The Complexity of Reading: Uncovering the Intricacies of Brain Activity

Reading is a complex activity. It sends our brains into a frenzy of electrical impulses that zig and zag through matter in ways we still do not totally understand. It organizes sights and sounds in designs that ultimately connect us to the broad vistas of life's many landscapes. Reading gives us the opportunity to appreciate those landscapes in all their variety. It is remarkable that, whatever approach, method, or ideology is used to teach reading, most students become proficient at it.

For many students, successful reading is assimilated into their experience quickly and with seeming smoothness.

For perhaps as many as 20% of students however, reading is not an automatic skill. Patterns of understanding have to be systematically instilled so that the reading has the opportunity to crack the alphabetic code. More and more, what we have learned is that connecting these alphabetic symbols to specific sounds in order to create meaningful words. There is considerable longitudinal research to support that we should employ literacy skills every time we read.

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Without this connection between the basic unit of sound and the alphabetic symbol, reading does not occur for any of us.

Accurate identification of children who experience delays in attaining critical early literacy skills is needed to prevent reading problems. Studies have demonstrated that reading problems become increasingly more resistant to intervention and treatment after the 3rd grade. This study will focus on early core literacy skills. These needed core skills for young children are phonological awareness (ability to identify and manipulate sounds), alphabet knowledge (awareness of individual letters and letter names), and grapheme–phoneme correspondence (ability to identify correspondence between letters and sounds).

Children’s abilities across these four core skills serve as important predictors of subsequent reading achievement. A screening instrument that does not comprehensively examine all core skills may be ineffective for identifying children who display limitations in a particular area of early literacy. However, failing to identify young children exhibiting delays in early literacy acquisition or lacking core literacy skills is a risky venture and this is a challenge that we will face in this study. Historical Background Name: Alyza Zofia Z.

RenonAge: 5 Sex: FemaleDate of birth: March 10, 2006 Identification: Alyza is a normal, outgoing 5 year-old kindergarten girl. Since her mother is a pre-elementary teacher, she teaches her everything when they are at home. She enjoys dancing and playing games. She loves to listen about science-related topics whenever possible. She is talkative and loves to answer questions. She can only read alphabet and one or two syllable words with pictures. Affective Factors Alyzas's motivational level apparently varies with the topic.

According to her mother, if the topic is interesting to her like books with colorful pictures, she is highly motivated. However, if the topic does not appeal to her, she keeps silent or finds something to play with. Physical Factors Alyza has a very good eyesight, in terms of auditory acuity, Alyza showed no indications of difficulties. Alyza didn't show any other physical limitation; she appears to be physically healthy. This means, there are no obvious health-related reasons for her reading difficulties. Objectives:

This research will aim to determine or identify student who is at risk or not at risk for reading problems. This study will also seek to answer the following questions: 1. How do the 3 literacy skills affect the reading of the child? 2. How does the student's background affect her reading ability? 3. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the child in reading? Significance of the study The researchers hope that the study will be beneficial to the following: To the student, who will learn and improve her reading skills. Likewise, to the teachers of kindergarten, for they will focus more on the three literacy skills.

Furthermore, to the researchers, to understand the factors that affect the poor reading ability of the child. Lastly, to the school administration, this study will provide basis to improve their curriculum and to focus more on literacy skills in pre-elementary department. Scope and Delimitation of the study This study will be conducted to determine the literacy skills of a kindergarten child. It will deal on how the child identify and manipulate sounds, her awareness of letter names and ability to identify correspondence between letters and sounds.

It will discuss the certain measures, steps and ways on how to develop the literacy skills of the child in reading but it does not deal on the ways on how to pronounce the words correctly nor steps on how to syllabicate the words properly. The respondent of the study will be limited to kindergarten student only. Research Paradigm Chapter 2 Review of related literature Local According to Unicef Philippines, there are only 63% of the children who enroll in school complete primary school, this means that the quality of education remains poor in many areas of the country.

A child's literacy skills are important to their success in school and work. Children who learn to read from an early age are generally more successful in academic areas. (Unicef Philippines) There were a research in 2008 conducted by by Bananal, a faculty member of arts and letters in U. S. T on how to measure the reading ability of grade's 1 and 2 students. She stated that there were 3 levels in reading: Independent reading level - pupil can read with ease without the help or guidance of a teacher. The student can also read with rhythm, with a conversational tone and can interpret punctuation correctly.

Instructional reading level - pupil can profit from instruction. Frustrated reading level - pupils show symptoms or behavior of withdrawing from reading situation and commit multiple type of error in informal reading. Reading levels of children Grade 1 Frustrated reader - 64. 41% Instructional reader - 20. 17% Independent reader - 15. 42% Grade 2 Frustrated reader - 49. 98% Instructional reader - 31. 40% Independent reader - 19. 07% The result showed that there many students who encountered difficulties in oral reading.

This means that children did not master the three literacy skills when they were in the primary level. The use of accurate, valid, reliable screening tools several times throughout the early years can help in the identification of those in need of monitoring further intervention or remediation. Information obtained from early reading screenings is likely to lead to positive changes in children's reading trajectories because prevention strategies and interventions provided have a better chances of success when started sooner rather than later (Bananal, 2008).

Foreign The negative effects of reading problems are well documented (Harris & Sipay, 1990). There is evidence that reading disability is associated with social, economic, and psychological problems. There is little evidence, however, that efforts to correct reading problems through remedial reading programs or through special education placement have been very successful (Allington & McGill-Franzen, 1989; Hiebert & Taylor, 1994; Johnston & Allington, 1991; Karweit, Slavain, & Wasik, 1992-93; Kennedy, Birman, & Demaline, 1986; Rowan & Guthrie, 1989).

