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Amanda

Canada Education Program/Courses/Psychology of Language9APSWI323


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Learning to read is an almost miraculous story skilled with many developmental processes that come together to give the child entry into the teeming underlife of a word usable by the child

Learning to read is the process of acquiring the skills necessary for reading; that is, the ability to acquire meaning from print. Learning to read is ironical in someways. For an adult who is a fairly good reader, reading seems like a simple, effortless and automatic skill that a person can just do without too much difficulty. Reading seems so natural to an adult who is literate that it is hard to remember back to when you first acquired the skill of learning to read and what a long complicated process that it was and how long this process actually is.

Acquiring Language
A child ability to learn to read begins before most people would suspect. It is in comfort of a loved one’s arms that the process for acquiring reading begins. This is also known as reading readiness. All the material that a young child is presented with, their brain is able to make some use of. This includes every perception, concept and word that they come in contact with. Research has shown for years that the amount of time that a child spends listening to their parents or other important caregiver’s read to them will be a good predictor of the level of reading that they will attain later on in their life. As the child sits and listens looking at the pictures, listening to ancient tales and new stories, they will slowly learn that all the different lines on each page make different letters and then these letters make words. Taking time to read to children is the most important precursor that is critical to a child’s development of reading. If a child only receives a few tales and very few stories are told to them and little language is learned, the child will start to fall further and further behind before reading can actually even begin. Why is it that Margaret Wise Brown’s book Goodnight Moon, has captured millions of children and they are wanting their parents to read it to them night after night? There are many reasons why this book have captivated so many. These include the use of pictures of items in a room, that the child would be familiar with including: the night lamp, the mitten, the bowl of mush, the rocking chair, also the sense of discovery as the child learns to find a tiny mouse that hides in different places on every page and the different ranges in the reader’s voice as it seems to get softer and softer until the last page of the book. This begins the ideal process of the beginning of what some researchers call emergent or early literacy. It is this relationship between hearing written language and feeling loved that seems to provide the best type of foundation for this long process of learning to read.

But just reading to your children and exposing them to many books is not enough to prepare them for preschool. Reading to children is only part of what prepares them for reading and the other part is the ability to name a letter.

Reading Development
There are five stages of reading development. They are the emerging pre-reader, novice reader, decoding reader, fluent comprehending reader, and the expert reader.

The emerging pre-reader also known as reading readiness, is where the child sits on the loved ones lap and listens to them read. A major insight from this stage of reading is that reading just never happens to anyone. Emerging reading comes out of many years of perception, and increasing both conceptual and social development. Along with this increasing the exposures to oral and written language. Showing that this process starts early is the fact that children typically produce their first word before their fist birthday (How should reading...)

The next step in the learning to read process is the novice reading stage. This begins with the child learning to decode print and to understand the meaning of what has been decoded. To do this, the child must first figure out the alphabetic principle that actually took our ancestors thousands of years to discover. Most children believe that the words on a page in a book mean something, but don't really know what it is and that words are made of the sounds of a language, that letters convey these sounds and that each letter conveys a particular sound or two. Novice readers learn to hear and segment different units. In this stage they learn to hear and manipulate the smaller sounds in syllables and words. This skill is one of the best predictors of a child's success in learning to read. One way that you can teach children to become more aware of sounds within words is through such things as nursery rhymes that enhance the child's ability to hear and divide the structure of words. Another way is through little "games" in which the sounds in the words are either clapped, written or danced to to the beat. A novice reader will absorb the most common letter patterns in their own language and most of the frequent words that will not necessarily follow the phonological rule such as in English the words "have" and "who". It is in this stage that children will develop a vocabulary of between 2,500 to 5,000 words (How psych....). As the child's vocabulary continues to grow as they enter elementary school they will continue to learn new words at a rate of about seven words per day (How Psych...). This shows that at this stage in reading the best piece of advice is to just practice, practice, practice or read, read more, read.

