page_title: Learning to read
section_title: Novice reader
hierarchical_section_title: Learning to read / Reading development / Novice reader
caption_attribution_description: English: A new reading time at a primary school in rural Laos. This marked the first day of a "Sustained Silent Reading" period at the school, intended to improve literacy rates in a country where many children in third and fourth grade still have difficulty reading a sentence, because they've had so little practice. The books were provided by Big Brother Mouse, which promotes reading in Lao schools and villages.
context_page_description: Learning to read is the acquisition and practice of the skills necessary to understand the meaning behind printed words. For a fairly good reader, the skill of reading should feel simple, effortless, and automatic. However, the process of learning to read is complex and builds on cognitive, linguistic, and social skills developed from a very early age. As one of the four core language skills, reading is vital to gaining a command of the written language.
context_section_description: The next step in the learning to read process is the novice reading stage also known as selective association.  This begins with the child learning to decode print and understanding the meaning of what has been decoded. To do this, the child must first figure out the alphabetic principle and master it in only a few years. Most children know that the words on a page in a book mean something, but do not readily understand how the letters code the meaning.  They know that these words are made of the sounds of their particular language, and that letters convey these sounds.  Novice readers learn to hear and manipulate the smaller sounds into syllables and words. If a child is able to master this skill, called phonological awareness, it is one of the best predictors of a child's success in learning to read. One way that you can teach children to become more aware of sounds within words is through such things as nursery rhymes that enhance the child's ability to hear and divide the structure of words.  Another way to teach a child to read is through little "games" in which the sounds in word are either clapped, written or danced to a beat. A novice reader will also memorize the most common letter patterns in their own language and most of the frequent words that will not necessarily follow the phonological rules such as in English the words "have" and "who". It is in this stage that children will develop a vocabulary of words that is between 2,500 and 5,000 words. Children's vocabularies continue to grow as they enter elementary school, since they will continue to learn new words at a rate of about seven words per day. This shows that at this stage in reading the best piece of advice is to just practice, practice, practice or read, read more, and read again.
caption: Reading time at a primary school in rural Laos. Learning to read poses different challenges in Laos compared to English-speaking countries. The written language follows clear phonetic rules, so the mechanics of reading are easier than with English. However, children learn from a teacher with a blackboard, and get little or no opportunity to improve their reading skills by reading for pleasure. Most schools have no library and no books except textbooks; even fourth-grade students often cannot read a full sentence. The daily reading period shown here uses books provided by Big Brother Mouse, which promotes reading in Lao schools and villages.
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