Literacy Skills Assessment

Bobrow discusses the importance of phonemic awareness. Bobrow states that phonemic awareness is important for reading achievement and learning how to read. According to Bobrow, students need to be able to “grasp printed words”(para.3) and know how words “work together”

Phoneme Segmentation Fluency is a 2 minute assessment where Suzie hears a word such as "bat" and Suzie responds with "/b/ /a/ /t/". This assessment was difficult for her and she scored a score of 3. She needs more improvement in this skill to meet the standards.

According to Stanovich (1986) and Kaminksi & Powell-Smith (2016), phonological awareness stands out as the highest predictor of reading acquisition. Phonological Awareness (PA) is the process in which students learn that words are made up of phonemes (sounds) and learn each individual phoneme (Eissa, 2014). PA is the ability to recognize rhymes, counting syllables, and separating the beginning sound from the ending sound (e.g. /c/ from /at/) (Yopp & Yopp, 2000). More than twenty percent of kindergarten and first grade students struggle with an aspect of PA; furthermore eight to ten percent show significant delays (Trehearne, 2003).

Phonemic awareness is the knowledge of sounds in spoken sound. Yopp and Yopp (2000) state that it is the awareness speech involves sequencing sounds and this instruction should be of priority in early reading instruction. To assess phonemic awareness I would use the pre- and post-assessment for phonemic awareness. This informal assessments evaluates a student’s ability to recognize syllables, distinguish, manipulate and delete initial sounds, distinguish rime and rhyme, distinguish oddity; blend letter sounds and segment sounds.

Based on the knowledge gained from this course, I believe assessment literacy matters because assessment is about the process of growth. Assessment literacy gets to the heart of education as it is more than just testing and teaching. When educators are assessment literate, they provide transformative opportunities for their students. They enrich their learning environments beyond traditional assessment

Probably the most significant advance in the scientific study of reading and related skills has been the identification of the role of phonological processing in learning to read. It is now widely recognized that children will struggle to learn to decode text if they cannot segment and blend the separate sounds within words orally. As a consequence, there has been an increasing emphasis on the inclusion of phonological skills training in programs designed to help young children learn to read. Presently it is greatly recommended phonological intervention plan should be an essential component of programs designed to meet the needs of older low-progress readers.

Learning to read is a complex task which involves more than just decoding the print on the page. The goal of reading is to construct meaning from the text (Winch, 2014). While the teaching of decoding skills is an extremely important step in the reading process, simply having the skills of decoding is not enough to become a successful reader. For this reason, the key elements of the reading process will be discussed in an order which allows children to develop the building blocks necessary to become a successful reader. Systematic and explicit reading instruction is vital for reading development as it allows children to build on the previously acquired skills and strategies required to become a successful reader. The purpose of this essay is to explain why having a concept of print, phonemic awareness, phonics and comprehension are important to the reading process and how effective teachers teach these skills.

Teaching my student reading I notice that it is a complex topic of the text, and their knowledge of their culture to construct meaning with text. I stated in one of the district often several professional learning development doing summer to improve and inform teacher about how assessment the students. There is new instant data for informal and formal assessment called illumination. We are able to assess the students and reteach the material within second of teaching the information. I will continue to implement this development can help the student with organizing, motivating, and guiding the support aids for students in classrooms.

Phonics is a method that teaches reading and writing of the English language. It aims to enhance investigation into sound-letter relationships, and the understanding of the alphabet (Hill, S., 2012, p. 241). It attempts to do this by developing learners’ phonemic awareness. Phonics is used to assist learners with the decoding of words. Phonics is valuable as without this understanding of sound-letter relationships, being able to read is unachievable. However, it is not the whole part of learning to read and write.Gough, Hoover and Peterson state (cited in Damianou, 2016, p. 128) that a ‘child who cannot decode cannot read; a child who cannot comprehend cannot read either”. Understanding what readers are reading is also a very important role and should not be overlooked. Research has found that there are six elements that benefit children who are starting school that must firstly be

Phonological awareness is a very important factor of emergent literacy because it helps children’s reading and construction of meaning.

Teacher assessments are paramount in allowing the teacher to find out what the student requires for their individual process of learning. Literacy levels need to be diligently assessed, recorded and acted upon repeatedly. Just as you teach to the individual, so too must your assessment be flexible (University of Wisconsin Green Bay, n.d.), particularly in the early learning years. Whether using a running record an informal reading inventory, reading logs in a portfolio or a rubric, (University of Wisconsin Green Bay, n.d.), the scaffolded learning components, of the emergent learning stages are the quintessential requirements necessary for the learning journey towards becoming a fluent compressive reader, therefore it is important no child falls behind. In later middle Primary Schooling year levels, as the children progress, the children are introduced to more formal structures of assessment so as to become accustomed to a uniformed style of assessment. Such assessments may differ depending on if the school follows State or Federal curriculum structures, however the most structured is the NAPLAN (Australian Curriculum and Assessment Reporting Authority, 2016)

Literacy has been one of the most prominent aspects of education and schooling due to the ongoing craft of a curriculum that both questions and reflects our current sociocultural situation. Literacy teaching and learning has vastly changed over time with cultural, social, academic, and technological developments. Graff (1987) has previously proposed that, while the education system develops, it only seems appropriate for literacy approaches to be revised. Kalantzis, Cope, Chan and Dalley-Trim (2016) put forward the four literacy pedagogies of didactic, authentic, functional and critical. Pedagogical approaches draw links to developmental theories and are generally supported by academics of the relevant period, with strong ties to the sociocultural

‘Schools are made to be relevant to students because they need skills and tools to use in the real world,' my English teacher use to remind us back in high school. I have always been determined to achieve the highest level of literacy and skill while learning. Learning the purpose of literacy and the required skill is one of the most crucial elements of school and as soon as any student would understand that, then learning would be much more interesting, comfortable and passion filled. Many students all read the same way, to get a gist of the material and not to understand. Understanding that study materials can be different, it would be necessary to apply different skills to each reading material depending on the purpose of reading. The amount of literacy and the correct use of this skill can go a long way in helping students achieve their learning objectives both in school and after school. My literacy skills have helped me make some of the most significant steps in accomplishing my goals.

Phonemic awareness and phonics instruction are provided in the emergent literacy and decoding stage of reading development and are followed by the confirmation and fluency stage as named in Chall’s 2004 study (McCardle and Chhabra, 2004). The confirmation and fluency stage is a consolidation and

Determining a student’s level of phonological awareness, does the student hear, analyse and manipulate the sounds and syllables of spoken words? Do they understand speech is a combination of separate words? Does the child distinguish the individual sounds or phenomes that form syllables? Can they identify rhyming words? Do they blend or exchange sounds to make new word combinations? These are the questions educators need to firstly find answers too and secondly teach in order to tutor children in reading (Reid Lyon, 2008). It is crucial to build upon a child’s phonemic awareness, if children struggle to isolate the sounds of spoken word, it will be difficult for them to relate these sounds to their represented letters (Fellows