Question: "What are some of the major differences between a skills approach to literacy and a comprehensive approach or sociopsycholinguistic approach?"
After completion of the reading, I was very interested in the multiple approaches to teaching reading. The two main approaches to teaching students to read are the skills approach and the comprehensive approach. There are many differences between the two and they are often considered opposite viewpoints.
First, the skills approach starts with the smallest piece of language (sounds or phonemes) and works its way "upward" to comprehension and gaining meaning from a piece of text. The skills approach focuses on "going back to the basics" where teachers emphasize teaching letter-sound relationships first and then move onto decoding words letter by letter. In the skills approach language is broken up into bits and pieces where letter sounds are isolated. With the skills approach, teachers believe that reading means first identifying words and later understanding their meaning. When teaching the skills approach, teachers main focus is on phonics and fluency before moving onto larger concepts such as comprehension or constructing meaning from a text.
On the other hand, many teachers teach the constructive or sociopsycholinguistic approach. When teaching this approach teachers believe that the purpose of reading is to gain meaning. This approach focuses on reading simple stories and rhymes to and with students before concentrating on the actual words and letters in a story. Here, teachers read to students as a whole group and in small group to help student understand comprehension strategies and help them to be able to identify items in the story such as the main idea, character, setting, problem, solution, etc. The constructive approach uses phonics knowledge as a whole to construct meaning from the text. In this approach, teachers encourage students to write as much as possible even if it only means constructing a picture. The constructive approach focuses on getting students to construct meaning from a text and write down their ideas.
All in all, I have enjoyed learning about the two approaches to reading and I am excited to implement them in my classroom.
I noticed that as I read that I take a more skills approach to reading. I tell the students to sound out words rather than just telling them and letting them focus on the meaning. I am going to start teaching the students both ways rather than just using the skills approach.
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