Why Dr. Timothy Rasinski Thinks Reading Fluency Should Be “Hot!”

• April 23, 2013 by Norene Wiesen

Tim Rasinski is on a mission to change minds and he shares that mission with us in his webinar, “Keys to Increasing Reading Comprehension in the Age of Common Core.”

What’s Hot, What’s Not

Rasinski laments the fact that reading fluency has been ranked “Not Hot” for years in the annual “What’s Hot, What’s Not Literacy Survey” in Reading Today. Worse, he says, is the fact that the reading experts surveyed said that fluency should not be hot.

Fluency is one of the key skills, says Rasinski, that increases comprehension, the real goal of reading. So he wrote an article called “Why Reading Fluency Should Be Hot!,” which was featured in last May’s Reading Teacher magazine.

Building a Bridge to Reading Comprehension

Rasinski likens reading fluency to a bridge that connects accuracy in word study (phonics, decoding, spelling, and vocabulary) to comprehension. When students do not pick up the connection intuitively, educators have to teach it. But, if educators do not see fluency as an important component of reading instruction, the bridge to comprehension may never be built.

Teaching fluency means developing automaticity in word recognition, so learners can devote their available cognitive energy to comprehension. When that limited energy is spent on word recognition, there’s often not enough left over for the difficult task of deriving meaning from the words that have been read.

Ways to Develop Fluency That Really Work

Rasinski outlines what he calls “the essentials” of developing reading fluency:

1. 1. Reading real literature
   2. Getting real-time word recognition support
   3. Reading with expression
   4. Participating in assisted reading activities
   5. Practicing both “deep” and “wide” reading

Anyone interested in helping students become eager and capable readers should take the time to watch the full webinar and hear Rasinski’s thoughts on these points in his own words. It’s a topic he’s thoroughly studied, and he brings his extensive knowledge and passion to the discussion.

The online Reading Assistant program, as Rasinski points out, supports classroom teachers by delivering these five essentials—including real-time corrective feedback—to any number of students simultaneously.

Reading comprehension all comes down to meaning, says Rasinski, and teaching reading fluency ultimately helps learners get better at deriving meaning from any text.

Doesn’t that sound “Hot!” to you?

Related reading:

5 Fluency and Comprehension Strategies That Every Reader Can Use

Print Exposure and Reading Fluency: Building a Foundation for Academic Success

 

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Categories: Education Trends, Reading & Learning, Reading Assistant

Tags: child reading development, cognitive skills, Common Core, fluency, improving reading skills, learning to read, literacy, phonics, reading comprehension, teacher effectiveness, teacher impact, technology in education, vocabulary, webinar

How Language Immersion Helps English Language Learners Succeed in School

• July 17, 2012 by Norene Wiesen

According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the number of school-age English Language Learners (ELLs) more than doubled between the years 1980 and 2009, rising from 4.7 million to 11.2 million. ELLs currently represent one in nine students ages 5 - 17 in US classrooms, with the majority found in the primary grades.

In a recent webinar, Dr. Virginia Mann, Professor of Cognitive Science at UC Irvine in Southern California, confronted the barriers that ELLs face, and outlined the pathway to success for these students. In order to develop into fluent readers, she explained, ELLs rely on a couple of basics:

• Vocabulary and early language skills
• Phonemic awareness

The good news is that building these skills in a learner’s first language can help build skills in English, as phonemic awareness generalizes across languages and it’s a short hop to understand new English words that sound similar in both languages.  The bad news is that many ELLs also grow up in poverty and research shows that young children living in poverty often do not get enough early language experience and exposure to develop strong early language skills.

Because early language skills are so critical for ELLs, if parents take the time to "become teachers" for their children and immerse their children in language by having conversations with them and working with them on listening and speaking activities, learners can make significant gains.

Students whose first language uses an alphabet system have some advantages over those whose first language use an orthographic system, but the bottom line is that when students engage frequently in language-oriented activities and build oral skills, vocabulary, and phonemic understanding in any language, they are on the pathway to successful English language learning.

