The use of an autobiographical narrative links personal history as a reader to the practices a teacher employs in their classroom (Vacca, Vacca, Gove, Burkey, Lenhart, & McKoen, 2010, p 13). The use of this tactic requires teachers to reflect and dig into their past to discover the whys and hows of their reading experiences. Then the teacher can apply alterations to their practice if necessary to make the most confident readers out of their students. Continuing to study the practice of teaching and adjusting their methods is a way teachers increase their professional knowledge.
Teachers who are specialized in the process of reading and learning to read may complete extra development and become a literacy coach (Vacca, Vacca, Gove, Burkey, Lenhart, & McKoen, 2010, p 15). They then apply their expertise within the classroom to assist students who require more assistance reading, as well as provide vital training and support for teachers. As language and literacy learning are inseparable, discovery of the alphabetic principle is a very important process in all languages including English. The correspondence between letters (graphemes) and sounds (phonemes) is the basis for the alphabetic principle. Students well-versed in perception of patterns and structures are able to decode words using this orthographic knowledge. “From an instructional perspective, then, it is important to know how to help beginning readers develop into skilled readers who can identify words quickly and accurately as they read) (Vacca, Vacca, Gove, Burkey, Lenhart, & McKoen, 2010, p 18).
Reflection on prior knowledge, experiences, conceptual understandings and so forth refer to the schemata make-up of the person (Vacca, Vacca, Gove, Burkey, Lenhart, & McKoen, 2010, p 19). Students use this information to create meaning of new things they encounter. The process of how humans organize and construct this meaning is referred to as schema theory. It relates directly to reading comprehension by training the student to automatically recall that knowledge and construct it just as quickly while they read. “The more we know, the quicker we learn because we can activate those connections better. This is particularly applicable to students in the classroom because they all have different experiences and connections made outside of our classroom, and through discussion and community activities they can share and draw on each others knowledge to form their own schemata as well.
When applied to reading, metacognition (thinking about thinking) includes self-knowledge, task knowledge, and self-monitoring (Vacca, Vacca, Gove, Burkey, Lenhart, & McKoen, 2010, p 20). Using implicit instructional techniques to encourage student growth helps them discover the way to learn themselves. For example, if a student struggles with a word or sentence, ask them to make an educated guess about the word. This implicitly tells the student that the word/sentence should make sense, and asks them to activate their background knowledge to read something that makes sense with what they know. Explicit instruction includes modeling, demonstrating, explaining, and reflecting aloud. Students benefit from both implicit and explicit instructional strategies, and a teacher should apply both frequently within their classroom.
There are two highly acclaimed psychologists whose theories dramatically changed the way we think about child learning and our teaching (Vacca, Vacca, Gove, Burkey, Lenhart, & McKoen, 2010, p 22). Jean Piaget observed the way children learn and interact primarily with their environment, and how their experiences directly influence their schema. He stated that language reflects thought but does not necessarily shape it. Lev Vygotsky agreed that children are active participants with their learning and environment experiences shape that learning, but he also argued that language stimulates their cognitive development.
Psycholinguistic views of learning to read can be broken into three distinct systems in written language: graphophonemic, syntactic, and semantic (Vacca, Vacca, Gove, Burkey, Lenhart, & McKoen, 2010, p 23). Graphophonemic refers to the print itself as the main source of information for the reader. The more experiences the reader has with written words, the better they are at decoding the words themselves. Syntactic provides that the reader must possess knowledge about how language works, such as the structure of sentences, grammatical relationships, and patterns or use. Semantic systems are all about the schemata the reader brings with them when they read and how they make meaningful connections to what they are reading from that schemata.
There are three models of reading: bottom-up, top-down, and interactive (Vacca, Vacca, Gove, Burkey, Lenhart, & McKoen, 2010, p 25). Bottom-up models require that the process of translating print to meaning begins with the print. Students are taught to first identify the letters and features, link the patterns, then process through sentence-paragraph-whole text levels. Top-down models assume that the reader’s schemata influences their ability to interpret the text into meaning. Students are asked to make predictions about what the text might be about based on reading the title or looking at the pictures provided by the author. Interactive models use both prior knowledge and print to create meaning. The teacher insists the reader process their schemata while reading the print to successfully comprehend the text.
Resources
Vacca, J., Vacca, R., Gove, M., Burkey, L., Lenhart, L., & McKoen. (2010). Reading and learning to read. (Tenth Edition). Pearson.
