The Reading Process

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The Reading Process

• Jane Coates

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Mrs Jane Coates Background Jane Coates - an
experienced Social Worker and Primary School
Teacher based in Leeds, UK, but spends regular
periods abroad as a volunteer teacher. Jane
has had short periods of teaching in Angola,
Africa Bangladesh India and Afghanistan. She is
particularly committed to teaching in China, and
has led teacher teams each July for the past 6
years (in Luzhou, Sichuan Xingtang, Hebei and
Chuzhou, Jiangsu Province and Guangxi Province.)
and this is her 7th Summer English Programme on
behalf of the Amity Foundation. Amity is a
charity which was one of the first NGOs
officially approved by the Chinese Government.
Its Summer Programme helps Chinese teachers of
English to develop oracy skills (speaking and
listening, language and teaching skills). She has
been married to Professor Coates for 40 years and
they have four adult children and three
grandchildren.
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What is involved in the reading process?How can
Teachers support this process?

• The active process of getting meaning from print
• comprehension and word recognition/decoding
• Word recognition and language comprehension need
  a different weighting
• Teaching of word recognition/phonic knowledge and
  skills. Then language comprehension processes
• Develop a wide range of skills and strategies

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What do children need in order to become good
readers?

• Phonics (grapho-phonic skills)
• 44 sounds (phonemes) in English and 26 letters
• Phonics describes the sound/symbol correspondence
• Learning the Letter Sounds
• The sounds are taught in seven
• groups
• Blend the two sounds, s and t caneach be heard
  (e.g. mishap)
• Digraph (e.g. midship)
• Encourage children to say the two
• sounds as one unit (fl-a-g not f-l-a-g)

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What do children need in order to become good
readers?

• Syllables
• Teacher rhythmically clapping syllables
• Writing words on cards and cutting cards up into
  syllables
• Colour each syllable a different colour on a word
  card.
• Give children the first syllable to complete the
  word
• Word search
• Building syllabic phrase, e.g
• a one the 1 syllable
• baby tiny noisy 2 syllables
• elephant hedgehog aeroplane 3 syllables

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What do children need in order to become good
readers?

• Onset and rime
• Within syllables there is a natural distinction
  between the onset and the rime.
• The onset is the opening consonant or consonant
  cluster.
• The rime is the vowel sound and any following
  consonents.
• e.g. s and sand
• (ONSET) (RIME)
• str ing string
• Nearly 500 primary grade words can be made from
  the following set of 37 rimes
• -ack -all -ain -ake -ale -ame -an -ill -in
  -ine -ing -ink -ip -ir
• -ank -ap ash -at -ate -aw -ay -ock -oke -op
  -ore -or -uck -ug
• -eat -ell -est -ice -ick -ide -ight -ump -unk

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Some suggestions of ways to develop phonological
awareness

• multi-sensory, systematic, and daily
• aiming for fluent and fast word recognition
• The full circle game t a i s p - sat, sit, sip,
  tip, tap, sap, sat.
• Phoneme discrimination - being able to pick out
  individual sounds
• Splitting up the sounds within words and putting
  them together again
• Words with common sounds and common letter
  sequences / strings
• e.g. -en den hen men pen ten
• Syllable work - clapping syllables, segmentation,
  onset and rime activities
• Concept of rhymepoems, jingles-leaving out the
  last rhyme for children to fill in
• Discriminating between rhyming and non-rhyming
  words

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What do children need in order to become good
readers?

• Sight vocabulary - key words and high frequency
  words
• Being able to recognize words on sight eliminates
  the frustrating process of trying to break down
  non-phonetic words.
• The first 100 high frequency words make up one
  half of words in common use.
• Evidence that teaching words in isolation (e.g.
  flash cards), is not always effective.
• Better to have a word card with the high
  frequency word and sentence providing context
• meaningful and memorable to the child
• Semantic (relating to meaning)
• The key elements here are
• Understanding and interpreting texts.
• Engaging and responding to the text.
• Children need to be taught to use their knowledge
  of book conventions, story structure, patterns of
  language and presentational devices and to also
  use their background knowledge and understanding
  of the content of a book.

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What do children need in order to become good
readers?

• Shared and Guided reading
• Responding to the text - thinking and talking
  about the book
• Reading aloud together is less threatening than
  individually
• Some schools colour code books according to level
  of difficultyor use a published graded reading
  scheme

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Shared and Guided reading -1

• Responding to the text is at the centre of all
  reading. Children need to personalize knowledge
  in order to both understand it and retain it.
  Group reading creates a sharing situation which
  naturally leads to thinking and talking about the
  book giving children the best opportunity to
  personalise their knowledge.
• The teacher is able to model reading skills and
  the response to the text.
• The teacher is able to observe and assess the
  childrens reading strategies.
• Reading aloud together in a group is far less
  threatening to children than reading individually
  to an adult.

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Shared and Guided reading -2

• Once children have mastered the basic skills of
  reading adequately and choose to read silently
  many teachers are uncertain how to develop their
  reading further.
• Some schools colour code the class library books
  according to the level of difficulty of the
  texts others use a published graded reading
  scheme others encourage children to choose books
  for themselves from the school or class library.
• Too many children develop only as surface
  readers. These children read for the story alone
  and rarely explore subtle aspects of the text
  such as making inferences and deductions about
  the plot and characters.

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DARTS (Directed Activities Related to Text)

• help children to become critical and reflective
  readers
• involve a collaborative approach
• talk always precedes any written work
• Activities

Underlining Outlining Listing / ranking Time ordering (flow diagram) Scanning Cloze procedure Sequencing Prediction (what happens next?) Skimming Chaining. Headlines/Titling Segmenting Labelling Modelling
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Ways to improve

• Ways to help ways
  to improve ways to get
• find information
  reading fluency more
  understanding
• underlining
  cloze segmenting
• main ideas and details
  sequencing titling
• outlining
  prediction labelling
• note taking
  skimming modelling mapping
• listing/ranking
  headlines time charts
• classifying
  flow
  charts, cycles, tables

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The Reading Process

• Jane Coates