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This part of the rope includes background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge.

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The Science of Reading uncovers the intricate ways that our brains learn to read. Scarborough's Reading Rope is one of the most approachable ways to better understand the complex processes of what is happening in our brains as we are learning to read. The Reading Rope model offers a clear framework to help us better understand the intricacies of reading.
How long has the Reading Rope model been around?
In the early 1990s, Dr. Hollis Scarborough invented the Reading Rope model. This model was developed with the goal of helping parents better understand the necessary skills that their children needed to develop to become proficient readers. In the original model Dr. Scarborough used pipe cleaners to convey how the different "strands" of reading are all interconnected yet independent of one another. For many students, learning to read is a challenge and Scarborough's Rope captures the complexity of learning to read. The Handbook of Early Literacy Research published Dr. Scarborough's Reading Rope in 2001. Since then, this framework has become a staple for many reading teachers.

Scarborough's Reading Rope is made up of lower and upper strands. When all these component parts intertwine it results in skilled and accurate, fluent reading with strong comprehension.

The Upper Strands Include:

Background knowledge

Vocabulary

Language structures

Verbal reasoning

Literacy knowledge

The Lower Strands Include:

Phonological awareness

Decoding

Alphabetic principle

Letter-sound correspondences

Sight recognition

The Upper Strands

Background Knowledge

Background knowledge is an essential component in learning because it helps us make sense of new ideas and experiences. Readers rely on background knowledge to attend to and make sense of what they are reading. This is especially important for readers who are still relying heavily on word decoding rather than rapid word recognition. Having knowledge about a variety of subjects, topics, and ideas makes it more likely that they will be able to make sense of what they are reading and more likely that they will add to their body of knowledge.

Vocabulary

An extensive and rich vocabulary enables readers to make sense of what they are reading. A reader with rich auditory and oral vocabularies will find it easier to read through texts that contain words they have not seen in print before. If the student can use their growing decoding skills and match their result with a word they already know the meaning of, they will be more confident in their abilities and will spend less overall effort on reading a text.

Language Structures

Syntax - The arrangement of words in a phrase or sentence. The English language has patterns and rules for the way we order our words. It also has some flexibility and variety in acceptable patterns, and even then, speakers and writers are allowed some leeway with these patterns.

Semantics - In linguistics, semantics is the study of the meanings of morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences. Knowledge of the meaning of a text is essential to reading.

Verbal Reasoning

Inference - a conclusion one can draw from known facts or evidence

Metaphor - a word or phrase used to say that something is another thing in order to suggest that they are simila

Literary Knowledge

Print Concepts - letters vs. words, 1:1 correspondence, reading left-to-right and top-to-bottom, spaces between written words, letter order matters, etc.

Genres of Literature - different types of books or stories defined by special characteristics

The Lower Strands

Phonological Awareness

Phonological Awareness is a skill set that includes identifying and manipulating units of oral language - parts such as words, syllables, onsets, and rimes. Did you know that you can improve your students' ability to read unfamiliar words without showing them a single printed letter?

Decoding

Decoding is the ability to apply knowledge of sound-letter relationships (phonics) to correctly pronounce written words. Did you know that in 2019, only 35% of 4th graders were at or above (NAEP) proficient level on the reading assessment?

Sight Recognition

Our sight word memory is also referred to as our orthographic lexicon, which includes all the words we can read accurately and effortlessly. Literate adults have a sight word memory of 30,000 to 70,000 words. Starting in 3rd grade, it is estimated that "skilled orthographic mappers" anchor 10-15 new words a day into their sight word memories. Sight word recognition is foundational to fluent reading.

Connecting Strands to Literacy Success
Scarborough's Reading Rope illustrates how skilled reading relies on the intertwining of language comprehension and word recognition. Each strand-like phonological awareness, decoding, vocabulary, and background knowledge-works together, gradually strengthening to create fluent, meaningful reading. As educators, using the Reading Rope framework helps us focus on building these essential components in a balanced, structured way, ensuring that students not only decode words but also fully understand and engage with the text. By addressing each strand, we help students develop into confident, capable readers equipped for lifelong literacy success.

Bring the Science of Reading to Life in the Classroom

Explore our engaging foundational reading approach. Avoid special education referrals, and jumpstart student outcomes across the curriculum.

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Scarborough's Reading Rope | Really Great Reading

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Can Scarborough's Reading Rope Transform the Approach to Literacy Instruction? The Science of Reading uncovers the intricate ways that our brains learn to read. Scarborough's Reading Rope is one of the most approachable ways to better understand the complex processes of what is happening in our brains as we are learning to read.

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To comprehend a story or text, young readers need a threshold of knowledge about the topic, and tougher state standards place increasing demands on children's prior knowledge. This article offers practical classroom strategies to build background knowledge such as using contrasts and comparisons and encouraging topic-focused wide reading.

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Vocabulary plays a fundamental role in the reading process and is critical to reading comprehension. Children learn the meanings of most words indirectly, through everyday experiences with oral and written language. Other words are learned through carefully designed instruction.

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Scarborough's Reading Rope provides a model for understanding the components of skilled reading. This blog series examines each of the strands of the Language Comprehension half of the rope and how Wit & Wisdom® strengthens these upper strands. Image courtesy of Dr. Hollis Scarborough, 2001.

In Scarborough's Reading Rope, the Language Structures strand refers to semantics-how word choice develops meaning-and syntax, the grammatical rules of a language.

The language structures used in writing often differ from how we speak, so building a strong knowledge of semantics and syntax helps readers comprehend challenging texts.

The Role of Language Structures

Why is knowledge of language structures critical for students' reading development?

1. Complex texts have complex language structures. The complexity of language structures within a text contributes to quantitative and qualitative measures of text complexity. Longer sentences, figurative language, and low-frequency words increase the complexity of a text. To read increasingly complex texts successfully, students need support navigating complex structures and word choice to understand how each contributes to the text's meaning.

2. Knowledge of language structures helps readers track information within a sentence or across a text. A skilled reader uses their knowledge of language structures to accurately summarize and make logical inferences. Without understanding how to refer to a noun used in a previous sentence, for instance, students quickly lose the ability to make meaning of challenging texts.

3. Reading comprehension relies on subtleties of language structures. Semantics and syntax both affect meaning. You may have seen (or even own) a coffee cup with this frequent but clever pairing of sentences:

"Let's eat Grandma!"
"Let's eat, Grandma!"

To understand the joke, a reader needs strong knowledge of how the comma placement in the second sentence changes the meaning. Developing knowledge of language structures strengthens students' ability to glean meaning from sentences.

The Power of Integrated Instruction

Ideally, teachers help students build knowledge of language structures by guiding students to analyze the language of complex texts and apply that learning to their own writing. But educators haven't always approached teaching syntax this way.

Traditionally, grammar has been taught isolated from texts and content knowledge, focusing primarily on students' ability to identify, describe, and define grammar rules (Fearn and Farnan 64). Often, traditional grammar instruction begins and ends with error correction, which reinforces negativity and insecurity with writing (Cleary; Shanahan 18). The traditional approach lacks the component of grammar's deep relationship with meaning.

To make meaning from complex texts, students must be able to analyze the relationships among words, phrases, and clauses at the sentence level. This ability builds students' reading habits and stamina (Liben and Pimentel 9). It also improves students' written communication (Fearn and Farnan 79).

When students analyze a text's sentences, they develop an understanding of grammatical rules (syntax) and the strategic use of words and phrases to carry meaning (semantics). In an integrated English language arts classroom, students also receive explicit instruction on crafting similarly structured sentences that convey meaningful ideas about students' learning.

Wit & Wisdom's Approach to Teaching Language Structures

Wit & Wisdom builds students' knowledge of language structures by anchoring learning in the module texts. When students learn from the language used in complex texts, they build a skillset that strengthens their reading comprehension and written expression.

At any grade level in Wit & Wisdom lessons, teachers can regularly find language structure instruction in two places:

Deep Dives: Students engage in daily 15-minute Deep Dives that focus on building language-structure knowledge and skills. The content of Deep Dives directly relates to a Wit & Wisdom core lesson. Students might categorize module-specific words for their shades of meaning, engage in a morphological analysis of an important word from a module text, or analyze the construction of sentences from a core text.

Reveal stage lessons: The Reveal stage often requires students to analyze the effect language structures have on meaning. Students answer the question, "What does a deeper exploration of _____ reveal?" This sentence is often completed by an element of language, such as an author's word choice or the use of figurative language.

Wit & Wisdom Prologue™

All learners need opportunities to build knowledge of language structures used in writing, especially in academic and expository texts. To make content learning accessible for multilingual learners and students with language-based learning disabilities, additional instruction may be needed to support language and reading comprehension (Haager and Osipova 8). Prologue, a collection of 30-minute lessons for grades 6 through 8, supports students' language development to prepare for Wit & Wisdom instruction.

Summary

Teaching language structures improves students' reading comprehension, and teachers' approach to this instruction matters. Teachers can cultivate comprehension and effective communication by integrating reading and writing instruction and by providing focused time to study how language conveys meaning.
Works Cited
Cleary, Michelle Navarre. "The Wrong Way to Teach Grammar." The Atlantic, 25 Feb 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/02/the-wrong-way-to-teach-grammar/284014/.

Fearn, Leif, and Nancy Farnan. "When Is a Verb? Using Functional Grammar to Teach Writing." Journal of Basic Writing, vol. 26, no. 1, City University of New York, spring 2007, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ787964.pdf.

Haager, Diane, and Anna V. Ospiova. "Enhancing Academic Instruction for Adolescent English Language Learners with or at Risk for Learning Disabilities." Insights into Learning Disabilities, vol. 14, no. 1, 2017, pp.7-26, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1165739.pdf.

Liben, Meredith, and Sue Pimentel. "Placing Text at the Center of the Standards-Aligned ELA Classroom." Achieve the Core, Student Achievement Partners, 24 Aug 2021, https://achievethecore.org/page/3185/placing-text-at-the-center-of-the-standards-aligned-ela-classroom.

Shanahan, Eileen. "From Finding Error to Finding Wonder: A Shift in Grammar Instruction." Voices from the Middle, vol. 28, no. 3, National Council of Teachers of English, March 2021, https://library.ncte.org/journals/vm/issues/v28-3/31174.

About Hannah Dieter

Hannah Dieter is a director of implementation services on the Humanities team at Great Minds. In this role, she leads a team of implementation leaders who support schools and districts across the country with their implementation of  Wit & Wisdom and Geodes. Before joining the Great Minds team, she was the director of early childhood education for Lorain City Schools in Ohio. Hannah is also a former kindergarten teacher and instructional coach. She is currently working on her master's degree in reading science from Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati.

About Tanisha Washington

Tanisha Washington is a director of implementation services on the Humanities team at Great Minds. In this role, she leads a team of implementation leaders who support schools and districts across the country with their implementation of Wit & Wisdom and Geodes. Before joining the Great Minds team, she was an assistant principal for a charter school in Washington, DC. As an assistant principal, Tanisha was a member of the 2013 New Leaders' Aspiring Principals program, the 2018 Relay Graduate School of Education's National Principals Academy, and the 2018 School Leader Lab's leadership cohort. Tanisha is also a former elementary school teacher and has a master's degree in elementary education from American University in Washington, DC.

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Hannah Dieter and Tanisha Washington explore the Language Structures strand of Scarborough's Reading Rope and how to help readers comprehend challenging texts.

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Components of the Reading Rope: Language Structure - Braintrust

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Language structure, one of the eight "strands" of Scarborough's reading rope, consists of a complex set of rules and conventions. These conventions allow us to communicate with one another verbally and in writing. Put simply, students need to develop an understanding of the structure of the English language as they are learning how to read.

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All languages have underlying structural rules that make meaningful communication possible.

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Build Foundational Literacy Skills with Research-Based Strategies

Join Waterford's Science of Reading virtual summit to explore how the brain learns to read and get strategies for effective, research-based instruction from literacy expert and Vice President of Curriculum Julie Christensen. Guidance for teachers and administrators is included!

Plus, find upcoming and on-demand video series led by early education experts through the Webinar Library, featuring topics chosen with administrators in mind like:

Impactful Family Engagement Made Easy

Understanding the Six Instructional Strands for Literacy

Professional Learning: Teaching the Science of Reading

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Discover the essentials of instruction for language concepts, a set of skills that support the development of reading comprehension. Then, learn strategies to help educators in your school teach language concepts skills-along with five free books available in English and Spanish!

The Elements of Language Concepts

Instruction of language concepts encompasses a broad variety of skills that help students understand how written language is organized. Within Scarborough's Reading Rope, these skills are part of the Literacy Knowledge and Language Structures strands.

Literacy knowledge includes awareness of things like print concepts, genres, and text features. Language structure includes punctuation, parts of speech, and syntax. Let's take a closer look at these two component skills within language concepts.

Literacy Knowledge

Print concepts

A strong awareness of print concepts for young learners includes the following:

Print represents spoken language

In English, text is read from left to right

Letters can be arranged in specific ways to create words

Words are separated by spaces

Words can be combined to make sentences that convey ideas

Sentences end with punctuation marks

Genres

The more book genres that a student encounters-including narrative and informational text, biography, folktales, and poetry-the broader their vocabulary and background knowledge will become. And we know that vocabulary and background knowledge are the foundational building blocks for reading comprehension.

Including various genres in a classroom or school library also helps students discover different purposes for reading, like reading a fantasy novel for enjoyment or reading a science book to learn about animals.

Text features

Text features include table of contents, headings, captions, graphs and visual information, glossaries, and more. Understanding and using these features within texts supports reading comprehension.

Language Structures

Punctuation

Knowledge of the functions of punctuation-defined here as marks that convey meaning or tone in a text-supports both reading fluency and comprehension.

Parts of speech

Instruction related to parts of speech helps students understand how categories of words-like nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, interjections, and conjunctions-play different roles in contributing to meaning within sentences and larger texts. Understanding parts of speech supports the development of reading comprehension.

Syntax

Syntax is the study of how words are arranged to build meaningful phrases and sentences. Building students' syntactic awareness fosters sentence-level comprehension that leads to stronger overall comprehension of texts. Syntactic awareness also helps students develop strong writing skills.

Strategies for Teaching Language Concepts

Teaching about language concepts to build students' understanding of how written language is organized is a key part of literacy instruction. As these skills are taught, it is important to tie them to meaningful texts. The goal of reading is, of course, understanding meaning. To teach language concepts skills effectively, educators can:

Model and teach print concepts skills for the youngest learners in the context of frequent rich experiences with narrative and informational texts.

Incorporate a wide range of genres to help students explore themes and subjects in a variety ways as they build vocabulary and background knowledge.

Preview books as a class to examine text features and consider how they can be supports for understanding. Teach students to ask questions such as:

How can I use the table of contents to think about what ideas are included in this book?

What extra information can I learn from pictures, graphs, and other visuals in the book?

How can the headings help me organize my thoughts as I read?

Draw students' attention to punctuation within texts. Help them think about how punctuation helps us understand important elements of a story like how characters are feeling or when a character is speaking.

Teach about how different parts of speech each play a role in contributing to the meaning of a text. How can verbs, nouns, and adjectives support understanding by answering questions about who, what, when, where, why, and how?

Explore syntax within a text. Help students understand how words are arranged to build meaningful sentences. Find sentences that join ideas using the word but, so, or because. Help students practice writing their own sentences that follow the same structure.

Additionally, according to Christensen, it can be helpful to link language concepts instruction to a theme or topic you are teaching in class. That way, students are simultaneously building content knowledge that supports their reading comprehension.

5 Free Books to Teach Language Concepts

The free books linked below represent a range of genres and can be used to teach a variety of language concepts skills. Share these books with teachers in your school to use in class or send to families as a home learning activity.

Nursery Rhyme: The Itsy, Bitsy Spider ( Spanish) Foster print concepts skills by reciting this well-known rhyme as you track print from left to right and point to each word to model the connection between speech and print.

Biography: Defying Gravity: The Story of Mae Jemison ( Spanish) Examine the text features in this book. What extra information can be gathered from the timeline or the diagram of our solar system? What can be learned from the glossary?

Folktale: The Little Red Hen ( Spanish) Find punctuation in the book. How do question marks, exclamation points, and quotation marks help us understand the story?

Poetry: Annie Can Whistle and Other Poems ( Spanish) Use this book of poems to explore parts of speech. Pay special attention to adjectives. Many poems describe feelings or experiences, so adjectives play an important role.

Informational Text: Water ( Spanish) As you help students learn about the water cycle, you can also help them learn about syntax. Look for sentences that use the word "and" to combine two ideas. Next, look for two shorter sentences. Can you use the word "and" to combine them to form one sentence?

Read Waterford's full Foundations of the Science of Reading article series and learn how to support your teachers with research-driven strategies as they plan for classroom instruction. Continue learning with three more in the series:

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How To Teach Language Concepts Skills - Waterford.org

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Language concepts is a set of skills that support reading and comprehension. Find essential tips to teaching language concepts skills and free books here.

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Language Structures Part 1 of 7: Understanding Semantics – Structured Literacy

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Welcome to part 1 of 7 in a series that discusses what semantics is, why it is important for language and reading development, and how to implement simple activities in your classroom to support its development.

