Early Reading Skills Programming

Designing Instructional Programming for Early Reading Skills

• Reading is the most crucial skill children acquire early, serving as the foundation for future learning and independent living.
• A substantial percentage of adults in the US lack basic reading skills, with 14% performing below basic literacy levels.
• Successful reading relies on the alphabetic principle, where the same sound in different words is represented by the same letter.
• Decoding, or word attack, is a critical skill in fluent reading. It utilizes phonics to understand letter sounds and blend them to form words.
• Engelmann's Direct Instruction is one example of a phonics-based reading program.
• Decoding skills are essential for expanding vocabulary because they enable readers to understand unseen words.
• Delays in acquiring decoding skills have long-term negative impacts on reading achievement.
• Letter names are strong predictors of reading success, as shown by the National Research Council and National Reading Panel reports.
• Early letter naming and phonemic awareness are crucial for early reading success.
• Speed is an essential aspect of letter recognition, impacting reading fluency, and a deficit in naming speed can contribute to difficulty learning to read.
• Simultaneous discrimination (presenting multiple letters at once) may aid learning compared to successive discrimination.
• For similar-looking letters (e.g., b and d), initial discrimination training may be important prior to letter naming.
• Receptive letter naming (understanding letter names when heard) might help children learn to name letters.
• Fading procedures can effectively help children learn new discriminations gradually.
• Identity matching to sample is a simultaneous discrimination procedure that involves presenting a sample letter and asking the student to select the corresponding letter from a set of choices.
• Stimulus control-shaping procedures are effective for students with difficulty in discriminating similar letters.
• Sight word instruction is valuable to develop a large vocabulary without focusing on every letter in every word.
• It's important to recognize that children may extract information from parts of words instead of analyzing the whole word and using that knowledge for decoding other similar words.

Auditory Stimulus Control

• Speech perception (discrimination) is an early auditory skill for reading.
• Identifying and discriminating speech sounds is necessary for linking sounds to letters.
• Difficulties in speech perception are particularly associated with stop consonants.
• Research suggests that procedures to improve speech discrimination are similar to those used with visual discriminations.

Phonemic Awareness

• Phonemic awareness is a critical skill that's crucial and often precedes the ability to read.
• It involves focusing on and manipulating phonemes within spoken words.
• Children who excel in phonemic awareness demonstrate better reading ability than those who don't.
• Some educators believe that learning nursery rhymes can also assist with phonemic development.

The Alphabetic Principle

• Knowledge that the letters in writing correspond to the sounds in spoken words is the alphabetic principle.
• This skill enables generalization of sound-print correlations across words.
• Phonemic awareness (awareness of individual sounds within words) plays a significant role in developing the alphabetic principle.
• Matrix training (teaching combining different elements in a structured way) can help build the skills of combining letters in many combinations, which helps to understand how to generate novel words.