Research has shown that students who can read with accuracy and fluency are better able to comprehend the material because they are spending the majority of their time thinking about the text and not deciphering the words.

Have students read the same passage repeatedly to improve rate and accuracy Monitor and track speed and accuracy

For example, students who encounter the word “ungrateful” will be able to decode it quickly if they can recognize the words’ three meaningful parts (its prefix, root, and suffix) and comprehend it easily if they understand the meaning of each part.

To this end, the teaching of both phonological and phonemic awareness and phonics and the alphabetic principle are very important in Kindergarten. In the phonological

Thus, one key task of the kindergarten teacher is to build students’ motivation to read books by building their foundational reading skills and exposing them to a wide variety of texts through the Read Aloud.

“First grade is the time when children bring together the many language and literacy skills they have been attaining—book and print awareness, phonemic awareness, letter and word knowledge, background information about different topics—and start getting comfortable with the conventions of associating letters and sounds.

For many children, first grade is the time when they move from “pretend reading” to conventional reading

Unfortunately, disparate quality of past literacy instruction begins to evidence itself quite dramatically in second and third grade

Third grade students learn to write in cursive

Excellent teachers of literacy recognize the high returns that come from careful and constant assessment of their students’ literacy skills.

One of the most profound and personal connections that young children make to print involves their names. The presence of students’ names in several locations around the elementary classroom (on classroom management charts, reading group lists, classroom job boards, etc.) is of great importance as an instructional tool for new readers.

Without quick, accurate reading, comprehension is near impossible. We simply cannot focus on understanding a story if we must spend all of our time decoding the words on the page

word and structural analysis skills.

phonics and the alphabetic principle

phonological and phonemic awareness

book and print awareness,

beginning readers who receive explicit, systematic phonics instruction and practice decoding simple words and reading easy books will eventually find that their ability to decode has become so automatic that they have to expend little cognitive energy on the process.

children master the important skills, strategies, and knowledge they need to become successful readers and writers most quickly and effectively if their teachers integrate both systematic instruction in letter-sound relationships and critical thinking about literature in to their literacy classrooms Researchers and educators often refer to this multi-faceted approach as “balanced literacy” instruction.

The emphasis on teaching students to recognize whole words automatically and to use clues to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words became known as the whole language approach.

A landmark study conducted at the University of Kansas examined the exposure to verbal language of children in several socio-economic settings and found a dramatic difference in the total number of words heard by children at the high end of the socio-economic scale (45 million words over four years) and the children in the lowest sector of the socio-economic scale (13 million). All children will show up for Kindergarten on the same day, but one may have heard 32 million fewer words in his or her lifetime, a fact that will almost certainly affect how quickly a child can decode and understand words.9 Clearly, environmental factors—including those at play before children ever arrive at school—have an enormous impact on students’ literacy development.

the literacy skills of students in the under-resourced schools where we teach often lag well behind those of children in wealthier areas.

Young, capable readers will seize the opportunities provided in a literacy-infused classroom and develop invaluable confidence in their own abilities, which leads directly to success in other subjects such as social studies, math, and science.

children who read well in the early grades are far more successful in later school years

No single method of intervention will have as dramatic an effect on a student’s future learning and success than a solid foundation in literacy.

, it is essential that elementary teachers follow the constant cycle of diagnosis, instruction, and assessment that is the crucible of excellent instruction

Perhaps the most obvious benefit of such an initial diagnosis is that it shows you where to begin your instruction.

Phonological Awareness Tests.

Finally, you can ask individual students to read from a Word List, which contains short lists of progressively more challenging words. When a student says a word incorrectly or skips it, the teacher records that as a “miscall.”

As the name implies, this assessment approach requires students to retell a story to the teacher that the student has read. By recording what aspects of the story the child recognizes and retells, the teacher establishes a picture of the student’s literacy skills.

To measure a student’s fluency (also called oral reading rate), you would conduct a Timed Reading Exercise with a text on this student’s independent reading level

Most teachers—even at the kindergarten and first grade level—find that rubrics are an invaluable tool.

