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
Promote children’s phonological skill development by playing with the separate sounds within spoken words.
Building children’s capacity to hear and manipulate sounds in spoken language supports their ability to understand connections between sounds and letters and written words when they get older. Phonological awareness tasks can be difficult because they require young children to take what is most intuitive – which is thinking about what words mean – and focus instead on something more abstract – which is the way words sound. Phonological awareness is a slowly developing skill that continues to develop through the elementary school years. Explicit instruction paired with fun activities that continue to reinforce the sound patterns of language are important ways to build young children’s phonological awareness.
Sources: Institute of Education Sciences, Foundations in Emergent Literacy Instruction; University of Virginia
Effective Practices
- For small groups for explicit instruction; group children to focus on specific skill needs.
- Teach children how to delete parts from spoken compound words.
- Provide opportunities for children to manipulate sounds in spoken words along the phonological awareness continuum- word, syllable, onset-rime, and phoneme.
- Label and describe various units of sound.
- Teach different units of sounds through exaggerated stress and explicitly labeling the sound features of the words.
- Teach units of sound by focusing on words in a sentence.
- Teach units of sound by focusing on rhyme endings in rhyming words.
- Teach units of sounds by focusing on multisyllabic words and beginning word sounds.
- Prompt children to identify or manipulate various units of sound.
- Ask children to break apart (segment) words into various units of sound
- Ask children to take units of sound and blend them together to make words.
- Comment and ask questions about the similarities and differences in sound patterns.
- Teach children about sound patterns via structured phonological awareness games.
- Teach children about words that have similar and different sound patterns by focusing on rhyming, alliteration, and syllables.
- Provide additional opportunities to practice throughout the day.
- Lead a matching game with pictures of compound word parts.
- Point out examples of compound words during read alouds.
Tools and Activities
Examples of explicit, implicit, and incidental instruction for phonological awareness:
Explicit Instruction
The teacher implements systematic, small-group instruction using the I Do, We Do, You Do instructional routine to teach children how to delete syllables from spoken words. For example:
- “The word is teacher. Now, I’ll say teacher without saying tea. Cher.”
- Five words are used to model (tea-cher, chil-dren, mar-ker, re-cess, sing-ing) and time is provided for individual practice with scaffolding.
- The teacher repeats this explicit activity multiple times with the same and different words.
Implicit Instruction
During whole-group instruction the teacher leads the I Spy game with two-syllable objects around the classroom. Children say the whole word, the teacher identifies one of its syllables to delete, and then the children say the real or nonsense word that remains. For example:
- “I spy paper. Say paper without saying per.” The children say, “pa.”
Incidental Instruction
During a read-aloud of “Secret Seahorse,” the teacher asks the children to say secret without cret. The children say, “se.”
Phonological Awareness
Preschoolers can learn these skills during fun, engaging activities such as stories, songs, and word games.
Learn More from ECE Resource Hub
Phonemic Awareness: Phoneme Segmentation
See a detailed activity plan to help students learn to segment words into individual sounds.
Download from National Center on Intensive Intervention
Onset and Rime Picture Cards
Use these cards for a matching puzzle activity to take apart and put together parts of single-syllable words.
Download from Institute of Education Sciences
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.