Dialects in the Classroom

In 2000, the National Reading Panel (NRP) released its Teaching Children to Read report. The NRP provided a comprehensive overview of the five components of reading instruction, sometimes called the “Fab Five” or the “Five Pillars” of effective reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension. The National Reading Panel detailed these pillars as follows:

• Phonemic awareness:  the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds- phonemes- in spoken words.

• Phonics:  the ability to understand the predictable relationship between phonemes (the sounds of spoken language) and graphemes (letters and spellings representing those sounds in written language).

• Fluency:  the ability to read text accurately, quickly, and with expression (prosody).

• Vocabulary: the ability to understand the meaning and pronunciation of spoken and written words. Vocabulary is broken down into two parts; expressive (words children use to express themselves when speaking or writing) and receptive (spoken, written, or signed words children understand).  

• Comprehension: the ability to make sense or get meaning from printed text (words, phrases, sentences, passages, etc.). Reading comprehension requires good phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, and vocabulary skills working in concert together and automatically to be effective. 

These five components have become the cornerstone of all tier-one reading programs approved by the state of Louisiana and used in New Orleans public schools today. We will look at these instructional practices and identify what this instruction should look like in a New Orleans classroom.