“Reading is the process of understanding speech written down. The goal is to gain access to meaning.” (Ziegler and Goswami, 2005: 3)
Good readers not only understand how print is a representation of speech, but also use knowledge (language, life experiences, and so on) to derive meaning from what they read. While speaking develops naturally when children live in a culture and a community that uses language and where children are expected to interact with others, reading must be taught. Thus, if instruction is appropriate for the acquisition of reading, we could expect children who do not exhibit genetic or neurodevelopmental impairments to be reading after three years of schooling.
Yet, a substantial proportion of children are not reading after such a period of formal instruction. Nonacademic factors, such as a genetic deficit, certain types of neurological impairments, or chronic malnutrition that adversely affects brain development, are more difficult to prevent and rectify than faults in instruction, or the lack of adequate facilities and procedures for the early diagnosis and intervention of reading difficulties. The COGENT (Cognitive Enhancement Training) program aims at building the cognitive, language, and phonemic awareness skills that support reading, especially for those children who are at risk for developing reading difficulties.
In the present chapter, we describe the Reading Readiness program called COGENT (Das, 2004). But before we do that, let us step back and look at the entire landscape of how children learn to read. The simple answer is—by learning the letters of the alphabet, learning that a letter has a sound, combining the sounds of the letters in simple words, and all the other things that children are taught by their teachers in Grade 1. However, does this work all the time for all students?
Letter to sound is not a simple conversion; as we all know, the letter a may be said in many different ways (for example, apple, air, autumn). Sometimes when children are learning letter-sound correspondence, they cannot break down the word into its sounds. They need to perceive the sounds in the first place, that is, they have to pay attention and discriminate between the different sounds, and then organize the sounds in a sequence. They must also blend the sounds together, chunk the sounds into bite-size units, and assemble the chunks in units that can be pronounced.
Then they have to vocalize or say the word. Children are paying attention, planning and organizing an output, chunking, and sequencing. Planning, attention, and the two ways of ordering information into simultaneous and successive types (PASS) are the four basic processes that we need not only for reading, but for getting around in a town, understanding a conversation, thinking of the future, or, in short, living our lives.
The challenge for educators is to prepare the children for reading by allowing them to apply these processes, to make them ready to attend to words and language, discriminate between sounds in a word, automatically recognize not only familiar shapes and colors but also letters and simple words, follow the sequence of arrangement of words in a sentence, and, what is more, understand, comprehend, and realize how the words are arranged in a sentence, sentences in a text, and texts within a theme. As children get ready to do all this, they are ready to read and are on the path to enjoying reading.
COGENT is an attempt to create a program for reading readiness by first ensuring that children are engaged in PASS processes, a prerequisite for reading. It is based on knowledge borrowed from several reliable studies (Luria, 1981). It is based on evidence, and now we are also building research evidence for its efficacy and to show that it works.