learning to read

Question 1

how many people are functionally illiterate?

Answer 1

20%

Question 2

how many words per min can a literate adult read?

Answer 2

238

Question 3

what is the goal of reading?

Answer 3

-to understand what is being read

decoding + linguistic comprehension –> reading comprehension

Question 4

decoding

Answer 4

• learning to associate arbitrary visual symbols with meanings
• alphabetic: symbol/grapheme represents individual phoneme e.g. english
• syllabic: symbols represent whole syllables e.g. japanese
• morphophonetic: symbol represents elements of meaning and sound e.g. chinese

Question 5

alphabetic systems

Answer 5

• there are variations in depth of orthographic (transparency with which graphemes represent phonemes)
• deep orthographies = inconsistencies e.g. english is harder than finnish
• different phonemes can represent one grapheme and vice versa
• non-trivial (hard) task because segments of acoustic don’t match phoneme level (overlap in continuous speech)
• initial phase, partial alphabetic phase, full alpha phase

Question 6

share 1995

Answer 6

the more orthographic knowledge, the less reliance on decoding

Question 7

dorsal and ventral pathways and decoding

Answer 7

reliance gradually shifts from dorsal (phonologically mediated) to ventral (direct access to meaning)

Question 8

lexical quality

Answer 8

• exposure to printed words increases lexical quality (representations of words) in flexible (adapt to different meanings) and precise way
• as it builds it frees cognitive resources

Question 9

morphology and learning to read

Answer 9

• stems e.g. ‘clean’ are the same in words with similar meanings
• affixes e.g. ‘un’ alter the meaning of stems in predictable ways

Question 10

comprehension

Answer 10

=how well we understand spoken language

• we construct mental representations of situations as we read
• to build on situations we need good oral lang skills, grammar, cohesive devices and background knowledge

Question 11

cohesive devices

Answer 11

• anaphors: words that refer to previous things e.g. ‘he’

- connectives

Question 12

construction-integration model

Answer 12

• linguistic: recognise + process individual words and their meanings
• microstructure: work at sentence level
• macrostructure: recognises + process themes - draws on ToM

Question 13

how do you build a situation model?

Answer 13

• activate relevant meanings
• generate inferences- inference making at 4 years related to vocab size
• monitor comprehension: identify when wrong - 9 yrs sensitive to expectations when reading