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Fluency Overview from Ohio's Dyslexia Course

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Fluency Overview from Ohio's Dyslexia Course

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Basic Word Reading Instruction from Ohio's Dyslexia Course

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Basic Word Reading Instruction from Ohio's Dyslexia Course

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Module 7 Section 3b Basic Word Reading Instruction

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Reading Fluency with Chloe, Second Grader, Reading Rockets

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Reading Fluency with Chloe, Second Grader, Reading Rockets

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Reading Fluency with Chloe, Second Grader

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Teaching Phoneme Awareness in 2022: A Guide for Educators

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Teaching Phoneme Awareness in 2022: A Guide for Educators

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Teaching Phoneme Awareness in 2022_A Guide for Educators

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Phonics: 10 Important Research Findings -Wiley Blevins

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Phonics: 10 Important Research Findings -Wiley Blevins

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Phonics: Ten Important Research Findings

Countless research studies have been conducted on phonics instruction. Much of this research has focused on the usefulness of phonics instruction and the best ways to teach children about sound-spelling relationships. Below is a list of ten of the top research findings regarding phonics.
#1: Phonics Instruction Can Help All Children Learn to Read
All children can benefit from instruction in the most common sound-spelling relationships and syllable patterns in English. This instruction helps children decode words that follow these predictable sound-spelling relationships and syllable spelling patterns.

Phonics instruction is particularly beneficial for children at risk for learning difficulties - those children who come to school with limited exposures to books, have had few opportunities to develop their oral languages, are from low socio-economic families, have below-average intelligence, are learning English as a second language, or are suspected of having a learning disability. However, even children from language rich backgrounds benefit from phonics instruction (Chall, 1967). As Chall states "By learning phonics, students make faster progress in acquiring literary skills - reading and writing. By the age of six, most children already have about 6,000 words in their listening and speaking vocabularies. With phonics they learn to read and write these and more words at a faster rate than they would without phonics."

Phonics instruction is therefore an essential ingredient in reading instruction. The purpose of this instruction is to teach children how to read with accuracy, comprehension, fluency, and pleasure. The early ability to sound out words successfully is a strong predictor of future growth in decoding (Lundberg, 1984) and comprehension (Lesgold and Resnick, 1982). Weak decoding skills are characteristic of poor readers (Carnine, Carnine, and Gertsen, 1984; Lesgold and Curtis, 1981). Readers who are skilled at decoding usually comprehend text better than those who are poor decoders. Why this is so can be gleaned from the work of cognitive psychologists. They contend that we have a set amount of mental energy that we can devote to any task (Kahneman, 1973). Since decoding requires so much of this mental energy, little is left over for higher-level comprehension. As decoding skills improve and more and more words are recognized by sight, less mental energy is required to decode words and more mental energy can be devoted to making meaning from the text (Freedman and Calfee, 1984; LaBerge and Samuels, 1974).

In addition, successful early decoding ability is related to the number of words a reader encounters. That is, children who are good decoders read many more words than children who are poor decoders (Juel, 1988). This wide reading subsequently results in greater reading growth. Children not only learn more words, but they become more familiar with the common spelling patterns of English which, in turn, helps them decode longer words.

Phonics instruction also helps to get across the alphabetic principle (that the letters of the alphabet stand for sounds) by teaching the relationship between letters and the sounds they represent. Beginning readers learn better when their teachers emphasize these relationships (Chall, 1996).
#2: Explicit Phonics Instruction Is More Beneficial Than Implicit Instruction
According to Chall (1996), "systematic and early instruction in phonics leads to better reading: better accuracy of word recognition, decoding, spelling, and oral and silent reading comprehension." The most effective type of instruction, especially for children at risk for reading difficulties, is explicit (direct) instruction (Adams, 1990; Chall, 1996; Honig, 1995; Evans and Carr, 1985; Stahl and Miller, 1989; Anderson et al, 1985.). Implicit instruction relies on readers "discovering" clues about sound-spelling relationships. Good readers can do this; poor readers aren't likely to. Good readers can generalize their knowledge of sound-spelling relationships and syllable patterns to read new words in which these and other sound-spellings and patterns occur. Poor readers must rely on explicit instruction.

Although explicit instruction has proved more effective than implicit instruction, the key element in the success of explicit phonics instruction is the provision of multiple opportunities to read decodable words (that is, words containing previously taught sound-spellings) in context (Stahl, Osborn, and Pearson, 1992; Juel and Roper-Schneider, 1985; Adams, 1990) and ample modeling of the application of these skills to real reading. In fact, students who receive phonics instruction achieve best in both decoding and comprehension if the text they read contains high percentages of decodable words. In addition, by around second or third grade, children who've been taught with explicit phonics instruction generally surpass the reading abilities of their peers who've been taught with implicit phonics instruction (Chall, 1996).
#3: Most Poor Readers Have Weak Phonics Skills and a Strategy Imbalance
Most poor readers have a strategy imbalance. They tend to overrely on one reading strategy, such as the use of context clues, to the exclusion of other strategies that might be more appropriate (Sulzby, 1985). To become skilled fluent readers, children need to have a repertoire of strategies to figure out unfamiliar words (Cunningham, 1990). These strategies include using a knowledge of sound-spelling relationships, using context clues, and using structural clues and syllabication strategies. Younger and less skilled readers rely more on context than other, often more effective, strategies (Stanovich, 1980). This is partly due to their inability to use sound-spelling relationships to decode words. Stronger readers don't need to rely on context clues because they can quickly and accurately decode words by sounding them out.

Unfortunately, children who get off to a slow start in reading rarely catch up to their peers and seldom develop into strong readers (Stanovich, 1986; Juel, 1988). Those who experience difficulties decoding early on tend to read less and thereby grow less in terms of word recognition skills and vocabulary.

A longitudinal study conducted by Juel (1988), revealed an 88% probability that a child who is a poor reader at the end of first grade would still be a poor reader at the end of fourth grade. Stanovich (1986) refers to this as the "Matthew Effect" in which the "rich get richer" (children who are successful decoders early on read more and therefore improve in reading), and the "poor get poorer" (children who have difficulties decoding become increasingly distanced from the good decoders in terms of reading ability).
#4: Phonics Knowledge Has a Powerful Effect on Decoding Ability
Phonics knowledge affects decoding ability positively (Stanovich and West, 1989). Early attainment of decoding skill is important because this accurately predicts later skill in reading comprehension (Beck and Juel, 1995).

One way to help children achieve the ultimate goal of reading instruction, to make meaning of text, is to help them achieve automaticity in decoding words (Gaskins et al, 1988). Skilled readers recognize the majority of words they encounter in text quickly and accurately, independent of context (Cunningham, 1975-76; Stanovich, 1984). The use of graphophonic cues (knowledge of sound-spelling relationships) facilitates word recognition abilities. In fact, a child's word recognition speed in first grade was found to be a strong predictor of reading comprehension ability in second grade (Lesgold and Resnick, 1982; Beck and Juel, 1992).

However, the inability to automatically recognize frequently encountered words affects reading in the following ways (Royer and Sinatra, 1994):

1. Since words can be stored in working memory for only a limited amount of time (approximately 10-15 seconds), slow decoding can result in some words "decaying" before a meaningful chunk of text can be processed.

2. Devoting large amounts of mental energy to decoding words leaves less mental energy available for higher-level comprehension. This can result in comprehension breakdowns.

#5: Good Decoders Rely Less on Context Clues Than Poor Decoders
Good readers rely less on context clues than poor readers do because their decoding skills are so strong (Gough and Juel, 1991). It's only when good readers can't use their knowledge of sound-spelling relationships to figure out an unfamiliar word that they rely on context clues. In contrast, poor readers, who often have weak decoding skills, overrely on context clues to try to make meaning of text (Nicholson, 1992; Stanovich, 1986). Any reader, strong or weak, can use context clues only up to a certain point. It has been estimated that only one out of every four words (25%) can be predicted using context (Gough, Alford, and Holley-Wilcox, 1981). The words that are the easiest to predict are function words such as the and an. Content words - the words that carry the bulk of the meaning in a text - are the most difficult to predict. Researchers estimate that content words can be predicted only about 10% of the time (Gough, 1983). A reader needs to use his or her knowledge of phonics (sound-spelling relationships) to decode these words.

"The whole word method (meaning emphasis) may serve a student adequately up to about second grade. But failure to acquire and use efficient decoding skills will begin to take a toll on reading comprehension by grade 3." Jeanne Chall, 1996

#6: The Reading Process Relies on a Reader's Attention to Each Letter in a Word
Eye-movement studies have revealed that skilled readers attend to almost every word in a sentence and process the letters that compose each word (McConkie and Zola, 1987). Therefore, reading is a "letter-mediated" rather than a "whole-word-mediated" process (Just and Carpenter, 1987). Prior to these findings, it was assumed that readers did not process each letter in a word, rather recognized the word based on shape, a few letters, and context.

Research has also revealed that poor readers do not fully analyze words; for example, some poor readers tend to rely on initial consonant cues only (Stanovich, 1992, Vellutino and Scanlon, 1987). Therefore, phonics instruction should help to focus children's attention on all the letters or spellings that make up words and the sounds each represents by emphasizing the full analysis of words. In addition, phonics instruction must teach children strategies to use this information to decode words. This attention to the spelling patterns in words is necessary for the reader to store the word in his or her memory. It also helps the reader to become a better speller because the common spelling patterns of English are attended to to a greater degree and thereby more fully learned (Ehri, 1987).
#7: Phonemic Awareness Is Necessary for Phonics Instruction to Be Effective
Before children can use a knowledge of sound-spelling relationships to decode words, they must understand that words are made up of sounds (Adams, 1990). Many children come to school thinking of words as whole units - cat, dog, run. Before they can learn to read, children must realize that these words can be broken into smaller units - and sounded out. Phonemic awareness is the understanding, or insight, that a word is made up of a series of discrete sounds. Without this insight, phonics instruction will not make sense to children. Some students with weak phonemic awareness skills are able to make it through the first couple years of reading instruction by memorizing words. This strategy breaks down when the number of unique words in text increases in grades three and up. Therefore, if weak phonemic awareness skills are not detected and corrected, these students may enter the intermediate grades with a very serious reading deficit.
#8: Phonics Instruction Improves Spelling Ability
Reading and writing are interrelated and complementary processes (Pinnell, 1994). Whereas phonics is characterized by putting together sounds to form words that are printed, spelling involves breaking down spoken words into sounds in order to write them. To spell, or encode, a word a child must map a spelling onto each sound heard in the word.

