Read Naturally 5.6 Answer Key

0 views

Skip to first unread message

Antígona Knknown

unread,

Aug 4, 2024, 8:20:28 PM8/4/24

to ovunmidfi

Foralmost a century, researchers have argued over the question. Most of the disagreement has centered on the very beginning stages of the reading process, when young children are first starting to figure out how to decipher words on a page.

One theory is that reading is a natural process, like learning to speak. If teachers and parents surround children with good books, this theory goes, kids will pick up reading on their own. Another idea suggests that reading is a series of strategic guesses based on context, and that kids should be taught these guessing strategies.

Of course, there is more to reading than seeing a word on a page and pronouncing it out loud. As such, there is more to teaching reading than just teaching phonics. Reading requires children to make meaning out of print. They need to know the different sounds in spoken language and be able to connect those sounds to written letters in order to decipher words. They need deep background and vocabulary knowledge so that they understand the words they read. Eventually, they need to be able to recognize most words automatically and read connected text fluently, attending to grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure.

By contrast, children do not naturally develop reading skill through exposure to text. The way they learn to connect oral and written language(4) depends on what kind of language(5) they are learning to read.

But children could succeed on this task if they were first given some explicit instructions. When children were taught how to recognize that certain letters represented certain sounds, and taught how to segment words to identify those individual letters and sounds, they had much greater success on the original transfer test. Neuroscience research has since confirmed and helped explain these findings. When learning how to read new words in an unfamiliar made-up language, participants had more long-term success if they were first taught which symbols correspond to which sounds, than if they tried to remember words as wholes. Brain imaging of these readers finds that the two teaching strategies tap into different neural pathways in the brain. Readers taught to connect print to meaning directly could recall words initially more quickly, but less accurately; readers taught to connect print to sound and then to meaning read aloud more quickly and correctly, better recalled the correct meanings of words, and transferred their knowledge to new words.

The most effective phonics programs are those that are systematic. The National Reading Panel found this in 2000(12), and since then, further research reviews have confirmed that this type of instruction leads to the greatest gains in reading accuracy for young students(13).

In one series of experiments(14), Stanford University neuroscientist Bruce McCandliss(15) and his colleagues made up a new written language and taught three-letter words to students either by asking them to focus on letter sounds or on whole words. Later, the students took a reading test of both the words they were taught and new words in the made-up language, while an electroencephalograph monitored their brain activity. Those who had focused on letter sounds had more neural activity on the left side of the brain, which includes visual and language regions and is associated with more skilled reading. Those who had been taught to focus on whole words had more activity on the right side of the brain, which has been characteristically associated with adults and children who struggle with reading. Moreover, those who had learned letter sounds were better able to identify unfamiliar words.

Early readers benefit from systematic phonics instruction. Among students in grades K-1, phonics instruction led to improvements in decoding ability and reading comprehension across the board, according to the National Reading Panel(16). Children at risk of developing future reading problems, children with disabilities, and children from all socio-economic backgrounds all benefited. Later research reviews have confirmed that systematic phonics instruction is effective for students with disabilities, and shown that it also works for English-language learners(17).

Moreover, cognitive and neuroscience studies have found that guessing is a much less efficient way to identify a new word, and a mark of beginning or struggling readers, not proficient readers. Skilled readers instead sound out new words to decode them.

Balanced literacy programs often include both phonics and cueing, but studies suggest cueing instruction can make it more difficult for children to develop phonics skills because it takes their attention away from the letter sounds.

There is a general path that most children follow as they become skilled decoders. Research can tell us how children usually progress along this path, and which skills specifically predict better reading performance.

Even very young children can benefit from instruction designed to develop phonological awareness. The National Early Literacy Panel Report (2009)(38), a meta-analysis of early literacy studies, found that teaching preschoolers and kindergartners how to distinguish the sounds in words, whether orally or in relationship to print, improved their reading and writing ability. The children in these studies were generally between the ages of 3 and 5.

The National Reading Panel report found that programs focusing on phonemic awareness, the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the smallest units of speech sounds, that lasted less than 20 hours total had the greatest effect on reading skills. Across the studies that the researchers looked at, individual sessions lasted 25 minutes on average.

For younger students, oral language skills; understanding syntax, grammar, vocabulary, and idioms; and having general and topic-specific background knowledge are also essential for reading comprehension.

The amount of time adults read with preschoolers and young children(50) does predict their reading skills in elementary school. One of the most important predictors of how well a child will learn to read is the size and quality of his spoken language and vocabulary, and children are more likely to be exposed to new words and their meanings or pick up grammar rules from reading aloud with adults.

In the last decade or so, access to Internet-based text has continued to expand, and schools have increasingly used digitally based books(54), particularly to support students who do not have easy access to paper books at home. Yet some emerging evidence suggests children learn to read differently in print versus digitally(55), in ways that could hinder their later comprehension.

Researchers that study eye movements find that those reading digital text are more likely to skim or read nonlinearly, looking for key words to give the gist, jump to the end to find conclusions or takeaways, and only sometimes go back to find context in the rest of the text. In a separate series of studies since 2015(56), researchers led by Anne Mangen found that students who read short stories and especially longer texts in a print format were better able to remember the plot and sequence of events than those who read the same text on a screen.

7. Scholars of historic language development suggest that one of the earliest writing systems, Sumerian cuneiform, evolved from a mostly logographic system to one that used characters to represent sounds in its spoken language. See: Proust and the Squid - Maryanne Wolf. You can also see Wolf discuss the evolution of spoken versus written language in this Nature interview.