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Scarborough's Reading Rope provides a model for understanding the components of skilled reading. This blog series examines each of the strands of the Language Comprehension half of the rope and how Wit & Wisdom® strengthens these upper strands. Image courtesy of Dr. Hollis Scarborough, 2001.

Good readers think about what they are reading. Developing strong reading comprehension includes developing students' expectation that what they read should make sense (Liben and Pimentel). In Scarborough's Rope, the Verbal Reasoning strand refers to a reader's ability to think about a text and infer meaning from what is explicitly and implicitly stated. To do so, readers must engage in cognitive and metacognitive processes such as

making logical inferences,

integrating ideas within and across texts, and

interpreting abstract language.

Verbal reasoning requires readers to go beyond what they read so they can make sense of a text and more deeply understand a topic (Burton et al. 5). For students to flex their verbal reasoning muscles, they need access to complex texts, adequate stores of background knowledge, and regular opportunities to think for themselves, with appropriate support along the way.

Knowledge and Verbal Reasoning

Readers make inferences by connecting prior knowledge to information stated in the text. But what happens if a student has very little prior knowledge? What if their knowledge is inaccurate or incomplete? The student will likely struggle to make a logical inference.

Educators often fail when trying to teach students to make inferences without first building background knowledge -students need to draw on a body of knowledge as they think through a text. According to cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, "factual knowledge enhances cognitive processes [such as] problem solving and reasoning. The richer the knowledge base, the more smoothly and effectively these cognitive processes-the very ones that teachers target-operate." Background knowledge provides the reader with tools to ask questions, connect concepts, and evaluate ideas within a text.

Productive Struggle and Verbal Reasoning

To support students with reading and thinking about complex texts, educators must foster students' productive struggle. Productive struggle describes the effort students exert when they persist and succeed with appropriately challenging tasks. Educators can foster productive struggle by gradually releasing responsibility to students as they work with complex texts.

Teachers may equip students with strategies for making inferences or interpreting and integrating textual information. Education researcher Nell Duke and colleagues recommend teachers gradually release responsibility to students to apply strategies in the texts they read. Teachers model thinking, provide opportunities for collaborative or guided practice, and require students to independently apply their strategies to reading. The most beneficial work happens in the middle when students collaboratively and independently practice while supported by the teacher (65-66).

Strengthening Verbal Reasoning in Wit & Wisdom

With a strong foundation of building knowledge and fostering productive struggle, Wit & Wisdom 's design further supports verbal reasoning development in three ways:

Complex texts create opportunities for verbal reasoning. Students need opportunities to read texts that will challenge their thinking. The complex texts students read in Wit & Wisdom allow them to apply their background knowledge to make inferences, interpret language, and integrate information across texts in a module.

The Content Stages invite all students to engage in verbal reasoning. The Content Stages scaffold students toward deeper thinking about a text over time. Each Content Stage employs associated strategies, which students use to comprehend what they read. Students gradually gain increased responsibility for applying the Content Stages to their reading and internalize the process for navigating texts independently.

Wit & Wisdom instruction fosters collaboration. Students regularly collaborate with their peers to exchange ideas and build on each other's thinking. Much of the collaborative work in Wit & Wisdom engages students in productive struggle to make sense of the texts they read. Students will often collaborate with a partner or small group and eventually bring their learning back to the whole group to deepen everyone's understanding of the text.

Summary

Successful reading comprehension requires students to apply their knowledge to new ideas in texts. In Wit & Wisdom classrooms, students leverage their background knowledge to effectively make inferences, interpret language, and integrate ideas within and between texts while engaging in lively, collaborative work that helps unlock hidden meanings in the rich, complex texts of each module.
Works Cited
Burton, Nancy W., et al. Toward a Definition of Verbal Reasoning in Higher Education. ETS, Nov. 2009, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED507807.pdf.

Duke, Nell K., et al. "Essential Elements of Fostering and Teaching Reading Comprehension." What Research Has to Say About Reading Instruction, edited by S. Jay Samuels and Alan E. Farstrup, 4th ed., International Reading Association, 2011, 51-93.

Liben, Meredith, and Sue Pimentel. "Placing Text at the Center of the Standards-Aligned ELA Classroom." Achieve the Core, Student Achievement Partners, 24 Aug. 2021, https://achievethecore.org/page/3185/placing-text-at-the-center-of-the-standards-aligned-ela-classroom.

Smith, Reid, et al. "The Role of Background Knowledge in Reading Comprehension: A Critical Review." Reading Psychology, vol. 42, no. 3, 22 Feb. 2021, pp. 214-240. Taylor & Francis Online, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02702711.2021.1888348.

Willingham, Daniel T. "How Knowledge Helps: It Speeds and Strengthens Reading Comprehension, Learning-and Thinking." American Educator, American Federation of Teachers, Spring 2006, https://www.aft.org/periodical/american-educator/spring-2006/how-knowledge-helps.

Wexler, Natalie. The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System-And How to Fix It. New York, Avery-Penguin Random House, 2019.

About Hannah Dieter

Hannah Dieter is a director of implementation services on the Humanities team at Great Minds. In this role, she leads a team of implementation leaders who support schools and districts across the country with their implementation of  Wit & Wisdom and Geodes. Before joining the Great Minds team, she was the director of early childhood education for Lorain City Schools in Ohio. Hannah is also a former kindergarten teacher and instructional coach. She is currently working on her master's degree in reading science from Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati.

About Tanisha Washington

Tanisha Washington is a director of implementation services on the Humanities team at Great Minds. In this role, she leads a team of implementation leaders who support schools and districts across the country with their implementation of Wit & Wisdom and Geodes. Before joining the Great Minds team, she was an assistant principal for a charter school in Washington, DC. As an assistant principal, Tanisha was a member of the 2013 New Leaders' Aspiring Principals program, the 2018 Relay Graduate School of Education's National Principals Academy, and the 2018 School Leader Lab's leadership cohort. Tanisha is also a former elementary school teacher and has a master's degree in elementary education from American University in Washington, DC.

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Examining Scarborough's Rope: Verbal Reasoning

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Scarborough's Reading Rope provides a model for understanding the components of skilled reading. This blog series examines each of the strands of the Language Comprehension half of the rope and how Wit & Wisdom® strengthens these upper strands. Image courtesy of Dr. Hollis Scarborough, 2001. Good readers think about what they are reading.

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Sarah Scaffolds - Teach, Save Time, and Feel Confident

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Teaching Verbal Reasoning - Sarah Scaffolds

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Teaching verbal reasoning can be a challenge. What even is verbal reasoning? Well, as part of my series of blogs on the Scarborough Reading Rope, we’re breaking down verbal reasoning and how to teach in it! So keep reading to learn my tips and tricks for teaching verbal reasoning and improving reading comprehension. There’s a

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Components of the Reading Rope: Verbal Reasoning Skills

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Verbal reasoning is one of the eight strands of Scarborough’s reading rope. It refers to a student’s ability to make sense of spoken and written words. Within the reading rope, it is part of the larger strand of comprehension and contributes, along with the other strands, to a student’s growth into a skilled reader. What […]

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Spend a bit of time with young children and you'll almost certainly hear questions like this: Why? Why not? How come? They are curious about the world around them. Their questions help them to locate a logic in what they experience and see. That's verbal reasoning at work. It's fundamental to how we understand the world around us. It's critical for understanding texts.

Scarborough's reading rope has been called one of the most influential infographics in education because of the way it succinctly captures the complexities of learning to read, both in terms of skills, represented by the strands, but also because of the dynamic way it portrays what reading teachers do-consolidate these skills by braiding them together to promote fluent and strategic readers.

But while other elements of the reading rope are well-understood by elementary educators, verbal reasoning may be something of a mystery (Fisher, Frey, and Lapp, 2022). In this blog, we address verbal reasoning and offer two ways to foster it in your classroom.
What is Verbal Reasoning?
Verbal reasoning is the ability to infer to find logical coherence in a text. It involves understanding concepts as they are framed in words, especially in terms of making inferences and understanding figurative language such as metaphors and idioms. For some students, it's a piece of cake. For others, they get by the skin of their teeth. Notice what we just did? You used your verbal reasoning, not isolated word meaning, to understand our point.

The second level of inferencing has to do with filling in a gap in the information. Take two sentences in the picture book Jabari Jumps by Gaia Cornwall (2017). Jabari is a young boy watching other children climb a diving board ladder and jump off. He's holding his father's hand.

"Looks easy," Jabari said. But when his dad squeezed his hand, Jabari squeezed back. (p. 9)

The author doesn't explicitly say that Jabari is feeling a bit nervous about jumping off the diving board. The word But at the beginning of the second sentence sets up a contrastive. While Jabari's words sound confident, his action may be telling us something else. Take But out of the sentence and there's no longer a reason to question how Jabari is feeling. The author chose that word carefully to signal that the protagonist's words and actions might not be completely aligned.
Teach to Strengthen Verbal Reasoning
Young readers benefit from instructional routines that promote their verbal reasoning skills. Although these recommended techniques vary widely from one another, they have one clear through line: they challenge students to make meaning from text, going beyond it to locate a deeper meaning, and explain it verbally.
Use Word Games
Games that involve words and their relationships to one another promote verbal reasoning. The logic behind identifying words as synonyms and antonyms uses verbal reasoning. After all, there is reasoning which explains why quiet and soft are similar while quiet and loud are opposites. One word game to play is opposites 1-minute speed rounds, where you provide a word and the child has to furnish the antonym.

Another word game to use with the whole class is the Alphabet Chain. Announce a category (animals, cities, items of clothing, world leaders) and then challenge them to sequentially list words that fit the category (alligator, bear, cat, etc). This is a great sponge activity when there are a few extra minutes to be filled before the next activity or class period.

Odd One Out is verbal word game where four words or phrases are furnished. While three of them are conceptually linked, one is the outlier. However, the logic may be due to the way one organizes their thinking. As one example, the sequence dog, cat, duck, and dragon has two possible answers. One is that dragon is the odd one out because it is imaginary. But another correct answer is that cat is the odd one out because it is the only one that doesn't begin with /d/.
Ask Forward and Backward Inference Questions
It is common to ask readers questions that cause them to make an inference about something that is going to happen in the story. We invite them to draw a conclusion about the plot in a narrative text and then ask them to make a prediction based on what they know so far. These forward inferences are important because they cause the reader to organize knowledge and state a reasoned hunch about what might occur next.

However, readers also use backward inferences to comprehend the text. Backward inferences are made when a reader links a current information in a reading to something they already learned in the text. Think of the last mystery novel you read. When you found out "who-dun-it," did you revisit earlier events in the text to confirm that it was a logical? That's backward inferencing.

Ask questions that cause students to make both forward and backward inferences. We'll use the example using Jabari Jumps again. It's not really meaningful to ask whether he will jump-the answer is right there in the title. (By the way, you just made an inference because we didn't directly answer the question.) But you could ask a better inference question: "Will it be easy or hard for Jabari when he does jump?" You've introduced a gap in their knowledge that they must bridge. In other words, they are going to have to make some backward inferences to answer the question.
Conclusion
Verbal reasoning plays an essential role in reading comprehension. Use word games to strengthen logic skills, especially in grouping like items, and interrogating synonyms and antonyms. Foster its application with forward and backward inferencing questions to help students see the coherence and logical flow of narrative and informational texts. In doing so, we can ensure that verbal reasoning isn't neglected.

Fisher, D., Frey, N., & Lapp, D. (2022). Teaching Reading: A Playbook for Developing Skilled Readers Through Word Recognition and Language Comprehension. Corwin.

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author: Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and Diane Lapp

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A Neglected Strand of the Reading Rope is Verbal Reasoning - Corwin Connect

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Verbal reasoning plays an essential role in reading comprehension. Explore the elements of verbal reasoning and tips to successfully introduce and reinforce this valuable skill.

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Anyone who's ever scratched their head over their car manual or struggled to parse a website's terms of service knows: It's hard to read about a topic you don't really understand.

It's a common-sense statement that's backed by research. Studies have shown that readers use their background knowledge-vocabulary, facts, and conceptual understanding-to comprehend the text they read.

In recent years, a growing number of parents, teachers, and reading researchers have called for changes to early literacy instruction, to bring it more in line with the evidence base around how children learn to read. Often, schools weren't taking research-based approaches to teaching students a crucial building block of reading-how to sound out words. If kids can't get the words off the page, they can't extract meaning from text.

Over the past three years, about two dozen states have passed laws mandating that students are taught these skills in an explicit, systematic way.

At the same time, though, some science of reading advocates have said that foundational skills instruction isn't the only piece of literacy learning that needs an overhaul. They argue that schools also don't do enough to support students' background knowledge-a key factor in their understanding of any text. That's the issue explored in The Knowledge Gap, a book that's made its way onto district leaders' reading lists and into teacher professional learning groups.

Over the past few decades, reading comprehension instruction has become "content agnostic," focused on skill practice, to the detriment of learning about science, history, and other disciplines, said Sonia Cabell, an associate professor at Florida State University's College of Education.

"In the No Child Left Behind era, and the Reading First era, reading became the main focus. Reading blocks were lengthened. This pushed out the science and social studies instruction," Cabell said, referring to the 2002 federal law and a $1 billion-a-year reading program it created.

Cabell and other researchers who study the integration of content knowledge and literacy instruction say the focus on "knowledge building" holds promise. But they also say there are a lot of unanswered questions about how these approaches should be designed, and how much they can actually improve reading achievement.

Here's what experts and research say about what a greater focus on content knowledge could mean for reading instruction.

What role does background knowledge play in reading comprehension?

This may seem like an obvious finding: Of course, kids can understand a book or an article better if they already know a bit of what it's about. It's likely easier to read a text about paleontologists, for example, if you already know the words "fossil" and "extinction," and you know that animal species that used to exist have since died out.

This applies even for children who are otherwise poor readers. One example of this is what's often referred to as "the baseball study."

They found that the baseball lovers who scored low on a general reading test could understand and recall the text better than the higher-scoring kids who didn't know as much about the game.

So, background knowledge about a specific topic is helpful in understanding text on that topic. But what about in general? Does knowing more about the world lead to better reading comprehension overall?

A large body of research shows a correlation: Children who score higher on tests of general knowledge are better readers. These kids also tend to grow more than their peers in reading comprehension over time, said Gina Cervetti, an associate professor at the University of Michigan's School of Education, who studies the connections between literacy and content-area learning.

But other factors could play a role, too.

"Those kinds of correlations are tricky, because there are a lot of other things that are going on," said Timothy Shanahan, an emeritus professor of education at the University of Illinois Chicago. People who score higher on tests of general knowledge also tend to have greater language ability, and tend to be from higher-income backgrounds.

If background knowledge is linked to reading ability, does teaching knowledge help kids become better readers?

It can. But there are some caveats.

There are a few different ways that teachers can connect content knowledge and literacy instruction in the elementary school day. One option is to merge the two-to embed literacy instruction into social studies and science, teaching students cognitive strategies to help them engage with the content.

These students also did better on standardized tests of reading comprehension. The integrated approach not only made them better readers of the content they were learning, it made them better readers overall.

This method has shown more mixed results.

Most studies of this approach find that it has a positive effect on students' knowledge of the subject in question-for example, teaching a 4th grader about the American Revolution will likely mean that they know more about the American Revolution. But only some of these approaches lead to higher scores on tests of general reading comprehension.

One that does is the Model of Reading Engagement, or MORE. It was developed by Harvard education professor James Kim and his colleagues.

The approach aims to build students' science content knowledge through literacy lessons. But it's not just focused on acquiring facts. The researchers designed the lessons with the goal of helping kids to build a schema-a mental model that they could then apply to understand new, related concepts.

Kim's study, and others that have shown general effects on reading comprehension, hold something in common, said Cervetti.

"These programs weren't teaching kids a bunch of knowledge at a superficial level. It wasn't knowledge as a set of facts to be learned," she said. "These kids were learning deeply about a set of concepts."

Still, in Kim's study, there was a limit to how far kids could transfer the knowledge that they learned. Generally, the new texts had to include explicit connections to the words and concepts they'd learned. If the familiar concepts were missing, students couldn't make the connections themselves.

If kids can't make connections between related topics, "it's a signal to teachers of what they need to go back and discuss," Kim said.

How should schools decide what kids should read and write about? What knowledge should be the focus?

This question has dogged the American education system for decades-if not centuries.

It's the debate at the heart of many decisions about teaching and learning. The conversation is particularly volatile now, as parents' groups and Republican legislators seek to limit what students can read and discuss in the classroom.

Studies' insight on this topic is limited. Evidence would suggest that students' curiosity should play a role, Cervetti said. There's a large body of work demonstrating that student interest and motivation have a strong impact on academic achievement.

But outside of that, things are more fuzzy. What's the right balance of depth versus breadth in topics? What knowledge will best prepare students for their lives outside of school? Researchers don't know.

Hirsch popularized the idea that students needed to learn about something in order to read well. I n his 1987 book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, Hirsch outlined a list of essential figures, events, and concepts. He tried to identify the background knowledge that would comprise a sort of cultural canon-the information that most writers and speakers would assume their audience shared.

Its contents provided the framework for Core Knowledge Language Arts, an ELA curriculum. But Hirsch's work also saw a swift and strong backlash from critics who said his list was Eurocentric and elitist.

Still, the question of whose knowledge matters-what's important for children to know and who gets to decide-is far from settled.

