After systematically reviewing reading research studies, the NRP put forth recommendations on reading instruction. These recommendations discussed the important roles of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. These elements are discussed further on this page. Educators should combine the NRP recommendations and the structured literacy research as they develop their reading instruction programs.
When we teach phonemic awareness (P.A.), we teach children to hear individual sounds within words; this sets them up to be ready for phonics instruction. In practice, children may work on recognizing beginning or ending sounds. Then they may blend sounds together or work to segment the sounds of which a word is comprised. In this article, Louisa Moats and Carol Tolman share how phonological knowledge develops.
The goal of phonics instruction is to make the alphabetic code explicit to students. English is a rich orthography, which means that despite having just 26 letters, it has about 44 phonemes. How do we know if a letter says its short or long sound? What is a schwa sound and when is it made? How do I read words with vowel teams? Phonics instruction teaches this code. There are always exceptions to phonics rules, and teachers should help students understand what the exceptions are and how to recognize them after they have a firm foundation of the pattern.
Fluency
Once students become fluent readers, they have more mental bandwidth to focus on comprehending and learning from text. As students master phonics patterns, continued practice will increase automaticity and fluency. In addition to decoding words accurately, fluent readers read with an appropriate rate and intonation. Educators and parents should regularly read aloud to their children to model fluency.Fluency can be directly practiced with repeated readings of passages that are at the students’ independent reading levels. Typically, practicing a passage 4 times aloud will enable students to read the piece fluently. Fluency can be practiced in fun, engaging ways, such as through choral reading with younger students, Reader’s Theater with older students, or by using character voices.
Vocabulary
Children learn thousands of words every year; most of these words are learned indirectly through conversations, spoken language, and through reading or being read to. Educators select words to directly teach. These words are ones students see frequently within a text. Understanding these vocabulary words helps students comprehend the text. Marzano describes a research-based 6-step process to teaching vocabulary here. Educators should encourage their students to be curious about words and to use a variety of interesting words in their writing and speech. When students area ready, teach base words, root words, prefixes and suffixes to help students learn more patterns to our language and to increase their understandings of the meanings of various word parts.
Comprehension
We know we’ve been successful as a reader when we are able to comprehend what we just read. Once a sentence has been decoded, we can consider its meaning. All grade levels benefit from seeing comprehension strategies modeled during read alouds. Research supports teaching the following comprehension strategies: monitoring comprehension, using graphic or semantic organizers, answering and generating questions, recognizing story structure, and summarizing the text. Strong readers are metacognitive – they are aware of their thinking as they read and they’re also aware of when their understanding breaks down. Educators should teach students to use reading strategies flexibly, and sometimes different strategies can be used in conjunction with each other.
What is structured literacy? 