Literacy Notes

CAFÉ - Comprehension, Accuracy, Fluency and Expand Vocabulary

To be an effective reader requires skills and understandings in decoding, text use and text analysis. Each of these skills and understandings is crucial in its own right, but they all take place within an overall focus on meaning making, which is the central purpose of all literate behaviour.  Meaning making must be central to the teaching of reading.  All teachers are expected to teach phonics explicitly, alongside supporting students’ literal, inferential and evaluative comprehension and to support students’ interest, engagement and enjoyment with books and other texts that they read and view (Department of Education Literacy Toolkit).

Students learn to read in a certain order: first they must understand that words are made up of different sounds, then associate sounds with written words, and finally they can decode words and read groups of words. Students who have trouble learning to read need to be specifically taught the relationships of letters, words and sounds. (Awareness of letter/sound relationships is the main tool good readers use to decode unfamiliar words). Each child needs a different amount of practice to be a fluent reader.

Abundant opportunities for children to read at their own reading level, helps them to learn to read for meaning and enjoy reading. One of the reading strategies in the Literacy CAFÉ System that we have adopted at Beaumaris North Primary School (CAFÉ is an acronym for Comprehension, Accuracy, Fluency and Expand Vocabulary) is ‘Abundant Easy Reading’. This is the ability to participate often in the act of accurate reading, fluent reading and reading with understanding. Abundant easy reading, or ‘high-success reading’ is a critical factor in accelerating reading development. Success breeds success. Readers need this abundant easy reading to consolidate their skills and strategies they are learning and refining daily.

A reader must have text that they can read with 99-100% accuracy (Betts 1949), they must choose to read and challenge themselves to read more each day. In order for children to read abundantly, they need to be able to find books that are not only at their independent reading level, but also of interest to them. They need to be ‘Good Fit Books’. It is imperative that we don’t try to rush students with their reading. It is not only important for the student to be able to read the text, but they must be able to understand and interpret what they are reading.

Abundant easy reading is an excellent strategy for children to practice and consolidate their, expression, fluency and comprehension. If students are continually reading books that are too challenging for them, their enjoyment will quickly decline and they will become reluctant readers.

Yours in Literacy

Tania Purton & Jo Taylor

Literacy Coordinators