Mann is quick to note that while parent involvement is crucial, one-shot programs are not sufficient.  Parents of ELLs need coaching and support, not just instruction.  Dr. Mann references numerous studies and gives examples of the enduring programs that she has created and implemented to support parents in helping their children succeed.

To learn more about why early immersion in any language is so crucial to future academic success, view Dr. Mann's webinar here.

Related Reading:

Why You Should Read With Your Child

Toddler Vocabulary Development: Shopping With Your Child

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Categories: English Language Learners, Family Focus, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic success, achievement gap, elementary school learning, emotions in learning, language learning, learning through play, oral language skills, phonics, phonological awareness, student growth, vocabulary

Developmental Dyslexia: Differences in the Pre-Reading Brain

• June 26, 2012 by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D.

Click image to enlarge

Dyslexia is thought to affect a high percentage of people. The condition can be caused by biological changes during brain development (known as developmental dyslexia) or by environmental effects such as illness or injury (known as acquired dyslexia). In their recent article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nora Maria Raschle, Jennifer Zuk and Nadine Gaab cite estimates that developmental dyslexia affects between 5 and 17% of all children. (2012) They further outline how it can have detrimental effects on a child’s life both inside the classroom as well as beyond. 

For these reasons, educators and researchers have placed intervention strategies for developmental dyslexia very high on their priority list.

While much progress on such interventions has occurred in the area of helping individuals with developmental dyslexia once they have been diagnosed, other research is delving into identifying the neurological and physiological differences between brains that develop the condition and those that do not.

To find out if there are identifiable predictors of developmental dyslexia, Raschle, Zuk and Gaab examined the functional brain networks during phonologic processing in 36 pre-reading children with an average age of 5.5 years. That is they were looking for brain differences even before any of the children had learned to read since previous brain studies of dyslexia have been conducted on individuals after they have begun to read, albeit poorly. All of the subjects were of a similar socioeconomic status; most came from homes with relatively high SES and strong language skills.  These are the type of home environments that typically result in the development of good language and reading skills.

The only substantive difference between the groups in this study was that half of the subjects had a family history of developmental dyslexia, while the other half did not.

Interestingly, the 18 children with a family history of dyslexia scored significantly lower than those who had no family history on a number of standardized assessments, including:

• Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (CELF), Core language
• CELF, Expressive language
• CELF, Language structure
• Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP), Elision
• Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN), Objects
• RAN, Colors
• Verb Agreement and Tense Test (VATT), Repetition

Not only did the research team examine the two groups’ performance on these evaluations, but they also used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning to identify what was happening in the brains of each learner during the examinations.

Brain activity in the left lingual gyrus as well as the temporoparietal brain areas correlated with phonological processing skills. Interestingly, the team discovered that members of the group with a family history of dyslexia showed a reduced activation in these areas even before learning to read. Their discoveries suggest that the left temporoparietal region of the brain in this group reflect an inability to map phonemes to graphemes. In other words, their brains simply were not adequately developed to match language sounds with their written counterparts. In addition, this same region of the brain – also known as the “visual word form area” – seems to be involved in processing words during reading in both children and adults. 

The authors unequivocally state, “Developmental Dyslexia can have severe psychological and social consequences, potentially negatively impacting a child’s life.”  All too often, we identify learning disabilities much too late. In the case of dyslexia, we might make such a diagnosis and begin interventions halfway through elementary school, but by then we have much catching up to do. If these students’ vocabulary skills and motivation to read have already been compromised, the climb back may be much more difficult than if had the situation been identified earlier.

Research like that of Raschle, Zuk and Gaab will help us begin to address learning disabilities at the neurological and physiological levels much earlier in life. Through very early diagnosis and intervention, we may one day be able to more effectively ameliorate – and maybe even eliminate – the distressing experience of developmental dyslexia.

Read this study to learn how Fast ForWord helped significantly improve reading skills in children with dyslexia.

