Reading and Writing

Our Literacy and Learning Specialists are trained to build and support reading and writing skills in students of all ages.  Of course, instruction is tailored to your child's individual needs and the content is always age-appropriate.  Moreover, the teaching materials and methods we utilize are supported by well-designed research demonstrating their efficacy.

The Foundation of Language Instruction

There are five areas underpinning effective language instruction:
1. Phonemic awareness
2. Phonics
3. Fluency
4. Vocabulary
5. Text comprehension
In the early years of schooling, instruction focuses on phonemic awareness, phonics and fluency.  In the latter years, fluency, vocabulary and text comprehension become the focus of language instruction.  It is said that first you learn to read and then you read to learn.
  1. Phonemic awareness: A phoneme is the smallest part of sound in a spoken word which has an impact on the word's meaning.  Phonemic awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate the individual sounds in spoken words.  This is not the same as phonological awareness.  Phonological awareness explains the ability to work with a much broader range of sounds in language - phonemic awareness is a subcategory of phonological awareness.
  2. Phonics: Phonics represents the relationships between the letters, or graphemes, of written language and the individual sounds, or phonemes, of spoken language.  Phonics instruction  - especially explicit and systematic instruction - is important because it teaches children to use these relationships to read and write words.
  3. Fluency: Fluency is the ability to read a text accurately and quickly.  A fluent reader has achieved automaticity in word recognition, allowing him or her to focus attention on making connections among the ideas in a text and between these ideas and background knowledge.  This skill is key because it provides the bridge from word recognition to text comprehension.
  4. Vocabulary: Vocabulary encompasses all the words one must know to communicate effectively.  Interestingly, there are four types of vocabulary: listening vocabulary, speaking vocabulary, reading vocabulary and writing vocabulary.  For one person, each set may be slightly different.  Additionally, there are two pathways to learning vocabulary: indirect and direct acquisition.  Indirect vocabulary learning, the bulk of vocabulary acquisition, occurs when students hear and see words used in everyday settings.  Direct learning occurs with teachers and tutors through an explicit vocabulary learning program.
  5. Text comprehension: Comprehension is the goal of reading instruction: to understand what is being read.  Students have a difficult task; they must have the ability to successfully understand many different styles of written text: novels, poems, history texts, mathematics problems, biology textbooks and others.  There are six strategies researchers have found effective in teaching text comprehension: comprehension monitoring, using graphic and semantic organizers, answering questions, generating questions, recognizing text structure and summarizing.
Our Literacy and Learning Specialists have experience using multi-sensory language instruction; they will customize instruction to your child's needs using our own tools and techniques from existing programs, including Wilson Reading System, the Academy of Orton Gillingham, Great Leaps and others.

For our older students, especially those in grades 6 and above, we emphasize the development of metacognitive strategies.  Metacognition is defined as "thinking about thinking."  Students with strong metacognitive skills are able to read actively by setting goals before reading, monitoring understanding during the process, and adjusting strategies to the type of text being read.

Please contact us to find out how our Literacy and Learning Specialists can help your child.