Language The Foundation for Reading

Expert teaching of reading requires knowledge of language structure at all levels. Without such knowledge, teachers are not able to respond insightfully to student errors, choose examples for concepts, explain and contrast words and their parts, or judge what focus is needed in a lesson.

 

Suppose that the teacher wants the students to read and spell words such as pin and pen, will and well, miss and mess without confusing them? Lecturing or singing about short vowels is unlikely to prevent the errors children often make. Knowing that these vowels are similar in articulation might help the teacher emphasize how the vowels feel in the mouth when they are spoken.

 

Anticipating the difficulty of these vowels, a teacher would provide frequent, short opportunities for students to contrast similar words and to read and spell words with /i ˘/ and /e˘/  in the context of sentences and stories.

 

What if, in the middle grades, the word deceive is to be read, spelled, or understood? To help children who may not know the word or who may misread or misspell it, the teacher could draw upon the following information:

_ deceive has two meaningful parts (morphemes),

a prefix de- and a root ceive-;

_ the word is a verb related to the nouns

deceit and deception;

_ the same root and derivational pattern

can be found with receive, conceive, and

perceive;

_ the vowel spelling follows the “i before e

except after c” spelling rule;

_ the word ends with an e because no

word in English ends in a plain v spelling

for the /v/ sound;

_ the /s/ phoneme is spelled with a c followed

by e; and

_ the accent of such Latin-based words is

almost always on the root morpheme.

 

 

Armed with such information, accumulated over many lessons, the teacher can deepen students’ word knowledge by calling their attention to any of these features in a lesson. The nature of exploration may vary from a “word a day” discussion, to finding –ceive words in a literature selection, to using several of the –ceive words in a written composition in their various forms (receiving, reception, receptivity). Few teachers,

 

however, are sufficiently well prepared to carry out such instruction— not through any fault of their own— but because their preparation programs, instructional materials, and teaching environments have not asked them to understand language with any depth or specificity. The language content that can inform instruction in reading and spelling is outlined in Part II of the core curriculum Knowledge of Language Structure and Application To Teaching illustrates the knowledge teachers must have and how that knowledge may be applied in teaching reading.