Education experts: Focus on the basics to boost reading scores

Howard County (Map, News) - To help students become better readers, teachers should focus on phonics, fluency and vocabulary, experts say.

“Teachers should be providing at least 90 minutes of instructional reading time for students and monitoring how kids are doing,” said Laura Westberg, director of special projects for the National Center for Family Literacy in Louisville, Ky.

Phonics, the teaching of letter-sound relationships, is important for early readers, Westberg said.

“This is an essential reading component because students are learning how to decode words,” she said. Once phonics is mastered, students become more fluent readers and increase their vocabulary.

The pressure to read has increased as schools strive to meet the demands of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which states students must be proficient in reading and math by the 2013-14 school year.

Westberg said her center is working on a pilot reading project involving 19 schools in Washington, Tennessee and Massachusetts to help increase reading test scores. They make sure students have at least 90 minutes of instructional reading time.

Many of the schools have met annual yearly progress goals defined by the No Child Left Behind Act, she said.

Other experts agree.

“Teach students how to decode using phonics at an early age, [give] students a boost in terms of their knowledge of the world in general and vocabulary in particular, and make sure they do a lot of reading of nonfiction materials,” said Don Crawford, director of training for the National Institute for Direct Instruction in Eugene, Ore.

Added Tom Burkard, who has conducted reading studies for the Centre for Policy Studies in London, England, “Reading scores on standardized tests up to the age of 9 are mostly measures of decoding ability, and instruction aimed specifically at improving this skill, is unquestionably the most effective.”

tjohnson@baltimoreexaminer.com

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