Personal Model of the Theory of Reading

Personal Model of the Theory of Reading Assignment

Kimberly Wood

Kennesaw State University

How do you teach reading? This is a question that I have been asked by several friends who are not in the education field. After a couple years of teaching, I can explain how I teach reading, but the process of the students learning how to read from my teaching baffles me at times. I feel learning to read begins when children are young. Being around a print-filled environment with books, labels, words, and letters, exposes children to literacy and gives them great background knowledge to begin the process of learning to read. Though this is not always the case for all children, as some students are not exposed to literacy at a young age, so the prior knowledge they build occurs in the school environment

            At school, all children are learning how to read on a daily basis throughout the school day. Typically children are taught how to read through a mixture of phonological awareness, phonics, prior knowledge, and reading comprehension. I believe that all of these factors coincide together in the reading process. A student just beginning to learn how to read in school is initially exposed to letters and letter sounds—the basics of phonics. Students learn to recognize letters and the sound of the letters in different words. Upon mastery, students memorize sight words that they will easily and quickly recognize in text, move on to spelling words that focus on a phonological pattern, and work on blending sounds together to form words. These steps help to set children up with the basic skills of reading. Also, in the early elementary grades, teacher read-alouds are common to show students how to read fluently as well as exposing them to words. I feel that these all factor into a student learning how to read.

            In the classroom, the most effective way for a student who is learning how to read is a small group guided reading time. I feel that this is the time that a student truly is learning how to read. From my personal experience, I group my children based on their reading levels. Some students read at an advanced level and some read at a lower level. Prior to reading a book on the students’ level, I choose words that I feel the students may not know how to sound out or words they make not recognize. We go over these words as a group where I write the word on the board, and the students repeat it. Usually the students know the meaning of the word, but they cannot read it. For example, a student may not be able to read the word “fire truck,” but once we read the word, the student can explain the meaning of the word. He or she is then able to transfer learning what the word “fire truck” looks like to the actual text and gain meaning and comprehension from the text. Throughout the small group time, students take turns reading. They use decoding skills, picture cues, prior knowledge, and the words that they were taught in the beginning, like “fire truck,” to read and understand the text. If students come to a word that they do not know, it is their job to use the skills to determine the word. Also, throughout the reading, I use Marzano’s thinking clouds/questions as well as higher order thinking questions to monitor the students’ comprehension. It is a combination of all of these factors that children use in order to understand the author’s complete thought.

            Teaching reading will continue to be a learning process for me. I know that learning to read can begin at an early age though the process of learning letters, the letter sounds, blending sounds, sight words, and spelling words. This way of teaching reading is useful in combination with small group time where meaning of words and comprehension all work together in an effort for students to truly be reading.