The National Reading Panel Report
A doctor once said the more that you read, the more things you will know. The more you learn,
the more places you ll go . That doctor was, of course, Dr Suess in his book 1978 book, I Can
Read with My Eyes Shut!. Reading is the orchestration of many skills. It is much more than simply
decoding words. The National ReadingPanel Report (A Closer Look, 2004, p. 1) summarised a
child s reading process and teachers effective reading instruction into five essential components.
These five critical elements are phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and
comprehension. Each element is individually important; however, each cannot occur independently
of one an other. The most effective way to teach these elements is through a balanced... Show more
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Studies confirm a high correlation of 0.6 to 0.8 between vocabulary knowledge and reading
comprehension (Baumann Kame enui as cited in Dalton and Grisham, 2011 p. 307). However,
the rate at which individual children develop vocabulary knowledge is enormously varied. At 5
years old there is already a 30 million word exposure gap (Hart Risley as cited in Dalton and
Grisham, 2011 p. 307). Linguistic morphology, the study of words and word origins, is a
significant component of vocabulary learning programs. Children should be actively supplied with
multiple exposures to words and exposures in varying contexts. Walbank and Bisby (2016, p. 11)
describe how building adjective vocabulary adds dramatically more interest, accuracy and detail to
students oral and written language. To encourage this development, students can work in small
groups to brainstorm alternative, more interesting words, for commonly used adjectives. For
example, replacing the word good with magnificent , superlative or exceptional . This direct
vocabulary instruction is essential, but having only explicit teaching is insufficient. Beck et al
(2008) estimate that educators can only actively teach 300 400 words per year (as cited in Dalton
and Grisham, 2011 p. 307). Also, research indicates that children learn a far greater number of
words indirectly through reading, than from instruction (Cunningham Stanovich as
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