Chapter 5 - Types of Readers and a Review of Two

All of the following developments will hasten the process of recognizing words parts, promote more simplistic decoding, spelling and will improve a child’s understanding of known and unknown words.

1. “Phonological development – This is how a child learns to hear segment and understand the small units of sounds that make up words¬critically affects the child’s ability to grasp and learn the rules of letter sounds at the heart of decoding.
2. Orthographic development-how the child learns that his or her writing system represents oral language-gives a critical foundation for all that follows. The child must learn the visual aspects of print-such as the features of letters, the common letter patterns, and “sight” words in English-and also how to spell all these new words.
3. Semantic and pragmatic development-how children learn more and more about the meanings of words from the language and culture around them-heightens and quickens children’s ability to recognize a word they are laboriously decoding and to comprehend it with an ever quicker “aha.”
4. Syntactic development-how children learn the grammatical forms and structures of sentences-enables them to make sense of the ways words are used to construct sentences, paragraphs, and stories. It also teaches them how events relate to each other in a text.” (Wolf, p. 113)

Learning to read moves through rather predictable steps:
1. Emergent Pre-reader
2. Novice Reader
3. Decoding reading
4. Fluent comprehending reader
5. Expert reader
Not everyone will follow this pattern, people learn differently and having different needs.

Emergent pre-readers – comes from years of sitting on loved ones laps and being read to, looking at pictures and associating their lives to story books.
Novice reader – Will be able to hear and segment larger units and will slowly start manipulating smaller phonemes in syllables and words. “The researcher Connie Juel at Stanford found that a child’s phoneme awareness in these earliest periods was critical for learning to decode in 1st and 2nd grade. Not being able to decode well in grade 1 predicted 88 percent of the poor readers in grade 4.” (Wolf, p. 117)
Sound blending requires a larger ability to synthesize literally, to blend sounds to form larger syllables and words. There are all sorts of ways to teach blending, but one of the most interesting came from an educator George O. Cureon from Harlem. “He assigned each child the sound of a letter and then lined the children up to “act out” the ways sounds blend to form words.”
A proven way to help novice readers with phoneme awareness and blending is “phonological recording” or a more familiar term would be “reading aloud”. The author feels that the term reading aloud is far too simple a term because of the amazing process that is happening to the students as the teacher is reading. Reading aloud emphasizes the connection between oral language and written language. It helps students understand words that may not otherwise know what they mean or how to pronounce. Reading aloud is an important teaching to novice readers and all students.
Reading builds word knowledge. Vocabulary is one part of our oral language students can figure out the meaning of a word by reading the word in its context. Learning how to look for those “context clues” that help give meaning to words they do not understand