Presentation (Transcript)

	Beginning Word Reading and Spelling

		In this module, you learned that understanding written material requires three things: decoding words, utilizing effective comprehension strategies, and having the vocabulary and background knowledge required for understanding the text. Therefore, in order for students to become successful readers, instruction in all three of these areas should be occurring simultaneously.

		In the first lesson of this module, you learned about developing a comprehensive language arts program in which students are exposed to a wide range of literacy experiences. In the next two lessons you learned how to teach students the foundational skills of how to think about, analyze, and synthesize spoken words. In this lesson you'll be learning how to build upon students' phonological awareness by incorporating letter-sound associations for beginning word reading and spelling. With this foundational knowledge, students are much more successful in learning the more complex decoding and spelling skills fluent readers use.

		The research on beginning reading has shown phonological awareness activities have the greatest impact when letters are incorporated into sound synthesis activities (e.g., Ball & Blachman, 1991; Bradley & Bryant, 1983, 1985; Ehri & Wilce, 1987; O'Connor, Notari-Syverson & Vadasy, 1998; Uhry & Shepherd, 1993; Williams, 1980). This enables students to gain a better understanding of the alphabetic principle, that is, the way sounds in words relate to the letters that represent them.

		From the required reading for this lesson, you learned about the instructional considerations to be made for teaching and sequencing instruction in letter-sound associations. In this presentation, following a quick review, you will learn how to use three different types of activities that have been shown to strengthen students' abilities to analyze and synthesize word spellings. These activities involve sounding out words as well as analyzing and synthesizing words using "Say It, Move It, Read It" activities. You will then learn different types of assessment activities to assess students' phonological awareness. Finally, you will learn how to make your instruction more intensive for those students who need it.

		Goals: At the end of this lesson you should be able to do five things. 1. You should be able to discuss what needs to be considered for teaching grapheme-phoneme associations and how this kind of instruction should be sequenced. 2. You should be able to discuss and give examples of how to expand on the sound analysis and synthesis activities by incorporating letters and words for beginning reading and spelling.

		3. You should be able to discuss and give examples of the different word types used for beginning reading. 4. You should be able to discuss the major types of activities that are used to assess phonological and phonemic awareness. 5. Finally, you should be able to discuss how to make instruction more intensive for those students who need it.

		Let's begin with a brief review of phonological awareness teaching activities and principles. In the last lesson you learned about sound comparisons, sound synthesis, and sound analysis activities. Sound comparisons include making judgments and producing sounds. Sound synthesis is the segmenting words into different sizes of sound units, manipulating sounds, and deleting sounds. You also learned that for teaching phonological awareness, you need to consider four dimensions of phonological difficulty when planning the sequence of instruction and choosing example words. The first dimension is the size of the sound unit, which can be the whole word, the syllable, the voiced sounds are easier to work with than stop-like sounds, vowels, consonant blends and consonant clusters. Finally, you learned about the key considerations for providing group instruction: using group versus individual responses, giving sufficient thinking time, signaling for group responses, monitoring responses, and giving corrections. In this lesson, you will be learning how to build on what students have already learned about phonemes to help them understand the alphabetic principle, which is how letters represent sounds.

		Knowledge Connections Strengthening Grapheme-Sound Knowledge with a Letter-Sound Alternating Drill Once students are accurate and can automatically say the sounds that are associated with five to seven letters, you can begin to use these letters in word synthesis and word analysis activities. From the required reading you learned how to teach letter-sound associations so students achieve accuracy. Once students are accurate, then you can work on helping them build automaticity, which is being able to say the sounds at an automatic rate without conscious effort. In just a moment you will be learning how to help students achieve this automaticity with the use of the Letter-Sound Alternating Drill, which has been adapted from the procedures in the book Direct Instruction Reading (1998) and in the reading curriculum Reading Mastery (1995). For this activity, the teacher writes five to seven different letters or graphemes on the board. The teacher points to each letter, alternating among them in random order. She pauses for just a moment to let students think of the corresponding sound, and then she signals students to say the sound. Remember, first work on accuracy, then work on automaticity or fluency.

