Striking a Balance: A Comprehensive Approach to Early Literacy

A Comprehensive Approach to Early Literacy

Nancy L. Cecil

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351812931
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Striking a Balance explores a comprehensive program of early literacy instruction through a balanced approach to reading and writing for both enjoyment and information. The fifth edition retains the special features that adopters have come to appreciate: classroom vignettes, discussion questions, field-based activities, a student website, and study guide. This latest edition offers expanded content on differentiating instruction for diverse learners, including working with English Language Learners and students with special needs. Also new to this edition is greater coverage on integrating state standards with early literacy instruction. The book's practical approach fundamentally demonstrates how children develop authentic literacy skills through a combination of direct strategy instruction and motivating contexts.

A Child Learns to Read 1

PROCESS AND PRODUCT

focus questions

What are the fundamental processes of reading?

Why is it important for teachers in the field to understand all aspects of the reading process?

How is reading defined by researchers and practitioners in the field?

in the classroom

although this vignette is titled “In the Classroom,” in actuality the learning-to-read process begins long before 4-year-old Lydia ever enters school. She has developed certain concepts about the function of print from the numerous signs in her urban environment and by observing how readers in her home interact with books, magazines, newspapers, and other reading material. For example, when she sees her older brother scan the fast-food menu and then order a hamburger and fries, she is discovering that those black squiggles carry meaning. When she asks her mother to write her name and her mother sounds it out in front of her, she observes that words are composed of a string of letters and that those letters are composed of sounds that hold meaning.

When she snuggles in her grandma’s lap and “reads” the fairy tale she has memorized after hearing it nearly a hundred times, Lydia demonstrates her understanding that many words together can tell a story. She asks for a second story and Grandma complies. She puts a chubby finger on the words as Grandma says them. Lydia is again revealing her understanding of the matching of spoken and written word.

Lydia Knows A Lot About Reading, But Can She Actually Read?

WHAT IS READING?

at first glance, it would hardly seem worth the trouble to answer the basic question of what reading is because, in a sense, everybody knows perfectly well what it is: most people do it in one form or another every single day! Reading is:

▪ devouring a book from cover to cover.

▪ exploring the repair manual so you can fix your (car, computer, dishwasher).

▪ looking at a tweet.

▪ following a blog.

▪ discovering a message found floating in a bottle off the coast of Kauai.

But true definitions underlie all intellectual endeavors. Definitions contain assumptions that determine future educational activities. In other words, what teachers do to teach beginning reading will be determined, in large part, by what they believe reading is.

To define reading, we must know exactly what is involved in this activity that sets it apart from other similar activities. It is not enough, for example, to define reading as “a thought-getting process,” because we can get thoughts just as easily from a lecture, a conversation, or a film. To put it another way, there are many similarities between reading a printed page (whether the printed page appears on paper or on an electronic screen) of difficult text and hearing the same text read to us by another person. The issue of comprehension is paramount for both reader and listener.

No one would deny that a major purpose of reading is to get information or enjoyment of some sort from the written words. But since we get information in the same way from spoken words, the purpose of getting information does not define reading in a way that distinguishes it from engaging in conversation. As soon as we understand this point, the problem of definition begins to resolve itself. If we see that meaning is a function of the relationship between the language and the receiver, we might then ask how the written words (which we read) are related to the spoken words (which we hear). If a language composed of sounds carries the meanings, then what is writing? Writing is a device, or a code, for representing the sounds of a language in visual form. The written words of a language are, in fact, just symbols for the spoken words, which are sounds.

So reading, then, becomes the process of turning these printed symbols back into sounds again whether or not audible vocalization of the sounds actually occurs. The moment we say this, however, some reasonable soul is bound to ask, anxiously, “But what about meaning? Can we propose to define reading as just deciphering the words without regard to the meaning?”

The answer is yes, but only partly. Reading is, first of all, the mechanical skill of turning the printed symbols into the sounds of our language. Of course, the reason we turn the printed words into sound—in other words, the reason we read—is to get at the meaning. We decode the printed symbols to get what the author is attempting to say, and then, more importantly, we make some meaningful connection to the world as we know it (Pearson, 1993).

reading

But there is even more to it than that. Reading entails both reconstructing an author’s message and constructing one’s own meaning using the words on the page as a stimulus. We can think of it as a transaction, or an exchange, among the reader, the text, and the purposes and context of the reading situation. A reader’s reconstruction of the ideas and information intended by the author is somewhat like a listener’s reconstruction of ideas from the combination of sounds a speaker makes. An artist creates a masterpiece that means one thing to him and a host of different things to different admirers of his piece. Likewise, the reader, like the listener, may create meanings that are different from those intended by the author. What a reader understands from the reconstructed and constructed meanings depends on that reader’s prior knowledge, prior experiences, maturity, and proficiency in using language in differing social contexts (Afflerbach, Pearson, & Paris, 2008).

