Reading Development Flashcards
Why is reading so much harder than speaking?
Must learn the alphabetic systems
Language Development from birth to 2 years
Newborns can discriminate all possible phonemes - after 12 months phonemes that don’t appear in infants native language are no longer discriminated
Aware of basic grammatic structures by 2
Language Development 2+ Years
5000-6000 words known at age 6
Start learning pragmatic use of language during preschool
Metalinguistic awareness: e.g. a sentence can be wrong, a sentence consists of words
Stages of Reading Development (Chall, 1996)
- Learning to read: age 5-9
- Reading to learn: age 9-15
- Independent Reading: age 16-Uni
Storybook reading by parents (Evens & Saint-Aubin, 2005)
Eye-tracking study
Children tend to look at pictures not words so ‘storytime’ does not assist learning to read generally
Adults should direct child’s attention to the text
Teaching Methods: Whole word/meaning-emphasis
Teach most important words (which are also irregular) e.g. have, first
Children shouldn’t be corrected when they make mistakes - don’t want to demotivate
Teaching Methods: Phonics
Start with limited number of letters then introduce more letters and consonant clusters e.g. th, ch, tr
Not as motivating as whole-word apprach but can be rewarding learning-wise
Teaching Programmes (Evans & Carr, 1985)
Students in phonics-oriented classrooms perform better
Supported by findings from the US National Reading Panel
Acquired Dyslexia
Problems caused by brain damage e.g. stroke, trauma etc
Developmental Dyslexia
Decoding problems in the brain, becomes obvious in childhood
Normal intelligence with specific difficulty reading
Problems with language processing
Binocular Disparity (Kirkby, Blythe, Drieghe & Liversedge, 2011)
Magnocellular theory would predict that dyslexic children have binocular disparity which causes them to struggle reading
BUT it was found that the disparity is caused by reading difficulty, not the other way round
