Teaching is a lot. As a teacher, you have approximately 120 things to do or think about each day – especially in the beginning. Special education throws a few extra balls at you as well. Teaching my students to read was probably the biggest challenge in my first few years. Unfortunately, my training was woefully inadequate. And I spent many nights pouring over blogs and research and teaching books. Here is a rundown of the basics for teaching reading.
There are two major components to reading: decoding the words and making meaning from the words. If a student struggles with reading, it will be in one or both of these areas. Breaking these components down further are the five major areas of reading:
1) Phonemic Awareness
2) Phonics
3) Fluency
4) Vocabulary
5) Comprehension
To provide the best instruction, you need to know your students’ levels of functioning in each area. I created a one-page form – Student Reading Profile At-A-Glance – that I fill out for each of my students at the beginning of the year and update it for their IEP meeting. Sometimes, you can find all of this information on a student from their previous teacher or recent evaluations. Otherwise, you will need to administer assessments in each area.
Phonemic Awareness
This area focuses on the most basic elements of language – sounds and units of sounds. Students need to understand that language is made of many different sounds. They also need to be able to identify specific sounds in words. It only focuses on spoken words and language. This skill is foundational for developing reading and spelling skills. Typically, phonemic awareness is addressed very thoroughly in kindergarten and teachers can begin to identify students who struggle.
Another part of this area is phonological awareness. This skill has students identifying and manipulating units of language such as individual sounds, onsets, rhymes, and syllables. This includes skills like rhyming words, segmenting words into individual sounds or syllables, and manipulating sounds (addition, substitution, and deletion). These are all foundational skills for successful readers.
If a student is struggling with reading, then it is valuable to know if they have strong phonemic and phonological awareness. A quick inventory will help you determine if it is an area of concern. As a middle school teacher, I did not always have access to the kindergarten curriculum. So I developed my Phonemic and Phonological Awareness Inventory for Middle School to use with my older students. It is quick and usually a great little brain break for my students when I am assessing them.
Phonics
After learning about the sounds in language through spoken word, students learn how to match sounds to letters. Eventually, they learn how to read short words and longer words by identifying syllables. This is phonics – where students learn to decode written words. For students with dyslexia, this is where difficulties arise most often. Fortunately, several intervention programs and pedagogies exist to provide support for these students.
A phonics assessment will have students produce sounds for letters, vowel teams, and letter groups (like ‘ing’ and ‘tion’). Students should also read a variety of words that include different sounds and syllable types. I always find this to be the most interesting and vital assessment. In my first year, I found out that one of my students did not know the sound for ‘w’ and it was a game-changer! Most schools will have an assessment available for phonics skills. As a teacher trained in Orton-Gillingham and Wilson Reading System, I often opt for the Word Identification and Spelling Test (WIST) or the Wilson Assessment of Decoding and Encoding (WADE.)
Fluency
This is the bridge between reading words and understanding words. Fluency is reading with automaticity and expression. Ideally, a student will read a sentence as if they were speaking in a conversation. This skill requires strong decoding and phonics skills. It also means that a reader needs to understand what they are reading. That way, they can phrase it correctly and incorporate expression. If a student struggles to read fluently, it can impact their comprehension and, therefore, make it difficult to process meaning from the text.
Fluency assessments typically focus on correct words per minute, or CWPM. Typically, a student reads a leveled text for one minute and the test administrator keeps track of any missed or skipped words. You may also rate or take note of the student’s phrasing, pace, and expression. Fluency assessments are often normed and come with a key that describes the average CWPM for a student by grade level. Many fluency assessments exist and most schools will have resources available. I like DIBELS from the University of Oregon – it includes materials for K-8 and many great resources for assessing and progress monitoring reading fluency.
Vocabulary
Of course, a reader can only make meaning from what they read if they understand what the words mean. This is the importance of vocabulary. Most students will understand around 20,000 spoken words when they are in the first grade (around 6 years old) and will learn new words very quickly in school. In addition to knowing many words, students begin to understand that words have multiple meanings. Morphology, the study of root words, suffixes, and prefixes, helps broaden readers’ knowledge of words and allows them to determine the meaning of words using their parts. Often students with learning disabilities will have a limited understanding of vocabulary words and this makes understanding texts very difficult.
Assessing vocabulary is not always straightforward. Some progress monitoring assessments such as NWEA MAP and iReady (computer-based diagnostics) can provide information on students’ vocabulary skills such as the approximate grade level of vocabulary they are understanding. Classroom-based diagnostics in parts of speech, word parts (prefixes, suffixes, and root words), and using context clues can give you a snapshot of a student’s overall understanding of words. These assessments can also give you an idea of the strategies students use for determining the meaning of words.
Comprehension
The ultimate goal of reading is comprehension – understanding, retaining, and synthesizing the information. It encompasses many reading skills including visualizing, summarizing, predicting, making inferences, determining the central idea, and interpreting figurative language (just to name a few). This area allows readers to gain knowledge and new ideas. Thus, it becomes fundamental to learning as students get older and are required to read and analyze texts. While there are many genres, texts generally fall under literature and informational texts. They have distinct structures and purposes and students will need to practice comprehension skills with both types of texts.
Since comprehension can be very broad and may be limited by a student’s word-reading skills, this can be tricky to assess comprehensively. As with vocabulary, progress monitoring assessments like NWEA MAP and iReady can give an idea of the grade level at which a student is comprehending. Fountas & Pinnell’s Benchmark Assessment System can give you some insight into a student’s comprehension (as well as fluency and phonics). If you do not have access to standardized reading comprehension assessments, then I recommend developing comprehension questions based on a reading fluency passage. This will give you an idea of what the student understands when they read a text.
I know that this is a very quick rundown on each area of reading and there is so much more to know about each area. I will expand on each of them in future posts. But this should give you a basic understanding of what reading encompasses and what you need to learn about your student’s reading skills. If you are looking for more tips on how to start your school year strong, check out my post on setting up a new caseload.