Scholastic Reading Hub | Teaching Reading
Teaching Reading
A key report published in 2000 by the UK National Reading Panel identified the five pillars of reading as phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. More recently you’ll find references to a sixth pillar of reading, ‘oracy’ and at Scholastic, we’ve added our own seventh: ‘reading for pleasure’. These pillars are the building blocks of reading, and when put together they help children to become balanced, confident readers.
Reading with children and helping them practice these reading skills can dramatically improve their ability to read.
Oral Language
Whether you refer to spoken language, oral language, speaking and listening or oral communication, you are also referring to oracy. Whilst oracy may sound like a new term to replace these more familiar names, it was first used over fifty years ago in Oracy in English Teaching to refer to ‘the development and application of a set of skills associated with effective spoken communication.’
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Phonological awareness
Phonological awareness is the grounding for success in early reading and it begins long before children start school in Reception. Before children begin learning sound and letter (phoneme and grapheme) correspondences, they need to develop phonological awareness. The best way to build on these skills is encourage play in an environment where speaking and listening is central.
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Phonics
Phonics is a process where children are taught to read letters or groups of letters by the sounds they represent. Knowing the relationships between letters and sounds helps children to recognise familiar words and “decode” new words. When the individual sounds are learned, they can then be blended together to make words.
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Fluency
In recent years, reading fluency has come to be considered a key determiner of how well children can read. This has largely focused on the rate (or speed) of reading, with the figure of 90 words per minute often being used to determine a child’s reading fluency.
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Vocabulary
Understanding what has been read is at the heart of reading comprehension. When children do not know enough of the words in a text, they will understand less. Having sufficient vocabulary knowledge is therefore essential to being a good reader.
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Comprehension
Teaching children to read is a complex process. Turning words on a page into meaning and understanding and with it the desire to read for pleasure is something that takes time, patience and a number of different strategies.
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Reading for Pleasure
There are a number of different definitions for reading for pleasure, reading for enjoyment or independent reading. The National Literacy Trust defined it as “reading that we do of our own free will, anticipating the satisfaction that we will get from the act of reading”.
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