By Kim Asche
University of Minnesota Extension
Regional Office, Hutchinson
To promote young children’s delight in talking, listening, reading and writing adults need to provide a variety of interesting language experiences. Children who have reading difficulties in the primary grades often had limited early literacy learning experiences.

Children with reading difficulties have:
less letter knowledge
less sensitivity to the notion that the sounds of speech are distinct from their meaning
less familiarity with the basic purpose and mechanisms of reading
poorer general language ability

Children who are skilled readers:
understand the alphabet and letters
use background knowledge and strategies to obtain meaning from print
can easily identify words and read fluently

Activities that prepare young children for learning to read, emphasize counting, number concepts, letter names, shapes, sounds, phonological and phonemic awareness, models of adult interest in literacy, and independent and cooperative literacy activities.

Read the full article here

Promoting young children\’s early literacy.

New research has shown that using abbreviated words such a “l8r”, “lol”, and the hundreds of other short forms is actually beneficial to both children’s spelling and literacy skills.

The research, carried out at the University of Coventry, involved children between the ages of 8 and 12. It found those kids that regularly sent/received text messages to have better literacy skills. This repeated use of text language tests their English skills and requires the learning of correct spellings. The study proposes that to create the short form word they need to understand and know the original too.

Read more at BBC News

My own kids often text and I’m not sure whether I agree with the research but I look forward to being proved wrong. Until then “C U l8r”!

Research by The National Literacy Trust on 3,001 children from England and Scotland showed that schoolchildren who blog or own social networking profiles on Facebook have higher literacy levels and greater confidence in writing.
The key objectives of the survey were to explore how much young people enjoy writing, what type of writing they engage in, how good at writing they think they are, what they think about writing and what the role of technology is in young people’s writing.
So what were the key findings?
75% of young people said that they write regularly. Technology-based formats were most frequently written. For example, 82% of young people wrote text messages at least once a month, 73% wrote instant messages (such as messages on AIM or MSN), and 63% wrote on a social networking site.
61 per cent of bloggers and 56 per cent of social networkers claimed to be good or very good at writing, compared to 47 per cent of those who had neither.
Pupils who write online are more likely to write short stories, letters, song lyrics or a diary, the research revealed.
Most young people said they used computers regularly and believed that computers are beneficial to their writing, agreeing that a computer makes it easier for them to correct mistakes (89%) and allows them to present ideas clearly (76%). Overall, nearly 60% of young people also believe that computers allow them to be more creative, concentrate more and encourage them to write more often.

Jonathan Douglas, director of the National Literacy Trust, said: “The digital age often gets a bad press but the findings of this report demonstrate that social networking sites and blogs are linked to young people’s more positive attitudes to writing. “Confidence and enjoyment are closely linked to the development of skills. Therefore, in order to improve standards we need to encourage children to write more and to enjoy writing, which could be supported by celebrating forms of writing they enjoy. Our research indicates that, for many, these are without doubt technology-based forms.”

Full report available here

Do you think computers are a help or a hinderance to children’s writing?

British neuroscientists have recently found the reason most people can predict words and sentences as they are being scanned by the eye. Rather than reading every word and sentence to the end before coming up with its meaning, new research has shown the brain makes an educated guess and then moves on.
As we become more literate, the brain becomes better at predicting sentences and therefore quicker at reading.
Researchers have shown that the angular gyrus’ role, rather than acting as a dictionary as previously thought, acts in anticipating what our eye will see – like the predictive texting function on a mobile phone.
The research, published in the journal ‘Nature’ was based on a unique study into former guerrilla fighters in Colombia. The team scanned the brains of illiterate adult rebels, who had had no education, before and after they had undertaken a five year reading and writing course. The new readers had a higher density of so-called grey matter, where information processing is carried out, in several areas of the left hemisphere of the brain.
It is hoped that the research could unlock understanding into the causes of dyslexia.
Google news article here.

A report today, commissioned for BookTime, a branch of the independent literacy charity Booktrust, reports some interesting findings regarding children’s leisure time and reading habits.

