The text should be downloaded and printed in two copies – a copy of the text without questions for a child, and another copy of the text with questions only for a parent.

Seven Meaningful Reading Teaching Guides are provided for the parents’ attention. Each set consists of seven stories, seven tales or seven comics. Demonstration (demo version) is applied to some of the guides; by watching demos you understand our approach in developing the learning program on reading with questions.

Pre-school and 1^st grade school children:

• Stories of 3-4 sentences, Volume I
• Stories of 5-7 sentences, Volume I
• Tales, Volume I
• Comics, Volume I

2^nd and 3^rd grade school children

• Stories, Volume I
• Tales, Volume I
• Comics, Volume I

1. With a child who has just learned to read (and this can be a child of 3-4 years old or a first grade pupil), at first you need to read only one sentence at a time. Then there is a discussion of how the child understood the meaning of what he read. Further, according to the same technology, the second sentence is read. Then the entire text, consisting of 3-4 sentences, (in comics, there may be two sentences). You should know that at the initial stage, when the text is read in a row, there will be no deep understanding of the text. Understanding is achieved only through consistency and
2. A child who reads more confidently (25-35 words per minute) can read the entire story, usually consisting of 3-4 sentences. Then, the adult asks the child a question whether he understood what this story was about? If the child answers in the affirmative, the adult proceeds to questions and discussion of the answers. If there are inaccuracies in the child’s answers, it is necessary to read the sentence (story) over again, and only after that continue the discussion.
3. An adult teaching a child to read must invariably observe rule 2 – about silent reading, and remember rule 3 – the child’s right to ASK ANY QUESTIONS ON THE TEXT, not forgetting rule – 4, i.e. not to demand retelling of what has been read.
4. It is recommended to read daily. The volume of reading should be such as not to cause a negative reaction, especially among schoolchildren, who have an opportunity to compare it with the volume of school assignments.

It will take at least 7-8 weeks of systematic reading to form the foundations of meaningful reading. Of course, it may take someone less time, on the contrary, it might take others more time. To develop the skill of meaningful reading, it is necessary to maintain it, for two to three years (during the period of study in grades 2-3) periodically arranging joint readings, during which it is imperative to ask the child questions, discussing what was read together. The material for such monitoring can be literature that the child prefers himself or herself or school lessons. The technology of reading “silently” and asking questions remains unchanged in this process, therefore, adults are strongly recommended to prepare for the discussion, i.e., certainly to read the text under discussion and the questions formulated to it.

5. Children, who have already developed the basics of meaningful reading, and they know how to write, can be given the opportunity to answer the questions in writing, without relying on the text. For sure, only after the child reads the text and answers in the affirmative to your question about understanding. Written answers to questions are recommended to be done no more than once or twice a week.
6. Adults need to be prepared for the fact that after reading this or that story, e.g., about “The Autumn”, he will have to go with the child to the park (or the yard) to personally observe the signs of autumn, and after a walk to get involved in a heated discussion of drawings on the theme of autumn with their author. Either after reading the story “The Squirrel”, your child or, perhaps, you will have a desire to learn more or read something else about the gray squirrel skin in the winter and red one in the summer.
7. You also need to be prepared for the fact that the child today may ask to re-read the story that you read yesterday. Moreover, such a desire may arise repeatedly. This indicates that the child still has something that requires comprehension, therefore, questions can and will be repeated. We strongly recommend that you do not prohibit such requests and questions. On the contrary, it is a great opportunity to read the text again and answer the questions again. Certainly, this should be done according to the technology of asking and receiving answers to questions. Stay patient.
8. You need to be very careful in answering questions. It is necessary that your answers are always exhaustive, without assumptions, especially without distortions. If during the reading the child makes mistakes, you should re-read and re-disassemble the entire story at the suggestion. The role of the questions and their value lies in the fact that when a child answers the questions on the text, each time he has to build a new sentence. Each time giving an answer, he thereby enriches his speech. Only the child’s arbitrary construction of, first, short, monosyllabic phrases, then extended sentences, contributes to the development of the literary language. An appropriate literary speech, unfortunately, does not appear from memorizing a large number of poems and texts.
9. Questions on each text (story, fairy tale, and comics) relate only to its content. Starting the development of teaching aids, we initially set the goal of avoiding evaluative, hypothetical, comparative questions. For example, such ones:

– Do you think this boy did the right thing?

