As my son, age 5, is learning to read I have been educating myself more on the Science of Reading.
According to NWEA, a non-profit that supports students and teachers, educators today versed in this method have a deep understanding of the following:
Phonological awareness: Teach students to recognize and manipulate the sounds within words. Move from syllables to the individual sounds, or phonemes. Explicitly connect phonemes to letters to more effectively support word decoding.
Phonics and word recognition: Teach letter sounds and sound-spelling patterns explicitly and systematically. Practices that include both reading and writing of words in isolation and in text are most supportive of taught phonics.
Fluency: Include frequent chances for students to read and re-read orally from connected text—sentences, paragraphs, and passages. Focus on the development of both automatic word recognition and fluent expression, keeping understanding of the text as the central goal.
Vocabulary and oral language comprehension: Include high-quality, language-rich interactions in instruction. With read-aloud texts, unpack academic and inferential language. Explicitly build students’ recognition of shared morphemes (e.g., root words, affixes) across words, both in oral and written language.
Text comprehension: Even before young students can read on their own, teach from rich texts via read-alouds and scaffolded reading. Teach students to use metacognitive strategies like setting a purpose, monitoring for meaning, and building inferences while reading. Discuss texts, including focusing on their organizational structures.
For an engaging podcast on the topic, please listen to Sold a Story.