Saturday, February 16, 2013
Oral Language Development and Reading Readiness
Marie Clay, expert on emergent literacy, emphasizes the importance of oral language skills in the development of reading readiness in young children. In her book Becoming Literate, she writes, "Children who have been read to a great deal will already know, in some way, that the language of books is different from the language that they speak. They will be developing 'an ear' for bookish or literary forms of language." (p. 28). Children who are read to at home easily figure out that the pictures tell a story and can create a story based on pictures. So, what do we do about children who have never heard a story read aloud until beginning kindergarten?
The majority of ELL's that I've worked with over the years have parents with little to no educational experience. Many of them are illiterate in their own language, as well as in English. That leaves the important work of developing that early reading readiness to the children's first teachers. Marie clay posits that "most difficulties in learning to read stem from inappropriate experiences rather than from impaired structures. Unfortunately they are equally difficult to overcome." (p. 43). As teachers of ELL's, we need then to step up our practice to include dedicated time spent creating meaningful opportunites for students to develop their oral language.
Marie Clay has also researched school entry, which is a very different experience for non-English speaking children--whether immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants--from low-income families. Many of their parents have little, if any, experience with school and so do not prepare their children for school the way that many "typical" US families do. So the teacher must take each child's individual experiences prior to beginning school and build upon those so that all of the students have common experiences to share. "Schools have created policies which exclude unready children from opportunities to learn to be ready. Sometimes they are found to be unready to attend school; sometimes they are retained in a class where they did not learn in the hope that second time around something surprising will happen. Schools demand from the child performances which the school itself should be developing." (p. 68)
So, what then do we do to build the oral language and early reading experiences children need to be successful readers? For one, we know that awareness of rhyme and alliteration has a positive correlation to reading and spelling success. Children who start school already knowing, for example, nursery rhymes, have a leg up on children who start school without this knowledge. Poetry should be an integral part of our early instruction of ELL's who are learning to read.
There are many oral language development resources available for teachers and parents/caregivers. Here are a couple that I found to be useful:
Tips on promoting oral language development with students:
http://www.med.unc.edu/ahs/clds/files/early-childhood-resources/Promoting%20Oral%20Language%20Development.pdf
Fun oral language activities that promote reading readiness:
http://www.literacyconnections.com/OralLanguage.php
Happy reading!
Jacquie
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