Ensuring Early Literacy Success

The American Educational Research Association (AERA) recently published another Research Points in the organization’s running series of research summaries titled, Ensuring Early Literacy Success. Volume 6, Issue 1 makes the argument for the expenditure of resources in early literacy interventions as a wise investment because literacy skills are essential to success in all school subjects — literature, social sciences, natural science, and mathematics. They review the strong research base for how children learn to read, how to prevent failure, and how to intervene when reading difficulties occur.

The paper makes the following policy recommendations:

Education policy makers should:

1. Establish policies in which schools are encouraged to organize primary grade instruction with a target of 90 percent of children being fluent decoders by third grade. Help schools use formative and diagnostic assessment to place K–2 children who are not on track in early interventions taught by qualified teachers.
2. From third grade forward, focus instruction on comprehension, writing, and continued language development.
3. Treat oral language development and vocabulary enhancement as major functions of preschool, elementary, and middle school literacy development.
4. Ensure that school leaders, working with their communities, set up programs in which children read more and read increasingly challenging materials on a daily and weekly basis.

http://www.aera.net/publications/Default.aspx?menu_id=30&id=314