Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Teaching Reading

Week 3 -- Answers

Vacca, Vacca, and Gove, Chapter 3

1. What are the early stages of reading and writing development in children?

According to the International Reading Association in the National Association for the Education of Young Children there are basically five stages in the development of literacy. These five stages are Awareness and Exploration, Experimental, Early, Transitional, and Independent and Productive.

In the awareness and exploration phase children are beginning to develop habits of literacy even though they're not yet able to read or write at all. They are exposed to and are assumed to begin to understand the power that reading and writing actually represent. They do this by pretending to read as well as pretending to write. They will actually lift books up and flip pages as if they're actually reading and also engage in various types other types of pseudo-literate behavior like scribbling. Awareness and exploration is a very important development stage and as such functions as a kind of root prerequisite for all the other stages in that it is during this stage that children really begin to understand what reading and writing is used for. They begin to be able to feel the power of permanence contained within reading and writing.

During the experimental reading and writing phase children again demonstrate, in more concrete ways, concrete knowledge about their own particular writing system. That is, they begin to show that they clearly understand whether their writing system works from right to left or bottom to top. In the English context at least they also begin to show that they understand concepts behind the alphabet and will even have internalized the names of some of the alphabetic symbols. Is also at this point that children begin to experiment with language itself and particularly with rhyming. This is important development in being able to get them to understand the phonetic basis of language which they will need to be able to work with an alphabetic writing system.

The early reading and writing phase usually occurs as children enter the first grade. It is here that children begin to engage in true reading and writing, albeit on a very basic level. Children do begin to read simple stories provided the stories have a very familiar context. This level is all about storytelling and seems to support the well-held belief that the narration is the most basic type of literary genre. It is also at this stage that children begin to be able to read more fluently and the number of words that they can recognize goes up dramatically. Still despite all this seeming success, there are still limitations. Whether the students are engaging in reading or writing this engagement has to be at a very personal level. They can really only engage with things that are extremely familiar, such as stories dealing with very simple surroundings and here and now or stories they have heard already and are very familiar with. Based on studies conducted on subjects at this phase it seems that repetition might very well be the key to literacy development. The children can really only begin to read and write within stories that they know very well. We can conclude from this that sitting down and telling stories to your kids might eventually have a very good impact on them though it may seem fruitless at the time.

In the transitional reading and writing phase what we basically find is a solidification and expansion of the skills that the children have developed in the early reading phases. Children can deal with more various and different types of texts because they are beginning to develop cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies inherent to the skills for reading at this stage. These types of skills are basically the same as the different literacy strategies that we introduced last week. This stage provides an important and necessary bridge between early reading and independent and productive reading because it is at this stage that important lifelong strategies begin to develop.

In the last stage which is called the independent and productive stage children are generally set in their lifelong process as readers and writers. As I mentioned in class is important that reading skill is developed early. Good reading and writing is a habit that must be fostered young because habits are difficult to develop later in life or they become harder to change as time goes on. In this case reading and writing are extremely important skills for basic success in school which means that if people have not developed them early on they are going to fall behind in school rather quickly and this could put extra pressure on them, spinning them into a negative cycle of failure and avoidance. Eventually reading and writing might become something which they hate and avoid at all costs. I am sure you know people like that. Such students, regardless of intelligence, invariably do not do well in school at least until they can get the reading problem under control.

2. What kind of environment is necessary for literacy to develop?

A literate environment is one in which curiosity for written forms is encouraged and supported. A good reading environment is one which clearly shows the usefulness of reading and print sources within the context of the world at large and from the earliest possible point. There has been a lot of research recently about what so-called family literacy is and its role as a base for the development of literacy skills in addition to the right formula for developing such a base. Basically, literacy begins at home. Parents need to try to get their children used to the idea that reading and writing are powerful and useful tools for their success as early as possible. This may simply involve engaging children in activities where they can be exposed to print. Writing is everywhere. As I mentioned the class, even here in Korea English writing is everywhere. Parents simply need to draw their children's attention to it in getting used to dealing with it and understanding what it means and why it's there. This is the beginning. Reading aloud to children and telling children's stories is also very important. Show them books and show them the print that is in the books. Let them try to make connections between symbols on a page, words in their minds, and the real world. When children have figured this relationship out they have made a giant step in becoming literate adults.

