Introduction
The importance of determining effective ways to teach children to read is a vital issue in forming a well-educated generation. This importance led to form the national reading panel in order to research this specific area and summarize the most effective ways to teach the kids reading. This essay analyzes the findings of the national reading panel based on the publication “Put Reading First: The Research Building Blocks for Teaching Children to Read”.
Analysis
The findings of the national reading panel were summarized in eight different strategies that should improve and develop the reading ability in the kids. The first strategy is “Improving the Phonemic awareness” which is basically teaching the children the parts of the words that are called “phonemes” which should improve the spelling ability and help to realize the words as a block of many small parts, rather than a whole word.
The second strategy is the “Phonics Instruction” which is teaching the children how to relate between the written letters and the individual sounds of the letter. Teaching this relation will help the kids to identify familiar words faster and recognize new words whether they are separated or connected within the text.
The third strategy is teaching the kids “Fluency” which is a logical extension to the previous two strategies in which they were taught to identify parts of the words, then relate them to written letters, and finally, learn how to do that quickly and automatically. If taught properly the children will learn how to focus on the meanings of the text rather than decoding the words separately.
The fourth strategy that was found effective in teaching reading is “Vocabulary instruction” which is teaching the children to recognize the words they are reading or pronouncing. The vocabulary is important to reading comprehension as the increase of the number of recognizable words can help the kids to advance to more complex text and recognize the meanings of the new words automatically.
The next strategy is the “Text comprehension instructions” which is using specific methods to help the children understand the text they are reading. One of the concepts of teaching comprehension is to make the reader purposeful and active, and therefore several strategies were developed to tech comprehension which includes:
- Monitoring comprehension.
- Using graphic and semantic organizers
- Answering questions.
- Generating questions
- Recognizing story structure
- Summarizing
Additionally, there are several methods to teach the comprehension strategies that include the following:
- Explicit teaching techniques: That includes a direct explanation in telling the students when and why to use a specific strategy while reading the text.
- Modeling: modeling a situation in which the strategy should be used in a way of “thinking aloud”
- Guided practice: The teacher assists the students throughout the learning process by giving them hints on how to apply the strategy.
- Application: Practicing a strategy until it can be used independently without the teacher’s assistance.
- Cooperative learning: that includes dividing the class into small groups to make the students collaborate and help each other through learning.
The next strategy which is called comprehension refers to giving the teachers formal instruction on how to use the comprehension strategies in class.
Another important finding the national reading panel outlined is the “teacher education in reading instruction”, which basically addresses the area in which the teachers’ knowledge can be improved and be more effective in delivering the information to students.
The final strategy the panel summarized is “Computer Technology in Reading Instruction” which is combing the effective use of computers in the classroom with the reading instructions, and as the research showed that there are “positive results from using computers for reading instruction.
Works Cited
National Reading Panel. (2001). About the NRP. Web.
National Institute for Literacy. Put Reading First: The Research Building Blocks for Teaching Children to Read. Web.