10 Principles for Uniting
Language and Literacy Instruction
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Focus on the five core meta-linguistic awarenesses – POMSS covers the important language functions needed for accurate, fluent, and meaningful reading. Each component specializes in a set of linguistic Lego pieces. They should be the central focus of developmental language-literacy instruction. All five awareness should be continually developed as they factor in long-term literacy growth:
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Phonemic awareness isn’t just a basic decoding ability but aids in pronouncing unfamiliar multisyllabic words and storing words in our specialized sight word memory. Meta-linguistic instruction includes word analysis activities such as minimal paired word analysis and word chains that promote serial substitution. Linguistic Lego blocks include phonemes, spoken syllables and their parts (onset and rime)
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Orthographic awareness is the ability to recognize letter patterns and sequences that make up words. These include graphemes which represent phonemes, longer letter sequences, written syllables including onset- rime patterns (initial consonants -initial vowel and following consonants), written words and words within words (a-part-ment). Phoneme-grapheme relationships are an important but initial orthographic process. O should be integrated with P and M to ensure continuous spelling and reading growth. For example, when a word is spelled automatically, it is often read fluently. Meta-linguistic practices include mapping activities that show how changes in spellings, phonemes and morphemes influence each other.
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Morphological awareness is the mainstay of literacy development, fueling decoding, fluency, word meaning, vocabulary development, spelling, and comprehension growth into secondary school. Lego pieces include suffixes, prefixes, and bases (words that have meaning alone or in combination with affixes – eat in eating) and roots (aud in audio means “to hear or listen” but isn’t a word itself).
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Semantic awareness - words and their relationships, including figurative language like idioms and metaphors, and synonyms and antonyms, word pairs – Ice cream, good friends, chocolate chips, phrases, (groups of words that aren’t quite sentences) – out of time, all day long, at your house.
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Syntactic awareness - insight into how words and phrases are constructed into sentences and beyond.
Take an Integrated Multicomponent approach to instruction – The same researchers whose work points to POMSS instruction agree that these abilities are best developed in an integrated manner – not as separate parts. The five abilities reinforce each other while strengthening related literacy abilities. Traditional instruction often focuses on one component, such as decoding or fluency. This time consuming, and often leads to incremental improvement.
Create meaning at every level as it contributes to comprehension, solidifies memory, and makes reading sensible to students. As much as possible, sound and spelling instruction should be tied to morphology. Show students that as words grow more complex, letter sequences became less reliable representations of sounds, but spellings still largely preserve the meaning of words - precise-precision, acquire-acquisition, displease-pleasant, equal-equivalent. Explore how compound words, collocations (word pairs like ice cream, good friends, chocolate chips), and phrases turn
small groups of words into larger units of meaning. Sue Hegland’s concise
Beneath the Surface of Words shows how morphological families, word sums
(dis + please + ure —> displeasure), and matrices creates connections between
written and spoken words while improving spelling, decoding and vocabulary.
Know what aspects of language to emphasize - The POMSS meta-linguistic abilities and their linguistic Legos pieces are the core language-learning components of literacy. Elfrieda Hiebert’s Teaching Words and How They Work defines the aspects of language to emphasize and simple ways to teach them.
Integrate fluency as an integrated ability as it is part of the language-literacy network, not as a separate skill. The POMSS abilities strengthen the accuracy and rate elements of fluency. Prosody, or expression, reflects a reader’s deeper understanding of a text. Tim Rasinski’s repeated reading practices provide classroom-ready fluency activities. On the meta-side, rehearsal practice, where words, phrases, and sentences from a short story are repeatedly practiced before reading the story, is a particularly effective fluency practice.
Keep in mind that reading unfamiliar multisyllabic words is as big a challenge as learning to initially read. Multisyllabic words require all five meta-linguistic abilities as letters don’t always map directly to pronunciation (sign-signature), and they often have multiple meanings. Proficient readers recognize unfamiliar multisyllabic words as composed of familiar Lego pieces, including spellings, syllables, morphemes, and words with words -- un-eco-logic-al or un-reli-able, with context providing the final confirmation. Multisyllabic words instruction must start early, as single syllable words pop up regularly inside longer words (a-part-ment). If a child can read hit, then introduce hitter, hitting, hits, and outhit
Develop flexibility with spelling, pronunciation and meaning as these vary greatly in English. Another meta-linguistic ability is mispronunciation correction (set for variability). The ability to play with the pronunciation of words is essential for single and multisyllabic words. Practice identifying the vowel phoneme in words like some, gone, love, move, have, sure, and give. Show students how to play with the pronunciation of unfamiliar multisyllabic words, until they sound meaningful.
Rely on Generative Learning, an established approach to vocabulary learning, generative learning is an essential teaching strategy as it is impossible to teach students the thousands of new vocabulary, sight, and spelling words they must learn each year. Generative learning is like showing children the basic combinations and connections between Lego blocks and then gently helping them construct complex structures based on this general knowledge. Explicitly teach students the general language patterns, principles, and connections, as outlined above. Then give them the opportunity to apply and generalize this knowledge in different contexts.
Use a wide variety of reading material that build language-literacy networks, not just books that stress decoding and fluency. 30% of students who read with high degrees of accuracy and fluency don’t comprehend even at the low bar of grade level. Reading practice should build language-literacy connections using text of increasing complexity. However, there is a growing disinterest in reading, and students need plenty of enjoyable reading practice as an alternative to the Internet. Give them access to text that they find interesting and easy to read. Academic progress will follow.
Respect differences in student experience and teachers’ understanding of students. We have laid out a sensible approach to developing language-literacy abilities, but we don’t know individual students, or the many challenges teachers face in today’s classrooms. Decisions about who and how much developmental instruction must ultimately be left to the teacher. We suggest that educators should keep in mind that roughly a third of students will develop robust language-literacy abilities through regular instruction. They may only need limited vocabulary, fluency, and spelling instruction to ensure long-term success. Also bear in mind that decades of research and experience have shown that a majority of students don’t read proficiently, finding reading to be only partially enjoyable, engaging and enriching. Also consider that some students may need more intensive instruction focused on a few components. Others will benefit from more engaging reading experiences to put down their cell phones and pick up books. Regardless, start with just a few students, devoting only a rotation or two a week to language-literacy development. Taking a language-literacy network approach should free up plenty of time for comprehension and knowledge-build instruction in the content areas. Finally, keep in mind that educators, too, benefit from instruction that reveals that few things are as enriching as discovering a love of words and the magic of language.
