Reading
Our brains are hard-wired to master spoken language, but learning to read is another story. Learning to read is a very complex skill — one of the most complex things that we ask our children to take on. And for many kids, it doesn’t come easily.
There are many reasons why children succeed or struggle in school, but among school-related factors, teachers matter the most. What teachers know and what they do in class every day have an enormous impact on student achievement.
It’s never easy, but when reading instruction is delivered by knowledgeable, skilled teachers, more students will be more successful, and all but the most severe reading disabilities can be addressed effectively. This is true even for students who are most at risk.
How Children Learn to Read?
The Simple View of Reading (SVR) offers one useful way to think about reading development. According to SVR, good reading comprehension requires two broad sets of abilities: word recognition and oral language comprehension. Each of these elements — word recognition and oral language comprehension — includes a set of specific component skills.
Word recognition encompasses, among other skills:
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Phonological and phonemic awareness
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Phonics and decoding skills
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Automatic recognition of common words
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The ability to read common phonetically irregular words
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Oral language comprehension encompasses, among other skills:
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Vocabulary knowledge
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Background knowledge
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Sentence (syntactic) comprehension
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Understanding figurative language, such as metaphors, similes, and idioms
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Word recognition and oral language comprehension are not equally important at all stages of reading development. For typical readers, word recognition abilities tend to be especially important in the early stages of learning to read, when children are learning phonics and developing the ability to read common sight words. Word-recognition skills tend to set a limit on reading comprehension in these early grades, because even if children have strong oral language comprehension skills, those skills cannot come into play while reading if they are unable to read many words.
For a more elaborate explanation please visit http://www.readingrockets.org/teaching/reading101-course/introduction-how-children-learn-read