Module 1: Reading and Writing

Around the World

Different countries, different children, different stories
Children around the world have different experiences with reading. Their experiences are
different for many reasons, such as where they live, what languages they need to learn to
read, and what their family background is.
Read the following descriptions of children from different countries below. How similar or
different are they from the children that you meet or teach? Remember that these are just
examples. What is described is not always true for all children in that country. But these are
important issues that some of them face.

Module 1: Reading and Writing

from the Outside-In - Contexts of
Reading
Contexts of reading
Children learn to read in many different contexts. When we say context, we mean countries,
educational systems, schools, neighborhoods, and homes. Contexts around the world differ.
These differences are often influenced by history, the needs of the people, and economics.
Figure 1 shows some of the different aspects of context that affect children’s learning. Click
here to see Figure 1.
As seen in the different stories earlier, different contexts work together to create the specific
situation that a child is in.

What languages do the children learn to read and write?

One important aspect of context is what language/s children learn to read in a specific place.
This determines the writing system, or script, that the children will learn to read and write. A
script is how we represent language in written form. In the United States, people could come
from different cultural backgrounds but everyone is expected to learn to read in English. In
India and in Hong Kong, children learn to read multiple languages that are often very different
from each other. For example, English is written in an alphabet script with only 26 letters
whereas Indian languages and Chinese have writing systems that have hundreds or even
thousands of different symbols.
Even languages that both use an alphabet have important differences. For example, children
in Finland learn to read much faster than children in English-speaking countries. This is
because Finnish is more consistent in the way letters and sounds are connected, unlike
English that has words like "choir" that aren't easy to read for the first time. This could be why
Finnish schools and parents have a relaxed attitude about teaching children to read.
Later in the course, we will see how these writing systems, or scripts, are different from each
other and what that means for children who are learning to read.

What happens when the language used in school is different from the one used at
home?
Many children around the world must learn to read in languages that are not spoken at home.
When the language they learn in school is unfamiliar, children could have trouble reading.
There are many situations where this could happen. One example is immigrants. For example,
children from Turkey who move to Germany must learn to read and write in German. This may
be confusing for them because they speak Turkish at home.

Another example is when a country has many different local languages. In Zambia, Tonga
speakers sometimes must learn to read in a different language such as Bemba. Their teachers
may not speak Bemba but another different language such as Nyanja, yet must teach Bemba.
When the children get older, they must learn to read in English. This means that sometimes
these children have no role models for learning the new language.
Finally, in many places there is the issue of diglossia. Diglossia occurs when two versions of
a language are used by a group. Often, one version of the language is more prestigious or
formal than others. For example, many people in Switzerland speak Swiss German. However,
in school, they must learn to speak and to read and to write in High German. High German has
a somewhat different pronunciation, vocabulary set, and even grammar from Swiss German.
The same is true in Arabic. Most Arabic speakers use a dialect of Arabic to talk with friends
and family. However, in formal educational settings, they use Modern Standard Arabic.

It's not an equal playing field

Another important aspect of context is about money and resources. Based on international
tests of literacy, children's reading levels are higher in richer countries such as Sweden and
Norway. In contrast, children's reading skills are lower in poorer countries such as the Ivory
Coast or Afghanistan. Within countries, children from richer families usually read better than
children in poorer families. Richer families have more advantages in several ways. For
example, they might have more exposure to educational content on the internet and television
and storybook reading at home. They could also afford to go to well-funded schools with better
resources and education support.
In some places, less resources are available to girls. In some countries such as India,
Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Sierra Leone, and others, families may not want to send girls to
school. They may not have the money for books or other expenses related to school. Schools
may not have the facilities that girls need like clean toilets. There could be many factors that
discourage girls from going to school.

Conclusion
For these reasons, it is quite difficult to make direct comparisons of how children learn to read
in different environments. It is important to think about the specific characteristics and
environments of your students. This can help you to identify outside factors that make learning
to read and to write more or less difficult for them.

Module 1: How Do We
Understand Struggling Readers
Better?
Many of you have probably heard of reading and writing difficulties that children might
experience. Maybe some of you are taking this course because you want to know how to help
the children in your context. Here we describe some of these difficulties and what you could do
to understand them better.

What are the different kinds of reading and writing difficulties?

The best known is called dyslexia. This is a problem in recognizing words. Dyslexia is a term
used for difficulties in one’s native language. A child is said to be dyslexic if she or he has
great difficulty in reading words in her or his own language. Another difficulty that some
children have is calleddysgraphia. This is a problem with writing or sometimes spelling words.
Some children might have both dyslexia and dysgraphia. Some might have only one.
Another problem that some children have is comprehension difficulty. Sometimes, these
children are called poor comprehenders. These children can read words in a normal way, but
they may not understand what they mean. Such children may have difficulties with vocabulary
or with making inferences. An inference is a conclusion based on evidence. For example,
please read the following two sentences together: “Sally saw a boy across the street. He
seemed to be hurt.” In the second sentence, we must make an inference. Our inference is
about who “he” refers to. In this case, “he” refers to the boy.
Not all children who struggle to read and to write have dyslexia, dysgraphia, or poor
comprehension ability. Some of them might not have learned these skills because they didn’t
go to school or were not taught in a way that suited their needs. Regardless, all students can
be taught how to read and write well. We can do this if we have a good understanding of how
we all learn to read and to write words.
In many of the readings in this course, we talk about a model of word reading. We talk about
cognitive-linguistic skills that are important for word reading and for word writing. Those with
dyslexia or dysgraphia tend to have difficulties with one or more of the skills we mention here.
A person with dyslexia or dysgraphia needs more time to learn reading skills as compared to
those without reading difficulties.
To understand the model of word reading and the different skills that children need to read and
write, it is important to know some basic terms that are related to linguistics. First, let's see
how many of these terms you could recognize.

Module 1: Reading and Writing

from the Inside-Out: A Cognitive
Components Model
On this page, we present a model of reading. This model describes the different components -
- or pieces -- that work together to make reading possible. Knowing the various parts
(components) of reading helps you to know how to

 identify learners' strengths and weaknesses

 help your learners improve their weaker skills
 adapt activities to fit your learners' needs.

You can watch this video (11:41) or read the video transcript below.

A model of word reading (and writing)

Every model of word reading must include at least four skills. This is true for every language
and script. These four skills all work together. The first is phonology, or the system of speech
sounds in a language. The second is meaning. This is how meaning is represented in
language. The third is orthographic representation. This is the system by which we use a
set of visual symbols to recognize and to write words. The final skill isautomatization. This is
the process by which we get faster and more automatic at recognizing words. In addition, we
also need visual-motor skills, in order to be able to write or to type. This is important for
dictation and spelling only.

Phonology, orthographic representation, and meaning are interrelated

In every language and script, these skills are interrelated. Think about how words are
presented in a dictionary. For example, let’s look at the word “book”.
book /bʊk/
1. a written or printed work consisting of pages glued or sewn together along one side and
bound in covers.
2. a bound set of blank sheets for writing in.
There are 3 important types of information given in this dictionary entry. First is how it sounds
when you say it (/bʊk/).1 This is an example of phonology.
Second is what it means ("a written or printed work consisting of pages glued or sewn
together" or “a bound set of blank sheets”). This is an example of meaning.
Third is what the word looks like. “Book” is spelled with "b", "o", "o", "k" which are letters of the
English alphabet. This is an example of orthographic representation.
Your mind is like a dictionary where the phonology, meaning, and orthographic representation
of different words are represented. When you read a word, you try to recognize it from how it is
written. You also think about how it sounds and what it means. In other languages, the word
for "book" can mean the same thing, but the way it is said and how it written is different. Figure
1 shows the word "book" in seven languages. Click here to view Figure 1.
Now let's look at the different components of the model of word reading and writing!

