From the time the students arrive to the time they leave, literacy lessons are an essential part of the daily programme at The Hong Kong Institute of Education Jockey Club Primary School (JCPS). They are in the morning messages that greet them each day, in the songs they sing, the journals they write, the investigation they conduct, the explorations they share to complete various individual and group projects, the poems they chant and the stories they read. At the foundation of such a literacy-based environment is a curriculum, which underscores the critical importance of reading and an understanding of the various levels of development of the children.

The key to reading success is the desire to read. In a school, there should be many opportunities for children to discover the joy of reading. Most children love stories. We need to capture that desire and make it a powerful drive for them to read on their own. We need to expose students to many different genres of text: charts, poems, fairy tales, picture books, chapter books, magazines, songs, non-fiction books, even shopping lists, advertisements, posters and newspapers. Yet, what are the criteria for choosing wisely for our students? How do we facilitate emergent readers to become independent readers? Would assessment dampen children's enthusiasm towards reading? This article will discuss reading and the home-school connection, oral reading and fluency, book selection, the development of reading skills and reading assessment.

Reading and the Home-school Connection
Many parents read to their children before they are enrolled in schools. Unfortunately, once formal schooling begins, 'Shared stories' tend to decrease. Dolores Durkin (1966) discovered that the children who learned to read earliest were those from homes where parents shared their books with the children as they read aloud to them every day. If parents know that twenty minutes of this natural parent-child activity can reap the benefit of improved vocabulary, enhanced comprehension, increased fluency, sustained motivation and a host of other achievements, they will undoubtedly make reading to their children a priority. Keith Topping (1987) suggests that even ten minutes a day of paired reading between a parent and a child can bring about significant improvement in reading by the child.

School administrators ought to make concerted and continuous efforts to educate parents about the critical role they play in motivating their children to read. They must invite parents to participate and remain involved in the literacy development of their children throughout their formative years by reading to the children, reading with the children and listening to them read. In Hong Kong, where some parents may not be able to read English books to their children, it may be more realistic to suggest that they purchase 'talking books' (i.e. books prerecorded on CDs or cassette tapes) for their children, listen to the reading with their children and listen to their children read. The ideal time may be the first ten minutes in the morning or at the very end of the day when both parent and child are relaxed in a quiet atmosphere conducive to listening. Blessed are the children whose parents enjoy sharing a book with them every day.

When parents have neither the time nor capacity to read to their children at home, an alternative would be for school librarians to recruit a team of volunteers to read to individual and small groups of students at different times of the day. Primary schools close to secondary schools might consider inviting the older students of their neighbouring secondary schools to volunteer as a community service to read books to the younger children at designated times mutually convenient to both parties.

Oral Reading and Fluency
Experienced language teachers love reading aloud to their students, especially the books which are beyond the students' comfort zone or of a genre unfamiliar to the class. Reading aloud is special because the expressive voice of the teacher adds meaning to the text. Remember, dramatic pauses adds to the expressiveness, and, practice makes perfect! I often enjoy this literary experience as much as my students, and pause deliberately from time to time to think aloud as I negotiate the text and construct meaning. At JCPS, students of all grades look forward to the few minutes of oral reading by their teachers at the beginning of every English class. The teachers agree that an expressive and meaning-filled voice can draw children into the magic realm of reading. Hence, it is imperative to practice beforehand and make these moments memorable and enriching experiences for the students. Oral reading can transform a self-conscious student into a star performer because students who read well orally tend to see themselves as confident learners and potentially successful people. While oral reading is rarely practiced in Hong Kong classrooms, according to a leading literacy researcher, Timothy Rasinski (2003), oral reading is regaining its place of importance in the West. He outlined the following key reasons why oral reading should be an integral part of any programme.

1. Oral reading is fun Even older students feel the emotional power of oral reading and become motivated to read more on their own. When their teacher reads to them, students witness fluent reading while they are exposed to multiple genres and more sophisticated words and text structures.

2. Oral reading builds confidence for 'real' reading
In many authentic everyday situations, we are called on to read orally, such as, giving a speech, making an announcement, offering a toast, reporting a news, telling a joke, reading a story, reciting a piece of poetry, performing a script, singing a song, shouting a cheer, presenting a business proposal, and welcoming a distinguished guest. It would be grossly remiss on our part not to prepare our students for such occasions.

