Reading And Writing Skills In Primary Education

May Young, Marie Thomas, Pamela Munn

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9789026508806
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000142501
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book summarizes aspects of reading and writing in primary schools, interest to educationists in the UK. It outlines the general process of reading comprehension into different levels.

PART 1:
REPORTS AND COMMISSIONED PAPERS

1.1 READING AND WRITING: A (META) COGNITIVE VIEW

by

Prof. Dr. Len F.W. de KLERK, Rapporteur General

1.1.1 INTRODUCTION

Writing can be considered as the most important invention in the history of mankind. Without a written language, a highly civilized culture is unimaginable. Reading and writing are vital skills which are necessary for adequate functioning in every civilized country in the world.

It is generally accepted that the development of literacy in the native language is a very important objective of elementary education. However, there is a serious debate as to what must be the ultimate goals of the teaching of reading and writing. Some schools seem to stress the learning of basic skills (such as decoding and spelling). Other schools pay more attention to the functional and communicative aspects of reading and writing.

One of the main reasons for such a debate, which sometimes is quite feverish, is that the topic of reading and writing has attracted considerable interest from scientists of different disciplines. Besides policy makers, we find, among others, linguists, sociologists, and psychologists. Even within a particular discipline there may be several specializations. Among the supporters of the linguistic approach, for example, there are educational, socio-, psycho-, and anthropological linguists, each of them having his own ideas about how and what to teach with regard to reading and writing.

In this general report of the workshop on reading and writing, the (meta) cognitive view has been stressed.

1.1.2 TECHNICAL READING:

1.1.2.1 Decoding and recoding

School reading is a broad curriculum area, involving many instructional objectives. With respect to these objectives, a distinction can be made between — what is referred to as — technical reading and reading comprehension. The main purpose of the teaching of technical reading is to promote learning to translate or decode written symbols into the oral language the child already speaks. This decoding process stands at the core of reading.

In order to be able to learn to decode printed words, the child’s oral language skills must be relatively well developed.

Each language has a restricted number of phonemes. By using rules for combining these phonemes it is possible to produce a great many words. Similarly, rules for combining words make it possible to produce a virtually unlimited number of sentences.

Within the context of speaking and listening the child must have sufficient knowledge about these rules. He must know what sounds or combination of sounds belong to the oral language (phonology); he must know how words are put together in sentences (syntax), and what words stand for (semantics). The learning of the various letter-sound correspondences is dependent on certain pre-reading skills. Not only must the spoken word be available to the beginning reader, he must also be able to identify letters and letter configurations. Although there is a tendency to see an object’s shape as unchanging regardless of the visual orientation we see it in, the child must learn, however, that a “b” is not a “d”, nor a “p” a “q”. When a set of objects is rearranged, it still remains the same set of objects. Yet, the combination “au” is not the same as “ua”. Pre-reading skills such as discrimination and identification of letters, left-right processing of information, and the associations of symbols with sounds, must be sufficiently mastered before formal teaching of technical reading.

1.1.2.2 Comprehension

Technical reading focuses on the identification of the meanings of individual words. It is assumed that the meanings of words are stored in that part of the long term memory that is called the mental lexicon. The entries in this lexicon are not arranged alphabetically. There are essentially two mechanisms by which an entry can be accessed. One is to use the visual pattern of a word as a code, and the other mechanism is to sound out the words. Here it is through vocalization that the meaning becomes activated.

In skilled reading, the visual code is faster and will be first to reach the lexicon. However, when a word is not immediately recognized or difficult, then the sound code might be more adequate. In both cases, lexical access will lead to the activation of literal comprehension of words.

Literal comprehension is one of the objectives of the teaching of reading. This is sufficient for reading tasks such as looking up departure times in a railroad time schedule or telephone numbers in a telephone book. The ultimate goal of reading is, however, comprehension in the sense of understanding utterances or drawing inferences from them. Thus, comprehension may even involve going beyond the information literally or explicitly stated.

