| Commonly Asked Question About Raising Reading Achievement in Your School
Commonly Asked Question About Raising Reading Achievement in Your School
- Q. What's the most important thing for kindergarten and first grade
teachers to do to ensure that every child learns to read on grade level?
- A.
- Teachers must begin teaching phonemic awareness (i.e. the conscious
understanding that a spoken word is made up of a sequence of speech sounds)
directly and explicitly at an early age (kindergarten). Children must be
trained to hear the individual sounds (phonemes) of their language. They
must be able to disconnect or "unglue" sounds in words in order to use an
alphabetic writing system. For example, they must be able to separate and
hear each of the three sounds in the word "cat". Educators and parents
cannot count on all or even most children developing this awareness
naturally; they must be taught. This skill is an absolutely essential
prerequisite for learning to read and spell. The lack of phonemic awareness
is the most powerful determinant of the likelihood of failure to learn to
read. If children cannot hear and manipulate the sounds in spoken words,
they will have an extremely difficult time learning how to map the sounds
of our language to letters and letter patterns–the essence of decoding.
Phonemic awareness instruction should begin before instruction in
sound-spelling relationships and be continued throughout the teaching of
sound-spelling relationships.
- Teachers must teach each of the sound-spelling correspondences (phonics)
explicitly and systematically. It is not enough to teach phonics in the
context of a story by introducing an isolated example and then expecting a
child to figure it out on his/her own the next time he encounters the
letter in print. This important aspect of reading instruction cannot be
left to chance. The phonemes must be separated from the words for
instruction. This can only happen if the teacher isolates each phoneme
(sound) and then matches it up with the correct letter. Be warned that most
traditional phonics programs use the reverse logic: they begin with the
letters (spelling) and then associate them with their corresponding sounds.
Programs that start by teaching the "one to one correspondences" (i.e. one
sound to one letter) and when these are mastered move on to "one to many
correspondences" (i.e. one sound to several letters) and then to the "code
overlaps" (i.e. those letters that have several different phonemes i.e.
sounds) are most effective in teaching the alphbetic principles of the
English language.
- Teachers must show children exactly how to sound out (decode) words
through blending the individual sounds together. They must be shown how to
move sequentially from left to right through spellings of words as they
"sound out," or say the sound for each spelling. Daily practice sessions
should include the blending of only sound-spelling relationships the
children have learned to that point. This skill must be "overlearned" so
that it becomes highly accurate and automatic.
- Teachers should provide an ample supply of code-based readers (i.e. books
in which almost all of the words with the exception of high-frequency sight
words can be sounded out by students) rather than ordinary literature
during early instruction. This statement does not mean that children's
literature will not be read-aloud daily as part of the instructional
program at preschool, kindergarten, and first grade. Rather, it means that
children will not be using ordinary literature for their own early
independent reading experiences. Using reading material that has too many
words that children cannot decode independently encourages guessing which
may actually hinder reading development. Children need connected, decodable
text to practice the sound-spelling correspondences they have learned. The
integration of phonics and reading can only occur with the use of decodable
text. Children can begin reading decodable text relatively quickly since
learning just a few sound-spelling correspondences will enable the reading
of dozens of words.
- Teachers should correct oral reading errors. Whole language instruction
discourages teachers from correcting students who make errors, but children
benefit when they receive corrective feedback.
- Teachers should read-aloud interesting stories, picture books, poetry, and
literature of all kinds to develop knowledge and comprehension. Teacher-
and parent-read stories play a critical role in building children's oral
language comprehension, which ultimately affects their reading
comprehension. These story-based activities should be structured to build
comprehension and vocabulary skills, however and not include (phonics)
decoding skills. Teachers should read-aloud to students several times
during the school day and use these opportunities for discussion about text
organization (fiction, non-fiction, poetry), vocabulary development, as
well as general knowledge building.
- Teachers should use good literature to teach comprehension and use phonics
to teach decoding, but not mix the two. A common misconception held by many
educators is that if they are teaching sound-spelling relationships in the
context of real stories (implicit instruction), they are teaching phonics.
This is not the case. Mixing decoding and comprehension instruction in the
same instructional activity is less effective, even when the decoding
instruction is fairly structured. When phonics instruction is embedded
(implicit) it does not have the same instructional effect as when it is
taught purely and separately and then practiced to mastery in decodable
text.
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