In many instances throughout my coursework in the master’s of reading education program, I have been somewhat frustrated with assignments that I have been given because I have not seen how they would benefit me in my current position as a pre-kindergarten teacher. I am not saying this is the fault of the professors because I realize that this program is designed to encompass a wide span of grade levels; however, it has been frustrating to develop units, read novels, etc. that were much above the level of my four-year-olds and would in no way benefit them. In this course (RE 3030: Psychological Bases of Reading), however, I have been able to make some connections through the required readings that would benefit my pre-kindergarten students as they are beginning to make connections between the spoken and written word.
The students with which I work were selected for participation in the pre-kindergarten program because they were identified as being “at-risk” through a developmental screening done with them this past spring. Among the identified risk factors were low socioeconomic status, language delays, limited English proficiency, previous and/or current health issues affecting development, etc. One of the main goals of the program, therefore, is to give them a boost so that they will hopefully be on close-to-equal footing with their classmates upon entering kindergarten. In other words, it is hoped that the gap between these students and their peers will be closed or lessened at a young age before it negatively affects their performance during their educational careers.
One of the issues in our readings that I found most interesting was the Matthew effect and children’s vocabulary acquisition. This was clearly explained in the article by Joshi (2005) as he explored the relationship between vocabulary and comprehension. Most of my students definitely fall into the category of “the poor” in terms of their vocabulary and since the beginning of my time in pre-kindergarten in 2002, it has been stressed to us that we should take the opportunity to talk to our students and engage them in conversations about everyday occurrences and what they are experiencing. For example, we are supposed to sit with these students at lunch and make conversation with them about what they are eating and encourage them to explore various concepts while eating, such as “What does that taste like?” or “How many of those do you have?” While this might seem like a common-sense notion, this course provided some readings, in addition to that by Joshi which was previously mentioned, that illustrated why this is important. Hart & Risley (1995) found considerable differences in the number of words spoken in families of lower socioeconomic standing as compared to those of higher socioeconomic standing. Additionally, they found that these lower-SES families typically communicated with more directives, as opposed to explanations and questions. As a result, children of these families did not have the opportunity to develop as much of a vocabulary. Beck & McKeown (2007) further illustrated this in reporting that schools actually do very little in terms of teaching new vocabulary. If schools are doing such a poor job with this, it would stand to reason that these students would continue to have a poor vocabulary and would, therefore, be missing a key component in comprehension, which would hinder the development of fluent reading (Joshi, 2005).
In reflecting on the above readings and my own practices in my classroom, I can see both strengths and weaknesses in my teaching. I sincerely believe I do a decent job of using more than just directives with my students and give explanations and alternatives that help them to see that their questions and ideas have validity in the context of their learning. I believe I do extremely well in terms of introducing my students to new vocabulary in the context of subjects and/or themes that we are studying. For example, in math, I typically introduce my students to the concepts of equal/unequal and symmetry. We use these words in a variety of contexts throughout the day and my students will often be heard taking ownership of these words and using them to describe instances in which these concepts are being illustrated. On the negative side, however, I do not think my performance is nearly as good in using and explaining new vocabulary presented in books we read. On several instances, I have caught myself substituting a word my students would likely know for an unknown word when reading a book to them. My rationale behind this has been that I did not want to break the flow of the story by stopping to explain a particular word. I think I could definitely do a better job with this and I could search for opportunities to use new vocabulary words presented in readings in new contexts throughout the day, while encouraging the students to do the same.
A second area that I found interesting was the transference of students’ knowledge about the spoken word to the printed word. According to Ehri & Wilce (1979), young children already have a substantial amount of knowledge about words. What they have to do in beginning to read is to learn how to incorporate printed language into this current knowledge. As children learn to speak, Ehri & Wilce (1979) believe that children develop phonological, syntactic, and semantic identities for words in their lexicons. In learning to read, they must add an additional identity to words and that is an orthographic identity or visual image. When these identities are joined, it is said there is an amalgamation and recognition of the printed words becomes increasingly automatic. This dovetails nicely into what Adams (2004) has to say in describing her model of reading with the four processors: “With recognition initiated by the print on the page and hastened by the connectivity both within and between the processors, skillful readers access the spelling, sound, meaning, and contextual role of a familiar word almost automatically and simultaneously” (p. 1225).
Upon reflection, I can see connections between the information in the preceding paragraph and my work with my classroom of pre-kindergartners. Upon entering pre-kindergarten, they definitely have some knowledge (to varying degrees) of how words are articulated, the grammatical roles of these words in a sentence, and what the meanings of particular words are. They do not generally have visual images of words, although some are able to recognize their own names. After having been in pre-kindergarten for a couple of months now, the students are able to recognize not only their own names, but most are able to recognize the names of their classmates as well. When they make mistakes, they typically say someone’s name that begins with the same letter(s). Adams (2004) would relate this to the connections that are made in the brain and the activations and inhibitions that occur within the brain when trying to process a word. It would stand to reason that repeated exposure of students to other common words (high frequency or sight words, common brand names, etc.) would aid them in recognizing these words as well. An implication from Cassar and Treiman’s (1997) study in which students had to pick the way a word should look is that exposure to print goes a long way in helping students learn the connection between the printed word and the spoken word. Likewise, Cunningham and Stanovich (1993) found that a considerable degree of the variance in orthographic processing was explained by exposure to print. With findings such as these, it would behoove me, as well as other teachers, to provide students with print-rich environments in an effort to have students integrate the various identities of words in their lexicons. Additionally, drawing attention to similarities and differences between printed words regarding letter-sound relationships would aid in cementing the students’ developing knowledge of the orthographic identities of words.
