What helps learning to read?

 Surely many parents at home ask themselves this question: What helps learning to read?

The variables that effectively facilitate learning to read in children have been investigated. This is key to face, not only to teach reading, but above all, in order to prepare children to learn to read. 

In this article, specialists from village high school are going to present the variables that facilitate this learning.

The facilitators of reading learning 

We are going to see the variables that facilitate this learning of reading.

Phonological awareness 

The phonological awareness is the first variable that facilitates learning to read. The phonological awareness is the ability to understand that spoken discourse can be divided into smaller units (words, syllables, and phonemes) and to be able to manipulate those units. 

In practice, developing phonological awareness, as a way to facilitate learning to read, consists of carrying out activities such as the sample that we present below: 

• Break the words into syllables. 

• Segment the words of a sentence. 

• Verbally order the words to form a sentence. 

• Say words by eliminating initial or final syllables or phonemes. 

• Identify rhymes. 

• And many more.

The vocabulary

A second variable that facilitates learning to read is vocabulary development: "knowing the names of things." 

Knowledge of words has an influence on reading performance, since the more words you know, the easier it will be for you to recognize them, and also on comprehension. 

In addition, word knowledge is associated with another important variable for comprehension: the level of prior knowledge, which is also decisive for subsequent reading comprehension.

RAN tasks 

RAN tasks are Rapid Automated Naming tasks. These are activities to name pictures, colors, letters or numbers as fluently as possible. 

Authors such as Maryanne Wolf emphasize this facilitating variable. They point out how performing this type of task facilitates the subsequent development of reading fluency and speed.

Working memory

The influence of some cognitive abilities is also important, specifically working memory as one of the facilitating variables of learning to read. 

Working memory is one of the executive functions: it is a type of short-term memory responsible for retaining temporary information to solve a task or situation. For example, it is the type of memory that we use to solve mental calculation tasks. 

It is a decisive function in subsequent reading learning, related to reading comprehension since it is in charge of retaining the information that we are extracting from the text as we read.

The family literacy environment 

We are asking ourselves in this article what help learning to read. We have already named some important variables, but we leave for the end one that seems to be of decisive importance: the family literacy environment. 

Maryanne Wolf is one of the authors who talk about this variable and defines the family literacy environment as the variety of resources that parents offer regarding the development of reading, as well as certain parental skills that favor this development. 

It seems that the socio-family status, especially of the mother, has an important influence on later learning to read in the child. It seems to influence the richness and pace of vocabulary learning. 

In addition, carrying out certain activities with the boy or girl is also part of that family literacy environment. One of them is reading stories: reading tales or stories by a family member while the child listens. Also, you can teach the child where paragraphs begin, show him/her how some punctuation marks work, etc. In general, all activities related to letters and reading.

Teachers from elementary school show low and parents work together to help the students to meet their learning goals.