How and when to teach reading?
Agnė Petrauskaitė
Vilnius University, Faculty of Natural Sciences
„Even very young children brains are naturally programmed to learn.“
Smilkstein
The fact is that the teaching of reading has never really been grounded in research. According to the Reading Reform Foundation, the whole National Literacy Strategy is based on a compromise of methods, with no attempt made to subject the programmes advocated to evidence-based testing to discover what are the most effective methods for teaching reading.
What’s the answer?
Unfortunately, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this. Children develop at different rates but research from the United States (National Research Council, 1998) has shown that children should be being prepared for reading well before they come to school. This is because the first three years of a child’s life are critical for the development of a child’s brain and it’s during this time that children develop most of their capacity for learning.
Why is this?
Children are born with over 100bn brain cells called neurons. These neurons form connections, called synapses, which make up the wiring of the brain. Children’s brains work on a ‘use it or lose it’ principle and only connections that are regularly activated will continue to function effectively. So, depending on the amount of intellectual stimulation the brain receives in the early years, it can gain or lose up to 25% of the synapses it has. Therefore, the opportunity for creating the foundation for reading and, indeed all other learning, begins at this time.
Is a child’s ability to learn to read dependent on their intelligence?
A child’s ability to learn to read isn’t just determined by their innate intelligence. The brain benefits from exercise and stimulation and it is when very young children’s brains are exposed to experiences and sensations that they develop the new neural connections that make learning to read possible.
Parents and carers can stimulate their children’s brains so that they will be receptive to learning to read by talking, singing, telling nursery rhymes, showing and sharing books and reading aloud to their children. In fact, the children of parents and carers who treat the process of learning to read as a form of entertainment, rather than as a task to be mastered, tend to have a greater facility for reading than those who don’t.
Conclusions
According to the National Research Council (1998), in the same way that children develop language skills before they can speak, so they can also have literacy skills well before they are able to read. In the light of what we know about how the brain develops, we can see why children who are read to and exposed to books and language games from an early age are more likely to develop into good readers when they come to school than those who aren’t. However, this leads us on to consider what research can tell teachers about how to teach reading effectively.
