10 Components & Strategies of Effective Reading

Dr.Priti Hingorani

1.      Module 10: Components & Strategies of Effective Reading

2.      Learning Outcomes

3.      Introduction

4.      The Essential Components of Reading

5.      Strategies for Developing Reading Skills

6.      Factors Affecting Reading Behaviour

7.      Summary

1.  Module 10: Components & Strategies of Effective Reading

2.  Learning Outcomes:

• By the end of this module, students will be able to
• Understand the components of effective reading

Learn what are the strategies for developing reading skills Know about the factors that affect the reading behavior

3.  Introduction

People generally lack in reading skills and are not very much interested in reading books. Also, they prefer more picturesque and illustrative books over core text. To inculcate the reading habit, special format programs need to be used which make reading interesting.

The components of reading helps the reader to read the material in a proper way, it also aid children to learn to read. Despite of some factors that affect reading behavior there are various strategies which facilitates in effective reading and make reading an enjoyable task.

4. The Essential Components of Reading

Reading is an extremely complex cognitive process. Our intellect is in fact engaged in number of tasks when we are reading, despite of the belief that reading is one singular act. There are five attributes to the process of reading: phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, reading comprehension and fluency. These five features work together to form the reading skill. In order to turn out to be a triumph in reading skills, individuals must develop expertise in all these five areas.

Source: Florida Centre for Reading Research, “Essentials for reading success: Components of Reading”, available online at http://literacysanantonio.com/tutoring/

4.1 Phonics

“Phonics instruction helps early elementary students develop proficiency in decoding,

spelling, and understanding words”

– National Reading Panel

Phonics is the relationship or a connection between sounds, letter symbols or word families, short vowels, long vowels, and letter combinations and the sounds they represent. Without phonics, words are just a group of scribbles and lines on a page.

There are many ways that phonics can be skilled because there is a multiple ways to apply this aspect when reading. Every single approach permits the reader to use phonics to read and discover new words in a diverse way.

4.1.1 Synthetic phonics:

It makes words from the ground up. In this approach readers are trained to first attach letters to their matching phonemes (sound units) and then to combine those together to form a word.

They discover the resonance of the letters in their minor units, and then learn to place them together, or, blend them, thus it is named as “synthetic” phonics. For example, children or beginners in reading first become skilled at the sounds ‘a’, ‘n’, and‘t’ before putting the letters together to form the word ‘ant’.

4.1.2 Analytic phonics:

Analytic phonics on the other hand, approaches words from the top down. A word is recognized as an entire unit and then its letter-sound associations are brought out.

Analytic phonics talks about recognizing the whole words by vision or display, and later split it down into the smaller units of sound. using analytic phonics in children’s case they are trained to identify and speak ‘ant’, after mastering the word ‘ant’ by sight, children learn to break the word into smaller parts like a-n-t. Thus, here the sounds of letter are taught after reading has begun, even followed by correct spelling of words.

4.1.3 Analogy phonics: It uses the known parts of words to determine new words.

Thus, Phonics, using the spelling mode emphasizes on linking the sound with letters in writing. All of the above mentioned techniques can be imparted and used independently or in combination to help the beginners to learn to recognize and familiarize themselves with new words.

For example, during the learning process, when the children learn the word “play,” they also come to know that AY says [sound of long] A, and the similar spelling pattern is found in all these words: day, say, may, lay, jay, stay, spray, tray, etc. The sound spelling is highlighted so that it stands out visually as a unit, showing that the particular sound of AY is used in many more different words.

Phonic knowledge is very important as accurate and fluent word recognition depends on it. The ability to read words accounts for a substantial proportion of overall reading success even in experienced readers. They do not face any difficulty to identify new words. Those readers prefer using the decoding approach; whenever come across an unknown or difficult word they decode the word, name it, and then attach meaning. Most of the time, the context of the passage helps a reader get the meaning of a word once a word has been decoded.

4.2 Phonological to Phonemic Awareness

“Teaching phonemic awareness to children significantly improves their reading development” National Reading Panel

Source: Make, take & Teach (2012) “Phonological awareness, Phonemic Awareness & Phonics”, available online at http://blog.maketaketeach.com/phonological-awareness-phonemic-awareness-and-phonics/

Phonemic awareness is closely related to phonics because both involve the connection between sounds and words. The difference is that phonemic awareness is the thoughtfulness that words are formed from phonemes (small units of sound in language). Phonemes are simply the auditory sounds of words. Phonemes are learned before a child begins to read for the reason that they are centered on the sounds of language relatively than written words.

