The Big Five Foundational Skills

An Overview of the “Big Five”

The National Reading Panel Report, completed in the USA in 2000, emphasized a balanced approach to effective reading instruction, highlighting five critical components. These foundational skills collectively enable students to achieve reading proficiency through explicit instruction and integrated practices like shared and independent reading. These are the same skills that Universal Early Literacy Screeners like the Acadience Reading Screener (now being used widely across Ontario) seeks to target.

By addressing all five foundational literacy skills, the Super SOR French Phonics Program provides a comprehensive, research-backed approach to early reading instruction. Through systematic, engaging activities, students build the essential skills needed to become confident, fluent readers.  We will explore the connections between research and my resources later, once the Reading Research series is complete.

Phonemic Awareness & Phonics

Phonemic awareness, the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes—the smallest units of sound in a language—is a crucial predictor of early reading success. Dr. Louisa Moats, teacher, psychologist, researcher, and author of many books such asTeaching Reading IS Rocket Science, emphasizes that phonemic awareness is not just an early skill but continues to play a role in spelling and advanced word reading. Without a strong phonemic awareness foundation, students struggle to make sense of phonics instruction because they lack the ability to differentiate and manipulate sounds in spoken language.

Phonemic awareness instruction strengthens speech processing. Identifying phonemes may require instruction for a number of reasons, such as:

• the phonemes in spoken words overlap or blend together

• some phonemes can be similar, which can make them confusable and difficult to distinguish

• many children are not aware that spoken words are composed of sequences of speech sounds

• most children with dyslexia suffer from difficulty with phoneme processing

Phonics

While there is some overlap between phonemic awareness and phonics activities, they are two distinct and crucial elements of reading instruction. Systematic and explicit phonics instruction is widely recognized as essential for early literacy development, as it ensures that students develop efficient pathways for recognizing and decoding words. 

Phonics refers to teaching students the relationships between letters (graphemes) and the sounds they represent (phonemes), and how to use this knowledge to read and spell words. It moves students from hearing sounds in spoken language to applying that knowledge to print.

Phonics Instruction will be explored further in another blog post, where we will look at the neuroscience behind it and why phonics is particularly crucial for students with dyslexia and other reading difficulties.

Fluency

Fluency—the ability to read with speed, accuracy, and expression—bridges the gap between decoding and comprehension.

Research shows that fluency develops through repeated exposure to text, allowing students to shift from laborious decoding to automatic word recognition. Without fluency, reading remains effortful, limiting cognitive resources available for comprehension. If students spend too much “cognitive energy” on decoding, then they have little leftover to focus on the “more important task of reading - comprehension”. 

Reading fluency is often linked only to word recognition but also reflects language comprehension. Fluency serves as a bridge between word recognition and comprehension. It involves accuracy in word reading, automaticity, and prosody—the appropriate expression, intonation, and phrasing that maintain meaning. For students to use prosody while reading, they must be monitoring comprehension in order to reflect meaning with their voice. In “The Active View of Reading”, modelled by Duke & Cartwright and explored more in another blog post, Beyond the Big Five, it is considered a “bridging process”.

An important way to build fluency is through repeated reading. Of course, repeated practice improves reading fluency using the text that is repeated and practiced, but the true impact of repeated reading is shown when students move on to a new text: what students learn from one repeated reading partially transfers to the next.

Vocabulary

Vocabulary knowledge is integral to both language comprehension and word recognition, directly contributing to reading ability. For instance, Duke & Cartwright point out how vocabulary knowledge can help readers determine the correct pronunciation of heteronyms (e.g., wind or desert) and assess whether text makes sense.

An important aspect of vocabulary learning is orthographic mapping—the connection of words’ spellings, pronunciations, and meanings. Knowing how a word is encoded, pronounced, AND what it means helps us store it better in our memory.

Thus, we can see how vocabulary knowledge and acquisition is related to both comprehension and word recognition skills.

Studies show it predicts reading ability beyond the components of the Simple View of Reading. For example, one study found that children exposed to 45 million words by age three outperformed peers exposed to only 13 million words in reading and math at age 10. While constrained skills, such as phonemic awareness can predict later reading success in the primary grades, unconstrained skills such as vocabulary have far-reaching impacts. Another striking study showed that first-grade (as well as 3rd and 5th grade) vocabulary size through exposure to print predicts comprehension into 11th grade.

Vocabulary is critical due to its cumulative nature. One’s vocabulary builds on prior knowledge, forming interconnected networks of meaning. This rich foundation supports comprehension and facilitates the acquisition of new words. As we read, we construct mental representations of the text based on our knowledge, and then integrate these representations with our existing knowledge.  This integration process results in learning, increasing both our comprehension and knowledge. Simply put, we use what we know to learn more, and use that new knowledge to continue acquiring new knowledge. The process goes on and on. This can place readers with insufficient vocabulary at a disadvantage when it comes to comprehension.

