Structured Literacy

Structured Literacy approaches emphasize highly explicit and systematic teaching of all important components of literacy.

These components include both foundational skills (e.g., decoding, spelling) and higher-level literacy skills (e.g., reading comprehension, written expression).

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Structured Literacy also emphasizes oral language abilities essential to literacy development, including sensitivity to speech sounds in oral language, phonemic awareness, and the ability to manipulate those sounds.

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Phonemic Awareness is the ability to process, remember, sequence, count, and manipulate a single unit of speech sound.

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Phonemic Awareness is not only a key component of structured literacy instruction and programming, but it is a critical first step and essential literacy skill. 

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ALL learners can, and must be explicitly taught the seven essential phonemic awareness skills as a first step, at a basic level to set the foundation to be successful in all future literacy areas.  

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