Literacy Development in Children

Five different areas of instruction co-exist together to productively teach children how to be successful readers. These are known as the components of literacy and include phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary development, comprehension, and fluency.

Phonemic awareness is the ability to understand that words are made up of individual speech sounds or phonemes, which are the smallest units of sound in a spoken word that can change its meaning. This is an important concept to learn because children need to be aware of how the sounds in words work before they can learn to read print. Children who cannot hear or correctly understand phonemes of spoken language have difficulty with phonics, the next component of literacy.

Phonics is the ability to understand that there is a predictable relationship between phonemes and graphemes, which are the letters and spelling patterns that represent sounds in written language. Phonics requires children to understand that sounds can be combined to make a word. Therefore, children who cannot hear and consequently cannot properly work with phonemes of spoken language have difficultly understanding how phonemes and graphemes relate to each other when they see the letters and letter groups in written words. This is why it is very important that in order to read accurately, words that the child are going to attempt to read must be a part of the student's oral language.

The next component of literacy is vocabulary development. This refers to all the words children must know to communicate effectively. This includes oral vocabulary, the words people use when speaking or recognize when listening. There is also reading vocabulary, the printed words people recognize. Most of the words children learn come indirectly from being around others and listening and taking part in conversations, but they also learn new words when they read on their own and listen to adults read.

Comprehension is another component of literacy, and it involves a student being able to read text and engage with ideas in order to construct meaning of the text as a whole. Students must learn to monitor their comprehension so that if they do not understand something, they can use appropriate strategies to fix this problem and build their understanding of the text.

Fluency is the last component of literacy and is defined as the ability to read text quickly and accurately. Fluent readers are able to read text and focus on what it means as a whole. They do not have to decode what each individual word means, but instead are able to effortlessly and expressively recognize and comprehend the text simultaneously.

Each of these components takes time to develop and will do so at different paces in every child. No matter who you are working with, it is important to be patient and assist them in mastering each of these components of literacy. Each one builds on top of another, so even though particular components may come quicker than others for different children, as an educator, patience, your complete and full attention, and assistance is what will ultimately lead to a classroom of successful readers.

References:
http://www.learner.org/channel/libraries/readingk2/front/components.html
http://www.nifl.gov/partnershipforreading/publications/reading_first1.html