word recognition and decoding- blog 2

Word Recognition and Decoding:
    Reading is a very complex process in which you must identify words from which you construct meaning, in addition writing is equally as complex and therefore equally as important. Reading is a message getting activity where readers draw on multiple interacting knowledge sources to construct the meaning of a text. Teachers are vital to the success of students reading, through coaching. Through coaching a teacher uses two main types of cues: general cues to prompt thought, and more focused cues to prompt specific action. When teachers use the general cues, the responsibility for for thinking is with the reader. The more focused type requires more detailed information about the word recognition task. These cues can come in the form of either a question or a statement. For teachers to coach successfully they must be aware of the knowledge sources available for word recognition, have specific knowledge of student’s word recognition abilities, be able to analyze a word, and generate appropriate cues. This coaching is critical to students success as readers. Word recognition is a crucial part of comprehension, and there are three developmental stages where children read words qualitatively different. The first stage is the selective-cue stage where recognition comes in the environment in which the word is placed. The second stage is spelling sound stage, where readers use the letter-sound relationship to recognize words. The last stage is the automatic stage where students recognize most words without conscious attention to spelling-sound relationship.
    Part of this word recognition is phonemic awareness. This is an awareness to speech streams consisting of a sequence of sound-specific phonemes, the smallest unit of sound that makes a difference in communication. There are two parts to the super-ordinate construct, phonemic awareness which is a type of phonological awareness, and metalinguistics, which is one’s awareness of control over one’s language in general. As far as teaching goes in the phonemic awareness, the activities must be extremely child appropriate, for younger children: songs, chants, and word-sound games. In the study included in the reading, teachers should spend approximately 10-30 minutes daily, if possible working on phonemic awareness. To move children along in the decoding and spelling abilities in the upper grades teachers should focus on morphemes- prefixes, suffixes, and roots- and how they help us decode, spell, and gain meaning for polysyllabic words. Both the book and the online reading provides multiple activities for teachers to use to promote both phonemic awareness, and word recognition.
    As a future teacher, the word recognition and cues that are necessary for reader’s development are hard to completely understand. The examples given in the readings show teachers going through these cues, without having to think constantly about it. All the teachers said they learned and picked up on this skill after completing their educational program, and upon being in a school environment. This is such an important aspect of reading that it doesn’t seem so overwhelming to completely understand it now.