Teaching literacy

Literacy comprises a number of subskills, including phonological awareness, decoding, fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary. Mastering each of these subskills is necessary for students to become proficient readers.^[21]

Many children experience difficulty when learning to read. Learning to read is difficult because reading requires the mastery of a code that maps human speech sounds to written symbols. Mastering this code is not a natural process, like the development of language, and therefore requires instruction. Reading can be very difficult if students do not get good instruction in this code.^[22]

Readers of alphabetic languages must understand the alphabetic principle in order to master basic reading skills. A writing system is said to be alphabetic if it uses symbols to represent individual language sounds,^[23] though the degree of correspondence between letters and sounds varies across alphabetic languages. Syllabic writing systems (such as Japanese kana) use a symbol to represent a single syllable, and logographic writing systems (such as Chinese) use a symbol to represent a morpheme.

Phonics is an instructional technique that teaches readers to attend to the letters or groups of letters that make up words. A common method of teaching phonics is synthetic phonics, in which a novice reader pronounces each individual sound and "blends" them to pronounce the whole word. Another method of instruction is embedded phonics instruction, used more often in whole language reading instruction, in which novice readers learn a little about the individual letters in words, especially the consonants and the "short vowels." Teachers provide this knowledge opportunistically, in the context of stories that feature many instances of a particular letter. Embedded instruction combines letter-sound knowledge with the use of meaningful context to read new and difficult words.^[24]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy

See also on wikipedia.org:

• Numeracy
• Mediacy
• Political literacy
• Likbez
• Literate environment
• Functional illiteracy
• Project LISTEN
• Society for the Scientific Study of Reading (SSSR)
• United Nations Literacy Decade
• International Literacy Day
• Reading education in the USA
• Literacy Florida!