Literacy Acquisition: Article Analysis

I’m writing an analysis of “Battle Royal” by Ralph Ellison. It is told from the first person point of view. This is a story about a young African American named Ralph Ellison, who is trying to be accepted by white society. He is offered the opportunity to read his speech he had written for his graduation at a gathering of the town’s leading white citizens (p.286). Ralph Ellison is told that he should partake in the Battle Royal before giving his speech as part of the entertainment. The Battle Royal is a fight in which several young African American boys are blindfolded, given boxing gloves, and forced to fight each other until one person is left standing in a boxing arena. There are no time

For this assignment, I will first briefly discuss the value of early reading pre-school and the stages of reading. After that I will critically evaluate the history of introducing synthetic phonics reading in primary schools in England. Furthermore, I will investigate the developments and issues which have been brought about the different teaching strategies used in schools and using teaching synthetic phonics in early years to teach first reading.

Causes of dyslexia or reading disabilities have been hotly debated by researchers and educators. Knowledge regarding the causes of reading disabilities is important as they define the strategies that will used to help students with dyslexia learn. Dyslexia is caused by differences in the information processing patterns of learning disability students. Language and phonological skills have been found to be the main cause of reading problems. This paper presents a critique and summarizes a paper dealing with phonological skills and how they affect the ability to read. Besides this the paper will highlight the main findings of

Reading begins with a foundation in spoken language. Children must understand the relationship between the ways words sound and how they look and relate to one another on paper. Early exposure to reading and writing introduces children to emergent literacy. They learn that printed words are meaningful, there are different forms of printed matter, there are rules for spoken language transcribed and there are some predictable conventions of written language. Children are effective readers when they exhibit phonological awareness and are capable of identifying distinct sounds that make up words. When presented with phonological awareness,

The Literacy Test was used to enable African Americans from voting. It was an underhanded method that basically ridiculed the intelligence of black people and maintained white dominance in politics.

The article research topic was a study that analyzed the phonological awareness, naming skill, and visual skill of Hong Kong and United State children, and if there were any similarities on these influences and English word recognition. The hypothesis was that age was linked to the speed of the performance in phonological awareness, naming skill, and visual learning all three models influenced reading skills. The study was conducted on 190 Hong Kong kindergarten children ages 3-6 years and 128 United State kindergarteners and first grade children. Both Hong Kong and American children were given exams by psychology students; the exams were to measure their reading, phonological awareness, naming, and visual-spatial skills. The results were that

Research shows that all proficient readers rely on deep and ready knowledge of spelling-sound correspondence while reading, whether this knowledge was specifically taught or simply inferred by students. Conversely, failure to learn to use spelling/sound correspondences to read and spell words is shown to be the most frequent and debilitating cause of reading difficulty. Many children learn to read without any direct classroom instruction in phonics. But many children, especially children from homes that are not language rich, do need more systematic instruction in word-attack strategies. Well-sequenced phonics instruction early in the first grade has been shown to reduce the incidence of reading difficulty even as it accelerates the growth of the class as a whole. Given this, it is probably better to start all children, most especially in high-poverty areas, with explicit phonics instruction. Such an approach does require continually monitoring children's progress both to allow those who are progressing quickly to move ahead before they become bored and to ensure that those who are having difficulties get the assistance they need.

ences among theoretical models to a certain extent. However, the theoretical models of reading processes actually make some commitments about the sources of reading problems. For example, a dual route model allows two very different sources of word reading difficulties: Either the direct (print-to-meaning) route or the indirect (print-to-phonology-tomeaning) route can be impaired (Coltheart et al. 1993). This provides a model for both developmental and acquired dyslexia. In acquired dyslexia, surface dyslexics are assumed to have selective damage to the direct route; phonological dyslexics are assumed to have selective damage to the phonological route. For developmental dyslexia, children may have a phonological deficit or an ‘orthographic’ (direct

Reading is associated with new vibrancy in the left-hemisphere of the brain (Turkeltaub, Gareau, Flowers, Zeffiro, & Eden, 2003). When this part of the brain records a rise in activity and the right inferotemporal records a reduction in doings, then a person increases his phonological skills (Turkeltaub, et al., 2003; Raschlea, Zuk, & Gaab, 2012). This enhances the learning capability of a person and this can be taken to mean that with a reduction in the development of the phonological skills, then a person is likely to develop learning difficulties (Ivry & Justus, 2001). As such, the authors are in support of the phonological theory with regard to dyslexia. In addition, the study has shown that reduced ability to differentiate between phonetics can lead to learning difficulties.

