Multisensory Reading Clinic

CRITICAL SKILLS TO BECOME SUCCESSFUL READERS

 

To become successful readers, children must master the following skills:​

• Phonological awareness

• Automatic and accurate letter naming

• Letter-sound association

• Word reading accuracy and fluency

• Passage reading fluency and comprehension

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Phonological Awareness

Reading requires the ability to accurately and rapidly recognize and name single words in print. It is this basic skill that differentiates the dyslexic student from students who do not like to read and those who lack the intellectual ability to read. Word recognition depends on a specific linguistic ability known as phonological awareness. Children with dyslexia are typically slow and inaccurate when they try to link written alphabetic symbols with the sounds they represent, and they often make mistakes when they try to blend those sounds to read a new word. Conversely, when they try to spell, they have trouble identifying the separate sounds in words and recalling the letters that spell them. They may have a poor sense of how words are put together at both the sound and symbol levels.

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Automatic and Accurate Letter Naming

A second critical skill that predicts later reading is the ability to recognize and name letters automatically, or without a lot of mental effort. This simple skill is easily measured by brief, timed tests of naming letters randomly sequenced in an array encompassing several cognitive or mental skills that are important for reading. First, the reader must recognize the form of the letter and not confuse it with others - a necessity for associating it with the right speech sound later. Second, the reader must recognize the written symbol rapidly because this skill is the basis for later automatic recognition of letter sequences that represent sight words. Third, letter names are phonological entities composed of speech sounds. If the child has difficulties naming, writing, and recognizing the letters, such as confusing the b and the d and vice versa, this could be a clue that he might have a specific learning disability and the parents must seek help from a professional for early intervention. 

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Letter-Sound Association

A third critical skill that should be directly assessed is the ability to link speech sounds with written symbols. Often referred to as phonic knowledge, the matching of speech sounds with letter symbols must be accurate and automatic for a student to decode unknown words. Otherwise, the student will try to guess words based on the meaning of the passage, sentence, or pictures on the page of the book. Some children can easily be confused with the names and the sounds of the letters such as the letter a and its sound. It is extremely important to correct the children's mistakes right away and assist them with the right sound associated with the keyword of the sound to get and remember the sounds such as, "that is the name of the letter a, the sound of the letter a is  /a/, apple, say /a/ apple. " Letters cannot help the children learn to read at the very beginning stage of learning to read and spell and it is only needed in the advanced level such as learning the vowel-consonant-e syllable or silent e like cake, ride, cute, etc. Hence focus on the basic sounds of the letters first until the children know all the sounds of the alphabet and slowly teach the names of the letters separately to avoid confusion.

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Word Reading Accuracy and Fluency

As children become more proficient at the more basic skills already described, the goal of phonics instruction is to develop automatic or fast recognition of whole words, or sight recognition for fluent, automatic reading.

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Passage Reading Fluency and Comprehension

After about the end of first grade, one of the best overall indicators of reading skill is oral reading fluency. Oral reading fluency is the number of words read correctly in 1 minute when the child reads a passage at an appropriate level of difficulty.

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Source: Moats L.C., Dakin K.E., 2008 Basic Facts About Dyslexia & Other Reading Problems