Reading Tutoring and Literacy Consulting
Science of Reading
The human brain is not designed to naturally begin reading. We need to develop new pathways in our brains in order to learn to read. The skills needed to learn to read are housed under two areas: language comprehension and word recognition. The Simple View of Reading provides a model to help us understand what skills are needed for us to learn to read.
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Word Recognition
Word recognition includes phonological and phonemic awareness, phonics, and sight recognition of known words (orthographic mapping).
Language Comprehension
Language comprehension includes background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge
Both of these areas must be developed in order to achieve reading comprehension.
What does all of this mean?
Phonemic Awareness
Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify, isolate, and manipulate the smallest units of sound in words. Direct instruction in phonemic awareness has been shown to be critical to developing reading skills.
Phonics
Phonics instruction teaches the connection between the sounds in language and their corresponding spelling patterns.
Comprehension
Reading comprehension is the ability to understand what one reads. This is the ultimate goal of reading instruction. We can support reading comprehension through the development of vocabulary, background knowledge, and language comprehension.
Fluency
Fluency is the ability to read smoothly and accurately. This ability is developed through direct and explicit phonemic awareness and phonics instruction.