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.