Phonology
You can also think of phonology, meaning, and orthographic representation as going from the
bottom to the top. At the beginning is phonology. We are all capable of recognizing
phonological units even if we do not understand a language. That is, if you hear unfamiliar
languages being spoken, you can tell, just based on sounds, that they are different. For
example, even if you do not know the languages, you will notice certain sound patterns in
Russian that are different from the sound patterns in Portuguese. You can do this without
understanding either language, because human beings have some basic skills
in phonological processing.Phonological processing is all about speech sounds.
As children become better at phonological processing, they develop the ability to take apart
spoken words into smaller sounds. The smallest sounds that make the difference between one
word and another are called phonemes. Some phonemes are consonant sounds, like /p/, /d/,
/b/, and /t/.1 Some are vowelsounds, such as the /æ/ sound of "a" in “bat” and the /eɪ/ sound of
"a" in “bake”. A syllable is a unit of a word containing a vowel sound. For example, there are
two syllables in “butter” and three in “cucumber”. When consonants and vowels are put
together to form syllables, they make different patterns such as consonant-vowel (or CV, like
"ba"), consonant-vowel-consonant (or CVC, like "dad"), or even harder ones like CCVCC (or
like "drift"). Figure 2 shows different examples of English words broken down into phonemes
and syllables. Click here to view Figure 2.

Meaning
However, as we start to connect meaning to sounds, we also hear the sounds more clearly
and distinctively. We map meaning to sound. Meaning is at the second level, above
phonology. Meaning in this case broadly refers to morphology in connection to
reading. Morphemesare the smallest units of meaning in a language. For example, “pet”
represents a morpheme or unit of meaning that represents a “tamed animal that a human
takes care of at home”. The word "pets" contains two morphemes, "pet" (the animal) and "s"
(marking it as plural). Morphemes can indicate a lot of information about words. They can
answer these questions: What is it? Is it plural or singular? Is the word masculine or feminine?
What is the grammatical tense (past, present)? Morphemes can also be prefixes or suffixes or
help to form compound words. In English, a morpheme can be in different forms. See Figure 3
for some different forms of morphemes in English. Click here to view Figure 3.

Orthographic representation
When we learn to read, we connect words we know to visual patterns in our script. All words
we can read have a certain look that we get used to and recognize over time. Orthographic
representation is at the third level in our model. Phonology is at the base. Meaning connects
onto sound when we learn a language. Orthographic representation is at the top.
As seen in Figure 1, languages around the world are represented using different scripts. Some
are written in letters, like English. Some are written using more complex visual symbols, like
Hindi. In Module 2, we will see how orthographic representations vary in different scripts or
writing systems.
Perhaps the best example of how orthographic representation works is by
comparing homophones. Homophones are words that sound the same but have different
meanings. These differences are reflected in their different spellings. For example, “to,” “too,”
and “two” all sound the same but are written differently. The same is true for “by,” “bye,” and
“buy.”

Automatization or speed
Along with the sound (phonology), meaning, and orthographic representation of words, we
also need to talk about automatization, or speed. In order to read quickly or fluently, we have
to reach a certain level of speed. Beginning readers are often very slow to recognize patterns
on a page. They have to recognize all of the visual information on the page, put it together,
and recognize the word. Thus, “b-i-t” spells “bit.” Combining these three letter sounds can be
slow and difficult.
There are many processes that are very slow and difficult at first and that, with practice, we get
faster at. Learning to button a button or to tie our shoelaces are examples. The steps are slow
at first and then become almost automatic later. We talk about this as speed, automatization,
or fluency, in reading.

Visual-motor skill
A final aspect of learning to write a word is visual-motor skill. Children learn to write by making
marks on a page, typically with a pen and paper. Eye-hand coordination is needed in order to
make sure that the marks look like a real word. This is a special step that is involved in spelling
but not in reading.

Conclusion
To summarize, we have highlighted the central features of learning to read (and to write)
words. The first is phonology. Phonology involves recognition of speech sounds. Speech
sounds occur at different levels, such as phonemes, syllables, or others. The second is the
recognition of the meaningful units of words. Words are made up of morphemes. Morphemes
can indicate a lot of information about words, including indicating if words are singular or
plural; if they are masculine or feminine. Morphemes can also be prefixes or suffixes or help to
form compound words. The third is orthographic representation. This is the visual pattern of
the word involving a particular script. In different languages, this will involve letters, syllable
units, radicals or strokes, diacritics or other marks, and other features. Putting sound,
meaning, and visual information together quickly is important. To do this, we need to practice
in order to attain fluency, or automatization. Finally, in order to learn to spell, we must learn
eye-hand coordination. This helps us to write words in the script that we have learned.
Module 2: How Languages are
Represented in Writing Systems
Around the World
A writing system is a family of scripts that share a common focus. There are different writing
systems or scripts around the world. Different writing systems may require somewhat different
skills to learn to read and to write them. For example, what is useful for learning to write in
Korean Hangul might be different from what is useful in learning to write in Hindi. This is
because scripts around the world are different in terms of how phonology, meaning, and
orthographic representations are written down. To understand this better, we will first look at
different features of scripts. Then, we will introduce different types of writing systems around
the world.

Features of Writing Systems

Visual Symbols and Diacritics
Words are written with different visual symbols or graphemes using different lines, curves,
dots, and other symbols. These written words represent spoken words. If you are reading this
now, then you know that the English words that you are reading are made of visual symbols
called letters. When these letters are put together, they make up words. Other languages do
not use an alphabet, but use other types of visual symbols. Later you will see examples of
these in Chinese, Japanese Kana, Korean Hangul, and Indic writing.
Another unique feature of some writing systems is their extensive use of diacritics. Diacritics
are signs, written above, below, or through letters or syllables to show a change in meaning
and sound. Arabic, Thai, and Vietnamese (which is written in the Roman alphabet), as well as
Indian aksharas, use diacritics a lot. English does not. See Figure 1 for some examples of
diacritics in different scripts. Click here to view Figure 1.

General Differences among Scripts

Writing systems can be generally defined as how the written language is represented in
linguistic units. Is the smallest written unit at the letter level, or at the syllable level, or at the
morphemic level? New research helps us look at these classifications differently. For example,
English, Spanish, German, and Arabic are all classified as alphabetic writing systems.
However, there are many differences among these systems. English writing is considered to
be deep or opaque (or inconsistent) due to a lack of correspondence between letters
(graphemes) and sounds (phonemes). English is very hard to learn to read and write! In
contrast, Spanish is a transparent (or consistent) system due to a close correspondence
between the letters and sounds. It is relatively easy to read and write.
Arabic is very different. First of all, there is a difference between spoken Arabic and written
Arabic. Also, after about second grade or so, markings (diacritics) for most vowels are not
included. Thus, CT could be CAT, CUT, or COT, based on the context. Also, Arabic letters
may take a different form depending on whether they appear at the beginning of the word,
middle or final position of the word. Some letters can join with other letters, and some cannot.
Some letters may join with other letters only in certain positions. Furthermore, Arabic (like
Hebrew) is written from right to left, whereas English and Spanish are written from left to right.
So, even though Arabic, English, Spanish, and German are all alphabetic writing systems,
they are not the same.
Thus, even though many languages may be grouped in one category such as an alphabetic or
syllabic writing system, there are a lot of features to consider. As many as 10 different
categories were suggested to classify the writing systems. We won't be able to talk about all of
these categories in detail here. Just remember that scripts could have differences in their
representation of linguistic units, directionality of text, and consistency of symbol-sound (or
grapheme-phoneme) relationships.
Below we will introduce five types of writing systems.

