Overview
Topic
Area Focus
The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) review focuses on reading interventions for students in
grades K–3 (or ages 5-8) that are intended to increase skills in alphabetics (phonemic
awareness, phonological awareness, letter recognition, print awareness and phonics), reading
fluency, comprehension (vocabulary and reading comprehension), or general reading
achievement (see definitions below). Systematic reviews of evidence in this topic area address
the following questions:
- Which interventions intended to provide basic literacy instruction improve reading skills
(including alphabetics, fluency, comprehension or general reading achievement) among
students in grades K–3 or ages 5-8?
- Are some interventions more effective than others at improving certain types of reading
skills?
- Are some interventions more effective for certain types of students, particularly students
who have historically lagged behind in reading achievement?
Individual intervention-level reports are released on a periodic basis; one topic-level report will
subsequently be released.
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Key
Definitions
Alphabetics Domain
Phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness (or phoneme awareness) refers to the understanding
that the sounds of spoken language—phonemes—work together to make words, and phonemes can
be substituted and rearranged to create different words. Phonemic awareness includes the ability
to identify, think about, and work with the individual sounds in spoken words. Phonemic
awareness helps children learn how to read and spell, by allowing them to combine or blend the
separate sounds of a word to say the word (e.g., “/c/ /a/ /t/ - cat”).
Phonological awareness. Phonological awareness is a more encompassing term than
phoneme/phonemic awareness (PA). Phonological awareness is a term referring to various types
of awareness, which includes PA and also awareness of larger spoken units such as syllables and
rhyming words. Tasks of phonological awareness might require students to generate words that
rhyme, to segment sentences into words, to segment polysyllabic words into syllables, or to
delete syllables from words (e.g., what is cowboy without cow?). Tasks that require students to
manipulate spoken units larger than phonemes are simpler for beginners than tasks requiring
phoneme manipulation (Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer, & Carter, 1974).
Letter identification. Knowing the names of the letters of the alphabet supports reading
acquisition. Letter-naming measures have been shown to be predictors of reading development
especially when letter naming is taught in conjunction with other beginning reading skills.
Print awareness. Print awareness refers to knowledge or concepts about print such as (a) print
carries a message; (b) there are conventions of print such as directionality (left to right, top to
bottom), differences between letters and words, distinctions between upper and lower case,
punctuation; and that (c) books have some common characteristics (e.g., author, title, front/back).
It has been shown that print awareness supports reading acquisition (e.g., decoding).
Phonics. Phonics1 refers to (a) the knowledge that there is a predictable relationship between
phonemes (the sounds in spoken language) and graphemes (the letters used to represent the
sounds in written language); (b) the ability to associate letters and letter combinations with sound
and blending them into syllables and words; and (c) the understanding that this information can
be used to decode or read words.
Reading Fluency Domain
Reading fluency. Fluency is the ability to read text accurately, automatically, and with
expression, while still extracting meaning from it.
Comprehension Domain
Vocabulary development. This refers to the development of knowledge about the meanings,
uses, and pronunciation of words. The development of receptive vocabulary (words understood)
and expressive vocabulary (words used) is critical for reading comprehension.
Reading comprehension. Reading comprehension refers to the understanding of the meaning of
a passage and the context in which the words occur. Reading comprehension is composed of two
equally important components. Decoding, or the ability to translate text into speech, is only part
of the process of reading comprehension. The other part is language comprehension, or the
ability to understand spoken language. All struggling readers have difficulty with either language
comprehension or decoding or both.
General Reading Achievement Domain
General reading achievement. Outcomes that fall in the general reading achievement domain
are those that inextricably combine two or more of the previous domains (alphabetics, reading
fluency, and comprehension) or provide some other type of summary score, such as a “total
reading score” on a standardized reading test, grades in reading or language arts class, or
promotion to the next grade.
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1 “Phonics” also refers to an instructional approach that focuses on the correspondence between sounds and symbols
and is often used in contrast to whole language instructional approaches. For the purposes of the Beginning Reading
Evidence Reports, we use the term phonics as defined above, not as an instructional approach.
