1. How Children Read
I.L. To explore the cues which
children use to enable them to
read texts

2. The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you
may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos
were like, things changing so skorry these days and
everybody very quick to forget, newspapers not being
read much neither. Well, what they sold there was milk
plus something else. They had no licence for selling
liquor, but there was no law yet against prodding some
of the new veshches which they used to put into the old
moloko, so you could peet it, with vellocet or synthemesc
or drencrom or one or two other veshches which would
give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes
admiring Bog And All His Holy Angels and Saints in your
left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg.

3. Analytic phonics Synthetic phonics
Children break down whole words
into phonemes and graphemes
Children remember up to 44
phonemes and their related
graphemes – remember, one
phoneme can be represented by
different graphemes (e.g. ‘ough’,
‘ow’ and ‘oa’)
Children learn to look for patterns in
phonemes
Children learn to recognise each
grapheme and sound out each
phoneme
They use rhyme and analogy to
learn similar words (e.g. c-at, m-at,
p-at)
Children blend sounds together to
pronounce the word phonetically
Children become competent readers
within around 3 years, by breaking
down and sounding out unfamiliar
words
Children learn phonemes quickly, in
whole-class teaching groups where
they hear the sound, see the
grapheme, and use actions such as
counting syllables

4. Don’t forger Skinner
• Positive and negative
reinforcement play key roles
in a child’s literacy
development
• Parents/teachers tell children
when they have read
something wrong
• They also praise correct
reading, especially of more
challenging words (well
done, yeah, good girl etc)

5. Cues
• Children are constantly encountering new
words and new combinations
• They use a range of cues to decode words
and read meaning into a text
• Writers of books for children to read build
cues into their texts to help children in their
literacy development

6. Cue Activity
Graphophonic Looking at the shape of words, linking these to familiar
graphemes or words to interpret them
Semantic Understanding the meanings of words and making
connections between words in order to decode new
words
Syntactic Applying knowledge of word order and word classes to
work out if a word seems right in the context
Contextual Searching for understanding in the situation of the story –
comparing it to their own experiences or their pragmatic
understanding of social conventions
Miscue Making errors when reading; a child might miss a word or
substitute another that looks similar, or incorrectly guess
a word from accompanying pictures
Visual Looking at the pictures and using the visual narrative to
interpret new words or ideas

7. Analysing Cues in Use
• In pairs, prepare a commentary on the
example of Oliver reading
• Which cues is he using?
• Which are more successful?
• How is the book he is reading written to
enable the use of cues?