Writing Systems Around the World

Writing system 1: Alphabetic
A first system is the alphabetic writing system. The alphabetic writing system includes many
Indo-European languages such as German, Italian, and English. Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek
are other alphabetic systems. Alphabetic scripts make use of a set of letters that represent
speech sounds. Most alphabets contain between 20 and 30 letters. For example, there are 26
letters in the English alphabet. There are 28 in Arabic, and 22 in Hebrew.
WATCH: As mentioned earlier, different alphabetic writing systems have important differences
with each other. In the following video clip, Prof. Karin Landerl talks about the similarities and
differences between German and English. (Approximately 1 minute)
Click here to see the video.
WATCH: Many alphabetic scripts use both letters and diacritics, just like Arabic. In the
following video clip, Prof. Elinor Saiegh-Haddad talks about Arabic and the use of diacritics.
(Approximately 1.5 minutes) Click here to see the video.

Writing system 2: Kanji/Chinese

The second family of scripts is Chinese, or Japanese Kanji. In this script, each unique unit of
writing is known as a character. In Chinese, one character usually also represents one syllable
and one morpheme. Therefore, Chinese is referred to as morphosyllabic. The basic written
unit may be at the syllable level, but it contains meaning (morpheme). In Figure 2, you can see
examples of Chinese characters that represent one syllable and one morpheme each. Click
here to view Figure 2.
Furthermore, Chinese is made up of at least 1,000 different radicals. Radicals make up the
different characters used in Chinese. You will learn about two types of Chinese radicals in the
next section. In Chinese, strong skills in noticing small visual differences in writing are needed.
See Figure 3 for some examples of Chinese characters that look very much alike but are
actually different from each other. Do you notice the differences between them? Click here to
view Figure 3.
Another interesting about Chinese is that it has many examples of homophones. In spoken
language, the words sound the same. This is like the examples of to, too, and two in English.
In Chinese, in writing, you can tell the words apart because they are represented by different
characters. See Figure 4 for different forms of homophones in Chinese. Click here to view
Figure 4.

Writing system 3: Japanese Kana

Japanese Kana is a third system of writing. Each kana represents a sound in the Japanese
language. In most cases, this is a vowel (like お or /o/) or a CV syllable (consonant vowel, like
も or /mo/). Unlike the syllables in Korean Hangul (see #4) or the Indic writing systems (see
#5), kana characters do not always give clues about the individual phonemes contained within
the syllables, so kana may have to be learned as whole units or through memorization. For
these reasons, Japanese Kana is considered a syllabic writing system. In Japan, children
learn to read Japanese Kana first before learning to read in Kanji, which is similar to Chinese
characters. See Figure 5 for examples of words written in two types of Japanese Kana:
hiragana and katakana. Click here to view Figure 5.

Writing system 4: Korean Hangul

Korean Hangul is a fourth writing system. It is referred to as an alphasyllabary. It has this
name because the syllables are made up of individually identifiable phonemes within them,
unlike Japanese Kana. Letters representing consonant and vowel sounds are combined into
syllable blocks called Gulja. This is a unique writing system in the world. It is quite easy to
learn to read. See Figure 6 for an example of a word written in Korean Hangul. Click here to
view Figure 6.
WATCH: In the following video clip, Prof. Jeung-Ryeul Cho provides an introduction to Korean
Hangul. (Approximately 1.5 minutes) Click here to see the video.

Writing system 5: Indic writing system

A fifth writing system is the Indic writing system. This writing system is used in and around the
Indian subcontinent and other southeast Asian countries. Some examples include Tamil,
Sinhala, and Marathi. The basic unit of the Indic writing system is referred to as an akshara.
An akshara is arranged with the basic vowels represented first and then the consonant
syllables with the inherent vowel. Aksharas have some unique properties that make them
different from the other types of scripts. For example, unlike Japanese Kana, the sound can be
identified within the syllable. Also, unlike Korean Hangul, the vowel symbol is not added
separately but is built into the syllable. One akshara can be a CV, CCV, or CCCV syllable. The
name of the akshara is also its sound. What you see is what you read. Aksharas are
transparent both for reading and writing. However, aksharas are visually complex. For
example, four phonemes/sounds can be represented in one akshara, as in ‘sthree’ (lady).
Even a single dot can change the sound of the akshara [e.g., ರ (ra) vs. ರ (da)]. The length of
the line can also change the sound [ರ (o) vs. ರ (ba)]. Aksharas in most of the languages are
written in a curved round shape, perhaps due to the early practice of writing on palm leaves
with a stylus. It may take about 4-5 years of formal instruction to master the skills needed to
read aksharas. See Figure 7 for examples of different types of Indic writing systems. Click
here to view Figure 7.
WATCH: In the following video clip, Prof. R. Malatesha Joshi provides an introduction to
reading aksharas. (Approximately 4 minutes)
Click here to see the video.

Conclusion
The requirements of learning to read and to write in your own script vary. Special properties of
your script might be at the phonological, morphological, or orthographic levels. Writing
systems can be different in the visual symbols that they use, including diacritics. There are
also important differences in terms of the direction of writing and how easy it is to learn the
sounds that the visual symbols represent.
It is impossible to cover all the specific aspects of reading and writing that are unique to your
language and script. All we can do is point out here that different writing systems have
different requirements and simply name a few. Can you give an example of a word in your
language/script and what is special about how to write it?
Module 2: Learning Letters and
Other Visual Symbols
Beginning readers start by recognizing the different visual symbols in their writing system. This
could be a small or big number, depending on the script. Children learning alphabetic writing
systems only have to remember a small set of 20 to 30 symbols. Children learning Indic writing
systems have to remember up to 400, whereas Chinese children have to learn more than
1,000 different radicals.

In every script, children learn some basic symbols individually and probably also in context at
the same time. Some symbols are learned as part of a whole. For example, around the world,
children learn the symbols of their name early. Or they might learn “C-A-T spells “cat’” without
fully understanding what “C,” “A,” or “T” are at the beginning. Children often see print around
them. Children will notice signs or words on cell phones or printed paper. Many young children
think that they can read “Coke" (Coca-Cola). When they see a red can with white letters, they
may recognize it as the drink called “Coke.” They cannot read “Coke” in other contexts but
only when it is printed on a real Coke can. But seeing words in the home or on signs or in the
supermarket is all part of learning to read.
Such experiences can help children to understand basic ideas about print. For example, in
some places, print is read from left to right. In other places, it is read from right to left or top to
bottom. Another example is that page 1 comes before page 2 in a book. These experiences
are also important in teaching children that learning to read is useful and important. When
children realize that reading will help them to learn and to communicate, they are likely to be
more interested in it.

