Effective reading instruction helps learners foster their strengths and shore up their weaknesses when reading. The quality of instruction offered to learners/students is the key to form a strong foundation for reading that will last a life-time. Following is a list of some components of reading instructions validated by experienced teachers:

• Phonological And Phonemic Awareness: Phonological awareness refers to the awareness of words, sounds, rhymes and syllables that make a language. Phonemic awareness on the other hand is an important component of phonological awareness. It teaches kids how to segment and manipulate individual sounds into words.
• Phonic Skills: Phonics plays a major role in making better readers and spellers. The lessons on phonics start in pre-school by making kids familiar with letter sounds, reading simple words with short vowels, visual learning with the help of blends and graphs, mastering “r” and long vowel words, learning diphthongs and other vowel teams.
• Reading Fluency: An effective reading instruction module is one that helps the learners in developing the skill of reading fast, accurately and with proper expression. This can be done by reading aloud to children, using audio recordings for kids to follow-up after reading, incorporating playful activities to practice sight words, enrolling kids in a reader’s theater, encourage buddy-reading, echo-reading, choral-reading, repeated reading, scooping phrases and so on.
• Comprehension: Comprehension helps kids to process, decode and recognize words. It is a vital component of reading. Comprehension skills can be improved by connecting experiences, movies, pictures and even other books with what is being read. Learners should be encouraged to make predictions, make mental images, they should be asked questions to keep them interested. Also they should be asked to summarize what they’ve read in a few words.
• Fix-Up Strategies: These strategies help readers when they come across unfamiliar words or cannot understand what they are reading. Students should be taught how to pause at a difficult part, re-read it, think about it and look for pictures, graphs or captions around the words that can give them a clearer understanding of what they are reading.
• Building Vocabulary: Vocabulary instruction should help students build their vocabulary without the aid of a dictionary. This will greatly improve their reading speed and also their understanding of what they read. The instruction should focus on helping kids understand a single meaning of a new word that fits the context. Learners should be engaged in fun games or incentives that teach them how to use a word in the correct context. They can also be asked to draw the meaning of a word, switch the new word with a word they know and even practice their opposites.

We, at See-N-Read Reading Tools offer a variety of reading & learning tools. For more information, call at (630) 236 – 5592.