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Reading is very much a "psychological skill," since it allows one to cope much more effectively in the world. Children who are having reading difficulties can have their psychological well-being greatly enhanced by improving their reading skills. We may think of reading skill as progressing through five stages, as follows: 1. Oral language development. To comprehend written language, you must first be able to comprehend spoken language. Conversation, hearing stories read, and doing dramatic play are three big ways in which young children gain skills in spoken language. 2. Phonemic and spatial awareness. When you hear the word "pat," can you hear three separate sounds in it? If someone says to you the separate sounds of a word, can you blend them together to say the word? These are some of the tasks that define "phonemic awareness." Some children seem to have these skills from the beginning. But for those who don't, some exercises to develop these skills can greatly help in learning to read. Spatial awareness is the ability to distinguish visual patterns from their mirror images. Can the learner reliably look at a list of b's and d's and tell which is which? If not, it can be useful for the learner to practice distinguishing pictures from mirror image pictures, starting with easy ones and working up to more difficult ones. 3. Letter-sound correspondence. This means knowing the sounds that letters and combinations of letters make. If learners can associate each letter with one sound, they can read hundreds of words that conform to these letter-sound patterns. They can then scaffold upon this knowledge to learn words where combinations of letters make different sounds. 4. Sounding and blending individual words. The exercise of looking at a word from left to right, saying the sound of each phoneme, and then blending those sounds together to make the word, is a tremendously useful exercise. It gives practice in phonemic awareness, letter-sound correspondence, and word reading. If the words are grouped together in "word families" (e.g. the bat cat fat rat ... family) then the learnings from one word can be generalized to the rest in the list. 5. Text reading. In this stage, the learner reads sentences that mean something, for example stories. If the previous stages have adequately prepared the learner to read all the words in all the sentences, we call the text "decodable text." ************ Here are some more ideas on teaching reading. 1. Songs and stories are fun ways of learning letter-sound correspondence and phonemic awareness. Please take a look at my CD of songs on letter-sound correspondence, What the Letters Say, and the book with characters who are letters who communicate by saying their phonetic sounds, The Letter Stories. 2. Doing the sounding and blending exercise with lists of words in word families is work, but if that work is greatly celebrated and reinforced, the learner can benefit not only by learning to read, but by increasing self-discipline skills and work capacity. If throughout the course of instruction, the learner gradually increases the amount of sounding and blending he or she can do at a sitting, this is a marker of increasing work capacity. 3. As soon as the learner becomes able to read stories, those stories should start presenting positive models of psychological skills. From the very beginning, the learner accomplishes two things at once: practicing reading, and learning psychological skills. 4. It's crucial to adjust the frequency of reviewing to the "memory decay curve" of the individual learner. If we review when we have forgotten none or only a little of what we learned, we can quickly strengthen memory traces. But if we wait until we have forgotten almost all of what we learned before reviewing, we have the frustrating task of relearning what we thought we had mastered before. Different learners have different rates of forgetting. Those who forget more quickly need to review more often. I believe that tailoring the schedule of reviewing to the individual learner's rate of forgetting would preclude a large portion of the frustration that teachers and learners experience. 5. Dividing words into groups with similar patterns of letter-sound correspondence greatly helps in learning spelling, as well as reading. Rather than having to memorize each separate word, the learner can apply the same phonetic principle to all the words in a list. 6. Telephone tutoring is a very pleasant and effective method of helping emerging readers. The tutor and the student are at the phone at their appointed times, each with the same teaching materials. I have used this method successfully in a project that has gone on for about the last four years. If you are interested in my book on teaching reading, please check out Manual for Tutors and Teachers of Reading.
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