		(chime) T: Eyes up here. Get ready to say these sounds. T: What sound? S: \|m\|

		T: What sound? S: \|s\|

		T: What sound? S: \|k\| T: This sound is \|h\|. What sound? S: \|h\| T: Good. (chime)

		One of the students made an error and said \|k\| when the correct answer was \|h\|. There may be three reasons for the error. The teacher may not have given enough thinking time, the student may not have been paying attention, or the student may not know the sound for the letter 'h'. The correction procedure would be the same for each error type. First the teacher stops the students and provides the correct answer while pointing to the letter 'h'. She then asks her students for the correct sound. To make sure that all of the students know the sound of the letter 'h' she will then alternate between the letter 'h' and the other letters, increasing the number of other letter responses between the responses for the letter 'h'. Notice the pattern she uses in strengthening or firming up her students' responses for the letter 'h' sound. She will ask her students to say the sound for the letter 'h', then one other letter. Then she goes back to the 'h', then to two other letters, then back to the 'h', then to three other letters. Finally, because all of the students seem firm on the letter 'h', she will have them say all of the other sounds and end with the letter 'h'. At the end of the drill she would give different students individual turns in saying all of the items, especially the student who made the error. If any student continued to have difficulty with the letter 'h' or another letter, the teacher should not include it in the following activity so as to avoid additional errors. This type of alternating drill can also be used for building fluency in naming letters and reading words. The following dialogue is of a teacher using this correction procedure.

		(chime) T: What sound? S: \|k\| T: This sound is \|h\|. What sound? S: \|h\|

		T: What sound? S: \|a\|

		T: What sound? S: \|h\|

		T: What sound? S: \|p\|

		T: What sound? S: \|t\|

		T: What sound? S: \|h\|

		T: What sound? S: \|i\|

		T: What sound? S: \|m\|

		T: What sound? S: \|s\|

		T: What sound? S: \|h\| (chime)

		Let's review the correction procedure. After the student made the error, the teacher gave the correct response for the sound of the letter 'h' and had all the students repeat it. She then alternated between the letter 'h' and the other letters extending the amount of time the student had to remember the correct response. She could have ended the drill by giving students individual turns.

		Here is the pattern for correcting the error. Alternate between the letter 'h' and one other letter, then 'h' and two other letters, then 'h' and three other letters. Continue this pattern until students say all of the other letters, ending with 'h'.

		Choosing example words for introducing letters into "Say It, Move It, Say It" activities. Once students can say letter sounds automatically, you can begin to incorporate letters into activities such as "Say It, Move It, Say It." When first introducing letters into these types of activities, only one letter should be used with the otherwise blank tiles or cards. You should choose example words in which the target letter is in different positions in the word. For instance, if you were going to use the letter 'm', students could be asked to segment a variety of two- and three- phoneme words with the \|m\| sound in the initial and final positions. Examples are words such as 'man', 'ham', 'met', 'mop', 'am', 'me', and 'some' as in "I'd like some ice cream, please." As you look at these examples, notice that the placement of the letter 'm' in these words is not in the same position for each word. It is important to randomly order the words so that there is not a simple alternating pattern regarding the position of the phonemes and letters within the words. Otherwise, some students will notice the pattern and simply place the letter in the expected place rather than analyzing the word to determine where the letter should go. In the list of words on the screen, the position of the \|m\| in the first word is in the initial position. In the next word, it is in the final position. The next two words have \|m\| as initial sounds, and so forth, in random order. Remember, after students segment the words into the phonemes, the "Say It, Move It, Say It" activity requires students to point to each card as they blend the sounds back together into the original word.

		Beginning Word Reading Once students are proficient with orally segmenting and blending two- and three-phoneme words and can easily say the sounds for at least five consonants and one vowel, you can begin to teach them to sound out words and spell words. Let's talk about how to teach sounding out words. Even with older students who have been exposed to many different types of words, it is helpful to return to the simpler types of words and then introduce more complex words as students become more proficient in word recognition and spelling. It's much like learning math; you learned how to do single-digit addition really well before you moved on to double digits, carrying, subtraction, and borrowing.

