Learn ■ verb (past and past participle learned or chiefly Brit. learnt) acquire knowledge of or skill in (something) through study or experience or by

learn■ verb (past and past participle learned or chiefly Brit. learnt) acquire knowledge of or skill in (something) through study or experience or by being taught. ▶commit to memory. ▶become aware of by information or from observation. archaic or dialect teach.

learnability noun learnable adjective learner noun



INSIGHTS FROM RESEARCH ON READING

Elisheva BarkonETAI

Maalot-TarshichaSeptember 4, 2007



Introduction

• Basic vs. proficiency• Literacy in the US• Instructional casualties• Learning to read in grades 1-2• Shame• Reading is not natural• Shifting the blame• Training teachers• The local settingwww.childrenofthecode.org



• Listening and speaking come before reading.

• This is an important point because we must remember that reading is essentially a language skill.

Reading is a language skill



Work on linguistic knowledge before teaching learners to read. More specifically, engage learners in a lot of listening to familiarize them with the sounds, stress, rhythm and intonation of the language. In addition, teach core vocabulary.

Implications



Mastering reading in any language depends on many skills and competences. Three deserve priority: knowledge of the alphabetic system, segmentation into meaningful syntactic or semantic units, and meaning construction.

Barkon, 2006

Mastering reading



Instruction in phonemic awareness involves teaching children to focus on and manipulate phonemes in spoken syllables and words.

NRP, 2000

Alphabetics



Phonemic awareness and letter knowledge are the two best school entry predictors of how well children will learn to read during the first two years of instruction.

Phonemic awareness training leads to improvement in students’ phonemic awareness, reading, and spelling following training.

NRP, 2000

Alphabetics



The primary focus of phonics instruction is to help beginning readers understand how letters are linked to sounds (phonemes) to form letter-sound correspondences and spelling patterns and to help them learn how to apply this knowledge in their reading and writing.NRP, 2000

Phonics instruction



Children need to be able to blend sounds together to decode words, and they need to break spoken words into their constituent sounds to write words. Programs that focus too much on the teaching of letter-sound relations and not enough on putting them to use are unlikely to be very effective.NRP, 2000

Phonics instruction



Psychologists now know that the process of mentally sounding out words is an integral part of silent reading, even for the highly skilled.

This understanding suggests that learning the correspondences between letters and sounds (phonics) is keenly important for beginners.

Phonics instruction



Remember!

Reading instruction is most effective when combined with writing instruction.NRP, 2000

Reading instruction



Caution:

Phonemic awareness training does not constitute a complete reading program.

Rather, it provides children with essential foundational knowledge in the alphabetic system.

NRP, 2000

Phonemic awareness training



Alphabetic knowledge is a requirement for automatic word recognition / a large sight vocabulary.

Sight vocabulary



A large sight vocabulary is the basis of fluent reading. In fact, it may be considered a precondition for fluent reading.Day and Bamford, 1998

Sight vocabulary



If text is read in a laborious and inefficient manner, it will be difficult for the reader to remember what he has read and relate the ideas expressed in the text to his or her background knowledge. This is because information necessary for integration will fade from memory before it has been integrated with current information and background knowledge. Thus meaning construction will be negatively affected.

Why is it important to recognize words rapidly?



The answer is that skilled readers:

• Recognize letters in groups, or chunks

• Break words into syllables with little conscious analysis

• Use their knowledge of how words are spelled to read by analogy

• Employ their knowledge about the way a written text is structured

• Activate their extensive vocabulary Hall and Moats (1999)

How do skilled readers recognize words so quickly?



In order to read fluently and efficiently you need to quickly recognize words. Yet the way to achieve rapid word recognition is to study the letters in words repeatedly, so that letter chunks, syllables, and whole words will become part of the repertoire of words you recognize automatically.Hall and Moats, 1999

There is a paradox about learning to read.



The paradox is that the process of breaking the word apart and studying it on a letter by letter basis is exactly what ultimately allows you to become automatic in reading that word and not have to study it letter by letter later.Hall and Moats, 1999

There is a paradox about learning to read.



Eye movement research has taught us that skilled readers:

• fixate on almost every word

• process every individual letter in every word

• perceive letters in chunks, not individually

• do not rely on context to recognize words Hall and Moats, 1999

What do we mean by accurate word recognition?



Caution:

A large sight vocabulary does not cause comprehension.

“Efficient word recognition seems to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for good comprehension”.Stanovich, 1992 cited in Day and Bamford, 1998

Sight vocabulary



Bottom line

In the early stages of teaching FL/SL reading, learners are learning to read not reading to learn. In other words, they are learning how to identify words automatically, accurately and rapidly. To that end they need practice with easy texts where all the words are familiar so that they can develop sight vocabulary.

