Learning to read

Question 1

Pre-reading skills

Answer 1

1) Handling books, for instance turning pages
2) Looking at and recognising pictures
3) Understanding events or pictures in a book, for instance imitating an action in a book or talking about what happens in it
4) Engaging in story-reading behaviour, such as babbling in imitation of a story

Question 2

Main methods in UK

Answer 2

1) ‘Look and say’
- children learn the shape of the words
- children learn to recognise whole words or sentences rather than individual phonemes
- flashcards with pictures are used
2) Phonics
- children learn the different sounds made by different letters and letter blends and some rules of putting them together
- emphasis is on developing phonological awareness and on hearing, differentiating and replicating sounds in spoken words
- the two main approaches to teaching phonics are analytic and synthetic

Question 3

Phonics strategies

Answer 3

Segmenting: chunk phonemes
Blending: putting the chunks together again (sounding out into full word)

Question 4

Phonological features

Answer 4

Phoneme: the sound
Grapheme: the written letter
Digraph: 2 written letters that make 1 sound
Trigraph: 3 written letters that make 1 sound
Split digraph: 2 letters making a sound with a letter in between (mAkE)