In addition to these traditional descriptions of what reading is, other considerations arise from the ubiquitous new technologies of the twenty-first century. Educators now talk about new literacies (Kist, 2005; Kress, 2003) that consist of ways not only to read and write but also to view and visually represent texts in new and exciting ways—especially texts related to technology. These texts are often in electronic rather than conventional printed paper format and can be viewed on many devices, such as computers, mobile devices, tablets/e-readers, and interactive whiteboards. They may also use a variety of enhancements, including video and/or audio clips, computer graphics, and digital photos. This type of reading and writing has many unique characteristics, including the way it is organized and discrete features that allow students to interact with the text. These new literacies will require students to be proficient in the six language arts (reading, writing, speaking, listening, viewing, and visually representing); in accessing and synthesizing information from a variety of sources—especially the Internet; and in evaluating the information’s accuracy, relevance, and authenticity (Castek, Bevans-Mangelson, & Goldstone, 2006).

new literacies

THEORIES OF READING ACQUISITION

two theories regarding how we learn to read are at the heart of the question about how reading should be taught. Each of these theories offers us important insights about how students think about reading.

Nonstage Theory

The earlier theory is a nonstage theory, which holds that unskilled and skilled readers essentially use the same strategies to figure out unknown words. This theory, revisited by Goodman in 1997, posits that readers use predictions based on the context of sentences, as well as the letter-sound correspondence, to determine unknown words. They depend mostly, however, on the grammar (syntax) and semantics (underlying meaning) to decipher the message. In this process, the reader uses strategies to sample and select from the information in the text, makes predictions, draws inferences, confirms or rejects, and regresses when necessary to make corrections in reading. Visual and aural features of the words—the graphophonic information—are usedas necessary. Such a theory suggests that certain apparent “errors” that studentsmake while reading, such as saying the word dad for the key word father, offer observers an actual “window into the child’s brain”; such miscues are not errors at all, according to the theory, but merely deviations from text, occurring because the child is trying to make sense of print.

nonstage theory

graphophonic information

miscues

Stage Theory

A seminal study by Juel (1988) indicated that unskilled and skilled readers use different strategies to unlock or decipher unknown words. Unskilled readers become “stuck” with strategies such as guessing or trying to memorize every new word and therefore are not as successful as learners who have internalized a wide range of helpful strategies. The stage theory holds that children go through three stages in acquiring literacy: During the first stage, the selective cue stage, children might use only the context of surrounding words and illustrations to predict possible meaning for unknown words or might focus on limited components of words to decode them; for example, recognizing only the first and last letters in words. At the second stage, the spelling-sound stage, they listen for known sounds and letters to determine the meaning of new words. When children have arrived at the final stage, called the automatic stage, they have reached the fluent or automatic level of reading. At this sophisticated stage, they almost subconsciously scan every feature of a word and compare it instantaneously to patterns with which they are familiar. Very little mental effort needs to be directed toward decoding unknown words, and most of the reader’s attention can be focused on obtaining personal meaning from text.

stage theory

CUEING SYSTEMS

perhaps in an attempt to better understand just how literacy happens, some researchers then suggested that four systems make communication possible: (1) the grapho-phonological system, (2) the syntactic system, (3) the semantic sys-tem, and (4) the pragmatic system. Skilled readers must use all four systems at once as they read, write, listen, and speak (Clay, 1991). These cueing systems help children create meaning by using language in a way that most English speakers accept as “standard.” Effective teachers of beginning literacy are aware of these systems and model and support students’ use of them in all areas of communication. The four cueing systems are described briefly in the following sections.

cueing systems

The Grapho-Phonological System

There are roughly 44 to 48 sounds (or phonemes) in the English language, and children learn to pronounce these sounds in many different combinations as they begin to speak. Teachers support experimentation with how these sounds cor-respond to letters (graphemes) by teaching children how to use temporary or experimental spellings to sound out words; modeling how to pronounce words; calling attention to rhyming words and alliterations; and directly teaching other decoding skills, such as showing how to divide words into syllables. For example, by pointing out the rhyme scheme in “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” the teacher shows children how the words...