Republic of the Philippines

                                        WESTERN MINDANAO

STATE UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF EDUCATION

Beginning Reading

Introduction

The faulty reading habits of many of our children today and the presence of the non-readers
in the upper grades and even in the high school may be due to poor beginning instruction.
Reading being a developmental process must be started right. It must have a firm foundation on
oral language ability and word recognition skills. These can be the foundation to build the higher
skills demanded of an intelligent discriminating reader. There is a need for a systematic
beginning program which can help young learners to learn good reading habits and skills.
Filipino children are expected to read not only in Filipino, but also English, a good reading
program must take into account that some reading habits and skills developed to read in Filipino
can also be built upon in learning to read in English. Let us look at beginning reading in the
context of the whole reading program.

In order to turn out independent and efficient reader, our reading program has to go through
the following stages:
1.develop the reading readiness
2. initial stage in learning to read
3. rapid development of reading skills
4. stage of wide reading
5. refinement of reading
Development of Reading Readiness
A. Oral Language Ability in English
How? Give a lot of listening-speaking activities in English to give them familiarity with the
basic structures and common English vocabulary which they are bound to meet in their early
reading materials through:
1. listens to directions and follow them
2. listen to rhymes and recite them with understanding and enjoyment
3. listens to stories and retell them or act them out
4. give them plenty of practice in giving directions to their classmates
5. practice in identifying objects, pictures etc.
6. practice in asking and answering questions about themselves and others
B. Auditory and Visual Discrimination How?
1. Give exercises on sounds, shapes, sizes colors, directions, etc.
2. additional auditory and visual discrimination exercises different from these went
through in Filipino. example:
Consonant sounds- /f/, /v/, /th/, /z/,
/zh/, /ch/,/j/
vowel sounds- /ae/, /iy/, /i/
3. need to go through letter shapes
C. Eye Movement
The need to go through the left-to-right, top-bottom orientation.
D. Familiarization with Punctuation Marks like periods, commas, question marks….
Beginning Reading
According to Kenneth Goodman
“Reading is not hierarchy of isolated sub-skills”. It is a holistic process that has two separate
but interrelated components:
1. word recognition
 2. comprehension
A. Word Recognition
Word recognition or decoding is the abilityto identify words automatically and accurately.
It is sometimes called word-attack skill. It is the result of the interactive functioning of
the following sub-abilities which a reader should have to be able to move from print to
meaning.
a. Associating objects/pictures with printed symbols in labels/ captions
b. phonetic analysis-associating letter sounds with letter symbols.
example:
bag- child attempts to read the
1 st letter as “buh”
2 nd letter as “ae”
3 rd letter as “guh”
and gets the word “bag”
C. Structural analysis-breaking up of big word into known parts as looking small words into long
words. Example
classroom-1. train them to look closely at the unfamiliar word “classroom”
2. analyze them in terms of structures and find out if there are any part that is
familiar to them.
3. If they can recognize “class” and “room show that all they have to do is to put
together the two familiar words “class”+”room” to read the big word classroom.
d. spelling pattern- spelling patterns and the principle that govern their
pronunciation, if mastered by pupils will be a great help to them in word attack.
Example:
CVC pattern (consonant-vowel-consonant What guideline does this pattern
give?
When a word or syllables follows a CVC pattern the vowel sound is usually short.
cat bed sit pot cup In the CVCe pattern the vowel becomes Long and
“e” is silent.
Example:
Rate (long a) Site (long i)
CVVC pattern (consonant-vowel-vowel-consonant) What guideline does this pattern give?
In a CVVC pattern, that two vowel letters are together in a word, the first stands for a long vowel
and the second is silent. Example:
ai - rain (“a” long and “I” is silent)
oa - boat (“a” long and “a” is silent)

. Context clues- the ability to use the semantics (meaning) and/ or syntax (grammatical
structure) of a word and its context in the sentence to assume what the word is.
Example:
The baby is drinking milk.
(The unfamiliar word is milk.)
If the children cannot read the last word, guide them with questions until they are able to
identify the context clues baby and drinking deduce from them that the unfamiliar word is milk.
Sight Word Identification- the immediate accurate recognition of a within one second upon
seeing it.
Example:
Dolch Basic Sight Words

Alternative Approaches To Teaching Beginning Reading

Phono-Visual-Oral Sound
Blending and Meaning (PVOSBM)
‫٭‬Intended to teach beginning and non-readers.
‫٭‬It starts with the teaching of sounds.
‫٭‬It establishes a strong association between sounds and symbols.
Steps in Teaching using the PVOSBM Approach
1. Sound recognition
2. Sound production
 3. Sound blending
a. syllable
b. words
c. phases
d. sentences
4. Meaning
The Teaching of Blends
R- Family:
br cr dr gr fr pr tr str
L- Family:
bl cl dl gl fl pl

An Interactive Approach to Teaching Reading: From the Bottom-Up

Models of Reading
• Bottom-up processing (decoding)
• Top-down processing
• Interactive approach
Bottom-up Processing
Reader builds meaning from the smallest units of meaning to achieve comprehension.
Example
letters 🡪 letter clusters 🡪 words 🡪 phrases 🡪 sentences 🡪 longer text 🡪 meaning = comprehension
Top-down Processing
Reader generates meaning by employing background knowledge, expectations, assumptions, and
questions, and reads to confirm these expectations.
Example
Pre-reading activities (i.e. activating schema, previewing, and predicting) + background knowledge
(cultural, linguistic, syntactic, and historical) = comprehension
Interactive Approach
Reader uses both bottom-up and top-down strategies simultaneously or alternately to comprehend the
text. Example
Reader uses top-down strategies until he/she encounters an unfamiliar word, then employs decoding
skills to achieve comprehension
Interactive Approach
Knowledge base + bottom-up strategies + top-down strategies = comprehension Which model should be
adopted? The reader must be competent in both bottom-up and top-down processing.
Interaction (“balance”) of bottom-up and top-down strategies:

Bottom-up strategies
(“phonics”
approach)
________________
Examples:
• decoding
• using capitalization to infer proper nouns
• graded reader approach
• pattern recognition

Top-down strategies
(“whole language”
approach)
________________
Examples:
• using background knowledge
• predicting
• guessing the meaning of unknown words from context
• skimming/scanning
 The role of phonemic awareness
“Phonemic awareness is an important precursor for alphabetic reading, but paradoxically people
often acquire it as a result of learning to read an alphabet” Why is it important for ESL readers?
• Readers who have it are better readers.
• Readers are able to connect sounds with symbols.
• Readers can attach meaning to sounds.
• If readers can associate the sounds of words when learning the meaning of new vocabulary, it
sticks better.