How Do Kids Learn To Read? Understanding this process is crucial for parents and educators alike. At learns.edu.vn, we provide a comprehensive guide to the science-backed methods that help children unlock the world of reading, focusing on systematic phonics instruction as a cornerstone. By exploring the best teaching strategies and essential components of reading, we empower you to nurture a love for literacy and build a solid foundation for academic success. Explore our website for detailed resources on reading acquisition, phonological awareness, and literacy development.
1. Do Children Learn to Read the Way They Learn to Speak?
No, children do not naturally learn to read the same way they learn to speak. While infants acquire spoken language through exposure and interaction, reading requires explicit instruction and the understanding of a code.
Infants learn to speak by listening to and repeating sounds made by adults and connecting them to meanings. They unconsciously distinguish individual sound units (called phonemes) when hearing spoken language. Some research suggests infants learn probabilistically—for example, hearing the sound “ball” at the same time as the sight of a round, bouncy object over time makes the child associate the two—while other studies suggest children map meaning to a word after experiencing it just once or twice. Within the first two years, typically developing toddlers’ brains focus on the most common sounds in their native languages and connect those sounds to meaning. A child develops understanding of speech through exposure to language and opportunities to practice the “serve and return” patterns of conversation, even without explicit instruction.
By contrast, children do not naturally develop reading skill through exposure to text. The way they learn to connect oral and written language depends on what kind of language they are learning to read.
Alphabetic languages, like English or French, use letters to stand for sounds that make up spoken words. To read an alphabetic language, children must learn how written letters represent spoken sounds, recognize patterns of letter sounds as words, and match those to spoken words whose meanings they know. This differs from Chinese, for example. It uses a tonal spoken language, conveying meaning with small differences in stress or pitch. Its writing system is partially logographic—in which written symbols correspond directly to a word or concept—and also includes words that couple symbols for meaning and symbols for sound. Someone reading Chinese hanzi characters could not “sound out” unfamiliar words character by character.
