By the 2030s, say demographers, English language learners (ELLs) will account for approximately 40% of the entire school-aged population in the United States. In some areas, that projection is already exceeded-in California, for instance, 60%-70% of schoolchildren speak a language other than English as their primary language.

Silent Period

The plethora of scientifically based reading research on how to best teach reading supports direct and explicit instruction in the five essential sub-skills; phonics, fluency, spelling, vocabulary, and comprehension (National Reading Panel, 2002; NPR).

The challenge then for reading instruction designed to meet the needs of adolescents is not how or what to teach, but how to best sequence and balance the introduction of the NPR's five essential sub-skills to maximize student responsiveness.

Poor comprehenders who attain normal single word reading accuracy scores may have deficits in reading comprehension because of poor fluency of word reading; poor fluency may result in a "bottleneck" that impedes comprehension. Deficits in other skills, beyond the word-level (i.e., accuracy and fluency of word reading), may also contribute to impaired reading comprehension. Other skills that have been found to influence reading comprehension include vocabulary, syntax, visual and verbal working memory, ability to make inferences, and planning /organization/monitoring, which could be conceptualized as falling within the overlapping domains of language and executive function.

Affixes

Analytic phonics

Reading is a complex system of deriving meaning from print that requires all of the following:

Phonics