Literacy: Reading Skills

Reading Literacy

According to the most recent IALSS (Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey), conducted in 2003, only 58% of Canadians have adequate literacy skills. 42% of Canadians have low literacy levels, and their lives are negatively impacted by their inability to participate in society. Increasingly higher levels of literacy and digital literacy are required to function in today's technological society.

McShane (2005) found that in order to read fluently, a reader should know 98-99% of words in a text. The two thousand most common word families account for 80-95% of most written texts (Nation 2002).

Reading Strategies

Reading is a complex process, and involves decoding words, as well as understanding the meaning of words and sentences to comprehend the text. It is important to adopt a balanced approach, which requires multiple strategies. Explicit instruction, featuring a cognitive approach, includes phonics (sounding out words). Implicit learning, also called the whole language approach, features a social approach to learning and emphasizes background knowledge/schemata and the context clues of words, sentences and the text to generate meaning. The interactive model argues that reading is a complex relationship between the reader and the text and requires many strategies.

Bottom Up/Internal/Explicit Skills

These helpful strategies to read and identify a word are also called 'word attack' skills. These skills require examining the word letter by letter or piece by piece using synthetic phonics and structural analysis. This is helpful because despite there being twenty-six letters (graphemes) in the English alphabet, there are forty-four sounds (phonemes).

Only four hundred of the most common words don't follow conventional orthographical rules, so decoding skills are very applicable (Hughes and Schwab 2010).

Is the word recognizable? These are called "sight words."
What is the first letter? Can it be sounded out? Is it a consonant or a vowel? The next letter? Continue segmenting and then blend the sounds together.
Are there blends (consonant blend: br, pr, gl), vowel pairs (two vowels one sound: ey, ay, ai) or other digraphs (two letters one sound: ph, mb, ea)?
Are there any chunks: patterns or word families (-dge, ight, -ane)?
Are there affixes - small morphemes (parts) added to a word: (prefix: important, prepare and suffix: information, lonely)? Is there is a root word (lone+ly, photo+graph, bio+l+ogy)?
Is it a compound word (two words together: greenhouse, doghouse, cheesecake, etc.)?
Analyze the syllable. Is it open (no consonant sound after vowel - ti-ger, pan-da, su-gar) or closed (consonant sound after vowel - ti-ger, pan-da, su-gar)? There are six types: closed, open, silent 'e', vowel pair, 'r' controlled and final stable syllable.

Synthetic Phonics Sequence

1) Single consonants

at the beginning of words
at the end of words

2) Short vowels

in the middle of three-letter words

3) The silent 'e' syllable - this makes the vowel say its name!

4) Words with two or more closed syllables

5) Blends

at the beginning of words
at the end of words

6) Consonant digraphs

at the beginning of words
at the end of words

7) Vowel combination/blend (regular)

ai, ay
ee, ea
oa, oi, oy

8) Vowel combinations (less regular)

au, aw - all, alk
ei, eigh, ey
ie - ild, ind, igh, ign
ow, ou, oo

9) The consonant + /le/ syllable

From: Cameron, J. and Rabinowitz, M. (2000) A Guide for Tutoring Adult Literacy Students. Ministry of Advanced Education.

Top Down/External/Implicit Skills

These skills feature a more global approach to reading (analytic phonics). It is helpful to imagine a bird looking down and seeing everything below, in this case, the whole word. It is also referred to as a whole-language approach. There is a significant focus on meaning and function in the text.

Pre-Reading Activities

Activate schema/background knowledge, generate interest, make predictions, have learners create discussion and questions, as well as questions they would like answered.

During and After Reading Activities

Word Level

Noticing: identify familiar patterns in groups of words to aid recognition. If know 'sun', then can more easily identify 'fun'.
How does this word relate to other words in the sentence?
What is its function?

Sentence Level

How does this sentence relate to the text?
What is its function in the text?
Where is it in the article or paragraph?
Can the reader paraphrase the sentence?

Text Level

Is the genre familiar (newspaper article, report, blog, etc.)?
What does the reader know about the subject?
How does the reader feel about the subject?
Think about APT (Audience, Purpose and Tone).
Can the reader identify the main idea, supporting details and examples?
Can the reader skim for gist and scan for detail?
Can the reader sequence the events?
Can the reader retell/summarize the text?
Apply LOTS (Lower Order Thinking Skills - remember and understand) and HOTS (Higher Order Thinking Skills - apply, analyze, evaluate and create) questions/activities.
Make a concept mat/graphic organizer to demonstrate understanding.

References

Hughes, N. and Schwab, I. (2010) Teaching Adult Literacy: Principles and Practice. Glasgow: Bell and Bain.

McShane, S. (2005) Applying Research in Reading Instruction for Adults: First Steps for Teachers. Portsmouth: National Institute for Literacy.

Nation, P. (2002) Managing Vocabulary Learning. RELC Portfolio Series 2. Singapore: SEAMED Regional Language Centre.