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- The English language is a derivational language in which the spelling of the root word is generally retained even when other syllables are added, but the pronunciation of the root word may change.
- The National Reading Panel (2000) concluded that the most effective reading instruction explicitly and systematically focuses on four things: phonemic awareness, phonics, guided oral reading, and the application of reading comprehension strategies.
- Because individuals with reading disabilities tend to have difficulty with phonemic awareness, most reading programs that have been able to increase the reading abilities of these individuals begin with phonological and phonemic awareness activities and continue to reinforce these skills throughout the programs.
- Reading comprehension instruction should continue throughout the school years because students will encounter increasingly complex texts even after they have developed reading fluency.
- Basic decoding is linking individual letters to their phonemes and blending them into words. Advanced decoding is recognizing letter and word patterns, translating them to their sounds and blending them into words.
- Retrieving sight words from memory is automatically recognizing words without having to sound them out.
- It generally takes good readers approximately seven exposures to a word to move it into their sight word vocabulary. The number of exposures needed for students with learning disabilities is much higher.
- The more words someone has in their sight word vocabulary, the faster they are able to learn to recognize new words immediately.
- Analogizing words involves using parts of known words to help decode new words.
- Predicting words is using the context of the sentence to identify the word.
- Mature readers most often use predicting only after using one of the other strategies. Many times students with reading disabilities tend to use predicting as their first and primary word identification strategy while ignoring all or most of the letter clues.
- Students are expected to read an average of 10,000 new words per grade level.
- Guidelines for sequencing instruction are teaching (1) pre-skills of a strategy before the strategy itself; (2) combinations that are consistent before exceptions; (3) high utility before low utility skills; (4) easier skills before harder skills; and (5) easily confused information and strategies at different times.
- Selection of examples for instruction should be based on those words that students need to learn and practice.
- When introducing new phonetic elements, select a range of consistent examples.
- When selecting examples for discrimination practice, use minimal pairs.
- When selecting elements for general practice, use a range of examples, minimal pairs, and previously learned words.
- In the English language, there can be several different letters or graphemes that can represent one sound or phoneme.
- Students definitely need to learn the most common graphemes, but the uncommon graphemes do not need to be specifically taught. Instead, students need to be taught to recognize the whole word within which these graphemes appear.
- Consonant digraphs need to be explicitly taught to students with reading disabilities.
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