A peek into language acquisition: Under the scientific microscope
Narratives are often structured in a certain way. There are characters, settings, a plot, and a conflict and resolution. Narratives can take many forms, from story books to oral story-telling, and their tradition stretches back to the beginnings of human history and across cultures. Narratives…
Reading, at first glance, is about mapping sounds onto written characters. There are, however, other skills a reader needs, like visualization. If you read a book series before seeing the movies, you may have been surprised at how different your imagination was from the visuals…
Imagine a robot reading a sentence word by word: The. Owl. Sleeps. On. The. Tree.Now try reading the sentence silently: The owl sleeps on the tree. You may have almost heard yourself saying it in your head. It may seem that we read word after word monotonously,…
When we think of literacy, the first thoughts that come to mind might be the shapes of letters or characters or the hand movements used to write those letters or characters (see Do we need to teach handwriting these days?). There is, however, more to…
Reading to a child is a great way to set the foundations for future literacy in a fun way! For example, it can be an opportunity to connect written language with signed or oral language. When reading to a Deaf child, it is important to…
Most of the writing we do these days, from emails to reports to tweets, is on a keyboard. It can seem intuitive to also start with the keyboard when teaching a child to write. Typing looks so much easier to do than handwrite. Just think…
As a child is making her first steps toward literacy, the focus is often placed on identifying letters or characters. Caregivers may point out a letter or character, and ask the child which it is. Though reading is largely a visual (or haptic, in the…
Reading and writing are two facets of literacy. To make learning to read and write easier, we might want to break literacy down and teach just reading or just writing at any one time. Yet, a particular effective way to develop literacy skills is actually…
At first glance, learning to read can seem to be just about learning to match symbols (letters or characters) to sounds. But there is a lot more to reading than meets the eye! There are three foundational basics: First, a child needs to learn that…