They use graphic organizers, story maps and outlining techniques to teach students the form and structure of various genres of text.

Running records, which are useful for students of all grade levels, do not have to be complicated.

Running records, which are useful for students of all grade levels, do not have to be complicated.

some teachers use the “five finger rule,” where the student is asked (and taught, so he can use this method to choose texts he reads on his own) to read an approximately 100-word passage and put up a finger every time he comes across a word he can’t read. If he puts up fewer than five fingers, the text is at his independent level and he will be able to read it and comprehend it without assistance from the teacher; the process of doing so will also build his fluency, due to the repeated exposure to words he already knows.

Describe the overall structure of a story

name the author and illustrator of a story and define the role of each in telling the story.

Describe characters in a story (e.g., their traits, motivations, or feelings) and explain how their actions contribute to the sequence of events.

lassroom Snapshot: Word Study

Improve students’ ability to hear sounds by working with rhymes, riddles, and stories;

print awareness

second grade, Ms. Cleary’s students build their comprehension during the Read Aloud and in Shared Reading. During these times, students are listening to a book read to them or are supported by the voices of other fluent readers; thus, their cognitive energy is freed to think strategically about the texts. In fourth grade, however, students are able to use comprehension strategies during Independent Reading; for most students, decoding has become an automatic process. The fourth graders with weak decoding skills (Clayton, Shawnice, and Troy) listen to a book on tape during this time to improve their reading fluency and also attend Mr. Moreno’s small group for additional instruction in troublesome spelling patterns.

Phonological and phonemic awareness

Reading Habits Checklist.

develop your students’ prior knowledge by allowing them to share their knowledge of the subject and giving the class important information they will require to make sense of the text.

frustration levels of your students

prefix, root, and suffix

Understanding the function of print and the characteristics of books and other print materials

One of the most profound and personal connections that young childre

honics (decoding words by examining relationships between sounds and letters)

absence of literacy skills is one of the key indicators of the achievement ga

more than 74% of children who enter first grade at risk for reading failure will continue to struggle to read into adulthood.3 Weak literacy skills will prohibit these children from accessing entire fields of knowledge

absence of literacy skills is one of the key indicators of the achievement gap

absence of literacy skills is one of the key indicators of the achievement ga

it's another thing entirely to observe a ten year old who can only read 40 words per minute at the beginning of fourth grade, when he should be reading over 100

dramatic difference in the total number of words heard by children at the high end of the socio-economic scale (45 million words over four years) and the children in the lowest sector of the socio-economic scale (13 millio

dramatic difference in the total number of words heard by children at the high end of the socio-economic scale (45 million words over four years) and the children in the lowest sector of the socio-economic scale (13 million

Upon encountering a word that had not been taught, children were told to use picture or context clues to determine its meaning.

Upon encountering a word that had not been taught, children were told to use picture or context clues to determine its meaning.

bothdecoding and comprehension processes

by reading books on their independent level and thinking about more challenging books that are read aloud to them.

mental energy can be used to read and comprehend increasingly complex words and texts.

What Is Literacy?

Phonological Awareness: Understanding that the spoken language is made up of units of sounds, such as sentences, words, and syllables

ntain both syllables and individual sounds, or phonemes. They should be able to hear and produce rhyming and alliteration, as well as begin to segment and blend simple words (to break the word cat down into the sounds /c... a... t/ and put those sounds together again to say cat). Students should also be able to recognize, name, and easily write the individual letters of the alphabet (both capital and lowercase), and know their corresponding sounds

Children become, in a real sense, independent readers.

diagnosing your students’ abilities and progress is a necessary foundation for achieving the significant academic gains that your students must make in order to catch up with students in more privileged communities

First grade is the time when children bring together the many language and literacy skills they have been attaining—book and print awareness, phonemic awareness, letter and word knowledge, background information about different topics—and start getting comfortable with the conventions of associating letters and sounds

Phonological Awarenes

pre-writing strategies

common roots, prefixes, and suffixes)

