Developing Readers from Emergent to Literate

As teachers of reading our ultimate goal is to help our students go from emergent readers to fully developed and literate readers. In class we discussed that readers use two major forms of Information Systems to read and understand text. We learned that a reader uses information that is "outside in" where they bring their previous learned knowledge to the table, such as prior knowledge, connections, cultural perceptions, their overall schema, as well as having phonological awareness and the ability to read with a good vocabulary. They also use information that is "inside out" where they learn how to comprehend text using information in and around the text. They can use context clues, the information that allows the students to make inferences and connections as they read. They can also use text features, which are all the surrounding elements that guide a reader, such as the photographs, captions, bold face words, labels, and charts and graphs.

Literate individuals and readers use all of these components in conjunction with one another to decode and comprehend with ease. As a teacher we are constantly looking for new ways to teach our students to decode and comprehend text, especially considering that every student comes into our classroom with different experiences, different abilities, and different skills. Therefore, as a teacher we need to expose our students to a variety of things using stories and illustrations or photographs. For example, recently in the first grade reading text, the word stadium appeared, and for many of my students, it was an unfamiliar word. Only one student had attended a professional football game and he knew that stadium was the place where a sporting team plays. The other students were not familiar with the term until his experience of attending a Philadelphia Eagles game was described to the class. Other students had been to football and baseball games, but never knew that the place where the game was played was called "stadium." Dylan's prior knowledge or "Outside In" source taught 19 children a new vocabulary word to a concept in which they were already familiar.

A reinforcement of the Information Systems concepts to create a fluent reader is wonderfully described and analyzed in a recent article in the Reading Rockets website. It reviewed seven strategies to teach comprehension. The ultimate goal of instructing students on comprehension strategies is to create "purposeful, active readers who are in control of their own reading comprehension" (Adler, C.R., 2004). The article states that there is a firm scientific basis that each of these seven strategies will improve text comprehension. This article offers a clear, concise understanding of the use of the information systems concept to become literate.

Reading Rockets: Seven Strategies to Teach Students Text Comprehension