Literacy Basics - Community Literacy of Ontario

Reading

Learning to read is a complex process. Reading has been described as the ability to construct meaning from written text. The text itself, the interaction of the reader with the text, and the context in which reading takes place all play a role in the reading process. Together, this adds up to more than simply decoding letters and words on a page … it means that the student is able to make sense of, or comprehend, what those letters and words mean.

According to an article entitled “Yes, Teaching Reading IS Rocket Science” (www.aft.org/pdfs/teachers/rocketscience0304.pdf) published in 1999 by the American Federation of Teachers, reading instruction should include:

• Decoding
• Comprehension
• Phonics
• Vocabulary building

Reading instruction should also incorporate a variety of texts such as authentic materials, novels, poetry, text books, etc.

Although the above article was written for teachers of children, the same concepts apply to the teaching of adults. However, there are also important differences between teaching adults and teaching children:

• Adults bring life skills and knowledge to the learning situation that children do not possess. Their skills and knowledge can then be incorporated into direct teaching by using words and concepts from students’ everyday lives.
• Similarly, adults may bring a good deal of “baggage” to the program with them, especially if their early school experiences were negative.
• Also, in our day-to-day lives, adults solve problems and make decisions based on the analysis of a given situation. Adult learners can be shown how to transfer these critical thinking skills to the learning environment to develop learning strategies.
• Adults can relate to their teachers as peers/partners.
• Adults usually take courses with a specific purpose in mind. In other words, they are goal-directed.

Most research into how reading happens has involved children. Research on how adults read is harder to come by, but it is available and continues to be developed and expanded. However, that research does show us that using prior knowledge to identify words and construct meaning from those words is an effective and essential learning strategy. For example, good readers may be able to decode a word like durian but if they do not know the meaning of that word, their decoding skills are not of much value. (Durian is a foul-smelling tropical fruit.) The advantage to this approach is that it is based on a positive (what learners already know) rather than on a negative (what they don’t know).

When developing reading activities, instructors should keep in mind that they don’t necessarily have to create documents at a certain level; rather, they should identify tasks to be accomplished at a certain level. For example, a workplace memo or a novel may be written at a Level Five, but Level One reading tasks can be assigned such as identifying sight words. This is particularly important when working with workplace literacy because few authentic workplace documents are written at Level One. So, rather than adapt them to meet the learner’s current skill level, it is better to identify appropriate tasks that can be accomplished using the authentic document.

The Ontario Literacy Coalition’s Level Descriptions Manual (www.nald.ca/fulltext/levels/cover.htm) includes summary statements for each of the five reading levels. These statements clearly show the progression from a beginning reader to a fluent one. The manual also includes possible performance indicators for each level.

Level One: The reader locates, understands and responds to simple, concrete ideas and sequential information in graphics, sentences and very short, simple texts about familiar topics. To do this, the reader uses basic reading strategies, personal experience and familiarity with some common forms and conventions of simple texts.

Level Two: The reader locates, understands, and begins to interpret concrete and some inferential meaning in short, uncomplicated texts about familiar topics. To do this, the reader uses various common reading strategies, personal experience, and knowledge, as well as familiarity with some forms and conventions of more formal texts.

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