Spelling development lags behind reading development. A word can generally be read before it can be spelled. The visual attention a child needs to recognize words is stored in his or her memory. This information - the knowledge of the spelling patterns of English, also known as orthographic knowledge - is used to spell. Spelling, however, requires greater visual recall than reading and places higher demands on memory.

Good spellers are generally good readers because spelling and reading share an underlying knowledge base. Poor readers, however, are rarely good spellers. Phonics is a particularly powerful tool in improving spelling because it emphasizes spelling patterns, which become familiar from reading. Studies show that half of all English words can be spelled with phonics rules that relate one letter to one sound. Thirty-seven percent of words can be spelled with phonics rules that relate groups of letters to one sound. The other thirteen percent must be learned by memorization. Good spellers have not memorized the dictionary; they apply the phonics rules they know and have a large store of sight words.

Writing, in turn, supports a child's reading development because it slows the process by focusing the child's attention on how print works. Poor spellers experience difficulties in both writing and reading. Poorly developed spelling ability also hinders vocabulary development (Adams, Treiman, and Pressley, 1996; Read, 1986).
#9: A Teacher's Knowledge of Phonics Affects His or Her Ability to Teach Phonics
A teacher's knowledge of phonics has a strong effect on his or her ability to teach phonics (Carroll, 1990; Moats, 1995). This knowledge of the English language enables the teacher to choose the best examples for instruction, to provide focused instruction, and to better understand students' reading and writing errors in relationship to their developing language skills. I highly recommend that all teachers take a basic course in phonics or linguistics to gain further insights into our language that can be used in the classroom in productive and purposeful ways.
#10: Knowledge of common syllable patterns and structural analysis (affixes, roots) improves students' ability to read, spell, and learn the meanings of multisyllablic words.
For many children, reading long words is an arduous task. Explicit instruction in the six common spelling patterns, the most common syllable types (e.g., VCe, VCCV,), prefixes, suffixes, roots, and word origins helps students recognize larger word chunks that makes decoding easier and aids in figuring out a word's meaning. For example, it may be efficient for a student to decode text containing simple CVC words such as cat and ran sound by sound, it is not efficient to decode text containing words such as transportation and unhappy sound by sound. Rather, it is more efficient to recognize common word parts such as trans, port, tion, un, and happy and blend these larger chunks to sound out the word.
Here are some helpful articles and videos about phonics . . .
http://teacher.scholastic.com/reading/bestpractices/phonics/questionstranscripts.htm
http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/teaching-phonics-wiley-blevins
http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/frequently-asked-questions-about-phonics
http://teacher.scholastic.com/clifford1/resfound.htm
Here are some of my favorite web sites . . .
Scholastic (for Parents): www.scholastic.com/parents/
Scholastic (for Teachers): http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/
Reading Rockets (for Parents and Teachers): http://www.readingrockets.org/
The Society for Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI): http://www.scbwi.org/
Disney's Family Fun: http://familyfun.go.com/
Q & A
Do you have a question for me about teaching your child to read? If so, email me and I will post your question and answer.

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teaching phonics and word study in the intermediate grades

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phonemic awareness activities for early reading success

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Wiley Blevins Author " Page Not Found " Phonics: Ten Important Research Findings

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Countless research studies have been conducted on phonics instruction. Much of this research has focused on the usefulness of phonics instruction and the best ways to teach children about sound-spelling relationships. Below is a list of ten of the top research findings regarding phonics.

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Hard WordsWhy aren't kids being taught to read? ~Emily Handford

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Hard WordsWhy aren't kids being taught to read? ~Emily Handford

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Scientific research has shown how children learn to read and how they should be taught. But many educators don’t know the science and, in some cases, actively resist it. As a result, millions of kids are being set up to fail.

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Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science: What Expert Teachers of Reading Should Know and Be Able to Do ~ Louisa Moats

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Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science: What Expert Teachers of Reading Should Know and Be Able to Do ~ Louisa Moats

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The most fundamental responsibility of schools is teaching students to read. Because reading affects all other academic achievement and is associated with social, emotional, economic, and physical health, it has been the most researched aspect of human cognition. By the year 2000, after decades of multidisciplinary research, the scientific community had achieved broad consensus regarding these questions: How do children learn to read? What causes reading difficulties? What are the essential components of effective reading instruction and why is each important? How can we prevent or reduce reading difficulties? Two decades later, hundreds of additional studies have refined and consolidated what we know about bolstering reading achievement, especially for students at risk.

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Stanislas Dehaene - French cognitive neuroscientist

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How the Brain Learns to Read - Prof. Stanislas Dehaene

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Relationship between Phonological and Phonemic Awareness...

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Relationship between Phonological and Phonemic Awareness...

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Levels of complexity

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from Really Great Reading

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What is Phonemic Awareness?

What Is Phonemic Awareness? Phonemic Awareness is the awareness of and ability to manipulate the individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words (Kilpatrick, 2015). Phonemic awareness is a subset of the broader category of phonological awareness, which is one's conscious awareness of and ability to "play with" the sound structures in oral language (Paulson & Moats, 2010).

Six Layers of Phonemic Awareness: Improve Students' Reading Using Their Ears

Reading With Your Ears? What if we told you that you could improve your students' ability to read unfamiliar words without showing them a single printed letter? As crazy as it sounds, it's true! This is because one of the major skills underlying the successful decoding of printed words, phonemic awareness, is a purely auditory and oral skill. It may not be "reading with your ears" in the literal sense, but the sounds we hear and play within words are what allow us to ultimately pull the print off the page with our eyes when we decode.

What Is the Difference Between Phonological Awareness & Phonemic Awareness?

Let's start with phonological awareness. Your phonological awareness is what enables you to hear the sentence "My dog ran away" and immediately determine that it contains four spoken words. It allows you to quickly identify that bat and mat rhyme, while bat and boat do not. And it enables you to determine that the spoken syllables /pic/ and /nic/ together make the word picnic and that the spoken word parts /spl/ and /ash/ put together make the word splash. Identifying and manipulating speech at the word, syllable, and onset-rime level are the marks of phonological awareness.

Your phonemic awareness, on the other hand, is what enables you to hear and manipulate the smallest units of speech, called phonemes. Your phonemic awareness gets the credit when you identify that the word map has three sounds, /m/ /ă/ /p/, while the word split has five, /s/ /p/ /l/ /ĭ/ /t/. Your phonemic awareness allows you to hear the individual sounds /f/ /r/ /ŏ/ /g/ and know right away that this is the word frog. And it is what tells you that stop without the /s/ is top, that adding /s/ to the beginning of mash gives you smash, and that changing the /ĭ/ in quick to /ă/ gives you quack.

These phonemic exercises are not only fun, but they are also essential to proficient word recognition and decoding. Seidenberg (2017) tells us that, "we read with our eyes but the starting point for reading is speech." In fact, researchers have found that "among poor readers, 70-80% have trouble with accurate and fluent word recognition that originates with weaknesses in phonological processing" (Fletcher, Lyon, & Fuchs, 2007). We know that "when children lack awareness of the role that sounds play in words, [they] rarely learn to read easily" (Henry, 2010, p. 76). Strong phonemic awareness skills lead to strong readers because phonemic awareness lays the underlying framework for reading (decoding) and writing (encoding) (Trehearne, 2003). Although playing with words at the larger levels of syllable and onset-rime is fun and helps to develop an ear for the sound structures in words, we want to get students as quickly as possible "to where it really matters, the individual phoneme level" (Tolman, 2018).

What is the Importance of Phonemic Awareness in Decoding?

Kilpatrick (2015) tells us that phonemic awareness is an essential part of the process of storing words in one's sight word vocabulary; that is, the body of words (high-frequency or not) that an individual can decode quickly and effortlessly. "Phonemic awareness is what allows us to anchor the sounds in a word to the written sequence of letters that represent those sounds" (Kilpatrick, 2015). This process is called orthographic mapping. Studies have shown that students with better phonological awareness skills can handle this mapping process more proficiently than those with weaker phonological awareness skills (Kilpatrick, 2015). The goal of decoding is to build words into our sight word memory, and phonemic awareness allows this to happen!

Why Are the Six Layers of Phonemic Awareness Essential to Learning to Read?

Adams (1994) emphasizes that while phonemic awareness is essential for learning to read, it is not easily established, and children need explicit instruction to gain the necessary skills. This makes it extremely important for teachers to understand that there are various layers of phonemic awareness and that each of these layers represents a skill that can be developed through targeted instruction and practice. These layers build from the simplest phonemic awareness skills at the bottom of the pyramid to the most complex at the top. These are skills that can be modeled, practiced, and established through oral wordplay.

The Six Layers of Phonemic Awareness: Definitions & Examples of Instruction at Each Layer

Phoneme Isolation: Hearing and isolating the individual phonemes (sounds) in spoken words represents the first layer of skilled phonemic awareness. Isolating phonemes entails knowing that a word is made up of a sequence of sounds and that the individual sounds in words can be differentiated from one another. Beginning sound isolation activities are a great way to help students develop their phoneme isolation skills. Beginning sound isolation is simply pulling the first sound off of a spoken word. Students can isolate the first sounds in words, as in /b/, bear, or /s/, soap.

Blending: Moving up the pyramid, we come to a slightly more complex phonemic awareness skill, phoneme blending. Phoneme blending, which is basically combining sounds, involves listening to and pulling together isolated phonemes to create words. This process requires a student to hold the individual elements in his/her mind as the word is created, thus challenging a student's active working memory. When beginning readers sound out a word, they use letter-sound knowledge to say each sound in a word (/b/ /ă/ /t/), and then blend the sounds quickly together to read the word (bat).

