Reading and Writing Skills

Phonemic Awareness is the ability to notice, isolate, and manipulate sound in words and sentences. Phonemic Awareness identify and working with syllables in spoken words.

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• Children who have phonemic awarness skill will learn to read and spell first than children who have few or none of these skills.
• Phonemics Awareness is more specific in identifying and manipulating the individual sound in words.
• The children who have phonemic awareness understand that sounds and letters are related in a predictable way.
• Learning to blend phonemes with letters helps children read words.
• Small-group instruction is more effective in helping your students acquire phonemic awaarness and learn to read.

Phonics Instruction is to help children learn and use
the alphabetic principle and the understanding that there are systematic and predictable relationships between written letters and spoken sounds.

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• Knowing these relationships will help children recognize familiar words accurately and automatically, and “decode“ new words.
• Phonics instruction is most effective when it begins in kindergarten or first grade.
• Although children need to be taught the major consonant and vowel letter-sound relationships, they also need ample reading and writing activities that allow them to practice using this knowledge.
• For phonics instruction to support the reading progress of all of your students, it is important to work in flexible instructional groups and to pace instruction to maximize student progress.

Fluency Instructions is the ability to read a text accurately and quickly. When fluent readers read silently, they recognize words automatically.

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• Repeated oral reading substantially improves word recognition, speed, and accuracy as well as fluency.
• Teachers can help their students become more fluent readers by providing them with models of fluent reading and by having students repeatedly read passages as you offer guidance.
• Usually, having students read a text four times is sufficient to improve fluency.
• If the text is more difficult, students will focus so much on word recognition that they will not have an opportunity to develop fluency.
• There are several ways that your students can practice orally rereading text, including student-adult reading, choral reading, tape-assisted reading, and partner reading.
• More fluent readers focus their attention on making connections among the ideas in a text and between these ideas and their background knowledge. Therefore, they are able to focus on comprehension.
• Less fluent readers must focus their attention primarily on decoding individual words. Therefore, they have little attention left for comprehending the text.

Vocabulary Instruction can be described as oral vocabulary or reading vocabulary. Oral vocabulary refers to words that we use in speaking or recognize in listening. Reading vocabulary refers to words we recognize or use in print. Vocabulary plays an important part in learning to read and to reading comprehension.

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• As children learn to read more advanced texts, they must learn the meaning of new words that are not part of their oral vocabulary.
• Students learn vocabulary indirectly when they hear and see words used in many different contexts
• Students learn vocabulary directly when they are explicitly taught both individual words and word-learning strategies. Direct vocabulary instruction aids reading comprehension.
• Your students can understand most texts without knowing the meaning of every word in the text.
• Learning words and concepts in science, social studies, and mathematics is even more challenging because each major concept often is associated with many other new concepts.

Text Comprehension Instruction is instruction that helps students to become independent, strategic, and metacognitive readers who are to develop, control, and use a variety of comprehension strategies to ensure that they understand what they read.

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• Comprehension strategy instruction helps students become purposeful, active readers who are in control of their own reading comprehension.
• Teachers and students use these four strategies flexibly asking questions about the text they are reading; summarizing parts of the text; clarifying words and sentences they don’t understand; and predicting what might occur next in the text as they are needed in reading literature and informational texts.
• Lead students in a discussion about the meaning of what they are reading, help them to relate the content to their experience and to other texts they have read, and encourage them to ask questions about the text.
• As a teacher, we can help our students make use of their prior knowledge to improve their comprehension. Before our students read, preview the text with them. As part of previewing, ask the students what they already know about the content of the selection (for example, the topic, the concept, or the time period). Ask them what they know about the author and what text structure he or she is likely to use. Discuss the important vocabulary used in the text. Show students some pictures or diagrams to prepare them for what they are about to read.
• If the students are struggling to identify and remember the main points in a chapter they are reading in their social studies textbook, teach them how to write summaries or teach them question-answering strategies. When they find that using comprehension strategies can help them to learn, they are more likely to be motivated and involved actively in learning.