Ready4Reading Evidence Portfolio
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o The program’s Read to Know Text Sets are designed to pre-teach the high-frequency words students will encounter using a three-step routine. First, a teacher displays the word and has students say it aloud. Next, the teacher uses the word in a sentence and discusses the word and its meaning. Finally, the teacher identifies known and unknown parts of the word. Across the program’s three primary components— Wiley Blevins ’s Teaching Phonics Lessons, Scholastic Short Reads Decodables, and Scholastic Read to Know Sets — decodable, informational, and fictional texts with photographs and illustrations are incorporated to help guide students to apply their decoding skills and prepare them to bridge to authentic grade-level reading. The program’s decodable readers are designed to control word choice so that students can decode most of the words using skills they have been directly taught, according to how far they have moved through the progression of targeted elements in the program’s scope and sequence. The decodable texts are intended to present high- interest topics that pique students’ curiosity and interest— with the characters, communities, and experiences featured being relevant to diverse students' lives.
Integration of Phonics Instruction with Teaching Essential Literacy Skills
Within the broader context of this explicit teaching model, Ready4Reading works to integrate phonics knowledge with other essential literacy skills, such as oral language, knowledge building, and vocabulary, so that students “learn to read and read to learn.” As it relates to these areas, research demonstrates a high degree of support for an explicitly integrated approach to early literacy development that builds foundational literacy skills and comprehension skills concurrently (Slavin, 2009; Guthrie, 2008; Fairbanks et al., 2014; Metsala et al., 2021; Owens, 2020; Blevins, 2019). Put simply, the ultimate goal of developing foundational literacy skills related to phonemic awareness, phonics, and oral language development, is to position students so that they can effectively comprehend text, and thus leverage reading as a means of learning content and writing as a form of communication (Deshler et al., 2007; Slavin, 2009; Lesnick et al., 2010). Pedagogical approaches that seek to integrate instruction across these domains can serve a valuable function in elevating students’ development in each. By simultaneously learning to read and reading to learn, research suggests that students are able to more quickly develop the skills associated with reading fluency, as well as those associated with vocabulary development and reading comprehension. Research in literacy science points to the ways in which the many domains of literacy, whether it be phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, speaking, or writing, are strongly interrelated. Oral language skills, for instance, such as those related to phonology, semantics, word knowledge, morphology, and syntax have been shown to be particularly critical in predicting children’s w ord reading ability and general reading comprehension skills (Fairbanks et al., 2014; Catts et al., 2005; Lepola et al., 2016; Lervag et al., 2018; Metsala et al., 2021; Roth et al., 2022; Snowling & Hume, 2012; Owens, 2020). By knowing the rules of speech sounds and syllables, as well as the rules governing grammar, word combinations, and vocabulary application (Owens, 2020), students are better positioned to derive accurate meaning out of text. Likewise, the development of “fluency” with reading, or the speed in which a student can decode and read at an appropriate pace, is also strongly predictive of the quality of their comprehension of a given text (Slavin, 2009). The greater a student ’ s fluency level, the less cognitive demand they experience with decoding and word recognition, thus freeing up
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