Read Aloud - Reading aloud to students in order to foster the love of reading and to expose students to a variety of vocabulary, language patterns, story structures, genre and authors. The text may be at a higher readability level than the level of the students because a proficient reader is reading.
Shared Reading - Text is enlarged so students have visual access to the text. The text used may be in the form of a big book, overhead transparency or multiple copies of a text. The teacher models what a skilled reader does with text (print concepts, strategies, comprehension, text features, etc.). Students engage with the text over a series of repeated readings for a variety of purposes.
Guided Reading - Students work in small groups and are matched to text by their instructional level. Students read the text with coaching by the teacher to develop print concepts, use of cueing systems and use of reading strategies. The teacher is also observing and assessing students to make decisions for appropriate text selection and teaching points.
Independent Reading - Students read text independently to build fluency, for information, and to apply strategies learned in read aloud, shared and guided reading in text at their independent level.
Letter - Sound Recognition - Refers to the names and sounds of alphabet letters, and the relationship between the two. Knowledge of the names of the alphabet letters is a reliable predictor of beginning reading achievement. A child's ability to use letter/sound relationships is crucial in reading and writing.
Cues - The goal of beginning reading is for children to use all the cues "in concert" to help them comprehend what is being read.
- Semantic Cues -- use of prior knowledge, pictures and story
- Syntactic Cues -- use of oral language, grammatical patterns and knowledge of book language
- Graphophonic Cues -- use of alphabet knowledge and letter-sound recognition
Metacognition - Refers to the ability of the reader to monitor his or her own reading comprehension and use of reading strategies accordingly. These strategies (how, when and where to use information) are important because they lead to independence.
Onsets and Rimes - The onset is the letter or letter cluster that precedes the vowel in a monosyllabic word. The rime is the vowel and any subsequent consonants. Example: w ing, th ing
Orthographic Analogies - Refers to word families that can be generated from knowing onsets and rimes. Using orthographic analogies, students quickly increase their reading and writing vocabularies. Example: If a child knows the word man, they could use a rime analogy to read or write any word that rhymes (tan, fan, can, an).
Phonemes - Refers to the smallest units of sound in a word. Example: the word pig has three phonemes /p/ /i/ /g/. Phonemes are important to beginning readers and writers. When young writers approximate spelling, they are segmenting the word by phonemes and then writing the corresponding letters.
Phonological/Phonemic Awareness - Refers to a variety of tasks related to the sounds of language. The ability to perform phonological tasks greatly assists with both reading and writing acquisition. These tasks have different levels of difficulty. Examples of phonological tasks are:
- distinguish words that rhyme from words that do not rhyme
- match sound to sound
- segment words into sounds
- blend sounds into words
- approximate spelling
Phonics - Focus on the teaching of sound-spelling relationships to arrive at an approximate pronunciation of a word. It is one part of effective word identification instruction that establishes the function of print, builds familiarity with letters/sounds and uses writing and spelling to reinforce word recognition skills and strategies.
Strategies - "In-the-head" processes used to integrate new information with what is already known. Operations that allow the learner to use, apply, transform, relate, interpret, reproduce and re-form information for communication. (Clay, 1991)
Adapted from the following sources:
- A Blueprint for Literacy Success, Sandra Iverson
- Guided Reading: Good First Teaching for All Children, Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell
- Hillsborough County's Elementary Language Arts and Reading Frameworks
