Psychology of Reading and Reading Development

Basic Facts about Reading

If the findings of research psychologists, educators, and linguists were better known, the risk of unfounded and even harmful teaching practices would be reduced. Learning to read is not natural or easy for most children. Reading is an

acquired skill, unlike spoken language, which is learned with almost any kind of contextual exposure. If learning to read were as natural as acquiring spoken language, many more societies would have written languages; human beings would have invented writing systems many thousands of years before we did; and everyone would learn reading as easily as ducks learn to swim.

 

The prolonged, gradual, and predictable progression of skill in

Print translation attests to the difference between processing spoken and written language. Although surrounding children with books will enhance reading development, a “literature-rich environment” is not sufficient for learning to read. Neither will exposure to print ordinarily be sufficient for learning to spell, unless organized

Practice is provided. Thus, teachers must be reflective and knowledgeable about the content they are teaching, that

is, the symbol system itself and its relationship to meaning.

 

Research has shown that good readers do not skim and sample the text when they scan a line in a book. They process the letters of each word in detail, although they do so very rapidly and unconsciously. Those who comprehend well accomplish letter-wise text scanning with relative ease and fluency. When word identification is

fast and accurate, a reader has ample mental energy to think over the meaning of the text. Knowledge of sound-symbol mapping is crucial in developing word recognition: the ability to sound out and recognize words accounts for about 80 percent of the variance in first-grade reading comprehension and continues to be a major (albeit diminishing) factor in text comprehension as students’ progress through the grades

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The ability to sound out words is, in fact, a major underpinning that allows rapid recognition of words “by sight.” Before children can easily sound out or decode words, they must have at least an implicit awareness of the speech sounds that are represented by symbolic units (letters and their combinations). Children who learn to read well are sensitive to linguistic

structure; recognize redundant patterns; and connect letter patterns with sounds, syllables, and meaningful word

parts quickly, accurately, and unconsciously.Effective teaching of reading entails these concepts, presented in an

order in which children can learn them.

 

The Characteristics of Poor and

Novice Readers

 

Experts agree that reading and writing call primarily on deep linguistic processing, not on more peripheral auditory or visual perceptual skills. Language knowledge and language proficiency differentiate good and poor readers. As they begin to  learn, poor readers are not less intelligent or less motivated; they are, however, less skilled with language, especially at the level of elemental linguistic units smaller than whole words. For this reason, they

benefit from instruction that develops awareness of sounds, syllables, meaningful word parts, relationships among word meanings, and the structures of written text.

 

The language skills that most reliably distinguish good and poor readers are specific to the phonological or speech sound processing system. Those skills include awareness of  inguistic units that lie within a word (consonants, vowels, syllables, grammatical endings, meaningful parts, and the spelling units that represent them) and fluency in recognition and recall of letters and spelling patterns that make up words. Thus, skilled reading presents a paradox: Those who can most easily make sense of text are also those who can most easily read nonsense. For example, children who comprehend well when they read also do better at tasks such as reading words taken out of context, sounding out novel words, and spelling nonsense words.

Intelligence and verbal reasoning ability do not predict reading success in the beginning stages as well as

these specific linguistic skills. Although the purpose of reading is to comprehend text, teachers should also

appreciate the relationships among reading components in order to teach all components  well—in connection to one another and with the emphasis needed at each stage of development.

 

A child cannot understand what he cannot decode, but what he decodes is meaningless unless he can understand it. If this relationship is realized, a teacher will teach linguistic awareness and phonics deliberately, while linking skills to context as much as possible.30 When appropriate, the emphasis will shift to increasing reading volume and teaching the interpretive strategies central to comprehension: summarizing,  questioning, predicting outcomes, and monitoring one’s own understanding. But a focus on comprehension skills can—and should—begin long before children can decode. Teachers and other adults should read to children and, thereby, begin to develop their appreciation for the written word and their  comprehension