		In teaching beginning word reading, you want students to notice and understand the regularity of how letters represent specific phonemes in words. Again, you need to choose example words carefully. You previously learned about the dimensions that contribute to phonological difficulty. There are also dimensions or characteristics of words that make them easier or harder for beginning readers to learn to read. For beginning word reading, it is easiest for students to read words that begin with continuous sounds. In addition, there should be the same number of phonemes as there are letters and each letter should represent its most common sound. You would also use only the five single vowel letters 'a' 'e' 'i' 'o' and 'u' that represent the phonemes \|a\|, \|e\|, \|i\|, \|o\|, and \|u\|. As with oral blending, it is best to start with words that have only two or three phonemes.

		The types of words that are listed on your screen would be good for beginning sounding out activities. These are VC words, which means that the word starts with a vowel and ends with a consonant. Some examples of VC words are the words 'it', 'am', 'at', 'in', and 'on'. The CVC words are words with a consonant, vowel, consonant sequence. Some examples are lap, him, not, and mud.

		Teaching Students to Sound Out Words In just a moment, you will be hearing a mini-lesson that introduces a Sound-It-Out strategy which is similar to those described in several of the reading programs listed in the reference section of this module, (e.g., Direct Instruction Reading, 1998; Phonological Awareness Training for Reading Kit,1994; Reading Mastery, 1995). Prior to teaching the Sound-It-Out strategy, the teacher would have already reviewed the letter sounds using the Letter-Sound Alternating Drill you heard earlier. The general steps for teaching sounding out words are as follows: First, print the word on the board. Slowly run your finger under each letter, from the students' left to right, as a signal to students to say each sound without stopping between them. You should spend one to two seconds for each continuous sound and just an instant for a stop-like sound. Remember that stop-like sounds should only be in the final position for beginning sounding out. Give students an appropriate length of thinking time to blend the sounds together. Finally, ask your students to say the word. Because some students may want to sound out the word faster than other students, you will need to have your students practice saying the sounds for as long as you have your finger under each letter. This will insure that your students are actually paying attention to each of the letters. Notice that in the following mini-lesson the teacher provides something called a pre-correction. Sometimes students make errors with vowel sounds, so before having students sound out the third word, she has them identify the vowel sound, which is different than the vowel in the two previous words. By having her students pay attention to the part of the word that may cause confusion, she is increasing the probability that her students will read the word correctly on the first try.

		(Chime) T: Look up here. Today you are going to learn how to read words by sounding them out. This is a lot like the "Say It Fast" game we played. The difference is that we will be looking at the letters I will write on the board. As I point to each letter, you will say the sound for that letter for as long as my finger is under the sound. Don't stop between the sounds. Then I'll ask you, "What word?" and you will answer by saying the word you just read. It will be my turn first. \|aaaaaaaaa\|mmmmmm\| 'am'. Your turn. Remember that you say the sound for as long as I have my finger under the letter. Also, don't stop between the sounds. I may try to trick you, so pay attention to how long I have my finger under each letter. Ready? S: \|aaaaaaaaaaaaa\|mmmmmmmm\|. T: What word? S: am. T: Good. Let's try another word. Ready? Remember, say each sound for as long as I have my finger under each letter. S: \|ssssssss\|aaaaaaaa\|mmmmmmm\| T: What word? S: Sam. T: Great. This time there will be a different vowel. What sound does this letter say? S: \|i\| T: Good. Now sound out this word. S: \|iiiiiiiiiii\|t\| T: What word? S: 'it' T: Great, you are reading words. Let's try one more. Ready? S: \|sssssssss\|iiiiiiiiiiiii\|t\| T: What word? S: 'sit'. T: Terrific! (chime)

		As students become more proficient in identifying letters that represent phonemes you can begin to teach students to sound out consonant blends. Once they are familiar with specific consonant blends or clusters, you can then use them in sounding out words. You would still want to use single vowels that say their sounds rather than vowels or pairs of vowels that say their names. This level includes CCVC words such as 'grab', 'sled', 'twin', 'frog', and 'drum'; CVCC words such as 'bank', 'send', 'milk', 'pond' and 'jump'; CCVCC words such as 'plant', 'slept', and 'trust'; and CCCVC words such as 'scrap'.

