Under the Houston district’s “balanced’’ reading policy, teachers must incorporate the following components into their reading instruction:
- Phonological awareness: The ability to attend to the sound structure-- including the words, syllables, and phonemes--as distinct from the meaning, of spoken language.
- Print awareness: An understanding of the conventions and formats of print, as in reading left to right and top to bottom, spacing between words, and recognition of letters.
- Alphabetic awareness: The alphabetic principle that written words are composed of letters of the alphabet that are intentionally and conventionally related to segments of spoken words.
- Orthographic awareness: An understanding of the writing conventions of English (or any other language, such as Spanish), which starts with familiarity with letters and letter-clusters and progresses to such complexities as when to double final consonants when adding inflectional endings.
- Comprehension strategies: Inferential and evaluative thinking about connected text.
- Reading practice: Shared, guided, and independent reading to allow the reader to develop comprehension strategies.
SOURCE: Houston Independent School District.