 

• One in every 20 family homes in Britain today has fewer than ten books.
• Yet 96% of all children surveyed say that they enjoy reading.
• 60% of children like to share a book with their parents/carers as it shows that they like to spend time with them.
• 3% of parents and carers never or rarely read with their children. For those who do, just one in three read with their children on a daily basis.
• 56% of all parents and carers (and almost half of all parents of 4-5 year olds [48%]) say their child spends more time facing a screen, playing computer games and watching DVDs rather than reading.
• Parents and carers of boys are twice as likely not to read with them compared to those who have girls.
• Children were asked ‘what stops you reading’ and they reported watching TV (54%) and playing on the computer or video games (41%).

 

So kids love reading, they love being read to yet half of them are choosing screen based ‘mind numing’ activities rather than reading. As parents we need to make reading a priority. Making time for reading demonstrates the importance we place on it and also increases literacy skills. When one in 5 children leave primary/elementary school without meeting the required standards in literacy we cannot leave this until it is too late. Turn off the TV and pick up a book or use screen time as educational time and introduce them to ebooks!

 

The independent research was conducted on behalf of Booktime and Booked Up. 1,772 UK parents of primary school aged children and 1,318 children aged 5-12 years took part in the research.

 

 

 

 

I was fascinated to discover information on how the importance of phonemic awareness was discovered. After World War II the U.S. Government looked for ways to ease the transition back into life for disabled veterans, including those who returned home blinded in battle. A young psychologist, Alvin Liberman, was tasked with creating a reading machine for the blind. The idea was to create a machine that could vocalize print as a finger ran over Braille letters.

Although the machine worked it proved too slow at articulating the individual sounds to resemble speech. Listeners found it impossible to join the machine’s sounds together to make any sense out of them. However, Liberman’s team of scientists had stumbled upon a new under¬standing of the reading process.

They had unintentionally identified the complicated relationship between the language that we read [letters] and the lan¬guage that we speak [sounds] and discovered one of the primary reasons it can be hard to learn how to read. Just as the blind listeners could not make sense out of the sounds coming from the reading machine, struggling readers have a hard time blending together the different sounds that make up a word.

Many young learners find it incredibly difficult to distinguish the small segments of sounds – “phonemic awareness”. Their difficulty has nothing to do with an ability to recognize the individual letters but what word they form when strung together. Well over a third of all beginning readers have difficulty identifying, discriminating, and isolating sounds.

Phonemes are the sounds that make up spoken words not the individual letters. For example, the word ‘on’ is made up of two phonemes: /o/ and /n/. We hear them as a single word because we blend the individual phonemes into a unit as we pronounce the word. Clusters of letters that represent single sounds (th, sh, oo, ough, or ck) are also important for children to be aware of. The word ‘though’ is not de-codable just by the individual letter sounds, there needs to be an understanding of the phonetic sounds too. Phonemes are not the sounds that letters make but the sounds of speech that can be represented by letters.

Effective reading instruction needs to include teaching of phonemic awareness and phonics. Helping your child to recognise the sounds the letters make and how they combine is as important as understanding the letters themselves.

For me, literacy is a concept that is not easy to define in the 21st Century. At a basic level, it could be defined as the ability to read and write. Reading and writing used to be a relatively privileged activity not that long ago. Yet we expect, and indeed should expect, that today every child should be able to read and write. But is that enough in the 21st Century to be really literate?

Massive advancements in technology have led to the need for new and different type of literacy skills. How are we helping children to keep up with this? Is it by chance or design?

At the click of a mouse, it is possible to retrieve information on the World-wide web, connect with people across the globe, research, investigate, comment and contribute on an extraordinary range of sources from all over the world. Are our children in danger of growing up in a world of information overload?

They will need the ability to access, process, filter, evaluate, combine and use the information to their advantage which depends on a different set of skills. These include using different technology mediums, keeping up-to-date with ever increasing new technologies, exploring new ways of working, assessing vast amounts of information and screening it quickly to assess its relevance, interacting with new communication technologies and styles, or networking in a virtual world. How are we preparing our children with these skills?

The UNESCO definition of literacy is: “Literacy is the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, compute and use printed and written materials associated with varying contexts.”

Does this definition go far enough to ensure our children are literate for the future? E-literacy starts with the basics of being able to read and write. Without this the information available is inaccessible. However are there other skills we should be teaching alongside the basics? And when does this become a standard part of the curriculum?

I was recently reading a report by Ofsted [an independent education review body in the UK] about literacy trends in schools.
The report is available here.