3. Oral reading connects spoken and written language
Many teachers are aware that word recognition instruction is more effective when studying words in isolation is balanced with studying them within the context of reading. In the Language Experience Approach (Stauffer, 1980), students are taught how to encode their discussion of life experiences, while in oral reading, the students are shown how to decode what they have written into speech. This organic process of encoding and decoding effectively shows students the connection between reading and writing.

4. Oral reading fosters comprehension
To build fluency, we must model good oral reading, support students' oral reading through choral reading, paired reading and the use of recording materials, provide ample opportunities for practice and encourage fluency through phrasing, as meanings in text often lie in the phrases rather than in the individual words. Pinnell's group (1995) demonstrated that in every decline in oral reading fluency, there is a marked corresponding decline in silent reading comprehension. By focusing on oral reading fluency, students see that apart from words in the text, meaning is carried through intonation, expression, phrasing and pausing, which are essential to fluent oral reading. Students with strong oral reading abilities can then free up their cognitive resources (or attention) to focus more on comprehension.

5. Oral reading allows us to assess the student's reading process
When students read orally, we can assess their ability to decode (e.g., Is the reader applying his or her phonics and other word decoding skills?), analyze their reading errors to diagnose their reading problems (e.g., Are the mistakes syntactically or grammatically acceptable within the passage?), determine their reading rate (i.e. the number of words read correctly per minute), and gauge their overall ability to comprehend the passage read by rating their performance against a proficiency rubric scale for expression, phrasing and pacing. More information on Reading Assessment will follow.

Book Selection
Print worth sharing and of value is available from a wide variety of sources. But what books are wise choices for our students? The answer really varies from one individual to another depending on the purpose, the interest and developmental stage of the reader(s). Whatever your choice, bear in mind that one of the main purposes in teaching reading is to develop in students a love of reading and books.

The reading process requires readers to construct meaning by bringing what they know about the world and the language to help them predict and make sense of the visual cues on the page. Beginner readers find the task more arduous than experienced readers due to their lack of knowledge about the world and the written language. To sustain the interest of beginner readers and motivate readers, of any age, to persist in the process, the texts presented to them must make their effort seem worthwhile, rewarding and satisfying.

Marie Emmitt, et al. (2003) declare that the children deserve to be in classrooms where print is used to capture their imagination. Beginner readers need texts where their rich and varied experiential knowledge can be used to construct meaning from the texts. Texts with predictable language patterns should be provided in order to support the learners' development of visual processing and integration of the different kinds of information necessary for making meaning. Familiar stories, rhymes, chants, and songs should be used frequently.

The Development of Reading Skills
More time is spent on teaching reading than any other skills in schools around the world, for being literate has been the mark of an educated person for centuries. Alas, not everyone learns to read and one of the most serious indictments of some education systems is that some students are still illiterate after having spent twelve years in school.

Broadly speaking, most teachers use either the bottom-up or the top-down approach in teaching reading. The bottom-up approach sees reading as a process of decoding written symbols into spoken words and finally arriving at the meaning of the text. On the other hand, the top-down approach, also known as the psycholinguistic approach, views reading as a process of reconstructing meaning rather than decoding form and the reader resorts to decoding only if all the other means have been tried in vain.

In using the bottom-up approach which is based on the principle of sound-symbol correspondences, many teachers teach reading using the phonics approach (matching written symbols with their aural equivalents) and the whole word approach (teaching words by their overall shape or configuration). Cambourne (1979), who uses the term "outside in" rather than bottom-up, offers the following schematization of the approach: Print ─ Letter discrimination ─ phonemes and graphemes matched ─ blending ─ pronunciation ─ meaning

Considering the complexity and relative unpredictability of sound-symbol correspondences in English, Frank Smith (1978) argues that the phonics approach is realistically illogical and de-emphasizes meaning in the reading process. However, to ensure effectiveness, teachers have taught phonics in context so that in actual reading, readers can predict the meaning of an upcoming word and negotiate the meaning of the whole text.

