The Reading Room

The Importance of Vocabulary:  Part 2 Chris Fox – cfox@ces.org Jessica Powell – jpowell@ces.org Download

Etymology: What is it, and how can teaching students about it strengthen their literacy skills? “Etymology, which is one of the most systematic, enjoyable and effective ways of enhancing word power, will increase the learners’ ability to figure out unknown and...

Prosody in Reading This month’s topic for the Reading Room is prosody. We will explore the different aspects of prosody and how to develop and improve it for our students. Definition of Prosody in Reading: “What is the Definition of Prosody? Reading with prosody...

Fluency We are dedicating this month’s Reading Room to fluency.  Fluency is not JUST how fast we read.  It is also the flow with which we read.  When fluent readers read out loud, it should sound as if they are speaking.   When readers mirror spoken language in read...

Orthography This month we will be discussing orthography: what orthography is, how does it affect decoding and encoding, and strategies to teach it. Or-thog-ra-phy – We can see that the word has four syllables. How many morphemes does this word have? If we check on...

Tips and Tricks: Semantics This month in the Reading Room, we will be focusing on semantics, which is the branch of linguistics concerned with how meaning is constructed and communicated in written or spoken language. Vocabulary development requires students’...

Tips and Tricks: Syntax This month we will be discussing syntax, one of the primary components of Structured Literacy. What is syntax, why do we need it, and tips on how to teach it. According to David Kilpatrick, author of “Equipped for Reading Success”, knowledge of...

This month in the Reading Room, we will be focusing on Morphology, a very important part of structured literacy.  Simply put, morphology is the teaching of word parts for both decoding purposes and meaning.  A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning. Some words have...

Last month we went over three syllable types (closed, v-e, and open) In this month’s Reading Room, we will be discussing Syllable Instruction: Part 2 (final stable syllable, vowel teams, and the r-controlled syllable type), and why syllable instruction is important to...