What is Automatic Word Recognition?
Automatic word recognition is a foundational reading skill that enables students to decode words instantly and without effort. In order to read fluently and with comprehension, students must acquire this skill. It is an essential component of any effective literacy intervention.
What is the importance of automatic word recognition?
Automatic word recognition is the gateway skill to reading with fluency. It bridges the gap from learning phonics, often learned through explicit, direct instruction, to reading with ease and understanding.
It’s been shown through peer-reviewed research that automatic word recognition is a critical predictor for fluency (Roembke et al., 2019; Roembke, et al., 2021).
However, it is often overlooked in traditional assessments, core instruction, and literacy intervention programs. As many as 50 percent of K-12 students in the United States are struggling with the foundational skills like automaticity that they need to become fluent readers.
What are signs that a student is struggling with automatic word recognition?
Students who continue to struggle with reading in later elementary grades and beyond often have gaps in their foundational reading skills, such as decoding and automatic word recognition. These gaps can result in:
- Reading slowly, with great effort and difficulty
- Struggling with decoding
- Inability to easily identify and distinguish vowels
- Lack of knowledge about the structure of syllables and how they work in words
- Difficulty breaking words into syllables
- Difficulty applying and generalizing knowledge of phonics to new words or to connected text
- Inability to quickly and effortlessly recognize words
- Difficulty spelling
How do you teach automatic word recognition?
It is a common misconception that automatic word recognition can be taught. Although word recognition skills can be taught, automaticity is a result of learning through specific types of practice.
How do you support automatic word recognition?
Developments in the science of reading provide insights into how students bring together all the complex, interdependent skills needed to become proficient readers.
First students acquire basic skills like knowledge of the alphabetic principle and decoding skills.
Before students can develop automatic word recognition, they must develop basic reading skills such as phonemic awareness and letter knowledge, apply the alphabetic principle that links letters to the sounds of the language, and develop decoding skills. Explicit, systematic phonics instruction has been shown to be an effective way to to build these foundational skills into a literacy program (Ehri, Nunes, Stahl, & Willows, 2001).
Some educators assume that automaticity in reading is a natural outcome of direct instruction. But many students need additional systematic practice before decoding skills transfer to automatic word recognition.
Students “learn by doing” and as they see patterns and practice in different tasks, they apply and generalize them across contexts to develop automaticity.
Language has highly complex patterns that are often hard to verbalize (Plaut et al., 1996). Learning to apply and generalize word recognition skills requires a different type of practice to promote automaticity.
Research from the science of learning provides insights into the development of automatic reading skills:
- More complex patterns are better learned implicitly, rather than explicitly (Ashby & Maddox, 2005). That is, they need to practice what they learned from explicit instruction in many contexts.
- Students need systematic and structured practice. This practice allows them to learn the regularities of oral and printed language.
Examples of automaticity
When word recognition skills become automatic, students read quickly and with ease. They stop consciously processing letter-to-sound mappings.
Once students can focus on the meaning of the text, their academic world opens up.
WordFlight builds automatic word recognition skills
WordFlight has the only patented assessment of automaticity, so educators can measure progress towards fluency. In addition, WordFlight is the only literacy intervention solution that uses findings from 50 years of learning science to make the foundations for fluency automatic.
References
Ashby, F. G., & Maddox, W. T. (2005). Human category learning. Annual Review of Psychology, 56(1), 149–178.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15709932/
Ehri, L. C., Nunes, S. R., Stahl, S. a., & Willows, D. M. (2001). Systematic phonics instruction helps students learn to read: Evidence from the National Reading Panel’s Meta-Analysis. Review of Educational Research, 71(3), 393–447. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543071003393
Plaut, D. C., McClelland, J. L., Seidenberg, M. S., & Patterson, K. (1996). Understanding normal and impaired word reading: Computational principles in quasi-regular domains. Retrieved from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.57.2570
Roembke, T. C., Hazeltine, E., Reed, D. K., & McMurray, B. (2019). Automaticity of Word Recognition Is a Unique Predictor of Reading Fluency in Middle-School Students. Journal of Educational Psychology, 111(2), 314–330. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000279
Roembke, T. C., Hazeltine, E., Reed, D. K., & McMurray, B. (2021). Automaticity as an independent trait in predicting reading outcomes in middle-school. Developmental Psychology, 57, 361–375. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001153
Staake, J. (2023, February 6). What Is Scarborough’s Reading Rope and How Do Teachers Use It? We Are Teachers. https://www.weareteachers.com/scarboroughs-rope/