The Four-Pronged Approach to

Teaching Beginning Reading

The Four-Pronged Approach to Teaching Beginning
Reading:
1. Developing a Genuine Love for Reading (GLR)
2. Developing Critical and Creative Thinking Skills
(CT)
3. Grammar and Oral Language Development
(GOLD)
4. Transfer Stage (TS)
 GLR focuses on eliciting emotional response from
the readers – love for reading – and skills
development (vocabulary development, listening and
comprehension) The use of pre-reading activities that
activates the readers’ prior knowledge and help them
unlock their difficulties, goal setting, story reading,
and guided comprehension play an important role
here.
 CT aims to imparting the very message of the
reading text. The teacher tests and retests the
reader’s understanding through comprehension
questions that harness their critical thinking skills.
Creative reading exercises may be given to further
heighten the reader’s interpretative and intuitive
skills
 GOLD implicitly exposes students to forms of
structures – lexical, and syntactic – that are evident in
the texts read, thus allowing students to gain mastery
of structures (grammar awareness) of either Filipino
or English and oral language proficiency.
 TS ensures that the child is prepared for
beginning reading instruction of the transfer stage. It
focuses on word recognition, vocabulary expansion,
spelling and writing. The use of differentiated
instruction is of value in this prong for each learner or
group of learners has differing needs and varying
levels of understanding
 PRONG GOAL
Developing a Genuine Love for To inculcate enduring love and
Reading pleasure for reading
Developing Critical and Creative To cultivate the readers’ reflective,
Thinking Skills critical and creative acumen
Grammar and Oral Language To advance the readers’
Development grammatical competence and oral
language proficiency
Transfer Stage To advance readers’ phonetic
awareness, decoding, and
encoding skills
Other Approaches to Teaching
Beginning Reading
1. Basal Reader Approach – This is also known as skills
based approach. It aids readers to progress from the
part to the whole by advocating the acquisition of
competencies in a systematic order.
- Directed Reading Activity (DRA) is the usual
procedure followed in teaching: 1. preparation,
motivation, vocabulary 2. guided silent reading 3.
comprehension development 4. oral reading 5. follow
up practice.
2. Literature-based Aproach – This individualistic approach
puts premium on reading fiction and non fiction literature.
- it promotes the use of full-length literary pieces
chosen by the readers themselves. The selection comes
from different genres and students are advised to discuss
with their classmates the pieces they have read after
receiving the discussion prompts from their reading
teachers.
3. Language Experience Approach – This approach takes
into account the reader’s experiences as bases for choosing
reading materials. The readers are expected to write –
either individually or collectively - their own stories that
are product of their experiences.
- this approach underscores reading as only one part of
the language arts process.
4. Balanced Approach – This fuses skills development with
literature and language arts activities. It directs its attention
to the use of literature as anchor of classroom teaching. The
teacher’s task is to carefully plan and to choose literature
themes that fits the learner’s reading ability that will help
him/ her activate prior knowledge and connect it to the
text.
Write it Down:

Write the insights you have gotten from this lesson. What
did the lesson entice you to do? What new discoveries did
the lesson lead you to?