The Threads of Reading

Strategies for Literacy Development

Karen Tankersley

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780871207944
• eBook ISBN: 9781416612605
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

How can teachers make sure that all students gain the reading skills they need to be successful in school and in life? In this book, Karen Tankersley describes the six foundational "threads" that students need to study in order to become effective readers: phonemic awareness, phonics and decoding, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, and higher-order processing.

For each area, the author explains how students acquire the reading skills they need and offers a series of skill-building strategies and activities that teachers can use in the classroom. Although reading is perhaps most intensely taught in the kindergarten and 1st-grade classrooms, Tankersley emphasizes that helping students become lifelong readers is a task for all teachers, including content-area teachers in middle and high schools.

The Threads of Reading addresses key questions about literacy, such as

* What makes a difference in reading achievement?
* How much reading time is enough?
* How can teachers use writing to build reading skills?
* How can teachers help students make meaning from their reading?

The strategies in this book address many situations, from individual instruction to small- or large-group instruction, from kindergarten to high school. Teachers will appreciate the multitude of activities provided, and administrators will learn to better evaluate the reading programs in place in their districts and schools. Grounded in both research and "teacher lore" from actual classrooms, this book is a solid guide to helping students become lifelong readers.

Note: This product listing is for the Adobe Acrobat (PDF) version of the book.

Chapter 1

Readiness/Phonemic Awareness

Teaching children to manipulate the sounds in language helps all types of readers learn to read. Phonemic awareness and letter knowledge have been identified in several research studies (Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, & Wilkerson, 1985; Adams, 1990; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998) as the two key indicators of how well children will master beginning reading skills during the first two years in school. Because it plays such a vital role in forming the foundation of reading development, phonemic awareness is the first thread in the tapestry of reading. Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate phonemes, which are the smallest part of a spoken language. Phonemes are the element of language that allows discrimination and make a difference in the meaning of a specific word. In the English language, it is generally accepted that there are anywhere from 41 to 51 phonemes in spoken speech. While there are words with only one phoneme such as I or a, most words have more than one phoneme. More than one letter (such as in the phonemes "bl" or "ch") can also represent phonemes. Phonemes with more than one letter are usually referred to as blends, diphthongs, or digraphs depending on their composition.

Instruction in phonemic awareness involves helping children examine and manipulate phonemes in spoken syllables and words. The ability to recognize that words are made up of discrete sounds and that these sounds can be changed is essential to success in learning to read (Lundberg, Frost, & Petersen, 1988; Hoffman, Cunningham, Cunningham, & Yopp, 1998). Beginning readers must also be able to make the connection that words are made up of sounds and that sounds are made up of letters and letter combinations (Gunning, 1996). This understanding is the foundation on which to build solid reading skills.

One of the major components that determines a child's readiness to learn to read is his or her understanding of how the sounds work together. Children learn that words are made up of individual phonemes that help to make one word distinguishable from another word. For example, the words cat, sat, and rat have the same phoneme sound "at" at the end of the word but because of the initial phoneme difference, a listener interprets very different meanings for each word. Phonemic awareness is this ability to take words apart, to put them back together again, and to change them to something else. It is a foundational skill around which the rest of the threads of reading are woven.

In addition to understanding sounds, a child also needs to understand the concept of a word, how the position of a word (first word or last word) makes a difference in a sentence, and that words consist of individual letters. Children must also understand that letters have positions in words (first letter, middle letters, or last letter) and that some of these letters form syllables.

Some ways to help students develop their phonemic awareness abilities are through various activities that identify phonemes and syllables, sort and classify phonemes, blend phonemes to make words, break apart words into their various components, and interchange phonemes to make new words.

Why Is Phonemic Awareness Important?

According to the National Reading Panel Report (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000), the level of phonemic awareness that children possess when first beginning reading instruction and their knowledge of letters are the two best predictors of how well they will learn to read during the first two years of formal reading instruction. Researchers Adams, Foorman, Lundberg, & Beeler (1998) tell us that before children learn to read, they must understand that the sounds that are paired with the letters are the same as the sounds of speech they hear. They state, "For those of us who already know how to read and write, this realization seems very basic, almost transparent. Nevertheless, research shows that the very notion that spoken language is made up of sequences of these little sounds does not come naturally or easily to human beings" (p. 1). A strong understanding of phonemic concepts must be solidly in place prior to formal instruction in reading. It is critical that a child make the association that words on the page are simply "talk written down."

Children form concepts about literacy by observing adults in their environment and by interacting with print during their own early attempts at reading and writing (Sulzby & Teale, 1991). The first signs of phonemic awareness usually appear in children between the age of two and three years old when they begin making rhymes out of words that they know. For example, children may sing, recite rhymes, or make a game out of saying words like "sat, fat, cat, rat, bat, at." An extensive exposure to alliterative texts and rich oral environments during these early years helps ensure that this connection develops.