– Have you ever lied to me? Do you always tell the truth, like this boy?

– Do you always help each other in the class?

– What would you answer if you were him?

 

10. Therefore, we strongly recommend in every possible way to keep from any evaluative questions, because our joint goal is to teach you to read so as to understand what you read.

During the reading, sentence by sentence, the meaning of each sentence is deposited in the child’s mind. Remember that at the initial stage, the child reads only one sentence, which is jointly discussed with the adult. Then, the next sentence comes. Asking questions of an evaluative, hypothetical nature, distracts and thereby significantly complicates understanding at the stage of learning to read.

Evaluation is a completely different activity, it is an attitude towards something and someone. Having learned to read meaningfully, sooner or later your child will independently approach the development and formulation of this attitude.

The First Rule: All texts should be short, simple, understandable, and complete in meaning. In the texts at the initial stage of learning, it is desirable that there is a picture illustrating the content. It is important that the texts are printed in large print, preferably at least 20-22 font size, so that the child can separate syllables.

The Second Rule: A child should read speechlessly, silently, only with his “eyes”. To switch to the silent reading mode, reading in a whisper is allowed for a while. Especially if the parents previously required the child to read up aloud.

The Third Rule: An adult must certainly answer all the child’s questions that arise during the reading.

The Fourth Rule: You should not force the child to retell the text that he has just read.

The proposed teaching aids are intended for teaching meaningful reading to children of preschool and primary school age.

The manuals are designed to be support, a kind of an orientation map for an adult who has set the goal to teach a child to understand what he is reading.

For many years we have been conducting diagnostic testing of children, where a reading skill is part of a battery of other tests that measure the level of development of intellectual and personal characteristics.

The experience has shown that a full-fledged reading skill when a child graduates from the fourth grade to a secondary school is developed in no more than 5% of the younger students.

After testing, we meet with parents and give feedback on the results. During the meeting, parents usually assure that they will certainly follow all our recommendations, including the development of reading. After six months to a year, children undergo monitoring testing, and improvements in reading development are observed only in one or two children, no more than the total. For the rest of the children, the picture practically does not change, remaining at a level from consistently severe to catastrophic.

When the parents become familiar with the results of retesting, they certainly get very upset, again trying to excuse themselves for inaction. The explanation mainly comes down to two reasons: lack of time and difficulty in formulating questions for discussion of what the child read

The situation is constantly repeated. Each and every year we give recommendations on reading development, each and every year they are not implemented. Then other children and other parents come, and everything is repeated.

Therefore, our main recommendation sounds like this: A CHILD’S INTEREST IN READING BOOKS CAN BE AWAKENED ONLY WITH THE HELP OF AN ADULT, AND ONLY WITH HIS DETERMINED INSISTENCE.

To have a child learn to understand what he has read, it is necessary that:

1. The child has learnt to read speechlessly, silently.
2. The adult, discussing with the child what he has read, has asked the child questions, guided by these ‘FOUR RULES’ and ‘TEN RECOMMENDATIONS’.

Study guides are presented in four languages: Kazakh, Russian, Turkish, and English. The content of the texts is identical.

Choose a guide in the language in which your child will study at school. If your preschool child is equally bilingual, you can teach reading in both languages. But if learning to read began only in the first grade, it is necessary to focus on the core language of learning at school, at least, until the end of the first grade. Later, you can painlessly include the development of reading in other languages.

