Reading on Reading - Encounters of Common Problems

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INTRODUCTION

What is reading difficulties? How can we define it? According to the website, , a reading difficulty is when a reader has difficulty meeting reading milestones for a given age or grade. A child can have difficulty with one or more aspects of the reading process. A reading difficulty may also be referred to as a reading problem, reading disability, reading disorder or dyslexia. It is important for us to realize that weaknesses in one or more components of reading can affect other components in reading. For example, children who have problems with phonemic awareness almost always have problems in word decoding/phonics; children with fluency problems usually have comprehension weaknesses; and a weak vocabulary also impacts comprehension.

        Learning to read is a difficult task. It involves coordination of the eye muscles to follow a line of print, spatial orientation to interpret letters and words, visual memory to retain the meaning of letters and sight words, sequencing ability, a grasp of sentence structure and grammar, and the ability to categorize and analyze. Furthermore, our brain must join together visual cues with memory and relate them with the specific sounds. The sounds must then be associated with specific meanings. For comprehension, the meanings must be preserved while a sentence or passage is read. Reading disorder occurs when any of these processes are disrupted. For that reason, the roots of reading disorder have proved difficult to isolate, and may be different in different individuals.

        What are the causes for this difficulties or this disorder? According to the same website, , one pf the causes to this matter is because of the brain. The source of their reading difficulty is probably inherited and it means that their reading difficulties are much more difficult to eliminate with regular educational involvement. Children that have this second kind of reading difficulty are often identified as having a Specific Reading Disability or dyslexia. There are few symptoms that can be found in children who have reading difficulties. Those symptoms are:

  • difficulty in identifying a single word
  • problems in understanding the sounds in words, sound order, or rhymes
  • problems with spelling
  • changing letters in words
  • excluding or substituting words
  • poor reading comprehension
  • slow reading speed (oral or silent)

Throughout this review, we are going to focus on common reading difficulties among children which are phonological and phonemic awareness, words decoding and phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension. Moreover, we will also discuss the suitable activities for each reading difficulties that can be done by teachers or parents.

PHONOLOGICAL AND PHONEMIC AWARENESS

        According to Smith’s and Goodman’s approach, reading is a unitary process. Thus, it is impossible to identify which specific skills that can be built up in any hierarchical way in order to achieve effective reading. This statement can be supported by a detailed study carried out by Lunzer and Gardner (1979) of secondary school children reading in their first language. There was no correlation between generally effective reading and performance on a supposed hierarchy of different reading sub skills/elements. Therefore, it is wise to say that these elements interact with each other and the mastery of each element affects the others. The research findings can be applied to our focused target group: children.

Reading can be hard on some children. There are various elements of difficulties the children encountered in their reading on daily basis. Phonological and phonemic awareness is one of the most common difficulties for the children in learning difficulties. It is also the most significant element in learning to read in English. Children whose second language is English find that it is more complex to master compared to children who use English is their first language.

Phonological awareness refers to broad skill that includes identifying and manipulating larger units of oral language. Stanovich (1993-94) describes phonological awareness as the ability to deal explicitly and in segments of sound units smaller than the syllabus. As it addresses the sounds of language, it teaches the sounds alone but not the symbols that represent sounds. This is appropriate to the teaching of English reading due to the relationship between alphabets and its sounds.  Instruction in phonological awareness can be divided into word awareness, rhyme awareness, onset and rime, syllable awareness and last but not least, phonemic awareness. These five characteristics also function to make a word easier or more difficult (Kameenui, 1995).

Word awareness defines that words have its meaning. Beginning readers must have this skill in order to understand what they read. This can be likened to schema. For instance, a child must recognize that an ‘apple’ is a fruit that is red in color and sweet or sour in order to understand the word ‘apple’. Rhyme awareness on the other hand is to understand that certain word endings sound alike, thus possess the same sound, such as the short /a/ and /p/ sounds in cap and map or the long /i/ and /t/ combination in fight and kite Onset refers to the initial consonant in a one-syllable word whereas rime is the remaining sounds including the following sounds (vowels and consonants). For instance, in ‘might’. /m/ is the onset and /ight/ is the rime. Next, syllabic awareness is to recognize that words are divided into parts that contain separate vowel sound. An example of this is ‘but’ can be identified as one syllable and ‘butter’ as two syllables. Last but not least, the most sophisticated level of phonological awareness is phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness refers to the ability to focus on and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. Acquiring phonemic awareness is important because it is the foundation for spelling and word recognition skills. Phonemic awareness is one of the best predictors of how well children will learn to read during the first two years of instruction. Therefore, phonemic awareness is used more specifically compared to phonological awareness.  According to recent National Research Council report, the terms phonological and phonemic awareness in reading can be distinguished by:

The term phonological awareness refers to a general appreciation of the sounds of speech as distinct from their meaning. When that insight includes an understanding that words can he divided into a sequence of phonemes, this finer-grained sensitivity is termed phonemic awareness. (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998, p. 51)

        Initial phonological awareness among children generally begins as they demonstrate an appreciation of rhyme and alliteration. Thus, materials for reading beginners are most likely based on rhyme or alliteration such as the B Book by Stanley and Janice Berenstain, 1997, or Each Peach Pear Plum by Janet and Allan Ahlberg, 1979, (Bryant, MacLean, Bradley, & Crossland, 1990). However, their basic phonological awareness does not necessarily develop into the more sophisticated phonemic awareness according to the children’s age. It is a child's phonemic awareness on entering school that is most closely related to success in learning to read (Adams, 1990; Stanovich, 1986). While phonological awareness affects early reading ability, the ability to read also increases phonological awareness (Smith, Simmons, & Kameenui, 1995). Most children with learning disabilities have deficiencies in their ability to process phonological information. Therefore, they do not readily learn how to relate letters of the alphabet to the sounds of language (Lyon, 1995). Meanwhile, for all students, the processes of phonological awareness, including phonemic awareness, must be explicitly taught.

Children of second language who are also culturally diverse backgrounds may have particular difficulties with phonological awareness. Exposure to language at home, reading at an early age, and dialect affect the ability of children to understand the phonological distinctions on which the English language is built. Having said that, teachers must apply sensitive effort and use a variety of techniques to help children learn these skills when Standard English is not spoken at home (Lyon, 1994).

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In order to teach phonological awareness, the teacher may begin by demonstrating the relationships of each element and build it to a whole model. Next, demonstrate and model how to segment short sentences into individual words so that the students will realize that how sentence is made up by words. When the students understand part-whole relationships at the sentence level, they are ready to learn multisyllable words for segmentation into syllables. Lastly, models a specific sound and asks the students to produce that sound both in isolation and in a variety of words and syllables in order to produce phonemic ...

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