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Phonemic Awareness best predictor for reading success

Research on instructing reading

Literacy at all levels is important as KNEA's Read Across America campaign is proving. The all-member publication, the KNEA Issues, will throughout the year highlight articles about instructing reading and heightening literacy for all students. This material can be found in NEA's publication Ten Proven Principles for Teaching Reading.

The principles and ideas written about are already being used in classrooms across Kansas and are based on solid research findings and practical experience. Research provides new information about basic cognitive and instructional processes, particularly those involved in reading comprehension.

Phonemic awareness is one of the best predictors of later success in reading

Phonemic awareness - discerning that spoken language is composed of phonemes, is an important predictor of success in learning to read. It involves a child's ability to hear the sounds in a word and to distinguish between words based on the different sounds.

Phonemic awareness helps children learn the letter-sound correspondences needed to read and spell words. Studies have shown that phonemic awareness training improves children's ability to read and spell. Unless word identification is effortless and automatic, the reader cannot devote attention to constructing meaning while reading.

Phonics - instruction in the relationships between letters and sounds - can help children attain automatic, visual recognition of spelling patterns within words for word recognition. Efficient recognition of spelling patterns, in turn, depends on accurate and automatic recognition of individual letters.

Studies of young children show that the most important precursor to success in learning to read is rapid recognition of the letters of the alphabet.

Studies also show that the efficient use of sound patterns in speech depends on the awareness of phonemes in spoken languages. This awareness relates strongly to success in beginning reading.

Many children develop these prerequisites without formal instruction. This is likely due both to the frequency and quality of early experiences these children have with oral language and to the amount of exposure they have to print before entering school.

Effective beginning reading instruction contains a balance of activities designed to improve word recognition, including phonics instruction and reading meaningful text. Writing and spelling activities are also part of effective reading instruction because they affect overall reading ability in a positive way.

Encouraging children to make invented spellings (to spell words as they sound) helps develop phonemic awareness as well as increase knowledge of spelling patterns.

Effective teachers interweave these activities within their instruction.

- NEA's Ten Proven Principles for Teaching Reading

And the research says

According to Robinson, Farone, Hittlelman and Unruh (1990), instructional practices in reading comprehension have shifted over the last century

• from using oral reading to help get meaning from text to using silent reading to aid comprehension;
• from using worksheets, workbooks and reading kits to direct student comprehension to teaching reading strategies that aid students in guiding their own comprehension;
• from asking "what questions"(e.g., identifying a story sequence) to teaching comprehension strategies that include these subskills (e.g., summarizing);
• from providing little direct teaching to increasing the amount of direct teaching that is specific (e.g., strategy instruction), followed by supervised independent practice.
  

This shift reflects an evolving view of reading that is now considered to be a strategic process through which readers construct meaning by interacting with text. That is, readers use clues in the text and their own prior knowledge to assign meaning to what they read.

Interactions among the teachers, the student, the text, the purposes for reading, and the context within which "literacy events" (activities that include reading, writing, discussions, journal writing) occur all come into play in the construction of meaning and acquisition of reading strategies.

The shift among practices in reading comprehension instruction is toward metacognition (understanding one's own thinking and using that knowledge to solve problems) and helping students develop tools with which to direct their own learning. This shift recognizes the significant role teachers play in student advancement along the continuum of literacy development.