Learning letters and other visual symbols around the world

English alphabet

How do children learn letters? In some societies, children learn a rhyme or a song related to
their alphabet. For example, if they are learning English, children often learn the “ABC song.”
This song is simply the 26 letters of the alphabet in order and set to music. Children like to
sing it.
The song likely helps them memorize the letters in order. The names of the letters are helpful
for learning to read and to write. In English, letter names are different from letter sounds. In
some places, letter names and letter sounds are the same. For example, in the Maori
language, the letter name is the letter sound.
We know a few more things about the English alphabet. First, children, at the beginning,
usually learn the first and last letters of the alphabet better than the ones in the middle. For
example, “A,” “B,” and “C,” as well as “X,” “Y,” and “Z” are all learned pretty early. Letters such
as “G” and “J” are learned a bit later, usually. Second, this pattern is true in general, but the
letters in a child’s name are usually learned faster, no matter what they are. A child named
“Juan” will learn the letter “J” very fast! Children usually learn the sounds made by letters that
start their names best. For example, the letter “T” starts with the /t/ sound. This makes it easier
to learn that “T” says /t/. Other letters that start with their sounds include B, D, K, and P.
Letters that end with their names such as M, N, and L are a bit harder to learn. Third, letters
that are visually confusable or look similar to each other, such as “p,” “q,” “b,” and “d” take
longer to learn to recognize and to write correctly. Say the letter names out loud so you could
hear the /t/ at the start of “T” and the /m/ at the end of “M”.
These ideas can help you think about how to teach beginning literacy. You can assume
children will have more difficulty learning the letters in the middle of the alphabet. They will
more easily learn the letters in their own name. They will make some errors related to visual
confusability. They will be able to link the sounds to letters that start their names. You might
want to spend more time on letters that are harder and less time on those that are easier.
WATCH: Letter knowledge in other alphabetic writing systems could be taught differently. In
the following video, Prof. Karin Landerl mentions that children in Germany and Austria learn
letter-sound relationships first before the letter sequence (ABCDE...) and letter names.
(Approximately 1 minute) Click here to see the video.

Chinese
The Chinese writing system is very different. In Chinese, there are two types of radicals.
Radicals are the components of Chinese characters. The two types
are semantic and phonetic radicals. Broadly speaking, semantic radicals indicate the meaning
of the word, while phonetic radicals indicate the sound of the word. One common way of
teaching radicals is to highlight the shared and unique radicals in different words. For example,
take a look at Figure 1. The Chinese character on the left (笆) means “bamboo strip” and the
one of the right (疤) means “scar”. But take a look at the yellow part in the two characters.
They are the same. The yellow part is the phonetic radical (巴). It indicates that the sound of
both characters is "bā". The other part of each character is a semantic radical. They are
different. The semantic radical then gives clues to the meaning of the character. For example,
the semantic radical of 笆 (bamboo strip) is “⺮” which means “bamboo”. The semantic radical
of 疤” (scar) is “疒” which can be roughly translated as “illness.” The fact that there are at least
1,000 different radicals to learn means that learning to read and to write Chinese is a big
challenge. When children can recognize the radicals that are the same and different in
different characters, this helps them to learn to read. For example, Chinese dictionaries that
are organized by grouping characters based on semantic or phonetic radicals are helpful for
children.

Japanese kana
As mentioned in the earlier section, Japanese children first learn Japanese kana, which
consist of both hiragana and katakana characters. To do this, children who are learning
Japanese kana must remember the syllable sound that goes with every character. In Japan,
children learn to memorize the pronunciation of Japanese kana through songs such as the
AEIOU Hiragana song:
This song contains 45 different syllables. Other diacritics also help in reading of kana. But
memorization via song is a good start.

Korean Hangul
The basic alphabet of Korean Hangul has 10 vowels and 14 consonant letters. These vowels
and consonants are combined into 140 syllables that are arranged into syllable blocks called
Gulja. Children are taught this system in different ways. Korean children might focus on
syllables using a syllable chart that shows these combinations of vowels and consonants but
others learn the individual phonemes first. If you're interested, a complete example of a
Korean syllable chart can be accessed
here: https://modernseoul.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/korean-alphabet-chart-modern-
seoul.pdf (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.).
WATCH: Prof. Jeung-Ryeul Cho describes 3 teaching methods for learning Korean Hangul,
including syllable charts. (Approximately 2.5 minutes) Click here to see the video.

Akshara system
The akshara system appears to be learned on some different levels as well. Phoneme and
syllable units can both be recognized and taught. Children must also pay attention to different
diacritics and small visual changes. In some aksharas, children need to learn up to 400
different visual symbols. The aksharas that are more visually complex and more confusing to
write are harder to learn for children. This means that it can be quite useful for children to
practice visual matching and copying tasks to help them to get used to the writing system.

Writing systems with diacritics

We learned earlier that diacritics are marks used in certain languages to indicate a change of
sound or meaning in a word. Around the world, they have very different forms, such as straight
or curved marks. Scripts may have many of them, as in some aksharas, or relatively few, as in
English. In Arabic and Hebrew, some of these are taught to beginning readers to distinguish
vowels. Later, these diacritics are taken away. Adult readers do not use these diacritics.
WATCH: Hebrew shares many similarities with Arabic, including its use of diacritics. Prof.
David Share talks about the use of diacritics to guide beginning readers of Hebrew.
(Approximately 1.5 minutes) Click here to see the video.

Conclusion
What is common for all writing systems is a set of symbols, either small, medium, or large, to
be learned by children. These must be memorized and applied to word reading. Around the
world, adults use different ways to help beginning readers to remember these basic symbols
such as songs, charts, learning letter-sound relationships, grouping characters that are similar
to each other, copying, and diacritics.

Module 2: From Visual Symbols to

Word Recognition
Our next reading is about how children go from recognizing visual symbols to recognizing
words. You can read the text below, or you can watch this video animation (12:41) of the same
reading.

Reading requires explicit instruction

Children are capable of understanding and speaking languages quickly. Yet, learning to read
is not as easy for children. It is hard for children to learn to read without being taught. In most
cases, adults need to show them how to do it.

Children begin by learning the basic visual symbols in their language. Children must then
understand how these visual symbols come together to form words. Learning to read words on
a page is called word recognition. There are two levels to this kind of understanding. On one
level, children can use their phonological skills to make connections between sound and print.
On another level, children develop the sense of how a word should be written. This ability to
recognize words visually, or using visual-print information, is calledorthographic processing.
Both phonological skills and orthographic processing are important for children to read and
write words. How can you help them develop these skills? It is important to adjust your
techniques to match children’s skills. You will know what helps children partly based on your
own experiences. It is also important to pay attention to what is suitable to your script.
Here are some examples of techniques used to help children to read and to write:

Making sound-print connections: Phonics

For most scripts, teaching phonics is important. Phonics basically means that the symbol-
sound correspondences are learned systematically. This could be at the syllable or phoneme
level. Korean Hangul, aksharas, and Chinese characters are probably all learned more at the
syllable than the phoneme level. Some other languages may emphasize the phoneme level.
For example, in many African languages, such as Cinyanja, the relationships between letters
and sounds are consistent, so awareness of phoneme sounds is important. In English, the
phoneme level is important, but so is the syllable level and other units such as the rime unit.
For example, we memorize “ought” as in “brought,” “sought,” and “fought.” You will learn more
about different levels of phonological awareness (syllable, onset-rime, and phoneme) in
Module 3.
To become a good reader, it is important to know the basic rules of phonics in your writing
system. Rules are helpful because children can be taught how reading in their language works
some or most of the time. It is better to teach rules, even if these rules don’t apply all the time.
When children know the rules, they don’t have to memorize how to read each word correctly.
For example, the letter “p” usually makes the /p/ sound. This could help children learn to read
English words such as “pat,” “pitch,” and “flap.”
Children who are taught phonics are better readers and spellers. When children know the
rules, then they can remember more. In many scripts and languages, there are also
exceptions. An exception word does not fit the rules. In English, “pint” and “know” are
exception words. Once children know some rules, they can learn the exceptions too. Teach
the symbol-sound correspondences that are easiest first. This will help children to feel
confident and remember more early.

