Real-Life Reading Inquiry

For my Real-Life Reading Inquiry assignment I have been tutoring my daughter Janelle with her reading development. I have always read to her every night and now that she is in kindergarten we also work on her reading homework together. Kathleen Clark’s article, “What Can I Say Besides ‘Sound it Out?' Coaching Word Recognition in Beginning Reading,” states that in order to coach word recognition successfully you have to be able to generate appropriate cues and have specific knowledge of the child’s word recognition abilities.

Months ago when the assignment began I was stymied by her insistence upon memorizing certain books and refusing to read what she had not yet memorized. In this post I will discuss the ways I have coached Janelle into the Transitional Alphabetic stage and still further into the later stage of Alphabetic. My first obstacle was getting Janelle to explore reading words without having memorized them in a familiar book.

I decided to remove the book aspect of it since I felt she was being distracted by a need to feel as accomplished as her older brother who often reads aloud. In Hallie Kay and Ruth Helen Yopp’s article, “Supporting Phonemic Awareness Development in the Classroom,” phonemic awareness instruction takes the form of word games much like the ones demonstrated in the REED 430 course. They are also recommended for children as early as pre-k. I play the onset and rime game with Janelle often and she loves it. We also play the activities recommended in Yopp’s article. This showed her that parts of words have their own sounds.

She became very eager to read books and this time she was trying to figure out the words for herself. Her technique was to make the sound of each letter as she had been taught what that sound made according to the alphabet. My next challenge was to show her (without discouraging her) that sometimes letters make different sounds then what she was used to. Sometimes they don’t make any sound at all.

Words like you would throw her for a loop. She would sound out yuh oh uh I would explain it to her with the cues from Clark’s article. At one point she explained it in her own words, “The u in the word you is very bossy. It tells the other letters to hush!” Her reliance upon sounding words out based on each letter often makes her read the words in a nonsensical manner but in the Alphabetic stage this is to be expected.

Janelle's grasp of phonemic awareness is helping the process very much but she still gets frustrated because she isn’t at her brothers level yet. My job is to keep her from losing interest. I have encouraged her brother to participate and he is very helpful. He tells her often that it takes practice and she is doing great. My tutoring and observations have taught me to be sensitive to what motivates children and that having the knowledge of different word recognition strategies and activities is very powerful. These activities are helping not only Janelle’s reading ability but her brother’s as well.