Page 20 - ABCTE Study Guide_Neat

Review

• Decoding is using phonemic awareness to recognize a word.

• Etymology is the study of a word’s origins and its usage over time.

• Morphology is the study of word structure.

• Orthography is the study of spelling patterns and conventions.

• Automaticity is the ability to quickly and easily decode words (remember that this is a
different skill than fluency).

Phonics Instruction II

From Phonemes to Graphemes

Print surrounds us—on monitors, magazine, buses, televisions—and it can be difficult to realize what
it might be like to take the first tentative steps into this world. However, it is crucial to familiarize
students with the conventions of our language as it appears in print. Students should know the
following:

• Printed words carry meaning (just like spoken words).
• Print is always organized; for example, it appears on a page from left to right, top to
bottom.

• Words are made up of letters.
• Words are separated by spaces.
• Words are grouped into sentences.

Of course, as students' skills develop, they may develop print awareness, which may include recognition
of punctuation and other subtleties. At the outset of their reading careers, however, it’s enough for
students to grasp the basics of the printed word.

Putting It All to Work

• They use the letters in a word to figure it out instead of guessing at it from context clues
and adjacent graphics.
• They consider pretty much every letter in a word when they decode.
• They rely on their knowledge of phoneme-to-letter relationships to decode words.
• They attack words with strategies that work for them.
• They have a firm grip on sight words, which are words they’ve encountered enough
times to recognize without having to consciously decode them.

If you weren’t aware of those basic concepts, you might not be able to recognize and intervene when
your students exhibit characteristics of unhappy or struggling readers, including the following:

• They’re not yet comfortable manipulating phonemes.
• They struggle with naming the letters of the alphabet.