Learning to read: the early years

Schools play a key role in the formal reading process, but it’s at home where children can best gain the everyday experience to make reading meaningful.

One of the biggest determiners of a child’s continued success in building reading skills is a child's development of spoken language, Mooney explains.

"Parents can help most of all just by talking with their kids, spending time with them," Mooney says.

"But parents are often so busy these days that kids are not hearing complete sentences. They come to school and we give them all these lovely rich books to read with complete sentences. But kids are hearing sentences starting with verbs: ‘Get your hat’; ‘Eat your lunch’."

What is crucial, Mooney suggests, is engaging a child in real conversation. "This means not accepting a ‘yes/no’ answer, or a grunt – which we do. But really, what we need to do is to ask ‘What else? And what else? And what do you think?'"

Mooney recently spent several days in Bangkok giving presentations for teachers and parents at International School Bangkok (ISB). The learning post was able catch her there along with Patrick O’Brien, co-principal of ISB’s primary school, for a discussion about early reading.

Toddlers are laying the groundwork for reading long before they are exposed to formal reading, Mooney says. Most importantly they are learning to see patterns, which Mooney says is "the single best determiner in a child’s ability to read".

Simple sorting activities can help this along, Mooney says. "All the things that are red go together, all the things that are green, all the things that are square. That’s really the beginning of reading – the beginning of reading and of math."

Parents should make use of nature as well, Mooney says.

"Just take the kids outside and observe some of the little patterns in the leaves. Just very mundane, ordinary things.

"Why is this leaf bigger than that one? Look what’s happened. This plant was only up to here yesterday and look, it’s up to here.

"It doesn’t have to be things that cost money, but they’re things that cost time," Mooney stresses.

By the age of three, children are beginning to attach meaning to letters, Mooney says. "They’re reading signs. Many kids at the age of three know the ‘M’ of McDonalds, the sign at the end of their road, the number on their letterbox," Mooney observes.

"There are a lot of things that a three year old knows and if they see them often enough and if it’s pointed out to them, they can make some very strong connections."

Obviously, parents will want to read to their children from a very early age, but here Mooney has a word of caution. "We want parents to read to their kids, sure, but we want parents to be patient enough to read the same book over and over. And when the child says, ‘Read it again to me, Daddy,’ we don’t want Daddy to say ‘No, I’m tired. I’m sick of that book, let’s take another one.’

"The more books you get, the less you read them frequently," Mooney explains. " I’d hate to see a reduction in books, but kids are not hearing that constancy of language that is totally critical to early reading.

"We want that child to feel ownership of the book through having read it. We want that child to internalise that language."

Reading is a very personal process, Mooney says. Parents should realise that while it is not something they can do for their children, it is something they can facilitate.

"I think we think of learning to read as a gift we give kids," Mooney says. "It’s not a gift unless the kids do some work to get the gift. It’s not something that you can give. Their ability to take that gift is dependent very much on the hearing of sounds or, if they can’t hear, the seeing of letters and being able to attach some meaning or sound to it."

This is an exciting time for people working in the field of early reading, as more and more researchers agree about the influences on a child's ability to read, Mooney says.

"Researchers have all agreed that there are five things that are absolute predeterminants of a child’s ability and that need to be fostered and nurtured and extended in the early years," Mooney explains.

First is what is known as phonemic awareness, or focussing on the sound and attaching the letters. Second is phonics (spelling) in which the child starts from the letters and attaches the sounds.

Third is vocabulary, the combination of sounds and letters to form meaningful words. This has always been an essential element of reading, but it is even more so today, Mooney says.

"We’re moving past the kind of comprehension questions where the child can just spot the word and give the answer," Mooney explains. "We’re requiring kids to use their own language to talk about meaning."

The fourth element is fluency. This requires words and the ability to put them together according to the structure of the language — what we know as grammar.

Once you have fluency, Mooney says, then you can have the fifth and final element: comprehension.

"The exciting thing about the research is that none of these are stand-alone," she explains. "They are totally interdependent and they continue throughout school."

With the new consensus on the essential elements of reading, is there similar agreement on teaching methodology?

"Probably the most common method is a combination of methods," Mooney says.

One of the methods, Mooney points out, is usually some kind of instruction where the child’s job is to watch and absorb as the teacher models and demonstrates a proficient reader at work.

Then there is what is often known as shared reading, in which observing moves towards absorbing and practicing in a very supported approach, Mooney continues.

"The core of most programmes is intentional reading," Mooney explains. "It has various labels – guided reading, instructional reading, group reading – but it’s essentially, ‘you practice while I watch you’. The child is practicing and learning to apply the meaning.

"The teacher’s job is to prompt and provoke the child as far as they’re able to go without fear or frustration or failure.

"It’s like a trampoline," Mooney says using a simple analogy. "When the kid stops bouncing, you give an extra boost to keep the child bouncing."

Many parents are unsure of the ideal time for their child to start formal reading. Mooney says this time can vary, but there are signs to look for.