An additional benefit of our guides in other languages ​​is as follows. For example, a child studies in Russian, but the academic programme in the first grade already includes the compulsory study of Kazakh and English. By the end of the first year, children are already reading and writing in these languages, certainly not at the same level as the core language of learning.

Education in primary school is the most favorable period for the development of the skill of full reading in other languages. Since the texts are identical, you will always have the opportunity to have materials within easy reach in several languages ​​in order to quickly navigate when discussing what the child has read. It may even happen that you do not notice how you start and learn a foreign language with him.

It is the same reason why they cannot solve the math test. They cannot understand the problem statement and think through the read. The paradox is that the child solves at the lesson and even at home (where the problem situation is explained by a teacher or a parent), but the child cannot solve the test, since he is unable to overcome a seemingly primitive operation such as reading the problem statement on his own. Of course, he can read the written aloud. Moreover, even very loudly and with “expression” (which, unfortunately, the child is primarily required by teachers and parents). But does the child understand what he has read, that is, read out loud?! Unfortunately, not all, not always.

Not all children understand what they have read. Not all children are educated to make conclusions extracting the necessary information from the read. Fairly admit that not all the grown-ups can do.

The math test is only the example. But how many such problems and tests does your child have to solve (or step back once again) in the future life?!

Understanding the text is a skill that must be formed and developed in every possible way. The sooner, the better. If reading comprehension has not been developed at an early age (at primary school), it will not be developed later in adulthood. Children do not read, primarily because we do not read – their parents. Like most parents, we are deeply mistaken in the belief that love of reading will be cultivated to our children at school. Unfortunately, it will not happen. At modern school, he is, taught to read loudly and expressively.

While it is very difficult to teach understanding. To cultivate love of reading is far more difficult. It is practically impossible if one day the child does not have a spark of interest in what he has read.

It is extremely important to notice this spark in time and carefully cherish the barely wavering flame, by all means to support the arising curiosity. It is as hard as lighting the fire in the pouring rain. It will not be easy to resist the alternative information flows streaming from TV screens, relentlessly attacking from smartphones, tablets, computers filled to the brim with games and entertainment.

Daily painstaking and hard work awaits you, until you, steadily controlling the natural reactions of the child, can finally guide him through the eye of the needle of the point of no return.

Then, the brightly flashed fire of living curiosity can no longer be extinguished. He will flare up to an all-consuming interest to the world around him, an insatiable thirst for knowledge, spreading to the entire universe.

Having learned to understand what he has read, the child, as he develops the skills of thoughtful reading, will quench this thirst on his own, without you! For he will find himself in a world created by his own imagination, much brighter and more vivid than the stamped video sequence exuding from the azure luminous incubator of impressions.

Be sure very soon your child will begin to amaze himself and those around him with a variety of knowledge gleaned from books. To love which he can learn only with your help, thanks to your relentless perseverance.

‘Reading is nothing but the ‘sounding’ of graphic icons.’ This is the definition of professors Ye.A. Bugrimenko and G.A. Zuckerman (1). The definition is based on the position of D.B. Elkonin that reading is ‘the process of recreating the sound form of a word based on its graphic model’ (2).

This means that the academic programme of primary school in the former Soviet states were rebuilt on the basis of this and similar provisions. That is, primary school and kindergarten students are primarily taught with sound analysis of speech. First, children learn to identify the sound composition of a word. Then they are forced to read aloud for a long time, developing the operation of the text articulation.

As a result, at the end of primary school, more than 95% of children are very good at verbalizing the text. This is confirmed by high rates of speed and expressiveness of reading, which, in fact, are the main criteria of reading technique.

The indicator of understanding (awareness) of the text is also present in a number of criteria. Truly, under the number 3, 4, or even 5, which is more eloquent than any words, it indicates that this criterion is inoperative, clearly not the key one. The main thing is to quickly and expressively read the text, and whether the child understood its content or not is neither here nor there. This is exactly what the results for reading literacy show.