		"Say It, Move It, Read It" In the next segment of this lesson, you will be learning how to extend the "Say It, Move It, Say It" activities by incorporating letters and having students read the words they spell. We will call this new activity "Say It, Move It, Read It." "Say It, Move It, Read It" activities can be used to help students learn more difficult levels of sound analysis, sound synthesis, Sound Manipulation, and sound deletion.

		To teach students word phoneme into the appropriate space. Then, as you point to each letter, you slowly sound out the word. Finally, read the word at the normal rate. When students are first learning this strategy, they may not sound out the word they spelled and instead say the word they intended to spell. To prevent this you need to watch your students carefully to make sure they look at each letter as they sound out the words. Once students independently use this strategy, the sounding out step will help them determine if they made an error in choosing the letters. In contrast to just teaching students to 'sound out' words, which is basically reading a sequence of sounds, "Say It, Move It, Read It' activities teach students to analyze spoken words and pay attention to all of the letters in the corresponding printed words. From this type of activity students learn to develop the habit of looking at the internal letter patterns of words and thinking about how different sounds can be represented in print. This helps students with beginning word reading and spelling, as well as prepares them for the more complex types of word analysis and synthesis skills that good readers and spellers use. These more complex skills will be discussed in other modules.

		Sound Manipulation Activities For teaching "Say It, Move It, Read It" activities you can use the same types of words that you use for sounding-out activities. In addition, you can introduce word families by using words with the same rimes but different onsets. By using word families, students can begin to develop the habit of paying attention to the similarities and differences in word spellings. Noticing the letter patterns within words can help with both reading and spelling (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Ehri, & Wilce, 1987; Lundbert, Frost & Petersen, 1988; Uhry, & Shepherd, 1993). Let's take a look at some word families. If students could accurately and automatically say the most common sounds for the letters 'a', 'm', 't', 's', 'i', and 'h', you could use the words on the screen for a "Say It, Move It, Read It" sound manipulation activity. Starting with the word 'am', students can change the appropriate letters to spell and sound out the words 'sam', 'pam', and 'ham'. If you start with the word 'at', students can make the words 'sat', 'pat', and 'hat'. If you start with the word 'it', students can make the words 'sit', 'pit', and 'hit'. For younger children or English language learners, you may need to explain what some of the words mean or use them in a meaningful sentence.

		Here is a mini-lesson in which the teacher uses the "Say It, Move It, Read It" for a sound manipulation activity using word families. (chime) T: You have been doing really well at sounding out words. Now we are going to learn how to spell words with a "Say It, Move It, Read It" activity. This will help you with your writing and your reading. First we are going to spell a short word and then add letters and change letters to make new words. We are going to start with the word 'am'. T: How many sounds are in the word 'am'? S: Two. T: Good, what are they? S: \|a\| \|m\| T: Good, what letter makes the sound of \|a\|? S: 'a'

		T: I'll get the 'a' card and put it in the pocket. What letter makes the sound of \|m\|? S: 'm' T: Good, I'll put the 'm' letter next to the 'a'. Watch my finger as I run it under the cards and say the sounds. \|aaaaaa\|mmmmmm\|. What word? S: 'am' T: Good. Sound it out. S: \|aaaaaaa\|mmmmm\| T: What word? S: 'am'

		T: Great. Now I'm going to make the word 'am' into the word 'Sam'. I'm going to put the letter 's' in front of the word 'am'. Sound it out. S: \|ssssss\|aaaaaaa\|mmmmm\| T: What word? S: 'Sam' T: Great. How would you change the word 'Sam' to the word 'ham'? (student's name) S: Change the 's' to an 'h' T: Good, let's try that. I'll change the 's' in 'Sam' to an 'h'. Let's sound out the word. S: \|hhhh\|aaaa\|mmm\| T: What word? S: 'ham' T: Great job. (chime)

		You can see how this activity helps students to increase their skills in sound segmenting and sound blending as well as to learn to pay attention to all of the letters in words. Once students understand the task, they can use letter cards and small pocket charts of their own. By having students use their own pocket charts you can easily monitor students' responses. In addition, students can self-correct their errors prior to committing them to paper. Once students have the correct spellings of words in their pocket charts, they can write the words in their journals and practice reading them. This same type of activity can be used for sounding out and spelling even the most complex words.

