The Building Blocks of Literacy and Reading

Alphabetic Principle:

According to the alphabetic principle, letters and combinations of letters are the symbols used to represent the speech sounds of a word. To understand that there is a direct relationship between letters and sounds is to understand the Alphabetic Principle, and it enables a reader to use appropriate pronunciation even an unknown word and associate it with a spoken word.

Understanding the relationship of letters and sounds is also the foundation of learning to spell. Thus, its importance is the basis for the basic building blocks of literacy. It can be assessed in many ways, but one concrete way of assessing one’s knowledge of the alphabetic principle is through the use of flash cards. There are many available for purchase, but it is also an easy tool to create by hand. Some instructional options include singing songs like the alphabet song, artistic means, and rhymes.

Phonemic Awareness:

Phonemic Awareness is a subset of phonological awareness in which listeners are able to hear, identify and manipulate phonemes, the smallest units of sound that can differentiate meaning. In order to do all of this and separate the spoken word requires phonemic awareness. Just as the word depicts, phonics is key in understanding phonemes because it is the ability to hear and manipulate individual phonemes. Like all elements of reading, phonemic awareness is important because it builds a foundation for students to understand the rules of literacy. This in turn allows each student to apply these skills and increase his or her oral reading fluency and understanding of the text. A key part of reading is being able to distinguish and manipulate the various individual sounds, so having a full understanding of phonemic awareness.

One way to measure one’s understanding is through the practice of phoneme isolation. This requires recognizing the individual sounds in words. For example, asking a student to tell you the first sound he or she hears in the word is one approach.

Oral Reading Fluency:

Readers not only need to decode the words accurately; they also need to decode them effortlessly or fluently. The ability to read with appropriate phrasing and expression (interpretation) is key in this component of reading and literacy. In essence, reading fluency refers to accurate and automatic decoding of the words in a text, along with appropriate expression and intonation. Be able to do so indicate success in optimal comprehension. Fluency is important in reading, then, because it affects how well readers understand what they read.

Assessments are discussed in terms of three components of fluency: accuracy, efficiency or how automatic it is, and appropriate use of phrasing and expression to convey meaning (intonation). eachers need to be able to gauge the effectiveness of their instruction in fluency; to do this, they need ways to assess student fluency validly and efficiently. Assessments should be as quick and easy to use as possible. One form of assessment is determined by the percentage of words a reader can read correctly. Although this only conveys a snapshot of a student’s reading skills, the assessments nonetheless reveal a great amount of competency. This procedure also guides teachers’ instruction to meet students’ specific needs. Students who perform poorly on the assessments can be identified for more thorough and comprehensive reading assessments.
 Reading fluency is yet another building block of literacy and certainly affects reading comprehension.


Comprehension:

What one could visualize or consider the top block amongst the stack of literacy blocks is comprehension. Comprehension is defined as the level of understanding of a text. If word recognition is difficult, students use too much of their processing capacity to read individual words, which interferes with their ability to comprehend what they are actually reading: the meaning is lost.

If the meaning is a lost, then there is nearly no use of all of the other literacy blocks that lead up to comprehension. Analyzing text inside and out of the classroom is a common practice for all teachers and their students. It is crucial for students to learn to analyze text (comprehend it) even before they can read it on their own, and comprehension instruction generally begins in pre-school or kindergarten. Reading different types of texts requires the use of different reading strategies and approaches. Teaching the components of these varieties of texts will help them to understand.

Analyzing text does not have to be limited to just discussion; an active, observable process can be very beneficial to struggling readers. However, a simple general form of analysis, summarization is a comprehension strategy that also needs to be taught. A summary might include the answers to who, what, where, when, why, and how.

Vocabulary:

Vocabulary simply refers to words and their meanings. Research has shown that vocabulary knowledge is an important predictor of reading comprehension ability. In order to understand the text as a whole, one must understand nearly each individual word. Children must have good vocabulary skills in order to communicate effectively; these skills apply to speaking, listening, and of course, literacy--reading, and writing.

Practicing vocabulary knowledge can be done by working with individual words, words in sentences, or in words meaningful text. You can teach your child about homonyms (words that are spelled and/or said the same way but have different

meanings like lead), synonyms (different words with similar or exact meanings like baby and infant), and antonyms (words that have opposite meaning like hot and cold). As any good educator knows, teachings these elements of vocabulary can be fun. Some students, like myself, will really enjoy word games such as word searches and crosswords. Others will enjoy more interactive, hands-on instruction like games, for example. Regardless of the method, assessment should still take place. Another method for assessment is spelling tests. Not only will you be practicing other elements of reading, but if you present it in the form of either or definition and they response by spelling the correct word, then this will surely prove to be a useful assessment in the general classroom.