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| How to Teach Children to Read | |
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7. Balance, but don't mix. The sixth feature, using interesting stories to develop comprehension, should be balanced with the decoding instruction described in the first five features. The comprehension instruction and the decoding instruction should be separate from each other while children are learning to decode, but both types of instructional activities should occur. In other words, comprehension and decoding instruction should be balanced.
A common misconception regarding the balance that is called for by the research is that the teacher should teach sound-spelling relationships in the context of real stories. This mixture of decoding and comprehension instruction in the same instructional activity is clearly less effective, even when the decoding instruction is fairly structured. The inferiority of instructional activities with mixed goals (embedded phonics) has been demonstrated in several studies. During the early stages of reading acquisition, children's oral language comprehension level is much higher than their reading comprehension level. The text material used to build children's comprehension should be geared to raise their oral language comprehension level. The material used to build their decoding should be geared to their decoding skills, with attention to meaning. While decodable text can be meaningful and engaging, it will not build children's comprehension skills nor teach them new vocabulary to the extent that might be needed. Comprehension strategies and new vocabulary should be taught using stories more sophisticated than the early decodable text. The teacher should read this text to the children and discuss the meaning with them. After the children become fluent decoders, the children can apply these comprehension strategies to their own reading. |
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