WATCH: Prof. Karin Landerl emphasizes the importance of 'sounding out' or applying letter-
sound correspondences for learning to read in German. (Approximately 1.5 minutes) Click
here to see the video.

Making visual-print connections: Orthographic processing

How do you know if a word "looks" right? Even very young children can sometimes spot when
words look like they could be written in their language or script. In experiments, a child asked
to pick which word is more ‘wordlike’ tends to select the one that fits the rules of her language
more than 50% of the time. For example, given a choice between these two (“ssgeit” vs.
“gelitare”), a child is more likely to pick “gelitare” as a possible real word. Why? In English, “ss”
cannot begin a word.
Even if we know the rules of a language, we cannot rely on symbol-sound associations only. In
English, we learn the rime segment “ought” as in “brought,” “sought,” or “fought.” If we only
used symbol-sound associations, we would pronounce “ought” in different ways. It looks like
“ow-guh-huh-t”. Furthermore, we would spell words incorrectly. “Wenzday” seems like a better
way to spell “Wednesday,” and “neumonia” is better than “pneumonia.” The word for an
ancient Egyptian king, a “pharaoh,” should be spelled “fairo,” but it is not. This is why
orthographic processing skills are also important for reading and writing.
There are many ways that children can practice their orthographic skills to remember what
words look like visually. Here are just some of them.

Memorization
Memorization can be used to learn letters or other visual symbols as well as characters or
words. Find fun ways to memorize! One way to memorize is to use flash cards. In Figures 1, 2
and 3, words are paired with pictures. This helps children with sound and meaning. Click here
to see Figures 1, 2, and 3.

Visualization
Children can read and write words when adults give them clues about the shapes of letters. A
Spanish adult could say that the letter “M” looks like two mountains put together. Visualization
is a very common teaching method in Chinese. Some Chinese characters were created to look
like some things in real life. An adult can give children clues about the shape of the word
“mountain (山)” by showing pictures of a mountain. Both this character and M can remind us of
mountains through visualization. See Figure 4 for an example of visualization in Chinese and
in alphabetic scripts.

Copying
Adults help children to write by giving them examples to copy. In alphabetic systems, younger
children trace dotted lines to write letters in words. In Chinese, there are thousands of
characters. You need to know about 3,000 characters to read a newspaper. Copying practice
is used to help Chinese children remember these characters better. But it is also important to
remember certain rules of writing in Chinese. Younger Chinese children are often asked to
copy or trace words in a specific stroke order. Numbers indicate which step the line or curve is
written in. Stroke order is an important aspect of education in this writing system. Figure 5
shows what these could look like.
Children can also copy just by using their finger. Use your finger to write a grapheme on the
table. Then ask the child to do the same. In this case, they will not see the grapheme after you
write it. They have to remember what you did. Copying is important everywhere, but especially
in China, India, and elsewhere where the writing system is very visually complicated.

Activities that focus on word spelling

A focus on the spelling of words is important to develop word recognition. One way is looking
at homophones and asking children to pick the right one. For example, ask them this question:
"What is the opposite of "yes"? Is it "no" or "know"? Children need to know how the word is
written in order to answer this correctly.
Dictation tests are traditional ways of practicing spelling. Ask children to write down the words
you read to them in a sentence. This helps them to recall how to write them. But be careful!
One thing that teachers should NOT do is to provide a mix of real and false versions of the
same word and ask the child to pick the correct one. An example would be the following:
Select the correct spelling of this word: 1) embarrass 2) embarass 3) embarras. The problem
with this sort of exercise is that it confuses everyone. You should try only to give the child the
correct models of words so that he or she does not confuse them.
WATCH: Adults use different ways to help children spell words. In this video from Zambia, the
adult writes the word "inyeleti" on the page. As the child spells the word, the adult gives
guidance on the letters and sounds that the word has. (Approximately 1 minute) Click here to
see the video.
A great way to make writing fun is to ask children to write with different materials. They might
like to write with chalk, a new pen, crayons, or with paint. You can also ask them to write in the
sand or on another child’s back. You can ask one child (A) to write on another child’s (B) back.
Child A should not tell Child B what she wrote. Then Child B has to guess the word or letter. It
is easier to memorize words or graphemes if they are meaningful. Be creative in making them
meaningful.
Another way is to demonstrate how different arrangements of print can lead to big confusion. It
could be helpful to show how misspellings can signal changes in meanings. An anagram is a
word that can be rearranged to make other words. Examples are “ate-tea-eat” or “won-now-
own” or “stop-pots-opts-tops-spot”. Making a game of spelling anagrams might get children to
understand the importance of correct spelling.
Other activities that can help make spelling better are crossword puzzles or word searches.
For young children, word shapes or asking children to fill up each box with one letter might
help. In Figure 6, you can see that the words “pit”, “good”, "bug", "clue", and "train" have
distinct shapes.

Summary
There are many ways to help children to read and to write. One way is to help them develop
symbol-sound (sound-print) connections. Another way is by developing children's orthographic
or visual-print skills. Both are important skills for children to master. Phonics, memorization,
visualization, copying, and spelling-focused activities are useful teaching techniques. Some
techniques are better than others in different situations. Always pay attention to what is helpful
for children at their age and their level of reading skills.
Module 3: What is Phonological
Awareness?
In this module, we will focus on phonology or phonological processing skills that are important
for learning to read. As we learned in Module 2, children need to connect print and sound
information to read words. But how do children become better at phonological processing?
You can read the text below, or you can watch this video (4:26), which contains the same text.
There are two types of phonological processing skills. One is the ability to pay attention to
smaller speech sounds that make up words. This is called phonological awareness. Another
is the ability to pay attention to the sounds that change how a whole word sounds by adding
stress or tone. We will give you many examples of these skills in this module. In this section,
we focus on phonological awareness.

