Word Level Reading: All Ages
Why Consider Word-Level reading skills?
To start with, to understand an alphabet-based written language, one must be able to read the words.
Skilled readers have instant and effortless access to all or to most of the words they encounter. And because of this instant and automatic response to deciphering words, they can focus on comprehending the text.
But how does this happen?
Children who learn to read well are sensitive to the linguistic structures within our language These may include knowledge of: the speech sounds that make up words, the meaningful parts of words (morphemes), syntax, and the linguistic features of connected text.
When thinking about word level reading, “The language skills that most reliably distinguish groups of good and poor readers are specific to the phonological or speech sound processing system” (Moats, 2010).
Knowledge of the sounds in our language act as an anchor for learning the printed word. If knowledge of this sound system is underdeveloped or “fuzzy”, it is difficult to anchor new information (i.e. graphemes/letters) to that piece of knowledge. Phonemic awareness/phonemic proficiency is an underlying cognitive-linguistic skill required for word-level reading.
What about memorizing all of those Sight Words?
As It turns out, proficient readers do not store words as wholes nor do they remember them as visual wholes. We learn and remember words by linking what we know about spoken language (phonemes) to print (letters/graphemes) and through this process of linking speech to print (and blending those sounds together), we build memory for that word. With repeated practice, we then start to build knowledge for instant and automatic recall. Automaticity in word recognition is the goal so we can devote our cognitive resources to make meaning and learn from text.
“When children read poorly, we may assume that the problem is one of “comprehension”. We may not realize that the difficulties with word recognition, accuracy, speech, reading fluency, and language comprehension all contribute to poor reading” -Moats (2010).
My colleague Lyndsay and I share more about our learning journey regarding word-level reading at The Endless Skies Teacher’s Convention this week in our presentation: “Reading Research: Exploring the Role of Phonemic Awareness in Word Reading”.
We are looking forward to the journey ahead and we are so happy to have you follow along in our adventures.
