October 24, 2024
Assessing Curricula: Reading Instruction (5/8)
Transcript
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Intro
We thank you for joining us for this series with reading specialist and Mason educator Donna Johnson. Let’s listen to her experience and advice.
What to Look for
Donna: Okay, here's what you were asking me before. "How do you know where to start? How do we make sure all of the different components of learning to read are being addressed and balanced?"
Word Recognition & Language Comprehension
One way to start thinking about it is the Simple View of Reading. I think the two researchers were Gough and Tunmer. In 1986, they said word recognition x language comprehension = reading comprehension. So, they're talking about oral language comprehension on the time side of that. So, if you have a good vocabulary, is another way to say it, good language comprehension, and then you learn how to recognize words, you'll be able to have not just oral comprehension, but reading comprehension.
A key thing about their Simple View is that that symbol on the side of the equal sign where there's two parts is a times symbol. So, if you have reading recognition, that would be one, but you don't have language comprehension, that would be a zero. And one times zero is zero. So, if you either can't comprehend language or can't recognize a word, you can't comprehend. You don't have reading comprehension. So, there's components to both parts of those. The oral comprehension, again, babies can learn to understand language, but you need morphology, you need to understand syntactical structure, you need to understand morphology, the meanings of the little parts of words in order to have oral comprehension. Now, we're not talking too much here about English learners, but you can see where that part of oral comprehension is so important to students coming in with a different language.
Phonemic Awareness
And the other important part of that Simple View of Reading besides language comprehension is word recognition. And there are a lot of parts to that. The first part really has to do with your ears and not your eyes. And that's phonemic awareness. So, that's a component of reading that you don't ever need to see print words. And that's something that is so good for schools, for parents to work on: rhymes. Rhyming is a big part of it, but manipulating letters in any way or any sounds. And if children miss out on that - and you can do this formally in preschool or school, too.
And actually, when I learned more about this, I began to wonder if the young lady that I tutored had ever worked with phonemic awareness. So, we're going through a program of doing that. The first time we meet is our one-minute activity where she manipulates sounds in whatever part of this program we're in. We're almost finished with it.
So, you really need that phonemic awareness as a basis of building up to reading comprehension, where you can manipulate the sounds of letters. Because like I said, our brain knows the word cat from orally hearing about that, what a cat is. But then the symbols that spell it, that sound it out, a different part of your brain matches the symbol with the sound, and then it has to get it over to where you already know that word is. So, there's different parts of your brain that are working together in order to actually be able to read words.
So, phonemic awareness, letter knowledge, and matching sounds with the letters. And in English, we have 26 letters and 45 sounds. And some of those letters make more than one sound and some combinations make one of those sounds. And it does seem crazy, but it's what English is. Spanish is easier. There's other languages that match up better with one letter having one sound. English is not that way. But again, that's why it's such a rich language. We have inputs from a lot of different languages, Greek and Roman and French and Spanish, and a lot comes into English. So, I just, words are very interesting.
A Skill With Many Components
And when you start to learn to read, you will need to know some words by sight, even though eventually they are words you can sound out. So, that's also part of the basis of reading comprehension after you have the oral comprehension that you need. So, phonemic awareness, letter knowledge, sight words, decoding, that will get you into word reading. And when you can decode words, then fluency is important because you need to be able to decode those words quickly enough so that when you're reading a sentence, you can remember the whole sentence and not get to the end - if you sound out every word really slowly, you're not going to be able to put it all together and comprehend what you read. So, reading fluency is also a big component of reading.
When you're working with a child that is a struggling reader, we spend a little bit of time on probably each of those every lesson, but you don't want long lessons.
So, that's a lot. And when you're working with a child that is a struggling reader, we spend a little bit of time on probably each of those every lesson, but you don't want long lessons. You need to consider their motivation and their emotions. If you push too hard or go too long working on any one component - “we're going to get through this today!” They're not learning then. None of us would be.
Beneficial for All
So, there are a lot of different components to learning to read. And you need what you need for word recognition, and that includes vocabulary and language comprehension, and then the word recognition has a lot of parts. Diagrams would be good for this. I think I talked about this quite a bit when we did the other videos about dyslexia, but none of this applies just to kids with dyslexia. The Science of Reading applies to every child. Because even the one that figures out how to read without formal teaching, that doesn't make you a good speller. So, spelling is part of it too. So, everybody benefits from the Science of Reading.
Danielle: We have several of those in our family and for sure, there's a point where that child hits a wall. And there's something like a glitch there. It's like there's something missing and they can't move forward until you figure out what that is.
Donna: That is so true. So, everybody really needs to follow the Science of Reading. My daughters didn't have a lot of trouble learning to read, I guess I would say. One of them did some in writing, one of the twins, and they're supposed to be identical, did some writing reversals for a while, but that went away too, I guess. I don't think we talked about it or made a big deal out of it, but they all - they thought it was kind of goofy when I made them go through a phonics program, letter by letter and spelling words, but you have to. Just because you can read doesn't mean you can spell. Because there's so much more to it. And I think it's so interesting the more that I've learned about it.
One word that, the eighth grader that I tutor, one word we just worked on [was "Holocaust"] because she had a unit in her public school English class about World War II, particularly the Holocaust. So, I don't think they read the Diary of Anne Frank, but they read the play that's based on it and they did some other things along that line. And we don't have, we don't have a Latin and base root curriculum. We just kind of go with what some words that are useful to what we're doing. So, all of a sudden I thought, Holocaust, what's the basis of that word? And we should look into it. I'd never thought about it. It just seems like something that happened in Germany. But the base, C-A-U-S, in different forms of that, mean burn. And it applies to other words like cauterize. Or there's a kind of ancient and still used today wax painting that's called plastic something, I forgot the name, where you color wax and paint with it. And the word holo means whole: whole burn. It just gave me the shivers to say that. And I never thought of it until we looked up where the word came from. And you can do that just on the base. You don't have to have a curriculum to do that. There's a free site called EtymOnline, where you can look up a word's etymology and find out where it came from. And there's other tools.
But that young woman can read. Spelling and writing is still hard for her. And it may always be. But I think looking further into the meaning and history of words is really helpful. And my students through the years have missed out on that because I didn't do that earlier. Because there's so many things you can learn.
I'm going to quickly go back to "by," "bye," and "buy." The shortest one is BY. That means it's just a function word. It's just a little word. You don't get a picture in your mind really of that because it's not a noun or a verb. But when you add the BYE, that actually comes from: God be with you. So, that's why the Y is in there. Goodbye. God be with you. And BUY, we know that's not standing by someone or goodbye. We're going to the store. Well, what's that U doing in there? It connects it with bought. So, when you can tell the stories that go with words, that really helps kids with dyslexia, but it helps everybody.
So, you can do that with a word every day. I mean, just find out what the story is. So, I think that's an important part of vocabulary, the morphology, the oral comprehension part of it. And that relates to spelling.
"When you can tell the stories that go with words, that really helps kids with dyslexia, but it helps everybody."
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