The five essential components of reading

The five essential components of reading are: PHONEMIC AWARENESS, THE ALPHABET PRINCIPLE , READING FLUENCY, VOCABULARY DEVELOPMENT, READING COMPREHENSION STRATEGIES.

Now to expand on these a bit

Phonemic Awareness (PA) is:

1. the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in spoken words and the understanding that spoken words and syllables are made up of sequences of speech sounds (Yopp, 1992; see References).

2. essential to learning to read in an alphabetic writing system, because letters represent sounds or phonemes. Without phonemic awareness, phonics makes little sense.

3. fundamental to mapping speech to print. If a child cannot hear that "man" and "moon" begin with the same sound or cannot blend the sounds /rrrrrruuuuuunnnnn/ into the word "run", he or she may have great difficulty connecting sounds with their written symbols or blending sounds to make a word.

4. essential to learning to read in an alphabetic writing system.

5. a strong predictor of children who experience early reading success.

The alphabetic principle is composed of two parts:

• Alphabetic Understanding: Words are composed of letters that represent sounds.

• Phonological Recoding: Using systematic relationships between letters and phonemes (letter-sound correspondence) to retrieve the pronunciation of an unknown printed string or to spell words. Phonological recoding consists of:

* Regular Word Reading

* Irregular Word Reading

* Advanced Word Analysis

Fluency (automaticity) is reading words with no noticeable cognitive or mental effort. It is having mastered word recognition skills to the point of over learning. Fundamental skills are so "automatic" that they do not require conscious attention.

Examples of automaticity:

• shifting gears on a car

• playing a musical instrument

• playing a sport (serving a tennis ball)

Vocabulary Knowledge is learning, as a language based activity, is fundamentally and profoundly dependent on vocabulary knowledge. Learners must have access to the meanings of words that teachers, or their surrogates (e.g., other adults, books, films, etc.), use to guide them into contemplating known concepts in novel ways (i.e. to learn something new).

(Baker, Simmons, & Kame'enui, 1998)

Comprehension is :

• the essence of reading

• active and intentional thinking in which the meaning is constructed through interactions between the test and the reader (Durkin, 1973)

(n.d.). Retrieved June Sunday, 2010, from http://reading.uoregon.edu/big_ideas/index.php

As an educator I'm sure that all teachers are aware of these areas and we all do teach them(even if we just give exercises from the Reading workbooks.). One wonders however how much emphasis is actually placed on these. I know that before this program one used to teach the 5 areas but usually gloss them over or even teach them during times of the day after having covered the “Big subjects” ie Maths and Language or just stick in a quick lesson to be able to writing up the record and evaluation for the week.

These days however one has placed an emphasis on these areas in fact it is best(in my humble opinion) to teach these areas at the beginning of the day(when the children's minds are fresh). One has noted a remarkable increase in the interest of all students in reading. In fact the students are a lot more eager to read aloud now than at the start of the academic year 2009.

It is very important to focus on the key concepts of reading, this sets the stage and the children will perform...