Teaching+Reading


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Teaching Reading //**



When a person begins to read they use the ‘four roles of a reader: code breaker, meaning maker, text user and text critic’ (Freebody & Luke 1990). The four roles are integrated and early readers need to understand and experience all four roles in order to become fluent and flexible readers. //**Code Breaker and Phonics** //

When a child is assuming the code breaker role they must understand the alphabetic principle, have phonemic awareness and have letter knowledge. media type="youtube" key="yS46jqYfZDg&hl=en" height="355" width="425" Phonology is the sound structure of speech and sounds, or phonemes, can be manipulated using intonation. Intonation involves stress, pitch and juncture. Pitch refers to how high or low a voice is when producing a sound, stress to how loud or soft it is and juncture to the pauses or connections between words, phrases and sentences (Morrow 2005). There are 44 phonemes in the English language which can be either one letter or several letters put together. For example the word dog has three phonemes: d – o – g and so does the word sheep. sh – ee – p The word ‘sheep’ demonstrates two, ‘sh’ and ‘ee’, of various combinations to represent sound. ‘Phonic awareness is the insight that every spoken word can be thought of as a sequence of phonemes” (Hill 2006, p.21). According to Hill (2006) in order to understand the alphabetic principle – the idea that sounds are represented by letter- one must have phonemic awareness. In an interactive process, the more children read and write the more their knowledge of letters and sounds develop. Knowing the letter names helps children to remember their sounds, as the names help to induce the sounds. Eg KAT (cat), PPL (people). // ** Meaning Maker ** // Hill suggests that meaning makers read to understand. They search for meaning in illustrations, print and sentence structure. Teachers can enhance children’s comprehension by asking questions at different stages of reading. This is known as supporting self-monitoring and it is made up of three main steps. **Before Reading**: teachers build up children’s prior knowledge and link this to the book they read. Sometimes teachers talk through the book to build up semantic webs so that the new vocabulary in the book can be discussed and classified. **During Reading**: teachers often use prompts to support children to problem solve and use several information sources such as meaning, syntax or the sounds and letters to figure out the print.

**After Reading**: teachers plan a range of activities for the children to practise what they need so they can become more independent readers. Reading involves drawing together information from several sources and teachers can use different prompts during reading to draw the child’s attention to meaning, syntax and visual information in a text. Children will learn to use these prompts automatically and in more and more complex texts. // ** Text User  ** // Text users identify the form or genre of a book to determine how they will read it. Learning to be a text user means developing a language about texts and to do this teachers can ask questions like: What kind of text is this? Is this book a recount or a narrative? Is this text and explanation of something? If this text is a narrative, what is the problem to be solved?

// ** Text Critic **  // According to Hill (2006) a text critic evaluates the author’s purpose and their decisions about how the information is represented. They are able to analyse the text and the teachers can support the role of text critic by giving the student an opportunity to respond, add their opinion, challenge the ideas put forth and to publish book reviews and evaluations.

// **Activities for the Reader Roles** //  For each reader role there is a wide range of different activities that help the child learn to read. **Say-it-move-it**

This game is designed for the breaker code role. The teacher says a word aloud and the child repeats it. The child is then asked to say each phoneme of the word separately while the teacher or the child moves the letter corresponding to the sound to a line or box. This activity would be excellent for someone just beginning to read as it will demonstrate their knowledge on phonemes and show how far they have progressed, depending on which sounds they have mastered. Semantic Web ** One of the best activities for meaning makers is a semantic web which is a way of organising information in categories. If a class wanted to know more about whales the teacher could have the class brainstorm words associated with whales and write it up on the wall. The students should be encouraged to categorise the words into subtopics like food and habitat. As the children read and find out more information they can add it to the wall. **  Writing in Different Genres and Formats   **
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Text user activities encourage children to explore the text type or genre and understand the purpose of the text and how to engage with it. Getting students to write in different genres and formats will help them to explore, understand and use different text types. The experience will help them to remember what they have learned. As there is normally a variety of different “jobs” in the classroom, such as a gopher, wiping down the board and taking lunch money to the canteen, getting the students to apply for a job is a good way to get them to write in a different format. They would need to write up the application and consider what information needs to be in it before filling in their own details. Exploration **   A text critic will explore the author’s intention and meaning. To gain confidence in this area, students could be given different types of text to interpret. Catalogues, advertisement booklets, fiction and non fiction books can be explored to determine how words and images are used to influence the reader. It is important for children to learn that not all information can be trusted but overall they should still enjoy reading.