Saturday, April 21, 2012
Amy Webb, PhD
Have you ever really considered what is involved in learning
to read? Most of us learned so long ago, we do not ever remember not knowing
how to read. For young children, however, written language begins as a jumble
of symbols and code that they simply do not understand. Some new research
is offering more insight into how parents and teachers can help children decode
and make sense of language in order to become effective readers.
Simple strategies in how adults read to young children can
make a substantial impact on their literacy skills. Researchers found that
certain strategies like pointing out capital letters, showing how you read from
left to right, and pointing out letters helped preschoolers learn to read
better. These strategies, called print references, were more effective in
helping students learn to read than simply being read to without such
references.
One of the most encouraging aspects of this study was the
fact that most of the students included were from low-income backgrounds and
started the study with less-than-average language skills. Students whose
teachers used the print reference strategies not only scored higher on reading
and spelling tests, but also had higher reading comprehension scores compared
to other students. This means that the students weren’t just decoding the words
themselves but were actually better at understanding the content of what they
were reading.
This research is especially promising because implementing
the use of print references in schools and homes would be so easy. Teachers
could easily adopt these strategies and they could have a substantial impact on
children’s long-term literacy skills. More research in this area is needed, but
this initial study showed that the impact of print reference strategies was
seen for students even one to two years later.
I think this research is really helpful because it not only
suggests strategies, but it indirectly sheds light on how children learn to
read. As adults, we take simple aspects of reading for granted, such as that
you read from left to right or the difference between capital and lowercase
letters. For children, however, all this knowledge is new and has to be
intentionally pointed out to them. This is yet another example of how good
research provides insight into the world from a child’s perspective rather than
just an adult’s.
Posted in: 