A close look at this graphic shows us that our ability to decode—to translate individual letters or various combinations thereof into speech sounds to identify and read words—is built upon our book and print awareness, phonological and phonemic awareness, phonics and the alphabetic principle, and word and structural analysis skills. Our ability to comprehend—to actively read and understand language—is based on our background knowledge, vocabulary, and ability to use comprehension strategies. Finally, our ability to read fluently—with speed, accuracy, and expression—is dependent on our ability to read non-decodable words on “sight,” to decode with such automaticity that we spend no mental energy in the process, and to read with appropriate phrasing. Reading fluency is the bridge from decoding to comprehension, hence its placement in the graphic.

We simply cannot focus on understanding a story if we must spend all of our time decoding the words on the page

Most teachers develop students’ Book and Print Awareness through constant, explicit modeling. When they hold up a Big Book that the class is reading, they “think aloud” about how to hold the book, where to start reading, and in what direction. While a teacher is writing the morning news on the board for his first graders, he might ask the students, “Should I start at the top of the board or the bottom?”

Understanding that the spoken language is made up of units of sounds, such as sentences, words, and syllables

Understanding that spoken words are made up of individual phonemes (the smallest part of spoken language); being able to hear, identify, and manipulate those phonemes

need

Discussions of new words that occur during the course of the day, for example in books

Beginning readers should be able to read easily 90 percent or more of the words in a story

Print represents oral language Reading from left to right and top to bottom Spaces between words and sentences Standard text structures and organization, such as covers, backs, titles, and illustrations Specific genre structures and organization, such as table of contents and index Sentence structure How to hold a book, turn its pages, and shelve it

Phonemic awareness is the recognition of distinct phonemes, or speech sounds, in words. For example, the word squished is composed of the phonemes /s/, /k/, /w/, /i/, /sh/, and /t/.

Once they figured out what letter or letter combinations made that particular sound, we decoded practice words with our cool new symbols.

A]ll students, regardless of which language(s) is (are) spoken, must develop an awareness of phonology and syntax if they are to become literate. . . . The development of listening comprehension is also a necessary condition for reading readines

This instruction begins in Kindergarten with the dictation of stories to correspond to children’s illustrations. The child first attempts to use the letters he or she is learning to label pictures independently. Then he or she moves on to early elementary grades, where he or she should learn sentence structure, parts of speech, and how to develop paragraphs with topic sentences and details on a variety of topics. Finally, in upper elementary grades, the child learns to complete full compositions of different styles targeted to different audiences.

Students need to be Web literate in the future—not simply as a literacy but also a fundamental human right.

Individuals plot their own learning pathway, but use the map as a guide.

“the Internet as literacy

“I just figure out what I need to learn and then I go learn it,

Furthermore, rarely is the core generator (e.g. the textbook or the curriculum guide) modified (“patched”) in an ongoing way based on student desires, pleasures, displeasures, actions, and interactions.

There are many different forms and routes to participation

Intensive knowledge is specialized, extensive knowledge is less specialized, broader, and more widely shared.

We want to know whether content organization and interactional organization reflexively shape each other in strong or weak ways, not just whether they do or not.

First, we can look at it directly in terms of content, i.e. what signs it has and how they are organized. Second, we can look at it in terms of how people interact with that content or with each other over that content.

Too often in schools knowledge is not shared across the students, is not distributed so that different students, adults, and technologies offer different bits and pieces of it as needed, and is not garnered from dispersed sites outside the classroom

Schools often try to teach kids to read and write, rather than read or write specific types of things like stories, reports, field notes, essays, or expositions. But, just like games, these different types of reading and writing operate by different principles and are used to carry out different types of actions.

The player gets a real sense of being in the game, even a sense of urgency, but can’t really lose, or at least lose at all early before having put up a very good stand.

We see the game as a system, not just a set of discrete skills.

Information is given multimodally (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001): that is, in print, orally, and visually

What has to come before is motivation for an extended engagement with the game.