Segmenting: The third layer in the pyramid is phoneme segmentation. This is the ability to divide a spoken word into its component sounds (phonemes). In a segmentation activity, students are given a word like mad, and then they segment it, or "stretch" the phonemes, /m/ /ă/ /d/. As they are saying the sounds, they can extend a single finger for every phoneme that they hear, starting with the thumb: /m/ (extend thumb), /ă/ (extend index finger), /d/ (extend middle finger). Lastly, they blend the phonemes together as they bring their hands back to their chests and say the word, mad.

Manipulation: Truly refined phonemic awareness includes even more advanced skills, like phoneme addition, deletion, and substitution, all three of which are considered phoneme manipulation. These are the top three layers of the pyramid. Phoneme manipulation is generally more challenging than segmenting and blending phonemes. Manipulation requires students to hold phonemes in their working memories long enough to isolate specific phonemes, add, delete, or substitute (delete and then add) specific phonemes, and then blend the phonemes back together to form a new word. These types of activities are an excellent way to build refined phonemic awareness, particularly for students who may have already mastered phoneme segmentation and blending.

Phoneme Addition: Phoneme addition involves adding phonemes to a given word to produce a new word. For instance, starting with the word we and adding the phoneme /k/ to the end turns it into week. Phoneme addition can be done with more complex words as well; starting with the word bell and adding the phoneme /t/ at the end turns it into belt.

Phoneme Deletion: Conversely, starting with the word guide and deleting the final phoneme, /d/, creates the new word, guy. A more complex example of phoneme deletion might include removing one phoneme from a two-sound blend. Starting with the word blast and deleting the initial phoneme, /b/, results in the new word, last.

Phoneme Substitution: Phoneme substitution, the most advanced of all the manipulation skills on our pyramid, requires that a student knows how to both delete and add phonemes. In a phoneme substitution exercise, a student might be asked to drop the short i sound in kit and replace it with the long i sound. When they do, kit becomes kite. This is done through a few intricate steps that are performed automatically and without conscious thought for strong, fluent readers. These steps include recognizing the component parts of the known word (segmenting the word into its phonemes), isolating a specific phoneme, deleting that phoneme, adding the new phoneme, and blending the phonemes together to say the new word. Did you notice that these steps include every one of the lower five layers of the pyramid? That's right -phoneme substitution, our top layer, encompasses every single layer of the phonemic awareness pyramid. If even one of these lower skills is weak, students will struggle to substitute phonemes.

The Importance of Phoneme Substitution

Teachers are often comfortable with and therefore put the instructional focus on the phonemic awareness skills toward the bottom of the pyramid, particularly phoneme blending and phoneme segmentation. Although these skills are undoubtedly important in helping students as they are learning to decode, it is actually the top of the pyramid, with the more complex phonemic skills, that is often left out of classroom instruction, where we need to pay the most attention, particularly as students move beyond the primary classroom. Kilpatrick (2015) tells us that research suggests that "phonological manipulation tasks are the best measures of the phonological awareness, skills needed for reading because they are the best predictors of word-level reading proficiency" (page 155) because phoneme manipulation (adding, deleting, and substituting) is actually the layer of phonemic awareness that is the most closely related to reading connected text (Kilpatrick, 2015).

Phoneme substitution is the critical breakthrough skill a child needs to teach themselves how to read new words. As illustrated in the images above, if a student encounters a new unfamiliar word, like moth, they can use their knowledge of a word that they already know (like math) to teach themselves how to read this novel word. Remember that manipulation activities require students to hold phonemes in their working memory long enough to isolate specific phonemes, add, delete, or change specific phonemes, and then blend the phonemes back together to form a new word. Kilpatrick (2015) states that "training in phonemic manipulation has substantial long-term impact on reading."

Fun Strategies to Use
Sneak some advanced phoneme manipulation practice into the school day!

"Reading problems can be prevented if all students are trained in letter-sound skills and phonological awareness, starting in kindergarten."

- Kilpatrick (2016)

When I first learned about phoneme manipulation, I thought there is no way that my kindergarten students will be able to do that this year. I was AMAZED at how quickly my students caught on and they had so much fun doing it. They're more prepared for 1st grade than any other class I've ever promoted, and I have DIBELS data to prove it!

-Jenna K, Teacher, New York

Download our complimentary Teacher Resources
Phonological Awareness Survey.

This survey enables one-on-one assessment of phonological and phonemic awareness skills that are essential underpinnings of accurate and automatic decoding.

Discover Reading at the Word Level

Click here to link to a word chaining activity we call Word Math>> Add word chaining activities to your day and help students practice their advanced phonemic awareness skills. Use deletion, addition and substitution to chain these words:
strap → trap → rap → rash → ash → lash → latch → batch → botch → blotch
This activity can be done as a pure phonemic awareness exercise without showing students any letters. However, in our illustrate that these advanced phoneme manipulation skills can also be used with word chaining activity we letter tiles to help students encode and decode complex single-syllable words with digraphs, 2-sound blends, and 3-sound blends.

We Love Educator Feedback & Questions
Contact us anytime. Our mission is to provide educators with the most efficient and effective tools for teaching phonemic awareness, phonics concepts, word attack skills, accurate reading and fluency. Student outcomes are our number one goal. No one knows their students better than educators. Therefore your thoughts, strategies, student successes and feedback are held in high esteem!

References

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Six Layers of Phonemic Awareness - Really Great Reading Blog

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Subscribe to our Blog To access a fun activity, word list, & phonological awareness survey, don't miss our Teacher Tips, Fun Facts, Check It Out!, and Word of the Week at the end of the blog! What Is Phonemic Awareness? Phonemic Awareness is the awareness of and ability to manipulate the individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words (Kilpatrick, 2015).

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Shows where phonemic awareness falls under phonological awareness

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Screening, Diagnosing, and Progress Monitoring for Fluency: The Details ~Jan Hasbrouck

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Screening, Diagnosing, and Progress Monitoring for Fluency: The Details ~Jan Hasbrouck

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Screening, diagnosing, and progress monitoring are essential to making sure that all students become fluent readers - and the words-correct per-minute (WCPM) procedure can work for all three. The only aspect of the procedure that has to change is the difficulty level of the text.

For screening, passages are selected from text at the student's grade level. For diagnosing, passages are selected at the student's instructional level (which may be lower than her grade level). In this context, instructional level text is challenging but manageable, with the reader making errors on no more than one in 10 words (i.e., the reader is successful with 90 percent of the text) (Partnership for Reading, 2001). For progress monitoring, passages are selected at a student's individually determined goal level. For example, if an 8th-grade student's instructional level is at the 5th-grade level, the teacher may conduct the progress monitoring assessments using passages at the 6th-grade level.

Screening

Because empirical research clearly indicates the urgent need to provide high quality, intensive instructional interventions to students at risk of reading difficulty as soon as possible (Snow, Burns, and Griffin, 1998), schools should administer screening measures to every student through the 5th grade.

First-graders should be screened in the winter and the spring; second- through fifth-graders should be screened in the fall, winter, and spring. To determine if students are at the expected levels in their reading fluency, my colleague Gerald Tindal and I (2006) suggest comparing students' WCPM scores to the 50th percentile score on the norms table (below), given the students' grade placement and the approximate time of year in which the assessment was conducted.

A score falling more than 10 words below the 50th percentile should raise a concern; the student may need additional assistance, and further assessments may be needed to diagnose the source of the below-average performance. Depending on the age of the student and any concerns about reading performance noted by the teacher or parents, such additional testing might include assessments of oral language development, phonemic awareness, phonics and decoding, and/or comprehension.

Diagnosing

If a student scores poorly on a fluency screening, or if the teacher has some other cause for concern such as poor performance in class or on another assessment, the teacher should take a more careful look at the student's strengths and needs. The student could be deficient in a variety of reading skills or in related areas like vocabulary and background knowledge, so administering some informal diagnostic assessments would be helpful for designing effective instruction, providing evidence of the need for a reading specialist, or referring the student for further evaluation.

Typically, if a student's fluency level is low, but word reading accuracy in grade-level texts is adequate, a teacher can place the student in an intervention focused just on improving fluency. But if diagnostic assessments indicate other areas of weakness, a more comprehensive intervention may need to be developed. ( See example below)

Monitoring student progress

If a student's diagnostic assessment reveals concerns about one or more areas of reading, additional, targeted instruction should begin right away. WCPM procedures can be used to monitor the student's progress. Many educators have found WCPM to be a better tool for monitoring students' progress than traditional standardized measures that typically are time-consuming, expensive, only administered infrequently, and of limited instructional utility (Good, Simmons, and Kame'enui, 2001; Tindal and Marston, 1990).

For students reading six to 12 months below grade level, progress monitoring should be done frequently, perhaps once or twice monthly for as long as students require supplemental instruction. Progress monitoring should be done as often as once per week for students who are reading more than one year below level and receiving intensive intervention services, including special education. This regular monitoring assures that if the intervention is not working well, it can be modified.

When monitoring the progress of these struggling readers, the standard procedures are expanded by graphing the student's WCPM scores. A progress monitoring graph, for perhaps a grading period or a trimester, is created for each student. Teachers can use the average weekly improvement (AWI) data in the norms table to select an ambitious, yet reasonable, instructional goal; for example, a fourth-grader's goal could be to improve by 15 WCPM over 10 weeks of intensive instruction. An aim line is placed on the graph to represent the progress a student must make to achieve a preset fluency goal. Each time the student is assessed, that score is added to the graph. If three or more consecutive scores fall below the aim line, the teacher must consider adjusting the instructional program (Hasbrouck et al., 1999).

Teachers should also consider having the students record their own WCPM scores on their graphs - it increases their motivation and investment in their reading progress (Shinn, 1998).

