word recognition

Chapter seven discusses word recognition and its importance in learning to read. It begins by explaining how even though a student can be a very skilled English speaker and understand spoken word they can not read because it is more difficult to translate the written language than oral. The chapter explains how skilled readers automatically recognize words in a text and can apply meaning to these words without making a conscious effort to do so. This made me think of in past chapters in the Graves text in which they explained how fluency makes reading more enjoyable for kids, hence they read more and become even more fluent (Matthew Effect). Of course skilled readers are not beginning readers so they must rely on things such as context, illustrations, and other cues to determine a word and its meaning. 

I remember when my younger sister was learning to read she came to me and told me she could read the entire "Brown Bear" book. As she read through the pages flawlessly I realized that she was reciting the book from memory. Though this wasn't exactly her being able to "read" the entire book, the repetition of having our Dad read it to her aloud time after time had allowed her to internalize the words she saw on the pages. This actually helped her to learn to read quite a bit because she was so familiar with the words, she could recognize them in other contexts and form meaning of other texts (that she hadn't read 500 times.) 

In this chapter Graves discusses the four developmental phases that children go through in learning to read words.  These phases are the pre-alphabetic phase, partial alphabetic phase, full alphabetical phase, and the consolidated alphabetical phase. Judging by the information given by Graves I would surmise that my sister was in the partial alphabetic phase. This phase is characterized by the child learning letter-sound correspondences and building on prior knowledge of to form connections and between letters, words, and meanings. He explains that in this phase the child often uses the first and last letter in a word to recognize and read the words. I would guess she was in this stage because she was using visual cues to recall words she had heard many times before. 

Some methods Graves suggests to get started building a students vocabulary are word banks and word walls. By using these children can visually see words every day and memorize them. By switching up the words on the teachers word bank each week and dedicating some time to going over the selected words each day we could vastly expand our students word recognition.