Development of Literacy:
Effects of Early Literacy Experiences
n Researchers
consistently find that young children who are read to frequently during the
preschool years have more advanced language development, are more interested in
reading, have greater awareness of word sounds and letter-sound relationships,
and learn to read more easily once they reach elementary school
Effects of Early Literacy Experiences
n Associating
literacy activities with pleasure may be especially important; for instance,
children who enjoy their early reading experiences are more likely to read
frequently later on.
n In
this respect, authentic literacy activities are more beneficial than activities
involving drill and practice of isolated skills.
Development of Phonological Awareness
n
Phonological Awareness à ability to hear the distinct sounds within words
n Letter recognition is a clear prerequisite for
learning to read
n Learning to recognize all 26 letters of the alphabet
may be difficult because some of the letters differ only in their orientation,
ex. M & W, b & d, p & q.
n In addition to knowing the letters, children need to
associate those letters with the sounds that make up spoken language.
Development of Phonological Awareness
n Phonological
awareness includes such abilities as these:
n Hearing
the specific syllables within words
n “can”
and “dee” in candy
n Dividing
words into discrete phonemes
n “guh,”
“ay,” and “tuh” in gate
n Blending
separate phonemes into meaningful words
n “wuh,”
“eye,” and “duh” make wide
n Identifying
words that rhyme
n Cat and hat
end with the same sounds
Development of Phonological Awareness
n The
development of phonological awareness typically follows this sequence:
n Awareness
of syllables
n By age 4
n Awareness
of parts of syllables
n Some ability
at age 4/5
n Awareness
of individual phonemes
n Age 6/7
Development of Phonological Awareness
n Specifically
teaching children to hear the onsets,
rimes, and individual phonemes in words enhances their later reading ability
Development of Word Recognition
n When
developing readers encounter a word they have never seen before, they may use
the following word decoding skills:
n Identifying
the sounds associated with each letter and then blending them together
n Think
of words they know that are spelled similarly to the unknown word
n Identify
clusters of letters that are typically pronounced in certain ways
n Use
semantic and syntactic context to make an educated guess as to what the word
might be
Development of Word Recognition
n After
encountering a word in print enough times, children no longer need to decode it
when they see it, instead they recognize it immediately and automatically
n In
preschool and early elementary years, word recognition abilities typically
emerge in the following sequence:
n (begin
on next slide)
Development of Word Recognition
Developmental
Sequence, Con’t.
n Initially
(perhaps age 4), children rely almost entirely on context (environmental) clues
to identify words
n Around
5, they begin to look at one ore more features of the word itself,; however,
they do not yet make connections between how a word is spelled and how it
sounds
n Soon
after, they begin to use some of a word’s letters for phonetic clues about what
the word must be
Development of Word Recognition:
Developmental Sequence, Con’t.
n Once
children have mastered atypical letter-sound relationships, they rely heavily
on such relationships to read
n AS
children gain more experience with written language, they develop a reasonable sight
vocabulary, that is , they recognized a sizable number of words immediately
and no longer need to decode them
Development of Word Recognition:
Developmental Sequence, Con’t.
n As
children learn to read, their recognition of most common words becomes
automatized. Although they do not lose their
word decoding skills, they depend on them only infrequently once they reach the
middle school and high school grades.
Development of Word Recognition
n From an information processing perspective, the mental
processes that occur during reading take place in working memory. If children must use their limited WM
capacity to decode individual words, they have little room left to understand
the overall meaning
n Because of this, it is essential that children
eventually automatize their recognition of most words.
Chall’s Stages of Reading Development:
Stage 0: Prereading (to age 6)
Stage 1: Initial Reading, or Decoding (ages 6-7)
n Stage
0 à
Children develop some awareness of words sounds and learn to recognize most
letters of the alphabet
n
Stage 1 à Children focus on
learning letter-sound relationships and gain increasing insight into the nature
of English spelling
Chall’s Stages of Reading Development:
Stage 2: Confirmation, fluency,
ungluing from print (ages 7/8)
n Children solidify the letter-sound relationships they
learned in stage 1, and automatize their recognition of many common words
n They are beginning to take advantage of the
redundancies in language, so they are less dependent on every letter and word
on the page
n The become increasingly fluent and can read silently
Chall’s Stages of Reading Development:
Stage 3: Reading for learning the new
(ages 9-14)
n Children can now read learn new info from things they
read, and they learn better from reading than listening by the end of stage 3
n Children begin to study the traditional academic
content areas in earnest and gain much knowledge from their textbooks
n Reading materials become increasingly complex,
abstract, and unfamiliar during Stage 3, and success at reading and
understanding them increasingly relies on prior understanding of word meanings
and subject matter
Chall’s Stages of Reading Development:
Stage 4: Multiple viewpoints (age 14
on)
n In high school teenagers become more skilled readers
of textbooks, reference materials, and sophisticated works of fiction
n They can now handle reading materials that present
multiple points of view, and they can integrate new ideas they encounter in
text with their previous knowledge about a topic
Chall’s Stages of Reading Development:
Stage 5: Construction and
reconstruction (age 18 on)
n Students
may begin to construct their own knowledge and opinions by analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating
what others have written
n They
also read more purposefully; that is, they may read certain parts of a text but
skip other parts to accomplish their goals for reading the text as efficiently
as possible.