Some more recent efforts have used Hirsch as inspiration. The Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy has created Knowledge Maps, tools it uses in work with districts looking to evaluate how and where their curricula build knowledge.

The Knowledge Maps are based on Hirsch's core knowledge guidelines with some additions and changes-such as added criteria around diversity, equity, and inclusion, said Ashley Berner, the director of the institute.

Other programs have taken different approaches. In the MORE intervention, Kim and his co-authors tried to choose content that was "timely and timeless." Timely, in that it aligned to current state standards in science. And timeless: It has shown up consistently in state standards over the past two decades, and science professors think that it's relevant and accurate.

Of course, these are still subjective decisions-an inevitability in choosing knowledge, said Shanahan. "When it comes to certain aspects of the arts, and science, and social studies, what content do we want kids to know? Those are value judgments," he said.

Is knowledge the only factor in reading comprehension ability?

Far from it. Children don't just need to learn information. They also need to know how to organize it in their minds, use it, and apply it in new contexts.

Teaching comprehension strategies can help students become skilled at these tasks. Decades of research have shown that explicitly teaching students how to use these strategies-like summarizing, visualizing, creating graphic organizers, and asking questions about their understanding-makes them better readers.

Teaching students about how different types of text are structured has also been shown to improve reading comprehension.

"This is a clear case in our field of a 'both-and,' not an 'either or,' said Nell Duke, the executive director of the Center for Early Literacy Success at Stand for Children.

In fact, most of the knowledge-building interventions that show positive effects in the research literature have combined content-area instruction with these kinds of strategies for metacognition, said Cervetti.

Cervetti thinks it's likely that deep content area knowledge and students' ability to use comprehension strategies reinforce each other.

"Imagine being a kid who has read lots of texts, but every text you encounter is unfamiliar ideas and unfamiliar words," she said. "You get through the text and you walk away having understood something about that text. But probably not enough to be a better comprehender."

With these topically disconnected texts, the student doesn't have the chance to practice the strategies that good readers use, Cervetti said, like making connections or asking questions prompted by prior knowledge. But if the texts work together to build a bigger conceptual understanding, they do present those opportunities. Knowledge, she hypothesized, "builds momentum" for kids to practice the comprehension strategies that research shows are powerful tools.

What do all of these findings mean for classroom practice?

The main takeaway is that reading instruction should be engaging students in deep, substantive ideas, said Cervetti.

Yes, learning about something-having clearly defined topics-is important. But these topics need to help students build a broader, conceptual understanding.

That means that instead of learning about "oceans"-an umbrella that could encompass everything from reading news articles about microplastics to studying Moby Dick -a unit might be centered around a theme, such as, "we have one connected water system."

Some English/language arts curricula attempt to structure units this way, developing them around social studies and science ideas. But Duke cautioned that these ELA programs shouldn't be seen as a substitute for instruction in other subject areas.

Science and social studies don't just teach content; they also teach discipline-specific practices-like developing a hypothesis or analyzing a primary source. "That kind of information, in my perception, doesn't tend to make it into ELA curricula," she said.

"I think an increasing segment of the field is picking up on the idea that content-rich English/language arts instruction is better for kids," Duke added. "But it has not fully tackled the question of, when in our day is there space left for science and social studies? And [there's] little attention to, how do we coordinate that across the school day?"

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What Is Background Knowledge, and How Does It Fit Into the Science of Reading?

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What a greater focus on content could mean for reading instruction.

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5 Steps to Leveraging Background Knowledge in Lessons

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Providing students with background knowledge about lessons improves their comprehension and engagement.

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When students learn new information, they need a hook to hang it on. Background knowledge is that hook.

Having the right background knowledge is critical to ensuring that students understand a lesson. This knowledge provides a foundation on which the rest of the lesson can be built. For ELLs, it can make a significant difference in their comprehension of the lesson and any related materials or texts.

When thinking about background knowledge and ELLs, it's helpful to think of two areas:

accessing students' existing knowledge

building new knowledge.

Finding out what your students know about a particular topic can help you figure out how to make meaningful connections to their experiences, which is an important step in making your instruction more culturally responsive. This can also help you be strategic about which background knowledge to provide.

Here's a step-by-step process to help you think through important considerations for ELLs when looking at the background knowledge needed for your lessons.

Recommended reading

To see more research about the academic and cognitive benefits of culturally responsive instruction, see Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain by Zaretta Hammond.

1. Identify key background knowledge needed for the lesson

Review your lesson plan and:

look for key concepts, events, and references that students will need to understand the lesson

take a second look for areas that you may be taking for granted, such as names of places, daily activities that may vary across countries, cultural customs, and events from pop culture, etc.

identify vocabulary needed to comprehend the content

determine what background knowledge is most critical for students to understand the lesson.

Video: An overview of background knowledge and ELLs

ELL teacher Amber Prentice discusses the necessity of accessing and building students' background knowledge before a lesson begins.

2. Identify students' existing background knowledge

Find out what background knowledge your students have on your lesson plan's topic. You can do this by:

Note: Choose strategies that match your students' language and literacy levels. For example, having students speak in groups may be a good fit for younger students who aren't writing yet or for older students with interrupted formal education who are still developing literacy skills. Graphic organizers are helpful to use with younger students who have some language background or older students who are acquiring new language skills.

During this process, keep in mind that:

ELLs bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to their classrooms.

ELLs' background knowledge varies greatly from one student to another.

ELLs' background knowledge will likely differ from students who were raised in U.S. (and that students' background knowledge will vary by U.S. regions too!)

By getting individual student input, you will have a better idea of what students know about a topic. Then you can look for ways to connect the content to things that are familiar, students' experiences, and their funds of knowledge.

For many more ideas on accessing and activating students' background knowledge, see How to Connect ELLs' Background Knowledge to Content.

Note: ELLs may bring different perspectives or frames of reference to the topics you are discussing, such as in the example at the end of the article about how many continents there are. It's important not to frame background knowledge as a question of what's "right" or "wrong," but to approach these teachable moments with an open mind and encourage all of your students to do the same.

Video: Story setup: Pre-reading strategies for comprehension

Buffalo teacher Michelle Lawrence Biggar shares pre-reading strategies that will help lay the groundwork for ELLs before tackling a new text. Strategies include previewing vocabulary, activating background knowledge, and introducing academic concepts (such as literary elements) important to the text in an ELL-friendly way.

3. Build background knowledge students need

Once you have identified some areas of background knowledge your students need, build that knowledge by:

using pictures, real objects ("realia"), maps, or personal experiences. Relate material to students' lives when possible.

pre-teaching important vocabulary words and concepts

explaining concepts and labeling them with key words ELLs can remember. For example, "This is the Statue of Liberty. Liberty means freedom. Liberty means libertad. The people of France gave us the Statue of Liberty..."

Home language connection

You can also use resources in students' home languages, such as books or videos. If you work with bilingual colleagues, such as teachers, paraprofessionals, or family liaisons, ask them if they have any recommended resources. And if you don't have any bilingual support available, considering connecting with a PLC online to find more resources. Other ELL educators around the country have a wealth of knowledge to share, particularly around low-incidence languages where there might not be as much material.

Video: Pre-teaching concepts and vocabulary before a lesson

ESOL specialist Katy Padilla collaborates with a fifth-grade team to plan a science lesson about vascular plants. You can also hear more about the planning process from Katy's related reflection interview.

Video: Teaching ELLs the names of all 50 states

ELL teacher Amber Prentice explains how she teaches ELLs the names of all 50 states in her middle school geography lesson.

4. Target background knowledge needed to understand texts

When reading grade-level text with ELLs, it's important to think carefully about which background knowledge (and how much) to provide.

Build text-specific knowledge by providing students with information from the text beforehand, particularly if the text is conceptually difficult or has an abundance of information that is important. For example, if there are six main topics on the animal kingdom, highlight them beforehand.

Establish the purpose for reading (e.g., "Now we are going to read to find out about a country called France. What are some things we might learn about France as we read?")

Select a specific comprehension strategy for students to use.

Look for books that students will find relatable. For more recommendations on selecting these books, see our related tips on using "mirror" books with students.

For more in-depth discussion of how much background knowledge to provide when reading grade-level texts, take a look at these blog posts from Dr. Diane Staehr Fenner, which discuss an American Educator article from Dr. Tim Shanahan on this topic:

5. Avoid assumptions

It is critical to avoid making assumptions about what background knowledge students do or don't have. Not only is this important for instruction, but it is critical for creating a welcoming classroom environment in which students feel respected.

For example, Dr. Ayanna Cooper shares a story in the video below about U.S. history teachers who mistakenly thought their Haitian student was an African American student who had a deep knowledge base about U.S. history. As mentioned above, the better you know your students, the better you can plan lessons that will give all students access to grade-level content.

Videos: ELL educators speak about background knowledge

Recommended Resources

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Background Knowledge and ELLs: What Teachers Need to Know

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When students learn new information, they need a hook to hang it on. Background knowledge is that hook. Having the right background knowledge is critical to ensuring that students understand a lesson. This knowledge provides a foundation on which the rest of the lesson can be built.

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Effective vocabulary teaching has five key principles.

1. Focus on rich meanings, not just dictionary definitions.

Too often vocabulary instruction is no more than kids copying definitions from the dictionary. But researchers have identified a number of instructional approaches that outdo any learning that may accrue from copying definitions.

One of those key principles is that students work with more extensive or complex definitions or explanations of word meanings. Encourage the encyclopedia explanation over the dictionary meanings.

When I teach vocabulary, I often have the kids engage in trying to provide several different versions of a word's definition.

1. Dictionary definition

2. Synonyms for the word

3. Antonyms (if there are any)

4. Part of speech

5. Classification (what semantic group does it belong to, like tools or ways of talking)

6. Comparison (it is like____, but different because______)

7. Real-life examples

8. Graphic version (drawings, pictures, representations)

9. Acting it out

By the time you've come up with nine different explanations of a word you are more likely to remember it (and, of course, we can do more than just these nine if we want to get into analogies, part-whole relationships, and the like).

2. Emphasize the connections among words.

Many vocabulary programs introduce words by category, such as focusing on words from health and medicine or about transportation, including some that have research showing that they can be effective. However, direct research specifically on this aspect of teaching, suggest that word learning goes slower and without evident later advantage from the extra work that mastering these words entails needed to master these sets of words.

And, yet, evidence reveals that the lexicons in our heads are organized in various networks, not like dictionaries. When you remember a word, you draw from memory a plethora of related ideas-attributes, functions, and synonyms related to that word.

Start thinking diesel trucks and words like wheel, tire, dump truck, gasoline, and highway will not be far behind.

There are circumstances in which it is necessary to simultaneously introduce collections of closely related words that may require fine or subtle distinctions, such as when kids are learning about the structure of cells or atoms. I'll give that a pass, since such introductions are likely to be accompanied by a much deeper dive into the underlying concepts in such cases.

I also think it is quite reasonable when teaching words to get kids thinking about words about that concept that they may already have mastered. Linking a new word to a concept, is very different than trying to learn and link a whole collection of words.

I would avoid introducing together plethora, dearth, scarcity, cornucopia, shortage, plenty, sufficient, abundant, and liberal as some programs do. Collect such words over time as they are learned and then later you can have kids comparing the ideas or fitting them into continuum or network.

One teacher I know has her students classifying the vocabulary each week in bulletin board folders, and when a folder accumulates several related words, they revisit them as a set.

3. Promote usage of the words.

It is not enough that kids study word meanings, but they have to learn to use these words in their reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Instruction should create opportunities for kids to use words in all of these ways.

For instance, that rich vocabulary assignment that was described earlier can be done by groups of kids working together to come up with those multiple definitions. That kind of cooperation requires that kids talk with each other about the words. Additionally, I often assign small numbers of words to each group and then have them get together to teach each other the words that their groups studied... more speaking and listening.

One might reward kids for using the studied vocabulary in their writing - or that can be required in various ways.

Isabel Beck and Moddy McKeown came up with the idea of "word wizards," which gave kids extra points in vocabulary if they could bring in evidence that they had confronted or used the words of interest. Kids get very turned on if they run across some of the vocabulary when watching television or playing their favorite computer game.

4. Review is important.

It can be hard to retain vocabulary if you don't get a lot of opportunity to use it. We may teach vocabulary because certain words were prominent in the texts, we were reading this week, but then kids might not see them for a long time.

There are many ways to deal with vocabulary, such as having one day a week when you only work with words that have been taught (and supposedly learned) in the past - or perhaps entire weeks might be devoted to this throughout the year.

I'm a fan of including words from past weeks on vocabulary quizzes and for the use of vocabulary notebooks to help punch up kids' writing during revision.

Another way of ensuring the words stick, is to see how many additional words students can construct morphologically, adding prefixes or suffixes or altering parts of speech and so on. I've written about some of the important work being done on morphology by Peter and Jeffrey Bowers before (and you can search for that on my site or on Google).

5. Involve students in identifying some of the words to be studied.

I noted earlier that much vocabulary learning is incidental and, therefore, largely out of the province of schools. However, not all kids are equally good at such learning and even for those who it is easier, it can still be a tough slog requiring many experiences with a word to get it to stick.

One thing that we can do to help develop a "word consciousness" among our students is to involve them in identifying unknown words from their own reading - and to include these in your classroom curriculum. When readers get used to noticing their lack of knowledge of particular words, they will be more likely to try to resolve those gaps when reading. Kids will also be more motivated if they have some say so over the curriculum as well.

This article is excerpted from the longer blog post, Five Things Every Teacher Should Know About Vocabulary Instruction .

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Five Key Principles for Effective Vocabulary Instruction

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Much vocabulary is learned without formal teaching. We gain words from conversation, observation, television/media, and reading. However, research shows that explicitly teaching vocabulary can measurably improve reading comprehension - if we teach the right words well enough. Here are five key principles to effective vocabulary instruction.

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Page 2: Components of Effective Vocabulary Instruction

Vocabulary is the content-specific words that students must know if they are to understand the material in a given subject area. When they introduce new vocabulary, content-area teachers commonly assign a list of words from the chapter for students to define and memorize. However, this is not a particularly effective means of helping students to understand or use the words in appropriate ways. Students often forget the vocabulary soon after they are tested on it and are therefore unlikely to retain critical information or to understand related content.

When you consider the number of words that students must understand if they are to successfully make sense of a given text, you soon realize that teaching the meaning of those words one by one is insufficient.

Listen as Sharon Vaughn identifies some of the things students need to be able to do to learn new word meanings (time:1:54).

Sharon Vaughn, PhD
Professor of Special Education
Director of the Vaughn Gross Center for Reading and Language Arts
University of Texas, Austin

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View Transcript
Transcript: Sharon Vaughn, PhD

There are three things that students need to be able to do in order to accumulate the number of word meanings they need. Number one, they need to be taught the meanings of important, necessary, complex words such as egalitarian, or manufacture, or cell in the sense of biology. Number two, they need to learn how to use text as a source for deriving the meaning of words that they don't know. So as part of number two, they first need to be able to recognize I don't know what that word means, and that's no small problem. Students can't just plow through text and not recognize when there's a word that they don't know. They need to know the word they don't know, and then they need to be able to use the text by rereading previous text and rereading other text to find out oh, that's what that word means, and particularly in the content area many of the complex words are defined in the text itself. Number three, students need to be able to be word-finders and word-collectors outside the content area so that when they're listening to television, when they're eavesdropping on conversations, or when they're reading other text, they attend to words they don't know, they remember the word they don't know, and they collect the meaning of those words so that they become independent word-meaning learners, and it is with the combination of those three things that they're likely to be very successful.

Teachers can provide more-effective vocabulary instruction by:

Selecting essential words

Explicitly defining and contextualizing those words

Helping students to actively process the information

Providing multiple exposures to the words

These four elements will be explained in greater detail on the module pages that follow.

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IRIS | Page 2: Components of Effective Vocabulary Instruction

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Vocabulary is the content-specific words that students must know if they are to understand the material in a given subject area. When they introduce new vocabulary, content-area teachers commonly assign a list of words from the chapter for students to define and memorize.

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BridgeUniverse - TEFL Blog, News, Tips & Resources

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By Lorena Siegel
November 25, 2022

Teaching vocabulary in ESL is crucial to a student's language development and communication skills. After all, without adequate words, it's difficult to relate thoughts, ideas, and feelings about who we are and how we interpret the world around us. But how do we achieve this goal without making students memorize lists of ESL vocabulary that will be forgotten after the next pop quiz? Check out these teaching strategies for how to teach vocabulary to ESL students - whether you're giving in-person lessons or teaching English online.

What is the best way to teach ESL vocabulary?

Create context around words you teach

It's a good idea to think about how students will recall a word when sitting for an exam and use this as your starting point to determine how you want your students to remember what you have taught them. In other words, don't teach new words in a vacuum. You want to create a contextual experience (an interesting story, a series of images, a dialogue) that leaves a deep impression so that when the time comes for your class to recall a particular list of words, they'll be able to access these words with little trouble, building their ESL vocabularies throughout each class!

Teach relevant ESL vocabulary

Be aware that if you focus on vocabulary that can't be put to immediate and repetitive use in your students' day-to-day lives, it will be relegated to the quicksand of short-term memory and soon forgotten, thus rendering all your hard work useless. Teaching vocabulary in ESL is of vital importance to long-term use of classroom lessons. Be sure to choose vocabulary that is connected to your students' lives and can be easily applied to their world outside of the classroom.
Learn the ins and outs of teaching English conversation.
Consider your students' age

Young learners are innately curious and love to learn the names of things that surround them. Hands-on activities, songs, or colorful visuals work well for kids.

