Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Teaching Reading

Week 5 - Answers

Morrow, Chapter 8

1. How do children or how should children study words?

What we need to remember here is that the situation in Korea is quite different than the situation that Morrow describes so lucidly in her book. The basic difference is that in the native speaker environment that Morrow is describing the children already have acquired a large part of their own native language, at least from a structural perspective. So, when we're talking about how children should study words, we are not talking about how they actually learn the words. We're focusing on how they are able to take words in their written form and internalize them. What we are really talking about is how they can figure out and develop reading skills based on studying words. In Korea and other foreign language situations the scenario is different. As teachers of a foreign language and literacy, which is what we are trying to learn to be in this course, we cannot just focus on the studying of words for reading and writing but also on the learning of words, or better put, vocabulary.

The bottom line of this is that children seem to go through certain stages as they learn to recognize words. Not coincidentally, the stages they follow seem to follow the stages on how writing itself was developed as a tool for communication. So, the first thing that children usually learn, or do, is to make associations between particular words (sequences of sound) and particular symbols (An important point to remember and one which allows this to happen is that words have been proven to be psychologically real even for young children. This means that children are able to recognize words as units in language way before they are able to read.). This is a kind of logographic type reading system. From the first basic associations that children form, what are called sight words develop. In order for children to develop sight words they need to be highly familiar with the object(s) in question and they also need to have abstracted the strictly logographic forms and their visual base down to one's that allow for phonemic accommodation. This is a big step. So at the level of sight words these children have associated a particular word with an entity in the world and also the name that is used to linguistically quoted that entity. It is only after the period of sight words that children do begin to further abstract their system into one which allows them to break the words up into individual units and they begin to understand that these units of sound have graphemeic units which correspond to them. It is at this point that we can begin to teach them phonics and the alphabet. The correspondences at first are necessarily going to be regular. This is simply commonsense.

2. How can teachers enhance a child`s study of words?

The answer to this question is surprisingly simple. A teacher can enhance a child study of words by making word study something natural and meaningful. It sounds simple and it actually is simple provided one creates the right atmosphere in the classroom. This may, however, not always be so simple in the teaching situation that we enjoy here in Korea. We have heard many times about how we might try to create this type of environment. We need to enhance and develop the natural curiosity that children have with the world around them and integrate that with a plethora of written forms. Again, it is important to remember the writing is not something which will develop naturally like spoken language. As teachers we need to form the connections in the minds of the students. We need to introduce them to the world of literacy, by giving them interesting materials and is having them self-explore under a watchful eye. As I have said many times before, "teachers don't teach language. Language teaches language." We need to keep that in mind as we try to develop literacy in our students. Let students write down words they like. Literacy should become part of their psychological reality and the world they live in and this means they need to play with it.

Part of our job as teachers is to enhance literacy throughout the lifetime of a student. I firmly believe that the ideas presented in this chapter by Morrow are not only applicable to young children (her target group is from kindergarten to third grade) but can also be used with much older kids and even adults. Because in Korea we English teachers have the dual job of developing literacy as we develop language from a very basic level we are going to have to be developing literacy for much longer. We can't just sit down and teach the alphabet immediately and expect people to learn it and expect them to learn how to read. To a certain extent I think what Morrow says is his actually more applicable to adults because they will take more of their own responsibility for their learning. So, the bottom line is to make things interesting and meaningful and then decide what is they want to read and what is they want to do with language and with the words you are trying to teach them.

3. What is sight vocabulary and how can it be taught and used?

Sight vocabulary is what the name implies. At an early stage of literacy development children will be able to recognize whole words. This does not mean that they can recognize the individual parts of a word. They simply have the word recognized in its entirety. The sight words tend to be words that are commonly around the children. The example that Morrow gives in the book is of McDonald's. A child might start off associating the golden arches with the name McDonald's and through this association they will further abstract this into a sight word type of situation in which they now associate the word McDonald's with the name McDonald's, that is, the phonological signature or sound associated with the name. At an early stage of literacy development children may have dozens, even hundreds of sight words. These are things that reoccur frequently in the world in close proximity around them. They might be the names of certain products, favorite storybooks, or anything else that is labeled like you may find in department stores or grocery shops. In Korea, due to a cultural accident, it is readily possible for it you to have your students try to develop sight vocabulary in English due to the tremendous amount of labeling it is done here through English code.

