Strategies, Practices and Tools
Decades of research provides a clear understanding of how skilled reading develops and how to most effectively support children in learning to read proficiently. Evidence-based, structured literacy instruction develops all the foundational language and literacy skills that must be woven together so that children can make meaning from the words they read.
The information presented here is intended to complement evidence-based core reading curricula and intervention programs already in place and help educators fill in gaps or modify their approaches with effective strategies, instructional practices, and tools and activities to implement them.
Early childhood educators can focus their practices to help children build language and emergent literacy skills. Pre-K and K-3 educators can find evidence-based ways to provide explicit, implicit, and incidental instruction across the essential components of literacy. And English Language Arts teachers across grades 4-12 will find effective practices to help students meet the increasing need for skilled reading.
Instructional Strategy
Provide both indirect and direct vocabulary instruction to build students’ knowledge of word meanings.
Vocabulary plays a prominent role in students’ ability to comprehend texts. Readers can’t fully understand a text without knowing what most of the words mean. Vocabulary instruction must extend beyond students memorizing definitions. Studies show that requiring students to look up the meaning of words in the dictionary and using the word in a sentence have found consistently poor results on students’ vocabulary growth. Using a variety of indirect and direct methods of vocabulary instruction increases students' word consciousness and interest in words and their meanings.
Source: Lane, 2014; Glass, 2020
Effective Practices
- Teach morphology to help support student access word meanings (e.g., word roots, common prefixes and suffixes).
- Teach word meanings through student-friendly explanations.
- Provide multiple exposures to a word’s meaning.
- Attend to word relations. Utilize graphic organizers such as word maps to support.
- Carefully select words to teach.
- To determine how to choose words for instruction, teachers should understand the three-tier system of categorizing words:
- Tier 1: Words that students learn through daily exposure to language. These words usually don’t need to be explicitly taught.
- Tier 2: Words that often appear in texts but are not commonly used in everyday conservations. These high-frequency words are ideal for instruction.
- Tier 3: Content-specific words.
- To determine how to choose words for instruction, teachers should understand the three-tier system of categorizing words:
- Provide opportunities for students to acquire words through indirect exposure (e.g., engage students in rich conversations, conduct engaging read-alouds).
Source: Glass, 2020; Honig et al., 2018
Tools and Activities
Frayer Model (Graphic Organizer)
The Frayer model is a vocabulary tool that helps build students' vocabulary. It requires students to define a vocabulary word or concept, generate examples and non-examples, provide characteristics, and illustrate the meaning of the word.
Download from AdLit
Related
Developmental benchmarks and literacy behaviors that most children display at a particular age/grade.
Evidence-based reading interventions support students who are identified as struggling with specific foundational literacy skills.
Evidence-based core curricula, interventions, and supplemental programs play a critical role in supporting students’ reading success.
While seemingly effortless, good reading is made up of a set of complex skills and strategies.