		Sound Deletion Another type of sound analysis activity that can be used with the "Say It, Move It, Read It" activity is sound deletion. For this activity, students spell a word in their pocket charts and then remove a letter so that another word is created. Some sets of words they can do this with are 'act' and 'at', 'drip' and 'dip', 'hunt' and 'hut', 'sand' and 'sad', and 'plan' and 'pan'.

		In summary, the "Say It, Move It, Read It" activity can be used for multiple purposes including sound segmenting, sound blending, sound manipulation, and sound deletion, as well as for spelling and sounding out words. Of these skills, sound segmenting and sound blending have been shown to be the most important aspects of phonological awareness for increasing students' reading and spelling achievement (Ball & Blachman, 1991, 1993; Ehri, & Wilce, 1987; Lundberg, Frost & Peterson 1988; Uhry, & Shepherd, 1993). In the next segment of this lesson we will be discussing invented spelling which also requires students to segment and blend sounds.

		Standard Spellings and Invented Spellings There are two different kinds of spellings - standard spelling and invented spelling. Standard or conventional spelling is the correct spelling that you find in dictionaries. Although the goal is for students to use standard spellings in their writing, beginning readers and writers may want to write words that they have not yet learned to read or spell correctly. For those words, students should be encouraged to use invented spellings. Invented spellings are idiosyncratic spellings; there are multiple ways of spelling any one word. The process of using invented spelling is similar to the "Say It, Move It, Read It" activity. Students say the word slowly while trying to identify, and then write, the letters that could represent the sounds. When teaching students the process of using invented spelling, encourage them to pay attention to how their mouths produce the sounds in the word they are trying to spell. This will help them to spell words that are more phonemically correct. Once the word is written, students should then sound out the word to determine if they missed or added any letters. The process of using invented spelling has been shown to increase both reading and spelling achievement for beginning readers (Adams, 1990; Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children, 1998). As you develop a comprehensive language arts program, with frequent opportunities for students to write for a variety of purposes, their written products will provide another way for you to monitor their progress in applying what they are learning about reading and writing. You can then focus on those areas in which your students need more instruction. Once students learn more standard spellings of words, or how to use a dictionary or word list, they should be expected to replace their invented spellings with the standard spellings in their final drafts. Although some good readers may be poor spellers, poor readers are almost always poor spellers. For older students, who typically don't read aloud in classes, poor spelling sometimes alerts teachers to the possibility that a student may have a reading disability. This would warrant further assessment.

		On your screen are three different ways the same phrase 'Once upon a time' might be spelled. One is the standard spelling and two are different invented spellings. Let's take a look at the first invented spelling example. At first glance, this could be an unrecognizable phrase for someone who is unfamiliar with phonemes. From what you have learned about phonemes, you should be able to recognize how this student has used her knowledge about sounds and letters. This example shows that the student is working at the semi-phonetic stage of spelling (see Moats, 1995a). She includes the sounds that are the easiest to identify in words, the first sounds and some last sounds. She omits middle vowel sounds which are harder to discern. Her use of the letter 'w' to represent the phoneme \|w\| at the beginning of the word 'once' shows that she understands the difference between letter names and letter sounds. The student in the second example is in the phonetic stage of spelling. This student has correctly broken the phrase "Once upon a time" into four words. Vowels are now in the correct positions in words but, as is typical of this stage, the student represents the long vowel sound in the word 'time' with the single vowel letter 'i'. The student is showing some signs of awareness of spelling and sentence conventions in that the word 'once' starts with the letter 'o' which is capitalized as the first letter in the sentence. By examining and keeping samples of students' writing, you can monitor their progress in learning about the alphabetic system. Writing samples such as these can help you determine what other assessments will help you gain more information about your students' progress.

