Chapter 2: The Reading and Writing Processes

Phonemic Awareness and Phonics-Student’s use their knowledge about phonological system, including how to manipulate sounds in spoken words and apply phoneme-grapheme correspondences and phonics rules, as they read. They develop these abilities through phonemic awareness and phonics instruction in the primary grades. 

Word Identification-Student’s recognize common or high frequency words automatically and use their knowledge of phonics and word parts to decode unfamiliar words. Until students can recognize most of the words they’re reading, they’re slow, word-by-word readers.

Fluency-Students become fluent readers once they recognize most words automatically and read quickly with expression. This is a huge milestone because students have limited cognitive resources to devote to reading. Beginning readers use most of their energy decoding words, while fluent readers devote most their cognitive resources to comprehension. 

Vocabulary-Students think about the meaning of words they’re reading, choosing appropriate meanings, recognizing figurative uses, and relating them to their background knowledge. Knowing the meaning of words influences comprehension, because its difficult to understand when the words being read don’t make sense. 

Comprehension-Students use a combination of reader and text factors to understand what they’re reading. To create meaning, they predict, connect, monitor, repair, and use other comprehension strategies as well as their knowledge of genres, organizational patterns, and literacy devices. 

• The reading process involves a serious of stages during which readers comprehend text. 

The Reading Process

Stage 1: Prereading-occurs as readers prepare to read

• Students have both general and specific background knowledge. General knowledge is world knowledge, what students have acquired through life experiences and learning in their home communities and at school and specific knowledge is literary knowledge, what students need to read to and comprehend a text. In this stage, students activate their world and literacy background knowledge: To trigger this activation, they about the title of the book, examine the book cover and inside illustrations, and read the first paragraph. 

Stage 2: Reading- students read the book or other selection in the reading stage.  

Teachers and students use five types of reading

1.Reading aloud to students

2. Shared reading

3. Guided reading

4. Partner reading

5. Independent reading

Read aloud- When reading aloud to students, teachers use the interactive read-aloud procedure to read aloud books that developmentally appropriate but written above students’ reading levels. As they read, teachers engage students in activities rather than postponing student involvement until after reading. Students become active participants. Reading aloud has many benefits, such as introducing vocabulary, modeling comprehension strategies, and increasing students’ motivation. 

Shared reading- Teachers use shared reading to read aloud books and other texts that students can’t reading independently, modeling what fluent readers to as they involve students in enjoyable reading activities. Shared reading differs from reading aloud because children see the text as the teacher reads. 

Guided reading- Teachers use guided reading to work with groups of four or five students who read at the same level. Students do the reading themselves, although the teacher may read aloud to get them started on the first page or two. Guided reading lessons usually last 25-30 minutes. Teachers observe students, as they read during guided reading lessons. 

Stage 3: Responding-Students respond to what they’ve read and continue to negotiate the meaning after reading. 

Stage 4: Exploring-Students go back into the text to examine it more analytically. This stage is more teacher directed than the others. 

Word wall/Word sorts- Teachers and students add “important” words to the word wall posted in the classroom. Students refer to it when they write and use the words for word-study activities, including drawing word clusters and posters to highlight particular words, doing word sorts to categorize words and completing semantic feature analysis charts to examine relationships between words. 

Mini Lessons- Teachers present minilessons on procedures, concepts, strategies, and skills. They introduce the topic and make connections between the topic and examples in the featured selection students have read. 

Stage 5: Applying- Readers extend their comprehension, reflect on their understanding, and value the reading experience in this final stage. 

Readers Theater- Often students create projects to apply what they’ve learned, and these projects take many forms, including stories, slide shows, posters, readers theatre performances, essays, and podcast presentations. 

The Writing Process

The Writing Process is a series of five stages that describe what students think about and do as they write; the stages are prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. 

Stage 1: Prewriting

Prewriting is the “getting ready to write” stage. Writers begin talking, reading, and brainstorming during this stage. During this stage students should choose a topic, think about their purpose for writing, and gather and organize ideas. 

Stage 2: Drafting

Students get their ideas down on paper and write a first draft of their compositions in this stage. Drafts are usually messy and unorganized. 

Stage 3: Revising 

During the revising stage, writers refine ideas in their compositions. Revision isn’t polishing; it’s meeting the needs of readers by adding, substituting, deleting, and rearranging material. 

Stage 4: Editing

Editing is putting the piece of writing into its final form. During this time students should proofread their work and locate and mark possible errors. Once they find their errors, it’s important to correct the errors. 

Stage 5: Publishing

Students bring their compositions to life by writing final copies and by sharing them orally with an appropriate audience. Publication is powerful: Students are motivated not only to continue writing but also to improve the quality of their writing through revising and editing. 

Reading and Writing Strategies

Application to the Classroom

It is important that we as educators understand the reading and writing process. By knowing the processes, we can understand what students do as they read and write. The reading process is a complex process involving components and as educators it is imperative that we know and understand the reading and writing process in order to teach our children and have them be successful in the classroom. Teachers use the reading process to involve students in activities to teach, practice, and apply these components. In our classrooms, we will also use the writing process often. It is important that students prewrite, draft, revise, edit and publish their work! The reading and writing strategies will be useful in our future classrooms, for it is useful to always have strategies on hand to help the students. Many classrooms also integrate reading and writing activities; making connections between reading and writing is a natural part of classroom life. In our classrooms it is important that we use strategies to organize, direct, and problem- solve as our students read and write. We will use many of these concepts in chapter 2 in our future classrooms.