In the end, I hope to convince you that today’s young people often see deeper and better forms of learning going on in the games they play than in the schools they attend.

arning to read in a way that allows people more than a literal understanding, that does not fuel the fourth-grade slump and create poor readers, requires that people “play” in a domain in such a way that they can give situation-specific meanings to the styles of language associated with that domain.

A variety of studies have shown that, in peer-peer discourse, children are less likely simply to defer to the authority of the other’s viewpoint, more likely to seek some rational way to deal with differing viewpoints and perspectives, and more likely to actually change their own viewpoint for reasons they understand

Perspective-taking and moral reasoning

Later, in other interactions, or in thinking to oneself, the child can re-run such simulations and imitate the perspective-taking

a) they are specially built and we make them on the spot to help us make sense of and act in specific contexts or with specific texts; (b) they are not “neutral,” but capture a given perspective or viewpoint, foregrounding some things and backgrounding others, though our perspective or viewpoint changes in different contexts.

We build our model simulations to help us make sense of things. Sometimes this does not work all that well.

thinking is connected to, and changes across, actual situations and is not usually a process of applying abstract generalizations, definitions, or rules

learning to decode was not “decontextualized.” It was not, in fact, separated from meaningful and value-laden action

It is easy to believe, as the traditionalists do, that the best way to learn such skills is to practice them over and over again out of any meaningful contexts. However, many children learn to decode print as part of larger activities which do have deep meaning and value to the children.

I was simply overwhelmed with details, questions, and confusions

It is, outside the practices in the domain from which it comes, just as meaningless, however much one could garner literal meanings from it with which to verbally repeat things or pass tests.

t may be somewhat surprising to learn that most researchers agree that although students do learn word meanings in the course of reading connected text, the process seems to be fairly inefficient and not especially effective

Here the report mentions the now well-known and much studied issue that from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, the Black-White gap in IQ test scores and other sorts of test scores, including reading tests, was fast closing (Neisser 1998; Jencks and Phillips 1998). This heartening progress ceased in the 1980s. Clearly, these factors were, whatever else they were, powerful “reading interventions,” since they significantly increased the reading scores of “at risk” children. Though the matter is controversial (Neisser 1998; Jencks and Phillips 1998), these factors may have been closely connected to the sorts of social programs (stemming originally from Johnson’s “War on Poverty”) that were dismantled in the 1980s and 90s (Grissmer et al. 1998: pp. 221–3). However that may be, the test scores were going up at a time that integration was also increasing. By the mid-1980s integration increases ceased and the society became more segregated instead, a trend that continues today.

The teacher heard her as rambling.

Brian’s father had repeatedly encouraged this sort of talking and thinking about the design of the game.

What is happening is that Jennie is learning to identify certain sorts of school-related identities with her primary home-based identity by forming an association between these two identities.

Of course Jennie is no master of this sort of language.

can make a noun (like “growth”) out of a verb (like “grow”)

“syntax” means the internal structure of sentences

The “fourth-grade slump” (Chall et al. 1990) is the phenomenon where some children seem to acquire reading (i.e. pass reading tests) fine in the early grades, but fail to be able to use reading to learn school content in the later grades, when the language demands of that content (e.g. science) get more and more complex

Learners observe masters at work. Masters model behavior (e.g. cooking a particular type of meal) accompanied by talk that helps learners know what to pay attention to. Learners collaborate in their initial efforts with the masters, who do most of the work and scaffold the learners’ efforts. Texts or other artifacts (e.g. recipes, cookbooks) that carry useful information, though usually of the sort supplied “on demand” or “just in time” when needed, are often made available.

Whole Language advocates argue that this is how children should acquire literacy as well.

phonemic awareness” (the conscious awareness that oral words are composed of individual sounds), then on phonics (matching letters to sounds), then practice with fluent oral reading (reading out loud), then work on comprehension skills.

