One of the perennial questions that plague you, as parents, is whether or not to teach your children to read and write. This question remains with you because of the many different systems for teaching reading that are employed by schools. You, as well as teachers, are besieged with many conflicting viewpoints about what should and should not be done. You may express genuine concern about how well your children will learn because many children do fail to begin to learn to read and write in first grade and continue to have difficulty in later years as well. You want assurance that your children will not fail to learn to read and write; but when you turn to educators for help, what do they say?
READING
In the past many educators have tried to answer the question of failure from a maturational point of view which assumed that children who failed to learn to read when instruction began were not ready to learn. Other reading educators added to this the idea that reading is a precise process that requires children to master a set of skills. These skills were housed in a set of reading books, workbooks, and other exercises. The skills were sequenced in the series so that one skill would build upon another in a logical hierarchy. This is still the most prevalent viewpoint among teachers today. However, it is giving way to another viewpoint that is of more value to parents.
In the skills view, the environment conducive for teaching children to read must be highly structured. Skills are sets of behaviors believed to be part of the reading process. When teaching reading from a skills point of view, it is necessary
to consider the prerequisite behaviors needed for each skill, the behavioral objectives (what behaviors are included in the skill to be taught), the criteria for determining mastery, the teaching procedures, and the tests that will demonstrate mastery of each skill being taught. In addition, standardized tests are given to compare performance in schools within a school district, across school districts, among states, and throughout the country.
Teaching reading in a skills program consists of getting students to respond to specific stimuli with specific behaviors. Each stimulus (the skill or part of the skill) being taught is the only one the students are to respond to at the time it is being taught; all other stimuli are to be ignored. The teacher cues the students with the appropriate stimulus, the students respond with the correct behavior, and they are reinforced. The possibility of being reinforced with rewarding consequences becomes the purpose for responding correctly. The skills children learn are dependent on the responses they are stimulated to make. The appropriate responses are determined by the behavioral objectives and teaching procedures used to elicit them.
Reading programs based on a hierarchy of skills are structured to elicit predetermined responses which are reinforced with some reward, usually permission to move to the next skill or task. Reinforcement is withheld if the children do not make the predetermined responses and they are recycled through the tasks. The teachers use a variation of the previous lesson or, in many cases, the same lessons exactly. In time, as the children move through the set of predetermined skills, the situations and the program of reinforcers change slightly, so that each succeeding task requires responses and reinforcers that are slightly different. This process continues until students have covered all the skills in the hierarchy and should be fluent readers.
The basic assumption in the skills view is that children are dependent on the structured reading program. This program provides the necessary stimuli to provoke correct responses that will enable them to accumulate the skills needed in order to read. In this sense children are somewhat like products of machines (the reading programs) which must be set in motion and tended by outside forces (the teachers). The children are manipulated to respond to the machine according to predetermined objectives. The teacher reinforces certain responses and not others so that some responses result in rewarding consequences and others in nothing or painful consequences.
When you ask teachers who are using skills programs what you can do to help your children learn to read, what can they say? Can they explain to you all the objectives, skills, teaching procedures, and tests required to make the program succeed? Not really! Some school districts may have developed specific procedures for you to use to help your children. Many teachers, however, will only be able to suggest that you read to your children and provide a variety of experiences to increase your children’s knowledge.
READING: A POINT OF VIEW FOR PARENTS
You, as a parent, may be in a quandary as to how to help your children learn to read if your school district does not provide any means of help. You may have no idea of what to do other than read to your children. Fortunately, there is another point of view concerning how children learn to read that allows you an important, if not the most important role, in helping your children learn to read. The assumptions underlying this view maintain that reading is part of the total language process (listening, talking, writing, and reading) in which children are immersed. And just as learning to speak is not a process of being taught one sound or word at a time, learning to read is not a process of mastering one skill at a time. Children learn to read by being read to from infancy and by reading, that is, by interacting with whole written language in order to construct their own knowledge of how to read. Assisted Reading discussed in POST 13 is one means of learning to read by reading.
Children are language reconstructionists. They learn to speak the language of their parents by abstracting rules they can use to develop their own speech from the language they hear. Their rules change as they develop language fluency. It is important to realize that the language our children hear is not broken down into little bits and pieces in order to teach them to speak; they hear the whole language spoken by those around them. They use the rules they construct to understand what they hear and to generate their own sentences. You may have noticed that young children’s sentences differ from adult sentences. They are different because their rules of grammar are different. The fact to remember is that children have more ability to develop and use language than we have realized in the past.
