Early Literacy Instruction in the Climate of No Child Left Behind

Early Literacy Instruction in the Climate of No Child Left Behind by Margaret Taylor Stewart

            In this article, its main focus is on the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 five research-based components of reading and oral language which are:  1) Phonemic awareness, 2) Phonics, 3) Vocabulary, 4)Fluency,  and 5) Comprehension, based from the National Reading Panel. In the beginning, it also talks about Title 1 and having a high-quality education for all children, and throughout the article it talks about effective teacher practices.

            To start off, Title 1 states "...is to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education and reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging Stat academic achievement standards and state academic assessments" (pg. 734). This basically says, in the subpart, that every child needs to be reading by grade three and that by having research-based. Teachers need to be knowledgeable in the proven research approaches with reading; that they need to reach out to the students on an individual basis and that using word study is one way on how a teacher can incorporate phonemic awareness, vocabulary, spelling, and high-frequent word recognition within a lesson.

            Moving on to the five research-based components that the National Reading Panel. According to the article, Cunningham and Hall (1994), states that making words has three empirical supports (pg 735). The first support is that learners understand the onsets and rimes better than phoneme isolation. An example given in the text is D-an rather than D-a-n. The second support is that 37 rimes can be found in approximentally 500 words. Some examples given are: -op, -ot, -ack, -ake, and -ice. The final support is the patterns of spelling by using an analogy (735).

            Vocabulary is an aspect of comprehension and vocabulary instruction and is deemed to be a measurement of importance as described by the National Reading Panel (735). Beck and McKeown sayd that effective teachers should use explicit instruction and that they should "take advantage of the students' listening and speaking competencies to enhance their vocabulary development" while providing the students with friendly definitions and explanations to expand the context. The article notes that the teachers promote vocabulary growth (and language development) through authentic and meaningful experiences (737).

            Next is fluency. Repeated readings and giving formal efforts are the two approaches that are to help the students read at a silent reading level while reading books for recreational and instructional use. Pressley stated that being fluent is important because the reader will not have to decode every word within the text before being able to comprehend the text. Samuels (2001) has also reinforced what Pressley said that word recognition comes from the amount of reading that the reader has done (738). Teachers should scaffold what fluent reading sounds to have a good effective practice.

            Comprehension was the final one that was talked about in this article. This article states that "comprehension has three subparts: vocabulary instruction, text comprehension, and teacher preparation of comprehension strategies" (738).  Comprehension needs to be taught explicitly to the students since it is the goal of reading and it needs to be relevant to the students. Discussion of the texts is one effective assessment and way of working on the comprehension strategy (739). Working with small groups is a good way to explicitly teach the students and the groupings need to be flexible (740).



Stewart, Margaret Taylor. "Early Literacy Instruction in the Climate of NO Child Left Behind." International Reading Association. 57.8 (2004): 732-744. Print.

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This page contains a single entry by brie0084 published on December 2, 2010 9:08 PM.

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