Teens, on the other hand, need vocabulary to help them understand the music they listen to and the shows or movies they watch, as well as words that can help them communicate with others and express their feelings.

Adults need the appropriate English vocabulary to help them relate to others on both a personal and business level, and they rely on you to give them the best and most common words and phrases that will help them improve their communication skills.

Learn more about the differences between teaching young learners and adults.
What are the techniques for introducing and teaching new ESL vocabulary?

Show images or drawings

Because drawings and photos are fairly universal and understood by most people, this is perhaps the best way to present new vocabulary. The internet is chock-full of photos and pictures, and there are a variety of stock photo websites to choose from.

If you have a knack for drawing, you can make your own pictures or create your own characters, but make sure that these are large enough for everyone to see clearly if you don't have access to a SMART board. Keep the composition of your photos or drawings simple, as too many things happening at once can confuse students.

If you are teaching online, you can make use of Skype or Zoom's screen share function to show the images. These platforms also have whiteboard features and annotation tools, which you can use for making simple drawings on-screen

Pro Tip: If you like, you can also create a couple of characters that your students can relate to and use them throughout your course to present new ideas. When used consistently, students form attachments to the characters and will rely on them when learning new concepts.

Present vocabulary with realia

Realia is essential to the learning of ESL vocabulary. For a lesson on how to describe the flavors of different foods, for example, there is nothing better than to have students taste a variety of foods, condiments, herbs, and spices. As you give your class a taste of each ingredient, announce what it is, and give them the accompanying statement that incorporates the vocabulary you are teaching. Examples: This is sugar. Sugar is sweet. These are potato chips. Potato chips are salty. This is mustard. Mustard is sour.

Even if you're teaching virtually, you can use traditional and digital realia in your online classroom. For example, you can use an online map to review English directions or the PDF version of a restaurant menu to practice phrases for ordering food. You can learn more about using realia in the virtual classroom by watching a past BridgeUniverse Expert Series webinar on the topic.

Introduce new words in the context of a story or article students read

ESL readings are of great value because they expose students to vocabulary they might not encounter in their day-to-day lives but that is useful, nonetheless. To pre-teach vocabulary from the reading you've chosen, follow this structure:

Make a list of 10 to 12 words that will be found in the reading and go over these verbally with students prior to starting the lesson.

As you go through the list, ask your students if any of them know the meaning of each word. Give them time to discuss words and guess the meanings if they're not sure. (It's a good idea to have two or three words that students already know, as this gives them familiar ground to stand on.)

As students call out the definitions they know, write these on the board, but leave a blank space next to the words they don't know.

Try to teach these words by drawing a simple picture or acting them out, if possible. If you are still unable to get your point across, let your students know that they'll be able to figure out the meaning when they've read the text, and remind them that you will make sure everyone understands the vocabulary by the time the lesson is over.

Pro Tip: Tell your students to not copy the definitions in their notebooks until you've finished the first part of the activity. The reason behind this is to make sure that your students are focusing on the lesson, listening to one another, and exchanging ideas instead of getting hung up on copying words from the board.

As you continue the lesson:

Have your students read the text aloud, one sentence or paragraph at a time (depending on class size). Don't interrupt as they read unless they're having great difficulty with a word.

Once everyone has had the opportunity to read out loud, go over the words they don't understand, including those that are not on your initial vocabulary list. Remind students to underline words they have difficulty pronouncing or do not yet understand.

Readings should always be followed by questions, first verbal and then written, to give students the opportunity to test their newly acquired vocabulary words and commit what they've learned to long-term memory.

Homework that involves students writing their own sentences or answering predetermined questions will also help to reinforce the vocab they've learned in class. (Be sure not to use multiple choice questions or short answers, as these do not aid in the reinforcement of either writing or speaking in the target language.)

Learn more about the importance of storytelling in the ESL classroom.
Use translation from the students' first language (yes, sometimes it's okay!)

If you speak the students' language or you have a teaching assistant who can help you translate, ask students what words they would like to learn. I call this " How do you say? " day.

During these sessions, students are encouraged to ask questions about things that interest them or help them to communicate in school or at work. Be sure to stay away from taboo topics as well as topics that are too personal.

These lessons are usually short and can be complemented with role-playing or ESL games that encourage students to put their new vocabulary to immediate use. Always be sure to ask the appropriate questions that promote verbal repetition.

Use antonyms and synonyms to teach and review ESL vocabulary

In order to build vocabulary, it's a good idea to not only use the words from your chosen vocabulary list but to also incorporate their synonyms and antonyms. Using opposites to teach new vocabulary gives students the opportunity to learn twice as many words. To make a bigger impact on your students' learning process, use pictures to illustrate sentences, or put words into short sentences that tell a story.

The following is an example of how to use opposites that can be used with beginner-level students:

Vocabulary: day/night, sun/moon, open/close, on/off

Put the following sentences on the board. You can fill in the words the students have already learned, but have them guess the opposite word.

The sun is in the sky during the day. We can see the ____ at _____.

I turn the lights off during the day, and I turn them ____ at night.

I open the windows during the day, and I ____ them at night.

Then, fill the words in as the students say them.

The sun is in the sky during the day. We can see the moon at night.

I turn the lights off during the day, and I turn them on at night.

I open the windows during the day, and I close them at night.

Next, ask questions that relate to your story.

Do you see the sun during the day or at night?

When do you see the moon?

When do you turn on the lights?

When do you turn them off?

Do you close your windows during the day or at night?

Pro Tip: When answering yes/no questions, students should use complete sentences. Short answers do not help in the acquisition of new vocabulary and sentence structure nor do they motivate students to practice their language skills.

Another way to incorporate antonyms into a lesson is by asking simple questions in which students get to choose the answer that suits their needs. Make up questions that incorporate new phraseology and that students can ask one another.
Examples:

Do you like staying at home on your day off, or do you like going out with your friends?

What do you save your money for, and what do you spend your money on?

When do you feel happy, and when do you feel sad?

(The repetition of phrases within the same question helps students commit them to memory.)

How can I make vocabulary fun with ESL vocabulary games?

Games are an essential tool in the TEFL/TESOL classroom. They allow students to think outside the box, put what they've learned to immediate use, create experiences with their classmates, and break away from lessons that could otherwise be tedious.

There are many simple games and activities that can be used to teach ESL vocabulary. For example, in the video below, a teacher plays a game called "Missing Object" with his online students.

This interactive game from the Bridge Micro-credential course: Games and Activities for the Online Classroom (Very Young Learners) is a fun way to teach vocabulary for ESL students in online or in-person classes. These games are also great for reviewing previously addressed material.

Show the student a collection of real items (realia) on a tray. Items could include a phone, a pair of glasses, a book, a watch, etc. You can include items that review vocabulary you've recently taught or items along a certain theme, such as foods.

Ask the student what each item on the tray is. Practice the pronunciation and ask follow-up questions (ex: "What do you use a phone for?").

After you've reviewed the tray of items with the student and discussed them, move the tray out of his or her sight, and remove one item. Then, show the tray again and ask the student, "What's missing?"

If the student cannot figure out what's missing, provide a clue (ex: "You put these on to help you see better").

Check out more fun ESL games and activities for young learners and teens.
What are other ways ESL students can improve their vocabulary?

If you ask students who are self-taught what methods they used to learn English on their own, they will invariably tell you the following:

They listen to and learn their favorite English songs and watch movies and TV shows with subtitles in either English or Spanish (some students swear by English subtitles, saying that it helps with their pronunciation).

They read English books and magazines that are of interest to them.

Many students also download language learning apps, such as Babbel and Duolingo, to their smartphones, so encourage them to use these tools to help develop their language skills on their own time.

Another way to improve students' vocabulary is to have them keep a notebook that is small enough to fit in their pockets. This is a great way for them to have a real-time record of the words and short phrases they use in their daily lives. When students keep a list of the words that are of interest to them, they are effectively writing their own little dictionaries that can be filled with pictures, synonyms, antonyms, and sentences that are useful to them.

Need a quick refresher on how to teach ESL vocabulary? Download this Bridge infographic for strategies for teaching vocabulary to English language learners

What should I keep in mind for how to teach vocabulary to ESL students?

Here are some more tips for helping your students learn vocabulary better:

Whether you are teaching vocabulary, grammar, phraseology, or pronunciation in a physical classroom or online, do your best to make sure your students can relate to each lesson and are almost immediately able to use what they've learned.

Follow a logical and organic order when teaching new vocabulary, and put words into useful phrases as often as possible.

Look for every opportunity to review what you've taught from one lesson to the next, and engage your students by focusing on topics that interest them the most.

Always encourage your students to ask you about the meanings of words and how these can be applied to their lives outside of the classroom.

There are myriad methods of teaching vocabulary - get creative, have fun, and do what works best for your students.

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How to Teach ESL Vocabulary: Top Methods for Introducing New Words

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By Lorena Siegel November 25, 2022 Teaching vocabulary in ESL is crucial to a student's language development and communication skills. After all, without adequate words, it's difficult to relate thoughts, ideas, and feelings about who we are and how we interpret the world around us.

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Scarborough's Reading Rope provides a model for understanding the components of skilled reading. This blog series examines each of the strands of the Language Comprehension half of the rope and how Wit & Wisdom® strengthens these upper strands. Image courtesy of Dr. Hollis Scarborough, 2001.

Developing Literacy Knowledge

Strong literacy knowledge-the understanding of the purposes, features, and conventions of texts-contributes to skilled reading. Like other components of the Language Comprehension half of Scarborough's Rope, literacy knowledge builds throughout a lifetime.

Even before students enter school, they may start building literacy knowledge, such as understanding how to hold a book and which parts are the front and back. In the early grades, emerging readers first build simple print concepts, such as understanding that reading in English means moving their eyes from left to right and that books have an author and often an illustrator. This knowledge of text features and print concepts builds a foundation for literacy.

How do educators continue to build students' literacy knowledge? By providing students opportunities to purposefully read a wide variety of genres with attention to text features, educators can help students develop internal frameworks for how texts work, strengthening students' literacy knowledge and facility with different genres. Students also benefit from writing instruction in the same genres as the texts they read, which allows students to internalize the features of these genres and how authors convey meaning.

Instructional Moves to Build Literacy Knowledge

Throughout their time in school, students need opportunities to read a variety of fiction and nonfiction texts, including novels, informational trade books, speeches, poetry, short stories, lyrics, and news articles. Exposure to a wide variety of texts ensures students build literacy knowledge of different genres, the purposes of those genres, and their associated structures and features. Growing literacy knowledge helps students navigate new texts with a clear understanding of how different genres work.

As students read across genres, they benefit from explicit instruction in text structures, a key kind of literacy knowledge ( Shanahan). To help students make sense of a text's organization, teachers can use various strategies such as employing graphic organizers, looking for signal words, and asking and answering questions about the text structure. These strategies help students make meaning by analyzing the relationships between ideas presented in the text. With these strategies, students build literacy knowledge and a deeper understanding of the text's content.

During instruction on text structures and features, teachers should maintain a clear focus on text comprehension, as some research suggests that simply teaching students a genre's features may be less effective than using the texts for authentic literacy purposes (Duke and Roberts 82). For example, reading a recipe while cooking a dish helps the reader understand the genre's features, such as the ingredient list order and the numbering of steps. In English language arts instruction, reading texts for authentic purposes-to answer a question of interest or communicate information to an interested audience-implicitly teaches students how different kinds of texts work. By reading with a purpose, students can leverage their explicitly built literacy knowledge to engage in important comprehension work.

Finally, integrating reading and writing widely benefits students' reading comprehension (Duke et al. 76); however, it's worth examining closely how students build literacy knowledge when reading and writing in the same genre. Two meta-analyses of the research on teaching text structures highlight the power of integrating writing into text structure instruction ( Shanahan). Students may use the same graphic organizers and signal words from reading instruction to craft similar texts in their writing instruction. Making organizational decisions as a writer can also help students build their awareness of how specific text structures and features communicate ideas, which reinforces students' experiences reading similar texts in the future.

Building Literacy Knowledge in Wit & Wisdom

In three key ways, Wit & Wisdom modules address the necessary literacy knowledge for students to comprehend complex texts:

Every Wit & Wisdom module integrates literacy knowledge and skills while providing reading opportunities across genres. Through a wide selection of texts, students build genre-specific knowledge and skills in the reading and writing domains while also building robust knowledge of an interesting and worthy topic. For example, in grade 5 students start the year by reading the novel Thunder Rolling in the Mountains and by building their understanding of cultural beliefs and values through several historical pieces about the Nez Perce people. Students also analyze an 1879 speech given by Chief Joseph, study maps of the United States' westward expansion, and listen to oral retellings of Nez Perce stories. As students study informational text features and enrich their learning via a variety of genres, they use their reading experiences to craft an informational essay.

Organize and Reveal lessons help students attend to text features and structure. During Organize and Reveal lessons, students build their understanding of text organization and analyze specific features that convey meaning to the reader. While students read texts to build topic knowledge, they also engage in text analysis to build transferrable reading skills in making sense of text structure and features. Organize and Reveal lessons use strategies such as encouraging students to ask and answer questions about text structure, employing graphic organizers, and analyzing the use of signal words that help students identify the text structure.

Wit & Wisdom writing instruction deepens literacy knowledge. During the Craft Stages, students learn how writers use text features by examining elements of authors' craft such as how topic sentences work or how authors use subheadings to organize information. The End-of-Module Task challenges students to write in the module's primary genre of study, providing students an opportunity to demonstrate their growing literacy knowledge and skill with different writing types. For example, in Grade 1 Module 3: Powerful Forces, students read a variety of texts, including informational and literary picture books, poetry, and informational articles. Through a study of sensory language and narrative structures, students develop their own narrative pieces. The lessons build students' understanding of narrative text structures and features, which helps students analyze the texts and create their own.

Summary

Strong literacy knowledge allows students to make sense of a text's organization and purpose and contributes to richer comprehension. To build literacy knowledge, students need opportunities to read a variety of genres, study them closely, and craft their own texts. Wit & Wisdom lessons help students do exactly that.
Works Cited
Duke, Nell K., and Kathryn L. Roberts. "The Genre-Specific Nature of Reading Comprehension." The Routledge International Handbook of English Language and Literacy Teaching, edited by Dominic Wyse, Richard Andrews, and James Hoffman, Routledge, 2010, pp. 74-86.

Duke, Nell K., et al. "Essential Elements of Fostering and Teaching Reading Comprehension." What Research Has to Say About Reading Instruction, edited by S. Jay Samuels and Alan E. Farstrup, 4th ed., International Reading Association, 2011, pp. 51-93.

Shanahan, Timothy. "Does Text Structure Instruction Improve Reading Comprehension?" Shanahan on Literacy, 22 May 2021, https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/does-text-structure-instruction-improve-reading-comprehension#sthash.TvI535QX.4xO1yrx4.dpbs.

About Hannah Dieter

Hannah Dieter is a director of implementation services on the Humanities team at Great Minds. In this role, she leads a team of implementation leaders who support schools and districts across the country with their implementation of  Wit & Wisdom and Geodes. Before joining the Great Minds team, she was the director of early childhood education for Lorain City Schools in Ohio. Hannah is also a former kindergarten teacher and instructional coach. She is currently working on her master's degree in reading science from Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati.

About Tanisha Washington

Tanisha Washington is a director of implementation services on the Humanities team at Great Minds. In this role, she leads a team of implementation leaders who support schools and districts across the country with their implementation of Wit & Wisdom and Geodes. Before joining the Great Minds team, she was an assistant principal for a charter school in Washington, DC. As an assistant principal, Tanisha was a member of the 2013 New Leaders' Aspiring Principals program, the 2018 Relay Graduate School of Education's National Principals Academy, and the 2018 School Leader Lab's leadership cohort. Tanisha is also a former elementary school teacher and has a master's degree in elementary education from American University in Washington, DC.

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Examining Scarborough's Rope: Literacy Knowledge

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Scarborough's Reading Rope provides a model for understanding the components of skilled reading. This blog series examines each of the strands of the Language Comprehension half of the rope and how Wit & Wisdom® strengthens these upper strands. Image courtesy of Dr. Hollis Scarborough, 2001.

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Scarborough’s Reading Rope: Literacy Knowledge - Braintrust

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Literacy knowledge encompasses all of the ideas we know are true about language, books and the text within them. Read more.

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Reading Universe | What Is Literacy Knowledge?

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A concise overview of literacy knowledge — what it is, how to teach it, and why it’s an important skill for developing language and reading comprehension.

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Excerpted from: Moats, L. C. (June, 1999). Knowledge and Skills for Teaching Reading: A Core Curriculum for Teacher Candidates. Teaching Reading is Rocket Science: What Expert Teachers of Reading Should Know and Be Able to Do, Appendix A. American Federation of Teachers.

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Knowledge and Skills for Teaching Reading

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The knowledge and skills base required for teaching reading well is extensive. This outline of a proposed curriculum for teacher education programs in reading covers knowledge of reading development, language structure, and strategies for instruction and assessment.

