Teaching Reading

Learning to read is distinctly different from learning to play a sport, ride a bike, or play a musical instrument. Although some essentials are the same (explicit instruction and lots of practice), learning to read requires the brain to internalize an array of invisible sub-skills. According to the National Reading Panel Report, the following 5 components are the essential pieces of proficient reading:

Since the goal of reading is comprehension - the thinking and feeling part of reading - these sub-skills must be “second nature” in order for us to fluidly move through pages in a book, website, consumer guide, etc. The child who does not master these sub-skills in the primary grades often develops ineffective habits, such as word-skipping; avoiding reading, “pretend reading” during classroom silent reading time; and inattentiveness to rich vocabulary words. And even for the child who easily masters decoding (figuring out how to pronounce words) the process of reading is still a complex one.

Think about the last thing you read. An editorial in the newspaper? A school newsletter from your child’s teacher? A report on water quality in your community? A novel? If you could recapture your mental processes, you would find a lengthy list of strategies, emotions, and particular world knowledge that helped you carry away facts or impressions or changes of attitude. Likely you had an internal conversation with yourself and the author, and, depending on how complex the text was, you paused, backtracked, made connections, visualized, adjusted your rate, and monitored your understanding of the main idea.

In school and work reading and writing are what so many other skills and learning curves hinge on. Many careers demand that an ability to quickly grasp internet information, paraphrase websites, synthesize a quarterly report, discern a well-written article from another, and write up reports for government, the private sector, or laymen. The level of attunement to one’s comprehension process and memory is paramount.