A Reflection on Establishing Communications in ELA

Reading remains as one of the most important of all life skills in almost every modern-day culture. Like any skill, it must be learned. Learning to read entails a complex regimen of training, involving explicit and implicit instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, decoding and fluency. For teachers, the responsibilities lie in assessing students appropriately, influencing students to be ready for the acquisition of language and reading skills, and adhering to Common Core Standards while responding to the needs of learners.

Assessing students’ acquisition of the targeted instructional skill, in this case basic reading fundamentals, is of the utmost importance because assessment is the tool that indicates whether or not the skill was indeed mastered or not. “Various types of assessments yield different information about strengths and weaknesses for diagnostic, judgment and prediction purposes.” (Tincher, 2017) We assess consistently throughout instruction to keep a pulse on the connections of developmental stages to appropriate reading strategies. Phonemic awareness, understanding sounds and how they relate to meaning, relates to phonics and how those sounds and their meaning are connected text in the English language. As phonics is being mastered, instruction then leads to decoding words by understanding that when letters are put together they form words which have meaning. From there, basic reading instruction turns to fluency – the ability to read text with accuracy, speed and expression. All of these components of basic reading need to be assessed before, during and after instruction in order to fully understand the students’ acquisition of the requisite skills.

Our roles as educators influence the acquisition of these skills because our instruction and our behavior toward the emergent reader lays the foundation for future reading development. Ideally, students enter school with five years of English language exposure with which teachers can mold phonemic awareness instruction. However, a significant majority of students do not for various reasons. Therefore, teachers must be prepared to differentiate to meet the needs of every learner, from those with adequate language exposure to those with little to none and including those with potential disabilities impeding their language exposure. Differentiation calls for teachers to know the instruction intent structured in their content, to understand their students as individuals and ensuring that the students connect with the content in a meaningful way (Sousa & Tomlinson, 2011).

Furthermore, teachers need to address the Common Core Standards as an answer to all of the aforementioned. By acquiring a broad range of teaching strategies to address the Common Core Standards, we will be serving the majority of student as well as differentiating for student who need extra supports. The Common Core Standards provide a target for instruction at all grade levels, including the acquisition of phonemic awareness, phonics, decoding and fluency – the components for developing early literacy skills. Teachers need to equip their practice with a wide variety of strategies to target every situation to serve all of their student adequately because the diversity in classroom is broadening culturally, cognitively and collectively.

In closing, early literacy lays the foundation for nearly all academic learning for students. Therefore, it remains imperative that teachers take early literacy instruction seriously, yet make it fun and engaging for emergent readers. “As many teachers and parents will attest, reading failure has exacted a tremendous long-term consequence for children’s developing self-confidence and motivation to learn, as well as for their later school performance.” (Armbruster, Lehr, & Osborn, 2001, p. i) Teaching early literacy effectively for each student will set the stage for future learning. Acquisition of skills will determine literacy later on, and therefore need to be taught both explicitly and implicitly. This is the start of serving the whole child.

References

Armbruster, B. B., Lehr, F., & Osborn, J. (2001). Put reading first kindergarten through grade 3: The research building blocks for teaching children to read. Washington D.C.: National Institute for Literacy.

Sousa, D. A., & Tomlinson, C. A. (2011). Differentiation and the brain. Bloomington: Solution Tree Press.

Tincher, D. (2017). Part 3: Assessment approaches. Module 2: The nature of learning. Indianapolis, IN, USA: American College of Education.