High Frequency Words

Reading is an acquired skill, developed through explicit teaching and founded upon a child’s innate ability to hear and process sounds from birth. Beginning at birth exposure to oral language, gestures and the functions of communication (Fellows & Oakley, 2010 p.165) allows exploration of sounds and words and their connection to each other, and introduces cue systems that will later assist in decoding complex text as development of reading ability occurs. Cue systems including linguistic rules of speech, such as grammatical, pragmatic, semantic and syntactic structures (McDevitt & Ormrod, 2004, p. 324), provide readers with strategies and knowledge for comprehension and phonological awareness (Gascoigne, 2005, p. 1). Rich language exchanges

The Simple View of Reading (SVoR) model suggests that children must have language comprehension and word recognition skills to be proficient readers, Medwell et al (2014). Jim Rose’s report (2006, p. 40) outlined the Simple View of Reading as a useful framework, which would make explicit to teachers what they need to teach about word recognition and language comprehension (see appendix 1). Before the Rose report, reading was defined as decoding black marks, Graham and Kelly (2012). After this the searchlights model suggested that phonics, grammatical knowledge, reading comprehension and graphic knowledge are equally useful tools when learning to read, Ward (2008). The Rose report’s Independent Review of the Teaching of Early reading reconstructed this model and created the SVoR. Rose (2006, p. 38) determines word recognition as a process which allows you to use “phonics to recognise words” and language comprehension as the means by which “word information, sentences and discourse are interpreted.” The SVoR suggests that, to become a fluent reader, the skills of language comprehension and word recognition are equally important and dependent on each other. Gough and Tummer first mentioned this model, as stated that “comprehension is not sufficient, for decoding is also necessary” Wyse et al (2013, p.

Comprehension is also an important factor when speaking of literacy. Students should be taught the many strategies that will help them with comprehension and word recognition. In my experience in a first grade classroom I used many of these strategies. Within my lessons I included the activation of prior knowledge to construct meaning, the use of context clues in a sentence, pictures clues, predicting, and drawing inferences about ideas or characters in the text. I always made sure that I modeled the strategy for the student before they set of to do it.

Phonemic awareness is a vital role in literacy instruction. Many schools and districts adopt a commercially published basal reading program and it becomes the cornerstone of their instruction ( (David Chard, n.d.). We also know that through investigation and research it has shown us that word-recognition instruction and instruction in oral language skills related to word recognition were inadequately represented. (David Chard, n.d.) The same researchers have found that the reading passages that students are reading didn’t relate to the words they were learning. In order for students to read at grade level or above a supplemental program should be implemented. I have found that at my school we are lacking a phonics program that will reach different students abilities and make them successful in reading. My goal for this paper is to show my district that using a supplemental phonics program aside from our basal phonics program will prove beneficial to strategic readers who fall below grade level.

The Fry Sight-Word Inventory is an informal, criterion-referenced screener which measures high-frequency word achievement. Fry 's Instant Words have been determined as the most common words used in English ranked in order of frequency. Specifically, Fry found that twenty-five words make up approximately a third of all items published, one-hundred words comprise almost half of all of the words found in publications, and three-hundred words make up approximately sixty-five percent of all written material. The first three-hundred words on Fry’s list should be mastered by the end of corresponding grade levels, and lists four through ten should be mastered between fourth and fifth grades. Each hundred words are broken down even further into twenty-five words per list, according to difficulty and frequency, and should be assessed sequentially. The goal of progress monitoring high-frequency word mastery is to increase fluency on high-frequency words in order to further automaticity within our students’ reading, which ultimately impacts overall comprehension.

1. This document teaches students how to read the word by introducing lots of vocabulary and

There are many components to building a student’s reading skill set. One skill that is introduced in preschool and developed through the primary grades is phonemic awareness. The term phonemic awareness is defined as the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes – individual sounds. The child becomes aware of how sounds are connected to words prior to reading. This awareness creates the understanding of how phonemes explains how the smallest part of sound creates a difference in sound to the meaning of a word. Therefore, the ability to dismantle words, and reassemble them, and then to alter the word into something different explains the concept behind phonemic awareness. It is the primary foundation in which other reading skill sets are according based.

Reading is an essential skill students should have in society. Word identification aids are advantageous for students with decoding deficits. With a decoding deficit, students’

Reading fluency is considered an integral component of the reading process and it has a big presence in the classroom. Its importance became evident since the National Reading Panel (2000) pronounced fluency instruction and assessment an essential and was thus incorporated into the reading First guidelines of No Child Left Behind in 2002 (Shelton, Altwerger, &Jordan, 2009). Reading fluency has been defined in many ways; an outcome of decoding and comprehension, a contributor to both decoding and comprehension, the ability to recognize words rapidly and accurately, the connections

Bobrow discusses the importance of phonemic awareness. Bobrow states that phonemic awareness is important for reading achievement and learning how to read. According to Bobrow, students need to be able to “grasp printed words”(para.3) and know how words “work together”

Designing an individual intervention to increase reading fluency requires completion of assessments that will determine the child’s reading strengths and weaknesses. An inaccurate reader needs direct instruction on improving word recognition, which may include sight words and decodable words (which rules is the student not applying) at their instructional level. Once the goals have been established, in this case fluency, the intervention will begin with an introduction on fluency and word recognition.

“Put Reading First” talks about the most important elements of reading such as phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The article explains the purpose and importance of these concepts, due to the idea of how hard it is for some children to read. It also offers the idea of instructional strategies to use for the concepts. For example, Phonemic awareness is being able to hear, distinguish between the sounds being heard, and make sounds in spoken words. This involves understanding that some words have the same beginning sound or segmenting the beginning and ending sound in the words. The article also goes on about the individual breakdowns of the concept such as graphemes and phonemes. It then goes over the strategies

Word recognition involves an individual’s ability to identify words independently without requiring related words for contextual help. A widely examined topic in the field of cognitive psychology, it deals with understanding printed letters as a word which has been kept in the lexicon. The word frequency effect is important in the recognition of words. It suggests more common words in printed language are easier, faster and more accurate to distinguish than words that appear less frequently. Outlined in their journal article, Howes and Solomon utilized Thorndike-Lorge’s word count for word frequency and measured the threshold of recognition. They found correlation coefficients of -.68 to -.75 between word frequency and threshold or duration.

For a child who is just starting to learn to read, they need sufficient practice in reading a variety of different books to achieve fluency. Reading can be complex and has many different aspects (Burns,1999). It is suggested that children who have problems reading and writing at a young age will find it hard to catch up as they get older and will not reach their full potential as adults, many will withdraw from school or society and some becoming involved with crime (MacBlain,2014). 40 percent of children find learning to read a challenge but with early help, most reading problems can be prevented (Reading Rockets, n.d.).

Oral language is also an important component in reading. When a child enters school, they enter with an amount of oral language and background knowledge that would come from their experiences so far. This knowledge helps them to understand their peers and others around them. The amount of oral language development within is student, directly reflects upon their reading level. The easier it is for a child to speak, the easier it is for them to pick up reading. Reading is not an easy task, but oral language does help with the process. Additionally, oral language would also help with the recognizing and association of words to text that is being read. There may be a situation in which the student is reading about for which they can relate too. This could be due to their prior oral language development. Associating words that are recognized in their vocabulary with words that are in the text creates a link that the student can expand on. This