It is important that a the connection between the world of school and the world of home is a seamless one. All too often parents see their job and the job of the teacher in relation to their child`s education as being totally different. Children learn at school and study at home. This can create problems for students who do not receive enough real support or modeling at home, just pressure.

3. How does writing develop?

There are basically three stages for development of early writing, but the stages are divided into some sub-stages. The three main stages are scribbling, invented spelling, and spelling. Writing first develops as scribbling but there are several stages in the scribbling practice; early controlled and named scribbling. Obviously as the names imply the scribbling of the child becomes ever closer to real writing over time. Scribbling is a very important development for the advent of writing skill. It really is a kind of mocking or simulation of writing. Children sit down and simply make marks on a paper. They think they're writing, and they might even be able to read or feign reading what is that they have scribbled although no one else would be able to do so. Often during the scribbling phase, particularly in later parts, writing begins to take on logographic characteristics in that particular symbols represent certain sounds or words for the children. It is important at this point that distinguish scribbling from doodling. While scribbling is basically a mimicing or a mocking of the writing activity, doodling is when children engage in rudimentary drawing. Both scribbling and doodling are necessary for literary development. The former is a type of writing while the latter is a type of storytelling and often they're fused together into a kind of a sticky ball that only the child will understand.

In the next stage, which is the invented spelling stage, children are beginning to understand sound to spelling correspondences and the phonemic nature of spelling, but they really don't have much of the system down yet. There tends to be a one-to-one correspondence between symbols and sounds and the conventions of spelling are definitely missing. It is at this stage that children really tend to write just the way they pronounce on the surface. For this reason the spelling tends to be very unconventional and overly simplistic. At the same time their spelling is also underlyingly systematic. This is an important phase because it is at this phase that the child begins to develop basic systems for spelling which they constantly test and revise. Inevitably, or hopefully, they are going to have to replace and alter these transient systems for more conventional and more permanent ones, but invented spelling provides a very important basis for sound elements in spelling in the future. Remember, like children's language in general, invented spelling is different from the adult system but it is a system unto itself. In all stages it is systematic, but the system will change bringing it all closer to adult norms.

After the invented spelling stage then spelling itself, as a proper and fixed series of conventions, begins to develop. This often occurs when children are exposed to more formal kind of instruction. The developments in spelling can be broken down into four different stages. The first of the stages is the prephonemic spelling stage. It is during this stage that children seem to do some letters and they begin to explore the relationship between certain symbols and sounds that can be attributed to them. During the phonemic spelling stage words begin to appear, but often vowels are missing. Also simple design correspondences can still tend to be one-to-one. During the transitional spelling stage children finally get beyond this one-to-one relationship between symbol and sound and begin to develop more awareness of spelling conventions and practices by inserting vowels in the right positions and even vowel clusters, although they might continue to have difficulty with diphthongs. In the final stage, the conventional spelling stage, children begin to learn to deal with the conventions of English spelling of which we know there are many.

At this point it should be mentioned that the conventions of English writing is quite difficult to master even for native speaker children and adults. One of the reasons proposed to explain the difficulty of English writing is that as a system English writing really tends to focus on underlying representations in the mind. The basic idea behind this is that every English speaker has the same underlying representations for the same words, even if the end of pronouncing them differently. This means that for most speaker sounding out a word out is not necessarily going to help them be able to spell it. English spelling tends to reflect underlying forms or historically older forms which may have little to do with current pronuinciations.

4. How can a literate environment be created?

Literate environments can be created in schools if certain guidelines are followed. One of the most important guidelines is that the classroom is much more students centered and this might seem strange when dealing with such young kids, but nevertheless for reading to develop as a natural type of activity for these kids they have to be doing it for and by themselves. Nobody can force you to read and certainly nobody can force you to learn how to read. Following this, it is imperative that the teacher create an environment where children feel happy in reading and where they don't feel pressure but rather have an interest in trying to be able to read. Remember Krashen`s basic argument in the Power or Reading. This is closely aligned with the basic philosophy of learner centered teaching that many of you have already discussed extensively in other classes. To create a literate environment the text should come from the very center of the class. The class should be based on the need to read for an interesting and important real-world (pseudo-real-world) purpose. Reading like language in general is functionally based. People read because they have a functional or goal-driven need to read not because they are forced to read by some often seemingly irrational omnipotent outside force (like a test) and its supporting lackeys, so in the class we need to create situations in which the children will want to read or will need to read to solve or deal with a situation or problem. At the same time we want to create an environment where children are exposed to a lot of different print and print types and also feel comfortable in their exposure and dealing with them. This means that the class should not necessarily be very competitive and that students should not be singled out for reading punishment or anything like that.

