As the vocabulary and concept demands increase in text, children need to be able to devote more of their attention to making meaning from text, and increasingly less attention to decoding. If children have to devote too much time to decoding words, their reading will be slow and labored. This will result in comprehension difficulties. When they read, children need to be able to use three cueing systems. These systems represent signals in text that interact and overlap to help the reader understand what he or she is reading.
Graphophonic cues involve a reader' s knowledge of sound-spelling relationships.
Phonics instruction helps children to use these cues. Syntactic cues involve a reader's knowledge of the grammar or structure of language. These cues do NOT help children sound out words. Rather, this knowledge helps the reader to predict what type of word might appear in a certain place in a sentence. Semantic cues involve a reader's knowledge of the world.