In later years, despite the repeated changes in the academic programmes and standards, the basis of the entire teaching has not practically changed. Children still continue to articulate graphic symbols.

Was learning to read always “sounding” signs? No not always. This approach began to be implemented in educational programs in the mid-80s of the XX century.

The assessment of this approach was reflected in the extremely low results of PISA – 2000. 32 countries participated in the research, and Russian schoolchildren took only the 27^th place in reading literacy. The Russian Federation was the first of the former Soviet republics that took part in the research involving children whose teaching to read from the first grade was completely reorganized to a phonemic approach.

Why do not modern children as well as their modern parents read books? Since they were not taught to read meaningfully at primary school. When a person realizes what he is reading, he becomes interested, he wants to know what will happen next. This is how a need is born and reading becomes essential and necessary.

Reading is comprehension, but not sounding graphic signs. Understanding “consists in operating the sign itself, in relation to its meaning, to the rapid movement of attention to highlighting various points that become the focus of our attention” – an outstanding Soviet psychologist Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky mentioned. (3)

And the most important factor in mastering the process of understanding is precisely the soundless way of reading “silently”. While loud reading “vocalization of visual symbols makes reading difficult, speech reactions slow down perception, tie it up, and split attention. Not only the reading process itself, but as odd as it sounds, the understanding is higher at soundless reading.’(4)

It is a great misconception to believe that at any age you can teach a child to read meaningfully. Fluent reading, as a fluent understanding, is formed only at primary school. By the end of the first grade, the child must master soundless reading. Further, with the tactful coordination of adults, it must be developed in every possible way to a full-fledged level.

At a full-fledged level of reading skill, the whole sentence is the semantic unit of text perception, but not a phrase or a single word. Therefore, it is necessary to radically change the method of teaching reading.

Enormous scientific and practical work in this direction was done by the Russian psychologist L.A. Yasyukova, who showed the fallacy of the auditory (phonemic) approach in teaching reading in a large-scale study that covered several thousand St. Petersburg schoolchildren. The scientist presented undeniable data how an auditory dominant in teaching to read deforms meaningful reading, forming illiterate writing along the way. As a result, children begin to write as they hear, instead of ‘knife – naif; Tuesday – Tjuzdei, eskimo – iskimo; fir tree – fur tri; instead of green – grin; instead of window – vindau.’ ‘More than 60% of students graduate from school with impaired reading skills. They do not read serious literature. Some of them can still write dictations, but they cannot write an essay at all.’ L.А. Yasyukov says. (5).

Learning to write is a separate job. In addition, learning to write should begin only after learning meaningful reading “silently”.

Methodologically, the issue of sounding and comprehending as two completely different operations was solved a long time ago by L.S. Vygotsky and successfully implemented in the Soviet country. ‘Soundless reading is socially the most important form of writing and has two other major benefits. From the end of the first year of study, quiet reading outreaches loud reading in the number of fixations of eye movements along the line. Consequently, the process of eye movement and the perception of letters is facilitated by soundless reading. … When reading aloud, a visual gap is formed, when the eye runs ahead and synchronizes with the voice. If we remember that school age is exactly the age of formation of inner speech, it will become clear to us what a powerful means of perceiving inner speech we have in soundless or quiet reading ‘silently’.’ (6)

We used to live and be the most literate and most reading country in the world. Isn’t it time to go back to roots?