That is, the child needs to learn with which of 44 sounds each of 26 letters can be associated. This system is pitifully smaller than the Pokémon system. That system is 150 (Pokémon) coupled with 16 (types) coupled with 2 (evolutions) coupled with 8 (skills) Yet, in the case of learning to read at school,

Controversies over reading should have less to do with debates about methods of instruction and more to do with understanding the links between poverty and (not) learning to read.

But the majority are poor or come from minority groups whose members have faced a history of prejudice and oppression

Most children learn to read, regardless of what instructional approach a school adopts,

geology textbook

Writers of narratives often omit the motives that drive characters to particular actions in a story on precisely the grounds that they expect readers to use their knowledge of stories, life experiences, and human nature to infer those motives.

small groups of students form “idea circles,” in which students meet to discuss the same idea (e.g., a particu-lar adaptation for animal survival) as explored through different texts, each at the appropriate reading level of only one member or a subset of members of the group

For these reasons, we suggest that much comprehension instruc-tion be conducted in small groups or individually based on students’ needs

Working with eighth-grade students, she evaluated an integrated social studies and language arts unit designed to promote his-torical understanding and argumentative writing skills.

This insight suggests that instruction may be more effective when teachers integrate reading and writing experi-ences in the classroom.

Table 3.5. Questions to Guide the Discussion in Questioning the Author

Another important tool to support text structure instruction is the use of graphic organizers, such as story maps, Venn diagrams for com-pare/contrast, and flowcharts for problem/solution.

(a) that students learn that text is structured and (b) that they develop the ability to take advantage of any particular text’s structure in learning and remembering its key informa-tion.

A key find-ing of research on highly effective teachers serving high-poverty students is that they spend a good deal more time coaching (i.e., providing guided practice for) students—that is, being the “guide on the side” as students try out their developing facility to apply strategies in actual reading and writing tasks

When stu-dents read on the topic of reported interest to them, whether working animals or robotics, they employed a greater number and range of com-prehension processes. This tells us that if our goal is to stretch students’ comprehension muscles, we should provide them with texts of interest.

found that increas-ing the volume of texts in child-care centers led to increased engagement with texts and improvements in children’s early literacy measures

Words are not the point of words; ideas are.

This means that the inquiry component of science and the strategy component of reading are mutually reinforcing and synergistic, in that what one learns in the one improves the other.

IDEAS (in-depth expanded applications of sci-ence) model replaces literacy instruction with a two-hour block of inte-grated science–literacy instruction. Students receiving this instruction have consistently outpaced students receiving regular language arts and science programs on national norm-referenced assessments

Skilled readers are also more motivated and engaged readers, reading more actively and more voluminously, thus further developing their knowledge and skill

This cycle has a down side, in that some readers do not come to the task with a knowledge base, inferential capacities, motiva-tions, or dispositions sufficient to enable comprehension

we use our knowledge along with our perceptions of what we think the text says to literally build, or construct, mental representations of what the text means.

The evidence for this role is impressive. In one study, some teachers of first-grade students in a high-poverty school district got 80% of their students to grade level in reading comprehension by the end of the year, while others in the same school district got only 20% of their students to grade level

Two promising pieces of national legislation to advance knowledge in this area are the Children and Media Research Advancement (CAMRA) Act and the National Center for Learning Science and Technology Trust Fund. The currently pending CAMRA Act would authorize long-term funding to establish a coherent research program on the many forms of electronic media and the myriad ways they affect children, from their developing brains to their developing bodies.

In school we often value words more than images and action. We often want to put a good deal of reading ahead of a learner’s opportunity to get images and actions (

With the enormous growth in English Language Learners in the United States, how do we teach English academic language in the larger context of English language and multilingual language development?

In carrying out quests like these in various units,

DIBELS

JUMP into reading for meaning (JUMP) program

the ages 6 to 11 — is absolutely crucial. It is during this time that children are making the transition from learning to read to reading to learn and, we now hope, reading to discover

Not only are we failing to educate millions of young people in basic literacy and numeracy, but we are also failing to educate them in important 21st-century skills. “21st-century skills”

Create “a place in every community”: New literacies technology centers

The most accurate predictor of school success is the size of a child’s vocabulary at age five of “book” words (words more likely to appear in written texts than in spoken language). This breadth of vocabulary is created by parents talking to children, answering their questions, reading to them, modeling their own pleasure in reading, and offering their children a wide variety of experiences in the world.

