Principles and Practices of Teaching Reading

To be meaningful, evaluation must be based on understanding of children as learners, reading as a learning process, and learning to read as a long-term developmental process.

Principles:

1. Learning to read is a complicated process and is sensitive to a variety of pressures. Too much pressure, or the wrong kind of pressure may result in non- learning. Sources of pressures on children experiencing difficulty in reading: Pressure from home and parents. Parents are ego- involved in their child’s success. Pressure from the child himself (stems from ego-needs and concept of self). Pressure from school. Children’s attitudes result from the competitive atmosphere fostered by adults (parents,school, teacher) and from the conformity pattern imposed by society.

2. Learning to read is an individual process. Grouping children is of negligible value unless the teacher adjusts learning situations to each child’s need for instruction.

3. Pupil differences must be a primary consideration in reading instruction. It is hypothesized that any home/school will house children/pupils whose present achievement and instructional needs vary greatly.

4. Reading instruction should be thought of as an organized, systematic, growth- producing activity. Sound instruction will start from the premise that the environment is an integral part of instruction.

5. Proper reading instruction depends on the diagnosis of each child’s weaknesses and needs. Diagnosis has become associated too often with cure or remedy rather than with preventing the development of poor reading. To establish the fact that a child is reading below what might be expected is not diagnosis. It is an invitation to diagnosis.

6. The best diagnosis is useless unless it is used as a blueprint for instruction. When test results are not used for instructional purposes, the educational objectives of the testing program are defeated. Any skill not mastered, or only partially mastered, may be instrumental in producing other reading problems. Intelligent instruction must be based on accurate information regarding the children s present accomplishments and weaknesses. In this sense, a thorough diagnosis is a blueprint for instruction.

7. No child should be expected or forced to attempt to read material which, at the moment, he is incapable of reading. All curriculum study and the placing of learning tasks at different points on the educational continuum are related to this principle. The principle should be followed in all areas of child growth and development \emdash physical, social, emotional, intellectual. The principle amounts to a rejection of the myth that \ldblquote the child is a miniature adult.

This principle is also related to the fact that different children develop at different rates and that the growth pattern of an individual child is not uniform. It is not conducive to social, emotional, or educational growth to subject a child to failure experiences, because he is physically present in a home school environment/classroom where arbitrary achievement goals are set.

8. Reading is a process of getting meaning from printed word symbols. It is not merely a process of making conventionalized noises associated with these symbols. Reading is more than a mechanical process, even though mechanics are an essential part of the process. Creativity and versatility are basic requirements for successful teaching.

9. Any given technique, practice, or procedure is likely to work better with some children than with others. Hence, the teacher of reading must have a variety of approaches. “There is no one best method of teaching.” When a parent/teacher becomes enamored of one method to the exclusion of others, she shuts out the possibility of adjusting the method to the individual child’s needs. Although such a parent/teacher may be highly successful with some children, she will inevitably produce a number of frustrated, unhappy misfits. Some of her children/pupils will develop behaviors which result in such labels as “bad”, “dull”, “dreamers”, “lazy”, and “anti-social.” These behaviors, instead of being interpreted as the logical outcomes of failure, frustration, and tension evolving from the reading situation, become in turn, the explanations of why the child failed in reading.

10. Learning to read is a long-term developmental process extending over a period of years. This rests on two promises. First, every aspect of the instructional program is related to the ultimate goal of producing efficient readers. The second, that the child’s early attitude towards reading is important from the educational standpoint. It can influence a student’s habits for life.

11. This concept of readiness should be extended upward to all grades. There should be as much concern with readiness at all levels as there is at the first grade level.

12. Early in the learning process the child must acquire ways of gaining independence in identifying words whose meanings are known to him, but which are unknown to him as sight words. Pronouncing words is not reading, but sounding out words not known as sight words is essential to independent reading.

13. Children should not be in a formal learning situation if they have emotional problems sufficiently serious to make them uneducable at the moment, or if they interfere with or disrupt the learning process. Just as the practice of “beating the devil” out of the “obsessed” came to an end, so, I pray, will we stop trying to beat learning into a child who is at the moment uneducable.

14. Emphasis should be on prevention rather than cure. Reading problems should be detected early and corrected before they deteriorate into failure -frustration – reaction cases. Sound principles of reading instruction should apply with equal validity to any instructional approach; and by definition such principles cannot reflect what might be called an either-or bias as to particular methodologies.

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