These procedures for screening, diagnosing, and progress monitoring have been available for many years, but have not been widely used in schools (Hasbrouck, et al., 1999). This situation will likely change as educators become more aware of the importance of preventing reading difficulties and providing intensive intervention as soon as a concern is noted.

Using fluency norms to set appropriate goals for student improvement and to measure progress toward those goals can be a powerful and efficient tool to help educators make well-informed and timely decisions about the instructional needs of their students, particularly the lowest performing, struggling readers.

Examples of a diagnosis

Andrew (a pseudonym), is an eighth-grader who recently moved to a different town where he entered a new school in March. It soon became evident to his teachers that Andrew was having difficulty with his academic work.

At a weekly meeting during which teachers discuss any concerns about their students, several teachers brought samples of Andrew's work to share. The teachers agreed that the school's reading specialist should determine if reading problems were contributing to Andrew's struggle with his assignments in several classes.

The reading specialist conducted an IRI (informal reading inventory) and planned to follow up with additional assessments if Andrew's performance on the IRI indicated possible deficits in phonemic awareness, phonics and decoding, vocabulary, and/or comprehension. The specialist built a fluency assessment into the initial IRI by using a stopwatch to determine how many words Andrew could read in the first 60 seconds of each IRI passage.

The reading specialist began the IRI using a sixth-grade passage, two years below Andrew's grade. The passage was at a frustration level for him: He had difficulty with decoding, phrasing, and expression, and was only able to correctly answer four of the eight comprehension questions. Because the passage was at Andrew's frustration level, the WCPM score was not calculated. The specialist then repeated the assessment using a fifth-grade passage; Andrew was able to read it with 94 percent accuracy and correctly answer six of the eight comprehension questions.

The specialist calculated Andrew's WCPM score for this passage and compared his score, 131 WCPM, to the norms for fifth-graders in the spring (Hasbrouck and Tindal, 2006). The 50th percentile in the spring of fifth grade is 139 WCPM. Because Andrew's score fell less than 10 words below it, his fluency is within the expected range for fifthgrade readers in the spring.

The reading specialist's conclusion was that Andrew appears to be reading approximately three years below grade level, but that his fluency skill level appears to be appropriate for his overall reading level. Before designing Andrew's reading program, the specialist plans to administer a diagnosticassessment focused on phonics and decoding, and a more comprehensive assessment of vocabulary and comprehension.

She suspects there may be some underlying weaknesses in Andrew's decoding skills contributing to his delay in overall reading development. His intervention will likely include fluency instruction and practice to keep him on track, and may also include decoding and comprehension instruction, depending on the results of the other diagnostic assessments.

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Screening, Diagnosing, and Progress Monitoring for Fluency: The Details

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Screening, diagnosing, and progress monitoring are essential to making sure that all students become fluent readers - and the words-correct per-minute (WCPM) procedure can work for all three. Here's how teachers can use it to make well-informed and timely decisions about the instructional needs of their students.

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These K-6 passages come from the National Geographic Panorama reading program.

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Fluency Norms Chart ~Jan Hasbrouck & Gerald Tindal

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Fluency Norms Chart ~Jan Hasbrouck & Gerald Tindal

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View the results of the updated 2017 study on oral reading fluency (ORF) by Jan Hasbrouck and Gerald Tindal, with compiled ORF norms for grades 1-6. You'll also find an analysis of how the 2017 norms differ from the 2006 norms.

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Phonological and Phonemic Awareness

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Learn the definitions of phonological awareness and phonemic awareness - and how these pre-reading listening skills relate to phonics.

Letter of completion

After completing this module and successfully answering the post-test questions, you'll be able to download a Letter of Completion.

Phonological awareness and phonemic awareness: what's the difference?

Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate the spoken parts of sentences and words. Examples include being able to identify words that rhyme, recognizing alliteration, segmenting a sentence into words, identifying the syllables in a word, and blending and segmenting onset-rimes. The most sophisticated - and last to develop - is called phonemic awareness.

Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. This includes blending sounds into words, segmenting words into sounds, and deleting and playing with the sounds in spoken words.

Phonological awareness (PA) involves a continuum of skills that develop over time and that are crucial for reading and spelling success, because they are central to learning to decode and spell printed words. Phonological awareness is especially important at the earliest stages of reading development - in pre-school, kindergarten, and first grade for typical readers.

Explicit teaching of phonological awareness in these early years can eliminate future reading problems for many students. However, struggling decoders of any age can work on phonological awareness, especially if they evidence problems in blending or segmenting phonemes.

How about phonological awareness and phonics?

Phonological awareness refers to a global awareness of sounds in spoken words, as well as the ability to manipulate those sounds.

Phonics refers to knowledge of letter sounds and the ability to apply that knowledge in decoding unfamiliar printed words.

So, phonological awareness refers to oral language and phonics refers to print. Both of these skills are very important and tend to interact in reading development, but they are distinct skills; children can have weaknesses in one of them but not the other.

For example, a child who knows letter sounds but cannot blend the sounds to form the whole word has a phonological awareness (specifically, a phonemic awareness) problem. Conversely, a child who can orally blend sounds with ease but mixes up vowel letter sounds, reading pit for pet and set for sit, has a phonics problem.

44 phonemes

There are 26 letters in the English alphabet that make up 44 speech sounds, or phonemes.

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Learn the definitions of phonological awareness and phonemic awareness - and how these pre-reading listening skills relate to phonics. Letter of completion After completing this module and successfully answering the post-test questions, you'll be able to download a Letter of Completion. Phonological awareness and phonemic awareness: what's the difference?

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SOR: Evidence for a New Era of Reading Instruction ~Laura Stewart

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SOR: Evidence for a New Era of Reading Instruction ~Laura Stewart

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The Simple View of Reading ~Linda Farrell

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The Simple View of Reading ~Linda Farrell

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The Literacy How Professional Learning Series: Phonemic Awareness & Phonics

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The Literacy How Professional Learning Series: Phonemic Awareness & Phonics

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This hour-long video will help you to review phonemic awareness & phonics before you take the 090 assessment.

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The Literacy How Professional Learning Series:  Phonemic Awareness & Phonics

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5 Big Ideas of Literacy: Phonemic Awareness

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5 Big Ideas of Literacy: Phonemic Awareness

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5 Big Ideas of Literacy: Phonemic Awareness

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Animated Reading Rope ~Dr. Hollis Scarborough

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Animated Reading Rope ~Dr. Hollis Scarborough

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By popular demand, AIM is pleased to introduce its first Specialized Reading Knowledge course, created in collaboration with researcher Dr. Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan, to help educators develop the specialized knowledge required to accelerate language and literacy proficiency for English learners (ELs).
Specialized Reading Knowledge Bundle: English Learners

Three asynchronous learning modules (10 hours)

Three synchronous Virtual Community of Practice sessions led by an expert AIM facilitator (3 hours)

Online instruction, including exclusive content recorded by Dr. Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan,on language and literacy development, word recognition and language comprehension for English learners.

A wealth of assessment resources, implementation tools, and printables to support immediate use in the classroom.

Winter cohort begins December 18! (Click here for Pacing Guide)

Cost: $320

Enroll Today Please note that comprehensive structured literacy training (such as Pathways to Proficient Reading) is strongly recommended before enrolling in this specialized learning opportunity. Interested in providing training to a team of teachers in your school or district?
Connect with the AIM team to learn how you can integrate Specialized Reading Knowledge Bundle: English Learners into your school's professional literacy learning.

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The Animated Reading Rope - AIM Pathways

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The Animated Reading Rope is one of hundreds of learning tools for educators in the AIM Pathways digital training platform.

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Simple View of Reading ~ Reading Rockets

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Simple View of Reading ~ Reading Rockets

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Aouad, J. and Savage, R. (2009). The component structure of preliteracy skills: Further evidence for the simple view of reading. Canadian Journal of School Psychology, 24 (2), 183-200.

Catts, H., Adlof, S., and Weismer, S. (2006). Language deficits in poor comprehenders: A case for the simple view of reading. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 49, 278-293.

Gough, P., Hoover, W., and Patterson, C. (1996). Some observations on a simple view of reading. In C. Cornoldi and J. Oakhill (eds.), Reading comprehension difficulties: Processes and intervention (pp. 1-13). Mahway, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

*Gough, P. and Tunmer, W. (1986). Decoding, reading, and reading disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7, 6-10.

Hoover, W. and Gough, P. (1990). The simple view of reading. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2, 127-160.

*Kamhi, A. (2007). Knowledge deficits: the true crisis in education. ASHA Leader, 12 (7), 28-29.

*These articles are short and easy to read.

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The Simple View of Reading is a formula demonstrating the widely accepted view that reading has two basic components: word recognition (decoding) and language comprehension. Research studies show that a student's reading comprehension score can be predicted if decoding skills and language comprehension abilities are known.

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As educators, we are always learning and growing in order to improve reading instruction. It can be challenging to sift through the many resources available, so we have created a list for you. The following includes a list of 30 resources for educators who wish to further their knowledge about the Science of Reading.

5 "Must See" Resources to Get Started
1. EAB Report: Narrowing the 3rd Grade Reading Gap (10 minute read)
A research brief for educators embracing the science of reading from the EAB District Leadership Forum. This is an accessible read for educators who want to learn more and implement classroom instruction that is aligned to the science of reading.

2. Of 'Hard Words' and Straw Men: Let's Understand What Reading Science is Really About by Louisa Moats (5 minute read)

An article about what the Science of Reading really entails and how important it is to really have an understanding of the components of foundational literacy instruction in order to implement them effectively into the classroom.

3. Hard Words: Why Aren't Kids Being Taught to Read? (45 minute listen)
Emily Hanford, educational journalist has researched reading instruction across the US. Her findings sparked conversations about The Science of Reading and how we can improve reading proficiency in the US. 4. Videos: Is My Kid Learning to Read? (Part 1 and Part 2; 26 minutes) How many students are being taught to read in the classroom can be eye-opening for parents. Watch this two-part video series to learn more about how students may be learning to read and how to best support them as they continue to learn to read. 5. Reading Rockets website
Okay, we kind of cheated with #5, but if you read nothing else on Reading Rockets, be sure to check out their articles on Phonological and Phonemic Awareness and Why Phonological Awareness is Important for Reading and Spelling .

