The United States is currently facing a literacy crisis, with many students entering high school without the ability to read or write at grade level. In fact, according to EAB’s “Leading for Literacy” study, 60% percent of elementary teachers have not received training to teach foundational reading skills such as phonemic awareness, phonological awareness, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.
Structured Literacy has been identified as a key solution to address this literacy gap, so it’s no surprise that in the last five years, more than 40 states have passed laws to reform reading instruction to be more aligned with cognitive research. The science of reading has started a nationwide movement to ensure that all students at every level learn how to read.
Growing Evidence On Structured Literacy’s Effectiveness
According to research on the effectiveness of Structured Literacy, 95% of people can learn to read with evidence-based assessment as well as cumulative instruction and explicit instruction. Many schools and districts have recorded their students’ reading results following the implementation of science-backed, structured approaches, which have consistently reflected an improvement in literacy scores and learning outcomes.
The State of Mississippi, for example, adopted Structured Literacy and screening in 2013. By 2019, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results demonstrated that Mississippi students living in poverty outperformed their peers nationally. In both 4th and 8th grades, black, white, and Hispanic students from low-income homes in Mississippi achieved higher scores than the national average in all four NAEP subjects. Mississippi is just one of the states that have seen its literacy scores improve drastically after implementing a Structured Literacy approach.
Specifically for students with dyslexia, Structured Literacy is essential to building foundational reading skills because dyslexia and most reading disorders stem from weaknesses in language processing. And with dyslexia being a common source of reading difficulties — with about 10% to 20% of the overall population thought to have symptoms — teachers need to have the tools to quickly identify students with dyslexia so they can provide them with the resources they need. When schools don’t have the tools to actively intervene in helping students with dyslexia learn how to read, it is easy for these students to be left behind.
From phonemic awareness and phonological awareness to how vowel sounds and individual sounds make up a sentence structure, educators must be familiar with the main components of Structured Literacy to successfully implement it in their own classrooms. Keep reading to learn more about the main components of Structured Literacy and what makes this science-backed approach so effective for literacy instruction.
The 6 Key Components of Structured Literacy
Structured Literacy teaches components of reading and literacy that are essential for students at all tiers to learn how to read. These smaller categories build upon one another based on the effectiveness of comprehensive and explicit instruction.
Phonology
Phonology is the study of sound patterns and speech sounds in a language. With the two important subcategories, phonological awareness and phonemic awareness, phonology includes speech patterns, and rules, and clearly highlights the relationship between individual sounds, vowel sounds, and symbols. Phonemic awareness and phonological awareness are key tenets of Structured Literacy because they lay the foundation for understanding alphabetic principles and are considered to be the most effective way for young students and students with dyslexia to learn how to read. Phonemic awareness has been proven to be effective for students and facilitates growth in printed word recognition and alphabetic principles with a high level of accuracy.
Sound-Symbol Association
Sound-symbol association refers to the connection between phonemes (individual sounds and vowel sounds) and graphemes (symbols and letters) so they can challenge themselves with more difficult sentence structures and alphabetic principles over time. Once students develop phonemic awareness and phonological awareness skills, they must then learn how to map phonemes to symbols or printed letters. Sound-symbol association must be taught in two different ways: visual to auditory (reading) and auditory to visual (spelling). The understanding and quick recognition of individual sounds and vowel sounds are both essential to students learning more complex literary concepts going forward.
Syllables
A syllable and syllable types are smaller units of oral or written language consisting of one vowel sound or individual sound. Instruction includes teaching the six basic syllable types in English and helps students organize the spoken language to break up more complicated sentence structures and words. The six basic syllable types are: closed, vowel-consonant-e, open, consonant-le, r-controlled, and vowel pairs. When students have a good understanding of syllable types, they develop the ability to break longer words into manageable parts to sound them out. Ultimately, the identification of syllable types gives students the confidence to champion more difficult sentence structures and alphabetic principles.
Morphology
Morphology is the study of words and the smaller parts they consist of. Morphemes are defined as the smallest meaningful units of a word or phrase and are fundamental for phonics in both reading and spelling, as well as in vocabulary and reading comprehension. Morphology knowledge helps students predict the meaning of a word they don’t know yet.
Syntax
Syntax refers to how words and phrases are arranged to form sentences and is a fundamental element of grammar. Syntax instruction includes teaching the variety of structures and rules of written and spoken language, which consists of word order, punctuation, and grammatical rules. Students must have an understanding of syntax to improve reading comprehension and build complex sentences.
