Beginning Reading Instruction

A Focus on Big Ideas

Big ideas are the fundamental concepts and principles that facilitate the most efficient and broadest acquisition of knowledge within an academic area and highlight what is important in a content area, such as beginning reading. The notion of big ideas assumes that not all curriculum objectives and related instructional activities contribute equally to reading development. Certain critical knowledge and skills are essential for learning to read, while other ideas are less important. Big ideas focus attention on the most relevant aspects of reading instruction and function as anchoring concepts within which “small” ideas can often be taught and understood. When teachers are forced to make instructional choices, big ideas provide guidelines about the central components of beginning reading instruction.

In 2000, the National Reading Panel, a group of literacy and reading experts appointed by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the U.S. Department of Education, identified five big ideas in literacy and beginning reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. These big ideas provide a strategic focus for instruction and intervention and should serve as the framework for organizing instruction. Beginning reading instruction, therefore, should consist of a strong and primary emphasis on these five big ideas.

Conspicuous Instruction

Although some students are able to infer the skills and strategies necessary for successful beginning reading, many students are not able to discover effective or efficient strategies without instruction. In a sense, the strategies that experts rely on to read and understand text are effectively hidden from students experiencing learning difficulties. The role of instruction, therefore, is to let these students “in on the secret” of reading success by making essential beginning reading skills and strategies conspicuous.

Conspicuous beginning reading instruction is direct and explicit. Concepts, skills, and strategies in each of the five big idea areas are broken down and taught systematically in a series of carefully sequenced steps. Teachers use language that is clear and consistent to reduce confusion and prevent misunderstanding. The goal of conspicuous instruction is to present and communicate new information in a manner that is easy to understand and unambiguous. In this way, learners struggle less with acquiring beginning reading skills and strategies and instead can focus their energies on applying them in more authentic reading and learning situations.

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