Just like phonics, phonemic awareness can be taught and used in a number of ways.

4.2.1 Phoneme isolation:

It involves the reader passing out the individual sounds in a word in order to determine its meaning. It also involves identifying the position of the sound, i.e. where that sound appears in the word.

4.2.2 Phoneme segmentation:

It is about breaking the words into their consequent phonemes (which may involve one or more individual sounds) to figure out the new word.

Both of these approaches are very similar to synthetic phonics.

4.2.3 Phoneme identification:

Reader’s general knowledge of phonemes plays an important role to identify the sound patterns in words. This is usually developed through speaking. For instance a reader would identify the phoneme /d/ he knows from the words “doll” and “dog” to help him learn how to read a new word “dance”.

Finally, phoneme blending requires the reader to connect a series of phonemes together to create a word.

Phoneme awareness and letter-sound awareness report for more of the difference in early reading and spelling success than general intelligence. They are the foundation for learning an alphabetic writing system.

Children who have not properly developed phonemic awareness at the end of pre-school playgroup are likely to become poor readers. When unambiguous or explicit instructions with the combination of sound identification, matching, segmentation, and blending are linked correctly to sound-symbol relation, it minimizes the chance of reading failure and helps improving the reading and spelling skills of children.

4.3 Fluency

Fluency is the ability to read accurately, quickly (without having to stop) and articulate it with expressions.

“Guided, repeated oral reading significantly improves word recognition, reading fluency, and comprehension in students of all ages”

The National Reading Panel’s

4.3.1 A readers Talent:

Fluency is a reader’s talent to read with swiftness, accurateness and expression. Thus for fluency it is required by a reader to merge and use several reading skills at the same time. While fluency is most often considered through oral readings, good readers also exhibit this skill when they are reading silently, as they “hear” the sound of the characters and even “speak” with expression.

4.3.2 Creating an overall picture:

A reader must be able to move swiftly in a sufficient amount from beginning to end of a text to build up the meaning. If he stopped in between while reading each individual word, or if lost amid some thoughts, he will not be able to create an overall picture in his mind of what the text is saying. Even if the reader is able to move rapidly through a text, if they are unable to master the expression associated with the words, the meaning of it will be lost.

4.3.3 Fluency for new readers:

The new readers must relate their decoding skills to fluency, and habitual reading of to bring the perfect art of decoding. Children who are reading with enough fluency are much more likely to figure out what they are reading. Thus the notion of self-governing reading level is vital: it is that level at which the child is familiar with more than 95 percent of the words and can read without struggling over decoding. Poor readers often read too slowly as they have some specific problem with fluent and usual text reading.

4.4 Vocabulary

“Students need to hear, read, understand, and use new vocabulary words in various contexts to build their comprehension levels. Repetition, aided by quizzes, glossaries, and crossword puzzles, is paramount to building vocabulary”

National Reading Panel

In order to read words we must first be familiar with them. Envision how difficult and futile it would be to read any content if all of the words are unfamiliar. As children become stronger, more advanced readers they not only learn to attach their oral vocabularies (the words we know when they are spoken) to their reading vocabularies (the words we know when they are used in print). They also improve on both of the vocabulary skills by relating and remembering them. Vocabulary development is a continuous process and this learning journey continues all through one’s “reading life”.

There are two primary ways of teaching and learning new vocabulary words.

4.4.1 Unambiguous teaching:

This include explaining someone that how a word is pronounced and what its meaning is. This task must be performed by all; it might be a teacher, a dictionary, a vocabulary guide or any other source contributing to definitions and pronunciations.

4.4.2 Context clue:

Context clues are the suggestions contained in a text that help a reader to bring out the implication of a strange word. They include other words in a sentence or paragraph, diagrams, graphs and charts. Context clues are basically anything in the text that clarifies the understanding of a new word.

4.5 Comprehension

“Young readers develop text comprehension through a variety of techniques, including answering questions (quizzes) and summarization (retelling the story)”

Source: Education Research Articles, “Strategic Reading, Comprehension and Study Skills”, available online at http://educationresearch4you.blogspot.in/2009/08/strategic-reading-comprehension-and.html

4.5.1 Reason behind reading:

Comprehension is the main reason behind reading a text. Reading comprehension helps in understanding about the content or text. It is more than just understanding words in loneliness.

