Research & Validation | Ready4Reading: A Literature Review

Ready4Reading Evidence Portfolio

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(e.g., breaking the text into small chunks, examining each piece thoroughly before moving on to the next), echo reading (e.g., when the teacher reads aloud a text line by line or sentence by sentence, modeling appropriate fluency —while students “echo” the reading back in return ), choral reading (e.g., reading aloud in unison with a whole class or group of students), questions, and prompts. They then apply phonics knowledge to read and make meaning from decodable texts. • Offer opportunities for practice and review with varying levels of scaffolded support: Throughout Ready4Reading lessons, students have regular opportunities to practice new skills, starting with a high level of support and transitioning to less support as they become more experienced and demonstrate increased competence. Spiraled review is built into the program with the goal of helping prevent learning loss. Further, the Read to Know Text Sets include Review Books after every three text sets read, and Short Reads Decodables include Review Cards after every four cards read. The review materials and books offer a consolidated review of prior phonics skills that can be used as a formative assessment to measure children’s progress at regular intervals. • Include frequent checks for understanding and the ability to receive feedback and respond: Ready4Reading includes daily, weekly, and cumulative checks for understanding. Students are asked to answer code-focused questions with oral, written, or action responses. During face-to-face instruction, teachers are guided to provide feedback that reinforces correct performance and helps students adjust as needed.

Ready4Reading offers color-coded lesson cards that aim to provide explicit code-focused instruction in word recognition:

• Phonological Awareness : Ready4Reading aims to recognize that phonological awareness instruction cues children to attend to the sound structures of words. Students learn that syllables (units of pronunciation) can be divided into onsets (beginning sounds of words that proceed the vowel; /c/ in cat ) and rimes (the part of the word after the beginning sound — vowel and consonant; /at/in cat ). The program teaches students that a syllable is a word part with a vowel sound, so if a word has more than one vowel sound, it has more than one syllable. One strategy the program uses to teach syllables is to have students notice when their chin falls when saying a multisyllabic word. The program also intends to strategically engage students in interactive games to sort words by their number of syllables and provides oral blending activities with onsets and rimes. These activities also include opportunities to substitute onsets or rimes to make new words. • Phonemic Awareness: Ready4Reading provides instruction that aims to teach students that words are comprised of phonemes and to associate these phonemes with letters. Throughout the program, students practice hearing, identifying sounds, and putting them together to make words. Wiley Blevins ’s Teaching Phonics emphasizes phonemic awareness skills, such as blending, segmenting, and manipulating sounds. In addition, Short Reads Decodables teaches phonemic awareness skills such as phoneme identification and distinguishing between phonemes — for example, teachers say the word tap and then ask children to identify each sound in the word. What is the beginning sound? (/t/) What is the middle sound? (/a/) What is

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