From Phonemic Awareness to Fluency: E ffective Decoding Instruction in a Research-Based Reading Program

In today’s society, it is absolutely critical that every child has the fullest opportunities to become an accomplished re a d e r. Anyone unable to read and write p ro f i c i e n t l y faces enormous social, personal, and economic limitations in today’s complex, information-flooded world. There is widespre a d a g reement that the reading demands are gre a t e r now than at any previous time in history. To function successfully, readers must be able to c o n s t ruct complex understandings, make critical comparisons, draw inventive conclusions, and c a refully evaluate the materials they read. In addition, to fully capitalize on the power of re a d i n g , readers must also be able to appreciate the artistry of an accomplished author. Reading involves these multiple goals and much more. This view of re a d i n g as an active, dynamic, constructive, and critical p ro c e s s is the view reflected in recent reviews of reading re s e a rch (e.g., National Researc h C o u n c i l , 1998; National Reading Panel, 2000) and is the view of reading reflected in this paper. One feature that distinguishes reading fro m other vehicles for acquiring, evaluating, applying, and appreciating information, such as listening to a lecture or witnessing a demonstration, is that reading depends on the ability to translate print into meaning. The first vitally important step in re a d i n g is being able to decode or recognize print. The p rocess of being able to translate or transcode p r i n t e d w o rds into their spoken language equivalent has been variously labeled as word identification, w o rd re c o g n i t i o n , or decoding. T h e Literacy Dictionary (Harris & Hodges, 1995) defines word recognition as “the process of determining the pronunciation and some d e g ree of meaning of a word in written or printed form.” (p. 283) Reading is sometimes seen as involving two major factors: word recognition that determines a word’s pronunciation; and comprehension, or understanding its meaning. English is an alphabetic language in that there is an orderly relationship between the phonemes (sounds) that are part of the oral form of language and the graphemes (letters and letter combinations such as "sh" and "th") that make up the printed form of the language. We refer to this orderly re l a t i o n s h i p in which the graphemes of written language re p resent the phonemes of oral language as the alphabetic principle. In order to understand that there is an orderly relationship, learners must be aware of sounds, or phonemes, of the spoken form of the language (phonemic awareness), and they must become very familiar with the letters of the alphabet (orthographic familiarity). Children can identify thousands of words they have never seen in print b e f o re if they learn a body of information about C u r r e n t R e s e a r c h