How the Brain Learns to Read

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How the Brain Learns to Read Page 13

by David A. Sousa


  • Consider having other adults, such as parents and other family members, read to the class and to their children at home. The more models of fluent reading the children hear, the better. Such an approach increases the children’s vocabulary, their familiarity with written language, and their knowledge of the world.

  In primary grades, read aloud from a big book while pointing to each word as you read it. The children will notice when you are raising or lowering your voice, and you may need to explain to them why you are reading a sentence in a certain tone.

  • Fluency develops when students can read a text repeatedly with a high degree of success; that is, they can decode and understand about 95 percent of the words. If the text is more difficult, students will spend so much effort and time on decoding that they will not develop fluency. Restrict text to 50 to 200 words, depending on the age of the reader, and include a variety of nonfiction, poetry, and stories to maintain interest.

  • Because they contain rhyme, rhythm, and meaning, poems are an easy and enjoyable way for children to practice reading.

  • One measure of fluency is the average number of words the student can read correctly in a minute. Graphing words correct per minute (WCPM) throughout the year can show a student’s reading growth. These values can be compared to published norms to determine whether students are making suitable progress in their reading fluency. After making the WCPM calculation, compare the result to average oral reading frequency norms. Some local school districts have set their own norms to help teachers assess their students’ progress in fluency. Table 3.2 lists oral reading frequency norms compiled by Hasbrouck and Tindal (2006). Figure 3.8 suggests a sample graph for Grade 2 that you could use to show a student’s progress in WCPM throughout the school year.

  Table 3.2 Average Reading Rates for Students in Grades 1 to 8

  SOURCE: Adapted from Hasbrouck and Tindal, 2006

  Figure 3.8 This is a sample graph of a student’s WCPM scores throughout the school year. It is an easy way to show progress in developing reading fluency. In this example, the student’s progress was monitored monthly, but less frequent assessments are also appropriate.

  Answer to Test Question #4

  Question: Research studies have concluded that neither the phonological approach nor the whole-language approach is more effective in teaching most children how to read.

  Answer: False. Numerous research studies have found that mastering the alphabetic principle does not come naturally to most children, and that instructional techniques that explicitly teach this principle through phonological awareness are more effective with most children than those that do not.

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION/REFLECTION

  • What are the basic characteristics of the various approaches to reading instruction?

  • What strategies are effective for teaching phonemic awareness, phonics, spelling, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension?

  • What strategies are effective for teaching reading to students who have limited English proficiency?

  What’s Coming?

  Now that we have explored strategies for teaching phonological awareness, writing, spelling, and fluency, we turn our attention to text comprehension. Surprisingly, it is possible for beginning and intermediate readers to read aloud with confidence and fluency, yet not have much of a clue about what they are reading. Sometimes, teachers assume that a fluent reader is also a comprehending reader. But that is not always the case. In the next chapter, we take a look at strategies designed to increase vocabulary and to help students understand what they read.

  4

  Teaching Reading for Comprehension

  The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.

  —Dr. Seuss, I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!

  RESEARCH FINDINGS ON READING INSTRUCTION—COMPREHENSION

  The ultimate goal of reading is for children to become sufficiently fluent to understand what they read. This understanding includes literal comprehension as well as more sophisticated reflective understandings, such as “Why am I reading this?” and “What is the author’s point?” Reading comprehension depends heavily on spoken language comprehension. As children master the skill of word identification, their reading comprehension improves dramatically. Reading comprehension is a complex cognitive process that relies on several components to be successful. To develop reading comprehension skills, children need to

  • develop their vocabulary and linguistic knowledge; and

  • thoughtfully interact with the text to derive meaning.

  Let us take a look at each of these areas and review the relevant research.

  Vocabulary and Linguistic Knowledge Instruction

  Vocabulary refers to the words we know that allow us to communicate effectively. Words that we use in our speech or that we recognize when listening comprise our oral vocabulary. Words we recognize or use in print comprise our reading vocabulary. Oral vocabulary becomes the basis for comprehension in reading. A child with a good grasp of the alphabetic principle can encounter an unfamiliar printed word and decode the word into speech. If the word is in the mental lexicon, the child will be able to understand it. However, if the word is not in the lexicon, the child will have to determine its meaning by other methods. Consequently, the larger the child’s oral vocabulary, the more easily the child will comprehend text. As children learn, pronounce, and use more words in their speech and reading, their linguistic knowledge develops. They get more confident in their understanding of letter-sound combinations, more adept at recognizing syntactic and semantic differences, and more aware of the various classes of words (e.g., adjectives, nouns, and verbs) used in a sentence.