Infographics

6. The Ladder of Reading by Nancy Young

7. Scarborough's Reading Rope

"The genesis of the Reading Rope dates back to Scarborough's lectures for parents on the complexities involved in learning to read. Originally, she spoke of skilled reading as resembling the 'strands' of a rope, using pipe cleaners to illustrate the interconnectedness and interdependence of all the components."

8. How Our Brains Learn to Read

Our brains are naturally set up to learn to speak, but learning to read does not happen on its own. Scientists have found that we must develop certain parts of our brains and build connections between brain areas that were not connected before. The picture (below) shows four different areas of our brains that we use when we read.

Podcasts

9. Educate by APM Reports

Stories about education, opportunity, and how people learn. Emily Hanford podcasts are recommended and two favorites are listed below:

At a Loss for Words (52 minutes; published Aug. 22, 2019)

National Assessment Shows More K-12 Students Struggling to Read (25 minutes; published Nov. 1, 2019)

10. Glean Education: Research to Practice

Dive into current research, hot topics, and success stories with our two podcast series for educators.

Why Phonological Awareness is Important to Reading? (23 minutes; published Jan. 3, 2019)

How to Make Sight Word Instruction and Reading Intervention More Effective ( 50 minutes published Oct. 1, 2020)

11. Science of Reading: The Podcast by Amplify Education

The latest insights from researchers and practitioners in early reading. Each episode takes a conversational approach and explores a timely topic related to the science of reading.

12. Teaching, Reading & Learning: The Podcast by The Reading League

Listen to speakers who have made important contributions to the educational community as they discuss reading and writing, but connect to other "literacies" that impact children's learning .

Websites, Blogs & Webinars

13. The Reading League

The Reading League is a non-profit organization focused on the mission to advance awareness, understanding, and use of evidence-based reading instruction.

14. Right to Read Project

A group of teachers, researchers, and activists committed to the pursuit of equity through literacy.

15. Louisa Moats

A website from Literacy Expert, Louisa Moats, includes webinars, blogs, and articles for educators committed to best practices in literacy instruction.

16. The Literacy Nest

Emily Gibbons, certified dyslexia practitioner and creator of The Literacy Nest shares resources for instruction for struggling readers.

17. CORE Learn

The Consortium on Reaching Excellence is Education (CORE) provides many excellent resources and free professional learning opportunities.

18. The Learning Spark

A kindergarten teacher who shares her experience along with many resources in the areas of literacy.

19. Education Week

A website sharing in-depth information and research serving K-12 education.

Articles & Research

20. Developing Early Literacy: Report of the National Early Literacy Panel (2008)

21. Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read (2000)

22. Learning to Read: Center for Early Reading (

23. Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science: What Expert Teachers of Reading Should Know and Be Able to Do, 2020 by Louisa Moats, published by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)

Teacher Resources

24. Florida Center for Reading Research: FCRR

25. University of Florida Literacy Institute: UFLI

26. The Simple View of Reading

Professional Books

27. Speech to Print by Louisa Moats (2014)

28. Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties by David Kilpatrick (2015)

29. Phonics from A to Z by Wiley Blevins (2017)

30. Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print by Marilyn Adams (1994)

Did we miss a resource? Please leave a comment and let us know!

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As educators, we are always learning and growing in order to improve reading instruction. It can be challenging to sift through the many resources available, so we have created a list for you. The following includes a list of 30 resources for educators who wish to further their knowledge about the Science of Reading.

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The Four Part Processing System of the Brain

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The Four Part Processing System of the Brain

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Florida Center For Reading Research: Student Activities for Intervention

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Florida Center For Reading Research: Student Activities for Intervention

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From 2004 to 2010, a team of researchers and teachers at FCRR collected ideas and created Student Center Activities for use in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade classrooms. The activities are designed for students to practice, demonstrate, and extend their learning of what has already been taught, sometimes with teacher assistance and sometimes independently. Students can complete the activities in small groups, pairs, or individually.

Accompanying these Student Center Activities is a Teacher Resource Guide that offers important insights on differentiated instruction and how to use the Student Center materials.

Component

Name of the reading component: Phonological Awareness (PA), Phonics (P), Fluency (F), Vocabulary (V), or Comprehension (C). Each component is color coded: PA is purple, P is orange, F is red, V is green, C is blue.

Subcomponent

Name of the reading subcomponent, which is a subskill of the component.

Activity Name

Activity Number

The letters correspond with the reading component (PA, P, F, V, or C). The numbers are listed in ascending order within each component. The activities are sequenced from simple to more complex within each component and subcomponent.

Student Icon

The suggested number of students for the activity. One student icon indicates that students may work independently or with a small group. Two student icons indicate that the activity requires students to work in pairs. Two student icons with a plus sign indicate that the activity requires two or more students.

Objective

States the goal of the activity, which is aligned with the subcomponent.

Materials

Materials are located on the pages that follow the Activity Plan. Most materials are non-consumable to be prepared and used repeatedly (e.g., word cards can be laminated). Some materials are consumable and will need to be duplicated for each student doing the activity. Other materials, such as counters, are commonly found in most classrooms.

Activity Statement

One sentence explanation of the purpose of the activity and what students do to complete the activity.

Activity Steps

The first step describes how to setup the center. The second step begins with: The student, Students, Working in pairs, or Taking turns depending on the number of students needed to complete the activity. The second step also starts the series of steps to complete the activity. The next steps explain what the student does to complete the activity. The last step lists one of three accountability methods: Self-check, Peer evaluation, or Teacher evaluation.

Example

A visual of the activity and key materials.

Extensions and Adaptations

Suggestions that extend or provide an adaptation for additional practice on the skill addressed in the activity. Materials for the extensions and adaptations are included after the pages that align to the Activity Plan.

Users may use the FCRR Student Center Activities resources as long as modifications are not made, the resources will only be used for non-profit educational purposes, and the copyright belong jointly to the Florida Department of Education and the Florida Center for Reading Research. These resources may not be used for any commercial purposes. These resources on our site may be linked to but not reposted, reproduced, modified, or copied to other sites. For questions about the use of these resources, please contact The Florida Center for Reading Research at fcrr@fcrr.org.

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From 2004 to 2010, a team of researchers and teachers at FCRR collected ideas and created Student Center Activities for use in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade classrooms. The activities are designed for students to practice, demonstrate, and extend their learning of what has already been taught, sometimes with teacher assistance and sometimes independently.

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Really Great Reading Sight Word Magic: Making Tricky Words Sticky

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Really Great Reading Sight Word Magic: Making Tricky Words Sticky

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Heart Word Magic - Read and Spell High Frequency Words | Really Great Reading

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Heart Word Magic - Help Students Learn to Read and Spell High Frequency WordsHeart Word Magic is a complimentary teaching tool designed to help students learn to read and spell high-frequency words, particularly those that aren’t very decodable. Show your students the animations, then try these fun…

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Teaching Phonemic Awareness: Heggerty Phonemic Awareness

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Teaching Phonemic Awareness: Heggerty Phonemic Awareness

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Curriculum Tab

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Each level of the Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Curriculum provides up to 35 weeks of daily lessons, focusing on eight phonemic awareness skills, along with two additional activities to develop letter and sound recognition, and language awareness. Lessons are designed for a classroom setting, and only take 8-12 minutes.

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Heggerty Curriculum - Phonemic Awareness Programs | Heggerty

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See why 7,250+ school districts across the U.S. rely on Heggerty to provide a cost-effectivephonemic awareness component to their language awareness curriculum.

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Enhancing and Refining the Use of a Sound Wall ~Mary Dalgren

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Enhancing and Refining the Use of a Sound Wall ~Mary Dalgren

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Virtual Literacy Instruction for Students with Learning Disabilities

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Explicit instruction in core literacy skills (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension) combined with multisensory supports, are key to helping children with language-based learning disabilities thrive in a virtual learning environment. Try these ideas and online learning tools with your students.

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Explore these short yet informative videos for a brief introduction to a variety of literacy topics.

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PaTTAN Literacy Resource Hub - PaTTAN Literacy Snippets

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Explore these short yet informative videos for a brief introduction to a variety of literacy topics.

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Access to the General Education Curriculum for ALL Learners

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Access to the General Education Curriculum for ALL Learners

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Trunk Work: Strong Systems, Structures, and Supports

As a collective state-wide group of education professionals, we are all responsible when it comes to meeting the needs of diverse and complex learners. Integrating supports that represent ALL learners, across all levels of the state-system, is a daunting task. This means we will have to work collaboratively across licensure areas, offices, and other silos of practice to ensure that ALL learners receive the expertise we each individually bring to the field. As a collaborative group, we will need to rely on strong guidelines and processes to planfully connect supports and implement to improve learner outcomes. Some examples of these structures within our system include academic learning standards, the assess, plan, teach cycle - Ohio Improvement Process (OIP), Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS), Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports (PBIS), etc.

Some examples of content targeting this "trunk work" can be found in:

Chapter 2: Designing Rich Tier I Instruction and Assessment: Overview

Chapter 2: Sorting and Clustering Standards for Instruction: Integrated Units

Chapter 4: Language and Communication Access: ALL In!

Chapter 10: Curriculum Screening, Audit, Selection, and Deselection

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FreeReading is an open-source instructional program that helps educators teach early literacy. FreeReading contains a 40-week scope and sequence that can supplement an early literacy core or basal program.