One-way dealing with this is by putting together what have been termed literary play centers. These literary play centers focus on the social nature of reading and writing at the early stages. As we already mentioned reading and writing, what is literacy development, really focuses on storytelling in the beginning and storytelling is a highly effective type of social activity. In the play centers students are encouraged to put together stories through pretend play and then to discuss their stories and deal with their stories primarily in spoken form but if possible also in written form. The basic idea here is the students need to be able to experience language in a tactile fashion and what they are creating with language from the mind. In order to be good storytellers children need to know about the world because stories are just representations of the world, either true or false. Children need to be able to experiment with that. Reading and writing should not be boring.

5. What are some of the different experiences that teachers can create for their students in dealing with written language?

There are a wide variety of different experiences that teachers can create for their students in the classroom which will allow them to deal with language as a means of developing habits of literacy. As mentioned earlier, students can engage in language experience that is not necessarily related strictly to reading a text or writing a text in a solitary and meaningless fashion. Most of these language experience types of activities are social in nature and in all the students are doing things in groups. So we are really talking about a student-student type interaction as well as student-teacher type interaction in addition to a student-text type of interaction. As an example of the latter a student could tell a story or dictate a story and have the teacher write the story down to be placed or displayed on the wall of the classroom at a later date. A student-student type of interaction could be between students telling each other stories through pictures or the combination of pictures and written words. It's important that visual information is linked with orthographic or written types of forms so that the students can make connections between the real world and reading and writing as they do this. For this, recent picture and visuals are always extremely important. Repetition, as mentioned before, is also a very important element of this, so we want students to be able to engage in singing and storytelling that is somewhat repetitious in nature. Repetition doesn't bother them the way it might annoy adults and it works in order to be able to get them to understand how they can activate their schema. So as students go to retain certain stories, since they already know some of the story, they will be able to use their schema to reactivate what they know as they hear the familiar story. Another aspect is sort of role-playing set up in the classroom. The purpose of the role-playing activities is for the students to be able to develop techniques for building stories and for getting out of their own heads a bit and extending things a bit. I think this is quite clear. It's also clear that reading to students would be a very natural type of activity to do when you're trying to develop literacy. In Korea there has been a lot of focus recently on storytelling as a means of language development. Unfortunately, however, storytelling is often not used as a way of developing literary skills because the students are more often passive than not. So, if you wanted to do storytelling for maximum focus you need to do storytelling in which the students are much more active. You need to get them involved in the story asking questions and even telling parts of the story themselves. As a suggestion, have them finish the story and /or have them work themselves through the story and the teacher acts simply as their guide to fill in missing details. Good storytelling is an art, and is a very far cry from simply reading through a text out loud. Having students read together and share books is also good type of activity. Reading does not and, especially in the beginning stages, should not be a solitary activity, even when done relatively silently. The same holds for writing. So, getting students to do these types of things together and figure things out in the reading text together helps to build and solidify literacy skills.

6. Why is it that reading and writing skills develop and need to be developed together?

You should be clear on this point exactly why we believe that reading and writing need to be developed together. They are really mirror images of each other which are based on the same principles just realized in different ways. We can't separate reading skills from writing skill. Although the actual practice of doing both are different, the principles which underlie them are the same. For example we've mentioned in the very beginning of this course that in order to read well you need to get into the head of the writer to be able to try to figure what the writer intended. Well, if you have never studied writing or practiced writing then that is going to be a virtually impossible thing to do. Most of the cognitive and metacognitive strategies that we've talked about already are really based on this reading-writing continuum. If you don't know how to write then you are going to have a lot of difficulties in trying to read and visa-versa. The strategies we talked about in relation to reading are really important for that skill, but they are much more a basic part of the writing process than the reading process. Thus, in effect, learning how to write makes us a better reader and at the same time learning how to read well also makes us a better writer.