Reference:

Gaab et al., 2007, "Neural correlates of rapid auditory processing are disrupted in children with developmental dyslexia and ameliorated with training: An fMRI study,"; Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience 25, 295-310.

Raschle, N. M., Zuk, J. and Gaab, N., 2012, "Functional characteristics of developmental dyslexia in left-hemispheric posterior brain regions predate reading onset." PNAS, v. 109, p. 2156–2161.

Related Reading:

Dyslexic Learners Dramatically Improve Reading Skills with Fast ForWord

Increased Brain Activity in Reading-Related Areas After Using Fast ForWord Language

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Categories: Brain Research, Fast ForWord, Special Education

Tags: auditory processing, brain development, cognitive skills, early learning, intervention, learning disabilities, phonemic awareness, phonics, processing

Using Poetry to Teach Reading: Rhythm, Rhyme, and Choral Reading

• April 5, 2012 by PC Munoz

Poetry is a powerful vehicle to teach children to learn and love language, reading, and writing. In some ways, using poetry to teach reading is analogous to sneaking highly nutritious (and occasionally child-repellent) vegetables into otherwise kid-friendly dishes. By making use of creative devices like rhythm, rhyme and choral reading, educators can help students learn about phonemes, morphemes, grammar, and other language-based skills, all while having a great time with poetry.

RHYTHM
Many poems written for children have some sort of meter, or basic rhythmic structure, that is catchy and relatively easy for kids to copy orally. This provides a great opportunity for classroom teachers (particularly at the primary-grade level) to go line by line through a poem and focus on the number of syllables (or "beats") in a given word, and demonstrate how each sound and word plays a part in maintaining the meter of the poem. Asking students to swap out one of the words in a highly rhythmic poem for an appropriate new word (which has the same number of beats and a similar sound as the original) is a fun activity that exercises phoneme awareness, vocabulary, and creative writing skills. Haiku and its established structural confines, which require detailed syllable counting on the part of students, is a favorite for students of all ages to read and write.

RHYME
Rhyming poems are ripe with abundant classroom activities. Students can examine the sounds in each rhyming line, identifying the rhyming sounds and coming up with alternate rhyming words that could work in the poem. As an oral activity, creating "silly" substitute rhymes that have the correct matching sound but make absolutely no sense within the poem can also be a lot of fun for students of all ages, while flexing their phoneme awareness and vocabulary skills.

CHORAL READING
Choral reading of a poem (reading aloud in unison with a group of students or whole class) gets students to use their voices, collaborate with their classmates, gain an understanding of the potential dramatic power of the written word, and strengthen their understanding of punctuation. Leading students through a choral reading session can include a significant emphasis on punctuation and how it affects oral reading (pausing when there's a period, inflecting upwards in pitch when there's a question mark, etc.) and affords opportunity to work on enunciation skills as well. Breaking up a choral reading poem so all students have a chance to read a line or phrase on their own can also get the whole class to participate and feel positive about their relationship to the written word.

Using poetry to teach reading is a fun way to inspire students of all skill levels to engage with the subtle beauty and nuances of a language, encourage expression and creativity, and become excited about words, reading, and writing. The possibilities for using poetry in the classroom to teach valuable concepts and skills are almost as boundless as the potential combinations of words in a poem.

*I am the author of the haiku in this post. Though I didn’t know it at the time, my second grade teachers, Tina McCarter and Sharon Kamimoto, helped kick-start a lifelong love of words...for which I am grateful.

Related Reading:

Using Fiction Writing Activities to Develop Creative Thinking in the Classroom

5 Reasons Why Your Students Should Write Every Day

 

About the author:  PC Muñoz is a San Francisco-based writer, recording artist, and educator. Information on his past and future projects can be found at http://www.pcmunoz.com

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Categories: Reading & Learning

Tags: arts, child reading development, creativity, language learning, learning to read, literacy, motivating students, oral language skills, phonemic awareness, phonics, play, reading comprehension, teacher impact, writing

Student Reading Improvement Nearly Doubles In Just 24 Days

• June 28, 2011 by Andrew Ostarello

This video summarizes a study of Fast ForWord Reading 1—the first product in Scientific Learning’s Fast ForWord Reading Series.

