Teaching Reading
At Shakespeare and More, we think that learning to read is just about the single most important thing children learn to do at primary school.
If a child can read well by the time they leave primary school, they’re ready to take on the challenges of life. They’ll be able to access the curriculum at secondary school, will have access to new ideas and knowledge, their command of language will improve, and they’ll get lots of enjoyment from the books and other things they read. So, how do we get them to do it?
Reading is a complicated old business. The most common model used to describe the process of reading in recent years has been the Simple View of Reading, first proposed by Philip Gough and William Tunmer. This suggest that there are two interlinked strands to reading: language comprehension and visual word recognition. Both of these elements are necessary to be a skilled reader. In 2001, Hollis Scarborough presented the idea in the well-known visual, the 'reading rope'.
If a child can read well by the time they leave primary school, they’re ready to take on the challenges of life. They’ll be able to access the curriculum at secondary school, will have access to new ideas and knowledge, their command of language will improve, and they’ll get lots of enjoyment from the books and other things they read. So, how do we get them to do it?
Reading is a complicated old business. The most common model used to describe the process of reading in recent years has been the Simple View of Reading, first proposed by Philip Gough and William Tunmer. This suggest that there are two interlinked strands to reading: language comprehension and visual word recognition. Both of these elements are necessary to be a skilled reader. In 2001, Hollis Scarborough presented the idea in the well-known visual, the 'reading rope'.
Both elements (and their component parts) are necessary for reading. Neither is much use on its own. And there's another aspect to think about. The Simple View of Reading provides a useful model to explore the process of learning to read. But, being a reader, someone who chooses to read, is about more than those elements. There are a whole raft of skills and behaviours that make a child a reader, rather than simply someone who can read. For the sake of our own sanity, let’s think about reading as three interlinked things:
Word-Reading
Comprehension
Enjoying Reading
Word-Reading
Comprehension
Enjoying Reading