Children enjoying to read

The top-down approach was ushered in by Smith and his contemporaries, such as Goodman and Burke, who were pioneers of a technique known as miscue analysis (i.e. the analysis of errors made by the reader when reading aloud). This approach begins with a set of hypotheses about the meaning of the text to be read and then selectively samples the text to determine whether the prediction is correct. Cambourne (1979) provides the following illustration of how the process is supposed to work: Past experience, language intuitions ─ selective aspects of print ─ meaning ─ sound, pronunciation, if necessary, and expectations

This approach emphasizes the reconstruction of meaning rather than the decoding of form. Nevertheless, in order to be able to read fluently, readers have to recognize words on sight. This ability closely resembles the function advocated by proponents of the whole-word approach. It follows then that teachers ought to distinguish between how the beginner readers and fluent readers should be taught. Consequently, Stanovich (1980) in his exhaustive review of teaching models criticizes the deficiencies of both bottom-up and top-down models. He proposes a third approach, called the interactive-compensatory model, in which the readers process text by using information provided simultaneously from several different sources and compensate for deficiencies at one level by drawing on knowledge at other levels, i.e. phonological, lexical, syntactical, semantic and discoursal knowledge.

I daresay that Stanovich's eclectic approach is effective because reading is an interactive process wherein the reader shuttles constantly between the bottom-up and top-down processes. The phonics approach may be more efficient and effectively used to teach reading in the early stages, but once past the beginning stage: the text type, the cross-cultural aspects of reading comprehension (Steffensen 1981), the reader's past knowledge and the purpose of the task would enable the proficient reader to make more sense of the text, and even go beyond to evaluate and critique what they have read. Research has proven that different individuals learn to read in different ways. So, teachers need to adapt different pedagogies to meet these different needs.

Furthermore, the Curriculum Development Council (1997) of the Hong Kong Education and Manpower Bureau reminds us that in order to ensure the language which the learners acquire is meaningful and useful, it is essential that the teaching and learning of the language is integrative. Careful planning of teaching and learning is necessary to enable such integrative use of language.

Reading Assessment Strategies
There are a number of standardized tests available for the traditional learning environment. These can even be administered through quizzes and tests and graded by outside agencies. Often, the drawback of these tests is that they do not reflect the actual language use. On the other hand, teachers can design their own reading assessments and evaluate their own teaching in order to discover what the students can or cannot do as a result of the instructional process. It is also important to collect from time to time information that will inform us if the teaching materials, procedures and other aspects of the instructional process need to be changed.

The plethora of assessment strategies is as plentiful as the assessment objectives ─ teachers can write anecdotal notes when observing children engaged in reading, attempt miscue analyses to diagnose students' reading problems, determine students' overall reading levels by word recognition accuracy or with an informal reading inventory (IRI), evaluate students' reading responses to track comprehension progress, determine students' reading rate or assess their word recognition using the One Minute Reading Probe, and even train students to systematically assess their own learning progress.

During the past twenty years, there has been a significant recognition of reading as a sociocultural activity. The changing nature of our understanding of literacy has also lead to further expansion of reading assessment practices. The different uses of literacy need to be acknowledged and therefore reflected in the range of materials used for reading and reading assessments.

Conclusion
Learning to read begins with shared-reading at home and involves learning to use the language to achieve authentic purposes in particular contexts. The teacher and the librarian collaborate to help students acquire the necessary skills for independent reading, by enticing them to participate in both intensive (guided-reading) and extensive reading (self-selected) sessions in the school. Frequent opportunities to practice can instill good reading habits, thus it is strongly recommended that we demonstrate good reading to students and provide them with a print-rich environment to stimulate their imagination.

Proficient readers concentrate on reading for meaning, interacting with the text at hand and comparing their reading responses with other readers. Less proficient readers tend to be more concerned with graphophonic cues. To track students' reading progress, teachers must make careful and continuous observations of students' reading development, by using texts from a variety of genres and levels of difficulty. Day-to-day teaching and learning situations will provide teachers with ample opportunities to collect assessment data, and over-time, a cumulative record of each student's progress can be built up.