Lastly, the issue of being able to decode effectively and how this affects comprehension was an area of interest for me. Ever since I began teaching, I have been a big believer in the importance of teaching phonics in an effort to aid students in their reading abilities. I give a lot of credit to my supervising teacher and principal in this regard because of the instructional program they had in place at a time when whole language was all the rage. As they told me at the time, the pendulum in education tends to swing back and forth and they believed that the pendulum would swing back towards the importance of phonics if I stayed in education long enough. Twenty years later, I can say that they were correct in what they said.
In this course, there were some readings that backed up the importance of strong decoding skills in a variety of ways. Daneman & Carpenter (1980) did a study in which they explored the relationship between reading comprehension and working memory. In this study, they found that subjects’ abilities to correctly match pronouns and their antecedent referents were related to the distance between them in a reading passage. The shorter the distance, the more likely it was that the two could be correctly matched. They concluded that this meant that working memory was limited and that if word recognition and decoding skills were fairly automatic, there should be sufficient space left over in working memory for comprehension of what is being read. Perfetti and Hogaboam (1975), in their study, wanted to know how students who vary in their comprehension skills compared on their decoding of words for which they know the meaning and how they compare on their decoding of words for which they do not know the meaning. They found only a minimal difference in the amount of time it took for the skilled and less-skilled groups to name high frequency words, but there was a greater difference in the time it took for the two groups to name pseudowords and low frequency words. From these results, they felt it could be concluded that the skilled group had the ability to decode words more efficiently than those in the other group. In our final reading of the semester, Rayner et al. (2001) explored the pros and cons of various methods of reading instruction and, in their summary, stated that based on classroom studies of reading methods conducted from the 1960s to the present, it has been shown that better results are obtained from early phonics instruction when compared when instruction that emphasizes meaning at the word or sentence level (p. 67).
In examination of my own practices and beliefs about reading, the findings mentioned in the previous paragraph basically gave credence to much of what I have been doing as a teacher. During the course of the year in pre-kindergarten, I expose my students to letters and their corresponding sounds. In fact, part of our daily morning routine deals with saying the letters and sounds. In some cases, this is done with flash cards in which we say the letter, its sound, and a specific word (with accompanying picture) beginning with that letter and sound. As the year progresses, we switch this up by varying the words used that begin with the various letters. In other instances, it involves singing a song, such as Dr. Jean’s “Who Let the Letters Out?,” in which we sing “Who let the ‘A’ out? /a/, /a/, /a/, /a/,” etc. We also write a couple of sentences each morning containing some high frequency words that we then read. As the year progresses, we look for various features contained in these sentences. For example, we might look for words beginning with the same letter or same sound within these sentences. I believe these are beneficial activities for my students, although I might be somewhat prescriptive in my approach to these. One area I think in which I think I could definitely do more would be having the students write. We do quite a bit of dictation, but I think it would be beneficial for me to have my students do more writing on their own in an effort to have them make use of what they know in terms of letter-sound correspondences. They could then “read” this back to the best of their ability. Additionally, I need to do a better job of finding simple books for my students to “read” as they attempt to employ their knowledge of letters, sounds, and high frequency words.
In conclusion, the readings in this course have covered a variety of different issues and have made me examine if what I am doing as a teacher is helping my students. In many instances, the readings have done much to affirm beliefs and practices that I have held since the beginning of my teaching career. They have provided validation through research for what I am doing, but they have also made me think of what I could do better.
Bibliography
Adams, M. J. (2004). Modeling the connections between word recognition and reading. Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading, 1219 – 1243.
Beck, I. L. & McKeown, M. G. (2007). Increasing young low-income children’s oral vocabulary repertoires through rich and focused instruction. The Elementary School Journal, 107, 3, 251 – 271.
Cassar, M. & Treiman, R. (1997). The beginnings of orthographic knowledge: Children’s knowledge of double letters in words. Journal of Educational Psychology, 89, 4, 631 – 644.
Cunningham. A. & Stanovich, K. (1993). Children’s literacy environments and early word recognition subskills. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 5, 193 – 204.
Daneman, M. and Carpenter, P. A. (1980). Individual differences in working memory and reading. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 19, 450-456.
Ehri, L. & Wilce, L. (1979). The mnemonic value of orthography among beginning readers. Journal of Educational Psychology, 71, 1, 26 – 40.
Hart, B. & Risley, T. R. (1995). 42 American families. Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children. Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co., 53 – 73.