Relationship between Oral and Written
Language
Knowledge Components
Interactive Processing
Model of Beginning Reader
How do Beginning Readers acquire Knowledge
Components?
Use of Oral Vocabulary to Teach Sight
Vocabulary
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When children enter school they are already masters of oral language.
They are able to communicate with their parents, teachers, friends. When children are
hungry they know how to ask for food. When they want a toy they know how to convince their
parents to buy it for them. In essence, children can use oral language to achieve their
goals. The goal of early reading instruction is to extend children’s mastery of
language to include written language. Teachers and parents want children to communicate as
effectively with written language as they do with oral language. For example, reading the
menu at a new restaurant or writing a birthday toy wish list. Since children enter school
with an oral language foundation, how can we use their oral language to build their
written language? There is an overlap between the skills and knowledge of oral and written
language. Given the overlap in necessary skills , one would hypothesize that children
would easily learn to read.
However, one of the biggest obstacles for children is making the
connection between oral and written language. Children have a hard time realizing that
every spoken word has a written symbol. They find it difficult to understand that a
printed sentence corresponds to a spoken sentence, that the word written on the page
symbolizes the same spoken word they are accustomed to hearing and speaking. Part of the
difficulty lies in the fact that printed words are delineated by spaces, whereas spoken
words occur in a continuous stream of speech. Indeed, children may begin reading with
little awareness of how speech becomes partitioned into word units. As children learn to
read and spell, they acquire a visual representational system that allows them to see what
they say and hear(Barr 1990). Thus word learning as a part of reading instruction involves
not only learning about the nature of printed words, but also discovering how oral
language may be segmented into units that correspond to these words.
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We hypothesize that understanding the meaning and usage of words
through oral language should make the task of learning to read words easier. This
hypothesis is based on Seidenberg and McClelland’s (1989) model of how readers read
and learn to read words. Below is a diagram and explanation of their model.
According to Seidenberg and McClelland, there are four types of
knowledge we need to know about any given word in our language:
•Contextual Knowledge - The context of familiar stories
enables children to make predictions of future actions and speech of characters. Children
are also able to predict the words are going to appear on the page. For example, when
children are trying to master the word "bus", they know that the word is likely
to appear in stories about school, taking a trip to a distant city, or traveling around
the city. Children also know the word "bus" appears in some of their favorite
songs.
•Meaning Knowledge- Knowing the meaning of a word is also
essential so that children can understand what they are hearing or reading. Since many
words have multiple meanings, the context in which the word appears helps children
determine the appropriate meaning. For example, when children read a story with the word
"bus", they need to determine what type of bus is being described. Thus, when
they read or hear a story about school, they are likely to think about a school bus, and
when they hear a story about taking a trip downtown with their parents, they will probably
think about a city bus.
•Phonological Knowledge- Besides context and meaning,
children need to be able to pronounce a word. Pronouncing a word does not have to take
place out loud. Many times we speak words silently to ourselves. Children who cannot read
are only able to access the meaning of a word through its pronunciation.
•Orthographic Knowledge -Orthographic knowledge, i.e.
textual representation, is the component that distinguishes readers from non-readers.
Readers are also able to access a word's meaning via it's orthographic representation. The
acquisition of a word’s orthographic knowledge is the major goal of beginning reading
instruction.
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Few researchers or studies subscribe to an exclusive inside-out or
outside-in model of reading. Interactive models are a combination of the two. These models
are based upon the assumption that reading is both a conceptual and a cognitive process,
which the reader uses both background knowledge and the orthographic features of the text
to create meaning(Wray 1991).
Figure 1: Interactive Processing model
In an interactive model, both the processing scenarios described above
take place at the same time. Whichever model is the first to reach the correct meaning
wins. This dissertation is based on the interactive model.
Example of Interactive Processing Model
The connections between words that the child develops upon hearing a
story are not isolated to just oral language. If a child reads a story she have heard
multiple times then she is prepared to read the same words. For example, when a child who
has heard Little Red Ridinghood, reads it for the first time she will expect to read the
words - “wolf”, “grandma”, “forest”, “big”,
“nose”, “eyes”, and “ears” (see table below). The child
would find it strange if while reading Little Red Ridinghood, she read the words-
“Snow White”, “dwarf”, or “Humpty Dumpty”.
Table 1: Example of familiar stories and words we expect while
listening to these stories.
Why is this? The context of Little Red Riding Hood limits the number of
possibilities children have to consider when hearing a word. Besides limiting the number
of word possibilities, context helps children decide the appropriate meaning of words that
have multiple meanings. The context, word pronunciation, and word meanings join to create
children's understanding of the word. Upon hearing a story over and over, the child starts
to develop connections between the words heard in the story. When the child hears some of
the words in the story she is prepared to predict words that she will hear. Thus, the
contextual knowledge unit signals the meaning unit, which in turn signals the phonological
unit to prepare to hear certain words.
Figure 2: Diagram of the Interactive processing model in use
Stories are not the only forms of oral language that use contextual
knowledge to filter meanings and prime us to hear and read certain words. Our everyday
conversations are full of episodes where we use our contextual knowledge as a filter and
primer. For instance, when we talk about last night’s basketball game, we expect to
hear about fouls, three-point plays, the score, and baskets. We do not expect to hear
about missed field goals or icing penalties. In essence, we use contextual knowledge to
filter all of our communication.
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Beginning Readers use only three of the four knowledge sources-
contextual, meaning, and phonological knowledge- to understand and process language. Their
ability to comprehend an oral utterance is a result of the interaction between the
utterance, it’s context, word meaning, and phonological representations of words in
the utterance. When a child is learning to read she does not have enough knowledge of
letter-sound correspondence to be outside-in processors.
For a child to turn their oral vocabulary into a written vocabulary she
must add orthographical knowledge. Skillful word reading depends on the processing of the
orthography (i.e., textual representations) of words. Skillful reading is the product of
the coordinated and highly interactive processing of all orthographical, phonological,
meaning, and contextual knowledge.
That beginning readers are inside-out processors follows the stage
theory of Barr (1990). As stated earlier, beginning readers’ word recognition
mistakes are highly contextual. For example, when reading “I took my coat over to my
friends house” Children might sometimes read the sentence as “I drove my bike to
my friends house”, thus mistaking “bike” for “car”.
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To this point, the acquisition of the knowledge components has been
described as a linear process. However, this is not necessarily true. Children do not
acquire the knowledge components of individual words in any set order. For example, a
child might know the meaning, pronunciation, and spelling of the word “bus”, but
for the word “catch” the child might only know its pronunciation and meaning.
The order in which we try to teach children the four components dictates the type of
processing model, top-down or bottom-up upon which our instructional strategy is based.
It is important to determine which of the components children possess
for words that we are trying to add to their sight vocabulary. In that way instruction can
be tailored to use the components children already have to teach them the components they
need to learn.
When print is both viewed and read aloud, it will automatically result
in the growth and refinement of the associations to, from, and within the child’s
orthographic knowledge- provided that the child has sufficient familiarity with the units
that are to be associated.
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One way to teach children about the relationship between written and
oral language is to help them build a sight vocabulary that includes the words in their
oral vocabulary. As children develop a sight vocabulary the
connection between written and oral language becomes clearer because each word in their
sight vocabulary represents a word in their oral vocabulary. The words that make up a
child’s oral vocabulary are there because she uses them to communicate with others.
For example, a child uses her oral vocabulary to describe her day to her parents, to tell
her mom why she is angry with her brother, or to ask for help from her teacher. With many
of these words, the child’s ability to use the words correctly in speech indicates
her understanding of their meaning.
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