  What Are Decodable Texts?

  Some confusion exists about what constitutes a decodable text. Why does this confusion exist?

  First, the word decodable is used differently by researchers and by educators and policy makers. In research studies, decodability is a measure of the regularity of word pronunciation as decoded by the reader’s phonological module. It does not refer specifically to phonics instruction. To educators and policy makers, however, decodable text contains a certain number of words that students are expected to be able to pronounce (i.e., decode) as a result of phonics lessons already taught.

  Second, the documents issued by educators and policy makers offer many different definitions of a decodable text. In general, the documents state that a decodable text should be composed of words that use the letter-to-sound correspondences that have already been taught, but there is no universal agreement on what the percentage of such words should be. Several states have mandated a minimum decodability for their beginning reading texts. For example, California requires at least 75 percent decodability, while Texas sets the minimum at 80 percent (Mesmer, 2006).

  The scientific research on vocabulary instruction reveals that some vocabulary must be taught directly but that most vocabulary is learned indirectly. The research also has shown the following:

  • Children learn the meanings of most words indirectly, through everyday experiences with oral and written language. These experiences include conversations with other people, listening to adults read to them, and reading on their own. They learn vocabulary words directly when they are explicitly taught individual words and word-learning strategies.

  • Some vocabulary should be taught directly. Direct instruction is particularly effective for teaching difficult words representing complex concepts that are not part of the children’s everyday experiences.

  • Repeated exposure to vocabulary in many contexts aids word learning and linguistic knowledge. The more children see, hear, and read specific words, the better they learn them and their various meanings.

  • Vocabulary acquisition can be affected by several factors. In the last major broad review of the research literature on vocabulary, Swanborn and de Glopper (1999) found that factors such as ability, age, and text density have an impact
on the chances that students will learn new words in context. Table 4.1 shows the factors and their influence on vocabulary acquisition. Low-ability students have only an 8 percent chance of learning new words in context, but that number climbs to 19 percent for high-ability students. Not surprisingly, students in Grade 11 have a 33 percent chance of learning new words while fourth graders have only an 8 percent chance. Text density measures the number of new words per given number of words. The lower the text density (1 new word in 150), the greater the chances of learning a new word (30 percent). The chances drop to only 7 percent when the text density reaches to 1 new word in 10.

  Table 4.1 Factors Influencing Chances of Learning New Words in Context

  SOURCE: Swanborn and de Glopper (1999).

  • Linguistic knowledge includes one’s ability to (1) hear, distinguish, and categorize the sounds of speech (phonology); (2) understand the rules that constrain how words are put together in phrases and sentences (syntax); and (3) understand the meaning of individual words and sentences and the relationships between them (semantics).

  How Do I Teach Vocabulary?

  Selecting Vocabulary. Selecting which vocabulary words to teach separately is an important instructional decision. To help in this selection process, consider the following:

  • Be sure to teach those terms that are central to the unit of study. These should be terms that are so important that students who do not understand them will have difficulty comprehending the text. Avoid selecting words that will have little value to students after they complete the unit test.

  • Remember the capacity limits of working memory and keep the number of new words per lesson to no more than five for elementary students and up to seven for secondary school students. This will give you more time to teach each word in depth, resulting in greater student comprehension.

  • Choose other new words with care. Although a chapter may have 10 to 15 new words, only 3 or 4 may address critical components of the chapter. Avoid selecting words in the text just because they are italicized or in boldface print, or words that the student will never encounter again.

  • Include words that will be used continually throughout the text or unit of study. Having a deep understanding of these words will allow students to build on them as they develop new information over the long term.

  Other Guidelines. Here are some other guidelines for teaching vocabulary.

  • You can promote indirect learning of vocabulary by doing each of the following:

  Reading aloud to your students, regardless of the grade level or subject that you teach. Students of all ages will learn vocabulary better if you read text containing difficult words. Discuss the text before, during, and after you read to help students attach meaning to unfamiliar words by connecting them to past knowledge and experiences. Then ask the students to use the newly learned words in their own sentences.

  Encouraging students to read extensively on their own.

  • You will not have time to teach directly all the words that students might not know in a text. In fact, it is better not to try to teach all the unknown words so that students can develop their own word-learning strategies. Word-learning strategies include using the following resources:

  Dictionaries and other reference aids. Students need to learn how to use dictionaries, thesauruses, and glossaries to deepen and broaden their knowledge of words. You can show them how to find an unknown word in the classroom or online dictionary and note that there may be several different definitions for the word. Read the definitions one at a time and have the class discuss which one is more likely to fit the context of the story. For example, in the sentence “The workers went into the mine,” the children may confuse mine with the possessive word form. After you finish reading the various definitions from the dictionary, the students can eliminate the inappropriate definitions and settle on “a hole made in the earth to find coal or minerals.”

