School-age Literacy Development and Adolescent/Adult Language

The Nature of the Reading Process

• Comparison to Oral Language: Unlike oral language, there is no immediate "give and take" interaction between the reader and the writer.

• Contextual Limitations: The context of the written material is typically not known to the reader at the outset.

• Complexity of Reading: Reading is a multifaceted interaction between several components:     - Recognition of individual letters and their corresponding sounds.     - Understanding word meanings.     - Grammatical comprehension.     - Integration of prior knowledge.

The Strands of Skilled Reading (Scarborough's Rope)

• Language Comprehension Strands: These strands become increasingly strategic over time.     

• Background Knowledge: Encompasses facts, concepts, and world information.     

• Vocabulary: Relates to breadth, precision, and links between words.     

• Language Structures: Involves syntax and semantics.

• Verbal Reasoning: Includes the ability to make inferences and understand metaphors.    

• Literacy Knowledge: Understanding print concepts and various genres.

• Word Recognition Strands: These strands become increasingly automatic.     

• Sight Recognition: Immediate identification of familiar words.     - Decoding: Applying the alphabetic principle and spelling-sound correspondences.     

• Phonological Awareness: Understanding syllables, phonemes, and sound patterns.

Literacy Development in Early School Years

• Foundational Focus: Emphasis is placed on pre-literacy and beginning literacy skills.

• "Playing with Language": Activities designed to foster awareness, such as:     

• Blending and Segmentation: Combining or breaking apart sound units.     

• Nursery Rhyme/Word Play Examples: "Sam Sam, bo-bam, banana fanna fo fam, me my mo mam, SAM."     

• Song-based Deletion: "Bingo was his Name-o" where letters are progressively replaced by claps (e.g., delete/clap B…INGO).

• Shift in Educational Focus:     

  • Pre-$3rd$ Grade: Students are "learning to read."  

  • 3rd to 4th Grade and Beyond: Students shift to "reading to learn."

Grade-Level Print Concept Milestones

• TK (Transitional Kindergarten) and Kindergarten:

  • Demonstrating an understanding of print organization and basic features.   

  • Following words in order (left to right, top to bottom, page by page).     

  • Recognizing that spoken words are mapped to specific written words.    

  • Understanding that spaces serve as boundaries between words.     

  • Recognizing and naming all $26$ upper- and lowercase letters.

• First Grade: Identifying distinguishing features of a sentence, including the first word, capitalization, and ending punctuation (periods, question marks, exclamation points).

Developmental Progression of Reading and Writing Phases

1. Logographic Phase (Up to Age $6$):

   • Emerging recognition of printed words.     

   • Words are identified by length, the first/last letter, or distinct visual characteristics.     

   • Development of a foundational sight vocabulary.    

   • "Pretend reading": Paraphrasing stories or moving a finger along text while reciting from memory.     

   • Writing is characterized by scribble writing.     

   • Delay Indicators: Failure to recognize words or a lack of understanding regarding what defines a "word" or "sentence."

2. Alphabetic Phase (Ages $6-7$):     

   • Mastery of how speech is represented by symbols.     

   • Alphabetic Principle: The realization that specific letters represent specific sounds.     

   • Importance of phonemic awareness for blending sounds.     

   • Use of "invented spellings" (phonetic representations of words written as they sound).     

   • Delay Indicators: Relies on word familiarity (sight reading) rather than sounding out words; remains stuck in the logographic phase.

3. Orthographic Phase (Ages $7-8$):    

   • Focus shifts to larger units of print.     

   • Children identify spelling patterns, prefixes, and suffixes.     

   • Delay Indicators: Over-regularization of spellings (e.g., writing "laff" instead of "laugh").

4. Reading to Learn (>3rd Grade): Material is used to acquire new information and locate specific data.

5. Reading to Gain Multiple Viewpoints (Ages 14-18 years): Readers can identify and distinguish patterns between different perspectives and viewpoints.

Phonemic Awareness Details

• Definition: The specific understanding that spoken words are composed of individual phonemes.

• Examples:

• Understanding that "wait" consists of three distinct phonemes.  

• Recognizing that "pill" and "map" both share the phoneme $/p/$ at different positions.

• Functional Necessity: Required for the skills of segmenting (breaking words down) and blending (combining sounds).

Scaffolding and Instructional Tools for Literacy

Shared Reading Strategy:     

1. Introduction: Discuss title, cover, and creators (author/illustrator). Have students make predictions.     

2. Interactive Reading: Read aloud with appropriate tone/inflection. Pause for further predictions and ask brief questions to check comprehension.     

3. Conclusion: Time for reactions/comments. Relate story to student experiences and have them retell the story in their own words.     

