Recognizing Words in Print

Recognizing Words in Print

Strategies

Several strategies are used by teachers to help students recognize words in word. Teachers, through a series of activities, can help students understand word meanings through the utilization of the appropriate strategies that address the print concepts. Consequently, students can enhance their word recognition skills. The following are some of the best strategies that teachers can use to enhance word recognition of students

Scaffolding: This is one of the instructional practices, and it acts as a psychological element of teaching and learning. This basically means that the teacher provides support to the student to develop fundamental reading skills. To achieve this, teachers divide the content to be taught into small parts to facilitate efficient comprehension (Chen & Law, 2016). This is done using the graphic organizers, introducing background information, using the small group teaching strategy, and focusing on vocabulary based context. This will enable the students to identify their errors easily. Once no further assistance is needed, the scaffolding is removed allowed the students to improve their skills on their own.

Connecting to prior knowledge: Through this strategy, the student should asses the student’s experiences and understandings, and therefore, the teacher can establish what the student knows and what they need to be taught. The students who commit more errors lack enough experience on how to grasp new information. The teacher should therefore establish a platform where students can share knowledge through discussions, and consequently, they will be able to identify their errors and rectify each other.

Providing opportunities to learn: The teacher should ensure that the students make frequent responses during silent and oral reading. Through such responses, the teacher can identify errors that the students are committing. Children with a learning disability need more time to practice their skills..

Motivating students: Motivating students helps them in achieving their goals efficiently. Young students are likely to attribute their failure to lack; however, they need to be motivated regularly. Literacy activities should be incorporated in real life situations so that the students are motivated to participate in them. This can provide a better platform where students can practice hence identifying there errors.

Constructing meaning: The purpose of reading is to construct meaning from a text. Children mostly acquire comprehension, decoding, grammar, and spelling prowess if they are presented in a manner that is personally meaningful to them. This further improves their ability to identify errors.

Activities

From the class profile provided, there is a small group that needs help with verbal and nonverbal signals. This can be achieved through the following activities.

Phonological awareness: Phonological Awareness. The scaffolding strategy will work best for this activity. This is because, through the teacher’s support, students learn more about units of sound words such as phonemes, rhymes, and syllables (Derwing, 2017). Through this activity, children will be exposed to different types of speech sounds; hence they will be able to read different words better. The teachers should know the instructional activities meant for one awareness may not be the same for another. Enhancing this activity will ensure that the students can identify the relationship between print and speech.

Decoding: This is another essential, especially in recognition of words. The teachers should familiarize children with various alphabetic principles and letter-sound correspondence. This will help the students the various letter correspondence and different sounds of various sounds (Dessemontet et al., 2019). Through decoding, the students can interlink various words together to produce sensible words. Decoding can be accomplished through meaningful construction strategy, and this will ensure that children can link print and speech on their own due to exposure to such rich literature.

Sight word recognition: The children should be exposed to various sight word recognition activities. It is difficult for children to identify words when they are just pronounced, yet they frequently appear in the form of print. In this context, the motivation strategy works best because children will be encouraged to memorize such words.

Rationalizing

The above strategies and activities can play a crucial role in helping the identified group improve in verbal and nonverbal signals. Without proficiency in the verbal cues, the spoken language of the affected students is also weak. The non-verbal signals help the students to communicate with each other even when they are at a distance through various platforms such as gestures, posture, and facial expressions. Scaffolding is the best strategy that can be used to ensure that the students attain the required proficiency. Through scaffolding, the students will be guided by their teachers to perfect their verbal communication skills. The teachers should use proper motivational skills to encourage their students that they can improve even where it seems to be impossible. The meaning construction strategy will help the students learn various verbal and non-verbal cues in real-life situations. Teachers should provide a favorable learning environment by encouraging group work and discussion.

The word recognition activities are also crucial in improving the verbal and non-verbal proficiency of the students. These activities are most likely to develop the verbal communication of the students. The phonological awareness will enable the students to pronounce various letters and syllables. These are the basic elements of any word. Decoding will familiarize the students with various letters and sound correspondence. The students will learn to combine various letters to produce words. Sight recognition will enable the students to identify various verbal cues not only though pronunciations but also in printed form.

References

Chen, C. H., & Law, V. (2016). Scaffolding individual and collaborative game-based learning in learning performance and intrinsic motivation. Computers in Human Behavior, 55, 1201-1212.

Derwing, T. M. (2017). The role of phonological awareness in language learning. The Routledge handbook of language awareness (pp. 339-353). Routledge.

Dessemontet, R. S., Martinet, C., de Chambrier, A. F., Martini-Willemin, B. M., & Audrin, C. (2019). A meta-analysis on the effectiveness of phonics instruction for teaching decoding skills to students with intellectual disabilities. Educational Research Review, 26, 52-70.