While it is not the intent of this manual to build your expertise in teaching reading to young students, it is useful to have a basic understanding of the building blocks to literacy and to see where fluency fits in the process. The following terms were listed in the “Steps to Literacy” graphic, and tutors have found it useful to have them listed here for reference.
Phonemic Awareness
Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify and manipulate individual sounds — phonemes — in spoken words.
Phonemic awareness is not phonics; its focus is on spoken language, whereas phonics relates to written language.
Phoneme Segmentation
Phoneme segmentation is the ability to hear words and break down the individual sounds in the words. For example, the learner breaks the word run into its component sounds — r, u, and n.
Phonics
Phonics is the relationship between the letters of written language and the sounds of spoken language.
Phonics is letter-sound associations.
Alphabetic Principle
The goal of phonics instruction is to help children to learn and be able to use the alphabetic principle. The alphabetic principle is the understanding that there are systematic and predictable relationships between written letters and spoken sounds.
Alphabetic principle is composed of two parts:
- understanding that words are composed of letters that represent sounds, and
- using systematic relationships between letters and phonemes (letter-sound correspondence) to retrieve the pronunciation of an unknown printed string or to spell words.
Decoding
Decoding is a process students are taught when faced with a word they do not know. Decoding is breaking the word into parts to sound it out using phonics skills. In essence, the student is breaking the word’s “code” — hence, decoding.
Recoding
Recoding is putting the word parts together into a complete word.
Initially, recoding is choppy and plodding as the student recodes each word and reads word-by-word, rather than automatically recognizing words and reading fluently.
Blending
Blending is the skill of joining individual speech sounds (phonemes) together to make a word. Blending is a crucial phonemic awareness skill
Sight Words
Sight words, often also called high-frequency sight words, are commonly used words that young children are encouraged to memorize by sight as a whole word so that they can automatically recognize them words in print without having to use any strategies to decode.
Fluency
Fluency is the ability to read text accurately and quickly. Fluent readers group words quickly to gain meaning and read aloud effortlessly with expression.
Additional Resources: Leveled Book Curriculum Grades 1–3