LEARNING+TO+READ



LEARNING TO READ. **

Before children begin to read they have already been taught some valuable lessons about language through everyday occurrences, by listening and observing they unknowingly develop a greater understanding of the importance and role of language in every day life. Reading to children is a large and very helpful part of this, it enables children to learn by identifying words with sounds, pictures and familiar objects and as well as this, it encourages them to develop an interest in books and learning. //“Reading is the process of constructing meaning from print and from other symbols”// (Hill, Susan, 2006) In the years before starting school children begin to journey through the stages of early reading development.  ·  Beginning reading (for babies and toddlers) and  ·  Early emergent reading. Children experience these stages at different ages and for different periods of time, for example, some may find a particular stage more difficult than another and therefore they remain until they are able to begin to understand the next. BEGINNING READING This is the first stage of learning to read where babies and toddlers are introduced to books and reading as a part of daily life. Books being read to babies are very stimulating for their reading development as in encourages the child to become immersed in a book as they are fascinated with the sound of an adult’s voice and the varying pictures on the pages. Familiarizes and fascination with language and pictures stems outside books and onto things such a birthday cards and posters as babies make a link between the pictures in a story book with the pictures on a poster. Signs of babbling and squealing can be thought of as a baby’s first effort at reading. As a child progresses into toddler-hood they begin to follow the story and soon develop favorite which they could tirelessly listen to. They interact more with the book as they demonstrate the intended emotion that the book is meaning to evoke. Songs, rhymes and picture books all enable children in this stage to develop an understanding of why language is used.



EARLY EMERGENT BOOK READING This stage begins as a child follows a story largely by to the pictures and then slowly begins to pay attention to the writing as they attempt to link the story with the valuable print. They have a fairly established sense of what books are, that they are turned page by page, from right to left and read always right to left. When reading begins at school, children experience another set of stages in developing their reading.  ·  The emergent phase  ·  The early reading phase  ·  Transitional reading development and  ·  The extending phase.

THE EMERGENT PHASE In this stage of reading development children begin to make direct links between illustrations and text. They can follow simple story lines and become familiar with a range of punctuation but are not yet fully understanding of its purpose within a story. Complexity of reading increases in this stage by expanding the concepts in the text and well as length of the book and amount of text on a page. (Hill, 2006. pp 148, 149)

THE EARLY READING PHASE In this particular stage of reading difficulty in reading levels are increased again as the child develops more familiar concepts and sentence structure becomes longer. Books used in this stage contain less emphasis on illustrations and more focus on the text. The size and position of the text itself become more varying and children learn to read emotion in the text and how to read different moods from different words, for example, they learn the difference in reading the word ‘roar’ and ‘ROAR’ and the effect this has on a stories impact. (Hill, 2006, pp 154- 157)

TRANSITIONAL READING DEVELOPMENT This stage sees children become more confident and fluent in their reading and developed a greater skill to problem solve and predict a sorties ending based on events that precede it. The books increase in complexity again and they begin to delve into themes that go beyond a Childs experiences. Illustrations become minimal and the stories can be compiled of fiction or non-fictional stories. (Hill, 2006, 149, 156- 157)

THE EXTENDING PHASE In this stage a child’s vocabulary is increasing and they are able understand more complex texts and integrate information from a range of sources. They begin to understand narratives and the role of plots and characters and the text variety increases for the child in order to continue broadening their conceptions about reading.