Throughout the course of this semester, my knowledge about
reading instruction and teaching reading strategies has grown, however, I still
believe a large part of what I stated in my first paper. Reading is the foundation of
every subject and without a solid foundation in reading students will struggle
in other content areas. Initially
I believed reading was a process that slowly built upon itself or a part to
whole concept; however I now believe reading is a continual cycle that allows
students to continually learn and grow. In reading, contexts, meaning, and
prior knowledge should be all intertwined to effectively teach reading to a
student. Ultimately,
the students will use reading in everything they do and continually build upon
their foundation.
I
believe that reading begins before a student enters a classroom. Students are able to connections and
associate pictures, words, and letters long before they are able to read and
use phonics to sound out unfamiliar words. 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, fluency, and comprehension.
I have had many students that have been unsuccessful and struggle with
reading. However, I believe through shared reading, guided reading, individual
conferencing and other components of a comprehensive literacy program students
can improve their reading skills and level. Also,
students are able to view how to become a better reading through the teacher’s
modeling during read-alouds and mini-lessons.
Comprehension
is vital to the success of young readers. 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. This course has shown me that often
times when a reader reads aloud, the may use miscues if they are fluent
readers, but the words they miscue may not necessarily change the meaning of
the text. In this case, miscues
are acceptable as long as it does not change the meaning of the passage since
comprehension is one of the primary goals of readers. Readers take on meaning
from their texts by making connections to the words and their contexts from
prior experiences. The process of comprehending written text is an ongoing
collaboration of visual aspects, letter-sound relationships, schemas, contexts,
and words and their meanings.
Young
readers should also continue their work on making connections. Allowing students
to make connections to words using context and prior knowledge will help them
develop. For example, many times
teachers ask students to write a sentence about something and draw a picture to
go with it. The connection with
the picture may help the students write the sounds of the words they drew. Eventually this will lead to learning
and identifying spelling patterns and strategies to correctly spell a word,
which will lead them to become better readers.
Readers
should also 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. 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. When a student read to me during guided
reading or through assessments and made many miscues I often assumed the
student was not a proficient reader and needed to be placed into a lower
reading group. This course has
shown me that it not always the case.
Many times readers can change a word accidently and the passage will
still make sense. Ultimately I
would like the reader to not make any miscues, but my main concern is that the
student is able to take away meaning from the text.
Reading is a
lifelong journey and a continual learning cycle, not just a step-by-step
process. It is my 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.
This course and Weaver’s text has really helped me realize that reading
is valuable and important to teach to students. I have learned a great deal from this course and cannot wait
to try some of the strategies I read about with some of my future students.
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