Early Literacy Instruction - Research Paper Example

The kind of teaching that is done and the time that teaching is done also affects the rate and quality of learning or literacy acquisition that will take place. Reading acquisition is one of the most important literacy components that take place in people. As far reading instructions are concerned, it has been argued that the acquisition process becomes more effective and efficient when it is done at the very early stages of a child’s learning career. It has also been said that the type of learning intervention that is used by trainees or teachers in teaching reading instructions is also very instrumental in determining the success rate of the learning process.

Because these assertions are generalized, the present research paper is dedicated to critically analyzing; by comparing and combing existing works of research to draw valid conclusions on the acquisition of early reading instructions with focus on phonemic awareness. The meta-analysis shall be done using eight existing recent research based studies. The contents of these research works shall be put together in four major themes as discussed below. The use of Scaffolding as a teaching Intervention Two of the research based literatures were thematically captioned to touch on the use of scaffolding as an intervention to teach phonetic awareness.

These were research works from Lea et al (2009) and Shayne et al (2010). Whereas Lea et al (2009) sees scaffolding as a teacher-based approach to teaching phonetic awareness, Shayne et al (2010) sees scaffolding as a student based approach. Both researchers however agree that scaffolding is used in such a way that the teaching of phonetic awareness is taken from the student’s perspective whereby the teacher undertakes the teaching process from a point where student lacks the acquisition of a particular phonetic skill.

The actual scaffolding takes place in the form of provision of series of guidance to students in developing the phonetic awareness of a particular sound (Lea, 2009). The intervention is thus called scaffolding because the teacher unfolds the learning process through a series of steps or processes (Shayne, 2010). In the various researches, it was found that one of the commonest ways in which kindergarten children learned phonetics was to isolate the sounds in a word, especially the first sound.

It was therefore necessary that teachers taught phonemic awareness through the teaching of individual sounds of letters rather than combining them at a very early stage of language acquisition. Effect of phonetic awareness on English reading in non-English children Two other researchers found in their research works that the basis of English reading acquisition was phonetic awareness (Yeung et al, 2012 and Ryder et al, 2007). This means that for children to effectively acquire English reading skills, they needed to have a very good basis in phonemic awareness.

According to Yeung et al (2012), phonemic awareness is the single most effective way to attempt to pronounce or spell any new English word. Consequently, Ryder et al (2010) hold the opinion that for effective reading to take place among new readers, it is important that the learner gets an idea about as many phonetic sounds of letters as possible. This way, the pronunciation of new words will be attempted by the sounds and pronunciation of already known letters. Consequently, the researchers lay emphasis on learning from the known to the unknown using phonemic awareness.

Indeed, the researcher were quick to criticize other