4. Reinforcement: Re-read the story or provide independent reading time.     

5. Extension: Conduct follow-up activities (e.g., crafts related to the narrative).

• Comprehension Scaffolding Tools:     

• Identifying multiple-meaning words.     

• Establishing a purpose for reading.     

• Understanding specific text structures.     

• KWL Chart: A graphic organizer for track "What I Know," "What I Want to know," and "What I Learned."     

• Clunks and Clues Graphic Organizer: Used for unknown words/ideas ("clunks").         -

• Fix-up Strategy $1$: Reread the sentence and look for clues; think about what makes sense.         

• Fix-up Strategy $2$: Reread sentences before and after the clunk.         

• Fix-up Strategy $3$: Look for a prefix or suffix that gives a hint.

• Fix-up Strategy $4$: Break the word apart to find smaller, known words.

Analysis of Text Structures

• Chronological: Presenting events in sequential order. Key words: First, Next, Then, Finally, Afterwards.

• Cause and Effect: Explaining an event and its subsequent results. Key words: Since, Because, If/Then, As a result, Therefore.

• Problem and Solution: Stating a problem and identifying potential solutions with pros/cons.

• Compare and Contrast: Discussing similarities and differences. Key words: Both, Alike, Different, However, Likewise, In contrast.

• Classification-Division: Sorting information into distinct categories (e.g., categorizing groceries into Dairy, Meat, and Produce).

• Description: Providing examples of a topic. Key words: One example is… Another example is… A final example is…

Adolescent and Adult Language Development

• General Trends: Development slows significantly compared to childhood. Language knowledge deepens, with a greater reliance on underlying meaning rather than just syntax. Decline in older years is generally non-rapid.

• Narratives: Retelling abilities remain consistent from young adulthood through middle age. Older adults may show slightly less accuracy in narrative recall.

• Speaking Styles: These are socially conditioned and influence syntactic complexity, word choice, phonology, clarity, and rate. Adults are adept at changing their "register" based on the context.

• Conversational Abilities:     

• Adolescents: Use of colloquialisms, idioms, and cohesive communicative turns.     

• Delay Markers: Frequent use of "uh," "um," "like," and "so on and so forth."     

• Shading: The ability to transition gradually between topics.

• Multitasking: Research suggests humans are not as efficient at simultaneous language processing and multitasking as they believe.

• Vocabulary Use: Often influenced by profession, hobbies, peer groups, and pop culture. Older adults may experience lexicons that continue to grow based on life experience but face difficulties in retrieval and naming speed.

• Syntax and Morphology: Greater complexity is found in expository (explanatory) works compared to casual conversation. Cohesion is achieved through the use of conjunctions.

• Noun Phrases: Adults use a higher frequency of nouns and noun phrases, which are more elaborate in written formats than in spoken language.

• Phonology and Articulation:     

• Anticipatory Coarticulation: The ability to plan speech production movements in advance. This improves during adolescence into middle age.     

• Example: The difference in lip positioning for the $/k/$ sound in "cat" (unrounded) versus "coat" (rounded).

• Reading Habits: High academic reading in young adulthood, followed by a general dip outside of obligation, then an increase in adulthood driven by vocational necessity or personal interests.

• Bilingualism: development continues throughout the lifespan, influenced by the age of acquisition, percentage of daily usage, and personal attitudes toward the language.

Supplemental Concepts: The SEDL Framework

• Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (SEDL): Provides a framework for reading comprehension consisting of Language Comprehension and Decoding.

• Linguistic Knowledge Components:     

• Phonology: Hearing and distinguishing the sounds of a language. Insufficiency here negatively impacts comprehension.     

• Syntax: Provides structural meaning and minimizes ambiguity; helps infer the meaning of unknown words (e.g., "I fell asleep while waiting for Mary to return from the tembal").

• Semantics: Meaning at the levels of discourse/sentence, vocabulary, and morphology.

• Background Knowledge: Includes personal experiences, scripts, and schemas that act as an "anchor" for new information.

• Language Comprehension (Receptive Language): Influenced by the formality of language and the sophistication of processing (explicit vs. inferred information).

• Decoding Sub-components:     - Letter Knowledge: Discriminating letters (e.g., $/p/$ vs. $/q/$) regardless of font, case, or handwriting.    

• Alphabetic Principle: Not the same as sound-letter correspondence; it is the specific understanding that phonemes in spoken words (like the $/s/$ sound in "fast" and "seat") are represented by specific letters.     

• Phoneme Awareness: Understanding that phonemes are the building blocks that can be rearranged to form different words.

• Lexical Knowledge: Recognizing familiar "sight words" (e.g., "the," "who") and irregular words (e.g., "Connecticut," "pneumonia").     

• Cipher Knowledge: The underlying knowledge used to sound out new, regular words (e.g., "Dort," "Skeem").