Facilitator:
Reading is a compound and purposeful cognitive, linguistic and socio-cultural process. Through this procedure, learners use their knowledge of language, the topic of a given text and their culture to construct a meaningful understanding of various concepts. Effective reading instructions are therefore important in view of the fact that they help learners understand the written language (Alan, 2002). This is easily achieved through teachers’ interest for their students, the background, attitudes and interests of learners. Phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension are the essential components of effective reading instructions as identified in 2000 The National Reading Panel’s report.
In reading, it is important for a learner to be able to hear and identify the smallest units of sound to differentiate diverse meaning. These smallest units of sounds are referred to as phonemes. Therefore, phonemic awareness is important as it help in improving children’s reading and spelling. In this respect, the basis for learning phonics and foundations for understanding the rules in English language hence increase the learner’s fluency in oral reading. Research identified oral blending, segmenting and sound deletion as strategic elements for enhancing phoneme awareness. This is made possible through reading the sounds loudly. For example, in oral segmenting, the teacher says the word such as “cat” and the learner says the sounds singly, “/c/a/t/.” On the other hand, in the oral blending, the teacher says individual sounds and the student give the word itself. Therefore, the ability to detect, think about and work with the sounds is a key element of success in reading (Barbara, 2007).
Phonics is used in English language to develop phonemic awareness by enhancing manipulate phonemes to teach the association of sounds and the spelling patterns. Therefore, phonics is an important method for teaching reading and writing English language. It enables beginners in reading to decode written texts by sounding them out and blending them with sound spelling patterns hence focusing on spoken and written units. There are four basic rules of phonics namely cognitive reading skills, vowel phonics patterns, and alphabetic principles and consonants phonic patterns. In UK and Australia, research shows that synthetic phonics is the accepted technique of teaching other than blended and analytical phonics approach (Alan, 2002).
Improved vocabulary instruction enhances communication in various ways. This strategy fosters the creation of high-quality oral language, wide reading, and explicit instruction of specific words, word consciousness, and independent word-learning element. Students learn new words through experiences in wide text reading which in turn improves their ability of reading complex words. Conclusively, the most important aspect in building vocabulary in students includes encouraging them to interact more with literary materials (Barbara, 2007). As students read widely, they learn new words thus acquiring more vocabularies that increase their ability of comprehending the instruction language. Further studies indicate that cumulative effects of learning from reading are high apart from the odds of learning any obvious or usual text from a context. Word consciousness is a strategy for autonomous word learning that can be promoted by several written and oral word games such as Hink-pinks, jokes, crossword puzzles, puns, riddles, limericks and anagrams. These games encourage learners to play with words thus developing interest in learning more about them (Barbara, 2007).
Comprehension is an essential element of effective communication. This means learners need to know how words and language work to utilize communicators and be in a position to analyze and convey meaning critically. Comprehension instruction helps learners to become metacognitive, strategic and independent readers who can use and control a variety of strategies to understand the learnt concepts (Alan, 2002). This strategy gives learners the ability to organize texts and read widely. Accordingly, teachers need to choose strategies that are aligned with what the students are reading to enhance their command. This is through modeling and thinking critically on the importance of a given strategy and the students’ needs. Modeling goes in hand with practicing where the students need to figure out how a certain strategy is used and give out the feedback (Barbara, 2007).
Reading instruction comprises of various elements and knowledge of each of these components is essential in comprehending literary works. Motivation is an important element in helping students learn to read and promote higher levels of literacy. Furthermore, wide reading enhances learner’s abilities to understand a wide array of texts from simple sounds to complex words and texts. Educators need to have high knowledge of diverse instructional strategies to improve the students’ learning potential.
References
Alan E. F. & Jay S. (2002). What Research Has To Say about. Reading Instruction. New York: Teachers College Press.
Barbara M. T, James E. (2007). Effective instruction for struggling readers. London: Oxford University Printing Press.
