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Important Components Involved In Learning To Read

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There are many important components involved in learning to read, however, five main aspects stand out. These being early experiences with language and print, phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary and fluency. All of these elements are important and depend on each other to generate the ultimate goal for reading which is comprehension. Teachers need to have a comprehensive understanding of the process of learning to read, intensive knowledge of effective strategies to help children thrive when learning to read
The reading process begins well before children start school where the introduction to language comes from parents providing a rich environment surrounded by suitable oral language experiences, exposure to a range of books, and the …show more content…

Phonological awareness is being able to distinguish the assembly of isolated sounds that make up words and experiment with adjusting the distinct sounds known as Phonemes to form new words (Emmit, Hornsby & Wilson, 2013). Elements of phonological awareness include practice with separating, manipulating and grouping together sounds of words, in addition to exploring words and sounds in an enjoyable way using rhymes (Matheson, 2005). Phonological awareness provides innovative processes for a broader vocabulary and the ability to sound out new words (University of Oregon, 2009). The decoding process that occurs allows readers the ability to then concentrate on the meaning of what they read and improve their reading development (Reid Lyon, 1998). When teaching phonological awareness to children, teachers should work in small groups that explore only a couple of concepts at a time for instance how the mouth moves when saying a variety of isolated sounds in comparison to these phoneme sounds blended to assemble a word (Learning Point Associates, 2004). In conjunction with the familiarity of phonemes and words in phonological awareness, it is imperative to integrate this fundamental feature of reading development with understanding graphemes, and the link to letters in print to their phonemes sounds with phonics (Fellows & Oatley, …show more content…

Phonics is imperative to learning to read because it allows for the reader to distinguish these associations in letters and words that they read to captivate comprehension (Walbank & Bisby, 2016). At the preschool-grade, knowledge of the alphabetic principles should be extensive and in-depth, however, too much focus can lead to over application of this skills having words read but not comprehended. The directional approach for teaching phonics should be precise, articulated well with graphemes organised in a logical and systematic way allowing plenty of time to recite the new skills received inherited obtained attained gained acquired (Learning Point Associates, 2004). Likewise, with phonological awareness the expertise of listening to the sounds in phonemes and words, phonics helps complete the process of sounding out to decode what has been read to eventually move onto the primary goal of learning to read being comprehension (Fellows & Oakley, 2014). Another approach is to teach phonics is the analytical technique in which the teacher guides students to observe phonemes and graphemes by scrutinising full words to bring forth another critical thinking skill required to understand what the text means (Ewing & Maher, 2014). This essential component combined with

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