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The National Reading Panel’s report on research-based approaches to teaching children to read found that there are several skills children need to learn to become good readers. They must be taught phonemic awareness skills, phonics skills, the ability to read fluently with accuracy, speed, and expression and the application of reading comprehension strategies to enhance understanding and enjoyment of what they read.
Phonological Awareness is an umbrella term that includes all levels of the speech sound system:
Phonemic awareness specifically refers to the conscious awareness that spoken language is composed of phonemes, or speech sounds. It involves the ability to blend segments and manipulate phonemes in spoken words. It begins with auditory development and continues to develop as students connect sounds to print.
Word/Sentence Segmentation is the ability to break sentences into words (for example, How many words in this sentence? The boy ran home.) as well as the ability to break words into syllables (How many parts/syllables in this word? Mother.)
Phoneme Segmentation is the ability to blend, segment, and manipulate phonemes or speech sounds in spoken words. Here are three examples: What word am I saying? /c/ /a/ /t/. Say the sounds in sat. The word is bug. Change the first sound to the last sound and the last sound to the first sound.
Rhyming is the ability to recognize and produce words that have a similar ending sound, for example, Does pie rhyme with sky? or What rhymes with sky?
Phonics is the study and use of the sound/spelling correspondence to help students read written words. Phonics instruction teaches students:
Alphabetic Principle is the principle that letters are used to represent individual phonemes in a spoken word.
Print Concepts is an umbrella term encompassing several concepts about printed text. Some relate to the features of printed language.
Sound-Symbol Correspondence is the concept that sounds (phonemes) are represented by letters (graphemes).
Fluency refers to the ability to read words automatically without conscious effort or attention. It includes the ability to group individual words into meaningful phrases, and apply rapid phonic, morphemic, and contextual analyses to identify unknown words. Fluency also includes components of rate (number of words per minute) and accuracy (number of correctly identified words) that support deep comprehension. Prosody, or reading with expression, is an additional dimension to fluency.
Rate refers to the number of correct and incorrect words a student reads in a period of time, generally one minute (e.g., 120 correct words per minute)
Prosody refers to the rhythms and tones of spoken language, the ability to read with expression by segmenting text into meaningful units, marking phrase and sentence boundaries with pauses, and changes in pitch and emphasis.
Vocabulary is a term that is associated with the body of word meanings that are known by the speaker of a language in order to read text with fluency and comprehension. It involves four types of vocabulary: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Tactics in this area will focus primarily on reading vocabulary (versus listening, speaking, and writing vocabulary.)
Vocabulary Development includes specific and intentional word instruction for all words identified as those that are important to achieve an established level of knowledge (i.e., meaning is easily, rapidly, and automatically recognized) versus an unknown or acquainted level of knowledge. Vocabulary development includes teaching unknown words, antonyms, synonyms, multiple-meaning words along with strategies for remembering word meanings.
Word-Learning Strategies refers to strategies that help students determine the meanings of unfamiliar words on their own. They include 1) how to use dictionaries and other reference aids to confirm and deepen knowledge of word meanings, 2) how to use information about word parts (e.g., compound words, prefixes, word roots, etc.) to figure out the meanings of words in text, and 3) how to locate and use context, both external and semantic context clues, to determine word meanings.
Comprehension refers to the process of constructing meaning from written texts. The process of comprehension is both interactive and strategic – readers make decisions by selecting strategies that fit the kind of text they are reading and their purpose for reading. Key strategies are used before, during, and after reading a selection. The key strategies include using prior knowledge, predicting, identifying the main idea, summarizing, questioning, making inferences, and visualizing. Awareness and understanding of text organization also plays a key role in reading comprehension. This includes physical characteristics (headings, subheadings, graphics) as well as recognizing text structures such as narrative (tells a story) and expository (communicates information.)
Strategic Reading refers to a group of highly interactive strategies that good readers apply and adapt to make sense of text. It involves learner-based actions or conscious applications of cognitive and metacognitive strategies. Strategic readers know when and how to use these strategies: 1) being aware of one’s thought processes and being able to successfully direct them; 2) adapting one’s thinking as needed, toward the accomplishment of a task like previewing before reading, monitoring understanding during reading, and checking understanding after reading.
Narrative Text refers to text that tells about sequences of events, usually with the structure of a fiction or nonfiction story.
Expository Text refers to text that reports factual information and the relationships among ideas.