The study is a randomized controlled trial that investigated the impact of Fast ForWord Reading 1 in three elementary schools.  The analyses that follow include data from 208 students in 1^st and 2^nd grade.

Students were randomly assigned to be in either the Fast ForWord group or the control group.  The randomization was stratified within grade.

Students using Fast ForWord trained for 48 minutes per day for an average of 24 school days.  Both groups were evaluated using the Test of Phonological Awareness, or the “TOPA” for short. 

There were two subtests: one for Phonological Awareness, and one for Letter-Sounds.

For each subtest, the Fast ForWord participants showed greater gains between pre-test and post-test than the control group.  These differences were both statistically significant.

In conclusion, Fast ForWord participation led to significantly larger improvements than the control group in both the Phonological Awareness and Letter Sounds subtests.

In both cases, the magnitude of the gains was about double for Fast ForWord participants: 12.8 points versus 6.9 for Phonological Awareness, and 5.5 versus 1.9 points for Letter Sounds.

Related Reading:

Fast ForWord Featured on ABC 7 News

After Just 24 Days, Summer School Students Significantly Improve Reading Scores

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Categories: Fast ForWord, Reading & Learning, Scientific Learning Research

Tags: academic success, accelerate learning, child reading development, elementary school learning, how children learn, improving reading skills, increased test scores, learning to read, phonemic awareness, phonics, phonological awareness, student growth, student reading improvement, technology in education, TOPA, video

Improving Reading Comprehension in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

• February 17, 2011 by Ann Osterling

Finally! I am pleased that Emily Iland, the author of the recently released book, Drawing a Blank: Improving Reading Comprehension for Readers on the Autism Spectrum, has addressed the issue of hidden reading comprehension problems in some children on the autism spectrum. For more than 30 years I have been working with children with a diagnosis of hyperlexia. Occasionally also diagnosed with High Functioning Autism or Asperger's Syndrome, these are children who can read words-with ease- often without any reading instruction,  and sometimes at a very early age. These children, who invariably show problems in socialization skills, also may exhibit significant impairments in language and auditory processing, yet they have been able to miraculously “break the code.”

These children may perform well on early tests of reading readiness and decoding. The term Hyperlexia is applied because they are often sounding out words (decoding) better than their peers who have no developmental issues. Because of their decoding skills, these children may not be identified as needing any special support in reading through the IEP process. In reality, they need help with comprehension and vocabulary of the sentences they can read aloud so easily.  Like Emily IIand, I have delighted in seeing this incredible ability to decode words develop and have recognized the issue of the comprehension problems that are often hidden in these children on the Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Iland writes from the perspective of a mother turned researcher and educational therapist. Her son’s spontaneous abilities to read and spell as a toddler were regarded as an exceptional talent (later diagnosed as hyperlexia). Although his ability to decode words continued, by fourth grade he began to struggle academically due to undetected comprehension problems. At age 13, he was tested and found to have a 12-year gap between his reading comprehension skills (4^th grade level) and mathematic skills (16^th grade level). Eventually he was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum.  But after intensive intervention, he was able to earn his bachelor’s degree in accounting, pass the CPA exam, and obtain employment as an accountant. However, many students like her son do not have this happy outcome because reading comprehension issues are not identified or properly remediated.

In her review of typical reading skill development, Iland points out where the breakdowns in comprehension begin for children with autism. She discusses the impact of the social deficits associated with autism spectrum disorders on comprehension of language and reading. The child’s narrow range of interests can lead to limited exposure to the world and restricted vocabulary. Difficulties with interpersonal relationships can interfere with the ability to learn that other people may have different perspectives, motivations and beliefs. Rigid thinking can restrict the children from understanding that words can have multiple meanings and that different words can be used to mean the same thing.

