The Five Components Of Reading

Reading is one of the most difficult and important forms of learning. While we often think of reading as one thing, our brains are actually engaging in a number of tasks simultaneously each time we sit down with a book. (Learns, 2015) There are five components to the process of reading: phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, reading comprehension and fluency. These five components work together to create the task of reading. As children learn to read they must develop skills in all five of these areas in order to become successful readers. Reading or learning how to read is a combination of all the components. The combination of each of the five components makes it difficult to teach them one at a time or in a particular order. It is more important to use the individual child’s knowledge and stage of development as a starting point for instruction. However, since there is a constant give and take among the components, one will sometimes be emphasized over another. (Learns, 2015) The term zone of proximal development comes to mind when discussing the components of reading. Vygotsky is one of the most well-known psychologists in the educational world. The zone of proximal development is the

(Learns, 2015) Phonics is sight word recognition and the decoding of words. Sight word recognition is when the student is able to see the word and recognize it immediately. At a young age we teach students to recognize hundreds and thousands of words that they will see very often. Decoding is the second part of phonics where students try to piece together words they don’t yet know. Students use this technique to look at digraphs and blends that they know to try to piece together the word and then say it. There are many ways to teach phonics because you can apply it in different ways to reading. This is an important step in emergent literacy because it starts from early childhood and continues into beginning of