Approaches to teaching reading

Language Experience Approach

Cloze ProcedureAdvantages

- Uses student’s own vocab (sense of

ownership)- As instant reading

materials- Encourage writing

activities- Bank of essential sight

wordsHow to generate?

- Open ended questions during discussion with child- Try to keep the sentences

omitted as original as possible, but correct the sentences as it goes on

boardHow to use the text?- Discuss the piece with

children- Point out new words

- Cut sentences into phrases into words mixed

sentences : let students arrange

Focus- Learners to rely upon

own ability to predict meaning

- Using context clues and own previous knowledge

Cautions- There are no right / wrong answers (as long

it makes sense)- 1 deletion after every 10 words (not too much)

Purposes- Assess

comprehension- Prediction skills

- Grammatical points- Spelling pattern

Selecting Words

1. Let children have the text in advance

2. Let them skim the text and choose words they i) “know”, ii) “sort of know” and iii) “don’t know at all”

3. Have them write the meanings for i) and ii)

4. This is to provide information for teachers to prepare for the next lesson

Teaching Vocabulary

1. Explains new word – use prior knowledge, imagery

2. Student restate meaning in own words

3. Students create non-linguistic representation (picture, symbolic representation)

4. Compare, classify, analogies and metaphors with new word

5. Discuss new word in pairs and groups

6. Play games to review

Ranking WordsCategorise the

words from children into three

tiers:

Tier One: basic words, do not need much focusTier Two: high frequency words, across a variety of topicsTier Three: low frequency words, appear with specific fields of study only

* Students will benefit more

when focus is on tier two you

would want the ii) and iii) words to

be in tier two

Doing It Differently: Tips for Teaching Vocabulary

Models of the Reading Process

Models-Top-down : what the brain already knows affects perception of what is being read-Bottom-up: reading was a linear progression from page to understanding Kenneth Goodman

-Reading involves cognitive processes (recognition, prediction, confirmation, correction, termination)-Reading processes are sequential-Language must be studied in context

David Rumelhart- Works on long-term memory and semantic mapping in the

mind- Creates a non-sequential

reading model : heavy reference to schemata and top-down processing : in

explaining reading process

Short Circuit- Reading does not end

with meaning only(letter naming / spell,

recoding, syntactic nonsense, partial

structures)

Teaching ImplicationsBottom-up: grammatical skills, decoding skills,

vocabulary development, relate word with contexts, schema theory

Top-down: build background knowledge, cultural and experiential knowledge, pre-

reading exercises, realia, visual help, comparisons with previous knowledge

Reading Assessment Techniques

How? Student reads a passage appropriately levelled for the child explicit question about

the context

Questions: inferential Qs, retell story in own

words, summarise idea, cloze task, read and follow instructions

Lang Comprehension: passage is read TO the child (child would still be able to understand even if she could not

read the text)

Decoding: ability to read words out of context – read out

isolated words

Phonology (basic cognitive element 1):

able to discriminate two words that sound

similar

Semantic(basic cognitive element 2): meaning of words /

phrases / sentences / discourse

Syntax (basic cognitive element 3):

grammatical structure, add in adjective to

complete a sentence, change tenses and

modifiers

Letter knowledge: able to differentiate letters

from a mixture of letters, numbers and

symbols

Phonemic awareness: rhyming words