The reading comprehension problems of individuals with autism are often “masked,” or hidden, by their strengths in decoding, fluency, rote memory, and understanding of concrete information. This is especially true during the early school years when there is a focus on teaching children HOW to read. There are specific difficulties in young children that correlate with later difficulties in reading comprehension that should be closely examined in children with autism. For example, a child who is reading fluently may not have good phonemic awareness abilities due to  the auditory processing problems, which are common in children with ASD.  Receptive language problems may also be present in these children. Iland discusses appropriate assessment tools for different ages, as well as the importance of identifying the underlying comprehension difficulties of these children.

A significant part of the book focuses on reading comprehension strategies to improve skills for these children. Iland shares the implications of the limited research on effective remediation of reading comprehension for learners with ASD. She addresses the recommendations of the National Reading Panel, pointing out the best strategies for students with ASD and helping the reader recognize strategies that would likely be a mismatch. While Iland selects strategies because of their value for children with ASD, many of them are useful for other children as well. Drawing a Blank: Improving Reading Comprehension for Readers on the Autism Spectrum is a welcome and needed resource. Emily Iland’s multiple perspectives and clear writing style make this book user-friendly for parents, educators, speech-language pathologists, students and others interested in helping individuals who are on the autism spectrum become more successful readers.

Related Reading:

Creating Reading Intention: Strategies to Improve Reading Comprehension Skills in Students

Teaching and Learning with Intent through Guided Reading Activities

Related Webinars:

Autism: What is the Latest Research?

Autism: Support and Interventions

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Attend one of our popular webinars with thought leaders in learning. Live and pre-recorded webinars are available. Register today!

Categories: Brain Research, Family Focus, Special Education

Tags: auditory processing, autism, child reading development, improving reading skills, learning disabilities, literacy, phonemic awareness, phonics, reading comprehension

Sing the Alphabet Backwards Sometimes: Kindergarten Phonemic Awareness Activities

• November 30, 2010 by Norene Wiesen

In Kindergarten, phonemic awareness skills acquisition is a focal point in language and reading development.  Kindergarten phonemic awareness challenges  include memorizing the consonant sounds that are associated with each letter of the alphabet and learning to detect the part of a word where a specific consonant sound is heard.

Your Kindergarteners can practice honing their phonemic awareness skills with some of these activities available via the Web:

Kindergarten Phonemic Awareness Activities from PBS Kids

PBS Kids offers several fun online games that even young children can play to develop phonemic awareness skills:

Elmo Rhymes

Elmo shows the child a selection of objects on the shelves of a closet.  He names one of the objects and asks the child to select all of the items in the closet that rhyme with the named object.  As the child mouses over an object, Elmo says the name of the object.

Pounce

The child hears a short word spoken and is asked to look at three written words and click on the word that he heard.  The child gets multiple chances to get it right, and after making a correct match, sees the written word next to a picture of the named object.

Fuzzy Lion Ears

The child sees a picture and a word label for the picture.  A letter is missing from the word.  It is the child’s task to select the missing letter from three letters provided.  The game also provides a little help: the child can mouse over several letters to hear the sound each one makes before selecting an answer.  

Alphabet Chant from EFL Playhouse

While the website is geared toward teachers of English Language Learners, the Alphabet Chant is appropriate as a general classroom Kindergarten phonemic awareness activity. The chant is designed to be fun, can be incorporated into the classroom in just 5-10 minutes, and over time helps young learners associate letters with sounds.

Kindergarten Phonemic Awareness Activities from “Patti’s Classroom”

From Los Angeles County Office of Education, “Patti’s Electronic Classroom” (http://teams.lacoe.edu/documentation/classrooms/patti/k-1/activities/phonemic.html)  provides many resources for teachers of students in grades K-3—including a selection of kindergarten phonemic awareness activities:

• Word rhyming
• Syllable segmentation
• Beginning sound substitution
• Sound isolation
• Phonemic segmentation

Kindergarten Phonemic Awareness Activities from SaskEd

Books and Language Play (link updated 04/02/2012)

These phonemic awareness activities from SaskEd encourage the use of books and songs that rhyme as well as tongue twisters, alliteration, and other types of language play.  The end of the article features a list of books for young children that highlight language play.

