Reading Deficits:

Literacy is an essential skill used daily and required for functioning in the world; however, unfortunately, many children today are unable to read well, interfering with their lives. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has indicated that 4th and 8th grade students are scoring lower on reading tests. It is estimated that 63% of 4th graders and 64% of 8th graders are reading at or below the basic reading level achievement. Studies suggest this is largely due to ineffective teaching methods in use. Systematic and explicit instruction must be used to increase the level of achievement by students.

How the Brain Reads:

Multiple areas of the brain activate when we read, including the parieto-temporal, used for step-by-step decoding and analysis, and the occipito-temporal, where everything about a word is stored and accessed.

Components of Reading Instruction:

Print awareness: this is the knowledge of the forms and functions of print, such as in books to tell stories or in magazines to convey information. This is the foundation for later letter identification and word formation. These kids will know how to handle a book, where the words come from in a story and that different forms convey different meanings.

Letter Knowledge: letters form words and represent sounds. Students will need to become very familiar with each uppercase and lowercase letter (the shape of them and the sounds they make).

Phonological awareness: this term means understanding larger parts of a spoken language, such as words, syllables, onsets, and rimes. In order to "sound out" words to read, one must know how to decode by splitting up words by their syllables and blending the onsets, etc.

Phonics: a method of instruction which involves the systematic relationship between letters and letter combinations, as well as the individual sounds of letters. This is the use of decoding in order to read.

Irregular Word Reading: Not all words follow the individual letters' sounds and therefore cannot use decoding to read them. These words will have to be known by heart when they see them in print.

Multi-syllabic Word Reading: Students will need to use chunking in order to decode longer, multi-syllable words and become familiar with common letter patterns.

Fluency: the accurate reading of connected text at a conversational rate with appropriate expression.

Vocabulary: knowledge of words and their meanings. It's not enough to be able to decode and read the word; one must understand the meaning as well. This is especially important for ELL students.

Comprehension: extracting and constructing meaning from text. Vocabulary builds this skill.

Reading Assessment

Screening: identify at-risk students, determines starting point for instruction

Progress Monitoring: determines progress, measure specific skills

Diagnostic: pinpoints a student's weak areas, provides information about skills and needs

Definition: Print Awareness is knowing about the forms and functions of writing, including in books, logos, magazines, or even on television.

Students who have print awareness can identify the structure of books and identify the structure of letters, and understand that print tells us what to say.

Print Referencing: This is a strategy that can be used to direct a student's attention to the forms and functions of print. This is done by reading aloud and either pointing to the text or asking questions/making comments about it.

When to Teach: In preschool and kindergarten, these skills should be developed systematically. By the end of kindergarten, a student should know

• know the parts of a book

• can identify the title and text in a book

• follows from left to right

• knows the difference between letters and words

• knows sentences have separate words

• knows sentences have spaces

Assessment and Intervention: In kindergarten, print awareness should be assessed 3 times in a year. Ensure you identify who needs extra support and determine if the pace of instruction should increase or decrease.

Teach and Model: Shared reading times are a great opportunity to develop print awareness. Show the book, say and point to the title, and have students repeat. Point to the author's name, say it and have students repeat. While reading, have students notice how you read left-to-right, top-to-bottom. Point out different punctuation and how it affects the way you read the text.

Reading to young children is the BEST way to introduce them to print, and later to build skills related to reading (letter knowledge, etc).

Definition: Letter knowledge is the understanding that letters are components of written words. It is the relationship between the shapes of the letters and the sounds they represent in words.

Iconicity: the names of the letters contain the sound that the letter represents. This identification makes it easier for students to learn the sounds of letters. Only 2 letters are not iconic in the English language (h and w).

Characteristics of letters will affect a student's ability to learn the letter names, including similarity in appearance to other letters or the number of phonemes it shares with other letters.

"[R]esearchers found that similarity of letter shapes was the strongest...determinant of confusion errors." This can be seen with b and d, which are often confused for one another.