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Phonological and Phonemic Awareness: In Practice

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Phonological and Phonemic Awareness: In Practice

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Explicit Instruction in Comprehension (9:33)

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Explicit Instruction in Comprehension (9:33)

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Ohio Department of Education and Workforce Server

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Explicit Intervention in Decoding (6:30)

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Explicit Intervention in Decoding (6:30)

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Ohio Department of Education and Workforce Server

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Explicit Intervention in Phonemic Awareness (4:58)

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Explicit Intervention in Phonemic Awareness (4:58)

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Ohio Department of Education and Workforce Server

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Explicit Intervention in Phonemic Awareness

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Explicit Intervention in Sight Word Recognition (8:07)

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Explicit Intervention in Sight Word Recognition (8:07)

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Ohio Department of Education and Workforce Server

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Explicit Intervention in Sight Word Recognition

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Small Group Scaffolding of Complex Texts (5:44)

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Small Group Scaffolding of Complex Texts (5:44)

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Small Group Scaffolding of Complex Texts

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Explicit Intervention in Vocabulary (6:49)

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Explicit Intervention in Vocabulary (6:49)

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Ohio Department of Education and Workforce Server

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Ohio Department of Education and Workforce Server

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What is the difference between phonemic awareness and phonics?

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In 2000, the National Reading Panel (NRP) identified 5 components of effective literacy instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. In addition to naming these five components, the NRP also concluded that phonemic awareness and phonics instruction needed to be increased in primary grades. While both phonemic awareness and phonics were named separately, these two terms are often confused or used interchangeably. Both components are absolutely essential for reading, but it is important to understand that they are not the same thing.

What is Phonemic Awareness?

Phonemic Awareness is the understanding that spoken words are made up of individual sounds, called phonemes. Phonemic awareness is oral and auditory, and the focus is on the sounds in words. Phonemic awareness is often confused with phonics, however, unlike phonics, phonemic awareness does not involve print or letter names. It is critical to understand the difference between the two, as reading is phonologically based, not visual as we often think it is.

Phonemic awareness instruction provides children with the understanding that the words they hear in oral language are not whole units but are co-articulated sounds that make up a word. Once children have this understanding, we can have them isolate, blend, segment and manipulate those sounds. These phonemic awareness skills are necessary to becoming a proficient, fluent reader.

The basic phonemic awareness skill of blending directly correlates to phonic decoding or sounding out a word. When we blend, we take the parts (sounds) and blend them together to make a whole word. For example, the sounds /s/ /u/ /n/ blended together make the word sun.

Segmenting is also a basic phonemic awareness skill. Segmenting mirrors blending and directly correlates to encoding or spelling. When we segment, we take the whole word and break it into parts. If I segment the word plan into all of the phonemes I hear, /p/ /l/ /a/ /n/, I will be able to spell that word once I have letter-sound knowledge (phonics).

Why is Phonemic Awareness Important?

In the past, many parents and educators have thought that teaching blending and segmenting was adequate phonemic awareness instruction. However, research shows that instruction in phoneme manipulation plays a critical role in creating proficient and fluent readers. As Louisa Moats states in her podcast Of Hard Words and Straw Men, "Perhaps the most critical and least-practiced component of effective early instruction is phoneme awareness. Awareness of the sounds that make up spoken words, facility at manipulating those sounds, and the links between speech and print must be mastered for students to be fluent readers and accurate spellers of an alphabetic writing system like ours."

Phoneme manipulation includes adding, deleting and substituting sounds in words. When engaging in these phonemic awareness activities, students learn they can make more words by manipulating individual sounds. For example, I can add /m/ at the beginning of at to make the word mat. I can also delete phonemes to make new words - the word play without /l/ is pay. I could also substitute a sound to make a new word. In the same word play I can change the /l/ to a /r/ and the new word is pray/prey. If students are able to manipulate phonemes orally, they will be able to transfer these skills to reading and writing during phonics instruction.

Importance of Phonemic Awareness in Spelling

Once students are engaged in phonics instruction, we can see the evidence of phonemic awareness skills in their reading and spelling. Educators and parents can observe students blending sounds together to read words or turning unknown words into automatic sight words by quickly manipulating phonemes (e.g. may, day, say, pay, lay) to read the words.

When students write, we can look at their spelling and see the sounds they are hearing in words. Oftentimes, our younger readers and writers hear the first and last sounds in words before the medial sounds - they might spell the word cat as ct. Analyzing writing and spelling helps us guide our instruction on which phonemic awareness skills students still need instruction in.

While phonemic awareness instruction transfers to reading and writing, we do not need to wait to teach it. Students can engage in phonemic awareness lessons before they know their letters and sounds. I can ask students to tell me the first sound they hear in the word man /m/, even if they do not yet know that M is the letter that makes the sound /m/.

The Importance of Phonemic Awareness in Spelling

Once students are engaged in phonics instruction, we can see the evidence of phonemic awareness skills in their reading and spelling. Educators and parents can observe students blending sounds together to read words or turning unknown words into automatic sight words by quickly manipulating phonemes (e.g. may, day, say, pay, lay) to read the words.

When students write, we can look at their spelling and see the sounds they are hearing in words. Oftentimes, our younger readers and writers hear the first and last sounds in words before the medial sounds - they might spell the word cat as ct. Analyzing writing and spelling helps us guide our instruction on which phonemic awareness skills students still need instruction in.

While phonemic awareness instruction transfers to reading and writing, we do not need to wait to teach it. Students can engage in phonemic awareness lessons before they know their letters and sounds. I can ask students to tell me the first sound they hear in the word man /m/, even if they do not yet know that M is the letter that makes the sound /m/.

What is Phonics?

While phonemic awareness is oral and auditory, phonics instruction is both visual and auditory. The focus of phonics instruction is letter-sound relationships. During explicit phonics instruction students are taught the letter or letter combinations that represent the 44 sounds or phonemes in the English language.

As students match letters or letter combinations to the sounds they hear in words, they apply the phonemic awareness skills of blending, segmenting, and manipulating phonemes with the print that represents each sound. In this way, phonemic awareness is connected to phonics. When students know the sounds the letters they see in print make, they are able to blend or manipulate those sounds to read words. When spelling, students hear the whole word, segment the word into sounds and match the letter or letter combinations to the sound it makes.

Critics of explicit phonics instruction believe that the English language is too unpredictable, and students should learn to use context or visual cues to "read" words rather than sounding them out. While it is true that English is not always predictable, it is still an alphabetic language with many consistencies. In fact, 84% of English words are phonetically regular. Additionally, many of the irregular words are only often irregular by one phoneme only.

For example, in the word the, the initial sound /th/ is phonetically correct, and the letter e saying /u/ is not. Compare this to using context clues, in which only 25% of words can be predicted through context (Gough, Alford, & Holley-Wilcox). Many of those words are function words like the and an. As readers move on to more content-focused texts, only 10% of words can be predicted by context (Gough, et al., 1983).

Why Should We Teach Both?

To understand the importance of phonemic awareness and phonics, we must first understand that reading is not natural. We do not learn to read the same way we learn to speak. In fact, reading is relatively new when we compare the amount of time humans have been communicating orally to when reading first came on the scene. As Barbara Foorman so clearly states, "Humans are biologically specialized to produce language and have done so for nearly 1 million years. Such is not the case with reading and writing. If it were, there would not be illiterate children in the world."

It is essential to explicitly teach students how sounds in words work (phonemic awareness) and how those sounds connect to the letters they see in print (phonics). Phonemic Awareness instruction does not replace phonics instruction, but rather, both skills are necessary when teaching students to decode words accurately and automatically. As Wiley Blevins explains, "Phonemic awareness training provides the foundation on which phonics instruction is built. Thus, children need solid phonemic awareness training for phonics instruction to be effective."

According to the research brief completed by the EAB, reading instruction in kindergarten through third grade should have a greater focus on word decoding until students become fluent readers. Much work has been done around Linnea Ehri's phases of word reading to help us understand how phonemic awareness progresses into phonics, phonic decoding and eventually fluent and automatic reading.

In the partial alphabetic phase of reading, children begin to understand that words are made up of individual sounds and learn the letters that represent those sounds. As they move beyond the partial alphabetic stage, and into the full alphabetic stage children begin using the skills of blending and segmenting to decode and encode words.

The Literacy Gap

It has often been thought that if children could blend and segment they would be proficient readers. However, blending and segmenting are only enough to get children to the full and consolidated alphabetic phases, not the automatic phase of reading. This is the cause of the lack of proficient readers our nation produces. In 2019, NAEP scores revealed that only 35% of 4th graders and 34% of 8th were considered to be proficient readers. Many of our students are left at the basic or below basic level of reading. There are two main contributors to the struggle to create proficient readers:

1. Students are not explicitly taught phonemic awareness and phonics. Instead, they think of words as visual and memorize them as whole units. They tend to guess at words using picture clues or the beginning sounds in a word. As we shift from "learning to read" to "reading to learn" in 3rd grade and beyond, these students do not have any strategies to read unknown words.

2. Students may have received explicit phonemic awareness and phonics instruction, but only to the basic levels of blending and segmenting. This allows students to sound out words, but does not give them the skills necessary to turn unknown words into automatic sight words. Sounding out words, or phonic decoding, does not allow students to focus on the content and comprehend what they are reading. Instead, they are laboring over the words they are reading and focusing on decoding.

All of Ehri's phases of reading are important to the development of a reader. However, we don't want students to get stuck in the full and consolidated alphabetic phases. We need to move beyond those stages and provide advanced phonemic awareness instruction with phoneme manipulation to allow students to reach the automatic phase. We can show students how the work we do through the air can transfer to print, allowing them to read and spell more words.

Bringing Phonemic Awareness and Phonics Instruction Together

While phonemic awareness and phonics are not the same thing, they do enjoy a reciprocal relationship. We do not need to wait for phonemic awareness to be fully developed before beginning phonics instruction. Instead, educators should help students understand the connection between phonemic awareness and phonics. When planning reading instruction, phonemic awareness only needs to be about 10-12 minutes of the literacy block for the primary grades. This instruction should include early, basic and advanced phonemic awareness skills.

Within the same literacy block, instruction should teach students how to apply the phonemic awareness skills to print, focusing on grapheme-phoneme correspondences. We can explicitly show students how blending sounds through the air connects to reading words as we blend the sounds the letters represent to read a word. We can model spelling words by segmenting whole words into individual sounds. Once we hear the sounds in words, we use our phonics knowledge to use the appropriate grapheme(s) to represent the sounds we hear.

