Cognitive approach to acquring reading skill

Abstract

The article attempts to monitor the relationship between acquiring the skill of reading as a complex mental process, starting from decoding or deciphering to the meaning that is built on the basis of the reader’s personal expertise and experiences, and related concepts such as phonemic awareness, morphological awareness, the alphabetic principle and mental lexicon according to the cognitive theory. The researcher used the descriptive approach through critical descriptive reading in the way the Moroccan curriculum approached the reading component in the elementary stage. The study has reached a group of results, most notably: The knowledge approach to gain reading skill is as an alternative to the procedural approach associated with behavioral approach, enables you to exceed the readings in primary school. She recommended a set of recommendations, the most important of which are: Adopting the cognitive approach as a cognitive framework for acquiring the reading skill, which recognizes the existence of the learners’ unconscious prior phonemic knowledge.

Keywords: phonemic awareness, morphological awareness, lexicon.