Module 4 – Activity 1

Even though this video has strong religious overtones, it is useful for determining strategies that beginning readers use when becoming literate, even at age 50. Watch the video and reflect on what strategy or strategies Robin used most to help him learn to read.

        Wow, this video was very inspirational and shows what a little believing in yourself can do, no matter your age.  At the beginning of this video, Robin was learning word families by utilizing a game that I am familiar with which is called “Chunks”.  He was practicing the word families with different beginning sounds. His teachers made sure that he focused on the phonograms since he tended to add letters that were not written on the blocks.

        Next, he moved to recognizing words with chunks and blends. I think chunking helped him the most because he was able to see smaller words within larger words. When he was reading Stone Soup, I was so excited to hear him say “Is that right?” even though he already knew that it wasn’t correct.  He also relied on context clues to correct himself with the phrase “I’ll give you some when it is ready”.  He tried reading it as “I give…” which did not make sense to him semantically. He also used syntax and semantic clues when he read “what” instead of “when” in the same text.  Robin knew that his miscues sounded odd within the text.  As a result, he reread the sentences and was able to correctly identify the words due to his context clues.
        I think Robin also used a great deal of prior knowledge since he has heard this language all of his life. For example, when setting up his Gmail account, Robin immediately recognized “rat” in the word “Congratulations”. He then started at the beginning of the word to sound out the rest.  However, after sounding out “con-grat”, he was able to draw on his schema to decipher this long word. This demonstrates that readers do not necessarily need to read each individual letter to identify the correct word. 
        Overall, this video clip was very touching and I loved that his teachers presented him with various types of literature such as: comics, bumper sticks, easy readers, newspapers, cards, billboards, and the Bible.  Robin was finally able to read for pleasure and “read the world”.