For older students, phonemic awareness and phonics instruction can happen in tandem. We show students how we can manipulate phonemes in words by changing phonemes within print. Repeated practice allows students "to bond the spellings, pronunciations, and meanings of specific words in memory" (Ehri, 2014). These repeated exposures to grapheme-phoneme correspondences is necessary for orthographic mapping. Orthographic mapping uses sound-to-letter relationships to anchor phonemes in a word's pronunciation to the printed letter strings into long term memory for future retrieval.

It is important to note that phonemic awareness and phonics instruction needs to be systematic, explicit and consistent. A sprinkling of phonemic awareness and phonics instruction here and there will not provide the repetition and practice needed to become automatic decoders of print. These skills are also a means to an end and at no point the only literacy instruction necessary to create fluent and proficient readers. However, these skills are not optional, and they lay the foundation on which additional reading components are built.

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In 2000, the National Reading Panel (NRP) identified 5 components of effective literacy instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. In addition to naming these five components, the NRP also concluded that phonemic awareness and phonics instruction needed to be increased in primary grades. While both phonemic awareness and phonics were named separately, these...

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What is the difference between phonemic awareness and phonics?

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In 2000, the National Reading Panel (NRP) identified 5 components of effective literacy instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. In addition to naming these five components, the NRP also concluded that phonemic awareness and phonics instruction needed to be increased in primary grades. While both phonemic awareness and phonics were named separately, these two terms are often confused or used interchangeably. Both components are absolutely essential for reading, but it is important to understand that they are not the same thing.

What is Phonemic Awareness?

Phonemic Awareness is the understanding that spoken words are made up of individual sounds, called phonemes. Phonemic awareness is oral and auditory, and the focus is on the sounds in words. Phonemic awareness is often confused with phonics, however, unlike phonics, phonemic awareness does not involve print or letter names. It is critical to understand the difference between the two, as reading is phonologically based, not visual as we often think it is.

Phonemic awareness instruction provides children with the understanding that the words they hear in oral language are not whole units but are co-articulated sounds that make up a word. Once children have this understanding, we can have them isolate, blend, segment and manipulate those sounds. These phonemic awareness skills are necessary to becoming a proficient, fluent reader.

The basic phonemic awareness skill of blending directly correlates to phonic decoding or sounding out a word. When we blend, we take the parts (sounds) and blend them together to make a whole word. For example, the sounds /s/ /u/ /n/ blended together make the word sun.

Segmenting is also a basic phonemic awareness skill. Segmenting mirrors blending and directly correlates to encoding or spelling. When we segment, we take the whole word and break it into parts. If I segment the word plan into all of the phonemes I hear, /p/ /l/ /a/ /n/, I will be able to spell that word once I have letter-sound knowledge (phonics).

Why is Phonemic Awareness Important?

In the past, many parents and educators have thought that teaching blending and segmenting was adequate phonemic awareness instruction. However, research shows that instruction in phoneme manipulation plays a critical role in creating proficient and fluent readers. As Louisa Moats states in her podcast Of Hard Words and Straw Men, "Perhaps the most critical and least-practiced component of effective early instruction is phoneme awareness. Awareness of the sounds that make up spoken words, facility at manipulating those sounds, and the links between speech and print must be mastered for students to be fluent readers and accurate spellers of an alphabetic writing system like ours."

Phoneme manipulation includes adding, deleting and substituting sounds in words. When engaging in these phonemic awareness activities, students learn they can make more words by manipulating individual sounds. For example, I can add /m/ at the beginning of at to make the word mat. I can also delete phonemes to make new words - the word play without /l/ is pay. I could also substitute a sound to make a new word. In the same word play I can change the /l/ to a /r/ and the new word is pray/prey. If students are able to manipulate phonemes orally, they will be able to transfer these skills to reading and writing during phonics instruction.

Importance of Phonemic Awareness in Spelling

Once students are engaged in phonics instruction, we can see the evidence of phonemic awareness skills in their reading and spelling. Educators and parents can observe students blending sounds together to read words or turning unknown words into automatic sight words by quickly manipulating phonemes (e.g. may, day, say, pay, lay) to read the words.

When students write, we can look at their spelling and see the sounds they are hearing in words. Oftentimes, our younger readers and writers hear the first and last sounds in words before the medial sounds - they might spell the word cat as ct. Analyzing writing and spelling helps us guide our instruction on which phonemic awareness skills students still need instruction in.

While phonemic awareness instruction transfers to reading and writing, we do not need to wait to teach it. Students can engage in phonemic awareness lessons before they know their letters and sounds. I can ask students to tell me the first sound they hear in the word man /m/, even if they do not yet know that M is the letter that makes the sound /m/.

The Importance of Phonemic Awareness in Spelling

Once students are engaged in phonics instruction, we can see the evidence of phonemic awareness skills in their reading and spelling. Educators and parents can observe students blending sounds together to read words or turning unknown words into automatic sight words by quickly manipulating phonemes (e.g. may, day, say, pay, lay) to read the words.

When students write, we can look at their spelling and see the sounds they are hearing in words. Oftentimes, our younger readers and writers hear the first and last sounds in words before the medial sounds - they might spell the word cat as ct. Analyzing writing and spelling helps us guide our instruction on which phonemic awareness skills students still need instruction in.

While phonemic awareness instruction transfers to reading and writing, we do not need to wait to teach it. Students can engage in phonemic awareness lessons before they know their letters and sounds. I can ask students to tell me the first sound they hear in the word man /m/, even if they do not yet know that M is the letter that makes the sound /m/.

What is Phonics?

While phonemic awareness is oral and auditory, phonics instruction is both visual and auditory. The focus of phonics instruction is letter-sound relationships. During explicit phonics instruction students are taught the letter or letter combinations that represent the 44 sounds or phonemes in the English language.

As students match letters or letter combinations to the sounds they hear in words, they apply the phonemic awareness skills of blending, segmenting, and manipulating phonemes with the print that represents each sound. In this way, phonemic awareness is connected to phonics. When students know the sounds the letters they see in print make, they are able to blend or manipulate those sounds to read words. When spelling, students hear the whole word, segment the word into sounds and match the letter or letter combinations to the sound it makes.

Critics of explicit phonics instruction believe that the English language is too unpredictable, and students should learn to use context or visual cues to "read" words rather than sounding them out. While it is true that English is not always predictable, it is still an alphabetic language with many consistencies. In fact, 84% of English words are phonetically regular. Additionally, many of the irregular words are only often irregular by one phoneme only.

For example, in the word the, the initial sound /th/ is phonetically correct, and the letter e saying /u/ is not. Compare this to using context clues, in which only 25% of words can be predicted through context (Gough, Alford, & Holley-Wilcox). Many of those words are function words like the and an. As readers move on to more content-focused texts, only 10% of words can be predicted by context (Gough, et al., 1983).

Why Should We Teach Both?

To understand the importance of phonemic awareness and phonics, we must first understand that reading is not natural. We do not learn to read the same way we learn to speak. In fact, reading is relatively new when we compare the amount of time humans have been communicating orally to when reading first came on the scene. As Barbara Foorman so clearly states, "Humans are biologically specialized to produce language and have done so for nearly 1 million years. Such is not the case with reading and writing. If it were, there would not be illiterate children in the world."

It is essential to explicitly teach students how sounds in words work (phonemic awareness) and how those sounds connect to the letters they see in print (phonics). Phonemic Awareness instruction does not replace phonics instruction, but rather, both skills are necessary when teaching students to decode words accurately and automatically. As Wiley Blevins explains, "Phonemic awareness training provides the foundation on which phonics instruction is built. Thus, children need solid phonemic awareness training for phonics instruction to be effective."

According to the research brief completed by the EAB, reading instruction in kindergarten through third grade should have a greater focus on word decoding until students become fluent readers. Much work has been done around Linnea Ehri's phases of word reading to help us understand how phonemic awareness progresses into phonics, phonic decoding and eventually fluent and automatic reading.

In the partial alphabetic phase of reading, children begin to understand that words are made up of individual sounds and learn the letters that represent those sounds. As they move beyond the partial alphabetic stage, and into the full alphabetic stage children begin using the skills of blending and segmenting to decode and encode words.

The Literacy Gap

It has often been thought that if children could blend and segment they would be proficient readers. However, blending and segmenting are only enough to get children to the full and consolidated alphabetic phases, not the automatic phase of reading. This is the cause of the lack of proficient readers our nation produces. In 2019, NAEP scores revealed that only 35% of 4th graders and 34% of 8th were considered to be proficient readers. Many of our students are left at the basic or below basic level of reading. There are two main contributors to the struggle to create proficient readers:

1. Students are not explicitly taught phonemic awareness and phonics. Instead, they think of words as visual and memorize them as whole units. They tend to guess at words using picture clues or the beginning sounds in a word. As we shift from "learning to read" to "reading to learn" in 3rd grade and beyond, these students do not have any strategies to read unknown words.

2. Students may have received explicit phonemic awareness and phonics instruction, but only to the basic levels of blending and segmenting. This allows students to sound out words, but does not give them the skills necessary to turn unknown words into automatic sight words. Sounding out words, or phonic decoding, does not allow students to focus on the content and comprehend what they are reading. Instead, they are laboring over the words they are reading and focusing on decoding.

All of Ehri's phases of reading are important to the development of a reader. However, we don't want students to get stuck in the full and consolidated alphabetic phases. We need to move beyond those stages and provide advanced phonemic awareness instruction with phoneme manipulation to allow students to reach the automatic phase. We can show students how the work we do through the air can transfer to print, allowing them to read and spell more words.

Bringing Phonemic Awareness and Phonics Instruction Together

While phonemic awareness and phonics are not the same thing, they do enjoy a reciprocal relationship. We do not need to wait for phonemic awareness to be fully developed before beginning phonics instruction. Instead, educators should help students understand the connection between phonemic awareness and phonics. When planning reading instruction, phonemic awareness only needs to be about 10-12 minutes of the literacy block for the primary grades. This instruction should include early, basic and advanced phonemic awareness skills.