Levels of phonological awareness

There are different levels of phonological awareness: syllable, onset-rime, and phoneme.
Children find it easiest to focus on syllables. Syllables are easier than phonemes. Another way
of saying this is that bigger sounds (syllables) are easier for children to process than smaller
sounds (phonemes).
Between syllables and phonemes, there is also the level of onset-rime.Onsets are the initial
sound of the word. This could be a consonant (like d in ‘doll’) or a consonant cluster (where
two or three consonants appear together, like dr in ‘drip’). In short words like ‘doll’ and
‘drip,’ rime is composed of the sounds that follow the onset. See Figure 1 to see how words
are segmented into onset-rime units.
Phonological awareness is an important component of learning to read across scripts.
Children who experience reading difficulties often have difficulties in phonological awareness
as well. But there are differences in phonological awareness that could be seen in children
around the world. For example, Italian-speaking children can be quicker to develop phoneme-
level awareness than English-speaking children. This is because letter-sound relationships in
their language are easier to learn than in English. Phonological awareness in English can be
especially difficult because there are many consonant clusters. It is hard to hear the individual
sounds in such clusters. Other languages, such as Chinese or Bemba, have few or no
consonant clusters.
The experience of Korean-speaking children is also a bit different. In Korean, words are
divided into the body and coda. Body includes the beginning of the word until the vowel
sound. The coda is the part of the word after the vowel. In Korean, it is easier to divide ‘cat’
into ‘ca’ (body) and ‘t’ (coda) than into ‘c’ (onset) and ‘at’ (rime), as is more typical in English.
This could be because Korean children hear more words that have the same body than the
same rime. Because Korean children are used to dividing words by body and coda, they will
find it harder to do activities that ask them to delete just the first sound or the onset of a word.
Hebrew-speaking children might also prefer dividing words by body and coda rather than by
onset and rime.

Module 3: What are Stress and

Tone?
Phonological processing can also refer to an awareness of speech sounds across a word or
phrase. This can refer to the stress placed on syllables in a word (lexical stress) or the pitch
level of a syllable in a word (lexical tone). Languages like Italian, Spanish, Greek, and English
have stress. Languages such as Cantonese and Mandarin have tone. Some languages like
Bemba and Thai have both.

Lexical stress
Different languages have different types of stress. In Finnish, words are almost always
stressed on the first syllable. In Polish, stress is usually on the second-to-the-last syllable. In
Greek, diacritics are used to show where the stress is located in a word. In Italian, diacritics
are not normally used in writing. Even varieties of English can have differences in stress. For
example, British English speakers say ‘A-dult’ but American English speakers say ‘a-DULT’.
Stress matters for meaning. Words can look the same but have a different pronunciation and
meaning because of stress. See Figure 1 for some examples in Filipino and in English.
Stress can sometimes differentiate between a noun and a verb (e.g. a PRO-test versus to pro-
TEST; a PER-mit versus to per-MIT). Indeed, in English, words that are two syllables are
usually stressed on the first syllable when they are nouns or adjectives (like "paper" or
"pretty"), and on the second syllable when they are verbs (like "forbid" and "untie"). Stress also
matters because stressed syllables are usually spelled better.

Lexical tone
Lexical tone is part of languages in many places such as East and Southeast Asia, sub-
Saharan Africa, and some indigenous communities in Africa. At least 40% of the world’s
languages use tones to convey meaning. Children who have difficulties in discriminating one
tone from another have more trouble reading. Tones are crucial for distinguishing the
pronunciations and meanings of words. We know a lot about the importance of tone for
reading especially in Chinese languages. Check the links in the box below for more
information.
Children who have difficulties in detecting either stress or tone have more trouble reading
because they are less able to match the word or syllable to its written form.

Module 3: Helping Children

Develop Phonological Awareness
Much of word reading involves mapping print to speech sounds. We do this at the phoneme,
onset-rime, syllable, or other (e.g., coda) levels. How we do this depends on what language
and script we are learning to read. When children have difficulty with reading, one important
way to help them is to reinforce their speech sound sensitivity. Do they notice the sounds?
Can they tell that one sound is different from another? If you can make up games that focus on
speech sounds in your language, this will help your students. Struggling readers need a lot of
games and exercises to help them focus on sounds.

Focusing on sounds in the environment

A really easy way to start to think about sounds is to focus on sounds in the environment. For
example, you can talk about the sounds that animals make. Do you know the song called "Old
MacDonald Had a Farm" (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.? This is a good
teaching song. It teaches a variety of animal sounds, and it is fun to sing.
"Old MacDonald had a farm"; Example: duck
Old MacDonald had a farm, EE-I-EE-I-O.
And on that farm he had a duck, EE-I-EE-I-O.
With a quack quack here and a quack quack there
Here a quack, there a quack, everywhere a quack quack
Old MacDonald had a farm, EE-I-EE-I-O.
In every language, animal sounds are different. It is fun for children to talk about them and to
make the sounds. It is also useful for them to see how these sounds are written or spelled.
Seeing and writing sounds can help to strengthen the development of basic phonological
sensitivity skills. Another fun activity for children is to recognize and to write onomatopoeias.
Onomatopoeia is a word that imitates or suggests the source of the sound that it describes.
Common onomatopoeias include animal sounds, machine noises, and human sounds. Figure
1 lists some of these for English. Click here to view Figure 1.
Here are some suggestions for activities that you could do in the classroom. Can you think of
ways to make these activities work in your language?

Classroom activities
“Little Detectives”
Demonstrate to children how daily life materials, e.g. comics, advertisement, package,
headlines, poems, etc., use onomatopoeia. In short, discuss how onomatopoeias are applied
in different situations. Of course, the internet is also a great resource for onomatopoeias.
Encourage children to keep track of onomatopoeias in their own environment. Compare
sounds in your native language and English (or other languages). Consider how to write them
using your writing system too.

Same or Different?
A direct way to emphasize speech sounds is to ask children to compare them. For example,
you can ask whether each pair of words begins with the same sound or a different sound.
Remember, you are asking them to think about the sounds, not the appearance of the words.
Do these pairs of words start with the same sound or a different one?
Bed and bug (same)
Fin and fast (same)
Goat and jam (different)
Sip and son (same)
Game and giant (different—remember to focus on the sound, not the letter)
Simple and cereal (same—remember again to focus on the sound, not the letter)
You can make up your own exercise like this for your students in your language.

Poetry
Poems that rhyme are very helpful to children’s sense of speech sounds. Rhyming poems
make language and speech sounds easy to predict. Consider this silly poem:
John is glad today.
It is the end of May.
He can go out and play.
He has a holiday!
In this simple poem, each line ends with the rime of “ay.” This makes the poem easy to read.
Beginning and struggling readers can use this to predict the sentence. The poem also
sensitizes children to the “ay” sound.

Alliteration
Apart from whole-word sensitivity, children should be trained to recognize the onsets, or first
sounds, of words. This sensitivity is usually helpful for word reading, especially in languages
such as English which divide words into phonemes. A good way to focus on onsets of words is
to use alliteration.
Alliteration refers to the repetition of a particular sound in the first syllables of a series of words
and/or phrases. It has historically developed through poetry. Alliteration is commonly used in
modern music, as well as advertisements, business names, comic or cartoon characters, and
common expressions. Some common expressions that make use of alliteration are “right as
rain,” “busy as a bee,” “jump for joy,” “labor of love,” and “good as gold.” From Disney, we
have “Donald Duck,” “Peter Pan,” and “Mickey Mouse” as examples of alliteration. It can be
fun to have children make up names or products that make use of alliteration. Here is one
activity:
Recently, Mr. Rabbit opened a supermarket in the center of the city. He would like to attract as
many customers as possible. Would you help to name his products, using alliteration, so that
they will leave strong impressions on the customers?
Compare children’s responses and vote on the most creative or best ones.
Alliteration is also fun and challenging in the form of “tongue twisters.” These are phrases that
make use of alliteration. When the alliteration is too much, they are difficult to say. One
example is “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.”
To make the activity more challenging (and fun!), you can also ask children to read and create
their own tongue twisters with alliterations.
e.g. A: An ape ate Ace’s acorn.
B: Baby Bobby's bed bounced better by bedtime before Billy bounced.
C: Cory collected cola cans counting continuously.
Check the internet for many classic alliteration poems as well, including “Betty Botter” and
“Silly Sally.”

