In order to fully understand the reading process, we need to take it apart, look at its individual pieces, come to know them, and then put them back together. When tutors understand the instructional components of reading, they are able to decide which reading strategies are best to use with their learners. This section looks more closely at those basic components of reading.
Much of the following background information is based on the book Applying Research in Reading Instruction for Adults: First Steps for Teachers by Susan McShane. It looks at the following ideas:
Reading is about making sense of the text on the page. Fluent readers do that without knowing the process they use; they do it without thinking about it, automatically. Making sense of teaching reading, therefore, becomes a complex process because we need to break an automatic skill into the component steps that we don’t usually think about. The result is that there are many books and articles about how to understand the steps involved in fluent reading well enough to teach them.
Adult literacy training manuals frequently divide teaching reading into two distinct processes: comprehension and word attack skills. However, each manual looks at these processes a bit differently, and then applies them to teaching reading in a different way. If you are interested in learning more, look through the resources for this section listed at the beginning of the unit.
This training manual teaches reading by dividing the process into five basic instructional components:
Susan McShane and others further categorize these five instructional components into print skills and meaning skills. Viewing the five components through this skills-lens helps an instructor know where to begin. It identifies a learner’s strengths and weaknesses and shows the strategies to use. Teaching someone print skills will include phonemic awareness training, decoding instruction and fluency development. Teaching meaning skills will include vocabulary development and comprehension. Each of these components is defined below.