Children are superbly developed systems of action designed to operate on and interact with their environment so that they can construct their own knowledge of themselves and the world. Genetically, they are endowed with the necessary systems for initial interaction with the world. They develop by interacting with the environment and adapting to it. This view of children as active participants in their own development suggests that learning to read is a problem that children must solve, not a set of skills that they must be taught.
You, as a parent, have the opportunity to give your children a head start by providing them with an environment that will be conducive to learning to read. You provide them with the language environment in which they learn to talk. If it is rich with experiences and lots of talk, they will have access to the language and world knowledge they need to develop extensive vocabularies and grammatical structures of their own. If there is little talking and few experiences are presented, they will not develop good vocabularies and will have trouble talking with others when they go to school. The same is true of reading.
If children are to learn to read well, they must be in a rich reading environment. They need to have the opportunity to interact with the written language as you read to them. You can do the most to help your children learn to read because you know the most about them. You can select books that relate to their experiences and that will extend those experiences. Listening to stories and to informational books should be an integral part of your children’s daily lives as they begin and continue the process of learning to read.
The books you select to read to your young children should have a degree of predictability that will keep their interest. Books and stories that use repetition such as The Gingerbread Man, The Three Little Pigs, etc. give children a sense of fun because they can guess at least part of what is going to happen next. In our daily lives we are always predicting what will happen to us in any new situation. Children do the same. They are often reluctant to go to some place new because they don’t know what is going to happen. Books that are somewhat predictable and yet present children with new experiences will help them make predictions about happenings in their daily lives and make life a little less uncertain.
It is important to select books that use everyday occurrences in children’s lives as springboards to new experiences. Information and experiences presented need to move from what children know to what they don’t know. Children need to be introduced to new concepts, but not so many at a time that they cannot comprehend what is being read to them. You, as a parent, are in the best position to know what your children know. You can select books that will build on the knowledge your children have. But don’t forget that your children’s interests are very important. They may not want to read books on topics they are not interested in. Try to relate new books to their current interests.
Children love to solve mysteries, puzzles, and all sorts of play with words. Books that present problems that are easy to predict solutions for are good to begin with. As your children get older, they like more difficult challenges. Their tastes become more sophisticated. However, the books they like are those that have the characters do the things that they do or would like to do. They like to read about everyday experiences with humorous twists and touches of mystery and intrigue.
The home is a better place to begin learning to read than the school. The environment in the home is generally more conducive to taking risks. You, as a parent, love and give your children positive responses when they are learning to talk. You spend your time encouraging them and giving them practice. You talk to them and they respond by learning to talk. You can do the same with reading. Read to your children and encourage them. Give them lots of love and hugs when they try to read. Provide an environment for reading where risk taking is encouraged. Let your children know that it’s okay to make mistakes. Mistakes are just part of learning. Provide lots of reading materials and use the procedures suggested in this blog. Give your children the opportunity to learn to read well and to love reading.
WRITING
Writing and reading go hand in hand. As you provide opportunities for reading, you should provide opportunities for writing. Children learn to write by reading and writing. They learn to read by writing and reading. Children who fail to learn to read do so because they don’t read. The same is true of writing. Children will fail to learn to write if they don’t write. Both reading and writing require a lot of practice in reading and writing. Remember, exercises on skills are not reading and writing. Filling in blanks in workbooks is not writing nor is it reading in any real sense.
Just as children take an interest in learning to talk they will take an interest in learning to write. Make paper, pencils, crayons, and paints available to your children and watch them. They will begin making marks on the paper that are representations of things, events, etc. Sometimes they will just enjoy the fun of producing scribbles; at other times their scribbles will have real meaning for them. Try paying as much attention to your children’s scribbles and writing as you do to their speaking; then watch them produce. Writing is fun, but it is even more fun if others appreciate your efforts.
Writing is developmental in much the same way as speaking is developmental. Children go through stages in their writing and spelling much the same as they do their speaking. If you want your children to learn to write, you need to provide the means to help them learn to write. Children will only develop in the areas they have experience. They learn to write by writing and reading. If they have little or no opportunity to write, they won’t learn to write. If the school doesn’t provide time, you must.
Posted by kenneth hoskisson at 4:07 PM
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