An Intro to Reading Instruction

When you think about reading, you probably think of curling up with a novel and delving into the twists and turns of a fictional story.  However, we are constantly reading in all areas of our life.  We read road signs that warn of upcoming construction.  We read billboards that advertise the date of a touring concert.  We read amber alerts, emails, Instagram posts, texts, recipes, resumes… the list goes on.  

No matter the career or education path your students will take, they need to learn to read in English.  

A Successful Reader

In order for your students to successfully comprehend a text, your students need two things: speed and vocabulary. 

• Speed: The minimum speed at which someone can understand what they are reading is 200 words per minute.  Any slower, and the brain will forget ideas faster than it can connect them.  A good target speed for your students is 250-300 words per minute.  To help your students build reading speed and fluency, you can do speed-reading exercises.  For example, give them a passage that is 250 words long and then have your students read the passage again and again, trying to read it in under a minute.  When the minute is up, have the students mark where they ended to show their progress over time. 

• Vocabulary: Research has suggested that before a learner can progress as a reader, they need to be familiar with 3000 - 5000 word families.  Not words, word families.  Students cannot succeed as readers until they build this foundation!  Do you want to help your students be successful readers?  Teach them vocab!

English is… Opaque

I love this poem from T.S. Watt (1954): 

I take it you already know 

Of tough and bough and cough and dough?

Others may stumble but not you

On hiccough, thorough, lough and through.

Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,

To learn of less familiar traps?

Beware of heard, a dreadful word,

That looks like beard and sounds like bird.

And dead: it’s said like bed, not bead—

For goodness sake don’t call it “deed”!

Watch out for meat and great and threat

(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).

English spelling does little to predict English pronunciation.  The Orthographic Depth Hypothesis suggests that it is easier to read a language when its pronunciation is strongly correlated with its spelling.  If, in a language, a letter always says the same sound, then it is considered transparent.  If pronunciation is not consistent with spelling, however, a language is considered opaque.  In stark contrast with Spanish, whose symbol to sound correlation is transparent, we could say that English is quite opaque.  

Although many teachers are naturally drawn to teaching phonics, it is important to recognize that, in English, the “A” does not, in fact, always say “ahh”.  

Alphabets

Although some of your students’ L1s may use the Roman alphabet (Spanish, French, Italian…), many languages do not.  Before jumping into a Novice Reading Curriculum, you may need to devote some time to the teaching the Roman alphabet.  If only a few of your students are unfamiliar with the Roman alphabet, you may consider providing some one-on-one time familiarizing them with it.

Types of Reading

In a well-developed reading curriculum, there should be two types of reading: intensive reading and extensive reading.

• Intensive Reading:  This reading is the hardy meats and vegetables of a reading curriculum.  Passages are typically at or slightly above the students’ level and are often expository, persuasive, or argumentative.  Readings could be pulled from academic articles, news stories, blog posts, emails, biographies… Intensive reading activities help students to develop reading strategies and are usually done in the classroom with lots of support from the teacher.  

• Extensive Reading:  Now for the dessert!  The goal of extensive reading is to help students develop fluency, reinforce vocab and grammar knowledge, and develop a love for reading!  While intensive reading passages are usually brief (1-2 pages), extensive reading materials are typically chapter books.  These books should be fast-paced quick reads that are below your students’ level so students can read them at home.  This is the chance for students settle down and get lost in the pages of a book they love.

I will delve deeper into each of these in future blog posts.