  Information about word parts to figure out the meanings of words in text. Word parts include affixes (prefixes and suffixes), base words, and word roots. Students learn that certain affixes change the meaning of words in a specific way. For example, the prefix dis- usually means the negative or reverse of the root word’s meaning (disrespect means showing no respect). Base words are words from which many other words can be formed. The base word complete can form the words completely, incomplete, incompleteness, completion, and completing. Word roots are the words from other languages (mainly Latin and Greek) that are the origin of many English words.

  Context clues to determine the meaning of words. Context clues are hints about the meaning of an unknown word that are provided by the words, phrases, and sentences that surround the word. The clues may be descriptions, examples, definitions, or restatements. However, not all context clues are helpful, because they give little information about a word’s meaning. Descriptive words that are used in a literary or obscure way are particularly difficult to comprehend through context clues. For example, in the sentence “She gave a strained response,” strained could have a number of meanings in this context, such as squeaky, hoarse, noisy, difficult, tense, and so on.

  Associating an image with a word. Imagery is a powerful memory device. Whenever students can associate an image (or other symbolic representation) with a new word, they are more likely to remember the word and its meaning. What we are doing here is strengthening the connections between the brain’s visual recognition and language processing systems.

  • With early readers, you will probably be able to teach about 10 new words per week. Focus your teaching time on the following types of words:

  Important words. Directly teach those new words that are important for comprehending a concept or the text. Give the students some word-learning strategies to figure out the meanings of other words in the text.

  Useful words. Teach directly words that students are likely to encounter and use repeatedly. For example, it is more useful for students to learn the word biology than bionic, and the word journey is more useful than excursion.

  Difficult words. Provide instruction for words that are particularly difficult for the students. Especially challenging are words that are spelled or pronounced the same but have different meanings, depending on the context. Here are but a few examples of words that are spelled the same but have different meanings in a sentence:

  The bandage was wound around the wound.

  When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.

  She did not object to the object.

  They were too close to the door to close it.

  Problems also arise with words that are spelled and pronounced the same, but have different meanings, such as store (a place to buy things) and store (to put away), land (a piece of ground) and land (to bring down an airplane), and arms (limbs) and arms (weaponry).

  • When selecting reading texts, it is important to know the level of word knowledge that students will have for those texts. Students know the vocabulary words in their mental lexicon in varying degrees that researchers divide into the following three levels:

  An unknown word is completely unfamiliar, and its meaning is unknown.

  An acquainted word is somewhat familiar, and the student has some idea of its basic meaning.

  An established word is very familiar, and the student can immediately recognize its meaning and use the word correctly.

  Assess the child’s level of familiarity with the words in a specific text according to these three categories. If the assessment indicates few or no unknown words, consider selecting a more difficult text to challenge the child and to build vocabulary.

  How Do I Teach Linguistic Knowledge?

  Linguistic knowledge refers to one’s understanding phonology, syntax, and grammar. It is a critical element in learning to read. Here are some ways to assess a student’s linguistic knowledge (SEDL, 2001):

  • Phonology. To assess phonological skill, play the “same or different” game by generating pairs of words that either ar
e identical or differ in some subtle way. Say them aloud and ask if they are the same or different. Most children should not miss hearing the different ones. Sometimes children can hear the differences between similar-sounding words, such as glow and grow, but have difficulty articulating that difference in their own speech. Difficulty with articulation does not mean difficulty with perception. When a child mispronounces a word, say the mispronounced word back to the child as a question. The child with normal phonologic skills will repeat the statement, trying to make you understand the meanings.

  • Syntax. The rules of English prohibit the haphazard arrangement of words in a sentence. Poor syntax can make meaning ambiguous (see Chapter 2). One way to assess syntactic skill is to give the children sentences with a key word missing. Ask them to supply the word that would correctly fill the blank. Remember that a child’s answer may not make sense, yet still be syntactically correct. Develop syntactic skills by helping children build more complex sentences. For example, after showing a short video, ask students to describe something they saw or heard (“I saw a tree” or “I heard a bird”). Then ask them to build their sentences (“I saw a tree and heard the bird singing”).

  • Semantics. Semantics describes meaning. One way to assess semantics is to create sentences and stories that have logical inconsistencies and see if the children can detect them (“Mary went to the store because she enjoys staying home”). Instructional activities that develop semantics include asking children to substitute words (synonyms) that would have the same meaning in context, and suggesting that they use context to guess the meaning of unknown words.

 

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