Learning to read



Bottom line (II)

Mastering decoding takes time. It depends on massive practice with easy texts. In an FL/SL context this means reading texts with familiar vocabulary and content. Once decoding skills are in place learners can move to text with some new vocabulary. This does not mean that learners should not be exposed to texts from which they can learn more lexical items and facts about the world. Indeed, these texts are important too. But they should not be used for learning to read.

Learning to read



Bottom line (III)

If when working on building sight vocabulary learners are required to practice with texts for which they do not have the lexical coverage the attention they should be directing at practicing reading will be channeled to working on the meanings of the lexis they don’t know. This defeats the purpose of practice at this stage.

Learning to read



Many SL learners are very slow readers. This may be the result of what we do in class with the texts we use (we focus on structure and vocabulary) and the result of the level of the texts (too difficult in terms of language and/or content).

Slow reading



Reading rate may be an indicator of fluent or disfluent reading.

A slow reading rate may be symptomatic of ineffi cient word recognition or lack of sensitivity to the phrase –the natural unit of meaning in reading.

Rasinski, 2000

Reading rate



Slow reading

• Excessively slow, disfluent reading leads to less overall reading

• Excessively slow, disfluent reading is associated with poor comprehension

• Excessively slow reading leads to reading frustration

Rasinski 2002



One goal of reading instruction is to help children become fluent readers. When children are fluent they read automatically, decoding words quickly and accurately. Fluent readers read with prosody – that is, they use the appropriate pitch, pace, phrasing, and expression. Fluent reading aids comprehension.

Mandel Morrow, Kuhn and Schwanenflugel (2006)

Reading fluency



According to the report of the U.S. National Reading Panel, fluency is a predictor of reading success. Although it has been found that fluency is a major goal in reading instruction, teachers are not as familiar as they should be with fluency strategies, and they are not using them regularly.


Reading fluency



Despite its importance as a component of skilled reading, fluency is often neglected in the classroom. This is unfortunate. If text is read in a laborious and inefficient manner, it will be difficult for the child to remember what has been read and to relate the ideas expressed in the text to his or her background knowledge.NRP, 2000

The neglected link



It is often assumed that if students can decode they will become fluent. Research has indicated that this is not necessarily so, and therefore students need training in fluency strategies.


Reading fluency



The reader must parse the text into syntactically and semantically appropriate units. I f readers read quickly and accurately but with no expression in their voices, if they place equal emphasis on every word and have no sense of phrasing, and if they ignore most punctuation, blowing through periods and other markers that indicate pauses, then it is unlikely that they will f ully understand the text. Rasinski 2004

Prosodic reading



Why is prosody problematic?

There are features present in spoken language that provide clues to a speaker’s intent such as gestures, facial expression, intonation, and stress. These are not present in printed text.

Hook and Jones 2002



The absence of these prosodic f eatures in text inhibits some readers f rom chunking words (grouping by semantic and syntactic f eatures) into meaningful units. J ust as we teach students to make sound-symbol correspondence during decoding instruction, we also must teach readers to map the prosodic f eatures of spoken language onto the printed text. Structured and systematic instruction in this area will f acilitate spoken-to-print prosodic correspondences and enhance comprehension. Hook and J ones 2002

Mapping prosody onto text



The student's problem is of ten that he does not know the target language well enough to chunk eff ectively. Many students read word by word, especially if the text is diffi cult, so to encourage good reading habits, a lot of practice with easy texts is needed. Nuttall 1996

Reading in Phrasal Units - Chunking



Reading practice is generally recognized as an important contributor to fluency.

Two instructional approaches, each of which has several variations, have typically been used to teach reading fluency.NRP, 2000

Fluency instruction



Guided repeated oral reading, encourages students to read passages orally with systematic and explicit guidance and feedback from the teacher.

Independent silent reading, encourages students to read silently on their own, inside and outside the classroom, with minimal guidance or feedback.NRP, 2000

Fluency instruction



The teacher plays a key role in developing prosodic reading skills by modeling prosodic reading in classroom read-aloud sessions and then discussing the specific oral interpretation that he or she chose. Rasinski 2004

Fluency instruction



Research on repeated readings indicates that the number of trials to achieve fluency decreases over time and fluency gains made on earlier passages transfer to subsequent passages (Samuels 1979).

Mercer, Campbell, Miller, Mercer,and Lane 2000.

Fluency instruction



There are three predominant themes in the research on the development of reading comprehension skills.

NRP, 2000

Comprehension



To understand reading comprehension you need a clear description of the role that vocabulary development and vocabulary instruction play in the understanding of what has been read.

NRP, 2000

Vocabulary development and vocabulary instruction



The goals of vocabulary learning

When we plan the vocabulary goals of a long-term course of study, we can look at three kinds of information to help decide how much vocabulary needs to be learned: the number of words in the language, the number of words known by native speakers and the number of words needed to use the language.

Nation 2001



How many words are there in the language?