Young children start out believing that the "story" in a book is in the pictures. As they mature, they develop the understanding that while they cannot read the words, it is the words and not the pictures that carry the important meaning of the book (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). This is an important developmental milestone. Four- and five-year-old children can be observed to "read" books that adults have frequently read to them with increasing intonation and phrasing even though they are in reality only "pretend reading" a memorized book. Children frequently use certain patterns that they have learned from listening to children's books such as "once upon a time" or "the end" while pretend-reading their own books. In their early stages of writing development, these are also the styles that children will mimic in their own attempts at story writing.

Young children also develop some understanding of letters as they "write" on paper. At the age of two or three, many children have observed adults writing—so they make their own attempts at writing by making squiggles on paper. Often children can even "read" the message to anyone who asks for a "translation." In later stages of development, the squiggles the child makes may even become recognizable letters or letter strings. This development should be encouraged and supported in the preschool classroom and in the family. It is foundational development in the understanding of the link between writing and word messages.

Because they often hear stories being read aloud, young children may believe that "reading" only occurs when words are being spoken. When watching an adult read silently, the child may insist that something must be spoken for reading to be taking place (Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982). Five year olds who have observed adults read silently will often engage in intense scrutiny of the pictures page by page as if reading silently before "reading" the page to another person. As children make more intense connections between the print and the "message" of the book, they will begin to attend more to the print on the page and less and less to the pictures. This transition seems to mark a period of time when children are assimilating knowledge about how print and speech are linked. This too is a developmental milestone on the road to fluent reading.

As children listen to adults read, they begin to develop the understanding that the adults are interpreting the message on the page through symbols. At quite a young age, children grasp the notion that an object or symbol can stand for a concept (Marzolf & De Loache, 1994). For example, children recognize that the "golden arches" stands for McDonald's restaurants long before they can read the name on the building. The interpretation of the child's own written symbols indicates that the child has made a connection between "talk" and the letter symbols on the page. This signals an emergence of sound-symbol awareness in the young child's mind.

Many children come from print-rich, literate homes and can have more than a thousand hours of exposure to reading and literacy-building activities before they enter formal school. In these homes, reading is a priority and parents have spent many hours reading to their children or playing language-building games such as singing, reciting rhymes, or playing word and letter games. Electronic letter identification technology, letter flash cards, and word games also abound in these homes. Writing is also encouraged and children have many opportunities to try a hand at scribbling, coloring, or working with magnetic letters. These children often "pretend read" a memorized book to their proud parents and "write" a love note to mommy or grandma. Their phonemic awareness skills are firmly in place by the time they enter formal schooling and they are ready to move into more formal reading activities.

What Happens When Phonemic Awareness Is Missing or Underdeveloped?

While phonemic awareness is easily taught to children in the early years, the absence of strong oral language, reading, and word play in the home can lead to reading difficulties and a failure to progress in reading development (Hammill & McNutt, 1980; Scarborough, 1998). The level of phonemic awareness that a child possesses accounts for as much as 50 percent of the variance in reading proficiency by the end of 1st grade (Blachman, 1991; Juel, 1991; Stanovich, 1986; Wagner, Torgeson, & Roshotte, 1994). The degree of phonemic awareness that the child has developed upon entry into school is widely held to be the strongest single determinant of the child's reading success (Adams, 1990; Stanovich, 1986; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998).

Poorly developed phonemic awareness skills distinguish low socioeconomic preschoolers from their more advantaged peers (Liberman, Rubin, Duques, & Carlisle, 1985). According to researchers Snow, Burns, & Griffin (1998), "Cognitive studies of reading have identified phonological processing as crucial to successful reading and so it seems logical to suspect that poor readers may have phonological processing problems." Between 40 and 75 percent of preschoolers with early language impairments develop reading difficulties and other academic problems as they enter formal schooling (Aram & Hall, 1989; Brashir & Scavuzzo, 1992). Other factors besides an impoverished oral environment in the preschool years, such as attention deficit disorder or hyperactivity disorders, can also impair early success in reading development.

As many as 31 percent of the children who enter kindergarten with attention deficit or hyperactivity disorders will have difficulty learning to read. Initial problems in reading usually do not go away without intensive intervention and individualized tutoring. By 9th grade, over 50 percent of students with attention deficit or hyperactivity disorders will have developed moderate to severe reading delays or other reading problems (Shaywitz, Fletcher, & Shaywitz, 1994; 1995). Early monitoring and early support for these students is critical if they are to progress with their age peers.

One sometimes overlooked problem that makes it difficult for some children to learn distinguishing characteristics of words is the dialect of adult speakers who instruct them. Adult speakers often enunciate sounds differently based on their dialectic patterns and personal speech habits. This can make it difficult for a struggling child to clearly hear the word that the adult is trying to say. When an adult uses a different dialect than the child, special care must be taken to enunciate the phonemes clearly and distinctly.

Another reason that some children can be delayed in phonemic awareness skills is due to poor or slowly developing oral language skills. Sometimes children are not able to enunciate all of the phonemes they may be exposed to in oral language. Children who have had many ear infections or tubes in their ears as an infant, sometimes cannot discriminate all of the phoneme sounds in the English language. In addition to not being able to hear these sounds, children sometimes are not able to orally form some of them. Speech articulation is tied to developmental stages so children are not able to form all sounds by the same age. If there are concerns about a student's ability to discriminate or enunciate certain sounds, a speech pathologist should be consulted. In most cases, all sounds should be fully developed and present in a child's speech pattern by the age of eight or nine at the very latest. Failure to note these difficulties and seek advice could contribute to delays in the development of solid phonemic awareness skills in young readers.

