Components+of+Literacy

Phonemic Awareness:
Phonemic Awareness is commonly defined as the understanding that spoken words are made up of separate units of sound that are blended together when words are pronounced. However, it can also be thought of as skill at hearing and producing the separate sounds in words, dividing or segmenting words into their component sounds, blending separate sounds into words, and recognizing words that sound alike or different.

Vocabulary:
Vocabulary refers to words we need to know to communicate with others. There are four types of vocabulary: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Listening refers to words that we understand when people talk to us. Speaking refers to words we use when we talk to others. Reading refers to the words we know and recognize as sight words when we read, and writing refers to the words that we use when we write.

Comprehension:
Comprehension is the main goal of reading. Without understanding what the reader is reading, reading itself becomes pointless. Comprehension involves constructing meaning from both prior knowledge and prior experience combined with the new information that the student is recieving from a text.

Fluency:
Fluency refers to reading smoothly and without hesitating. It is believed that an increase in fluency will lead to an increase in comprehension. This is because students who are able to read fluently and without stopping to decode the words free up more memory in their brains to comprehend. In other words, students who spend too much time decoding a word do not have enough memory capacity to truly understand what it is they are reading.

Phonics:
While phonics seems similar to phonemic awareness, it is something different. Phonics refers to an understanding of written language and the understanding that letters make a particular sound and that these letters have rules when they are put together.

[|Literacy Matters] A great website for teachers, parents, and students about incoporating literacy into the classroom.