It is using the word knowledge and trying to connect them into some meaningful context.

4.5.2 Comprehension as multifarious:

Reading comprehension is the most complex aspect of reading as it requires the reader to describe the general thinking skills. Asking and answering questions and summarizing the text what has been read is possible when a reader is actively engaged with the content. Similar to vocabulary, reading comprehension skills expand and advance over time through teaching and practice.

4.5.3 Improving comprehension:

The unquestionable purpose of learning to read is to comprehend. Comprehension depends, firstly, on a large, working vocabulary and considerable background knowledge. Further, comprehension is improved when educators make sure students identify with what they are reading by asking questions and cheering students to question and discuss. Valuable lessons will help the reader to vigorously relate his or her own awareness or knowledge to the ideas written in the text, and then retain the information or the ideas that they understood from the text.

4.5.4 Comprehension for children:

Even though children are at first limited in what they can read by themselves, the intellectual capacity is built as soon as they enter school. Still before children can read for their own selves, teachers can build this vital background knowledge by reading interactively and repeatedly to children from various texts of stories and tales, selected to expand the knowledge of children about the world around them.

5. Strategies for Developing Reading Skills

“Reading is a habit for a few, hobby for some, and only a professional compulsion for others, in whatever way we may read, it is important to develop reading skills”

Strategies to improve reading:

Commence understanding the importance of reading. Begin to read anything that pleases you.

Spend some time reading every day, and fix a particular time for reading. Gradually rise the time period for reading.

Read variety of material.

Widen the fondness of reading.

5.1 Using Reading Strategies

Reading in the native language is not that much difficult as it is in different languages that people learn. They think reading means to start with the initial part, going word by word, and discontinuing or giving a break to look up the dictionary for every unknown terminology, until the end of topic. While doing this, people are relying entirely on their linguistic awareness, a bottom-up strategy, where the word meanings are understood first and then the mind search the core idea of content. The most important strategies for better reading is that instead of using bottom up approach individuals may use top-down approach as they do in their native language, i.e. to firstly get an overall idea of the content and then start reading by predicting and scanning.

The reading strategies may help all of us to adjust the reading behaviour to deal with multiple situations, reading purposes and to contribute in future perspectives. This may even help students to develop a set of reading strategies and match suitable strategies to each reading situation.

5.2 Strategies that can help students read more quickly and effectively include

5.2.1 Reading at a glance:

For getting the logic behind the content which is selected for reading it is important to have a glance over the non verbal items or main topics like:

titles & headings, Subtitles looking over the pictures or diagrams going through graphs, tables, pie charts, flowcharts checking the sources

All these aspects give an overview of the reading material, and helps in understanding the idea in a quick way.

5.2.2 Forecasting:

This strategy helps by improving vocabulary by regular and varied reading. Whenever finding a new word try and attempt to look at the dictionary. Pay attention to synonyms, antonyms and substitutions. Thus by this way if the vocabulary is already good, so by using this past knowledge a reader can make future predictions.

The previous information about text type, structure of content and purpose aids here to understand the vocabulary, the content and to grasp meaning. Forecasting is also helpful when the reader is familiar with the author and can predict his/ her writing style.

Source: Fabian, R. (2015), “Strategies in developing reading skills” available online at http://www.fpemy.com/RenFabian/strategies-in-developing-reading-skills

5.2.3 Skimming and Scanning:

To skim and scan needs a good reading speed, as through skimming one can do a quick survey of the content i.e. a book, article, letter, etc. This facilitates in getting the main idea, identifying structure of the text, specifying projected details, and even answering few questions.

5.2.4 Presumption from context:

Tracing the content: using clue to get an idea of the subject, or extracting the meanings of unknown words by going through the sentence, or by relating it with topic, instead of stopping to look them up.

Logical Thinking: For presuming the context logical thinking of various situations and problems will improve the ability to logically link and see rationally to the ideas presented. This will enhance the ability to grasp the theme and other connected ideas.

5.2.5 Rephrasing:

Rephrasing is stopping at the end of a segment to make sure the understanding by paraphrasing the information and ideas in the text.

5.3 Reading to Learn

Reading is an indispensable part of language as it not only enhances linguistic knowledge expansion but also helps learning in various other ways.

