Assessment and developmental progression
Using evidence to inform instructional decisions, teachers continuously monitor their students’ progress in developing foundational reading skills. Early assessment by the classroom teacher provides information about each student’s knowledge and skills relative to grade-level expectations and provides a baseline against which progress can be measured. Educators can use a variety of assessment strategies and tools to gain information about specific foundational reading skills. These assessments should measure the skills being taught in the classroom, such as students’ phoneme awareness, grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences and decoding skills.
Before engaging in assessments, it is important for educators to be aware of and mitigate biases. These biases could result in the under-recognition or over-recognition of students from Francophone, Indigenous, Black, other racialized, or LGBTQ2S+ communities, students with disabilities, or students from all other marginalized communities.
Through ongoing assessment, teachers may recognize students who require additional support or early intervention to learn decoding skills. In some cases, classroom teachers may need to reach out to additional resources in their school (e.g., the school special education team, or an English as a Second Language or English Literacy Development teacher) or through their board (e.g., Speech and Language Pathologist) to determine whether and what type of additional support and/or intervention may be required.
The instructional focus of foundational reading skills shifts based on the overall progression and students’ mastery of skills that are taught. Instruction on building phonological awareness of words in speech and larger sound units in words (such as syllables and rimes) generally needs to take up only a small amount of time early in the reading program. Phonemic awareness then becomes one focus, alongside phonics instruction within a clearly delineated scope and sequence. Word study skills will play a larger role as students progress. Average reading development by grade is identified in the figure below, but mastery of grapheme-phoneme knowledge, sounding out words and building automatic word reading are indicators that it is time to shift the focus of instruction along a continuum of word-reading skill development.
Phonics instruction and word study becomes progressively more complex across the grades and as students move forward along the scope and sequence of skill development. Word study incorporates knowledge of common syllables in multisyllabic words, knowledge of morphemes, and the morphemic structure of words. This knowledge will lead to improved word reading, building of sight words and spelling skills.