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The Science of Reading: Literacy Knowledge - What EdLeaders Need to Know

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What do education leaders needs to know about the Science of Reading. Dr. Jackson is pulling apart the Reading Rope, one strand at a time.

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Mastering Literacy Instruction: Beyond the Basics

The five components of literacy instruction

As a teacher of reading and writing, you want to deliver the most effective literacy instruction possible. You want to help unlock the opportunity for your students to reach their full potential as readers and writers. It's also possible that you have had at least one experience where you felt less than confident about your approach to literacy instruction. Or that you're not familiar with what the most effective approach to literacy instruction is. We now know that with evidence-aligned instruction that's based in the science of reading, 95% or more of children can learn to read.

In the year 2001, The National Reading Panel reported that the most effective reading instruction included five components. Understanding the five essential components of literacy instruction and the way that they should be integrated and developed overtime and with direct instruction, is critical for building strong foundational skills for both reading and writing. Here's a breakdown of each element and tips for teaching them effectively.

1. Phonemic awareness

Definition: Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify and manipulate the smallest units of sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. It stands as one of the key skills in preparing children for reading and can be an early indicator or predictor whether or not a student will struggle as they learn to read.
Tips for teaching:

1. Use rhyming games: Encourage students to play with rhymes and alliteration to develop their awareness of sounds in spoken language.

2. Segmenting and blending activities: Practice breaking words into individual sounds and blending them back together.

3. Use a multisensory approach: Students can use strategies that engage more than one learning modality: like finger tapping or arm blending. This approach can help students to solidify sound knowledge. See our guide to phonemic awareness lesson plans on the blog for more information on this!

2. Phonics

Definition: Phonics is the method of teaching reading, writing, and spelling by correlating sounds with symbols-specifically the relationship between sounds (phonemes) and their corresponding letters or letter combinations (graphemes). It encompasses the alphabetic principle: the understanding that letters represent sounds, forming the foundation of decoding written language.
Tips for Teaching:

1. Explicit instruction: Teach letter-sound relationships directly and systematically ("I Do").

2. Frequent opportunity for practice: incorporate guided practice ("We Do") so students can get timely feedback and redirection if necessary. Offer independent practice ("You Do") so students have the opportunity to practice on their own, growing both their agency and their self confidence.

3. Decodable texts: Use texts that are accessible for students based on where they are in the learning sequence, allowing students to apply their phonics knowledge in context and at the right pace.

Check out our in-depth Guide to Phonics for more information!

3. Fluency

Definition: Reading fluency is the skill that enables students to read a text accurately, quickly, and with expression. Without strong fluency skills, students will be challenged to comprehend what they read, especially as they move through grades and expand their subjects of study.
Tips for Teaching:

1. Repeated reading: Have students practice reading the same text multiple times to build fluency. The NICHD research review confirmed that repeated reading and guided, repeated, oral reading show strong evidence of improving fluency.

2. Choral reading: Read aloud together as a class to model fluent reading. This allows students to hear both their teacher's voice and their peers' voices as they say words aloud. It offers oral reading practice without the added nervousness some children will have about reading aloud on their own.

3. Reader's theater: Use scripts to practice reading with expression and intonation. This is a great activity that students can do together as they work towards a common goal.

4. Vocabulary

Definition: Vocabulary describes the group of words that people recognize, understand, and use. Having an expansive vocabulary gives people the tools to read more efficiently and comprehend more at the same time. Vocabulary also refers to the words students must know to communicate and learn effectively.
Tips for teaching:
It's important to consider that for students to effectively grow their vocabulary they need direct vocabulary instruction both on the meaning of well chosen words and on how to break down unfamiliar words for themselves.

1. Word walls: Create a word wall to display high-frequency and new vocabulary words.

2. Teach new words in context: Teach vocabulary in the context of reading and writing activities students are already doing.

3. Interactive activities: Use games or activities like vocabulary bingo or creating vocabulary squares to help students engage with the words they are learning in a more authentic way.

5. Comprehension

Definition: Reading comprehension is the ability to understand and interpret what is being read based on both what you are reading and what you already know.

Skills critical to reading comprehension are:

Connecting

Questioning

Predicting

Imaging

Inferring

Determining importance

Synthesizing

Tips for teaching:

1. Graphic organizers: Use tools like story maps and Venn diagrams to help students organize their thoughts with regards to plot or text structure.

2. Questioning and connecting: Encourage students to ask and answer questions about the text in a way that engages their prior knowledge on a topic or shows them how to make connections.

3. Summarizing and synthesizing: Practice summarizing texts and pulling out big ideas and supporting details into an outline to ensure students understand what they are reading.

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Go beyond the basics & discover engaging strategies for ALL ages to develop strong literacy skills. Fun activities, expert tips & inspiring stories - all in one place!

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Research-based guidelines for teaching phonological awareness and phonemic awareness to all children are described. Additional instructional design guidelines are offered for teaching children with learning disabilities who are experiencing difficulties with early reading.

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Written by Dr. Jody Chong, Assistant Professor, Jackman Institute of Child Study at The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto/ Special Education Teacher, TDSB
Phonological awareness is a crucial foundational skill in the journey of learning to read. All oral languages have a phonology, or system of sounds, and for a language such as English, where the alphabetic writing system was designed in large part to represent the speech system, being aware of the relationship between speech sounds (phonemes) and letters (graphemes) is essential (Juel, 1988). Phonological awareness is an umbrella term that encompasses the way oral language can be broken down into various-sized units; larger ones such as words and syllables, and smaller ones, such as onsets and rimes (e.g., 'pat' can be broken down into the onset "p" and the rime "at" and slip would be broken down into "sl" and "ip"). The sub-skill that is most closely related to reading and writing development is being aware of how words can be segmented into their smallest units of sounds - phonemes.

Phonemic awareness is a sub-category of phonological awareness, and instruction in this specific area helps children identify, isolate, blend, segment and manipulate the individual phonemes in spoken words. Phonemic awareness is an important cornerstone of literacy programs for both early-stage readers and those with written language disabilities. Research shows that challenges in phonemic awareness and other phonological skills both predict and cause poor reading and spelling development (Bryant et al., 2014; Ehri et al., 2001) and that decoding instruction may be ineffective unless children can first hear the sounds in spoken language (Juel, 1988; Perfetti et al., 1987). These challenges cut across IQ, race, and socio-economic status.

Decades of research on this topic indicate that this skill is highly teachable (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Bus & van Ijzendoom, 1999; Bradley & Bryant, 1985; Lundberg et al., 1988); and when done early, can help prevent reading difficulties. Here are 10 tips to help teachers, parents, and clinicians support its development:

Tip #1 Practice Regularly

You don't need to spend hours a day developing phonological awareness. It should be introduced in kindergarten and grade 1. Devoting around 15 minutes, a few days a week, to whole class activities, with perhaps 10 minutes more in differentiated small groups for those who need additional practice, is ample. In their meta-analysis of research related to this topic, The National Reading Panel (2000) found that just 18 hours of instruction in total is sufficient for most learners, and this can be easily achieved over the course of several months.

Tip #2 Make it Playful

Starting in kindergarten or even pre-school, educators and parents can introduce games, songs, and activities in playful and developmentally appropriate ways. Phonemic awareness instruction should be engaging, and there are many excellent resources and ideas out there to inspire your practice (see Tip #10).

Tip #3 Seek out Professional Learning Opportunities

Louisa Moats (1999/2020) believes that teaching reading really is rocket science, and so it is important for teachers to have a deep understanding of what phonemic awareness is, why it is important, and to self-assess their own ability to perform phonological awareness tasks. Click here to test your knowledge and access further learning resources from Reading Rockets. If this is an area that is new to you, there are many excellent resources to help deepen your understanding and comfort level (e.g., Kilpatrick, 2015).

Tip #4 Use Assessment to Guide your Instruction

Using an assessment tool can help you screen your students and identify those who may need extra support, monitor their progress, and tailor your instruction to establish instructional priorities. As your students become adept at working with larger units of speech such as identifying individual words in sentences, clapping syllables within words, or dividing words into onset-rime, you can then progress to tasks that involve working with the phonemes in individual words.

A few tools to consider:

Tip #5 Focus your Instruction

For typically developing children, it may be more useful to focus on one or two types of phoneme manipulation (e.g., blending and segmenting), as studies have indicated that children who were taught only one or two types of manipulation, instead of three or more, learned faster. And in some cases, students made stronger gains in reading and spelling (NRP, 2000; Ryder et al., 2008). Kilpatrick (2015), however, advises that children who struggle with phonemic awareness, or who may be at risk for developing literacy difficulties; may benefit from programming that is more comprehensive and that includes a larger variety of tasks (i.e., programs that train students to manipulate, delete, and substitute phonemes rather than only to blend and segment phonemes).

Tip #6 Make it Multi-Modal

There are many ways to incorporate more than one modality into your instruction: incorporating manipulatives such as bingo chips or counters that students can "push" as they segment or manipulate phonemes; using toy cars or slinkies as they stretch and blend sounds; using Elkonin boxes (sound boxes); providing picture supports for targeted words; augmenting sound play activities with pictures of mouth movements (Lindamood & Lindamood, 1998); and having students tap with their hands, fingers, small wands, or pencils as they segment words.

Tip #7 Connect it to Letter-Sounds

Research tells us that phonemic awareness is a necessary but not sufficient condition for skilled decoding and spelling and that instruction that combines phonemic awareness with letter-sound instruction (phonics) produces steeper gains/superior outcomes than phonemic awareness instruction in isolation (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Bradley & Bryant, 1985; Schneider et al., 2000).

Tip #8 Connect it to the learning of irregular words

A significant percentage of the most common words in English contain irregular spelling patterns (e.g., was, some, of) and many educators once believed that, because of this, high-frequency words were best learned through whole-word memorization. We now know that in order to learn these words efficiently and to be able to transfer some of this learning to other words, students need to understand the relationship between the sounds they hear in the spoken word and the letters they see in the written word, even when these are irregular or unexpected. When we teach children to look at every letter in a word and think about which letter patterns are expected or unexpected, their brains learn these relationships and retain them through a process called orthographic mapping. This mapping ability helps to "bond the spellings, pronunciations, and meanings of specific words in memory" (Ehri, 2014, p. 5).

A helpful process for teaching children irregular words:

1. Say the word out loud and have them repeat it (e.g., "said"),

2. Ask the student to segment the word into phonemes (e.g., /s/ - /e/ - /d/),

3. Draw 3 lines on a blackboard or piece of paper to show that we need to choose 3 graphemes to represent the 3 phonemes,

4. Discuss which letters we might expect to see given our knowledge of sound-letter (phoneme-grapheme) associations,

5. Highlight the part of the word that is irregular or unexpected.

A few ways to frame this process for the students are to highlight the letter(s) that "aren't playing by the rules", or to call them "heart words" and to highlight the irregular letter(s) by drawing a small heart above, as this is the part(s) of the word that needs to be learned "by heart".
Click here to watch a 3-minute video demonstrating this approach.
Tip #9 Don't go overboard

Phonemic awareness is a means to an end - to help children read and spell - and it is possible to go overboard. Students just need to consistently demonstrate their awareness that spoken words are composed of phonemes, that these phonemes can be manipulated in different ways, and that they can apply this knowledge to decode and encode words (SEDL, 2008 as cited in Ehri et al., 2001).

Tip #10 Last but not least, build your toolkit of evidence-based (and engaging!) instructional resources

This list is far from exhaustive, but here are a few online favourites:

Balanced Literacy Diet Website - here are a few videos and lesson plan ideas from its collection. To access more like this, use the site search option or go to the phonemic awareness food group.

Florida Centre for Reading Research -- lesson ideas are organized by grade

Reading Rockets - There are many resources on this website related to phonemic awareness. Here are a few to get you started:
University of Florida Literacy Institute (UFLI) UFLI Virtual Teaching Resource Hub
References

Armbruster, B. B., Lehr, F., Osborn, J., National Institute for Literacy (U.S.), & National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (U.S.). (2001). Put reading first: The research building blocks for teaching children to read: kindergarten through grade 3. Washington, D.C.: National Institute for Literacy, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, U.S. Dept. of Education.

Ball, E., & Blachman, B. (1991). Does Phoneme Awareness Training in Kindergarten Make a Difference in Early Word Recognition and Developmental Spelling? Reading Research Quarterly, 26(1), 49-66.

Bradley, L., & Bryant, P.E. (1985). Rhyme and reason in reading and spelling (International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities Monograph Series No. 1). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Bryant, P., Nunes, T., & Barros, R. (2014). The connection between children's knowledge and use of grapho‐phonic and morphemic units in written text and their learning at school. The British Journal of Educational Psychology, 84 (2), 211-225.

Bus, A. G., & van IJzendoorn, M. H. (1999). Phonological awareness and early reading: A meta-analysis of experimental training studies. Journal of Educational Psychology, 91(3), 403-414. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.91.3.403

Ehri, L. (2014) Orthographic Mapping in the Acquisition of Sight Word Reading, Spelling Memory, and Vocabulary Learning, Scientific Studies of Reading, 18:1, 5-21, DOI: 10.1080/10888438.2013.819356

Ehri, L. C., Nunes, S. R., Willows, D. M., Schuster, B. V., Yaghoub-Zadeh, Z. and Shanahan, T. (2001), Phonemic Awareness Instruction Helps Children Learn to Read: Evidence from the National Reading Panel's Meta-Analysis. Reading Research Quarterly, 36, 250-287. doi:10.1598/RRQ.36.3.2

Good, R. H. III, & Kaminski, R. A. (Eds.). (2003). Dynamic indicators of basic early literacy skills (6th ed.). Colorado: Sopris West

Juel, C. (1988). Learning to Read and Write: A Longitudinal Study of Fifty-four Children from First through Fourth Grade. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80, 437-447.

Kilpatrick, D. A. (2015). Essentials of assessing, preventing, and overcoming reading difficulties. Hoboken NJ: Wiley.

Kilpatrick, D.A. (2016). Equipped for Reading Success, Casey & Kirch.

Lindamood, P., & Lindamood, P. (1998). The Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing Program for Reading, Spelling, and Speech, Austin, TX: Pro-Ed.

Lundberg, I., Frost, J., & Petersen, O.-P. (1988). Effects of an extensive program for stimulating phonological awareness in preschool children. Reading Research Quarterly, 23(3), 263-284. https://doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.23.3.1

Moats, L. C. (1999/ 2020). Teaching reading is rocket science: What expert teachers of reading should know and be able to do. Washington, DC: American Federation of Teachers - https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/moats.pdf

National Reading Panel & National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (U.S.). (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read: an evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction: reports of the subgroups. Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health.

Perfetti, C. A., Beck, I., Bell, L. C., & Hughes, C. (1987). Phonemic knowledge and learning to read are reciprocal: A longitudinal study of first grade children. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 33(3), 283-319.

Rosner, J. (1993). Helping children overcome learning disabilities, 3 rd Ed. NY: Walker & Company.

Ryder, J.F., Tunmer, W.E., & Greaney, K.T. (2008). Explicit instruction in phoneme awareness and phonemically based decoding skills as an intervention strategy for struggling readers in whole language classrooms. Reading and Writing, 21, 349-369.

Schneider, W., Roth, E., & Ennemoser, M. (2000). Training phonological skills and letter knowledge in children at risk for dyslexia: A comparison of three kindergarten intervention programs. Journal of Educational Psychology, 92(2), 284-295. doi:http://dx.doi.org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1037/0022-0663.92.2.284

Wagner, R., Torgesen, J., Rashotte, C., & Pearson, N. (2013). Comprehensive test of phonological processing - second Edition (C-TOPP-2). Austin, Texas: Pro-Ed.

Dr. Jody Chong is an assistant professor at the Jackman Institute of Child Study at The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. She is also a Special Education Teacher with the Toronto District School Board. Jody has been a member of the LD@school/TA@l'école Advisory Committee, providing input to support the planning and implementation of the LD@school and TA@l'école projects since 2019.

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10 Tips for Teaching Phonological Awareness

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Written by Dr. Jody Chong, Assistant Professor, Jackman Institute of Child Study at The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto/ Special Education Teacher, TDSB Phonological awareness is a crucial foundational skill in the journey of learning to read.

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Structured Literacy | Pride Reading Program

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Breaking up words into syllables or chunks is the second step in teaching phonological awareness. Syllabication helps children learn to read and spell difficult words. When a child is stuck on a difficult word, they can use syllabication rules to figure it out.

Count the Syllables

One activity that helps a child pull apart the syllables in a word is to count them. This can be done by clapping each syllable.

You can start by counting (actually clapping) the number of syllables in your child's own name. (clap, clap). Jon-a-than. (clap, clap, clap).

Chin Dropping

If your child is having trouble understanding syllables, try using "chin dropping." This technique will help your child really "feel" the syllables. Place your hand under your chin. Now, say a multisyllabic word aloud. Every time your chin drops, that is one syllable!

Phonemic Awareness is the most important step in teaching Phonological Awareness. Phonemic Awareness means that your child is able to manipulate the individual sounds in spoken language.

Sound Identification

You can begin working on sound identification by asking your child to match the very first sounds in words and then the final sounds. It is helpful to have a set of cards with pictures of everyday objects ( man, boy, girl, cat, dog, house, book, etc.). You can also cut out pictures from magazines and use those. Once your child is successful at matching beginning sounds, work on ending sounds.