You will know that your child has moved from the novice reader stage to the decoding stage because gone is the painful pronunciations and it its place are the sounds of a smoother, more confident reader on the verge of becoming a fluent reader. In this phase of learning to read, the reader will add at least 3,000 words to what they can decode. This mean for example in English that readers need to now learn the variations of the vowel-based rimes and vowel pairs. It is essential during this stage if a reader is going to become a fluent reader that the reader acquires a sufficient repertoire of the letter-pattern and vowel-pairs that help to make up words that go beyond the primer level. The faster that a child can see that the word together is to-get-her, the faster the reader will become a more fluent reader faster. As children move forward in their reading skills, they learn a great deal about what and is really inside a word, the stem, roots, prefixes and suffixes that make up morphemes of the language. By this stage, the children already know about the common bound morphemes such as "s" and "ed" because you will find these attached to many words. Decoding readers become exposed to many types of morphemes such as prefixes and suffixes and it is when they learn to read these as "sight chinks" that their reading and their understanding will speed up dramatically. A child being able to read at a fluent level is not only about how fast they can read, but it is matter of them being able to to utilize all the special knowledge that a child has about a word, its letters, letter patterns, meanings, grammatical functions, roots, and endings fast enough that they have time to think and comprehend what they are seeing. The point of becoming a fluent reader is to really read and understand what had just been read. Decoding reader are young and just beginning to understand and learn how to use their expanding knowledge of language and their growing powers of inference to figure out what they are really reading. It is also in the decoding phase that the child will learn to go beyond what is not said in the story to get the underlining meaning of what the story is really about. In the decoding stage a child also learns that if they do not understand a sentence or paragraph, that they may need to re-read it a second or third time to fully understand it. Knowing when a text needs to be re-read is a very important skill and can improve comprehension greatly.

The next stage in reading development is the fluent, comprehending reader. In this stage the reader builds up a collection of knowledge and is eager to learn from every source they can. It is during this time that teachers and parents can be tricked by fluent-sounding reading into thinking that a child actually understands what he or she is actually reading. It is as reading becomes more demanding that good readers' will develop knowledge of figurative language and irony which helps them to discover new meanings in the text that will help them to understand what they are reading beyond what is written on the page. While learning to read, one of the most powerful moments is when fluent comprehending readers learn to enter into the lives of imagined heroes and heroines. Examples of this could include Harry Potter, Lord of the rings, Huckleberry finn. The comprehension process grows while reading books like these, where children learn to connect prior knowledge, predict good or bad consequences, draw inferences from every danger-filled corner, monitor gaps in their understanding, and interpret how each new clue, revelation, or added pieces of knowledge changes what they know. In learning these new skills, they learn to unpeel the layers of meaning in a word, a phrase or a thought. These readers at this stage, they leave the surface layers of text to explore the wondrous terrain that lies beneath it. There are two ways in which this stage can be aided by. They are: explicit instruction by a child's teacher in major content areas and the child's own desire to read. When Children are able to engage in conversation with their teachers, this allows them to ask critical questions and to get at the heart of what they are reading. At the end of this stage before the reader really becomes an expert reader, they are on the threshold of attaining the single most essential gift that has evolved the reading brain which is time. With the decoding process almost automatic by this point, the brain learns to integrate more metaphorical, inferential, analogical, effective background and experiential knowledge with every newly won millisecond. This stage in learning to read often will last until young adulthood.

The final stage in learning to read, is the expert stage. When a reader is at this stage of reading, it will usually only take them one half second to read almost any word. The degree to which expert reading will change over the course of an adults life depends on what a person reads and how much they read. As a person matures, they bring to the text not all the cognitive experiences described in the time line for words, but also the impact of the life experiences, our loves, losses, joys, sorrows, successes and failures. It is through a persons' interpretative response to what they have read, that it has a depth that will often take them in a new direction from where the author's thinking had left them. An example of this is reading the Bible. Throughout a person's life when they read the Bible, they will have a new understanding of what it is saying. This is the case for any book that an expert reader reads. They can have one way of understanding it when they read it when they are twenty-five, and when they go and reread it again at the age of forty, they will bring new and different life experiences to the book and therefore will have a different understanding to what the author is trying to say then they had before. That is what the expert reader stage is about is that knowing that life experiences will effect the way that you view what you read, whether that is because you have more intellectual knowledge or if because you have experienced great loss, knowing that these all effect the way that a person views the text in front of them is crucial for this stage.

It is important to know that not all children move through these different stages at the same rate that is okay.

Reading difficulties
Dyslexia is defined as brain-based type of learning disability that specifically impairs a person's ability to read. These individuals typically read at levels significantly lower than expected despite having normal intelligence. Although the disorder varies from person to person, common characteristics among people with dyslexia are difficulty with spelling, phonological processing (the manipulation of sounds), and/or rapid visual-verbal responding. In adults, dyslexia usually occurs after a brain injury or in the context of dementia. It can also be inherited in some families, and recent studies have identified a number of genes that may predispose an individual to developing dyslexia."