		In the next segment, you will be learning about the major types of assessments that are used to assess phonological awareness from kindergarten through beginning word reading and spelling.

		While teachers should always be observing students and gathering information about their progress, there are three reasons for conducting more formalized assessments of phonological awareness. The first reason is to establish a baseline of what students already know so that you can determine what students need to learn and what you need to teach. The second reason is to monitor students' progress in developing phonological awareness. With this information, you can determine if some students need extra help or more intensive instruction in one or more areas. You can also use this information to help you determine if your instructional program is effective or if you need to make some changes in it. The third reason to assess students' phonological awareness is to determine which students may be at-risk for or may have a reading disability. In this segment of the lesson, we will discuss phonological awareness assessment in general, then we will discuss a specific assessment package that was developed for group assessment, and finally we will discuss using assessments to determine which students may be at-risk for or may have reading disabilities. Rather than develop assessment tools yourself it would probably be easier for you to obtain one of the relatively inexpensive packages of phonological awareness assessment activities that have been developed for this purpose. Several of these packages are listed in the research section of this module. These assessment packages include complete directions on how to give the assessments, the specific words to use for the activities, and how to score students' responses.

		If you are assessing students' phonological awareness to determine a baseline of what they already know, you will want to assess students' skills in sound comparisons, sound synthesis, and sound manipulation. Most of the activities for assessing phonological awareness are very similar to the types of activities you learned about to strengthen students' phonological awareness. Activities might include comparing sounds, producing rhymes, counting syllables, counting phonemes, identifying phonemes, and adding and deleting different sound units. Students whose scores on these assessments fall into the lowest 20%, as compared with their peers, may be at-risk for or may have a reading disability (O'Connor & Jenkins, 1997; Torgesen, 1999). In addition to assessing students' phonological awareness, you will want to test students on their letter-name knowledge as well as their letter-sound knowledge in the manner you learned about in the required reading for this lesson. With kindergartners who may not have been introduced to all of the letter sounds, you should assess their letter-name knowledge. For students who are in the first grade or beyond, you should assess their letter-sound or grapheme-phoneme knowledge. If you find that a particular student seems to be slower than the other students in identifying letter names or saying letter sounds, you may want to ask your reading specialist or psychologist to conduct a rapid naming test. The rapid naming test is used with students who are accurate but slow in naming or saying the sounds for familiar letters. This may indicate the student has difficulty retrieving names or labels from his or her memory, which is one characteristic that students with reading disabilities may have. The rapid naming test requires students to look at a paper with the same set of 5 common objects or letters and numbers randomly ordered for a total of 50 items. Students are asked to name the items as quickly as possible. The amount of time it takes a student to name all 50 items is the score. Although this test is easy to give, interpreting the results is a little more difficult. To determine if the student's score is within the normal range, the score needs to be compared with a large sample of students who are the exact same age and have had the same amount of school experience. This information is available in standardized test kits in the form of a norming table. School psychologists and reading specialists often have access to these test kits and norming tables ("Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processes for Reading," Torgesen & Wagner, 1999). Students who have difficulty with rapid naming benefit from extensive practice opportunities and activities that help increase their rate of responding. The alternating drill activity, which you learned about earlier in this lesson, can help develop students' fluency. Even with intensive interventions, some students may continue to have difficulty identifying letters, letter sounds, and words at a fast enough rate to allow good reading comprehension. The most severely reading disabled students are those who, even after intensive instruction, continue to have difficulty with phonological awareness and rapid naming. Take just a moment and read the line of numbers and letters at the bottom of the page as fast as you can. While this task is not hard, it may take more concentration and effort than you might expect.

		Most phonological awareness assessment packages have been developed to give to students individually; however, one of the packages developed for group administration is in the curriculum guide and activity book Phonemic Awareness in Young Children (Adams, Foorman, Lundberg, & Beeler, 1998). One chapter is devoted to the assessment of students' phonological awareness and includes assessments entitled "Detecting Rhymes," "Counting Syllables," "Matching Initial Sounds," "Counting Phonemes," "Comparing Word Lengths," and "Representing Phonemes with Letters." The entire assessment battery takes approximately thirty minutes to administer. It may take slightly longer for kindergarten students. The authors recommend that no more than six kindergarten students be assessed at a time, but older students can be assessed in groups of up to 15 students at a time.

