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 explicit instruction in the morphological structure of words.
Adolescent students who understand the morphological structure of words are better equipped to decode complex words, determine the meaning of these words, and are better equipped to tackle the increased reading and writing demands of middle and high school.
Source: National Institute for Literacy, 2007
Effective Practices
- Teach students different morpheme patterns (e.g. Anglo-Saxon morphemes, Latin morphemes, and Greek morphemes).
- Teach the six syllable patterns.
- Teach meaning of morpheme within the context of the sentence and how inflections and derivations change the meaning of words.
- Explicitly teach students specific multisyllabic word reading strategy.
Source: National Institute for Literacy, 2007
Tools and Activities
Multisyllabic Word Reading Strategy
One strategy for teaching students to decode multisyllabic words is to explicitly teach these five steps to students:
- Circle the prefixes.
- Put a box around the suffixes.
- Look at what is left – underline vowels.
- Say the word parts slowly.
- Say the entire word.
In order for the strategy to work, students must know prefixes and suffixes, understand syllable types, have some understanding of common roots, and understand basic phonics principles.
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.