Building Reading Skills from the Bottom Up

Proceedings of The 2nd Global Conference on Education and Teaching

Year: 2021

DOI:

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Building Reading Skills from the Bottom Up

Neil J Anderson, Aysara Otarova

 

ABSTRACT: 

A common instructional outcome of explicit instruction in a second language classroom is to facilitate the development of fluent readers; readers who can read at an appropriate rate with adequate comprehension. However, learning to read is challenging for many students and is even more so when the process is unclear. Building strong reading skills involves many different elements. One often overlooked element in second language reading instruction is building strong bottom-up reading processes. Bottom-up reading processes begin with the smallest units of language and build up from there: phonemic awareness, blending of sounds, sound/symbol knowledge, decoding skills, and sight word recognition. These processes are often classified as part of phonics instruction. To help readers be successful, the explicit instruction of bottom-up processes is essential. This session will introduce teachers to the rationale for explicit instruction in bottom-up reading processes. We will introduce you to a systematic approach for teaching these processes and provide an interactive tool for learning this approach.

keywords: Explicit; Phonics; Systematic.