Marsh’s Four Stages
Marsh’s Four Stages:
Stage 1: Linguistic Substitution
n When
children begin to read, they learn “rote associations”
n They
read the word as logograms, this has the disadvantage that they have no
rational way of working out what an unfamiliar written word means
Marsh’s Four Stages:
Stage 2: Discrimination, Net Substitution
n Two
major changes happen here
n The
child begins to use context in combination with linguistic cues to help him or
her to read
n The
child also begins to make rudimentary analogies by spotting similarities
between new words and familiar ones
Marsh’s Four Stages:
Stage 3: Sequential Decoding
n Children
are now in Piaget’s “concrete operations period”
n Children
can decode words if they are regular
Marsh’s Four Stages:
Stage 4: Hierarchical decoding
n Children
are able to use “higher order” rules
n Children
begin to make proper analogies when the read
Firth’s Three Phases and Six Steps:
n
Phase 1: Logographic
n Children
read words as logograms
n
Phase 2: Alphabetic
n Apply
grapheme-phoneme rules
n
Phase 3: Orthographic
n Begin
to analyze words into orthographic units without phonological conversion
Firth’s Three Phases and Six Steps:
Werner’s Three Stages
Stage1 – Orthographic Memory
n Whole word recognition without the knowledge of
phonemes and the alphabetic principle, depends on visual memory for the printed
word
n We would not consider it orthography until it can be recognized
when it stands alone
n This stage is almost entirely a visual activity,
requiring recognition of the shape of the whole word , along with some
significant features that help distinguish it from words with a similar
configuration
Werner’s Three Stages
Stage 2 – Learning the Code
n Depends
very heavily on learning the code, on being ability to work through a word, in
a left-to-right direction, and finding the correct phoneme (sound) to match
each letter or combination of letters (grapheme)
n Alphabetic
principle very important here
Werner’s Three Stages
Skills and Conceptual Understanding
Underlying Stage II Reading
n Phonological awareness
n Understanding of the alphabetic principle
n Memory for sound-symbol paired associates
n Attention to visual detail in discriminating among
look-alike letters and noting punctuation signs
n Attention to sequence in discriminating among
look-alike words
n Auditory memory and ready access to a sufficient inner
word bank to allow fro blending decoded sounds into a recognizable word
n Visual memory for recognition of whole words
Werner’s Three Stages
Stage 3
n Child
quickly recognizes familiar words at an automatic level and can decode
unfamiliar words with minimal difficulty
n Requires
no special skills (beyond those already learned)
n Generally
just a matter of practice to develop word identification skills to the level of
automaticity
Summary of stage development theories:
Consider children as starting out with a
visual approach to reading
Next an alphabetic stage –use of
phonological strategies
Lastly, orthographic patterns/lexical analogies
Limitations of stage theories:
The mechanisms involved in transitions
between stages is unclear
Early models did not emphasize phonological
awareness
They proposed an ordered sequence of stages
or phases – Findings show that the course of development is not the same for
all children
Reading research shows that the strategies
that children use depend on the teaching they receive and the language of
instruction
Goswami and Bryant’s Theory About Causes
1. Pre-school Phonological Skills – Rhyme
& Alliteration
n The
important phonological units for children are onset and rime
n Children
who are sensitive to rhyme and who are taught about rhyme eventually do much
better at reading
n Goswami’s
research supports that children associate onsets and rimes with strings of
letters right from the start
Goswami’s Theory About Causes
2. Instruction and Phonemes
n Children,
as early as 5/6 begin to detect and recognize phonemes as a direct result of
being taught to read and write such a script
n Children
are willing to break up words into phonemes when they write, but are reluctant
to do so when they read
Goswami’s Theory About Causes
3. Spelling and Reading
n Experiences
children have while reading influence the way that they spell, and their
knowledge of spelling effects their reading
n Here
children no longer confine global strategies to reading, and they are readier
than before to use their awareness of sounds when they read as well as when
they spell words
What must children know and do in order to
be successful at beginning reading?
They must realize that the relationship
between the printed and spoken form of words are at the phoneme level not the
morpheme level. Thus, they must be aware of phoneme and know the letter that represent
the phoneme.
They must learn to use context to
disambiguate partial decoding attempts e.g bean and beak.
They must have experience with the
orthographic system.