Phonological characteristics of letter names also come into play. Similar sounding letter names can confuse students. Ex: B = /b/ /ee/, C = /s/ /ee/

When writing letters, the shape similarities can be confusing as well. Ex: B, P, M, N

Handwriting is especially important when learning letters and their sounds. It is linked to basic reading and spelling achievement as well. To aid in learning to write letters, suggest the use of a continuous stroke. This method reduces the opportunity for reversals, helping students to avoid confusion.

Teaching Names and Shapes:

• Sing the alphabet to a different tune (Mary had a Little Lamb, etc.)

• Choose 5-6 letters and arrange them in a random order to point to and await students to respond with the letter name (may also use this method and ask for letter sound)

• Practice good handwriting habits (posture and pencil grip)

• Use skywriting for students to practice shapes without writing on paper

• Ensure you teach explicitly. Break down the types of lines used when writing letters

• Match uppercase letters with lowercase

• Teach by ease of writing (letters with primarily vertical and horizontal lines, small curves)

Phonological awareness: an umbrella term that includes the awareness of larger parts of spoken language (words, syllables, onsets, and rimes) as well as smaller parts (phonemes).

Four Developmental Levels:

1. Word

2. Syllable

3. Intrasyllable

4. Phoneme

• Phonemic awareness is the most important level. Students pay attention to the individual sounds of letters that make up words. Decades of research confirm that segmenting words into phonemes and blending and segmenting are the most critical skills.

• Phonological instruction should always be explicit and systematic and should progress in difficulty.

• Using concrete instruction, such as Elkonin boxes, are helpful in teaching phoneme manipulation as well as increase the understanding of the connection between phonemes and graphemes.

• There are 2 types of sounds: stop sounds and continuous sounds.

  
  

"[A] child's level of phonemic awareness at school entry is widely considered the strongest single determinant of his or her later reading achievement" (pg 122).

When to Teach

As soon as possible. Phonemic awareness, however, should mostly be taught in Pre-K and Kindergarten. Start with larger sound units and gradually progress to small units (eventually phonemes). When students move into phoneme-level skills, there should be ample practice time given. It is most effective to focus on one or two phoneme manipulations, rather than combining multiple types.

Instruction should be limited to 10-15 minutes per day. For students who require extra support, an additional 15 minutes in a small-group setting should be given 3-4 times a week.

To note: Evidence demonstrates that teaching letter-sound knowledge along with phonemic awareness improves readiness for decoding instruction.

Order in which to teach

1. Blending phonemes

2. Phoneme segmentation

3. Phoneme isolation

4. Phoneme deletion, addition, and substitution

   
   

Assessment and Intervention

Testing should begin by mid-kindergarten and continue throughout the early elementary years, as needed. In general, students who demonstrate decoding skills do not need to be tested further when it comes to phonological awareness. Students who have poor phonemic awareness may need intense intervention given via small-group setting with more explicit modeling and additional time. Intervention for older students struggling to read should focus on the phonemic level.

Lesson Models

• Utilize poems and songs with nonsense words to teach rhyme recognition. Begin with explicit instruction about what makes words rhyme.

• Use pictures of 2 different things that, when combined, make a new word. Explicitly tell students what the pictures are and physically push them together. Reveal the new picture which is the combined words. Ex. Dog + House = Doghouse. This develops addition.

• Take a picture that is 2 combined words (football, cupcake), with their words underneath. Use paper or your hand to cover one word at a time, developing deletion.

• Use onset-rime in a silly animal adventure game. "Sitter needs to catch the /b/.../at/"

• Use objects in the classroom and ask students what the final or beginning sounds of the word are. "This is a pen. What is my final sound in the word pen?"

