Entry#4 Teaching Reading to Emergent Literacy Level students

Among this week’s readings, I especially like chapter 7 of the book Catching Readers before they fall.

The title attracted me from the very beginning: I thought I knew how to teach reading, but whoa! As one can expect, this chapter is about how to introduce reading to students at an emergent level. Since I am very interested in and planning to dedicate to teaching reading materials to preschoolers or kindergarteners who are English language learners, I am very happy to read about the strategies for teaching English literacy for the emergent level students and I’ve found a bunch of good suggestions in the reading.

First thing I find useful for teaching emergent readers is that the chapter has included some key strategies for struggled readers, which may be useful for my future teaching. The key strategies I like best include:

1)   Directionality and one-to-one voice/print match

For preschoolers or even kindergarteners, because of their limited literacy capacities (and/or may limited access to books or other reading materials), they are more likely have no idea from which direction to read a book, and how to hold a book, how to turn pages, recognize the covers. So, from the very beginning, the students need to know this knowledge in order to become a reader later on. The chapter has introduced a way to combine teaching directionality and one-to-one voice/print match, that is, when consistently read books or any other readings to children, point to the words one by one while reading it aloud, in the meantime, the pointer moves from left to right, then up to down. This will give children a sense the way to read a book, as well as the awareness that sound can be matched to each word.

2)   Thinking strategies

The thinking process is of the most important things in reading, as reading is about making meaning, the thinking process is about trying to make meaning of the texts. A successful reader not only can read the texts, but can understand and internalize it as well. When reading, the readers need to search and gather information from the texts to make predictions and suggestions. As for the emergent language learners, the materials they are reading are most likely to be picture books or readings with pictures. In this case, when reading a book, the children can be taught to think and guess what the text might say according to the picture. Involve the students into active and life-related conversations while reading would be good for developing their thinking skills.

            Second, I really like the part of how to introduce books at the earliest levels. Again, making meaning of the text is the most important piece in reading. Here the book has introduced how to make stories out of the books with simple texts, such as: This mom is a police officer/teachers/nurse by creating a story line for the students, in order to make it easier for the students to related the reading to their lives, thus they can make meaning of the text.