W9

Question 1

What is the Big 5/5 Pillars of Reading/The 5 Keys to Reading?

Answer 1

Phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension.

Question 2

What is phonemic awareness?

Answer 2

The awareness of the sound structure of words. The ability to reflect on, talk about and manipulate the individual phonemes in words. E.g., blending the phonemes /sh/ /o/ /p/ to say “shop”, segmenting the word “crunch” into the phonemes /k/ /r/ /u/ /n/ /ch/

Question 3

What is phonics?

Answer 3

The knowledge of the alphabetic system – the letters or combinations of letters that represent sounds in spoken language, and the ability to use this knowledge along with phonemic awareness to decode (read) and encode (spell) written words.

Question 4

What is fluency?

Answer 4

The ability to read with a high level of accurately, at an appropriate rate, using suitable expression/ Relies on a level of automaticity with recognising individual words.

Question 5

What is vocabulary?

Answer 5

Knowledge of the meaning of individual words.

Question 6

What is comprehension?

Answer 6

Understanding and interpreting what is read.

Question 7

What are the four reading stages that each child moves through during literacy development?

Answer 7

Pre-alphabetic, early alphabetic, later alphabetic and consolidated alphabetic stages.

Question 8

What is the DRC model of reading?

Answer 8

The DRC model is an influential reading theory that is essential to understand healthy reading processes as well as developmental and acquired reading impairments.

Question 9

Describe the two reading pathways in the DRC, including which types of words can be read in each pathway.

Answer 9

• The non-lexical route – uses knowledge of letter-sound rules / correspondences to convert print into speech sounds. Most often used for nonsense words, or regular words (words that follow a regular / predictable spelling pattern).
• The lexical route – begins by processing the printed word into letter units, but rather than using the letter-sound rules to read the word, it activates the stored lexicon (written word representation + semantic/meaning representation + spoken word representation) to convert the printed word into speech. Can be used for regular words (once they’ve been read enough times to become a “sight word”), or irregular words that don’t follow a regular/predictable spelling pattern. In order to read these irregular words, you need to access previously stored information about how to pronounce the word, rather than rely on the most common letter-sound representations.