Early Reading Skills Development

Designing Instructional Programming for Early Reading Skills

• Reading is the most important skill children acquire early in schooling, serving as the foundation for subsequent learning and opportunities.
• Reading proficiency is a complex skill with many interacting component skills.
• Naming printed words is a critical component skill for reading. Without proper individual word recognition, broader reading abilities are significantly impacted.
• Decoding, or word attack, skills are crucial for fluent reading. These skills allow readers to identify words beyond those explicitly taught.
• Phonics instruction, teaching letter sounds and blending them to form words, is a common method for teaching decoding.
• Fluent word recognition requires a generative component, enabling proficient readers to decode new words.
• Delays in acquiring decoding skills negatively impact reading achievement in the long term.
• Letter discrimination and naming are critical for early reading.
• Letter knowledge strongly predicts success in early reading.
• Early letter naming is a significant indicator of future reading success.
• Knowledge of letter names is strongly linked to success in reading instruction.
• Speed and accuracy of letter perception are fundamental to all reading skills and essential for early reading instruction.
• Deficits in naming speed are a major factor in reading difficulties.
• Children who lag in naming speed or phonological awareness are likely to experience reading difficulties.
• Simultaneous and successive discrimination strategies are critical for mastering letter discrimination.
• Simultaneous discrimination involves presenting two or more letters at once, while successive discrimination involves presenting letters sequentially.
• Teaching these skills is important to master letter and word recognition.
• Delayed matching tasks involving presenting the sample stimulus, then removing it before showing comparisons (sample items disappear after presentation) can facilitate the identification of similar-appearing words or phrases.
• Receptive letter naming precedes expressive letter naming and can help build skills necessary for expressive naming.
• Learning to name letters and spell words facilitates reading comprehension.
• Early phonemic awareness, the ability to notice and manipulate sounds in spoken words, is critical for reading success.
• Mastering phonemic awareness and related skills lays the groundwork for higher-level reading skills.
• Early phonological (and phonemic) awareness in children is strongly related to later reading success.
• Syllable awareness and onset-rime awareness come before awareness of individual phonemes.
• Coarticulation, the smearing together of phonemes in syllables, makes it difficult to isolate individual phonemes.
• Proper instructional programming and assessment are necessary to ensure mastery of early reading skills.
• Sight word instruction, which focusses on whole word recognition without decoding, has its place in some educational settings.
• Instruction should consider individual differences and prerequisite skills.
• Effective instructional programming and assessment are vital for mastering early reading skills.