A robust vocabulary is essential for comprehension, as students must understand the meaning of the words they decode. Vocabulary development should not be left to incidental learning; rather, it must be explicitly taught and reinforced in multiple contexts. In The Reading Brain, Dehaene also notes that word recognition becomes more efficient when students have prior knowledge of the words they are reading, underscoring the need for vocabulary-rich instruction. Vocabulary is also considered a “bridging process” in the Active View of Reading, since students must be able to decode, encode, and understand vocabulary words.

Vocabulary clearly has a lasting impact on reading development. Yet, despite its importance, early vocabulary instruction is often underemphasized. 

Comprehension

Comprehension is the “most important” goal of reading, requiring students to actively construct meaning from text.

Research highlights that comprehension depends on a strong foundation in decoding, fluency, and vocabulary. These skills provide access to comprehension, as students are able to dedicate more energy to their comprehension of the text rather than decoding or understanding individual words.

Thus, building all of the aforementioned skills is the first way that we can support young, emergent bilinguals in their comprehension. 

However, comprehension can and should also be taught explicitly. On top of promoting the acquisition of decoding and automaticity, students should:

• be exposed to a wide variety of texts that they may be expected to understand

• frequently discuss words and their meanings

• spend time writing texts for others to comprehend

• engage in high-quality talk about text

Students should be reading “real texts for real reasons”.

Expanding the Science: More Skills That Matter

These five foundational skills—phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension—form the core of early reading development, but they are only the beginning.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be diving deeper into each of these skills, unpacking the research behind them, and exploring what they look like in real French Immersion classrooms. We will also look beyond the Big Five to examine additional processes and instructional practices that support young bilingual readers. There is so much more to learn about how children grow into confident, capable readers, and I’m excited to continue exploring this journey with you—one post at a time.

Follow along with the “Reading Research” series to keep learning, one post at a time. Subscribe to emails here.

SOURCES

Acadience Learning. Acadience Reading ALO Assessment Manual. 2020.https://acadiencelearning.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/AcadienceReading_ALO_Assessment_Manual.pdf.

Ashby, Jane, Marion McBride, Shira Naftel, Ellen O’Brien, Lucy Hart Paulson, David Kilpatrick, and Louisa Cook Moats. Teaching Phoneme Awareness in 2024: A Guide for Educators https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1tPwupou7EqctDO50XtfvMGxfJAx7xPk9?usp=share_link.

Beck, Isabel L., Margaret G. McKeown, and Linda Kucan. Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction. New York: Guilford Press, 2002.

Castles, Anne, Kathleen Rastle, and Kate Nation. “Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition From Novice to Expert.” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 19, no. 1 (2018): 5–51.https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100618772271.

Cunningham, Anne E., and Keith E. Stanovich. “Early Reading Acquisition and Its Relation to Reading Experience and Ability 10 Years Later.” Developmental Psychology 33, no. 6 (1997): 934–945.https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.33.6.934.

Dehaene, Stanislas. Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read. New York: Penguin Books, 2010.

Duke, Nell K., and Kelly B. Cartwright. “The Science of Reading Progresses: Communicating Advances Beyond the Simple View of Reading.” Reading Research Quarterly 56, no. S1 (2021): S25–S44.https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.411.

Duke, Nell K., P. David Pearson, Stephanie L. Strachan, and Alison K. Billman. “Essential Elements of Fostering and Teaching Reading Comprehension.” In What Research Has to Say About Reading Instruction, 4th ed., edited by S. Jay Samuels and Alan E. Farstrup, 51–93. Newark, DE: International Reading Association, 2011.

Duke, Nell K., and P. David Pearson. “Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension.” In What Research Has to Say About Reading Instruction, 3rd ed. Newark, DE: International Reading Association, 2002.

Ehri, Linnea C. “Orthographic Mapping in the Acquisition of Sight Word Reading, Spelling Memory, and Vocabulary Learning.” Scientific Studies of Reading 18, no. 1 (2013): 5–21.https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2013.819356.

Hart, Betty, and Todd Risley. Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children. Baltimore: Brookes, 1995.

Kintsch, Walter. Comprehension: A Paradigm for Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

LaBerge, David, and S. Jay Samuels. “Toward a Theory of Automatic Information Processing in Reading.” Cognitive Psychology 6, no. 2 (1974): 293–323.https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(74)90015-2.

Moats, Louisa C. “Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science: What Expert Teachers of Reading Should Know and Be Able to Do.” American Educator 44, no. 2 (2020): 4–.

National Reading Panel.

Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction. Washington, DC: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000.

Neuman, Susan B., and Julie Dwyer. “Missing in Action: Vocabulary Instruction in Pre-K.” The Reading Teacher 62, no. 5 (2009): 384–392.https://doi.org/10.1598/RT.62.5.2.

Rasinski, Timothy V. “Why Reading Fluency Should Be Hot!” The Reading Teacher 65, no. 8 (2012): 516–522. https://doi.org/10.1002/TRTR.01077.