Sound Deletion and Substitution

You can ask your child to repeat a word and give the first, middle, and last sounds of the word. Then you can change a sound in the word. By manipulating and playing with these sounds in words, the child begins to understand the concepts of language and build a strong reading foundation.

Phonological awareness skills are the basis for reading and without this important skill, potential reading difficulties might occur in the early reading stage. A child who has strong and solid phonological skills will have a strong reading foundation to develop with.

Thank you for reading my post today. You might also enjoy reading my previous posts:
How to Teach Letters and Sounds Correctly Harnessing the Power of Phonemic Awareness, Phonological Awareness, and Phonics
Please don't leave without checking out the PRIDE Reading Program. The PRIDE Reading Program is an Orton-Gillingham curriculum that is used by teachers, tutors, and homeschooling parents worldwide with great success.

The PRIDE Reading Program

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Strategies for Teaching Phonological Awareness

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Phonological awareness must be taught before phonics. Here are some effective strategies, tips, resources and activities for teaching phonological awareness to children.

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This toolkit helps teachers and families understand the difference between phonemic and phonological awareness and how to support a child's development of these important reading skills.

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Phonics vs Phonological Awareness: What’s the Difference? | Waterford.org

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Read on to discover the difference between phonics and phonological awareness, as well as how they’re connected.

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How We Learn to Read: The Critical Role of Phonological Awareness

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Phonological Awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the individual sounds known as phonemes in spoken words. This foundational skill is crucial for developing reading and spelling abilities.

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Resources to support the development of phonological awareness - a critical skill for all students’ literacy development

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Phonological awareness is an essential skill, without which students cannot become strong, independent readers. The Science of Reading identifies phonological awareness as one of the critical elements of reading, along with phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension.

However, because phonological awareness primarily deals with spoken language, rather than written language, it can be challenging to find classroom-friendly activities that provide students with engaging, targeted practice with this foundational skill.

Luckily, we've collected 50 of our favorite phonological awareness activities in one guide! These ready-to-use activities are the perfect addition to any kindergarten, first grade, or second grade classroom.

Complete the short form on this page to access your free copy of 50 Fun Phonological Activities for the full list of activities, or keep reading to see 15 sample activities from the guide.

What is phonological awareness?

At a high level, phonological awareness is the ability to notice, think about, and work with the sounds in the spoken language.

Broken down into more detail, phonological awareness encompasses five key skills:

Word Awareness: Understanding that sentences and phrases can be broken down into individual words; counting words in a sentence or phrase

Rhyme awareness: Identifying and later producing words that rhyme

Syllable awareness: Dividing a word into its component syllables; counting syllables in a word; manipulating syllables

Onset and rime awareness: Identifying words that start (onset) or end (rime) with the same sound, often practiced via alliteration

Phonemic awareness: The term phonemic awareness comprises six discrete skills

What is phonemic awareness?

Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds (or phonemes) in words. Phonemic awareness is part of the larger category of phonological awareness.

Phonemic awareness describes six distinct skills:

Isolation: Identifying the specific phonemes within words

Segmenting: Dividing a word into its component phonemes

Blending: Combining sounds to form syllables or words

Deletion: Removing a phoneme from a word

Addition: Adding a phoneme to a word

Manipulation or substitution: Replacing one phoneme in a word with another phoneme

Try these fun phonological awareness activities!

1. Word Awareness: Clap Along

Before children can start identifying the sounds in words, they need to be able to divide sentences and phrases into individual words.

One fun activity is to have students clap once for each word in a sentence. Start by speaking a simple sentence out loud, such as " He walks." Clap as you say each word. Then model the activity again, this time with a longer sentence such as " He walks to school. "

Now have students practice by clapping once for each word as you speak simple sentences out loud.

Tip: Make this more motivating for children by using their names in the sentences. For example, "Jayden waves to his friend." or "Kali rides her bike."

2. Rhyme Awareness: Rhyme Match

For this, you will need picture cards with common animals and objects on them, such as bat, cat, can, fan, man, pan. Show the cards one at a time and identify the word each picture represents.

Now, hold up two picture cards at the same time. Say the words out loud or have the students say the words out loud. Ask students to stand up if the words rhyme, or sit down if they do not rhyme. Repeat until you have gone through all card combinations.

3. Rhyme Awareness: Stand and Rhyme

You will need one set of picture cards for this activity. One at a time, hold up a picture card. Have students stand if they can think of a word that rhymes with the word represented by the picture card.

Ask a student who stood up to share the rhyming word they thought of. Tell students to sit down if the word shared was the rhyming word they thought of, but remain standing if they thought of a different rhyming word. Have students share rhyming words one at a time until the entire class is sitting, then repeat the activity with a new picture card.

Tip: If a student provides a rhyming nonsense word, explain: "That word rhymes, but it is a silly word! It doesn't have a meaning that we know."

4. Syllable Awareness: Syllable Sort

Kids can do this activity independently or in pairs. Provide a set of picture cards representing one-, two-, and three-syllable words such as ball, baseball, basketball, sun, sunset, bag, banana, pan, potato. Have children sort the picture cards into piles based on how many syllables each word has.

5. Onset and Rime Awareness: Lost Beginnings

Explain to children that you found a bunch of words that are missing their beginning sounds. Can children find beginning sounds that will make these words complete again? Practice with the following onsets (example answers provided in parentheses):

6. Phonemic Awareness - Isolation: Initial Sound Sort

Separate students into pairs or small groups, and give each group a set of picture cards for simple three-phoneme words. Explain to students that they will first say the name of each picture card, and then identify the beginning sound in each word.

Next, working as a group, students will sort the picture cards according to their initial sounds. For example, map, man, and mug should together be in one pile, and pan, pig, and pen should be in another pile.

Tip: Use this activity to practice medial and final sounds, too!

7. Phonemic Awareness - Isolation: Medial Sound Match

Identifying medial sounds can be more challenging for children than identifying initial sounds, so it can be beneficial to give children extra practice with this skill. In your classroom, display picture cards: pan, men, wig, hot, and mug. Work with children to identify the medial sound of each word: /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/.

Now, one by one, give each student a new picture card, such as fan. Help the student sound out the word, and then ask the student to identify the middle sound in the word. Have the student stand next to the displayed picture card with the same middle sound (so the child holding the fan picture card should stand next to the displayed pan picture card).

8. Phonemic Awareness - Isolation: Final Sound, Activate!

Explain to children that they are on the hunt for the final sound /k/, like in duck. You are going to say a list of words out, and if the word ends with the final sound /k/, the children should act out that sound. (Remind children to stay in their own spaces as they act out words.) If the word does not end with the final sound /k/, children should remain still.

One by one, say the following action words: walk, hop, sit, look, write, shake, bake, stand, run.

9. Phonemic Awareness - Segmenting: Team Sound

Divide the class into three teams: Beginning, Middle, and Ending. Say a three-phoneme word such as pen or duck. Ask Team Beginning to pronounce the beginning sound, then have Team Middle pronounce the middle sound and Team Ending pronounce the ending sound. After several rounds, mix up the teams so students have to listen for sounds in different word positions.

10. Phonemic Awareness - Blending: Simon Says Blend

Tell students that you're going to play a special version of Simon Says. Instead of telling them what to do, Simon is going to sound out the commands! For example, you'll say: "Simon Says /s/ /i/ /t/" and students will need to blend the sounds. Once they have blended the sounds into a new word, they should act out the word (sit). (Remind children to stay in their own spaces as they act out words.) Use commands like hop, spin, swim, run, look, eat.

11. Phonemic Awareness - Addition: Sound Thief

Tell children that a thief came in and stole the /t/ sound from a group of words, and you need their help restoring the /t/ sound to these words! Ask children to help you decide if the /t/ sound should be added to the beginning or end of each word. One by one, go through the following words: pan (pant), ten (tent), rain (train), rap (trap), in (tin), win (twin), car (cart), and rim (trim).

Tip: Add extra challenge by including words where the /t/ sound could be added to the beginning or end of a word. For example, an (tan / ant) and are (art, tar).

12. Phonemic Awareness - Deletion: Beanbag Toss: Remove /s/

Explain to children that they're going to practice removing /s/ from the beginning of words. When a child catches the beanbag, you're going to give them a word, and they will remove the /s/ from the front of that word. The child can then (gently) toss the beanbag to another child. For this activity, use: slow (low), slip (lip), sand (and), seat (eat), snap (nap), sold (old), stop (top), spin (pin), span (pan), slap (lap), scan (can), sink (ink), self (elf), scar (car), spot (pot), and spit (pit).

Tip: Reinforce vocabulary by having children discuss the meaning of each word. Explain any words students are not familiar with.

13. Phonemic Awareness - Addition & Deletion: Concentration

For this game, you will need pairs of picture cards where a phoneme has been removed or added, such as leg and egg, deer and ear, mice and ice, pot and spot, lip and clip. Put children in pairs, then have partners play "Concentration" by turning over two cards and making matches when they find two words where one word in the pair is made by adding a sound to the beginning of the other word in the pair. When children make a match, they keep the cards. When they don't, children return the cards where they were, facedown. Play continues until children have matched all the cards.

Tip: You can also plan this game with final phonemes, using words like car and cart, bell and belt, bee and bead, ten and tent, pass and past.

14. Phonemic Awareness - Manipulation & Substitution: Backwards Words

Oh no! You had a list of words, but somehow the sounds in your words have been put together backwards. One by one, ask children to help you sound out each word, then put the word back together in the reverse order. Practice with these words: tab / bat, sick / kiss, pit / tip, lime / mile, pack / cap, pot / top, sale / lace, tell / let, back / cab, net / ten, feel / leaf.

15. Phonemic Awareness - Manipulation & Substitution: Word Creation

Give students a starting word, such as pan. Put students in small groups and ask them to work together to come up with as many new words as possible by changing one sound in the starting word. For example, pan can become ban, can, fan, man, ran, tan, van (initial phoneme substitution), pen, pin, pun (medial phoneme substitution), and pad, pack, pal, pat (final phoneme substitution).

Tip: Reinforce phonics by having students write down the new words. Depending on students' skill level, accept approximate spellings.

Ready for more phonological awareness activities, games, and fun?

Be sure to complete the form at the top of this page to get your free copy of 50 Fun Phonological Awareness Activities!

You can find even more activities - plus interactive digital practice, educational games, articulation videos, and so much more - in Savvas Essentials™: Foundational Reading, a new supplemental program designed just for Grades K-2.

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Help students master phonological awareness and phonemic awareness with these 50 fun, free activities!

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Understanding Consonant and Vowel Phonemes in English
Having a basic understanding of the production and characteristics of consonant and vowel phonemes in English is essential in effective reading instruction. This document walks through the place, manner, and characteristics of English phonemes. This document can be used in tandem with the below Consonant and Vowel charts.

Consonant and Vowel Charts
The consonant and vowel charts organize the sound of the English language by place of articulation, manner of articulation and phonation. This document can be used with the above Understanding Consonant and Vowel Phonemes in English resource to help make sense of English phonemes.

Basic Phonograms Chart
The Phonograms Chart is a free interactive resource provided by Logic of English. The chart includes 75 basic phonograms that hold the key to unlocking hundreds of thousands of words. The chart includes audio and video features to ensure correct production of phonemes as well as an opportunity to see how the sound is produced in the mouth.

The Development of Phonological Skills
This article includes the continuum of phonological awareness skills from basic to advanced, typically ages within the progression, and some sample tasks for each skill.

Phonemic Awareness Instructional Activities from UFLI
Phonemic awareness, or the ability to notice and manipulate individual sounds in spoken language, is an essential building block for later decoding skills. The included activities are designed to promote the development of various phonemic awareness skills. Tutorials, sample lessons, and scripts are available.

Teaching Early Literacy Skills When Masking in Schools
This document created by the CDE Literacy Team provides suggestions for the explicit teaching of phoneme/grapheme correspondences when masking in required in a school. A sample of an explicit lesson is provided.

Phoneme/Grapheme Support Cards
These are provided as a supplement to the "Teaching Early Literacy Skills Through Pandemic Precautions" document. A corresponding grapheme card is shared with all of the consonant phonemes and for introduction of short and long vowel phonemes.

Phoneme Articulation Cards
These additional resources created by the CDE Literacy Team support teachers with explicit instruction of phoneme articulation and explicit teaching of phoneme/grapheme correspondences following the suggestions in the guide linked above.

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Understanding Consonant and Vowel Phonemes in English Having a basic understanding of the production and characteristics of consonant and vowel phonemes in English is essential in effective reading instruction. This document walks through the place, manner, and characteristics of English phonemes. This document can be used in tandem with the below Consonant and Vowel charts.

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Target the Problem: Word Decoding and Phonics

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Decoding is the ability to apply your knowledge of letter-sound relationships, including knowledge of letter patterns, to correctly pronounce written words. Understanding these relationships gives children the ability to recognize familiar words quickly and to figure out words they haven’t seen befo…

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You are welcome to print copies for non-commercial use, or a limited number for educational purposes, as long as credit is given to Reading Rockets and the author(s). For commercial use, please contact the author or publisher listed.

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Get the basics on guidelines for decoding instruction, speech sounds in English, and why children confuse certain speech sounds.

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Add to favorites
By Kim R. Fitzer and James B. Hale
Is Reading Natural?

Reading is not a natural part of human development. Children do not automatically learn how to read and need to be taught to read. Statistics Canada (2009) reported that of all children with disabilities (ages 5 to 14), more than half (59.8%) have learning disabilities (LDs).

Most of these children have a disability in reading (89.6%) (Gabel, Gibson, Gruen, LoTurco, 2010; Semrud-Clikeman, Fine, & Harder, 2005). This may be due to the importance of reading in all academic areas, as studies suggest math and writing LDs are also very common (Shaywitz, 2007; Willis, 2008).

Word Attack Skills, Reading Decoding, and Reading Competency
Defining Terms

Phonological Awareness: skill at identifying and manipulating sounds.

Phonemic Awareness: understanding that words are made of sounds (44 English phonemes) that can be used to create new words.

Grapheme Awareness: understanding that symbols in reading (letters) correspond to sounds.

Early exposure to sounds and letters is critical, even before school begins (Richards, 2009; Tallal, 2012). Children must learn four things:

1. Awareness that speech is composed of the smallest meaningful units of sounds (phonemes);

2. Awareness that letters (graphemes) and word parts (morphemes) are visual language symbols;

3. Recognition that written letters represent the sounds (alphabetic principle);

4. Understanding that phonemes and morphemes can be manipulated (Segmenting and Blending).

A Common Problem Seen in Early Reading and Word Reading LDs

Children can memorize words by sight instead of developing word attack or reading decoding skills. This is a common problem in children who have reading LDs (Fiorello, Hale, & Snyder, 2006).

This memorizing strategy allows children to guess at most words in the early grades from the initial letter or whole word configuration (shape of word) and still achieve average scores on most reading tests. What they often struggled with is pseudoword reading tasks (e.g., read the words belped, fralt, nockess). Although these children may not be identified with a reading LD, because of their average scores in early grades, later in elementary school they may have significant reading problems (Berninger et al., 2000; Hale et al., 2008).

Why would that lead to reading problems later in school?

In kindergarten, children are exposed to words that are easily memorized, because there aren't that many of them. However, as the lexicon expands dramatically through elementary school - with approximately 2000 to 3000 new words learned each year (Biemeller, 2003) - this visual memorizing strategy becomes less effective.

These same children cannot memorize enough words over time, and so their word reading and reading comprehension decline with age (Shaywitz, 2003). A child has to decode harder words not visually recognized to link the words to lexical-semantic word memory and their definitions (Biemeller, 2003).

What should parents and teachers do?

It is important to build word attack skills and good understanding of phoneme-grapheme correspondence throughout the early grades (Ramus et al, 2003; Shaywitz et al., 1999). Parents and teachers should watch for children who often guess at words or skip words they don't know. These children will often read much quicker during silent reading (because of the guessing/skipping strategy) and try to avoid oral reading. Comprehension too may be better during silent reading because they are able to "fill in the gaps" when they miss a word, and still understand what they read.

The Neuropsychology of Word Reading

There are many brain areas involved in reading competency, even at the basic word reading level (Feifer & Della Toffalo, 2007; Hale & Fiorello, 2004; Shaywtiz, 2005), so problems in one or more of these areas of the brain could lead to reading disabilities.

In a landmark study, Pugh et al. found a functional disconnect between the phonemic and graphemic systems in the inferior parietal lobe, which is likely the most common cause of word reading disability (Fiorello et al., 2006).

Click here to access the handout Brain Areas and Reading Skills.

Reading Fluency/Speed and Reading Comprehension

Reading comprehension requires reading quickly ( reading fluency),keeping track of what words are in the sentences ( working memory), vocabulary meaning and text conventions ( semantics/grammar), and understanding what is read ( receptive language) (Berninger & Richards, 2002; Cutting, Materek, Cole, Levine, & Mahone, 2009).