 

1 ‘Learn to read and write’ by Ye.A.Bugrimenko, G.A. Zuckerman, M., 1994, p. 37

2 ‘How to teach children to read’ by D.B Elkonin, M., Znaniye, 1976

3 ‘Collected Edition in Six Volumes’ by L.S. Vygotsky, Vol.3, p.193, 1983

4 ‘Collected Edition in Six Volumes’ by L.S. Vygotsky, Vol.3, p.192, 1983

5 ‘Psychological and pedagogical causes of the modern schoolchildren’s illiteracy’ by L.A.Yasyukova, National Psychological Journal No. 1(2), p.6, 2007

6 ‘Collected Edition in Six Volumes’ by L.S. Vygotsky, Vol.3, pp.192-193, 1983

 

ABOUT READING LITERACY

“Reading literacy is the most serious problem in the educational system of Kazakhstan …” – this is one of the conclusions of the World Bank Report ‘Strengthening Kazakhstan’s education systems: an analysis of PISA 2009 and 2012’

The main question of the PISA study is: “Do the 15-year-old children having received general mandatory education have the knowledge and skills required for full functioning in the society?”

The ability to fully functioning was assessed through the study of reading, mathematical, natural science literacy. Reading is a key general intellectual skill that is defining towards mathematical and science literacy. The reading literacy assessment included three key aspects. These are the ability to understand what they read, find and extract the necessary information from the general context, use it, reflect and reasonably argue the answer.

The indicators of Kazakhstan turned out to be much lower than the OECD countries and their own results of previous years. “Over the past three years, there has been a decrease in mathematics by 57, in natural science by 59 and in reading literacy by 40 points. At the end of 2018, indicators in natural science and reading literacy were lower than their own results in 2009.

Subject	2009	2012	2015	2018
Math	405	432	460	423
Natural Science	400	425	456	397
Reading Literacy	390	393	427	387

 

PISA indicators as per years and subjects/ Data by Informburo.kz

‘In reading literacy, the first result was 390 points, then the situation improved – 393 and 427 points, and at the end of 2018 they rolled back to 387 points. This is the 69^th place out of 78. For comparison, the Ukraine, which took part in PISA for the first time, was ahead of us – the 39^th place and 466 points. Countries of the former Soviet Union, once considered the most reading countries in the world, are in the middle of the ranking. Russia and Belarus are in the 31^st and 36^th places, respectively.’(1).

‘The share of those who do not show high results in reading is 93.07%, which indicates a low level of reading skills of students in Kazakhstan,’ as stated in the Report of the National Center for Assessment and Quality of Education on PISA-2012. This means that 15-year-old students cannot analyse and understand the text they have read. In accordance with the OECD gradation, such children are classified as ‘functionally illiterate’ (2). It follows from the results that our students are practically not taught reading skills. Not to mention how to apply them in various life situations.

The formerly 15-year-old Kazakh schoolchildren who took part in PISA 2009 for the first time turn 26 years in 2020. Most of them, having received professional education, have already entered adulthood in a variety of guises, and others even as parents. And yet these are those, who have repeatedly suffered from participation in various kinds of financial pyramids, have lost more than once in labour disputes, worried and will continue to experience difficulty in the sale and purchase of movable/immovable property and so on and so forth, because each of these actions are accompanied and formalised by one or another written document, to read and understand which they have neither skills nor insistence.

Reading competence is the Achilles heel of not only Kazakhstan. Even in the Ukraine, that was ahead of us and took part in the PISA 2018 survey for the first time, almost 26% of the Ukrainian students did not reach the basic level in reading.

The results of the Ukrainian schoolchildren correlate with the research data on St. Petersburg schools carried out by the famous Russian psychologist Lyudmila Apollonovna Yasyukova, who proposed a new measurement method, according to which a whole sentence should be the semantic unit of text understanding.

Pursuant to L.A. Yasyukova, the child’s full-fledged reading is formed only when he learns to grasp the meaning of a whole sentence. When only a word or phrase acts as a semantic unit, this is a clear sign of the lack of the skill formation to read meaningfully. In other words, the child does not grasp the meaning of what is being discussed.

According to L.A. Yasyukova, by the end of the second year of schooling, less than 1–2% develop the reading skill only at the level of a phrase. At this level of reading: “the meaning of the sentence is not immediately understood, but as if it consists of two or three pieces, and the reading skill is already incomplete” (3). That is, grasping the meaning of a single word or phrase is clearly not enough to understand the text falling apart in the student’s mind into incoherent fragments, into waste unrecognizable by the brain.