• Primarily for primary grade levels (K-2)

• Helps students understand the alphabetic principle

• Requires explicit and systematic instruction (the sound/spelling relationships are clearly defined and modeled)

• Incorporates phonemic awareness

• Provides sufficient practice in reading words

• Good instruction leads to automatic word recognition

• Builds fluency in reading and writing

Techniques

Corrective Feedback

• Errors should be corrected immediately and the correct response should be modeled

Monitoring

• Monitor to ensure students are attentive

Pacing

• Keep a lively pace, not allowing "downtime" after students give a response

Signaling

• Use hand signals so students know when or how to respond in unison.

Decoding

• Teach sound/spelling correspondences to prepare

• Students must be able to blend individual sounds together to form a word from print to speech

• It is easier for students to blend words with continuous sounds (m, f, v), rather than stop sounds (b, d, p)

• Teach continuous blending when applicable

• Provide students time to practice with decodable text

Phonograms: a series of letters that stand for a sound, or sounds, syllable, or syllable part. It is commonly referred to as the rime of a word (or everything following the onset)

How to Teach:

• Elkonin Boxes (drag down boxes to represent sounds in a word)

• Word Building (using substitution to change words into new words)

• Dictation (students are given a word and are told to think about what sounds are in it, then write the word)

• Temporarily irregular words will appear regular at the beginning of a reading program, but become regular as all sound/spelling correspondences are taught (for, there)

• Permanently irregular words contain at least one sound/spelling that are not pronounced conventionally, belonging to only a few words (said, of, one, been)

Irregular words can be high-frequency or low-frequency. They are not easily decodable, or decodable at all in some cases, so practice is necessary to build automatic recognition.

They are usually selected from upcoming stories or passages. They should be taught explicitly, drawing attention to all letters in the word.

Strategies:

• Word walls. Having a designated space for students to go back and look at words they've learned provides a source to practice fluency, as well as problem solve.

• Word banks. Personal word banks or dictionaries ensures every student has access to previously learned words to help with assignments or to bring home and practice with.

Sequence of Introduction:

1. Word frequency: start with high-frequency irregular words first.

2. Word similarity: Avoid teaching similarly spelled irregular words together (of, off, where, were).

3. Word relationship: Teach words in the same word family together (could, should, would).

When to teach:

When students can read regular CVC words at a rate of about one word every three seconds. Waiting for this skill will help students learn to sound out words, rather than memorizing them and failing to build phonics skills. It is recommended to start with one irregular word per lesson and gradually increase up to 5.

Progress monitor every 4-6 weeks for kids at grade level, every 2 weeks for kids below grade level, and every 1 week for kids significantly below grade level.

From 5th grade on, the average student encounters about 10,000 new words each year. It is critical that students have the necessary skills to decode large, multisyllabic words in order to extract meaning from text.

Syllabication is an important strategy to use. Good readers effortlessly break down the words into syllables. Poor readers often process multisyllabic words letter-by-letter, rather than syllables.

"Low decoders correctly pronounced fewer affixes and vowel sounds, disregarded large portions of letter information, and were two to four times more likely to omit syllables" (pg 268).

When to Teach

• After students master decoding single-syllable words

• Ability to pronounce common sound/spelling correspondences

• Able to identify open and closed syllables

• Able to pronounce affixes in isolation

Assess and Intervene

• Begin in the middle of second grade to plan effective intervention

• Students with difficulty in this area should also be given a diagnostic to ensure it is not a deep-rooted problem

• Older struggling readers lack strategies for identifying and decoding multisyllabic words

Open syllables: end in a vowel, making the vowel long

Closed syllables: end in a consonant, making the vowel short

Syllable Division Patterns V/CV, VC/CV, VC/V, C-le,

• Students should be taught explicitly

• Learn to identify and label the vowels and consonants in a word, then use the pattern knowledge to split the word into syllables

• Use nonsense words to teach open and closed syllables

Affixes: small parts of words that change the meaning of words, but cannot stand alone. Prefix- before and Suffix-after. Common prefixes include, a-, un-, pre-, in-... Common suffixes include -ing, -s, -ed, -ful, -tion...

• Students should be able to pronounce affixes alone

• Explicitly teach the meaning of affixes, then introduce root words that can be changed by adding an affix