Phonemic awareness and multisensory strategies in early reading development

¶ … Brain Learns to Read

The human brain is an incredibly complex structure. It learns common actions and skills in an intensely intriguing manner that we often take for granted. Take for example the case of reading, an incredibly complicated process which is learned over time through repeated exposure and emulation that builds and strengthens knowledge about language in print.

The process of learning to read is incredibly complex yet is incredibly interesting. Interestingly, many fundamental skills involved with early reading learning are done before the child even beings on his or her journey. For example, phonetic learning helps establish a strong foundation for future reading capabilities. It is important that young readers focus on learning and recognizing phonemes that are at the base of the words they are seeing. Here, the research states that "Learning to read starts with the awareness that speech is composed of individual sounds," (Sousa 2005 p 33). Knowledge of phonemes helps children recognize them and apply their prior knowledge to new and unfamiliar words. Moreover, children focus on taking apart pieces of words and putting them together with other sections of words during the process of learning to read. As they continue to learn phonemes, they begin to be able to dissect new words in order to try to make sense of them both logically and orally from a phonetic perspective. Children make the oral connection between how letters sound and how they appear in print, which is known by the research as the alphabetic principle (Sousa 2005). This can be incredibly hard for young children learning the process of reading; "the letters of the alphabet are abstract, and thus unfamiliar to the new reader, and the sounds they represent are not natural segments of speech," (Sousa 2005 p 36). Children have to spend many hours learning and categorizing these word parts in order to be able to reconstruct them later as they continue to encounter a world of new words.

There are a number of strategies parents could use to help encourage stronger reading skills in their children, three of which are to be evaluated here. It is important to use a multifaceted strategy in order to appeal to the child's other senses in the path to learning to read. Here, the research states that "A comprehensive and multisensory approach to early literacy develops reading skills while simultaneously immersing children in joyful, socially meaningful experiences," (Sohn Design Studio 2011). This means that parents should incorporate visual images into the child's reading experience. Using stimulating and relevant picture books will help keep the child's visual attention. Secondly, parents should focus on using books that rhyme and contain sing a longs. In regards to this, the research states that "The brain is uniquely wired to effortlessly learn through music; for the rhythms of sound have a powerful effect on cognition," (Sohn Design Studio 2011). Using rhyming and sing a long style text will help increase the child's engagement, but will also help the child remember particular words and vowel blends.