- How does early childhood education play its effective and real role in building language skills and preparing the child for the reading stage?
- What is the most important first step for proper language development in the pre-reading stage?
Early education is the threshold for a child's entry into the world of academic education. Therefore, early childhood is the foundation for proper education and learning, as it is there that the roots of language, knowledge, behavior, emotion, and early social skills are formed.
Therefore, the role of nurseries and learning centers is not only to teach letters and provide writing training, but the actual and real role is to support and measure the level of children’s growth comprehensively and to achieve a level of maturity and readiness for learning. Therefore, it is necessary to be deliberate and thoughtful in choosing the programs offered that will achieve the desired goals of preparation and equipping.
There are four main types of preparation
If we look at a bunch of grapes or bananas, we will find that they are all the same age, picked on the same day, but some of the fruits are ripe and some are still not edible?
And so it is with children; you may find a four-year-old whose language skills have been developed and who is ready to learn to read, while another who is not more than six years old but is having difficulty learning to read.
The process of language acquisition largely depends on biological maturation, as it requires the integrity of the hearing and speech organs. This is an important role that kindergartens must play. Language development also requires the appropriate stage of the brain areas responsible for speech, which control the mechanisms for linking sounds and ideas, and producing speech, which requires a highly complex coordination between breathing movements, lip movements, the tongue, the mouth, the vocal cords, and the brain areas important for speech.
The experiences that the children were exposed to.
To raise a child's readiness for reading, four main types of readiness must be present :
1. Cognitive : This enables the child to acquire basic knowledge and understand simple concepts such as larger and smaller, directions, and dimensions. It also includes a degree of cognitive development that encompasses maturity in cognitive processes, perception, and thinking, such as observation, classification, matching, analysis, comprehension, and memory. Cognitive maturity includes (stages of mental development – mental processes – cognitive growth).
2. Physical : This includes the integrity of the senses and the visual, auditory and speech systems. Social and emotional adaptation: This includes self-control, self-reliance, willingness to follow instructions, ability to pay attention and concentrate for a sufficient period, and ability to work with others.
3. Emotional and Social Development: A sense of acceptance, adaptability, and the ability to interact with the environment and peers, forming relationships without anxiety or fear, and possessing a sense of initiative. Perceptual- Sensory Maturity : This includes other motor skills and various coordination abilities. Appropriate background and experiences include knowledge of numbers, the names of common objects, and the concepts of time and space.
4. Linguistic : The ability to communicate, express oneself, use vocabulary correctly, have phonemic awareness, and know sounds.
Let us take linguistic readiness as an example. Focusing on memorization and rote learning does not build a solid linguistic and cognitive foundation, because memorizing letters directly is a kind of injustice to the child and a waste of his time. It is more appropriate to provide opportunities to practice classical Arabic to remove the alienation between it and the child’s hearing and perceptions, as it is the language of learning in primary school, and hearing it, pronouncing it and dealing with it is much more important than learning letters and writing them.
Research has shown that there are a number of necessary preparatory skills that are more important than learning the alphabet and should proceed gradually, one stage preceding the other, to build a ladder of language development without any difficulties or gaps with regard to reading and language development. Specifically, the process of preparing and building readiness for reading requires equipping the child with some basic skills before starting to teach letters and words. Studies have proven that pressuring the child to learn to write and read letters and words at an early stage and before reaching sufficient linguistic and cognitive maturity is a major factor that leads to painful psychological experiences that create negative attitudes in the child towards language and perhaps education as a whole.
Experts and philosophers of educational psychology agree that children practice the art of listening before any other language art; this skill is the basis of reception and learning; if a child listens well, he will speak well and be better and more advanced in learning.
There is no doubt that focusing on encouraging the child to read stories, solve word puzzles, play with words and rhymes, talk to others, and ask about their interests will instill confidence in abilities and alleviate learning difficulties related to phonological awareness and language skills. These processes are much more important than wasting the child's time and expending their high energy learning the alphabet and writing it, and learning what they should learn in elementary school, not in kindergarten. In other words, mastering oral language leads to learning to read and then write more easily.
Experts have confirmed regarding the assessment of the level of children of the world in comprehending and mastering the language, including a study discussed by Dr. Suhair Al-Sukkari. This study proved that children of the Western world had a much greater opportunity to master and become proficient in the language than the Arab child, because they speak and hear the same language. Thus, their linguistic repertoire is large and strong because it is unified, and it exceeds 16,000 words before the child enters primary school, while the repertoire of the Arab child’s vocabulary before joining school does not exceed 3,000 colloquial words, and the share of classical Arabic, which the child does not hear in his daily life, does not exceed 600 words, with the exception of those who memorize the Qur’an.
In 2004/2005, the Ministry of Education in Amman conducted a study measuring reading difficulties among students in the first cycle of basic education. This study concluded that oral reading errors were widespread among students, ranging from 63% to 91%, which are considered high rates. Furthermore, students demonstrated a weak grasp of several reading comprehension skills, such as vocabulary understanding, object classification, idea organization, stylistic differentiation, and the meaning of concepts and terms. In 13 out of 14 skills, proficiency was below the required level. The study participants identified the following as the most significant causes of reading difficulties among first-cycle students: weak proficiency in basic reading skills, inadequate reading readiness, and a limited vocabulary.
By reviewing the results of this study and other international and local studies, such as the World Bank study with the Ministry of Education in Oman, it becomes clear how weak there is in preparing and equipping children before they enter the first grade of school, which results in continuous weakness in subsequent years. This confirms the need to pay serious attention to the pre-school education stage so that pupils are well prepared to join school education.
The process of reading readiness includes not only learning the alphabet but also developing skills in listening, oral expression, language communication, visual discrimination, comprehension and understanding.
Let's agree that the process of preparing a child to read and even write does not begin with teaching him the alphabet and making him memorize its shape, since 70% of language skills are acquired by listening. Therefore, the alphabet is certainly not the first step, but rather the real beginning is forming language development skills with its four main pillars:
Understanding and comprehension
• Building vocabulary and using words in their correct place.
Understanding the intended meaning of the words.
Speaking, communicating, and expressing oneself in meaningful sentences.
Narrating the events in a sequential manner.
Predicting minor events.
· Choosing words that describe the action or event.
Describe the images in appropriate language.
Distinguishing between reality and imagination.
Phonemic awareness
Focusing hearing for multiple purposes, distinguishing sound sources, and classifying sounds.
Producing sounds, words, and sentences correctly.
• Knowledge of the articulation points of small sounds (phonemes).
• Knowing and pronouncing the correct sounds of at least ten letters.
• Knowledge of rhyming words, recognizing and producing intonation.
· Homogeneity between words in terms of the beginning and end sounds.
Combining sounds to form a word and analyzing words into sounds and syllables.
Delete, replace, or add a sound at the beginning or end of a word.
phonological awareness
Distinguishing between image and word.
Reading and understanding symbols, instructions, and trademarks.
• Knowledge of long and short words.
· Count the number of letters in the word in the format.
Knowing the number of words in the sentence.
Knowing the word (its beginning and ending).
Distinguishing between words that have meaning and those that do not.
Separating words into syllables in the form (football).
• Note the details.
Arabic linguistic awareness
· Knowledge of the direction of Arabic writing from right to left.
· Knowing ten letters in form and sound without naming them.
• Using (feminine and masculine) forms.
Identifying the singular, dual, and plural forms.
• Using demonstrative pronouns.
• Use of pronouns and adverbs.
• Knowledge of opposites and inverses.
• Knowing the number of synonymous words.