Online Reading Resources: Developing Reading Skills

Developing Reading Skills
Lyon, D. R. (1999). Developing reading skills in young children. Retrieved April 12, 2016, from /gk/articles/developing-reading-skills-in-young-children/
This article published by the Great Kids website was a transcript of a lecture taught by Dr. Reid Lyon in San Francisco in 1999. It covers a number of topics such factors contributing to reading difficulties among children, diagnosis and intervention for children with reading difficulties, as well as how parents can better support the development of reading among their children. Dr. Lyon, a research psychologist and the Chief of the Child Development and Behavior department of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), explains that there are emotional and social consequences among children with reading difficulties; in extreme cases, frustration and shame due to their difficulty in reading lead older students to drop out entirely of school. Dr. Lyon’s view of reading difficulties is that it can be both genetic and environmental, and that the problem can be characterized by "deficits in phoneme awareness, phonics development, reading fluency, reading comprehension, or combinations of these". The key to addressing these problems is early detection as children above the age of nine respond poorly to reading instruction.
Through his extensive experience, Dr. Lyon is able to express in a simple language, the importance of providing children with exposure to language as well as opportunities to practice their skills. This work is helpful for teachers because it breaks down the various basic skills they will need to develop in their children to ensure strong reading capacities, but it is exceptionally useful for parents who would like to take a proactive stance on the learning of their children. Through this article, Dr. Lyon was able to stress that parents are their children’s first teacher, and that the home interactions and enjoyable experiences they provide their children can help develop a strong foundation for reading.
Nash, M. (2014). Developing Reading Comprehension. Child & Adolescent Mental Health, 19(2), 160. http://doi.org/10.1080/01443410.2014.910979
Marysia Nash makes an important assumption at the beginning of her article: that reading comprehension is a highly interactive process and readers bring with them, differences not just in their knowledge levels but also in their experiences in these interactions. Whenever teachers instruct their students in reading, they are essentially speaking to an entire sociocultural and emotional context. Children bring with them their home culture, as well as the various values they have been taught about reading, its meaning, and its purpose.
To expound on her point, Nash iterates the "simple view of reading" wherein reading comprehension is dependent on a child’s word recognition skills and listening comprehension skills. Children first encounter language through oral conversations between family members. In this way, words are attached with semantic representations so that the child can workout the meanings of words in the network. And yet research shows that beyond the age of five, oral vocabulary is no longer effective in promoting vocabulary knowledge among children. Hence, it is important for both parents and teachers to provide children with new opportunity to adapt new vocabulary, for example, through songs, storytelling, reading together, and other fun and engaging language activities. These teaching methodologies provide children with the basic foundation for ensuring good reading comprehension: the capacity to predict, question, clarify, imagine and summarize what they are reading. And as children practice these capacities, they strengthen and build on their basic language skills, enabling them to take on more complicated language tasks in the future.
Trehearne, M. P. (2003). Literacy Learning in Preschool and Kindergarten. In Learning to Write and Loving It! (pp. 1–16). Thousand Oaks: Corwin. Retrieved from /upm-data/42661_ch1.pdf
In 2003, Miriam Trehearne published her book entitled Learning to Write and Loving It! which covered several methodologies on how to teach writing to children. Based on various researches, Trehearne establishes the connection between reading and writing: they are based on the same foundation of letter recognition, phonemic awareness, phonics, concept about print/books, and oral comprehension and vocabulary. Trehearne also says that in order for children to learn to write well, they must be able to draw upon their literacy experiences: the stories read to them, as well as songs and rhymes they have spoken. While Trehearne believes that children need to have a strong literacy foundation, she says that there are signs when a child is ready for intentional literacy experiences. Before this time, children should be allowed to play and discover things on their own, with minimal adult guidance.
The great thing about this chapter is that Trehearne shows that there are a lot of ways a child can learn language. In page 18 of her book, she provides a list of literacy skills that preschoolers, kindergarteners and first graders develop, and expounds on activities that teachers and parents can adopt to support learning. It shows that literacy skills are built over time and that excellent instruction is not just about the content of the lessons, but how the lessons are structured. Towards the end of the chapter, the author also looks at "play" as an important activity for young learners, as well as the necessity of developing lessons that are developmentally-appropriate and purpose-driven.
NCLRC Staff. (2016). Teaching Reading: Strategies for Developing Reading Skills. Retrieved April 12, 2016, from /essentials/reading/stratrea...