‘I have devoted 20 years of my career to studying the achievements of students in reading and mathematics, and now I am raising a child who refuses to read,’ as stated by Lucia Tramonte, Professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick in Canada and co-author of the PISAD (PISA for Development) program. ‘The son is in the 2^nd grade, he is 7.5 years old, and right now he is in a period of critical transition. The fact is that children are taught to read and write the first three years of school. And from the 4^th grade, teachers also teach geography, history and other subjects. Hence, they no longer teach children to read; instead, children must read to learn other sciences. This is the transition from ‘learning to read’ to ‘reading to learn’. If this transition does not take place, the student will never succeed in other sciences.’(4).

Consequently, from the fifth grade, in the base unit, when the study of the science basics starts, these children, not having a full reading skill, will experience significant difficulties. After all, the reading skill determines the development of thinking, the basic operations of which are also formed at primary school. Imperfect reading skills and insufficient development of thinking affect the results of the same PISA program.

The poor quality of the existing academic programme for primary school, unfortunately, does not facilitate, often directly prevents the implementation of the transition from ‘learning to read’ to ‘reading to learn’. ‘What were these children doing at school, how was the training going, could we have found them earlier and what should have been done for them?’ Professor L. Tramonte asks.

Changing the academic programme for primary school is beyond the power of neither us, nor parents, nor teachers overloaded with endless routine. But it is in our power to teach an individual child to read meaningfully. Moreover, it is desirable until the child starts school, so that he can adequately fulfill his needs, and only then the responsibilities in knowing the world around him.

1. Zh. Khabdulkhabar PISA-2018: The Kazakhstan schoolchildren showed a decline in literacy for the first time in 10 years, 5^th December 2019, https://informburo.kz/stati/pisa-2018-kazahstanskie-shkolniki-vpervye-za-10-let-pokazali-snizhenie-urovnya-gramotnosti.html

2 Zh. Nurbayev ‘Why did the Kazakhstan schoolchildren fail the PISA international test’, Forbes Kazakhstan, 22.05.2020.

3. A. Yasyukova ‘Forecast and precaution of learning issues at secondary school’ – 3-6 grades, Saint Petersburg: Imaton, 2001.

4. K. Kiselyova ‘Why do children lose interest to learning?’ Osvitoria Magazine 11.12.2019 https://osvitoria/media.

1. It is advisable to teach your child to read meaningfully before entering the 1st grade. The modern academic programme and the existing workload on teachers, unfortunately, do not allow this.
2. If your child started learning to read only in grade 1, you should strive and make efforts to have the child learn to read silently by the end of the first year.
3. The formed skill of meaningful reading must be accompanied and supported in every possible way throughout the primary school, through school subjects, direct participation in the selection, purchase, downloading of books, their joint discussion, formulation and search for answers to questions.

1. In the underdevelopment of the entire intellectual area. The first signal (call for parents) of this in primary school will be the inability (hence the unwillingness) to solve word problems in mathematics. Later, this will be added to the inability to apply the learned rules or formulas, write an essay or composition.
2. It is almost impossible to teach to read meaningfully in the secondary school (in grades 6-7). In this connection, there is no point in relying on a miracle, hoping that the child will somehow become addicted to reading fiction later. A miracle does not happen if the child is not properly prepared.

Generally speaking, a child does not learn to think unless he learns to read meaningfully.

3. In senior classes, the inability to read will inevitably affect the results of all kinds of exams UNT, USE, YGS, YÖS, SAT, ACT, IB, IELTS, TOEFL, etc.
4. In an illiterate writing, in mistakes when filling out official papers (employment conditions, questionnaires, surveys, etc.), carelessness, misunderstanding when reading and signing agreements, contracts, which is fraught with consequences, etc.
5. In a low cultural level of an adult.