- Unpack the challenges of teaching reading in a systematic way.
- Investigate the challenges of decoding and comprehension.
- Understand how these two strands work together to produce successful readers.
In this session, Dr Bronwyn Parkin takes us on a whirlwind tour of the reading instruction space - with the aim to make it less overwhelming.
To begin, she answers the question: What is reading?
Reading (in a model of language) means looking at the context of culture and the context of situations - and how they inform and shape text and language. These are our tools for making meaning.
As educators it is our job to expand students’ circles of context, and to build their tools to make meaning. This includes the tools to encode and decode meanings (graphology, phonology).
Bronwyn then goes on to explore some of the most popular reading frameworks used in schools. This is the basis of her highly popular PETAA paper 221: Reading models: putting the jigsaw together which explores these ideas in more detail.
Next, she breaks down what we need to know about reading and the human brain by exploring the four different decoding strategies in context of cognitive load. Which strategies work best with the young brains of new decoders?
Bronwyn says “All of these four strategies are needed.”
- Phonetic/phonological = Do I need to sound this out?
- Visual/orthographic= Does it look right? Does it look like English?
- Semantic/morphemic = Which patterns of the word carry meaning?
- Historical/etymological = Do I know which language this comes from?
Next, she works through an exercise to remind us what it is like when our literacy skills are not intuitive. Participants explore the meaning of a beautiful artwork as a model for how to analyse a text when we might be new to the text type.
“Even though we end up focusing on words, we make meaning in text from the sentence, the paragraph, the works of the author, the community of practice in which the author belongs… we must bring all of this to our consciousness.”
Next, Bronwyn walks attendees through an example of comprehending at text level.
What can we infer? How can we make those inferences explicit to students? She says: “Assume nothing.”
In short, Bronwyn explains that teachers need to bring meaning to decoding and give a motivation for doing so, using all four different decoding strategies. If we work systematically, and teach explicitly for comprehension, , we can achieve automaticity.
“Narrative storytelling is a great place to start [when working with students] - human emotions are universal and help make meaning for students.”
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