Instead, there is evidence to suggest that children who encounter difficulty in learning to read fall further and further behind their achieving peers (Stanovich, 1986). Traditional approaches to dealing with reading problems, such as tracking and grade retention, do not help; indeed, they often appear to be detrimental to eventual student achievement (Shepard & Smith, 1989; McGill-Franzen & Allington, 1993).

In contrast, a growing body of evidence suggests that reading problems are preventable for the vast majority of students who encounter difficulty in learning to read, if these students receive extra support in the form of an early intervention program (Goldenberg, 1994; Hiebert & Taylor, 1994; Reynolds, 1991). In this paper, the term early intervention refers to early school intervention programs that are designed to prevent problems in literacy from developing rather than trying to correct a problem after it is established.

For the most part, such programs have been used in first and second grades. Several of these programs have proven very effective when compared to conventional compensatory reading programs. For example, Hiebert, Colt, Catto, and Gury (1992) report that while 77 percent of the students in their early intervention project were reading at a primer level at the end of first grade, only 18 percent of a comparison group who participated in a traditional Title I program achieved that level of reading proficiency.

While almost half (47 percent) of the students in the conventional Title I program remained nonreaders at the end of first grade, only 7 percent of the early intervention students were nonreaders. Thus, a growing body of evidence suggests that almost all reading problems are preventable. A review of the research literature indicates that there are at least five early reading intervention programs that have documented effectiveness. This paper will only very briefly describe the individual programs and then will concentrate on the factors that seem characteristic of all or at least most of these successful intervention programs.

Two of the five programs, Success for All (Madden, Slavin, Karweit, Dolan, & Wasik, 1991; Slavin, Madden, Karweit, Livermon, & Dolan, 1990; Slavin, Madden, Karweit, Dolan, & Wasik, 1992), and the Winston-Salem Project (Cunningham, Hall, & Defee, 1991; Hall, Prevatte, & Cunningham, 1993), involve comprehensive reorganization of the entire classroom routine; all students in the grades in which the program is implemented are affected.

In the Winston-Salem Project all first and second grade reading/language arts instruction was reorganized around four major, thirty-minute blocks of activities: teacher-directed group reading activities, word learning activities, writing, and self-selected reading. In addition, in the school that served a very high proportion of at-risk students, an additional 45-minute block of time for very small-group instruction was included. During this small-group instruction time, students had additional opportunities to practice reading, writing, and word learning activities.

Though it has now been implemented in more than 85 schools, Success for All was first implemented in schools in major metropolitan areas that served, almost exclusively, children from low socioeconomic backgrounds who had few experiences with literacy. Major features of this schoolwide program included heterogeneous grouping for most of the day, cross-grade grouping according to reading level for 90 minutes of smaller group (15 to 20 students) reading instruction, and one-to-one tutoring for those students who needed extra support.

The Boulder Program (Hiebert, Colt, Catto, & Gury, 1992) and Reading Recovery (Clay, 1985; Clay, 1993; Clay, 1993a; Pinnell, 1989; Pinnell, Fried, & Eustice, 1990) are add-on, pull-out programs; they are added to whatever approach to language arts instruction is being used in a school. The Reading Recovery Program, which originated in New Zealand, has been widely implemented in the United States and in several other countries as well. It is exclusively a first grade, one-to-one tutoring program.

Reading Recovery is also recognized for the extensiveness of its teacher training program, which is conducted over the course of a year with fully certified teachers. The Boulder Program operated exclusively with the resources of a Title I program. The program worked originally with a pupil-teacher ratio of six students for each teacher. Through the use of carefully trained, supervised paraprofessionals who worked closely with certified, trained teachers, the ratio was reduced to three students for each teacher. Instruction was daily for twenty minutes.

The Early Intervention in Reading Program (EIR) (Taylor, Frye, Short, & Shearer, 1992; Taylor, Strait, & Medo, 1994) takes yet another approach. Regular first and second grade classroom teachers work for an extra twenty minutes with the five or six students who are encountering the greatest amount of difficulty in learning to read. Provision is also made for these students to practice their reading for an additional five or ten minutes each day by reading individually or in pairs to the teacher, a teacher's aide, a volunteer, etc.

All five programs clearly acknowledge that the small-group or individual early intervention instruction that students receive is an addition to, not a substitute for, the instruction they receive as part of the regular classroom program. In the case of two of the programs (Success for All and the Winston-Salem Project), regular classroom reading instruction has been redesigned to ensure that appropriate instructional routines and materials are used.

However, even when early intervention instruction is added to an effective existing reading program, there is also the anticipation that the sound practices that are part of the early intervention program will become infused into regular classroom instruction if they are not already part of it.

For example, Reading Recovery teachers almost always spend part of their day as regular classroom teachers, reading consultants, language arts coordinators, etc. ; through these roles they attempt to introduce instructional principles and practices that are part of Reading Recovery into the ongoing regular classroom.

All of the programs reflect a model of reading as an active, meaningful, constructive process. Before-reading activities are used to build or activate relevant background knowledge, concepts, and vocabulary. Students are taught to monitor their reading to ensure that what they are reading makes sense. They are taught strategies for correcting word recognition errors that detract from meaning, and they are given opportunities for reacting and responding to selections they have read.

The texts they are asked to read are read for enjoyment and for information. Other activities are developed within a framework of reading for meaning. Because reading for meaning is the constant point of reference and because students in these programs need substantial help in building word identification skills, the amount of time spent in discussing selections and in teacher questioning about the selection is kept to a minimum.