Dyslexia is a specific learning difficulty that affects individuals’ language acquisition skills such as learning to read and spell. Most researchers have agreed that its core cause is poor phonological awareness, that is, the poor ability to manipulate sounds in speech. Learning to read requires the child to establish a set of mappings between the letters (graphemes) of printed words and the speech sounds (phonemes) of spoken words. Learning to read English poses particular challenges for children with dyslexia due to its inconsistent letter-sound mappings. Traditional explicit and intense phonics-based (letter-sound) multisensory instruction training has shown its efficacy in helping children at-risk for or with dyslexia to learn to read.

“There is con-troversy, however about the ambitious targets set from Year 1 onwards and the risks of some children being regarded as dyslexic simply because they cannot keep up with the pace”( Pi-otrwski & Reason, year, p. #). In a study over the course of two months, children with dyslexia were taught for one month without the Phonics method and then the second month they were taught with the Phonics method and their grades went from failing to straight A and B students (). This shows that Learning with Phonics can be very helpful and resourceful too children with

difficult for children who have not been exposed to verbal language in their earliest years. In addition to this, phonics would be inaccessible to children who may be deaf and according to the current policy in place and their ‘cure for all’, there would be no real means of a different technique provided for them to suit their individualised needs (Davis, 2014; Bousted,2006). Furthermore, children who do not have additional needs may find phonics difficult due to all children being different as well as their learning needs too (Stuart, 2005; Clark 2013). Thus, how will early reading be achieved successfully here for children with additional needs and/ or different learning needs? Especially since, “at the heart of the educational process lies the child” (Plowden, 1967:2) not the method of reading/teaching instruction (Roper-Schneider, 1985).

I have chosen two articles that discuss the reading habit, but in a different context, one of academic articles and the other is a popular article. The title for academic article is “Understands the reading habits of children in Singapore”. This article is written by Shaheen Majid and Venus Tan from Nanyang Technological University. It published in Journal of Education Media and Library Sciences in 2007. The title for popular article is “Pleasurable pursuit”. This article is written by John Doraisamy and it’s taken from The Star Online. It published in 2010 as education article. Both of these articles are discussing about reading habits and reading interest among children. Using these articles I can study what the different between

In the article “Learning to Read across Languages: Cross-Linguistic Relationships in First- and Second-Language Literacy Development” by Keiko Koda and Annette M. Zehler, showed that reading aloud to children in elementary schools, in a secondary language increases their phonological awareness as they relate their slight knowledge from their first language, and apply it to the new acquisition of the second. The authors claimed that “the field of second (L2) and foreign language reading has pursued an understanding of factors that impact the reading process, one of which is first language (LI) literacy.” To support their claim, the authors brought together theories and research on the interaction of languages,

Methodology: The participants in this study consisted of monolinguistic and ESL children, defined as speaking any language other than English at home. These students hail from 30 different schools in a local school district of British Columbia, Canada. A total of 674 seventh grade students were compared in word reading, reading comprehension, working memory, phonological processing, syntactic awareness, and morphological awareness, where 572 were monolinguistic and 102 were ESL coming from a wide range of language backgrounds. They were assessed with the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test - Revised and the Test of Word Reading Efficiency for the word reading measure; students were instructed to read a list of words in the WRMT-R and given 45 seconds to complete the same task from the Sight Word Efficiency and Phonemic Decoding Efficiency subtests in TOWRE. Assessment terminated after 10 errors. In the reading comprehension measure, there were two different assessments in place: the Stanford Diagnostic Reading Test and the Planet Filk and Greb test.