Children must learn six things:

1. Automatic recognition of words as "pictures" in the brain (sight word recognition);

2. Quickly retrieving words in visual long-term memory for rapid naming (retrieval/fluency);

3. Linking read words with word meanings (vocabulary) in long-term memory (lexical/semantic knowledge);

4. Keeping track of words and meanings for sentences and passages (verbal working memory);

5. Knowledge of sentence structure and punctuation (grammar);

6. Linking read words, word meanings, and grammar for understanding (receptive language).

Common Problems Seen in Children with Reading Comprehension LDs

Most proficient readers read words by sight, and some children may be good at word decoding/attack, but they don't transfer those words to long-term visual memory (Hale & Fioello, 2004). Without automatic sight word recognition, too much effort is spent on decoding and comprehension is impaired (Ehri, 2005; Wolf, Miller, & Donnelly, 2000).

Why would poor sight word recognition lead to reading comprehension problems?

Problems with long-term visual memory can lead to poor sight word recognition. Without a good sight word vocabulary, reading speed is reduced, and working memory is consumed with reading decoding/attack. This does not allow for working memory to keep track of the words read, and comprehension is subsequently impaired (Elliott et al., 2010; Torgesen, Wagner, Rashotte, Burgess, & Hecht, 1997).

This seems in direct contrast with the earlier comments about not allowing children to use a sight word approach only for reading. This is because reading is hierarchical. A child first learns to decode words, then transfer the decoded words to long-term visual memory so the words can be rapidly named, and thus comprehension can develop as word reading competency increases (see Fiorello et al., 2006).

What should teachers do?

It is important to build vocabulary first and foremost, and then decoded words can be translated into reading sight words efficiently. With sight word recognition and reading speed, the demands on working memory are less, and so working memory can be used for reading comprehension to occur.

Watch for children who always try to "sound out" (decode) words, and/or have slow reading speed (Willis, 2008; Wolf, 2007).

The Neuropsychology of Reading Fluency/Speed and Comprehension

There are many brain areas involved in reading comprehension, even if basic word reading and reading speed are adequate (Berninger & Richards, 2002; Feifer & Della Toffalo, 2007; Hale & Fiorello, 2004; Shaywtiz, 2005). Reading comprehension and oral language comprehension are highly related, so any child with receptive or expressive language problems may also have a problem with reading comprehension (Feifer & Della Toffalo, 2007; Roth, Speece, & Cooper, 2002).

Click here to access the handout Brain Areas and Comprehension Skills.

Putting it Together: A Model of Word Reading and Comprehension

There are "fast" and "slow" routes for reading in the brain. In the beginning stages, one learns to decode words using the connection between sound and symbol in the brain's dorsal stream. But the fastest way to read a word is by sight, which is important for reading fluency and comprehension. Without reading fluency, word reading takes all of one's working memory, and comprehension is impaired.

So the reader's goal is to transfer an unknown word from the dorsal stream (word attack) to the ventral stream (automatic sight word reading) (Feifer, Nader, Flanagan, Fitzer, Hicks, 2014). Competency in both decoding and sight word recognition are needed however, with the former proceeding the latter during reading skill development.

Should we teach children to memorize words instead of decoding them?

The answer is NO. It is important to NOT let children try to learn words by sight only (e.g., guessing at words based on initial letter or total word configuration).

Why?

Because as the lexicon expands with increasing age there are too many words to try to memorize, so decoding of harder words is necessary for words we don't automatically recognize by sight, and then we can access them via the slower dorsal stream (Hale & Fiorello, 2004).

What do specific problems with reading look like? What are the implications for intervention?

The following table highlights some of the problems students experience during reading. No one pattern is "clear cut" because reading competencies are interrelated, and there may be more than one of the following problems in the same child, especially if a reading LD is present. However, understanding these patterns is a good first step toward developing effective interventions for children with reading disabilities (Crews & D'Amato, 2010; Feifer & DeFina, 2000; Fletcher & Vaughan, 2009).

Phonetic Coding and Sound/Symbol Association Word Recognition Visual Procssing/Rapid Automatic Naming Reading Comprehension

Difficulty learning visual letters

Difficulty recognizing words and letters in print, may see lip movement when reading

May have difficulty with visual discrimination or recognition of letters; makes phonemic equivalent errors

Comprehension not impaired for oral language or sentences presented orally, but impaired for written sentences

Difficulty learning sounds for letters

Over-relies on sight word approach. Guesses at words by initial letter or whole word configuration

Good visual memory may lead to adequate reading performance in early grades (not later grades, where decoding is needed)

Comprehension directly related to words misread; as number of inaccurate guesses increases, comprehension declines

Difficulty with sound (phoneme) - symbol (grapheme) association

Slow and laborious reading, with many misread words; reads with little expression, but lip movement seen during silent reading

Letter reversals, b for d, p for q; m for w, Letter and number inversions; poor memorization of words and linking meaning to read words

Comprehension errors frequent as majority of working memory is taxed by decoding, oral comprehension may be adequate

Difficulty breaking apart words or combining parts of words

Slow and laborious reading, with many misread words; some sight word reading may be used

Re-reads words and skips lines while reading; complains that eyes hurt or rubs eyes; loses place while reading

Confuses word order (syntax); Frequent errors in comprehension due to working memory being taxed or poor word relationships

Reasonable phonetic misspellings "akshun" for action

Rarely uses punctuation when reading, sounds out all words, even sight words, such as "righut" for the word right

Sequencing and tracking errors, will say "on" for no or "saw" for was; Complains of eyes hurting or sore when reading, and words or letters move ("jump") on the page

Slow laborious reading interferes with fluency, working memory, and comprehension; often re-reads a passage numerous times before understanding it

Good sound-symbol association for decoding words

Recognizes a majority of words taught

May not have problems with visual processes, but could have sequential processing problem

Working memory problem leads to poor text meaning or connected text understanding; so poor comprehension of sentences and passages despite good word reading

Most children may experience one or more of these problems during their reading skill development, therefore, it is important to note if the pattern is consistent over time, and resistant to intervention (Crews & D'Amato, 2010; Feifer & Della Toffalo, 2007).

In addition, it is important to recognize that good readers and children with reading LDs differ in their brain function and error patterns, so a good error analysis is critical for developing effective interventions for affected children (Feifer et al, 2014; Cao, Bitan, Chou, Buma, & Booth, 2006; Simos et al., 2005, 2007).

Teaching Reading: Linking Assessment and Intervention

There are a number of valuable resources for teaching children with reading problems and reading LDs. The following evidence-based intervention strategies were developed based on a number of important resources, including Berninger & Wolf (2009), Feifer & Della Toffalo (2007), Fry, 2010; Mercer, Mercer, & Pullen (2008), and Shawitz (2005). Several of these intervention strategies recognize the National Reading Panel (2000) findings that effective reading instruction addresses alphabetics, fluency, and comprehenison.

Click here to access the handout Interventions for Sound/Symbol Association and Phonetic Coding (K-2).

Click here to access the handout Interventions for Sound/Symbol Association and Phonetic Coding (3+).

Click here to access the handout Interventions for Word Recognition/Automaticity (K-2).

Click here to access the handout Interventions for Word Recognition/Automaticity (3+).

Click here to access the handout Interventions for Reading Fluency (K-2).

Click here to access the handout Interventions for Reading Fluency (3+).

Click here to access the handout Interventions for Reading Comprehension (K-2).
Click here to access the handout Interventions for Reading Comprehension (3+).
Related Resources on the LD@school Website

Click here to access the article WIST Program: A strategy to improve orthographic memory in students with reading disabilities.

Click here to access the article Improving Reading Fluency: Which Interventions are the Most Effective?.

Click here to access the article Integrating Vocabulary Instruction with Reading Comprehension Strategies.

Click here to access the article Direct Instruction of Reading for Elementary-aged Students.

Click here to access the article Effective Vocabulary Strategies for Students with Learning Disabilities.

Additional Resources

Click here to access the resource Phonemic Awareness: Developing Sound Sense.

References

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Berninger,V.W., Abbott, R. D., Brooksher, R., Lemon, Z., Ogier, S., Zook, D., & Mostafapour, E. (2000). A connectionist approach to making the predictability of English orthography explicit to at-risk beginning readers: Evidence for alternative, effective strategies. Developmental Neuropsychology, 17(2), 241-271.

Berninger, V. W. & Richards, T. L. (2002). Brain Literacy for Educators and Psychologists. USA: Academic Press.

Berninger, V. W., & Wolf, B. J. (2009). Teaching students with dyslexia and dysgraphia. New York: Paul H. Brooks Publishing.

Cao, F., Bitan, T., Chou, T. L., Buman, D. D., & Booth, J. R. (2006). Deficient orthographic and phonological representations in children with dyslexia revealed by brain activational patterns. . Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 47, 1041-1050.

Crews, K. J., & D'Amato, R. C. (2010). Subtyping children's reading disabilities using a comprehensive neuropsychological measure. Journal of Neuroscience, 119( 10), 1615-1639.

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Feifer, S. G., & DeFina, P. D. (2000). The neuropsychology of reading disorders: Diagnosis and intervention. Middletown, MD: School Neuropsych Press.

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Reading Disability Subtypes for Effective Educational Remediation. [Special Issue]. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 20, 1, 18-30.

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Fry, E. (2010). How to teach reading (4th ed.). Huntington Beach, CA: Shell Educational.

Gabel, L. A., Gibson, C. J., Gruen, J. R., LoTurco, J. J. (2010). Progress towards a cellular neurobiology of reading disability. Neurobiology of Disease, 38, 173-180.

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Hale, J. B., & Fiorello, C. A. (2004). School neuropsychology: A practioner's handbook. New York: Guilford.

Mercer, C. D., Mercer, A. R., & Pullen, P. C. (2010). Teaching students with learning problems (8 th ed.). New York: Pearson.

National Reading Panel (2000). Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. Washington, DC: US Government.

Pugh, K. R., Mencl, W. E., Shaywitz, B. A., Shaywitz, S. E., Fulbright, R. K., Constable, R. T., ... & Gore, J. C. (2000). The angular gyrus in developmental dyslexia: task-specific differences in functional connectivity within posterior cortex. Psychological science, 11(1), 51-56.

Ramus, F., Rosen, S., Dakin S. C., Day, B. L., Castellote, J. M.,White, S., & Frith U. (2003). Theories of developmental dyslexia: insights from a multiple case study of dyslexic adults. Brain, 126, 841-865.

Richards, T. L., Aylward, E. H., Berninger, V. W., Field, K. M., Grimme, A. C., Richards, A. L., & Nagy, W. (2006). Individual fMRI activation in orthographic mapping and morpheme mapping after orthographic or morphological spelling treatment in child dyslexics. Journal of Neurolinguistics 19, 56-86.

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Shaywitz, S. (2005). Overcoming dyslexia: A new and complete science-based program for reading problems at any level. Vintage.

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Simos, P. G., Fletcher, J. M., Sarkari, S., Billingsley-Marshall, R., Denton, C. A., & Papanicolaou, A. C. (2007). Intensive instruction affects brain magnetic activity associated with oral word reading in children with persistent reading disabilities. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 7 (1), 37-48.

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Wolf, M. (2007). Proust and the squid: The story and science of the reading brain. New York, NY: HarperCollins.

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Reading and the Brain: Strategies for Decoding, Fluency, and Comprehension

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By Kim R. Fitzer and James B. Hale Is Reading Natural? Reading is not a natural part of human development. Children do not automatically learn how to read and need to be taught to read. Statistics Canada (2009) reported that of all children with disabilities (ages 5

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Decoding Strategies: 6 Effective Strategies To Teach Decoding

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Decoding Strategies: 6 Effective Strategies To Teach Decoding - Teach these 6 effective decoding strategies to beginning and struggling readers to improve their decoding skills.

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Many teachers are familiar with decoding strategies that may emphasize the use of picture clues, meaning and self-monitoring. Sometimes these decoding activities are even given cute nicknames to help students remember.

While we want students to monitor our students and their reading for accuracy to make sure it makes sense, often these kinds of decoding strategies taught typically in younger grades barely touch decoding skills or WORSE, they may call a child's eyes and attention AWAY from the text, which is the opposite of what we want to do, especially for budding or struggling readers.

Students absolutely need additional tools to solve unknown words in reading. There are a number of important strategies that will help students decode effectively and will sustain them over time, no matter what grade they're in or how old they are. Let's dive into decoding strategies that are suitable for all children and adults.

The following decoding strategies have long been used within the Orton-Gillingham lesson plan as part of the Orton-Gillingham approach, but anyone can utilize them as part of their structured literacy framework.

The first thing to keep in mind is the importance of a strong foundation of phonological awareness. Students need to be able to hear the differences between two sounds, break a word into its individual sounds and blend those sounds. There is a tendency to teach phonological awareness only in Kindergarten and 1 st grade and to move on whether or not students have understood the concepts. Research has shown us that effective phonological awareness instruction not only involves instruction in advanced phonemic awareness concepts such as manipulating phonemes but teaching these phonological skills to the point of overlearning and automaticity is key.

When a student is faced with an unknown word, this decoding strategy is often my first step. By locating vowels, then syllable divisions and determining syllable types, students are able to break a word into bite size pieces. This is an area in which many interventions fall short. Students learn to break a word into syllables orally, but not how to divide the printed word. Read this six-part syllable blog series for more tips.

The vowels are the trickiest parts of most words for most students. By locating and marking the vowels, it not only facilitates syllable division, but also pronunciation and decoding. It is often useful to teach students the breve and macron markings so that they can mark vowels with the correct sound. Saying the vowel sound before attempting to blend the word is often also helpful. Read this six-part syllable blog series for more tips.

Looking for familiar spelling patterns such as digraphs, blends, or chunks is also a key skill to aid when decoding words. Students may make connections from known words to new words that share the same spelling pattern. If a student is familiar with the word cold, it will assist them in reading a word like withhold or golden. It is also helpful if students recognize patterns like silent letters, as in the word write, gnome or knight, as a predictable decodable pattern.

It is important for students to be proficient at both segmenting and blending as a phonemic awareness skill done orally before different spelling patterns are introduced. If a student does not know how to blend, they will not have the necessary skills to decode unknown words. Similarly, the ability to segment a word into sounds is crucial for spelling. Read, "The Top 6 Tips For Helping Children Blend Sounds" for more helpful tips to help children with blending.

In addition to breaking a word into syllables, the ability to locate and understand affixes, base words and roots is a critical part of reading and spelling more complicated words. This understanding is very often key not only for spelling, but also for pronunciation of words and word parts. This is especially helpful for decoding multisyllabic words

Even the most proficient reader when decoding words is going to need to use context clues to read and understand heteronyms, words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently and with different meanings. Examples include: sow (female pig, plant seeds), wind (breeze/roll up), bow (ribbon, front of a boat).

Although marking up a word with pencil or even color is undoubtedly helpful, there are times in every student's life when this sort of text marking is not an option. Teaching students to cover suffixes or syllables with their fingers is an excellent substitute that makes decoding instruction more multisensory and less visually overwhelming.

If a student is struggling with decoding a particular word part, I often have the student trace that part on the table or desk as they say the sounds. Not only does tracing make the word part more memorable, but the act of tracing triggers the kinesthetic and sensory pathways the student utilized when they initially learned a word or phonogram.

There is much that we can do as instructors to set a student with dyslexia or any struggling reader up for success. Choosing decodable text carefully that is controlled and within the student's zone of proximal development is key. Choosing fonts and font size carefully can also contribute significantly to a student's success.

More importantly, teaching a children to become metacognitive, (thinking about their thinking) when it comes to decoding in reading will serve them well in a variety of ways. Modeling the above decoding strategies to show a child how you can think your way through your reading to solve unknown words is a key first step. Then, transfer the task gradually onto them with less scaffolding from you. Finally, make it a healthy reading habit by asking children to utilize the decoding strategies independently. The gradual release of responsibility is developmentally appropriate and emotional sound teaching practice.
Remember it this way with your students:

By filling our students' reading toolboxes with...

a number of different decoding strategies for tackling unknown words,

explicitly teaching children how to use them, and

providing abundant opportunities for practice,

our students can confidently tackle reading tasks without resorting to relying on guessing or skipping words, which are quite honestly strategies I call flimsy. They don't hold up over time or get used incorrectly at best.

I tell my students that a strategy is a plan to do something WELL. Guessing or skipping words is not a plan for reading well. Let's empower our kids with efficient strategies that work, so when you ask them the all important question, "What do you do when you come to a word you don't know?" they can communicate exactly what to do.

If you are seeking materials to support your students, Multisensory Reading Strategies for Word Attack and Decoding Practice is going to support much of what I have discussed in this post with you today. In it, there are posters to display, bookmarks and cards to hang on a metal ring. There are two levels for younger and older students, but the message is the same: there is no guessing game.

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Effective Decoding Strategies To Improve Reading

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Many teachers are familiar with decoding strategies that may emphasize the use of picture clues, meaning and self-monitoring.

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Sight words are words that students are expected to recognize instantly. With the right support, students can become so familiar with these words that they no longer need to pause and try to decode them. Some sight words are regularly spelled words, and some are spelled irregularly.

You may hear other educators use the term high-frequency words. These are words that appear very often in what students read. It's especially important for these frequently used words to become sight words. Students can read with better fluency when they recognize these words right away.

By explicitly teaching sight words, you can help cement the words into students' memories. Use this three-part strategy, which starts with sound-letter mapping, then moves to a flashcard activity, and ends with other ways to keep reinforcing the sight words with repeated exposure.

Watch: Sound-letter mapping for sight words

Watch this video from Literacy How of a teacher using sound-letter mapping to teach her students the high-frequency word lit.

