Microcourse 1: The Science of Word Reading: Assessment and Instruction for Early Literacy
Effective word recognition is the cornerstone of successful reading development. In this research-based microcourse, you'll explore the essential components of word recognition as highlighted in Scarborough's Reading Rope and the Active View of Reading frameworks. You'll gain a clear understanding of how phonological awareness, alphabetic principle, phonics knowledge, decoding skills, and sight word recognition work together to allow students to successfully decode and recognize words with automaticity.
This course provides practical assessment tools to identify students' specific word recognition needs and offers structured approaches for targeted instruction. You'll learn how to design sequential small group lessons that systematically build decoding skills. Through carefully planned instructional cycles, you'll discover how to help students move from accuracy to automaticity in their word reading—setting the foundation for fluency and comprehension development.
Whether taken independently or paired with the Fluency microcourse, this course equips you with the knowledge and tools to implement effective Tier 1 word recognition instruction for all students in your classroom.
Learning Objectives:
- Define the key components of word recognition (phonological awareness, alphabetic principle, phonics knowledge, decoding skill, and recognition of words at sight).
- Use various assessment tools to identify students' word recognition strengths and instructional needs.
- Triangulate assessment data from phonemic awareness, letter-sound knowledge, and phonic decoding measures to create targeted instructional plans.
- Implement phonemic awareness instruction that explicitly connects sounds to graphemes to support decoding development.
- Design sequential small group instruction that systematically builds accuracy and automaticity of targeted phonics skills.
- Integrate isolated word practice with connected text reading using appropriate decodable texts.
- Explain how word recognition skills connect to other reading processes within a comprehensive approach to literacy instruction.