1.1.2.3 Reading as an interactive process

According to Weiss (1986), learning to read is a developmental process, whereby a number of stages can be distinguished. In the first stage, the child discovers that there must be some relationship between the oral language and what is presented in the form of prints. Gradually he learns to recognize the shapes of letters and the sounds they represent. In the second stage, the child starts reading by identifying the meaning of each word in a text, one at a time. Later on, as his vocabulary increases, the reader often uses only part of the visual information. He guesses the meaning of the words on the basis of his knowledge of the writing system as well as of the spoken language. The extent to which phonetical codes may guide his reading in this stage depends on the particular language.

In the third stage the surrounding context of the sentences comes to play an important role. The reading process probably begins as a bottom-up process, starting with the identification of letters and ending with the understanding of the meaning of whole passages. According to Weiss (1986) the reader will be guided more and more by his expectations about the text. In fact, reading becomes an interactive process (rather than a pure top-down process). In understanding a sentence, for instance, sometimes after getting just a few words, the reader may jump to what he thinks the entire sentence means. The few words may activate a whole scheme that is stored in his memory and that is used to help sentence understanding. Such schema guidance is very common, which means that language and memory are closely related in understanding both written and oral language (see also Schank, 1982).

1.1.2.4 Reading and problem solving

Failure to achieve the standards of performance for each of the various stages of the reading process is generally recognized as being a major problem in most primary schools in Europe. The information processing model of reading — as previously outlined — suggests that problems can occur in one or more component reading skills. There is evidence suggesting that skilled and poor readers may differ on each of these skills. This may be inferred from the experiments that have been discussed by Dehn (1986). This author has conceived of reading as a matter of problem solving. According to this view, trying to identify the meaning of a single word is a problem, as is trying to understand what a writer is communicating.

Good and poor readers do not appear to differ so much in the number or type of errors they make, but rather in the way they correct them. The good readers seem to be more flexible and accurate in correcting their errors.

From Dehn’s (1986) review, it can be concluded that proficiency in decoding and recoding is needed in order to carry out higher order “meta operations”. She did not find, however, that poor readers’ decoding and recoding skills are not as accurate as skilled readers. Rather it appeared that both bypes of readers differ in the way they use strategies to attack their problems. Good readers are better able to develop and use heuristics — selective searches that look at those aspects of the problem that are most likely to produce a solution. This is in line with the classical work of Duncker, who found that problems often are reformulated into smaller subgoals. From this work it also appeared that hints may be very helpful in finding the correct solution. Dehn (1986) found that good readers make better use of such hints than poor readers do.

For the more advanced level of formal reading instruction, it should be taken into account that reading may be done for many reasons. To ensure that the goals of reading are met optimally, the meta-operations are of great importance. These refer to the reader’s cognitive processes such as goal setting, strategy selection, evaluation, and remediation (see also Gagne, 1985).

A skilled reader sets a goal and selects a reading strategy. When the goal is, for example, getting an overview of a newspaper article, then skimming the text might be an adequate strategy. When directions for use must be understood in order properly to perform a series of operations, then the task requires literal comprehension for which reading word by word might be an adequate strategy.

A skilled reader will check from time to time whether his goals are being met. If not, then he must use some strategy to remediate the problem, such as re-reading or asking for help. This means that the reader must be able to recognize his problems and that he must know how to deal with them. The research, discussed by Dehn (1986), suggests that the heuristic approach that has been recommended, may help the reader to plan and to monitor his cognitive activities (such as planning, strategy selection, evaluation, and remediation) while he is performing the reading task. This is important, because skilled readers appear to be better at monitoring and controlling their meta-operations than less skilled readers (see also Palincsar & Brown, 1984).

1.1.3 COGNITIVE LEARNER CHARACTERISTICS

1.1.3.1 General

Generally speaking, it can be said that a teaching l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Part 1: Reports and Commissioned Papers
• Part 2: National Reports
• Secretariat Memorandum prepared by the Directorate of Education, Culture and Sport
• List of Participants