Within the same literacy block, instruction should teach students how to apply the phonemic awareness skills to print, focusing on grapheme-phoneme correspondences. We can explicitly show students how blending sounds through the air connects to reading words as we blend the sounds the letters represent to read a word. We can model spelling words by segmenting whole words into individual sounds. Once we hear the sounds in words, we use our phonics knowledge to use the appropriate grapheme(s) to represent the sounds we hear.

For older students, phonemic awareness and phonics instruction can happen in tandem. We show students how we can manipulate phonemes in words by changing phonemes within print. Repeated practice allows students "to bond the spellings, pronunciations, and meanings of specific words in memory" (Ehri, 2014). These repeated exposures to grapheme-phoneme correspondences is necessary for orthographic mapping. Orthographic mapping uses sound-to-letter relationships to anchor phonemes in a word's pronunciation to the printed letter strings into long term memory for future retrieval.

It is important to note that phonemic awareness and phonics instruction needs to be systematic, explicit and consistent. A sprinkling of phonemic awareness and phonics instruction here and there will not provide the repetition and practice needed to become automatic decoders of print. These skills are also a means to an end and at no point the only literacy instruction necessary to create fluent and proficient readers. However, these skills are not optional, and they lay the foundation on which additional reading components are built.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In 2000, the National Reading Panel (NRP) identified 5 components of effective literacy instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. In addition to naming these five components, the NRP also concluded that phonemic awareness and phonics instruction needed to be increased in primary grades. While both phonemic awareness and phonics were named separately, these...

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44 English Phonemes and Common Spellings

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The Basic Phonograms chart ncludes all the English phonemes, same words with spellings for each phoneme, and the option to hear the sound pronounced, offered by Logic of English.

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Chart of Basic Phonograms identified by Logic of English

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A New Model for Teaching High-Frequency Words

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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.

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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.

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View the suggestions from the Barksdale Reading Institute for planning an advanced phonics lesson that includes these 6 steps: Letter-Sound Correspondence, Coding, Syllable Awareness, Dictation, Reading Connected Text.

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44 Phonemes Free video resource for teachers. When teaching students to read, modeling the correct letter sounds is critical. Learn how to pronounce the 44 phonemes in the English alphabet.

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Orthographic Mapping Explainer, Lyn Stone

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Orthographic Mapping Explainer, Lyn Stone

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From the Reading for Life Online course (https://lifelongliteracy.com/shop/rea...), an explainer on orthographic mapping

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Heart Word Magic - Help Students Learn to Read and Spell High Frequency Words

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Heart Word Magic - Help Students Learn to Read and Spell High Frequency Words

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Heart Word Magic is a complimentary teaching tool designed to help students learn to read and spell high-frequency words, particularly those that aren’t very decodable. Show your students the animations, then try these fun, hands-on free Student Practice Activities>>

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Heart Word Magic - Read and Spell High Frequency Words | Really Great Reading

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Heart Word Magic - Help Students Learn to Read and Spell High-Frequency and Sight WordsHeart Word Magic is a complimentary teaching tool designed to help students learn to read and spell high-frequency words and sight words, particularly those that aren’t very decodable. Show your students the animations, then try these fun, hands-on free Student Practice

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Choosing Words to Teach - Reading Rockets

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Choosing Words to Teach - Reading Rockets

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Teaching vocabulary is complex. What words are important for a child to know and in what context? In this excerpt from Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction, the authors consider what principles might be used for selecting which words to explicitly teach.

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Anita Archer - Dynamic Vocabulary Instruction

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Anita Archer - Dynamic Vocabulary Instruction

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LINCS | Adult Education and Literacy | U.S. Department of Education

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by Steve Graham and Michael Hebert

Download PDF

Identifies writing practices found to be effective in helping students increase their reading skills and comprehension. Recommendations include the following:

1. Have Students Write About The Texts They Read. Comprehension of science, social studies, and language arts texts improves when students write about what they read, specifically when they:

Respond to a text in writing (Writing Personal Reactions, Analyzing and Interpreting the Text)

Write Summaries of a Text

Write Notes about a Text

Answer Questions about a Text in Writing

2. Teach Students the Writing Skills and Processes that Go into Creating Text, specifically when teachers:

Teach the Process of Writing, Text Structures for Writing, Paragraph or Sentence Construction Skills (Improves Reading Comprehension)

Teach Spelling & Sentence Construction Skills (Improves Reading Fluency)

Teach Spelling Skills (Improves Word Reading Skills)

3. Increase How Much Students Write

Visit our About TEAL page to learn more about the project and our participants. Look for new materials under Project Resources and visit Links to learn more about specific topic areas that are part of this adult literacy professional development project to improve teacher quality.

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Writing to Read: Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading

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by Steve Graham and Michael Hebert Download PDF Identifies writing practices found to be effective in helping students increase their reading skills and comprehension. Recommendations include the following: Have Students Write About The Texts They Read.

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OHIO’S PLAN TO RAISE LITERACY ACHIEVEMENT Appendices

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OHIO’S PLAN TO RAISE LITERACY ACHIEVEMENT Appendices

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The Ohio Department of Education aims to increase student achievement through improving language and literacy outcomes for all students. A successful language and literacy framework is built on five interrelated components-teacher capacity, shared leadership, multi-tiered systems of support, parent partnerships and community collaboration.

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The Ohio Department of Education aims to increase student achievement through improving language and literacy outcomes for all students. A successful language and literacy framework is built on five interrelated components-teacher capacity, shared leadership, multi-tiered systems of support, parent partnerships and community collaboration.

# data[].attributes.headline
A New Model for Teaching High-Frequency Words

# data[].attributes.subject
A New Model for Teaching High-Frequency Words

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
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.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A New Model for Teaching High-Frequency Words

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
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.

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Decodable Words in Isolation and in Text

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Decodable Words in Isolation and in Text

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Video 29: Decodable Words in Isolation and in Text (REL Southeast)

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Basic Spelling Instruction from Ohio's Dyslexia Course

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Basic Spelling Instruction from Ohio's Dyslexia Course

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Module 7 Section 3c Basic Spelling Instruction

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Module 7 Section 3d Intensifying Instruction

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Syllable Patterns from Ohio's Dyslexia Course

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Syllable Patterns from Ohio's Dyslexia Course

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Reading Strategies Bookmarks - SPELD NSW

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SPELD NSW Literacy Resources support all students learning to read. These downloadable and printable bookmarks support word reading skills.

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Reading Intervention for Students in 4th-9th Grades

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Reading Intervention for Students in 4th-9th Grades

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Vocabulary Strategies from Isabel Beck, Bringing Words to Life

# data[].attributes.subject
Vocabulary Strategies from Isabel Beck, Bringing Words to Life

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Text or passage reading fluency is generally defined as having three components: accuracy, rate, and prosody (or expression). Children have poor text reading fluency if they read many words of a passage incorrectly, if they read text slowly and with obvious effort, or if they read in a stilted or robotic way.
The three components of fluency, and the interactions between them, have been studied in detail. It is useful to understand these concepts in order get a better sense of how they inform teaching practice, especially for children whose fluency is affected by difficulties with one or more of them.

1. Accuracy

Accurate reading requires students to be able to pronounce written words correctly. Correct pronunciation of a word allows the young reader to access its meaning from their existing oral vocabulary - the words they use and recognise in spoken language.

Accurate word reading is dependent on the ability to decode words efficiently and the process of ' orthographic mapping '. Briefly, when we decode a word, we use knowledge of the relationships between letters (graphemes) and speech sounds (phonemes) and blend them together in the correct order to form a word.

Initially, students do this in a conscious way, sound by sound - 'sounding the word out'. After they have decoded a word multiple times and stored it in their memory, it becomes a 'sight word', according to Ehri's definition: familiar words that can be accessed by memory.

Recommended reading: An open access chapter of this book is available here

2. Rate

The rate at which students read is important because slow reading hinders comprehension. Automaticity is the effortless and autonomous recognition and production of a word. Effortlessness is apparent when we see someone reading for long periods of time without fatigue and when they are reading in an easy and natural way. Automatic word reading is important because it allows the reader to pay attention to the meaning of the text rather than decoding the words.

Reading speed does not suddenly go from slow to fast. For children who are learning to read, their speed increases with repeated practice, as they build up their orthographic memory and their reading stamina.

Text reading speed is dependent on more than just singular word reading speed. Students read more quickly when they are able to break text into syntactic and semantic phrases and clauses 'on the fly' (Sabatini et al., 2019). This demonstrates the reciprocal relationship between fluency and comprehension when students are reading more complex text.

Therefore, when teaching fluency to students it is better to focus on reading rate rather than speed per se. 'Speed' suggests that faster is always better, but that is not necessarily the case. If students think that the main goal is to read as quickly as possible, they may not attend to meaning. The goal is to achieve a pace that allows for appropriate phrasing and which acknowledges punctuation and changes in tone, but which is quick enough to enable comprehension.

3. Prosody

Prosody is the third element of text reading fluency. Prosody means reading with expression - with the appropriate rhythm, tone, pitch, pauses, and stresses for the text. Prosody depends on both accuracy and rate. In order to read with expression, the student must be able to read words efficiently and break the text into meaningful syntactic and semantic units.

Prosody has a reciprocal relationship with comprehension. For a student to read with prosody, they must be gaining some understanding of the text as they read it if they know the appropriate intonations and pitch to use. Likewise, by reading with prosody, they are more likely to be processing information as they read it, which leads to better retention and comprehension.

Students who exhibit good prosody in oral reading tend to have higher comprehension scores from silent reading as well (Zimmerman et al., 2019).

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Text or passage reading fluency is generally defined as having three components: accuracy, rate, and prosody (or expression). Children have poor text reading fluency if they read many words of a passage incorrectly, if they read text slowly and with obvious effort, or if they read in a stilted or robotic way.