Learning to read is a lifelong process, and I’m content to admit that after 40 years in public education, two university degrees and a lasting love of books, I’m still involved in that process.
I have also come to understand that the same obstacles that challenge first-time early childhood readers also apply to adult readers. The purpose of reading is, after all, comprehension — and that, in turn, is about extracting meaning from text.
Without comprehension, reading is nothing but a frustrating, pointless exercise in deciphering words. So how do we ease kids into reading in such a way that reading and comprehending the meaning of text becomes a source of enjoyment and not just another adult imposition on young minds?
The B.C. Primary (levels) program describes five stages of reading development: The first is when a child begins to show curiosity about print in his/her environment — signs, ads in shop windows, anywhere there are words.
The second stage is “emergent” when a child “role plays” and pretends to read, remembering words or phrases by rote.
Then comes the stage when a child shows interest in words in print, and wants to explore age-appropriate books independently.
Stages four and five find a child choosing to read silently for increasing periods of time and wanting adult support with text beyond immediate knowledge and linguistic development.
For adults wanting to buy books for a grandchild, niece or nephew, considering the reading level of the books given to or shared with a child is a good place to start.
According to an article in Psychology Today by Paula J. Schwanenflugel and Nancy Flanagan Knapp, most text readability levels are based on some combination of word difficulty as measured by the number of letters, number of syllables and/or frequency of use of words used in a book.
In the same way, sentence complexity, which will either encourage or discourage the early reader’s willingness to continue, is important. Sentence complexity is about the length in words or phrases in a sentence the child is attempting to read and understand.
Understanding the range of a child’s day-to-day operational vocabulary simply by listening to the child relay experiences will help adults understand a child’s potential willingness to persist with a chosen book.
It is only after that, again according to the two child psychologists, that as reading proficiency increases to books which have one-, two- and three-syllable words along with more challenging ideas are suitable.
That way, and without hurrying the process, adults can incrementally support the early reader as he/she progresses both in terms of proficiency and comfort.
Again, at that point guidance from a significant adult to clarify the meanings of words and phrases is invaluable.
So far so good, but the same processes apply to adult readers who choose to move into previously uncharted content. I said at the outset that, even as a more or less semi-educated adult, I am still learning to read and to draw meaning from some texts.
I can well remember deciding to read A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. How complex could it be? It was on the New York Times bestseller list for 100 weeks back in the late 1980s.
But three pages in, I found myself reading the same page over and over again to try to relate what I knew, or thought I knew about Hawking’s clarification of Aristotle’s “On the Heavens” and the emerging assumption that the earth might be round.
Then, on the same page, came Ptolemy’s second century cosmological “model” closely followed by concepts developed by Nicholas Copernicus about the earth, the moon and the sun that brought the wrath of organized religion down about his ears.
It was tempting just to pack it in with Hawking’s brilliant book and find something which did not make me feel so intellectually inadequate.
But I didn’t do that. I knew that if I wanted to understand anything about what Hawking was explaining, the content of which others had apparently found so interesting, I would need three things: An adjustment of my own expectations, patience and perseverance.
We now know that early readers have that same experience and those same needs. That’s where adults patiently reading with the child can make a difference. And it is a lifelong difference.
As American author Betty Smith wrote in her best selling novel A Tree Grows In Brooklyn: “Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows he/she can read printed words!”
gfjohnson4@shaw.ca
Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.
