Scarborough's Reading Rope

Image Credit: https://www.azed.gov/scienceofreading/scarbreadingrope

Five Components of Reading Instrcution

The National Reading Panel determined five components of effective reading instruction: phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. These five areas work together so that people can make meaning of what they read.

Phonological Awareness

A phoneme is the smallest unit of spoken language - essentially the smallest meaningful sounds. A word like cat has three phonemes:

/k/ /a/ /t/.

Phonemic awareness describes a person's ability to combine, manipulate, isolate, and change phonemes.

Rhyming, listing words that begin with the same sound, and segmenting words into their individual sounds are just some examples of phonemic awareness.

Phonics

Phonics is the understanding that written letters represent specific sounds. These letters come in predictable patterns that help readers decode words and read unfamiliar words.

English is a complicated language. Some letters and letter patterns can represent more than one sound. For example, the letter c sounds different in the word cat and the word celery.

Teaching phonics skills helps people approach unfamiliar words by knowing "the rules" of the language.

Fluency

Fluency is the ability to read quickly, accurately, and with proper expression. Fluent readers sound like they are naturally speaking as they read.

Fluency is important because it helps aid comprehension.

When a person is not fluent, their brain spends more time and energy trying to decode (read) the words on the page and has less capacity to decipher what those words mean when they are put together.

Vocabulary

Vocabulary is the ability to pronounce and understand the meaning of words. There are two main types of vocabulary and they both help aid comprehension.

Oral vocabulary is a person's spoken vocabulary. It is the words they can meaningfully use themselves when speaking and the words they understand when someone is speaking to them.

Print vocabulary is a person's ability to make sense of the words they read. People have a larger oral vocabulary than print vocabulary because decoding can get in the way of understanding a word's meaning. If a person cannot read a word, then they cannot find meaning in it.

Comprehension

Comprehension is the ability to understand what we read. Comprehension is what reading is all about. It is the main goal of reading - to make sense of the words on the page.

It takes all of the other components of reading to comprehend a text. People must be able to decode known and unknown words using their phonics skills, read fluently, and understand the vocabulary in a passage in order to comprehend it.

There are a variety of strategies to help understand texts. Some of these include: connecting reading to prior knowledge, making predictions as you read, asking questions as you read, answering questions as you read, recognizing story and nonfiction text structures, inferring, and summarizing.

Page updated

Report abuse