Components
The instructional components outlined below provide a format for teaching the characteristics of an alphabetic writing system to groups of children in the regular classroom. See An Alternative Classroom Reading Program for Learning Disabled and Other Low-Achieving Children, Benita A. Blachman, 1987.

1.  Review Sound-Symbol Correspondences

• GOAL:   students develop sound-symbol associations.
• Procedure:   teacher states letter name(s), gives keyword (stressing target letter-sound), and pronounces letter sound.  Students repeat sequence.
• e.g.   a-apple-/a/.
• Materials:   sound-letter cards.

2.   Teach New Decoding Skill

• GOAL:   students develop phoneme analysis and blending techniques to synthesize sounds.
• Procedure:   teacher slowly pronounces word, stressing vowel sound; students slowly repeat the word stressing vowel sound; students select corresponding letters and arrange them on sound boards.
• e.g.   s-a-t,   s-a-d,   m-a-d,   m-a-n,   f-a-n,   f-i-n,   f-i-t.
• Materials:   sound board with accompanying letter cards.

3.   Review Phonetically Regular Words and High Frequency Words

• GOAL:   students develop automatic (fast and accurate) word recognition.
• Procedure:   teacher "flashes" word cards; students say words.
• e.g.   man, sad, rat, bag, jam, hid, sit, fin, in, said, with, the.
• Materials:   3x5 white and yellow cards.

4.   Read Orally in Context

• GOAL:   students develop fluency and independence in word recognition to support reading for meaning.
• Procedure:   provide ample opportunity for students to practice the skills taught, guided with corrective feedback on oral reading errors consistent with the student's knowledge of phonics. Once words are pronounced, meaning must be attached. The process of word identification is supported by sound-symbol decoding; the process of learning a word's meaning is supported by contextual analysis (Moats, 1998). Appropriately apply instructional approaches to teaching comprehension skills.
• e.g.   corrective feedback:   "What does ea say?";   "Where would you divide protect?;   "What type of syllable?";   "What does the vowel say?"
• Materials:   phonetically controlled readers, predictable texts as well as literature with familiar language patterns.

5.   Dictate Words and Sentences

• GOAL:   students develop the ability to use phoneme-grapheme correspondences to spell word structures.
• Procedure:   teacher slowly says word; students repeat the word to hear and feel sounds, identify the vowel sound, "sound-as-write", proofread and make corrections with guidance. Controlled sentences are also dictated, written, and proofread.
• e.g.   s-a-n-d,   /a/,   s-a-n-d;   Fred *always swims with a pal at the pond.
• Materials:   student dictation books.

**   Extended Activities

• Shared reading of high quality and interesting books: fiction and non-fiction.
• Writing activities: dialogues, plays, descriptions, journals.
• Word games: matching, sorting, word construction, homophones.

Agenda | Phonemic Awareness | Alphabetic Principle | Syllables | Morphology, Syntax, Semantics | Resources

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Last modified: Sat Jul 24 10:34:15 EDT 1999