Figure 2. The Reading Rope
Source: Scarborough, 2001.
Word recognition The word recognition strands (the lower strands in Figure 2) in the Rope Model are phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition. Phonological awareness is especially important for learning to read. It is the understanding that the words we hear can be broken down into smaller speech sounds. When children enter kindergarten, they may have an emerging understanding of the speech sounds in spoken words. For example, many preschoolers can recognize words that rhyme and words that share the same onset sounds (Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Carroll & Snowling, 2001). Yet, their knowledge is only partial—during kindergarten, children need high-quality instruction on phonemic awareness to learn how to recognize individual speech sounds, or phonemes, and how to articulate them. Over time and with instruction, children should be able to identify phonemes in words and gain increasing skills to isolate, blend, and segment phonemes. By the end of kindergarten, typically developing children can often recognize phonemes in short words (ASHA, n.d.b). Phonological awareness lays the foundation for learning phonics, or the correspondence between speech sounds and letters in written words. Over the course of children’s literacy education, children increasingly build skills to decode —or sound out—written words. With time, they learn to automatically read familiar words without sounding them out. This sight recognition of familiar words helps children become quick and accurate readers.
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The Science of Reading | What Research Says About Setting Young Readers Up for Success
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