Graphophonic Strategies and Activities (link updated 04/02/2012)

In addition to the book list and language play suggestions, SaskEd’s graphophonic strategies and activities are perfect for helping kindergarteners discover the alphabetic principle, the idea that each letter of the alphabet is associated with one or two sounds.  Activities include making and reading one-letter books and a fun challenge to sing the alphabet backwards sometimes.

Have fun with these phonemic awareness activities and help your Kindergarteners begin to develop a lifelong enjoyment of language and reading and become a successful reader.

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Categories: Family Focus, Reading & Learning

Tags: child reading development, cognitive skills, early learning, elementary school learning, how children learn, learning through play, learning to read, phonemic awareness, phonics

Sharing the Practices of Phonics Practice: 5 Instructional Approaches

• November 23, 2010 by Terri Zezula

Let’s talk about phonics teaching. Actually, let’s talk about phonics practice. Together, let’s figure out and share what works. But before we start our quest forward, let’s take a quick look back.

The “Great Debate” between proponents of the whole language and phonics approaches to reading instruction and practice has gone on for decades. Essentially, the discussion comes down to the question of whether early readers should focus on developing an understanding of written language at the letter/sound level (a phonics approach) or at the word level (a whole language approach). Today, the most widely accepted strategy indicates that phonics instruction and practice represent the most effective methods of reading instruction for K-6 learners; phonics also has proven very effective in helping struggling students with learning to read and spell. (Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read, 2006)

So, what opportunities—systematically speaking—are open to educators to offer phonics practice and instruction to students? The National Reading Panel outlines five different instructional approaches that we can draw upon. Specifically, the report lists them as follows:

1. Analogy Phonics—teaching students unfamiliar words by analogy to known words (e.g., recognizing that the rime segment of an unfamiliar word—the part of a syllable used in poetic rhyme—is identical to that of a familiar word, and then blending the known rime with the new word onset, such as reading brick by recognizing that -ick is contained in the known word kick, or reading stump by analogy to jump).
2. Analytic Phonics—teaching students to analyze letter-sound relations in previously learned words to avoid pronouncing sounds in isolation.
3. Embedded Phonics—teaching students phonics skills by embedding phonics instruction in text reading, a more implicit approach that relies to some extent on incidental learning.
4. Phonics through Spelling—teaching students to segment words into phonemes and to select letters for those phonemes (i.e., teaching students to spell words phonemically).
5. Synthetic Phonics—teaching students explicitly to convert letters into sounds (phonemes) and then blend the sounds to form recognizable words. (Ibid.)

Print publishers as well as online curriculum providers have created countless tools to help educators teach phonics as well as offer practice to solidify these lessons. But any practice of these lessons that reinforces and offers further exercise in these five understandings--inside or outside the classroom--has the potential to help students solidify and improve reading skills. Guidelines for teaching phonics systematically can be found on many blogs and websites, including www.TeachingLD.org, where you can find their Current Practice Alerts publication on Phonics Instruction: Go For It! (http://www.teachingld.org/pdf/alert14.pdf)

In such a discussion of phonics practice, we must make the point that any selection of technology to assist in the process should be thoroughly researched and proven in tests as well as in the field. Speaking specifically about the Fast ForWord® products, multiple studies have shown their effectiveness in building the cognitive skills necessary for reading and writing. They do this through development of memory, attention, processing and sequencing abilities, and by exercising early reading skills including phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension.

That said, finding what works isn’t easy; it takes practice, but it also takes research, adaptation, experimentation and creativity. According to columnist Ruth Bettelheim as quoted recently in USA Today, one of the key elements for effective learning is giving students what she calls “the pleasure of mastery.” Phonics is one of those areas where we can—with the right instructional tools—give students the practice they need to not only achieve success, but deliver that pleasure of mastery to help stoke each student’s fire for learning.

