What Essential Skills Do Students Need to Become Mature Readers?

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The National Reading Panel (2000) identified key skill areas that should comprise the reading curriculum for students who are at risk. These areas include phonemic awareness, alphabetic principle, reading fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. These skills are also essential for remedial readers. The only difference is that remedial readers will learn these skills later than their peers.

Phonemic Awareness

Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear the smallest units of sound in spoken language and to manipulate them. Students who are at risk are less likely to develop this important foundational skill naturally. Word play activities and language games often do not provide enough support. Because phonemic awareness is a critical foundational skill for learning to read, researchers examined whether teaching phonemic awareness skills to students who are at risk was effective. As a result of these studies, a considerable body of research now provides guidance for teachers informing them that teaching phonemic awareness skills to students who are at risk within a language-rich environment makes it easier for them to learn to read (Armbruster, Lehr, & Osborn, 2001). Although there are many different phonemic awareness skills, this book stresses the two that researchers have concluded have the most value in a beginning reading program: segmenting and blending. Segmenting is the ability to break apart words into their individual phonemes or sounds. A student who can segment says /f/-/i/-/sh/ when asked to say the sounds in fish. The ability to segment helps students strategically attack words they will be reading in text and break words into phonemes when spelling. Blending, the opposite of segmenting, is the ability to say a spoken word when its individual phonemes are said slowly. A student who can blend can say the word fish after the teacher slowly says the individual sounds /f/-/i/-/sh/. Blending enables students to read unfamiliar text by combining single sounds into new words.

Alphabetic Principle


Alphabetic principle is the understanding that there are systematic and predictable relationships between written letters and spoken sounds. Students who have attained alphabetic principle can identify and remember words accurately and automatically. The teaching strategy described in this text to teach the alphabetic principle is based on phonics. Phonics instruction teaches students the relationships between written letters, or graphemes, and the sounds of language, or phonemes. Although some would argue otherwise, the English language has more than enough regularity to merit the teaching of phonics.

The utility of teaching phonics has been clearly established, but not all phonics approaches are created equal. After identifying more than 100,000 research studies and submitting them to rigorous review, the National Reading Panel (2000) concluded that phonics programs that are both systematic and explicit are most effective for teaching students to read, particularly students who are at risk. In Put Reading First, Armbruster, Lehr, and Osborn (2001) summarized the key differences between systematic and nonsystematic phonics programs. To attain the alphabetic principle, students need to acquire skills in the following areas: identifying letter–sound correspondences, sounding out words containing letter sounds previously taught, and identifying words at sight. Spelling is also included here because of the benefits of having students spell words they are also learning to read. Teaching students the alphabetic principle involves some of the most difficult, precise teaching you will do. The aim of these chapters is to provide you with information and guides so that you can teach all of your students to break the code and move into more advanced reading.