“How can emerging media help children learn?”

By providing linguistical-ly rich programs in which both the content andthe form of language are examined we are sup-porting literacy development in the fullest sense.

teachers should avoidrigid adherence to a sequence. It is not the casethat teachers should engage exclusively in rhymeactivities for weeks before they engage in sylla-ble activities. Likewise, we do not believe thatchildren must “pass” one type of operation (e.g.,matching) before having experiences with an-other (e.g., blending). Phonemic awareness de-velopment is not a lockstep process

Yo u m a y a l s o c r e a t e a c e n t e r w i t h p l a s t i cfoods and lunchbags. Children will play withthese items, retelling the story and creatingrhymes as they have their peers guess what theyhave in their bags. A copy of the book should beavailable at the center.

p h o n e m i c a w a r e n e s s c a n b estimulated in many students in large part by pro-viding them with linguistically rich environ-ments—ones in which they are exposed to richvocabulary, syntactic complexity, and decontextu-alized language as well as ones in which languageitself is explored and experimented with deliber-ately.

We b e l i e v e t h a t p h o n e m i c a w a r e n e s s c a n b estimulated in many students in large part by pro-viding them with linguistically rich environ-ments—ones in which they are exposed to richvocabulary, syntactic complexity, and decontextu-alized language as well as ones in which languageitself is explored and experimented with deliber-ately.

activities that arechild appropriate (International Reading Assoc-iation & the National Association for the Edu-cation of Young Children, 1998). Adams andBruck (1995), for instance, submitted that songs,chants, and word-sound games are ideally suit-ed toward developing young children’s sensitiv-ity to the sound structure of language. Beck andJuel (1995) posited that time spent on word play,nursery or Dr. Seuss rhymes, and general expo-sure to storybooks contribute to phonemicawareness. Mattingly (1984) encouraged class-room teachers to provide their students with lin-guistic stimulation in the form of storytelling,word games, rhymes, and riddles in order to fa-cilitate phonemic awareness. Yopp (1992), de-scribing developmentally appropriate activitie

phonemic awareness instructionshould be deliberate and purposeful. Althoughsome teachers have engaged their students inplayful language activities for years, they mayhave done so without knowing the full value ofthese activities.

Therefore, it is much too simplistic toidentify a hard-and-fast order in which opera-tions should be presented. Nevertheless, we pro-vide a possible order of what appears to be easierto more difficult operations for many children,given that the same types of sounds, the samenumber, and the same location are the focus ofattention. This information is offered only tosupport the teacher in making thoughtful deci-sions about potential sound manipulation activi-ties and is not intended to be prescriptiv

eachers played the essential role of facilitator or guide (Rogoff &Gauvain, 1986; Vygotsky, 1934/1986), with the scaffolding provided by theteacher diminishing in proportion to the students’ increasing knowledge, interest,and strategic abilities in a particular area (e.g., Alexander, 1997b; Brown &Palincsar, 1989), so that students could develop self-direction and autonomy(Deci & Ryan, 1991

A further consequence of this view of the learner as actively engaged in theprocess of learning has been a rekindled interest in strategic processing. In con-trast to the habituated skills of earlier eras, the effective use of strategies is un-derstood to require reflection, choice, and deliberate execution on the part of thelearner (Alexander, Graham, & Harris, 1998). Strategy use by its nature callsfor engaged learners who are willing to put forth effort, and who can knowl-edgeably respond to the demands of a particular situation. The body of literatureon learning strategies, particularly reading comprehension, has grown in recentyears in response to this new view of the engaged learner (P

Mothers cook without written recipes most of the time; if ( \ they use a recipe from a written source, they do so usually only after confirma­!lon and alteration by friends who have tried the recipe,

authority which books and book­related activities have in the lives of both the preschoolers