There are 5 fundamental reading skills in the English language. When your child has a grasp of them, they will be able to fully participate in reading at their level. They will also improve their language and reading skills at an above average rate.
What are Reading Skills?
Reading skills are the areas of language that are important for us to be able to read at a high level. Included in this are; skills that show our understanding of what we are reading and the relationship between words and their meaning.
If we have strong reading skills we can easily read something in front of us. We will also be able to display an understanding of what we have read, answer questions about it and summarise it.
Why Are Reading Skills Important?
Reading skills are important as they show us the 5 most important areas of language to focus on when teaching a child to read. They are complex skills that take a long time to perfect, years sometimes.
Some of these skills can be introduced to your child at a very young age, long before they begin to learn to read.
Reading is an essential life skill but that doesn’t mean that it is easy to learn or teach. Many children today may be proficient in some reading skills but not all of them. They are left at a huge disadvantage if one or more of their reading skills is left behind.
All of the 5 core reading skills are essential and should be given the same amount of focus. In order to be a proficient and successful reader, your child should have an excellent understanding of these 5 skills.
5 Core Reading Skills in English
These are the 5 essential reading skills that your child will need in order to master reading in the English language.
Phonological Awareness
This skill starts out as a pre-reading skill. It is one of the first skills that we need to develop before we learn to read and it will be important for our entire reading lives. If you want to assess your child’s pre-reading skills, download this simple checklist to gauge how ready they are to read.
Phonological awareness is an awareness of sounds. It is the ability to recognise different sounds and to break words down into their individual sounds.
A child with good phonological awareness would be able to tell you what the initial sound was in a word or the final sound.
A child with very good phonological awareness would be able to tell you the middle sound or sounds in a word. They would also be able to identify rhyming words, e.g., hat rhymes with mat and cat.
A child with excellent phonological awareness would be able to swap out one sound for a different one if you asked them to, e.g., swap the ‘h’ in hat for ‘m’ or swap the ‘o’ in hot for ‘a’.
This would all be done orally. A child does not need to know their letters or sounds to be phonologically aware. They are simply aware of different sounds and able to manipulate them if they need to.
Phonics
Phonics is the next step on from phonological awareness. This is where you match a sound (phoneme) with a specific letter or group of letters (grapheme). There are 44 sounds in the English language. We create them using single letters or groups of letters. There is often more than one way to make a sound, e.g., the ‘f’ sound can be made using f, ff, ph, gh, lf and ft.
We use both phonological awareness and phonics to help us to ‘decode’ or break down a word in order to be able to read it.
Vocabulary
This is another reading skill that begins way before we learn to read and continues for basically as long as we live! A wide range of vocabulary will give reading skills a great boost.
If you think about it, we actually begin this skill at birth. Every time we speak to our child we are exposing them to vocabulary. The wider the variety of words that we use with them, the wider their vocabulary will be.
Don’t ever feel like you need to talk to your child in simple language or ‘baby talk. They can understand far more than we give them credit for. They will use the type of language that we model for them.
Therefore, if you only use simple language, your child will only have simple vocabulary. But if you use a wide variety of words, your child will have a broad and varied vocabulary.
This in turn will make it easier for them to read at higher levels. When they come across some big or complicated words, there is a good chance that they have heard the word already. Decoding words while reading is a lot easier if we are already familiar with the word we are reading.
Comprehension
Comprehension is a skill that we have naturally to a point but really needs to be nurtured by those around us. As a parent, you can do so much to improve your child’s comprehension skills.
When I talk about comprehension, I mean the skill of understanding. There are many layers to this. At a micro level, your child needs to understand the words they are reading. But on a greater level, they need to understand the text as a whole piece of writing.
There are easy ways to test your child’s comprehension while they are reading. You can ask questions as they go along in the story and ask them to retell the story or summarise it back to you.
A child with good comprehension skills will be able to answer basic questions about events in the story. They will be able to retell the story in chronological order from start to finish.
As your child gets better at reading, their comprehension skills will improve. But you will need to continue to nurture them. Ask different types of questions, start with yes/no questions. Next, try questions where the answer can be found in the text. Work your way up to asking open ended questions. Try questions where the answer isn’t explicitly in the text but they will need to infer the answer or ‘read between the lines’.
Comprehension can be a difficult skill to master but it is very important. The skill of comprehension will be useful in all areas of academics and real life. We should make it our priority as our child’s primary educator to nurture this life skill.
Fluency
This is it! This is the one we are aiming for! Fluency is the accumulation of all the other skills!
Fluency is shown by the ability to read a piece of text with speed, understanding and accuracy.
This means that your child is able to use their phonological awareness, phonics and vocabulary to read quickly and accurately while also using their comprehension skills to understand the text also.
A great indicator of fluency is to listen to your child read aloud. Ask them not only to read the words but to use their tone of voice to convey the emotion of the piece or the characters.
The ability to read like this, to use your tone and pitch to bring a piece of text to life shows true comprehension of a piece. It may not explicitly say in the text that a character is sad but it may be apparent through what is written. If a reader can understand that and adjust their tone while reading to express this feeling, they are really mastering reading.
Conclusion
These 5 core reading skills and their development will help your child on their way to becoming a proficient reader.
Many of these skills will literally start at birth and continue throughout our lives. It is important to remember the influence we have on these skills as parents.
We can challenge them to expand their vocabulary and question them to improve their comprehension skills. All of these small steps that we can incorporate into our daily lives will make a big difference to our children’s reading journey!
