| "Humans could speak for about thirty thousand years before they devised systems to write and read, and literacy continues to be an elusive goal for most of the world's people." (Hall and Moats, 2000)
The Five Areas of Reading Instruction
The "Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read (2000)" identifies the leading scientifically based research of reading instruction. The recent national report, "Put Reading First" (2001), describes the panel's findings in five areas of reading instruction:
- Phonemic awareness is the understanding that a word is made up of a series of separate sounds, called phonemes. It is one type of phonological awareness. Other kinds of phonological awareness include working with word units larger than the phoneme, such as words within sentences, rhyming units within words, syllables, onsets, and rimes.
- Phonics involves the predictable relationship between individual sounds (phonemes) and letters (graphemes). It is the understanding and use of the sound-spelling relationships in written words.
- Fluency is the ability to read accurately, quickly, and with accentual rhythm (or prosody) and expression. Fluent readers read quickly, in meaningful chunks, and at a high level of accuracy. Fluency is generally regarded as a critical component of skilled reading.
- Vocabulary refers to the words children must know in order to communicate and understand what they are reading. There are four types of vocabulary—listening, speaking, reading, and writing.
- Text Comprehension is the process of making meaning from written text—it is the goal of reading. Comprehension strategies help children take control of their own reading comprehension and become active, purposeful readers.
Special Education Focus: Using Direct Instruction to Build a Foundation
Back to Top
Children who are having or who are going to have trouble with the building blocks most often are struggling to recognize, segment, and recall the separate speech sounds that make up words. Many children remember letters and letter names without realizing that the sounds the letters represent exist as segments of their own speech. Helpful instruction includes:
- direct practice distinguishing speech sounds from letters.
- direct instruction in how the speech sounds are formed in the mouth if children are having trouble distinguishing them. (/ch/ is a quiet sound with no voice; /j/ feels the same but it is made with the voice engaged.)
- direct teaching of the system of consonant and vowel sounds, as distinguished from the letters that represent them.
- direct practice manipulating sounds in words with the support of gestures, movement, or sound boxes and moveable chips.
|
