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
Support oral language development with frequent interactions and play-based instruction that encourages children to engage in conversation, listen, and think aloud.
Frequent, daily language interactions that follow children’s interests are the best way to support children’s oral language development.
Sources: Institute of Education Sciences, Foundations in Emergent Literacy Instruction; University of Virginia
Effective Practices
- Play-based interactions with teacher scaffolding.
- Model use proper use of suffixes.
- Restate and elaborate on what children say.
- Model using words to describe the child’s action.
- Engage children in brief language interactions throughout the day.
- Provide short opportunities for children to practice language features, such as prepositions, during daily routines.
- Encourage sophisticated language use by having children tell stories, provide explanations, talk about the past or future, and express their opinions or judgements.
- Engage children in multi-turn conversations and model how language is used in social situations.
- Ask open-ended, thought-provoking questions.
- Engage in active listening and give ample wait time before responding.
- Provide intentional responses during conversations using strategic scaffolds.
- Narrate with lots of details through descriptive phrases and words and model complex sentences.
- Encourage peer-to-peer language interactions.
- Help children to share and learn from each other to build language and social skills.
Tools and Activities
Talk, Read and Sing Together: Tips for Preschool Teachers
Get tips for creating a language-rich environment in preschool and other early childhood education programs.
Download from the U.S. Department of Education
Oral Language Comprehension Activities
Engaging in rich conversations about everyday things and reading lots of stories are ways to help young children strengthen oral language skills and comprehension.
Learn More from Reading Rockets
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.