Personal Model of Reading Theory

Tiffany Leguizamon

Personal Model of Reading Theory

Dr. Richie

June 4^th, 2012

            Throughout my teaching experience I have noticed how important and critical reading is to be successful in school.  Reading is the foundation of every subject and without a solid foundation in reading students will struggle in other content areas.  For example, math requires you to decode information, look for clues, and unnecessary information in word problems.  History requires you to read information from textbooks and other resources to gain knowledge about the content area.  Science also requires students to read information, data, and charts.  Ultimately, the students will use reading in everything they do and continually build upon their foundation.

            In my opinion, reading begins before a student enters a classroom.  Students are able to connections between pictures, words, and letters.  My two-year-old niece is a prime example.  Many days she and I will spend time coloring alphabet pages.  I am constantly questioning her while coloring about what the picture is and what letter is represented.  The majority of the time she is able to identify the letter and associate the picture with the word.  I believe that utilizing word association and the alphabet will help children to excel in reading before they reach the elementary school level.

            Once a student reaches the elementary school level, students should begin building upon the knowledge they already have about words.  This includes learning phonics, sight words, and word patterns.  Phonics can be quite difficult for many young learners and present them with a challenge.  Personally, I enjoy seeing word families utilized in classrooms.  I have had many students that have been unsuccessful with phonics advance greatly by using word families. While in my TOSS class, there was a student that struggled with the –ir, -ur, and -er sounds. After completing several activities with word families the student finally began to understand the sounds.  I believe learning phonics is a large part of reading and will help students decode unfamiliar words as they mature and grow as readers.  

            As a student progresses in reading the importance of comprehension is vital to the success of young readers.  During my student teaching experience in a third grade classroom this fall I noticed many students were able to read through a given passage very quickly, but were not able to recall anything they had read afterward.  I worked on slowing down the reading pace with students while focusing on punctuation and dialogue and stopping throughout reading selections to ask questions.  The students in my guided reading groups greatly benefitted in the area of comprehension after I began to use these strategies.  I believe that as a student begins to develop as a reader they must not just be able to identify the words they are reading correctly, but also be able to recall the information they have read.  A goal of mine professionally is to have the students to go home and be able to remember what they have read and explain it to their guardians with enthusiasm. 

            As a reader grows and develops another concept they should master is fluency. During my undergraduate work I had a professor say that fluency was not just the speed at which a student can read, but the ability to use decoding and comprehension quickly.  When students become fluent readers they are building upon all of their prior knowledge to become a better, stronger reader.  During my student teaching field experience one of my guided reading groups struggled with fluency.  As a result we read a lot of poetry aloud to help ease them into reading passages swiftly while also working on comprehension. Fluency is important for students to learn so they spend less time decoding and trying to pronounce the words and more time comprehending the materials they have read.

As an educator, I have come to understand how important reading is in a student’s life.  Reading builds upon itself as the student grows and develops and is a lifelong journey.  It is my personal goal to instill a passion for reading in each of my student’s lives that they will carry with them long after the leave my classroom and to be able to remind my students that becoming a strong reader is not a sprint, it is a marathon.