Reading is one of the most complex and amazing of all human abilities. While we might tend to think of the reading process is a single activity, in point of fact, many different things are going on in our brains while we are reading. The human brain has to do multiple tasks efficiently and simultaneously if we are going to be able to read, enjoy and fully understand any book or other written material. For teachers, there are five key elements of literacy instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, reading fluency, vocabulary development, reading comprehension. All of these elements combine to create an individual’s reading experience. For a child to successfully learn to read, he or she must develop all of these skills. The following will look into these five elements of literacy in detail.
Phonics
Phonics can be described as the link between letter symbols and sounds. It also describes how these sounds and symbols can be combined to create the words we use in speech and in writing. Phonics is what takes what would otherwise be just lines and squiggles on the page and turns them into meaningful words and sentences (Ellis & Moss 2012). Most people rarely consider the fact that letters and words are largely arbitrary in nature. For example, there is nothing about the word “car” that suggests an actual car. Only our general agreement that it symbolically represents the car allows us to understand its meaning and use in a sentence. Thus, children learning to make a connection between the various sounds that each letter in the word make and assembling these in their minds is critical to literacy instruction.
There are several different approaches to teaching phonics, there are a range of approaches and methods that can be used when reading. Different methods can allow the reader using phonics to learn and read in different ways. For example, synthetic phonics assembles words basically from the ground up. New readers are in this case taught to associate words with the correct phonemes (which are sound units). They then use these assemblages to create words. Another approach, called analytic phonics, is what is known as “top-down.” In analytic phonics, the word is identified as a whole before then being parsed out to discover the sound letter combinations. As the name implies, analogy phonics makes use of those parts of words the learner is familiar with in order to help them understand new words. The last approach, known as “phonics through spelling” concentrates on connecting letters and sounds in writing. It should be noted that these various techniques are not mutually exclusive. They can be used together or separately to help children understand new words.
Phonemic Awareness
Phonemic awareness is somewhat similar to phonics, both concepts relate to the
connection between words and sounds. Whereas phonics looks at connection between letters and sounds, paste that recognizes that words are assembled using phonemes (small, individual units of sounds). While on the surface this might seem like the identical concept, in fact there is an important (if somewhat subtle) difference between these two ideas. Because phonics involves the use of letters, it can only be employed for a written language. Phonemes (on the other hand) are entirely based on sounds (Cassidy & Ortlieb 2012). Although phonemes can be represented with letters, they can also be just the auditory sounds produced by speaking the words themselves. In fact, children often learn phonemes before they learn to read.
Just as with phonics, there are a number of different ways that instructors can teach students phonemic awareness. For instance, the technique known as phoneme isolation requires the reader to isolate the individual sounds contained in a word so as to discover its meaning. A similar concept known as phoneme segmentation requires the reader to disassemble words into corresponding phonemes to figure out what the new word means. As must be obvious, these two approaches are quite similar to synthetic phonics. The process of identifying phonemes is reliant upon the reader’s existing knowledge of phonemes acquired through speech. This knowledge allows the reader to identify the sound patterns in a word. For instance, the reader would try to identify the phoneme “B” from the words like “ball” or “bat” and understand how to read another word beginning with the “B” phoneme, such as “blue.” Finally, in phoneme blending the reader assembles phonemes to build a word. This last approach is used with others listed above.
Vocabulary
Before anyone can read a word, they must first know that word. Obviously, it can be extremely frustrating and even useless to attempt a read a book, short story or article filled with words you do not know. Over time, as children become better and more knowledgeable readers, they learn to not only connect their existing or vocabulary (words they understand when spoken) they also add new words to their vocabulary. Of course, vocabulary growth and development should be a lifelong process.
There are two principal approaches to learning or teaching new vocabulary words. The first approach is to use explicit instructions in which someone (or something) informs a student about the meaning of a word and how it is pronounced. While the someone in question could be a teacher or a parent, students could also learn these vocabulary words from a printed dictionary, an online thesaurus or classroom study materials. In short, any resource that can provide young person with word definitions and accurate pronunciations good service such as source. The second approach is to make use of context. Using context means the reader is using the clues provided in the text that will help him or her understand the meaning of an unknown word. These clues can include things like the other words contained in the paragraph or sentence, the formatting of the text (italics or underlining), graphs or any illustrations. Essentially, context clues represent anything in the text that can be used to better understand the words being used.
Fluency
Fluency refers to a reader’s ability to quickly and accurately read a text. Fluency would mean that he or she should be using a variety of reading skills simultaneously. While is most instances the best way to judge fluency is by having the student read aloud, it can also be exhibited when they read in silence (Scully & Roberts 2002). When the reader is reading they can imagine how the words sound, even when reading silently. The characters in the book will speak in their own voices. This applies even to text that does not have dialogue between characters.
As a concept, fluency is closely associated with reading comprehension. The reader has to have the ability to move through the text quickly while still garnering the meaning. This is because getting stuck on a single word can interrupt the flow of reading and can make understanding the overall meaning of the text very difficult.
Reading Comprehension
For most people, comprehension is what they think of when they think about reading. After all, comprehension is the principle reason for reading. All other aspects of reading (and writing as well) serve the purpose of creating comprehension. Comprehension basically means that the reader understands what a given text (be it a book or newspaper article) is about.
In many ways, this part of the reading process is the complex one. In addition to making use of the six other aspects of reading, the reader also has to critically think about the text. Readers who are engaged in a text will be able to ask and answer questions about it and can summarize what the text has to say. This is another skill that develops over time as the reader gains experience.
The ability to read and write is perhaps the human race’s greatest invention. It has allowed us to pass on knowledge and stories in a far more effective way than was possible with oral traditions. When one reads the works of Tacitus or Shakespeare or Jane Austin, it is as though these authors speak directly to us as individuals. That is the power of the reading process. This is why it is vital for teachers to ensure they are using all aspects of literacy instruction, including phonemic awareness, phonics, reading fluency, vocabulary development and reading comprehension, to guide students to literacy.
References
Cassidy, J., & Ortlieb, E. (2012). Looking at Literacy in the 21st Century. Clearing House, 85(4), 141-145.
Ellis, S., & Moss, G. (2014). Ethics, education policy and research: the phonics question reconsidered. British Educational Research Journal, 40(2), 241-260
Scully, P., & Roberts, H. (2002). Phonics, Expository Writing, and Reading Aloud: Playful Literacy in the Primary Grades. Early Childhood Education Journal, 30(2), 93-99.