		For each group assessment activity in this book, students are given a paper with pictures on it and the teacher demonstrates how to do three practice items. Students then do five items on their own. For the rhyme detection task, students have pictures of five pairs of rhyming objects arranged in random order. Students draw a line between each pair of objects that rhyme.

		For the phoneme counting task, students have a paper with pictures of five common objects whose names have between two and five phonemes each. Students are to indicate, on the line next to the picture, the number of phonemes in each of these words.

		For the Representing Phonemes with Letters task, students are asked to write the name of each object on the line next to the picture. The first three pictures are objects with CVC names and the last two objects have CCVCC and CCCVCC words. Because these are paper and pencil tasks, students may need to be separated or have dividers placed between them to discourage copying. These assessments can be used with students from the second semester of kindergarten through the primary grades to establish a baseline of what students already know. Because these assessments can be given several times a year, they can also be used to monitor students' progress. The authors of these assessments recommend that any student who scores 2 points or more below the class average on any of the assessments should be tested further on an individual basis to determine the extent of that student's needs.

		When using assessments of phonological awareness for screening purposes, you want to look carefully at any students who score within the lowest 20th percentile on one or more of the assessments. If these students took a group assessment previously, you would want to administer individual assessments. You want to determine if an individual student needs more intensive instruction in just one area, or if there's a general pattern of weakness in phonological awareness. If a student has a general weakness in phonological awareness, you should check with the school nurse to make sure the student's hearing and vision are within the normal range. You should then begin to plan for providing more intensive instruction for students who need it. If you haven't already done so, you should also try to involve the students' parents. Often parents will welcome suggestions regarding fun activities they can do with their children to increase their child's reading or pre-reading skills. Some of the curriculum guides that are recommended in this and other lessons have suggested activities for parents.

		You also can consult with other school district staff members including the school psychologist and speech-language pathologist, both of whom can work with you to develop a plan to evaluate your students' needs more carefully. Reading specialists and special education teachers can give valuable suggestions as well. Another option is to meet with your school's Consultation Team. Most schools have a Consultation or Intervention Team that will meet with individual teachers to discuss the progress of one or more students about whom there is concern. The consultation team may include the school psychologist, an administrator, classroom teachers, a special educator, and sometimes the speech-language pathologist, a reading specialist, the school nurse, and the school counselor or social worker. Through the consultation team process, a short-term intervention plan can be developed. Consultation teams generally set times for follow-up meetings to discuss student progress. If a student continues to have difficulty, the consultation team may decide that a formal referral for a special education evaluation may be necessary. Studies have shown that if schools provide more intensive instruction for those students scoring in the lowest 20th percentile on the phonological awareness assessments, few students will have difficulty in learning to read. When schools can provide more intensive instruction only to students scoring in the lowest 10%, the number of students who struggle with learning to read, and who end up with reading disabilities, rises (Torgesen, 1999).

		For students scoring in the lowest 20th percentile on phonological awareness assessments, and for older students still struggling with learning to decode words, intensive instruction is crucial at this time in their lives. If they are not identified and do not receive the type of intensive, systematic instruction they need, large numbers of these students will experience academic failure and will drop out of school. We know that students who are poor readers in the third grade are at high risk for dropping out of school (Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children, 1998). Dropping out of school has been linked to poorer job prospects, lower incomes, and poorer health (Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children, 1998). In contrast, early reading success has been shown consistently to lead to higher rates of high school completion, and more postsecondary education. Students who complete high school have been shown to have more job opportunities, higher incomes, and better health, as compared to those who drop out of high school (Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children, 1998).

