In this blog post, the focus is on the Fab Five of reading and how understanding these skills can help answer open response or constructed response questions on teacher certification exams for elementary education, teaching reading, and any exam assessing reading skills and fostering reading skills in students.
The science of teaching reading and the Fab Five of reading are essential components in building students' reading skills and making them stronger readers. These things are prevalent in teacher certification exams, including those for elementary education and middle school language arts, as reading comprehension is crucial for all students. However, before mastering reading comprehension, several smaller skills must be developed. This blog will quickly cover the Fab Five of reading, strategies for each skill, and how to apply them to open responses and constructed responses on teacher certification exams.
The Fab Five of reading consists of:
- Phonemic Awareness
- Phonics
- Fluency
- Vocabulary
- Comprehension
Phonemic Awareness and Phonological Awareness
Phonemic awareness and phonological awareness involve focusing on sounds in words, independent of written text. Strategies for enhancing these skills include sound-only activities. For phonemic awareness, an example activity involves identifying individual sounds in words. For instance, with the word "stick," students would identify the sounds /s/, /t/, /i/, /ck/.
Phonological awareness can involve breaking words into onset (initial consonant or consonant cluster) and rime (vowel and following consonants). For example, breaking "stick" into /st/ (onset) and /ick/ (rime). Deletion activities, such as removing the first sound from "stick" to get "ick," also strengthen these skills. Substitution is a higher-level phonemic awareness skill that involves identifying a sound in a word, deleting it, and substituting it with a new sound. This process engages multiple skills in the brain. For example, with the word "math," students can change the "a" sound to an "o" sound to make "moth." This substitution shows progression from identifying sounds to manipulating them. Substitution can be more complex than other activities like deletion or identifying sounds, demonstrating an understanding of phonological and phonemic awareness. This foundational skill is crucial for developing reading abilities, as it leads to phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.
Phonics
Phonics involves looking at words and understanding their sounds based on spelling rules, with strategies to strengthen phonics skills including teaching consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) patterns, like "bat"; explaining the CVC silent E pattern, where a word like "make" has a long vowel sound due to the silent E; and working on vowel teams, such as "mean" where "ea" makes a long E sound, and diphthongs, such as "boil" with the "oi" sound.
Fluency
Fluency focuses on reading with speed, accuracy, and proper expression. Strategies to enhance fluency include repeated reading to build confidence and familiarity with the text, chunking text into smaller, manageable parts, choral reading where students read together, and echo reading where the teacher reads a passage and students repeat it.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary development involves understanding the meanings of words within context, and strategies for vocabulary enhancement include using context clues to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words, encouraging students to read around the unknown word to derive its meaning from the surrounding text, and teaching students to use pictures and semantic cues within the text as context clues.
Comprehension
Comprehension is the ability to understand and think critically about a text. To strengthen comprehension, you might get a question about how to improve it. One highly effective strategy for comprehension is metacognition—thinking about thinking. This involves identifying the processes used to understand a text. A great example of this is the read aloud think aloud strategy. In this approach, the teacher reads a complex text out loud and verbalizes their thought process, such as figuring out the meaning of a difficult word using context clues or summarizing a paragraph. This helps students see how to use their brains when reading alone. Other helpful strategies include summarizing what was read, sequencing events in the story, and making predictions supported by the text. These techniques all help strengthen students' comprehension.
Application to Teacher Certification Exams
In open response or constructed response questions on teacher certification exams, it's important to use these strategies to demonstrate knowledge of the pedagogy and practice of teaching reading. By mastering and effectively applying the Fab Five of reading, teachers can support their students' reading development and excel in their certification exams. These foundational skills are crucial for creating confident and competent readers, essential for students' overall academic success.
If you're looking for additional support or resources to help you succeed in your teaching reading exams, please visit our website. You'll find a variety of study materials and tools designed to enhance your preparation and boost your confidence. Check it out here!