Module 3: b4 u txt - Is Texting

Good for Children?
Phonological awareness and text messaging
Many parents and teachers wonder about the effects of texting on children. When we text, we
often want to communicate information quickly. We write in a way that is fast and sometimes
not correct. Here are some texting abbreviation examples in English (with the correct
wordings in parentheses):

"Text abbreviations" by Athena Siu-yee Law and

R U O K? (Are you okay?)

Gr8 job (Great job)
B4 u go (Before you go)
I luv U (I love you)
Sometimes adults worry that texting this way may cause children to spell more poorly. What
do the experts say? Researchers in this area find that children who use more texting
abbreviations tend to be better with language and spelling. Actually, being good with texting
abbreviations seems to be a good thing. It shows that the child is flexible with language and
writing.
So feel free to ask children to play with texting abbreviations for fun once in awhile. It will not
hurt their reading or writing. Making up texts like these also requires that children have good
phonological sensitivity. They must be able to hear how sounds make up language.
Module 4: The Simple View of
Reading
The Simple View of Reading says that reading is made up of two important concepts. One is
word recognition. We have already talked about the early steps of developing word recognition
in Module 2 and the importance of phonological processing skills in Module 3. The other
important concept is oral language. Oral language is how we use spoken words to
communicate. A great way to boost children’s oral language skills is to read together.
One part of learning to read is knowing the meaning of vocabulary words in a story. Book
reading is a good way to help children to build their vocabulary knowledge. Book reading can
be done together or individually. Young children like to have someone read to them. Family,
friends, and teachers can all read with children. Older children might prefer to read on their
own. When children read new books, they are exposed to new things. Books present new
situations, new concepts, and new ideas. In books, the way ideas are expressed tends to be
different from how we talk in a normal conversation.
Reading is good for children. Books are exciting, but you can also read stories on the Internet
or in any other form of print. The more we read, the more we learn and understand. In this
module, we focus on ways in which children can improve oral language. Oral language
includes vocabulary knowledge, morphological awareness, and the ability to understand
meaning from language.

Module 4: A Focus on Meaning -

The Benefits of Dialogic Reading
It’s great when adults read with children, and often. It helps children become interested in
books and reading. It also helps them learn new words. But how we read with children also
matters.
Many adults read a storybook aloud while the child listens attentively. But children learn more
when adults encourage them to talk about what’s happening in the book too. We can do this
using the dialogic reading method.

Dialogic reading: the PEER sequence

Dialogic reading is a method where an adult asks questions to the child while reading a book.
When a child answers, the adult listens and adds more information to help him or her to learn
more. The adult also makes sure the child remembers what he/she learned. This type of
exchange is called the PEER sequence. P is for prompt, E is for evaluate, E is for expand and
R is for repeat. What do these steps mean? Read the descriptions below:

P – Prompt: The adult starts a conversation by asking a question or encouraging the child to
say something about the story. Read about the different CROWD prompts (below) for
examples of how to do this.
E – Evaluate: The adult evaluates the child's response. An adult might say, "Good!", "That's
right!", or "Let's see if you're right!"
E – Expand: The adult rephrases what the child said and adds more information to it.
R – Respond: The adult encourages the child to repeat the new information. This is to make
sure that the child learned what was said in the Expand step.

Dialogic reading: about CROWD prompts

In the first step of the PEER sequence, the adult asks questions or encourages the child to say
something about the story. Dialogic reading introduces five types of prompts that you can give
to children. Descriptions for each type of prompt are given below. To remember them easily,
just think of the acronym CROWD.
C – Completion: The adult starts a sentence but leaves a “blank” that the child will complete.
For example, the adult says, “The cat is wearing a ____,” and the child says “hat.” This is a
good prompt for books with rhymes and repetitive phrases.
R – Recall: The adult asks the child to remember what happened in a story that he/she
already read. This is a good prompt to use at the end of the story or before reading the book
for the second or third time. For example, “What happened to the crab in the story?” or “What
happened next?” This helps the child learn the sequences and events in stories.
O – Open-Ended Questions: The adult focuses on the pictures in the books. This is good
when the pictures have many objects or details. This is also good when the child knows the
story already. While looking at the picture, the adult can ask, “Tell me, what’s happening in this
picture?” or “Tell me a story about this page.” This helps the child express himself/herself more
freely.
W – Wh- Questions: These are “what,” “where,” “when,” “why,” or “how” questions. This
prompt can be used while looking at pictures in the book. Questions like these are good for
teaching new words. For example, the adult can point at an object and ask what it is called
(e.g., “an apple”). If the picture shows the characters in a certain place, the adult can ask
where they are (e.g., “a beach”).
D – Distancing: The adult connects the story with things that happened to the child in real life.
For example, if the story happened at a beach, the adult can ask, “Remember when we went
to the beach on Sunday? What did we pick up from the ground?” (e.g., sand, sea shells).
Some prompts are harder than others. Recall and distancing can be harder than completion,
open-ended questions, and wh- questions. Make sure to ask simple questions that children
can understand at their age. Listen carefully to what they like to talk about, and encourage
them to talk more!
In the following sections, we will share an example of a short storybook followed by ways to
apply dialogic reading techniques to this story. Then you will answer some questions to test
your understanding of dialogic reading techniques.

Module 4: Building Meaning

Through Morphological
Awareness
What is morphological awareness?
Morphological awareness helps children understand how words are formed through units of
meaning or morphemes. The ability to put together and take apart units of meaning enables
children to understand words in different forms. For example, it helps them tell the difference
between the meanings of "faints" (present tense verb) and "fainted" (past tense verb), "love"
(noun or verb) and "lovable" (adjective), and "starlight" and just "star" or just "light" on their
own.

When we talk about units of meaning, it is important to know four terms. These are root,
inflections, derivations, and compound words. We will first give examples in English, and then
we will give more examples in other languages:
A root is a word that carries the main unit of meaning. It cannot be divided into smaller
morphemes. In English, examples are “help” in unhelpful or “act” in acting.
Words can also have inflections. Inflections sometimes indicate tense (past, present, future),
gender (masculine, feminine), or other parts of grammar. In English, word endings like -s can
indicate a plural form of a noun. Examples are hats and apples. Word endings like -ed change
a verb to the past tense. Examples are walked and picked. Native speakers as young as 2-6
years old are good at learning inflections. Have you ever heard a child say, “I have two foots”
or “I goed to the store”? It might sound wrong, but it shows that children are learning some
rules of inflection.
Derivations happen when new words are formed from existing words. Usually, this is done by
adding prefixes and suffixes to change the meaning or grammatical category of a word. For
example, “unstoppable” is formed by adding the prefix un- and the suffix -able to the
word stop. Stop andunstoppable mean different things. English-speaking high school students
might try to learn Latin and Greek root words, as this helps in understanding the meaning of
many English words, such as microscope (micro means small) and hydrogen (hydro means
water).
Compound words are words that are combined to make new concepts. For example,
puttingfoot (the part of the body) and ball (the solid spherical object used for kicking, throwing,
or hitting in a game) together makes the word football (the game). The process of making
compound words is called lexical compounding.
Morphological awareness is important for learning new vocabulary words. It is important for
children to understand words that they might read for the first time. Children with strong
morphological awareness skills tend to have broader vocabularies and better reading skills
too.
Now let’s see how morphological awareness is important in non-English languages.

