Delayed English Literacy Report

Studies confirm a high correlation of 0.6 to 0.8 between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension (Baumann & Kame’enui as cited in Dalton and Grisham, 2011 p. 307). However, the rate at which individual children develop vocabulary knowledge is enormously varied. At 5 years old there is already a 30 million word exposure gap (Hart & Risley as cited in Dalton and Grisham, 2011 p. 307). Linguistic morphology, the study of words and word origins, is a significant component of vocabulary learning programs. Children should be actively supplied with multiple exposures to words and exposures in varying contexts. Walbank and Bisby (2016, p. 11) describe how building adjective vocabulary adds dramatically more interest, accuracy and detail to students oral and written language. To encourage this development, students can work in small groups to brainstorm alternative, more interesting words, for commonly used adjectives. For example, replacing the word ‘good’ with ‘magnificent’, ‘superlative’ or ‘exceptional’. This direct vocabulary instruction is essential, but having only explicit teaching is insufficient. Beck et al (2008) estimate that educators can only actively teach 300-400 words per year (as cited in Dalton and Grisham, 2011 p. 307). Also, research indicates that children learn a far greater number of words indirectly through reading, than from instruction (Cunningham & Stanovich as

Reading is a means of language acquisition, of communication, and of sharing information which is essential in being a productive member of society. If and when a student missed an opportunity to learn the skills necessary for reading, it’s has a profound impact on their lives. As educators we realize that teaching all children to read requires that every child receive excellent reading instruction. We are also aware that children, who are struggling with reading must receive

According to statistics, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (2016) show that more than 90% of DHH children are born to hearing families, but sadly many of these children lack full language acquisition

One reason the language gap exist can be contributed to the amount of words children hear. In a study done by Hart and Risley (1995), it was shown that children from high SES homes heard approximately 215,000 words,

Learning to read is a complex task which involves more than just decoding the print on the page. The goal of reading is to construct meaning from the text (Winch, 2014). While the teaching of decoding skills is an extremely important step in the reading process, simply having the skills of decoding is not enough to become a successful reader. For this reason, the key elements of the reading process will be discussed in an order which allows children to develop the building blocks necessary to become a successful reader. Systematic and explicit reading instruction is vital for reading development as it allows children to build on the previously acquired skills and strategies required to become a successful reader. The purpose of this essay is to explain why having a concept of print, phonemic awareness, phonics and comprehension are important to the reading process and how effective teachers teach these skills.

There have been various research studies and debates about how children learn. It started with Webster Spellers and their popular method of reading instruction, which was replaced with alphabetic and phonics methods. The debate soon became about phonics and whole-word method. They found that not one method worked for all children. Soon peoples thinking shifted to learning to read, should be as natural as learning to talk. Current research has found that whole-language and code-focused instruction are important for developing readers. Language helps us navigate through like. Oral language is vital groundwork of literacy instruction. Children with stronger oral communication read more fluently, than those who struggle with oral communication. Language skills identified with reading include vocabulary, metalinguistic awareness, and listening comprehension. Children’s vocabulary is correlational to their literacy skills. Explicit instruction is crucial for proficient literacy to develop in children.

Phonemic awareness is one of the five components of reading in which students must gain knowledge and manipulation of sounds in spoken words. We know that phonemic awareness is important in learning to read languages that are based on an alphabet. It may also be used as a prediction tool for how well a student will learn to read. Phonemic awareness helps young children use more advanced ways of learning new words that involves forming connections between visual information about a word as it appears in print, its meaning, and pronunciation. To add, phonics is the relationship between written and spoken letters and sounds. Phonics instruction is intended to help young readers understand and use the alphabetic principle. Systematic phonics instruction improves comprehension and impacts word

The ability to recognize words is imperative children’s reading fluency. As children progress through school, if there word recognition does not increase they are at risk. Sight words are important for words that are not easily decodable, because they provide contexts and allow for the child’s comprehension (Sullivan, Konrad, Joseph, & Luu, 2013). How children go about learning sight words is a common question amongst researchers. Children acquire early knowledge of sight words in the home whether it be conversation or practice, as well as at school. The following research provides evidence assessing these relationships.

Learning to read is an important skill for all people to succeed in life. This skill is learnt from an early age through reading books with parents. Although children from low socio-economic families are not exposed to texts that engage them, therefore they are not becoming fluent readers (Ewing & Maher, 2014). Developing literacy skills is not simply learning the letter sounds and blending them together. When looking into the process further there is more to it including oral language, phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension. These skills start at a young age and continue to develop throughout the first few years of school. Educators can teach these skills explicitly or systematically, but children need to be

We learn children to read books in oirder for them to learn through retaining information. With children paying too much attention and concetnrration to the level of print and decoding it, they can actually lose sight of what they are actually reading.

A lack of incidental learning does not only affect a person’s knowledge of vocabulary, but their knowledge of the world that surrounds them. It is already believed that hearing and Deaf individual’s organization of knowledge in the long-term memory is different (“How Deaf Children Learn”). The belief that Deaf and hearing students are the same, minus the ability to hear, is simply not true. How a Deaf person obtains, and retains information is quite different from how a hearing person approaches doing so. This, plus a lack of incidental learning can have lasting effects on how a student retrieves information from text. When reading, ideally, we will apply our own knowledge to make sense and obtain meaning from the text. This skill is called top-down

Vocabulary plays a crucial part in a child learning to read. A student that has limited vocabulary often prevents them from comprehending the text that he or she reads. Students that do not read well often times read less because they find that reading is tough and frustrating. Since these low level readers do not read enough their vocabulary does not improve. Unfortunately, as the student continues through school the gap between good readers and poor readers widens tremendously.

This means that you can hear the sounds of the words and convert them into letters on a page and see letters on a page and convert them into something you can hear (Jensen, 2016). Phonological processing deficits are second most common among impoverished students, next to working class memory, as this population of students tend to have poor auditory memory processing skills which leads to poor listening skills and classroom behavior (Noble, Wolmetz, Ochs, Farah, & McCandliss, 2006) as students have trouble processing sounds and words in real time. Most frequently, this leads to frustration, vocabulary difficulties, and low self-esteem. A lack of books and parent reading at home can also prohibit reading fluency and motivation (Jensen, 2016).

The child generally lacks knowledge of the alphabet, lacks left-to-right directionality in writing, and lacks concept of word (one-to-one matching of spoken and written words). Consistent spacing between words and consistent use of letter-sound correspondences are absent.

When data from students who had average accuracy and fluency scores, but lower comprehension scores were compared to data from those with similar accuracy and fluency but average comprehension, the consistent differences were found to be lower oral language and vocabulary skills in the poor comprehenders upon entry into formal schooling. (Nation, Cocksey, Taylor & Bishop) Thousands of dollars each year are spent on intervention, trying to improve the reading of children that show delays. When one reads, the clear goal is comprehension of what is read. Without communication of ideas between the author and reader, decoding texts is pointless. Most intervention programs are focused on phonics and word decoding. Oral language interventions concurrent with vocabulary and comprehension tasks at age eight have been shown to lead to significant improvements in reading comprehension. (Nation, et al., 2010). Reading comprehension is not merely a product of being able to decode words and sentences. How we teach children to process and integrate the ideas found in text can have a large impact on their ability to function in a world of ever expanding knowledge and information.