“The gap between schools in their understanding of the uses of new technology partly reflected the very differing views that schools held about English, the changing nature of communication and pupils’ literacy needs in the 21st century. The most effective schools understood that ‘ICT has fundamentally altered… how we think about reading and writing’. As technology has changed, so the literacy needs of pupils change. This always involves adding new skills rather than simply replacing old ones.”

This is fundamental. We need to view the use of technology as beneficial to engaging students as well as adding to the skill set that they will require in the future. The skills required to read and enjoy a novel are different to those needed to skim emails, or text messages or extract pertinent data from an electronic report. However we cannot forget the basics. Reading and writing are skills, in my view, that need to remain no matter what technological advancements are made.

What do you think?

What do you do when your child would rather do anything else than read?

It can be really frustrating as a parent if your child has no interest or worse still an aversion to reading. You know that you need to encourage them to read to improve their literacy skills but what do you do when it becomes a battle rather than a source of enjoyment?

Reading is a skill just like any other. And when you do not have the basic skills then for some children trying to gain the skills becomes worse than not trying. Imagine you were learning to play tennis. How motivated would you be if the ball never went over the net? It wouldn’t be much fun would it, especially if the other player was getting stressed about it.

So the key is to relax yourself. Find ways to have fun reading in different situations. Reading doesn’t just have to be sitting down with a book.

If your child is struggling to read and is spending more time stumbling over the words try reading the book to the child first. Then let your child have a go at filling in some of the blanks that you leave. Then try taking turns reading a page or line. Make sure the book is about something that the child is really interested in. Try and find interesting facts books on a topic they enjoy such as sharks, dinosaurs or soccer. If the subject matter is interesting then your child is more likely to want to master the skills to decode the information.

There are lots of tools available online that can support your child’s reading skills whilst they are having fun. Educational games can improve language development, word recognition or spelling. Kids usually love using the computer and game based learning can be great fun as well as educational.

Ebooks that are animated and read the story aloud as the child follows the words can present reading in a different medium which is removed from the normal associations they have with sitting down to read a book. You can also let them master the tool themselves to develop their self confidence. Look out for books where emerging readers can have a go themselves and click on a word to hear it spoken, like the ones at wizz-e.com.

Try playing word games, like word snap or making words out of different letters. These can be made at home for free and introducing the fun element of play can engage a disinterested reader.

Let your child write their own stories and print them out. You could illustrate the story using images available on the internet, from magazines or let your child draw the pictures themselves. Your child will love showing and reading their books to anyone who will listen! If your child is not a confident writer, then write or type the story out for them.

If you remove the battle and encourage a love of reading using different methods your child will be developing their skills in a way that they enjoy. Just as with learning to playing tennis once one skill set is developed it encourages the desire to learn more.

I was recently reading a book about what affects literacy skills in young children and I thought I’d share some of the key research findings I came across.

The critical point that was made was that learning to read and write begins long before the school years. Research shows that the attitudes of adults who interact regularly with children have a huge influence the attitude of children learning to read (DeBaryshe, 1995; Baker et al., 1995; Spiegel, 1994). A number of factors affect these interactions, including the parents’ own attitudes towards reading, the children’s motivation for reading, the opportunities parents provide their children and how they behave, as well as the parents’ own reading and literacy ability levels.

So what does the research say? Here are a few excerpts.

Parents who believe that reading is a source of entertainment have children with a more positive view about reading than do parents who emphasize the skills aspect of reading development (Baker et al., 1997).

Children who view school learning as irrelevant to life outside school are less motivated to invest time and effort in learning to read (Purcell-Gates, 1994; Stipek et al., 1995).

When parents are responsive and ”chatty” during shared reading, improvements in their children’s skills have been recorded (e.g., Whitehurst et al., 1994).

Parents who believe their children are interested in reading are more likely to provide reading activities than parents who do not see such interest (Hiebert, 1981).

Enthusiasm about reading is suggested by many researchers as a route to development of the child’s active engagement in reading (Snow and Tabors, 1996; Baker et al., 1995).

Activities such as family storybook reading promote positive feelings about books and literacy (Taylor and Strickland, 1986).

Mealtime conversation helps children acquire knowledge about narratives when family members recount the day’s activities, giving children an experience of value in learning about language and communication (Snow and Tabors, 1993).

So some simple steps can promote reading skills in your children:
• talk to your children,
• share books,
• be enthusiastic about reading,
• chat about the books they are reading,
• be seen to enjoying reading yourself.

Simple really isn’t it?