CLD: Reading

Question 1

What are key linguistic features of children’s early reading books?

Answer 1

Interaction with audience
Suggesting values (e.g. behavioural, politeness, morals)
Use rhyme or other phonological devices
Depict characters (animal/human)
Use spoken language features
Different proportions to the amount of text to pictures
Use hypernyms/hyponyms and semantic fields
Use rhetorical devices (repetition, parallel sentence structures)
Create textual cohesion (lexical repetition, syntactical repetition, connectives)
Vary sentence moods (declaratives, exclamatory, interrogative or imperatives)

Question 2

What is a grapheme?

Answer 2

The sound or blend of letters that represent a sound (e.g. s or ch)

Question 3

What is a phoneme?

Answer 3

The sound of a letter or blend of letters within a word

Question 4

What is the phonics approach?

Answer 4

This approach involves looking at letters and letter combinations in terms of sounds e.g. ‘cow’ is separated into the phonemes ‘c’ and ‘ow’ which means children learn how to sound out unfamiliar words

Question 5

What is the criticism of the phonics approach?

Answer 5

This approach has been criticised because it just focuses on sounds and letters rather than the meanings of the words.