4. What is the Language Experience Approach (LEA) and how can it be used?

The Language Experience Approach (LEA) is an approach to teaching literacy which basically tries to get the students to do their own kind of learning by themselves by trying to get them to experience the world through language. Again, as with all approaches there are certain ideas inherent in the approach, but there are very few specific guidelines in exactly how to conduct classroom instruction on a dat in day out basis using the LEA approach. In the chapter, Morrow does quite a good job of giving us specific types of activities that we can use in a literacy classroom. If we're going to be teaching somewhat older children in Korea we probably need to tweak some of the suggestions for the LEA approach simply because the older students might not be particularly interested in some of the ideas. The basic ideas, however, still apply. When you try to foster an exchange between the child and the world through language and particularly through written language the child can get a good feel for how writing works and how language can being encoded to be permanent. I'm not going to spend a lot of time listing the same types of things that she does a very good job of doing in the chapter especially because she is so focussed on younger learners. Using this with older learners is similar in its general processes but obviously the subject matter and the how one deals with concepts will be different since older learners know what writing is about.

5. What is phonics and what are some of the different strategies for teaching it?

Well, I think we all know that phonics is the teaching of sounds of a language in relation to its system of orthography. Usually phonics is taught in a specific order. The phonics teacher starts with consonants, and the more regular ones and very common ones, then starts to work with more irregular consonants, and eventually moves onto vowels first short vowels and then long vowels. After that there is kind of a cleanup wherein the phonics teacher will deal with consonant digraphs, structural elements of words, blending, and other sorts of more tricky phenomenon. In teaching phonics there are basically two different strategies that teachers employ. These are meaning-based strategies and specific word study activities. In employing meaning-based strategies the teachers are doing something not unlike the LEA approach in that all of what is going on in the classroom is supposed to be based on using language in the real world. The explicit word study activities are probably more familiar to us. They include things such as making new words and trying to systematize or order new words according to a set of principles. What were really trying to do with phonics is to get students to develop categories and concepts about each of the sounds as well as each of the graphemes used in the target language. This will allow them to form the patterns we talked about so much in the previous week

6. What are some of the advantages of oral reading?

What is interesting about oral reading is that studies have shown a direct correlation between the fluency a student will demonstrate while oral reading and the level of comprehension they have with the text. This doesn't mean that when people read out loud they will be better able to comprehend texts. It falls back on what some of you might have studied, or might be currently studying about pronunciation. What I'm talking about are thought groupings. Things like stress and intonation are extremely important in oral reading and seem to be equally important in being able to parse or break up text into more comprehensible units. The processes seem to be the same. Thus, by having students engaged in oral reading and giving the students certain clues and guidance as they are reading out loud the teacher can actually determine how well the student is doing in their reading and can also use this opportunity to help enhance their reading skills by pushing them where necessary and prodding and poking (proverbially of course) them in the places they need prodding and poking. It is a great type of activity, especially as it works well for adults when they want to develop their own skills in the language by themselves. Oral reading is not just about pronunciation, it about comprehension overall and in and in direct but highly correlated way.

7. How can we assess the quality of published material for reading development?

Morrow lists a whole bunch of different requirements for published material that we want to use as reading development material. I would suggest that you consult those lists with just a brief comment that you need to find materials which match the personalities and levels of your students as well as your own. As we have talked about in class, pictures and visuals are extremely important in the early stages of reading development. For us in Korea we also have the added worry of trying to build language in a very basic way as we are trying to get our students to learn how to read effectively. This means we need to try to find reading materials which are very familiar to our students.

8. How can we assess word-study skills?

Test them, but don't let them know necessarily that it is a test. Maybe the best way of doing this is to use worksheets so that you have a permanent record. The worksheets do not need to be difficult or boring, they should be exciting and incorporate pictures not unlike the 20 different reading/spelling activities I have provided you this week for your perusal.