Read: How to use this three-part strategy

K (Common Core Literacy RF.K.2: Know and apply grade-level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words; RF.K.3.C: Read common high-frequency words by sight)

1 (Common Core Literacy RF.1.3: Know and apply grade-level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words; RF.1.3.G: Recognize and read grade-appropriate irregularly spelled words)

2-5 (Common Core Literacy RF.2.3, RF.3.3, RF.4.3.A, and RF.5.3.A: Know and apply grade-level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words)

Choose words to teach. Assess how well your students recognize sight words using a simple pre-test. For example, you can have students read grade-level words from Dolch or Fry word lists. Then, make a list of the 25 words your students missed most often. Divide the list into groups of five words to teach each day. (You can adjust the number of words based on your students' needs.)

Prepare materials. On the board, draw sound boxes (a long rectangle divided into two, three, or four squares, depending on the number of sounds in the words you plan to teach). Give students a matching handout of the sound boxes, such as this printable of Elkonin sound boxes.

Choose one of the five words you want to teach. Tell the students they'll be spelling the word. (Example: with.) Invite them to repeat the word. Then ask, "How many sounds do you hear in with?" Hold up one finger per sound as your students say the sounds: /w/ /i/ /th/. Say the sounds with the students to help them identify individual sounds.

On the board, write in the sound boxes the letter or letters that correspond to each sound - one sound per box. Then read the word together.

Students can write the letters on their handout. Or you can give your students small manipulatives (like coins or bingo chips). Have students move one manipulative into a box for each sound. Then, when it's time to write the corresponding letter or letters in each box, students can move the manipulatives out of the way to write the letter(s).

Repeat the sound-letter mapping with each of the five sight words.

In round one, show and read the words one at a time to students. Wait three seconds to give students time to look at each word's letters and patterns. Then ask them to repeat the word.

In round two, shuffle the cards and show one card at a time. Wait three seconds and then ask students to read the word. If students read the word incorrectly or aren't able to read it, point out a memorable feature. For example, "Notice the -ed at the end of used." Wait three seconds and ask students to try the word again. Go through the stack of cards until students correctly identify each word at least twice.

Constant time delay for words with unusual spellings: Use this activity for word sets (or "word families") that share a pattern but that don't have typical letter-sound combinations (like could, should,and would). You can use a resource like Phinder to look for words based on letter patterns.

Write all the words from a word set in a vertical column on a card. Show students the card and ask them to identify how each word ends. After students respond correctly, point to and say each word on the card. Wait three seconds and then ask students to say the words.

If you're practicing words from different word sets, be sure to write the different sets on different cards. Shuffle the cards and have students read through each word set.

Teaching tip: If you're introducing these sight word activities for the first time, make sure to explicitly teach the activity and offer guided practice. If students are familiar with an activity, provide a quick model.

Understand: Why this sight words strategy works

When you use this strategy, you're teaching a skill called orthographic mapping. It's a process we use to store printed words in our long-term memory. Orthographic mapping is essential for learning sight words.

Here's what happens when we use orthographic mapping: When we see a word, we break it apart by the sounds we hear in the word (phonemes) and the letter and letter patterns (graphemes) that correspond to those sounds. This process fixes the word into our long-term memory. Eventually, we recognize the word immediately when we see it. We still see all the letters, but we know the word so well that we don't have to sound it out.

Research shows that most readers need between one and four exposures to a word to commit it to long-term memory. Struggling readers need even more exposure to new words because orthographic mapping can be hard. Repeated practice with sight words gives students the exposure they need to build their sight word vocabulary.

Teaching tip: For English language learners, including a word's meaning during instruction can help with reading and language development. Try using hand gestures as you teach word meanings.

Share this article with families to help them understand what sight words are and why they're important. You can also send home this list of 12 ways for families to help kids practice sight words at home.

Research behind this strategy

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Sight words: An evidence-based literacy strategy

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Use this strategy to teach sight words to struggling readers.

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Explicit Intervention in Sight Word Recognition

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Explicit intervention in sight word recognition is designed to increase students' ability to recognize and read individual words using phoneme grapheme mapping of regular parts and explicit call out of irregular parts. They store the connected sounds and letters of words (along with their meaning) as instantly recognizable sight words.

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Basics: Sight Words and Orthographic Mapping

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Words that you can read instantly are called sight words. Orthographic mapping is the process of storing a word permanently in memory for instant retrieval - and key to effortless, accurate, and fluent reading.

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In reading intervention we hear terms like sight words, high-frequency words, phonetically irregular words, red words, heart words, and so many other variations used every day. So we are jumping in to explain what these words actually are, and what the research says about how we should be teaching them!

First things first -

What are sight words?

Sight words are words that need to be recognized by “sight” or words that we need to automatically recognize without sounding the word out. Basically, they are words we can read automatically without thinking about them.

Why are sight words important?

Sight words are important because students need to have a certain level of automaticity in order to comprehend what they are reading. The tricky thing is that students need to be taught a systematic set of rules and patterns to decode words effectively. When students are learning to read, they should be working through a progression of concepts as they’re learning to “sound out” words. We talked more about this progression over here!

However, there are many words that students need to know before they get to that level of progression because they come up so frequently. This is why sight words are also known as high-frequency words. Because they come up so often, it can be helpful to teach students these patterns a little earlier in their instructional journey.

Now that said, we don’t need to have students memorize these words. Instead, we can use a systematic framework and progression to help build a foundation for future learning while also giving students the knowledge they need to be successful at their current level.

There are 7 Steps to a SMARTER Research-Based Instruction Framework (we use the acronym SMARTER to help remember each of the key components!)

1 - Systematic Instruction

Sight words (words that need to be learned by sight) can be taught systematically

When we are thinking about teaching words that need to become sight words, we want to focus on high-frequency words (words that occur frequently). We can divide those high-frequency words into two categories.

1 - Are they phonetically regular? (Can they be sounded out?)

or

2 - Are they phonetically irregular? (Is there one or more sound patterns that cannot be sounded out even after students have progressed through a systematic phonics progression?)

Once we have sorted our sight words or high-frequency words into those two groups, we have one more question to consider.

3 - If the word is phonetically regular (able to be sounded out effectively), does the student have all the foundational knowledge of each letter pattern in order to read it? For example, the word “them” is phonetically regular and can be sounded out effectively as /th/ /e/ /m/, however, if a student hasn’t learned that TH says /th/ it is a pattern that will be decodable but is not yet.

What does decodable mean?

A decodable word is a word that can be sounded out with a student’s current level of knowledge. So for example, if a student has learned that U says /u/ and S says /s/ the word “us” is decodable. In the example provided above, the word “them” will be decodable as soon as a student learns that TH says /th/.

Or, if we consider the word “bird” bird is decodable if students know that “IR” says /r/.

In this case, students would need to be familiar with the R-controlled syllable type but as soon as they are familiar with that pattern the word becomes decodable.

However, some words are not fully decodable. Words like “was” and “of” have at least one letter that doesn’t make a predicted sound pattern. These words that are not fully decodable are sometimes known as “heart words” or “red words” because at least part of the word needs to be memorized in order to sound it out effectively.

Notice I mentioned PART of the word needs to be memorized. The great news here is that usually, the entire word doesn’t need to be memorized.

So how exactly do we teach these words?

We use a “Lock Word Strategy” to teach high-frequency words (words that should become sight words). Essentially, these words need to be “locked” into our memory so that we can identify them by sight instead of needing to rely on a phonetic decoding strategy.

In order to help students retain or hold onto sight words, we break them into three different LOCK categories.

1 - Decodable words = Green Lock Words. These words are decodable which means they can be entirely sounded out with a student’s current level of knowledge about how to decode/sound out words. However, these words are high-frequency meaning they occur a lot so we want to “lock” them into our brains so that we can read them quickly, without having to labor over decoding them. We’re looking to build automaticity and reduce the cognitive demand required of sounding these words out.

You can grab a copy of these word cards along with some of our other favorite “lock word” resources here!

2 - Phonetically Regular (Will be Decodable) = Yellow Lock Words. These words are phonetically regular and could be sounded out, but not all of the patterns have been explicitly taught to the student. These often appear in high-frequency words. Again, they need to be “locked” into our memory since the patterns aren’t yet familiar AND we see them often. For example, in the word “go” students may not have learned about open syllables which means they may not know that O makes the long sound at the end of an open syllable, or in the word “you” they may not have learned that “ou” says /oo/. Therefore, once the student learns about open syllables and the vowel team “ou” the word could be sounded out effectively - but students need to be able to read these words before they may have reached this level of systematic exposure we talk about here.

3 - Phonetically Irregular Words = Red Lock Words. These words are tricky because they have at least one pattern that can’t be sounded out. We have to “lock” these patterns in our memory because they don’t follow our typical rules. For example, in the word “is” students need to recognize that S says /z/ which is unexpected because normally S says /s/ unless it is stuck between two vowels. We definitely want our young students to memorize this rule for the word “as” as well so we don’t have an uncomfortable moment in the classroom! (We’ve all been there!) For the word the, we have a Red Lock Word because the e says /u/ and depending on the scope and sequence if students hadn’t yet learned the /th/ pattern - we would want to make sure to explain to our students that TH comes together to say /th/ in this word which is why the letters “th” only have one dot under them.

By breaking our words down into these three categories, we are able to help students “decode” these high-frequency words effectively until they’ve been transitioned into memory. This helps them bucket these skills and see the bigger picture, instead of trying to just memorize hundreds of words.

Again, you can grab a copy of these word cards along with some of our other favorite “lock word” resources here!

2 - Multisensory Instruction

SIght word instruction should be multisensory

The first way we accomplish this is by providing the color-coding and lock symbol which immediately ties in an additional visual to help students with retention. Additionally, we want to think about ways we can add in auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic strategies wherever possible.

When practicing sight words we want to have students practice saying the letter name and not the letter sound since many patterns are irregular. For example, when practicing the word “what” a student would say W - H - A - T says what. Using foam glitter paper is an awesome way to practice! Additionally having students practice writing over a tactile surface like a grid and then using their finger to practice tracing the word is another way to get in some extra tactile practice.

3 - Applied Instruction

Sight word instruction should be progressive!

Reading and spelling lock words in isolation is definitely the first step, however, if we want our students to become fluent readers and writers we NEED to help them apply their knowledge when reading and in their writing!

You want to start by helping students identify (read) words on their own efficiently. Typically to be considered a mastered sight word students need to be able to identify what the word says in about one second. But reading sight words in isolation (all by themselves) isn’t enough. Once they can read the word you want to make sure they’re reading the word appropriately in context or in connected text. Just practicing sight word flashcards doesn’t mean students are applying that knowledge into their sentence-level reading so it’s critical we help them make that jump.

You want to start by having students recognize and read the word automatically, you then want them to be able to recognize and read the word in the context of a sentence without sounding it out. The spelling of these words typically takes significantly longer, and that’s okay - just be aware the development of sight word automaticity in reading will happen much earlier than a student’s ability to spell the word.

4 - Research Behind Sight Word Instruction

Much of the research that had been done regarding sight word instruction using pure memorization techniques is surprisingly dated.

Many of us in the field of education have heard about Dolch words or Fry words which are lists of words that are taught to students in primary levels. Dolch words were created in the 1930s by Edward Dolch, a professor and children’s book writer who researched words and created a list of 220 of the most common words used in children’s books during that time. Edward Fry expanded upon this list adding hundreds more words to a “sight word list” or list of words students should know by sight that was last updated in 1980. Dolch’s words were specific to younger students in Kindergarten through 2nd grade where as Fry’s words were meant to be studied by older students in 3rd - 9th grade.

According to the National Institute of Child Health in the National Reading Panel Report conducted in 2000, the recommended approach is combining explicit phonics instruction with either the Dolch or Fry list of sight words. This combination helps students build fluency quickly by providing a base of words they recognize on sight along with a method for decoding unfamiliar words.

Now the challenge with many of these words is that they are phonetically irregular or have parts of the word that cannot be sounded out and need to be memorized. We can help support this process by providing visuals or explaining the etymology (origin of the word and meaning) and morphology (parts of a word carrying meaning).

According to a study completed by Devonshire, Morris, & Fluck,⁠ (2013) adding instruction in morphology and etymology increased student retention of words above and beyond traditional phonics. This is especially important when traditional phonics patterns don’t apply.

5 - Targeted Instruction

Your instruction should target the words that your students need to know!

When teaching high-frequency words, we want to make sure the words we are teaching are actually important in instruction.

By putting together word lists based on frequency and common words at different grade levels you can then determine which words students need to know.

Ideally, students who aren’t struggling readers should be provided screeners to make sure they’re recognizing these common words by sight.

If you’re working in smaller groups or 1:1 you can use similar screeners to see which words to focus on with your students.

We also want to think about how many new “lock” words a student can learn at a time. Some students can read up to 5 per week, others do better with only 1-2 new words per week. If you have students who are struggling to learn these words, we recommend starting with the phonetically regular, high-frequency words (green lock words) first.

You can grab a copy of our sight word/high-frequency words here!

6 - Explicit Instruction

The biggest hallmark of research-based instruction is that the instruction must be taught explicitly, meaning that we don’t assume students have prior knowledge of foundational reading and spelling concepts just because of their age or reading/spelling ability.

We should be using explicit phonics instruction to teach these words wherever possible. When explicit phonics instruction doesn’t work, we want to give students as much information and practice as possible to be successful with these high frequency words.

One helpful strategy is combining words or grouping words into categories such as homophones.

Homophones

Visual cues like the examples below are a great support to help students solidify their understanding of these words. Again, many of these patterns are phonetically irregular and need to be memorized as a “red lock word.”

We can also explain complex words in terms of etymology.

We don’t always dig this far into the weeds but for students who can access a higher-level explanation, you can also teach them about the etymology of the words and why they are spelled the way that they are.

Etymology

Explicit sight Word Skills to Support Reading & Spelling

As you work through your lock word (or any variation of lock words, sight words, red words, or heart words) instruction, we suggest to start by explicitly teaching students how to approach the word. Teach them what sounds are phonetically regular and familiar, phonetically regular but still unfamiliar to them, and phonetically irregular. Then, move on to homophones.

As for the etymology - we need to be realistic here (which brings us to our seventh and final step).

7 - Realistic Instruction

Is etymology really that important?

When it comes to our lock words - etymology can be helpful in understanding why certain words “break the rules.” However, we need to be realistic about the amount of information our students can access and how much they actually need to be functional readers and writers.

It will always be more important that students can read and spell the word muscle, than knowing that it comes from a Latin term meaning “little mouse.” If etymology feels out of reach for your students - then don’t worry about it. If it doesn’t contribute to them having a functional ability to read and spell, it isn’t going to be worth your time or their time in the long run.

In addition to being realistic with our students, you also need to be realistic with yourself.

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.

Now obviously there is A LOT that goes into research-based instruction, including lock words, but again, it does not have to be difficult. One of the best things you can do is to start thinking about where you can incorporate these activities into what you’re already doing. The best instruction is the instruction you can actually deliver and keep up with, without burning yourself out!!! If you’re looking for activities to help your students develop sight word automaticity you can check out some of our favorites here!

If you want to grab a comprehensive set of lock words that we use with our students you can check out the High-Frequency Word Deck >>>here!<<<

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Corey Pollard

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reading comprehension, reading skills, reading instruction, reading intervention

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How to Teach Sight Words using a Research-Based Approach | SMARTER Intervention

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In reading intervention we hear terms like sight words, red words, high-frequency words, phonetically irregular words, heart words, and so many other variations used every day. Today, we are jumping in to explain what these words actually are, and what the research says about how we should be teac

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At a glance

Sight words are common words that kids recognize instantly without sounding them out.

Recognizing words by sight helps kids become faster, more fluent readers.

Many sight words are tricky to read and spell - they aren't spelled the way they sound.

Sight words are common words that schools expect kids to recognize instantly. Words like the, it, and and appear so often that beginning readers reach the point where they no longer need to try to sound out these words. They recognize them by sight.

Building up a large base of sight words helps kids become faster, more fluent readers. When kids master a sight word, they no longer have to pause to blend its letter-sounds together. And they don't have to think about spelling rules.

Some schools call sight words high-frequency words. Other terms for sight words include star words, core words, and popcorn words. Why popcorn? Because these words "pop up" so frequently in reading and writing.

About the author

About the author

Julie Rawe is the special projects editor at Understood.

Reviewed by

Reviewed by

Ginny Osewalt is a dually certified elementary and special education teacher with more than 15 years of experience in general education, inclusion, resource room, and self-contained settings.

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What are sight words? Sight words (star words, popcorn words) are common words we recognize without sounding them out. See examples of sight words for different grades.

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Overview of suggested restructuring

Teach 10-15 "sight words" before phonics instruction begins

Flash Words and Heart Words defined

Flash Words with advanced vowels to teach with early phonics instruction

Flash Words with two and three syllables

Implementing the new model

You are welcome to print copies for non-commercial use, or a limited number for educational purposes, as long as credit is given to Reading Rockets and the author(s). For commercial use, please contact the author or publisher listed.

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A New Model for Teaching High-Frequency Words

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Integrating high-frequency words into phonics lessons allows students to make sense of spelling patterns for these words. To do this, high-frequency words need to be categorized according to whether they are spelled entirely regularly or not. This article describes how to "rethink" teaching of high-frequency words.