ESSENTIAL

COMPONENTS OF
READING
PHONEMIC AWARENESS
• Phoneme
– It is the smallest unit making up a spoken language.
- English has 44 sounds of speech.
- Phonemes combine to form syllables and words.
- To hear the phonemes in a word, one must break the word up into
its sounds. This is called “segmenting.”

Ex. Fun - /f/ /u/ /n/

• Complex phonic code – in English, phonemes can be spelled by 1-4
letters.
Ex.
Sit - /s/ /i/ /t/
Mail - /m/ /ai/ /l/
catch - /c/ /a/ /tch/
through - /th/ /r/ /ough/
• Blending Phonemes
when you read a new word, they need to sound out the phonemes
like this:
/m/ /a/ /t/

you are encouraged to say the phonemes quickly so that they

“blend” together into a word they recognize:
/m/ /a/ /t/ - “mat”
• Spelling with phonemes.
we learn to spell by segmenting the phonemes in a word and writing
a letter or letters (grapheme) for each phoneme.

For example, to spell the word “hat”, they would need to segment
the word into sounds like this:
HAT
Why Phonemic Awareness is Important?
• It is a strong predictor of long-term reading and spelling success.
• It can predict literacy performance more accurately than variables
such as intelligence, vocabulary knowledge, and socioeconomic
status.
PHONICS
• It is a system of teaching reading that builds on the alphabetic
principle, a system of which a central component is the teaching of
correspondences between letters or groups of letters and their
pronunciations.

• Research tells us that in order to become fluent readers, students

need to learn to decode unknown words accurately and
automatically.
FLUENCY
• Fluency is the ability to read “like to speak”.

• Researchers agree that fluency is one of the critical blocks of reading,

because fluency development is directly related to comprehension.
VOCABULARY
• “Vocabulary knowledge is knowledge; the knowledge of a word not
only implies a definition, but also implies how that word fits into the
world”.

• From the researchers, we know that vocabulary supports reading

development and increases comprehension.
COMPREHENSION
• Comprehension, or extracting meaning form what you read, is the ultimate
goal of reading.

GENERAL STRATEGIES FOR READING COMPREHENSION

1. Using prior knowledge/Previewing
2. Predicting
3. Identifying the Main Idea and Summarization
4. Questioning
5. Making Inferences
6. Visualizing
STRATEGIES FOR READING COMPREHENSION: NARRATIVE TEXT
Narrative text tells a story, either a true story or a fictional story. There are a number of
strategies that will help students understand narrative text.

STORY MAPS
1. Setting
2. Characters
3. Problem
4. Important Events
5. Outcome
6. Theme
• Retelling
• Prediction
• Answering Comprehension Question
SPELLING
• Correct Spelling is still important.
Here are other examples of situations where spelling is important:
• Writing so others can read and understand
• Recognizing the right choice from the possibilities presented by a spell
checker
• Looking up words in a dictionary
• Filling alphabetically
• Playing word games like scrabble
• Spelling is Important for Reading
“Spelling and reading build and rely on the same mental
representation of a word. Knowing the spelling of a word makes the
representation of it sturdy and accessible for fluent reading.”

• Spelling is important in writing

Writing is a mental juggling act depends on using basic sills with
automaticity (e.g. handwriting, spelling, grammar, and punctuation) so
that the writer can focus on topic, organization, word choice, and
audience needs.
• Spelling needs to be Explicitly Taught
The report implied that phonemic awareness and phonics
instruction had a positive effect on spelling in the primary grades and
that spelling continues to develop in response to appropriate reading
instruction.