Judy Johnson received her Doctorate in education from UCLA. A veteran educator, Johnson is currently Associate Director of the Los Angeles Educational Partnership. She may be contacted via email at jjohnson@lalc.k12.ca.us.

What Do We Know About Learning How to Read? By JUDY JOHNSON, Ed.D Associate Director Los Angeles Educational Partnership RESEARCH DURING THE LAST DECADE tells us a lot about how young people learn to read and it suggests some strategies for teaching reading. What do we know? Reading is not a natural act. Unlike learning how to speak, reading does not happen without being explicitly taught. Speaking and creating grammatical structures seems to be wired into the brain. In contrast only five percent of children learn to read with ease; some 60 percent of students find reading a difficult task requiring repeated practice and formal instruction. There is a critical period for learning. The Los Angeles Times campaign on "Reading by 9" is based upon research. Reading skills are best learned early during the preschool and early elementary grade ages. Learning how to read after age 9 is possible but it takes significantly more time, energy and motivation for students. The preschool years and the home experiences are critical for giving children a jump-start on learning how to read. Children vary in learning rates. Some young people can learn to recognize a word with as few as four exposures and repetitions of that word; others may need as many as 14 repetitions. Some children come to school with a rich vocabulary and a love of books; others come with few language skills at all. A variety of skills help students become good readers. Beginning readers need to translate letters and letter patterns into sound, understand that speech is divided into sounds (phoneme awareness) and recognize that segmented units of speech can be represented in printed form (phonics). Children need to learn letter names and sounds and the sounds of letters combined. There are 26 names of letters of the alphabet in English and more than 40 sounds associated with them and their combinations. These skills get better when children are read to at home before they come to school and when they learn that reading is a fun activity shared early with their family. Then, children need to read fluently. They need to recognize words automatically, not sounding out every letter or group of letters. Teachers know this as learning how to read "sight words" and parts of words (prefixes, suffixes and root words). Finally, children need to construct meaning from the print they decode. Good readers connect what they read with what they already know. They summarize, predict, clarify what they read and use questions to guide their understanding. They are exposed to and ask these questions of a variety of texts. Students must want to read. Motivation is critical for learning the difficult task of reading and this is particularly true for older students. What can teachers do to help children learn to read with great ease and success? Here are a few ideas suggested by the research: Identify early those children who are having difficulty learning how to read Know which children know specific skills and which need additional instruction, and then teach skills appropriate for each student Teach phoneme awareness, phonics, fluency and reading comprehension Let parents know how important it is to involve children in reading from infancy; encouarge families to read to children, use nursery rhymes, listen to their children’s stories, and work with young people on building a large vocabulary Teach preschool children the alphabet, how to print and let them attempt to spell words they hear Encourage students to read 20-30 books of great interest to them each year to help them build new vocabulary Read to children to increase their knowledge and illustrate the purposes of reading. Demonstrate how readers get meaning out of text by relating to their prior experience, asking questions, summarizing what they have read, and the like. You might want to read some of the research on learning how to read. I recommend "The Keys to Literacy" edited by the Council for Basic Education, Washington D.C., 1998 and "Mosaic of Thought" by Ellin Keene and Susan Zimmerman, from Heinemann Press, 1997.