Reading and Language Arts (Elementary)
Reading items are built on the five components identified by the National Reading Panel-phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension-plus the writing and language skills that depend on them. Expect to interpret assessment data and choose the matching intervention.
The continuum
- Phonological awareness is the umbrella; phonemic awareness is the narrow skill of manipulating individual sounds (isolation, blending, segmenting, deletion, substitution). It is oral and does not involve print.
- Phonics is the relationship between letters and sounds, taught systematically and explicitly with practice in decodable text. English syllable types: closed, open, vowel-consonant-e, vowel team, r-controlled, consonant-le.
- Fluency has three parts-accuracy, rate, prosody. Repeated reading, modeling, and performance reading build it. Oral reading fluency is the most common progress-monitoring measure.
- Vocabulary instruction should be explicit, include Tier 2 words, morphology, and multiple exposures in context.
- Comprehension instruction is strategic: predicting, questioning, clarifying, summarizing (reciprocal teaching), text structure, main idea, and inference.
Using data
Running records and informal reading inventories yield accuracy and comprehension data. Common rule of thumb: 95–100% accuracy is independent, 90–94% is instructional, below 90% is frustration. Use that to decide whether to intervene on word recognition or comprehension.
Writing and language
Teach the writing process, sentence combining, and self-regulation strategies (SRSD, POW + TREE). Spelling follows orthographic patterns; assess whether errors are phonological, orthographic, or morphological. Dyslexia is a word-level reading disability, not a vision problem-students do not 'see letters backwards' as a defining feature.
Worked example
A second grader reads a grade-level passage at 90% accuracy, 38 words correct per minute, and answers 3 of 5 comprehension questions. Accuracy is instructional and rate is well below benchmark. Because word recognition is not independent, the priority is systematic phonics and accuracy building with decodable text, then fluency building-not comprehension strategy instruction alone.
Traps
Treating phonological awareness and phonics as synonyms; teaching comprehension strategies to a student who cannot yet decode the text; relying on one running record to change placement; using grade-level passages for progress monitoring when the student is far below; and assuming a student with dyslexia needs colored overlays or vision therapy.