5.3.1 Reading to discover the language:

Reading material is language contribution which includes words, speech, lingo etc. It’s important to provide students by multiple opportunities by giving them a variety of materials to read, i.e. to absorb vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure, as they occur in contexts. Students thus gain a more complete picture of the ways in which the elements of the language work together to convey meaning.

5.3.2 Reading for content information:

Student’s purpose for reading is often to obtain information about the content, a topic, or an area of discussion of their interest, which can help them in the language learning classes also. Content reading provides students both valid reading material and a genuine purpose for reading.

5.3.3 Reading for cultural knowledge and awareness:

Reading everyday materials like newspapers, magazines, and Web sites can give one and all an insight into the lifestyles of others and even the worldviews. In this way by the help of everyday reading people increase their knowledge and awareness as they are exposed to different cultures.

5.4 Do’s and Don’ts of Reading Strategies

6. Factors Affecting Reading Behaviour

6.1 Attitude:

Positive attitude helps in building an interest towards reading, as it facilitates in understanding and grasping the content for future use. It also provides an opportunity to use the knowledge which has been acquired by reading to assist someone in the task. Reading with right attitude leads one to synergy and helps in keeping themselves away from negergy or from the negative thoughts which surrounds people from time to time.

6.2 Peer influence:

Peer influence is the most impactful thing on children. At a small age, they should be encouraged for group reading and to share reading materials among themselves. Interest in reading at a small age can inculcate as a hobby in them. Also, they should be made aware of importance of reading books and encouraged to gift the books to friends as well. Reading campaigns and camps should be propagated in the campus frequently to promote reading culture. Also, benefits of share and read should be made known to them, which would help more in developing the interest in reading.

6.3 Environment:

More efforts can be put forward to create the right ambience to the reading culture by providing the best environment to read. The surroundings affect a lot on reading and also on the type of reading. It’s important to have a right kind of environment not only for children’s or for students in their educational institutes but also for the employees in organizations so that they can enhance their knowledge by reading valuable material.

6.4 Cost of reading materials:

Cost is the most constraining factor for buying and reading books. It does have a negative influence on the reading habits as most of the reading materials are expensive. This is to be expected, that if Lower prices of books and reading materials are considered it can enhance reading practices. Electronic formatted materials are more popular due to its lower cost. However, some of the readers are ready to pay higher prices if the book is of great interest to them. Therefore, we believe that price factor can be one of the major constrain for students belonging to lower income group families.

6.5 Reading stations (RS)

RS are another medium to encourage reading habits among students/ employees. It can be of great use if it is designed in a planned way. Most of the students show lack of interest to use this facility due to:

Limited number of books Outdated reading material

Too academic but not so relevant

Limited subjects/ not area of interest

Broader coverage of comics, novels and magazines not available

Though students acknowledge and support the concept of reading station, but they are unhappy about the selection of books available. Also, the available reading material needs to be updated on a regular basis to attract more readers. Quality of books also plays a major role in motivating students or employees to read them.

Instructors can help students learn when and how to use reading strategies in several ways..

By using a combination of techniques including speaking as you preview; predicting, scanning and skimming and being expressive. This helps them to understand how different strategies work and how they can have an idea about the text before they start reading it word by word.

By guiding them to preview and predict the text individually and in group as a class exercise and also as homework. Special emphasis and time allocation on these activities shows their importance.

By using various class exercises such as one word or fill in the blanks to review vocabulary items. This helps students to judge and better understand the meaning from the text.

By motivating students for group discussions and allow them to share their thoughts on the strategies that will help them in a reading assignments and the probable approach they would use. This will then be compared to the actual strategy that they used. This is a great technique as it provides strategy choosing flexibility to students.

At the beginner’s level, when the learners use different reading strategies, they understand the actual use of it and find it comfortable that they can control the reading experience. This motivates them and increases the confidence level of their ability to read the language.

7. Summary

Reading way of life is very important as it leads one to vital information that leads to the person’s transformation. Reading components helps to be more successful while dealing with the text. There are five attributes to the process of reading: phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, reading comprehension and fluency. Reading at a glance, forecasting, skimming are some of the strategies which sharpens reading skills, knowledge and experience. Some factors like attitude, cost, and peer influence affect the reading behavior of individuals but despite of this, efforts should be made to improve reading skills by the means of strategies and components. As reading is also an important element of knowledge based community, higher education institution should assist in prospering this art of reading. The importance of reading in a nation’s development cannot be overlooked and in this journey to build this ecosystem, the institution has a real long way to go.