Morphological awareness across languages

Alphabetic languages
Just like in English, morphological awareness is important in languages such as German and
French. Some examples can be seen in Figures 1 and 2.
WATCH: Prof. Karin Landerl explains that while German is easy to learn to read through
sounding out, it is more difficult to read long words because of the rich morphological structure
of the language.
Inflections, derivations, and lexical compounding are also important in Filipino. Verb
forms are complicated and may involve prefixes, suffixes, and even infixes. Many adjectives in
Filipino are formed by adding ‘ma’ to a root word. There are also examples of compounding.
You can see some examples in Figure 3. It would be interesting to study morphological
awareness of children in this language. Unfortunately, we do not know of any studies that have
done this yet! Click here to see Figure 3.
Arabic and Hebrew use inflections to represent person, number, gender and time. Derivations
are used for nouns and verbs (see Abu-Rabia, 2007; Ravid & Schiff, 2006 for possible
examples). See Figure 4 for some examples in Arabic. Chinese

In Chinese, more focus is placed on understanding word meanings by looking at the structure
of words. Do you remember that semantic radicalsare the meaning components of Chinese
characters? For example, the semantic radical for mouth also appears in other “words” or
characters like“drink,” “sing,” and “kiss.” All of these are related to the mouth. Children who
pay attention to semantic radicals are usually better at reading. See Figure 5 for other
examples. Click here to see Figure 5.
Lexical compounding is another important aspect of learning Chinese. For example, in
Chinese, electric + brain together make the word forcomputer. This is helpful for children to
learn more complicated vocabulary words. See Figure 6 for some examples.
Conclusion
WATCH: Prof. David Share talks about the importance of morphological awareness across
different languages. (Approximately 3 minutes) Click here to see the video.
With phonological awareness, children learn to put together and take apart units of speech
sounds. With morphological awareness, children learn to put together and take apart units of
meaning. In different languages, inflections, derivations, and lexical compounding are used to
add more information to words or to create new meanings. Having good morphological
awareness is good for both vocabulary and for reading.

Module 4: Morphemes as Building

Blocks of Vocabulary Knowledge
Usually, children learn whole words first and then start to recognize the morphemes later.
From an early age, children’s morphological awareness helps them to learn new vocabulary
words. Similarly, children’s vocabulary knowledge helps them to have better morphological
awareness. Wecan improve vocabulary knowledge using morphological awareness. Here we
present two ways of doing so: word families and word chains.

Word families
One way is to teach word families. For example, you could teach all the words with a certain
morpheme in them at the same time. For exampleyou could teach word families for the root
"work": Unworkable, overworked, working, workforce, rework, worked, etc. You can also teach
any kind of root word in your language. In English, teachers sometimes teach Greek or Latin
roots because English has many of these. Here are some examples in Figure 1. Click here to
see Figure 1.
One creative way of presenting word families is through word matrices. Figure 2 below is an
example of the word family for 'work' as a word matrix.Click here to see Figure 2.
You can also play this as a game where you ask children to think of all the words that contain
a root in it. Let’s take the word “time.” How many words can you think of that contain this
word? Here is a start:
Timely, timed, times, untimed, daytime, nighttime, dinnertime, summertime, springtime,
wintertime, timetable, timer…

Word chains
Another thing you can try in your language is a word chain. It is not so easy to do in English.
To make a word chain, take the second morpheme in the word and make it the first one in a
new word. Here is an example:
Anywhere-wherever-evergreen-greenhouse-houseboat-boathouse-houseboy-boyfriend-
friendship-shipshape…
Here’s another example:
Snowman-manpower-powerboat-boatyard-yardstick-sticker (the last one is a derivation,
but it might still count!)
Can you make your own word families or word chains?
Module 4: Books Open Up a
World of Words
The relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension goes both ways.
When children know more vocabulary words, they are better at understanding what they read.
At the same time, when children read more, they tend to learn more vocabulary words and
ideas. A big part of reading comprehension is vocabulary knowledge. How can you help
children to select books to read that best match their skills?
When you choose a book for a child, keep in mind the 95% rule. This rule says that 95% of the
vocabulary words in a book should already be familiar to the child. If more than 5% of the
vocabulary words are new to the child, the child will have difficulty reading easily. Instead,
reading will be slow and difficult. This is because every time a new vocabulary word comes up,
the reader has to take time to understand what it means.
How can children learn new vocabulary words by reading? Three answers
are exposure, context, and derivations.

Exposure
The chances of a child learning a new word after seeing it once are less than 20%. Children
are more likely to learn the meaning of a new word when they see it several times. They need
multiple exposures to the word to learn it. This means that children should read texts that
make use of new words in multiple places. They might see it used in different books or in
different homework assignments or just in different sentences.

Context
Teachers can help learners understand word meanings by using the word in
different contexts. Here, “contexts” means different places or situations. These contexts
should be meaningful. Ideally, the rest of the sentence helps children understand what the
word means. Sometimes sentences can be structured to show what the word means.
Compare these two sentences, both using the word“injured.” Which one better helps the
reader know the meaning of this word?

1. The boy was injured, so his parents decided that he could not go to school.
2. Because her foot was injured, the girl could not walk but only hop on her other foot to
get home.

Both sentences are long. Both include some details. From both sentences, you might
understand that “injured” seems like a problem of some sort. However, Sentence 2 provides a
much better context. It helps you to understand the meaning of the word. From it, a child can
probably see that “injured” means something about pain, hurt, or damage.

Derivations

Another way to help readers understand new vocabulary words is to usederivations of these
new words. This helps us to fully understand the word meaning. A derivation is a different form
of the same word. To illustrate this point, we use the word “consider” in three different
derivations below. A dictionary definition of the word “consider” is “to think carefully about.”
This is a good start. A dictionary definition can help us understand a word meaning. However,
if we use the word in different sentences and in different forms, it helps us understand the
word better.

Putting them all together

Let’s look at some examples. These examples make use of the three ideas we presented
earlier. These sentences demonstrate exposure because we give three different sentences
using the same word. These sentences also demonstrate context because each sentence
provides some context as to the word meaning. Finally, these three sentences use three
different derivations of the word “consider.”

1. The teacher has to consider carefully whether to give the exam today or to change it to
tomorrow.
2. The teacher gave great consideration to the student’s argument that he did not cheat
to ensure that he would not punish him unfairly.
3. Because the rule was unfair to girls in the school, the principal reconsidered it and
finally changed the rule.

With three examples making use of the root word “consider,” a child might put the information
from context and derivations together to learn the basic idea of “consider” as “to think about.”

Conclusion
Children learn vocabulary in several ways. Try to remember these methods and use them in
your classroom. They can all help children improve vocabulary knowledge.
To summarize, vocabulary knowledge is better when children:

 Have exposure to new words several times (not just once)

 See words in varied contexts
 See words in different derivational forms
 Have an understanding of morphemes in words through root words.

Compiled by: Glades S. Garcia

#Dav.OrMOOCers
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