Semantics
Semantics is understanding the meaning of words and sentences. Structured Literacy instruction teaches students semantic awareness by focusing on developing key vocabulary, word meanings, and comprehension strategies. When students understand the connection between words and their meanings, they are better prepared to grasp more complex vocabulary and reading concepts.
How to Teach Structured Literacy with Evidence-Based Principles
Structured Literacy instruction is based on three primary evidence-based principles that are informed by the science of reading and proven to work for all students at every level.
Systematic and Cumulative Instruction
This category refers to how language is organized to best teach students how to read. Cumulative instruction, based on the science of reading, is a teaching method that builds on previously learned concepts, meaning that material is organized in an order that begins with the most basic concepts and progresses to more challenging ones. The objective of cumulative instruction is to help students automatically apply their knowledge of language to decoding the meaning of a text. This cumulative instruction helps fluent readers focus on understanding the meaning of a text rather than spending all their time decoding it.
Explicit Instruction
Explicit instruction is a teaching method that aims to simplify reading concepts for students. By directly modeling a skill, using multiple examples, and verbally explaining their thought process behind a concept, students are able to easily follow their teacher’s explicit instruction and learning materials. The way that this is done ranges from teachers working with students one-on-one to allowing students to engage with their work independently.
Diagnostic and Responsive Instruction
Diagnostic and responsive instruction allows teachers to personalize their explicit instruction based on the needs of each student. Teachers use a variety of tools to identify students’ strengths and what they are struggling with, and can then adjust their teaching methods accordingly. These forms of instruction can be informed by having students take placement assessments, brief quizzes, and frequent progress assessments and are especially important for identifying students with dyslexia and other reading difficulties.
Learn More About Structured Literacy with IMSE
Interested in learning more about Structured Literacy? IMSE provides a range of products and training programs to transform your school or district’s literacy curriculum to reach every student with proven and applicable strategies. Districts that participate in IMSE’s literacy training have access to in-person and virtual programs to ensure every educator can learn about how to apply Orton-Gillingham and Structured Literacy at their own pace.
FAQs About Components of Structured Literacy
What are examples of Structured Literacy?
Structured Literacy activities ask students to take core reading concepts and put them into action through activities that call on different senses during each exercise. Students develop a better grasp of building block concepts such as vowel sounds, individual sounds, phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, and syllable types to create and understand more complex literacy concepts like sentence structures and alphabetic principles. This cumulative instruction approach allows students to work their way up to more difficult literacy concepts.
A few examples are:
- Dictation sentences that allow students to go back over sounds and words they’ve learned.
- Building words and sentences with blocks or tiles.
- Moving tiles into sound boxes as words are talked about to correlate sounds and letters.
- Using hand gestures while making word sounds to support sound memorization.
What are the major components of the Orton-Gillingham method of reading instruction and how well does it work?
The Orton-Gillingham (OG) Approach is a multisensory, structured, and sequential method for teaching literacy that can help people who have difficulty reading, writing, and spelling. The OG approach has several major components, including:
- Breaking down skills: Reading and spelling are broken down into smaller skill sets that build upon one another.
- Language and sentence structure: The fundamental structure of language is taught directly through explicit instruction.
- Multisensory teaching: Students learn through all their senses, including eyes, ears, mouth, and hands.
- Diagnostic and prescriptive: Teachers can identify what students are struggling with early on and create a curriculum to help them. This is especially important when it comes to identifying students with dyslexia.
- Cognitive: Students are actively engaged in understanding what they’re learning.
- Comprehension strategies: Students use strategies such as visualization, predicting, summarizing, and inferencing to connect text.
What is not a component of Structured Literacy?
Sometimes orthography is confused with phonology, however, orthography is not a component of Structured Literacy. Phonology is the foundation of teaching a Structured Literacy approach and is the study of spoken sounds, while orthography is the study of written language.
How many components of literacy are there?
According to the National Reading Panel, there are five essential components to literacy: phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.
Structured Literacy is a beneficial teaching approach for all students, even those who have dyslexia and struggle to understand early reading concepts. By using an approach that is helpful for every student at every tier, not only can schools ensure students have the tools they need to successfully progress to the next grade, but they also can intervene early on when a student needs extra support. The key to ending the literacy crisis is investing in solutions that are proven to drive results.
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