Reading Development and Teaching

Morag Stuart,Rhona Stainthorp

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781473943803
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Psychology

This textbook will prove invaluable to teacher educators, teachers, educational psychologists, and any professional who is involved with teaching children to read. It provides a detailed examination of the processes that are involved in achieving fluent word reading skills and ability to comprehend written texts. Understanding these processes and their development empowers teachers to select appropriate, evidence-based teaching strategies and thus teach children more effectively. The book is in four parts:

Part 1 provides the reader with a Tutorial Review covering essential knowledge about language, and presenting the two dimensions of the Simple View of Reading. Part 2 concentrates on the word reading dimension, with chapters on processes in skilled word reading, the development of these processes, and practical advice on research validated teaching methods to develop children's word reading skills.

Part 3 turns to the language comprehension dimension, with chapters on the comprehension of oral and written language, and on teaching reading comprehension. Part 4 introduces the reader to assessment practices and methods of identifying children with difficulties in either or both dimensions of the Simple View, and considers children with word reading difficulties and children with specific comprehension difficulties, describing effective evidence-based interventions for each type of difficulty.

Part 1 Tutorial review

1 Essential knowledge about language

Summary

In this chapter, you will learn about the phonological system of languages: the ways in which speech sounds are identified and combined to produce and understand spoken language. You will learn about the orthographic systems of languages: the ways in which written languages represent their spoken forms. This is essential knowledge for those of us involved in understanding and teaching reading. The contents of this chapter will equip you with the knowledge you need to read subsequent chapters, and will enable you to answer the question: why is learning to read words in English so much more difficult than in most other languages?

Introduction

A recent study comparing rate of development of word reading skills in children learning to read in nine European languages (Seymour, Aro & Erskine, 2003) demonstrated that learning to read words in English is more difficult than in most other alphabetic languages. For children learning to read in English, these skills developed more than twice as slowly as those of beginners learning to read in Finnish, Spanish or Greek. Of course, difficult is not synonymous with impossible. The vast majority of children in the UK (and other countries where English is the first language) learn to read words accurately and fluently in an acceptable time scale. However, the early stages of learning to read are more taxing in English, and it takes longer for children to become fluent.

The difficulty lies within the orthography, which Henderson (1984) defined as the conventional writing system of a language and the way this maps onto spoken language. Each language has its own pattern and rules for writing: its own orthographic system. Beginner readers must learn how the orthographic system relates to spoken language in a given writing system. In this chapter, we explain how writing systems work and why the English writing system is so difficult.

We need to introduce you to a number of technical terms: these help us to be precise about our meanings. We will give you some exercises to do to help you feel confident about the terms. Because you are a skilled adult reader, you have already internalized knowledge of English orthography: thus, most of the information we provide will already be part of your implicit understanding. To understand reading development and how to teach children to read, it is useful to transform this implicit understanding into accessible explicit knowledge. We hope that by the time you finish this chapter you will be convinced that, albeit difficult, English orthography can be fascinating, and good teachers can pass on their fascination to their pupils. Writing systems represent the sounds of spoken language, its phonology. Before we consider writing systems themselves, we have to make an extensive detour to describe the English phonological system, which is what English orthography represents.

Phonology: the sound system of language

The sound system of language is called phonology, from the Greek phone meaning sound and logos meaning speech. So the word ‘phonology’ literally means the sounds of speech. The phonological system is the system of language that uses sounds as its units and these sounds are combined to produce individual words.

We will first list all the speech sounds (phonemes) of English, each paired with its International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbol. Each row in the tables gives you the unique IPA symbol for the phoneme and an example of that phoneme as pronounced in a real English word. Spelling of the phoneme in question is printed in bold. Table 1.1 lists IPA symbols for consonant phonemes, and Table 1.2 lists IPA symbols for vowel phonemes.

¹A diphthong vowel is one where the tongue moves as it is produced so that the sound appears to glide from one vowel to another.

You will see from the tables that there are 44 phonemes in English: 24 consonant and 20 vowel phonemes. These statistics alone alert us to the challenges encountered in English orthography, because English has only 26 letters to represent these 44 phonemes. This imbalance of number of phonemes and number of letters also poses a challenge when writing about the sound system of language. The International Phonetic Alphabet allows us unambiguously to represent each phoneme with a specific symbol. Throughout the book, we will be using IPA symbols when we want to specify particular phonemes.

Above, we equated ‘phoneme’ with ‘speech sound’: the box below gives a more complete definition of the phoneme.

There is now considerable evidence that the average adult is not explicitly aware of phonemes in words (Moats, 1994; Stainthorp, 2004). When asked, ‘How many sounds are there in the word RUST?’, adults are just as likely to say ‘two’ or ‘three’ as ‘four’. When asked to explain their decision, one person may say that the two sounds are /r/ and /ʌ st/; whereas another might say the three sounds are /r/ /ʌ/ and /st/.

