Personal Model of Reading Theory

Personal Model of Reading Theory 

Reading is the foundation for the rest of our school careers, as well as the rest of our lives. In order to become a fluent reader, it is an essential element that needs a lot of emphasis and practice within the classroom, however there is not only one way of teaching that pushes students to achieve that level.

            In order to read, the students need to first recognize that the English Language has an alphabetic principle, which means that they need “the concept that letters and letter combinations are used to represent phonemes in our written language” (Bear, Invernizzi, Templeton & Johnston, 2012, p. 409). Therefore, it is important to expose the students to the sights and sounds of words on their developmental level through appropriate and frequent whole group read-aloudswhere the students are given the opportunity to hear and see the words on each page. Reading to your students allows for vocabulary growth, but in order to insure true vocabulary development you must also make the read-aloud interactive by choosing specific words that are relatable to students’ lives and have the ability to be repeated through common themes. A Word Wall in a classroom is a wonderful way to allow the students visual access to different vocabulary and high frequency words, however, the Wall cannot just be for decoration- it needs to be interactive. The best way to get students involved with the Word Wall is to incorporate it into various lessons and even individual/group activities. Because the Word Wall would be an ever-changing visual aid and a part of the student’s daily routine, it would build the students word familiarity.

            As well as reading to students, you must teach them phonics which is “the systematic relationship between letters and sounds” (Bear, Invernizzi, Templeton & Johnston, 2012, p. 412).  When students have seen and begin to recognize various words is the time to break down the word into its individual sounds. Teaching phonics needs to be done in conjunction with writing. There are five stages of spelling development: Emergent (Kindergarten to middle of First Grade), Letter Name-Alphabetic Spelling (Kindergarten to Middle of Second Grade), Within Word Pattern (First Grade to Middle of Fourth Grade), Syllables and Affixes (Third Grade to Eighth Grade), and Derivational Relations (Fifth Grade to Twelfth Grade). These stages are very important when teaching reading because you must teach the students on their developmental level which could vary from student to student. Also, the students need to understand the various “rules” associated with the written language in order to be able to manipulate individual phonemes in their oral language. Full understanding of oral and written patterns with their corresponding sounds is gained through continual repetition and use within the classroom. An activity such as a word sort would be beneficial to the student’s word pattern understanding because the students would be able to group various words together according their beginning, internal or ending sound. Introducing the students to “word families” through different forms of charts is also a fun way to get the students involved in their reading.

            Once the students have surpassed the emergent stage of reading where they learned the “concepts of print”, it is vital that the students are always reading within their instructional level of understanding. If the reading is too simple for the student then he/she will not gain more vocabulary which will in turn stunts their reading progress. The instructional level of reading is the level in between independent and frustration level, therefore the students will still be unfamiliar with some of the words but they are not words that are above their understanding. The words the students do not know are words that the student will begin to focus on until they have mastered their patterns and corresponding sounds. Through instructional reading, the students will put to use all the other reading techniques from read-alouds and phoneme recognition in order to figure out the correct pronunciation of unknown words the student may come across.

Resources

Bear, D. R., Invernizzi, M., Templeton, S., & Johnston, F. (2012). Words their way, word study for phonics, vocabulary, and spelling instruction. (5th ed.). New Jersey: Allyn & Bacon.

Tompkins, G. E. (2010). Literacy for the 21st century, a balanced approach. (5th ed. ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.