Is Reading a Natural Process for 3-5 Year Old Children?

Is reading a natural process? Have you ever wondered how a child learns to read? Adults often fail to realize that this is not a natural process. Reading is a process learned through the development of the child's ability to take spoken language create a relationship between that which the child learns and that which the child sees. Reading is a very complex set of learned responses to both sounds and sight. For example, when a child sees a cat, he responds, "cat." Yet, when a child sees the written word c a t, he must be able to distinguish both the shape and the sound of the letters.

Through this reading process, a set of skills are developed that require the child to use both critical and creative skills. The critical thinking skill is the recognition of the letter sound and the creative skill is the recognition of the shape of the letter. Both are necessary for a child to begin to read. These processes are called encoding and decoding. Encoding is spelling for writing and the skills used in encoding are developed alongside decoding skills. Decoding is the various skills a person uses to decipher a printed sentence into an understandable statement. Decoding means translating written words into the sounds and meanings of spoken words. Both are interchangeable and both are needed for a child to become a proficient or good reader.

A child who has been exposed to an extensive vocabulary learns from various resources and experiences to create meaning from both the spoken and the written word. The child's experience depends on his or her exposure to spoken and written language. The exposure allows the child to create meaning that is directly related to his or her experiences through the reading process.

But how does this relate to 3-5 year old and reading skills? When a child is learning to decode words, the child depends heavily on their exposure to the spoken word. For a five year old to be able to tackle the complex world of reading, this child must have a working vocabulary of 5,000 to 7,000 words in their oral vocabulary. This is in stark contrast to many urban children who enter kindergarten with a vocabulary of around 500 words. So we must ask ourselves, how will a child whose vocabulary consists of only 500 words be able to learn to read? The answer is-they can't. This is due to the extreme lack of vocabulary awareness. For a child to begin to grasp the concept of reading, the child must know and recognize a large amount of spoken words.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/6267571

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