Letter-Sound Identification

Once a child has a strong sense of phonemics, the learning of the letter names and their corresponding sounds can begin to take root. Learning letter sounds by associating the sound with something concrete such as an animal name or other concrete object is the quickest and most long-lasting method for learning the letters and their corresponding sounds. Teaching the letter names and letter sounds themselves is the beginning stage of phonics instruction.

The development of solid phonemic awareness skills should be the main goal of the preschool and kindergarten years. Early instruction in phonemic awareness should be primarily oral with the exception of some beginning attempts to write the letters themselves. There is a hierarchy of understandings that must be mastered at the foundational level (Treiman & Zukowski, 1991). The first understanding is the concept of a "word" followed by the concept of rhyme and how to make rhymes. After mastering these concepts, students must learn to segment syllables, hear the onset and rime in a word, and then learn to segment and blend sounds into words. Each child must be able to identify individual sounds within a word, recognize the same sounds in different words, and be able to distinguish between the same or different sounds in words. Children must also be able to combine sounds to form various words and to isolate separate sounds in words. Manipulating letters, sounds, and phonemes is the heart of learning to read.

An easy test to determine a child's readiness for beginning reading instruction is the letter identification test. Asking students to name letters and sounds given in random order is as good a predictor of reading readiness as is giving an entire reading readiness battery to the student (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). Developing phonological awareness consists of helping students understand the rhythm, pattern, and beauty of the language. Solid readiness skills consist of several factors. First, children must understand the concept of directionality. This understanding includes the concepts of left to right; front to back; and top to bottom. Second, they must learn to see and recognize patterns and develop an interest in the rhythm of language. According to Adams (1990), "Reading depends on a system of skills whose components must mesh properly." Understanding how print works and that it has predictable patterns help children learn to embrace print as enjoyable and helpful.

Children come to formal schooling with a wide range of background experiences and developmental milestones. Children should be taken from where they are and advanced in their reading development process. If kindergarten children already possess sound phonemic awareness skills when they come to school, then they are ready for more challenging work and more formal reading instruction. If they do not have this background, then we must provide this background knowledge and support before continuing with more advanced reading instruction.

Students who are extremely delayed or who come from severely impoverished homes may need additional tutoring or individual support to become proficient in letter-sound relationships. If children are having difficulty learning the letter names, we should teach the letters in unlike pairs such as x and o or n and p. Once the children have mastered the unlike letters, then they can advance to finer discriminations such as c and o, r and n, m and n, b and d, or p and q.

The phonemic awareness and extensiveness of the vocabulary that a kindergartner brings to school are two of the strongest predictors of future reading achievement (Juel, 1991; Scarborough, 1989; Stanovich, 1986; Wagner, Torgeson, & Roshotte, 1994). There is also a high correlation between letter identification skills and success in beginning reading (Scanlon & Vellutino, 1996). One of the main goals of the preschool and kindergarten years should be to have every child develop strong phonemic awareness skills and to master letter-sound identification. Beginning instruction in phonics prior to when the child has acquired phonemic awareness and letter identification skills is ineffective. Ensuring that these two foundational understandings were in place by the end of the kindergarten year would go a long way toward helping 1st graders develop solid beginning reading skills. Some activities to help students develop letter identification and letter-sound identification skills, are the following:

Letter Sort

Give students magnetic letters, lettercards, or letter tiles. Ask students to sort the letters by various categories such as letters with curves, letters with circles, long letters, tall letters, short letters, upper case, lower case, vowels, consonants, letters with short sticks, letters with long sticks, and so forth. This activity will help students visually identify the characteristics of the various letters and will reinforce the concept of sorting based on specific attributes.

Forming Letters

Ask students to form letters using various manipulative materials. Substances that can be used are clay, dough, sand, salt, or shaving cream. Grocery store meat trays work well as individual "drawing boards" for letter experimentation. Many grocery stores will give unused styrofoam meat packing trays to teachers free of charge or at a very minimal cost if you ask the store manager. Place alphabet stamps with blank paper in another center for student experimentation with letters. Cookie cutters to make letters from clay or play dough can also be available for making words in another classroom center.

Ordering Letters

Use a pointer often to help young children learn left-to-right tracking and sweep. Sing the alphabet song while pointing to the letters with the pointer. When lining up to leave the classroom, hand each child an alphabet letter....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Readiness/Phonemic Awareness
• Chapter 2. Phonics and Decoding
• Chapter 3. Vocabulary
• Chapter 4. Fluency
• Chapter 5. Comprehension
• Chapter 6. Higher-Order Thinking
• Chapter 7. Frequently Asked Questions About Literacy
• Conclusion
• References
• About the Author
• Related ASCD Resources: Literacy
• Copyright Page