		What type of instruction is needed for students who are at risk for or have been identified as having reading disabilities? In the required reading Catch Them Before They Fall (1998), Torgesen describes four features of effective reading intervention programs. These features are: "(a) the right kind and quality of instruction delivered with (b) the right level of intensity and duration to (c) the right children at (d) the right time" (p. 34). The right kind of instruction, for beginning reading students who are struggling with learning to read, is the research-based, explicit, responsive, and systematic type of instruction you have been learning about in this module and will be learning about in other modules. The quality of the instruction depends on the teacher's ability to assess and be responsive to students' needs, to choose the appropriate skills and activities to focus on, and to use effective instructional practices. Finally, the quality of instruction includes a teacher's ability to encourage and motivate students to put forth the effort to learn to read and spell.

		The level of intensity of instruction can change by varying the teacher-student ratio. For students who are at risk for or who have been identified as having reading disabilities, most initial instruction should take place in small groups or on a one-to-one basis with the teacher. Most of the activities you learned about in this lesson can be used with small- to medium-sized groups of students. The research studies cited in this module had student-teacher ratios of one teacher per one or more students with a maximum of eight at-risk students at a time. The students who had the most severe reading disabilities received one-to-one instruction with a teacher for up to 40 minutes per day. The level of intensity that individual students need may vary depending on the activity or the objective. The duration or length of time that students need to master different skills or concepts will also vary. To increase the duration, you may have to lengthen the instructional time per day or increase the number of instructional sessions. If needed, students may benefit from having two or more instructional sessions per day or more sessions over the course of the semester or school year. Providing more practice opportunities can also increase the intensity and duration of instruction. Once students have mastered a given skill with approximately 90% accuracy, you can help them build fluency through practice sessions in which they can get immediate corrective feedback. This can be accomplished through carefully training and supervising para-professionals, volunteers, or peer tutors to work with students. While the primary instruction should always be the responsibility of the teacher, having trained para-professionals, volunteers, or peer tutors can be a valuable addition to a program. Effective intervention programs depend on the teacher's ability to continuously monitor students' progress and provide the right kind and quality of instruction to enable students to learn to read and write.

		Let's review. In this lesson you learned about the instructional considerations for teaching and sequencing letter-sound associations. You also learned several research-based activities for teaching beginning word reading and spelling, including the Letter-Sound Alternating Drill, Sounding Out Words, "Say It, Move It, Read It," Sound Manipulation and Sound Deletion activities, and invented spelling. You learned about the different word types that are appropriate for beginning word reading and spelling. You learned about the different types of activities that are used for assessing students' phonological awareness and what may indicate that a student may be at risk for a reading disability. You learned about the steps that you can take to develop a plan for more intensive instruction. Finally, you learned about the features of effective reading intervention programs. With your deeper understanding of the role that phonological awareness plays in beginning word reading and spelling, you should be able to effectively use research-based resources such as those listed in the research section of this module. By making phonological and phonemic awareness activities a key part of your comprehensive language arts program, you will be helping students develop the essential foundational knowledge and skills necessary for them to become fluent readers.

		By integrating what you have learned in this module into a comprehensive language arts program, you should be able to help your students work to attain the following goals: (1) Your students should be developing a greater appreciation for a wide range of literature. (2) As a result of exposure to various classroom experiences and discussions about different types of written products, your students should be developing larger vocabularies and greater oral language comprehension. (3) Your students should be developing accuracy and fluency with letter-sound correspondences, as well as with synthesis and analysis of spoken and written words.

		(4) Your students should understand that as they learn more about reading and spelling they will continue to use the segmenting and blending processes to enable them to read and spell most words in the English language. (5) Finally, your students should be learning to value and enjoy reading and writing as forms of communication, as tools for giving and gaining information, and as a means for enriching their lives. By providing the types of research-based instruction that you have been learning about in this module, you will be helping more students than ever before become successful readers. Your charge is great. The quality and type of instruction you and your peers provide can and will impact the lives of your students, forever.

Gildroy, P. G. (1999). Beginning word reading and spelling (Module 1, Lesson 4). In B.K. Lenz & P.G. Gildroy (Eds) Beginning word reading [Online]. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas, Center for Research on Learning. Available: Onlineacademy.org

Meyen, E. L. The Online Academy: Linking teacher education to advances in research. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning. (Contract No. H029K973002; 1997 -- 2000, U. S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs).

Beginning Word Reading