Five Essential Components to Building Stronger Readers

Reading is a highly complex activity that involves building neutral pathways among discrete regions of the brain. Research suggests there are five components to effective reading instruction: phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency and reading comprehension.

A good reader will read once while a struggling reader will read three times. First for decoding, second for fluency and third for comprehension.

Phonemic Awarewness

Phonological awareness is ability to hear, identify, and manipulate sounds in the spoken language.

Skills include:

• Identifying words in a sentence: How many words do you hear in this phrase: Big animals like eating spagehtti.
• Splitting and blending syllables: How many syllables are in table or napkin?
• Rhyming: Find a word that rhymes with bat – mat, cat, fat, etc.

Phonemes are the individual sounds that make up a word. They are the foundation of language.

For example, the word “last” is made up of four phonemes (sounds) : /l/ /a/ /s/ /t/

The word “lash” is made up of three phonemes: /l/ /a/ /sh/

Advanced phonemic awareness concepts are essential to reading and spelling. The ability to manipulate, blend, delete, add and substitute the sounds to voicing the word correctly; a process required to be fluent in reading connected text.

Phonics

Phonics is the letter (grapheme) to sound (phonemic) relationship that is organized, logical and predictable between written letters and spoken sounds. The letter “m” represents the sound /m/.

Vocabulary

Effective vocabulary involves more than memorizing definitions or unfamiliar words. But context to derive meanings, find root morphemes, mapping word derivations, understanding word origins and paraphrasing idiomatic or special uses for words.

Fluency

Fluency is the ability to read words accurately, quickly and with proper expression.

Comprehension

Reading comprehension is the ability to understand what we read and remember the relevant knowledge or information.

Children learn to read from Kindergarten to Grade Three. After that children read to learn.