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Categories: Family Focus, Fast ForWord, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic success, child reading development, cognitive skills, early learning, how children learn, improving reading skills, learning to read, phonemic awareness, phonics, struggling readers, technology in education

Teaching Children to Read

• July 6, 2010 by Martha Burns, Ph.D

According to the Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read Reports of the Subgroups, the capacity to learn and grow as a reader depends on five essential skills:

Foundational Skills for Beginning Readers:

1) Phonemic Awareness: The insight that every spoken word can be conceived as a sequence of phonemes. Phonemes are the speech sounds that are represented by the letters of an alphabet.

2) Phonemic Decoding: The ability to capture the meaning of unfamiliar words by translating groups of letters back into the sounds that they represent, link them to one's verbal vocabulary, and access their meaning.

Skills Needed to Read for Meaning:

3) Vocabulary: Understanding the words in a passage, including the specific dimensions of their meanings or usage that matter in context.  For example, knowing that “tree” when reading about a “family tree” has a different meaning from “maple tree.”

4) Fluency: The ability to read with sufficient ease and accuracy that active attention can be focused on the meaning and message of the text and the text easily retained.

5) Comprehension: Thinking about the meaning of each segment of the text as it is read, building an understanding of the text as a whole, and reflecting on its meaning and message.

Teachers today are fortunate to have access to a wealth of scientifically based research into what works when teaching children to read.  The links that follow are courtesy of the National Institute for Literacy:

Birth to Early Childhood

Children begin building literacy skills long before they go to school.  Even very young children can be prepared to become successful readers later on.  Research has identified certain skills that are important for later literacy development; these skills include knowing the names and sounds of printed letters, manipulating speech sounds, and remembering what has been said for a short time.  Here are some ways to teach younger children these pre-reading skills.

Childhood

From kindergarten through third grade, young readers are actively developing all five of the core reading skills from phonemic awareness to fluency and comprehension.  Research has shown that teaching children to read successfully during this window requires a combination of strategies and instructional approaches.  Teachers must know how children learn to read and be able to tailor instructional approaches to individual children--especially those who are struggling readers.  Here are some instructional approaches for the five essential skills.

Adolescence

While many adolescent readers have mastered phonemic awareness and decoding strategies, they are often still challenged to fully understand what they read.  In middle and high school, it is common for literacy skills to be developed not only in language arts courses, but also in a variety of different content areas.  To prepare students for the literacy challenges of secondary school, language arts and content area teachers need to focus on the last three components of reading: vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.  Here are some approaches to teaching vocabulary and comprehension skills.

 

Related reading:

Sing the Alphabet Backwards Sometimes: Kindergarten Phonemic Awareness Activities

Sharing the Practices of Phonics Practice: 5 Instructional Approaches

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Categories: Reading & Learning

Tags: child reading development, early learning, elementary learning, elementary school learning, fluency, high school learning, how children learn, improving reading skills, intervention, learning through play, learning to read, literacy, memory, oral language skills, phonemic awareness, phonics, reading comprehension, reading intervention, struggling readers, struggling students, teacher effectiveness, teacher impact, vocabulary

Phonemic Awareness as a Foundational Reading Skill

• May 18, 2010 by Denise Ruvalcaba

Phonemic awareness is the insight that every spoken word can be conceived as a sequence of phonemes.  Phonemes are the speech sounds that are represented by the letters of the alphabet.

Phonemic decoding is the ability to capture the meaning of unfamiliar words by translating groups of letters back into the sounds that they represent, link them to one’s verbal vocabulary, and access their meaning.

Together, phonemic awareness and phonemic decoding are key foundational skills for beginning readers.

Learn more about teaching children to read from the National Reading Panel at www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/nrp/report.cfm.

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Categories: Reading & Learning

Tags: learning to read, literacy, phonemic awareness, phonics