"As soon as the child is able to focus on a book and has a good story structure in their head and has a good letter-sound relationship," Mooney asserts. "And really, then it’s just simple short texts and it’s just matching written-spoken-heard word."

While there is no set age for the start of formal reading, Mooney says, it is normally between the ages of four and seven.

"Some folks start them much earlier, but you want kids to experience being kids," Mooney asserts.

A five-year-old in kindergarten might be expected to be able to read short passages, she says.

"Typically, they’d be able to read along with the teacher, maybe four or five lines of text," she explains.

"But in terms of what most of them are able to read independently or with teacher guidance, it’s probably going to have a fairly clear picture and perhaps a sentence of six or eight words with very clear type and probably a slightly extended space between."

This, stresses Mooney, does not mean the children will simply be reading words they recognise by sight. "They will be able to use their initial letter sounds, their understanding of vowels, the beginnings of common letter patterns to pick up a book and have a go at reading that text unseen," she says.

Throughout the process, the child will be predicting and confirming, Mooney explains.

"Let’s say a child saw a picture of a cat and we said, ‘What do you think that (word) is’? ‘How do you know’?

"Now the child could say, ‘I saw a picture of a cat.' But we can’t let that pass. ‘What did you see? What letters and sounds did you see in that word that you could check that it was a cat?’ The confirmation is absolutely critical so that it doesn’t become a guessing game," Mooney emphasises.

Sight words do play an important role, however. "We wouldn’t put a child onto reading those sentences until they had some sight words that would be the glue to help them pull those words through. Where I come from we want kids to have between 15 and 20 words that they can click to," Mooney explains.

Patrick O’Brien, co-principal of ISB’s primary school.

Most children learn to read. Those who don’t are relatively few in numbers, but they are a source of serious concern, says Patrick O’Brien. "Schools must try to be as precise as possible about assessing what is the nature of the problem," he says. "Is it sounding out words? Is it their sight vocabulary? Is it the overall comprehension?"

For Mooney, six is the crucial age. "I’d start to worry at six, after their first year of school because that’s the year of habit forming," she says. "If kids think that they can slide by reading pictures, the teacher and the parents have a reason for concern."

Lack of fluency is one of the key indicators of potential reading difficulties, O'Brien says. "Even by the end of first grade, you’ll see different rates of fluency, how quickly, how accurately they’re reading," he observes. "If they’re still very halting by the end of first grade, they’re going to have trouble with comprehension."

Indeed they’re probably going to have trouble with school in general, Mooney says. "There’s great research on that showing that if children don’t have fluency by the time they’re seven, they will have difficulty at secondary school."

There are several things children should be able to do by the end of the first year of school, Mooney points out.

"They should know that letters and sounds help you attack words," she says. "And that the word always says the same thing, every time you meet it. It may have a different meaning in a different context, but it’s still going to say the same thing. They should have a bank of probably 50 basic words that they use in their reading and their writing and a few more according to their interest," Mooney explains.

"We would certainly hope they’re further along than that. I would hope that they’d be able to read a book of a couple of hundred words.

"They’re not relying on pictures, they know that pictures can support text, but that it’s the text that carries the message. I’d want them to be able to tell me which words describe something, which words name something – in other words, the foundations of grammar," Mooney continues.

"I’d want them to know that most text is read in a certain way depending upon the kind of text. Because you don’t read every text left to right, top to bottom. Coming onto six, most of our books have a table of contents and you don’t necessarily need to read the table of contents starting at the top," she explains.

"I’d want them to know that some stories are true, some stories will explain, give facts, and for some stories you need to have an imagination."

There is a lot that parents can do to help their young children if they are experiencing reading difficulties, but the first rule is not to exacerbate the problem, Mooney emphasises.

"The first thing is not to get too uptight because that will carry over to the child. Parents should do lots of talking, lots of reading and not say to the kid ‘Come on, you’re dumb.’"

Giving children books they are interested in is one solution, Mooney says. Parents should also spend time talking about books with their child and playing alphabet games. Parents should also talk with their child's teacher and find out what teaching method is being used at school.

"Lots of parents get so desperate that they actually cover up the pictures so these kids are left with a series of codes that they have no understanding of," Mooney observes.

A student’s reading difficulties can often be deceptive and mask their true abilities, O'Brien notes. "It’s interesting to me the number of kids who are still struggling with fluency at the end of first grade, but their receptive comprehension is very good," he says. "They can hear a story, they can retell it from memory."

"They can really do a nice job with the comprehension part of reading. It’s just their struggle with decoding and the fluency that’s getting in the way. All of those problems can pretty much be overcome except in the very rare cases," O’Brien says encouragingly.

Mooney stresses that any child will benefit from quality time reading with their parents. "Ten minutes a day is really all that’s required at a constant time – a time that kids anticipate," she says. "So they know it’s a time with Mum or Dad – and preferably not that same one all the time."

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Last modified: March 31, 2003