Webster’s Third New International Dictionary contains around 114,000 word families excluding proper names.

Nation 2001





How many words do native speakers know?

Recent reliable studies suggest that educated native speakers of English know around 20,000 word families. These estimates are rather low because the counting unit is word families which have several derived family members and proper nouns are not included in the count.For each year of their early life, native speakers add on average 1,000 word families a year to their vocabulary.

Nation 2001





How much vocabulary do you need to use another language?

There is a very small group of high-frequency words which are very important because these words cover a very large proportion of the running words in spoken and written texts and occur in all kinds of uses of the language.Usually the 2,000- word level has been set as the most suitable limit for high-frequency words.

Nation 2001





Since reasonable comprehension of a text requires the understanding of about 98% of its vocabulary, more than 2,500 word families should be familiar to the learner.Laufer (1992) suggests 5,000 word families.

Laufer 2005

How much vocabulary do you need to use another language?





How should teachers and learners deal with these words?

The high frequency words of the language are clearly so important that considerable time should be spent on them by teachers and learners.The words are a small enough group to enable most of them to get attention over the span of a long-term English programme.This attention can be in the form of direct teaching, direct learning, incidental learning, and planned meetings with the words.

Nation 2001





Specialised vocabulary

There is a very important specialised vocabulary for second language learners intending to do academic study in English. This is the Academic Word List. It consists of 570 word families that are not in the most frequent 2,000 words of English but which occur reasonably frequently over a very wide range of academic texts.

Nation 2001





Adding the academic vocabulary to the high frequency words changes the coverage of academic text from 78.1% to 86.6%.With a vocabulary of 2,000 words, approximately one word in every five will be unknown.With a vocabulary of 2,000 words plus the Academic Word List, approximately one word in every ten will be unknown.

Nation 2001

Specialised vocabulary





Contextualized vs decontextualized vocabulary learning

Even though many language educators who adhere to communicative teaching do not accept learning from lists, there is ample evidence that people can learn a large number of words in lists and even remember many of them later.

Laufer 2005





Selecting words for instruction

The most important perspective on word selection at the peresent time is that of Beck, McKeown, and Kucan (2002). Beck et al. view vocabulary as falling into three tiers.The first is high-frequency words and the third rare words that are specific to particular content domains.

Pearson, Hiebert and Kamil, 2007





Beck et al. believe that vocabulary instruction should focus on second-tier words.Words in the second tier characterize the vocabulary of mature language users when they read and write. They are best thought of as less common labels for relatively common concepts: stunning in place of pretty, pranced instead of walked, astonished but not surprised.

Pearson, Hiebert and Kamil, 2007

Selecting words for instruction



Comprehension is defined as “intentional thinking during which meaning is constructed through interactions between text and reader” (Harris & Hodges, 1995). Thus, readers derive meaning from text when they engage in intentional, problem solving thinking processes.

Text comprehension in enhanced when readers actively relate the ideas represented in print to their own knowledge and experiences and construct mental representations in memory.

NRP, 2000

Comprehension



Reading comprehension is interactive - relating current information to what has gone before and constructive – relating meaning to our knowledge of the world.

Field, 1995

Reading comprehension



The Panel lists 7 categories of text comprehension which have a solid scientific basis:

Comprehension monitoring, where readers learn how to be aware of their understanding of the material;

Cooperative learning, where students learn reading strategies together;

NRP, 2000

Text comprehension instruction



Use of graphic and semantic organizers (including story maps), where readers make graphic representations of the material to assist comprehension;

Question answering, where readers answer questions posed by the teacher and receive immediate feedback;

Question generation, where readers ask themselves questions about various aspects of the story;NRP, 2000




Story structure, where students are taught to use the structure of the story as a means of helping them recall story content in order to answer questions about what they have read;

Summarization, where readers are taught to integrate ideas and generalize from the text information.

NRP, 2000




The preparation of teachers to better equip students to develop and apply reading comprehension strategies to enhance understanding is intimately linked to students’ achievement in this area.NRP, 2000

Teacher preparation and comprehension strategies instruction



Reason

Teaching reading comprehension strategies to students at all grade levels is complex.

Teachers not only must have a firm grasp of the content presented in text, but also must have substantial knowledge of the strategies themselves, of which strategies are most effective for different students and types of content and of how best to teach and model strategy use.NRP, 2000

Teacher preparation and comprehension strategies instruction



Celebrate the alphabetic code to secure automatic and accurate word recognition. Instruct learners to recognize chunks and give expression to the words in the text.

Set goals for second language reading speed.

Monitor vocabulary growth in second language learners. Engage learners in strategies that direct attention to content and structure. Establish an enticing extensive reading program.

Implications

Documents

Learn ■ verb (past and past participle learned or chiefly Brit. learnt) acquire knowledge of or skill in (something) through study or experience or by