The correct answer is four phonemes: /r/ /ʌ/ /s/ /t/. We can see how this works if we use the definition of the phoneme given above.

We start with the word /rʌst/ meaning ‘iron oxide’. Changing the first phoneme from /r/ to /d/ gives us the word /dʌst/ (DUST) meaning ‘tiny particles lying on a surface’. By changing one phoneme for another we end up with a word with a different meaning, so the initial phoneme and the substituted one must both be phonemes of English.

Changing the second phoneme from /ʌ/ to /ɛ/ gives us /rɛst/ (REST) meaning ‘to stop work’. We can swap the final two phonemes round so instead of /rʌst/ we have /rʌts/. Again we get a different word. We can also say /rʌst/ without the /s/ phoneme and then we get yet another word /rʌt/.

You might like to try specifying the number of phonemes in this set of words:

STRAIGHT

ENOUGH

TAX

KISSED

BATTED

(Answers on the next page.)

You might also try systematically changing the phonemes in each of these five words to make new words that differ by one phoneme. By playing with the phonemes like this, you will begin to raise your level of phonemic awareness. This is important because in order to teach children their letter-sound correspondences for phonics, teachers need to be confident that they have a fluent ability to identify and manipulate the phonemes in words. Educational psychologists assessing causes of reading difficulties also need these skills. Remember to focus on the phonemes of the words and not the letters.

In the IPA table the phonemes are arranged into two primary groups: consonants and vowels, but we have not yet defined the terms consonant and vowel. These definitions are shown in the next box.

In everyday language, the term consonant normally refers to the 21 letters B, C, D, F, G, H, J, K, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, V, W, X, Y, Z, and the term vowel refers to the five letters A, E, I, O, U. The letter Y is generally considered to be a consonant, although much of the time it is used to represent a vowel phoneme, as in BY, FLY, CRY, etc. Because this distinction between letters and sounds can cause confusion, throughout this book we will refer to consonant letters and vowel letters when considering the written form, and consonant phonemes and vowel phonemes when considering the spoken form. As already stated, in English there are not enough letters for a one-to-one match between letter and phonemes. This is particularly the case for the vowel phonemes, with only five vowel letters (plus Y) to represent the 20 vowel phonemes in English: thus, learning letter–sound correspondences for vowel phonemes poses an extra challenge for learners. As spelling has developed over the centuries and incorporated orthographic features from different languages, combinations of letters have become used to represent all the different vowel phonemes.

We have covered the smallest unit of phonology that impacts on the writing system: this is the phoneme. At the largest level there are the words themselves. These are sequences of phonemes that are blended together and that carry meaning. An additional useful technical term in the realm of meaning is morpheme, defined in the next box. The word comes from the Greek morphe, meaning form.

Some morphemes are called free morphemes. These are words in their own right. Each word carries meaning and has its own syntactic (grammatical) status, such as noun, verb, adjective, etc. In language, words are combined together in a rule governed way to form phrases in order to convey meaning. (We cover these aspects of language more extensively in Chapter 6, when we discuss language comprehension.)

Some morphemes are called bound morphemes. Below the level of the word are morphemes that carry meaning, but which cannot stand on their own. Hence the term ‘bound’: they have to be bound to other morphemes. In the box above, the morpheme /z/ (spelled <S>), which conveys plurality, is a bound morpheme. This is because it cannot stand on its own. It has to be affixed to another morpheme. Other examples of bound morphemes include the past tense ending, -ED /id/ (WANT → WANTED); the present progressive tense ending – -ING /iŋ/ (WANT → WANTING); the -ER /ə/ ending depicting an agent (FARM → FARMER), or a comparative (HAPPY → HAPPIER); and the -EST /ɛst/ ending depicting a superlative (HAPPY →HAPPIEST). The new Programme of Study for English in the revised National Curriculum (Department for Education, 2014) requires most of the bound morphemes given as examples here to be taught to Year 1 pupils in England.

In between the phoneme level and the word level there are other units of phonology. One of these is the syllable, defined in the next box.

Though most adults are not explicitly aware of phonemes, they are much more comfortable with syllables. The syllable seems to make intuitive sense to English speakers and people can happily clap to the ‘beat’ of language. In effect, what happens when we clap to the beat is that we clap on each syllable. When we do this, we are clapping on each vowel phoneme.

The final set of terminology about the phonological system relates to the structure of the syllable, illustrated first in ‘The structure of the syllable’ box below.

Here are some examples:

<OWE> /əʊ/ is a syllable that is a word with just t...