According to the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read (see chapter 3), the capacity to learn and grow as a reader depends on five essential skills:
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Foundational skills for beginning readers
- 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.
- 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
- Vocabulary – understanding the words in a passage, including the specific dimensions of their meanings or usage that matter in context.
- Fluency — the ability to read with sufficient ease and accuracy that active attention can be focused on the meaning and message of the text.
- 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.