Introduction
Literacy development is a vital part of your child’s overall development. It’s the foundation for doing well at school, socialising with others, developing independence, managing money and working.
But before your child learns to read and write, he needs to develop the building blocks for literacy – the ability to speak, listen, understand, watch and draw.
And as your child gets older, she also needs to learn about the connection between letters on a page and spoken sounds. For this to happen, she needs plenty of experience with:
- pictures and objects – how you can use words to talk about them
- letters and words – their shapes, sounds and names
- sounds – how words can rhyme, begin and end with the same letters, be broken up into parts like syllables, be formed by blending different sounds and so on.
You can help with all these areas of your child’s early literacy development by:
- communicating with your child
- reading together
- playing with rhyme and other sounds with your child.
And the great news is that you can do this in ways that are fun for both of you.
Task
Help learners complete the 5 stages of reading.
Process
STAGE 2: THE NOVICE READER (TYPICALLY BETWEEN 6 TO 7 YEARS OLD)
During the second phase of the reading development process children are learning the relationships between letters and sounds and amongst printed and spoken words. The child begins to read stories with high-frequency words and phonically regular words and uses emerging skills and insights to “sound out” new one-syllable words.
STAGE 3: THE DECODING READER (TYPICALLY BETWEEN 7 – 9 YEARS OLD)
During the third phase of the reading development, process children are beginning to read familiar stories and text with increasing fluency. This is accomplished by consolidating the foundational decoding elements, sight vocabulary, and meaning in the reading of stories and selections that the child is already familiar with.
STAGE 4: THE FLUENT, COMPREHENDING READER (TYPICALLY BETWEEN 9 – 15 YEARS OLD)
During the fourth phase of the reading development process, reading is used to acquire new ideas to gain new knowledge, to experience new feelings, to acquire new attitudes, and to explore issues from multiple perspectives. Reading includes the study of textbooks, reference works, trade books, newspapers, and magazines that contain new ideas and values, new vocabulary and syntax.
STAGE 5: THE EXPERT READER (TYPICALLY FROM 16 YEARS AND OLDER)
During the fifth phase of the reading development process, the learner is reading from a wide range of advanced materials, both expository and narrative, with multiple viewpoints. Learners are reading broadly across the disciplines, including the physical, biological and social sciences as well as the humanities, politics and current affairs.
Evaluation
Literacy assessments help teachers like you identify a student’s literacy progress and understand how to best support them. Although the word "assessment" may bring to mind the high-stakes tests that legislators love, students dread, and teachers loathe, literacy assessment is a much broader concept. In Assessment Literacy in a Standards-Based Urban Education Setting, Norman Webb states, "Assessment Literacy is defined as the knowledge of the means for assessing what students know and can do, the interpretation of the results from these assessments, and application of assessment results to improve student learning and program effectiveness."
Conclusion
Language and literacy are major domains of early childhood development. These are connected areas, but refer to different things. Language development involves the development of the skills used to communicate with others through languages, while literacy development involves the ability to read and write. Babies are born with the capacity for development in these areas. There are simple ways that adults can support this development. In addition to understanding basic behaviors, adults should also be aware of common communication disorders, which may impede language and literacy development.
Credits
Teacher Page
Teachers should provide flexible writing experiences that allow young children to use scribble, random letters, or invented spelling in the beginning, and over time move to more conventional forms.When children write their own texts, they are also developing their vocabulary and phonemic and literacy awareness