correspondences, blend sounds together to read words, and recognize that some words are irregular. In addition, they must learn that when they do not understand something they read, they can use comprehension and vocabulary strategies to construct meaning from the passage. This is a huge undertaking for both students and teachers (Vaughn & Linan-Thompson, 2004).

# **_a. What are the main early-reading skills?_**

There are five critical elements of beginning reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension (Armbruster, Lehr, & Osborn, 2003; Vaughn & LinanThompson, 2004). _Phonemic awareness,_ is “the ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds in spoken words” (Armbruster, Lehr, & Osborn, 2003, p. 2). The concept of phonemic or phoneme awareness is comprised in the broader term of phonological awareness. Before children learn to read print, they must understand that words are made up of speech sounds: this is phonological awareness. Conversely, phonemic awareness is the understanding that words are made up of phonemes, it entails, for example, the ability to recognize, isolate, and merge individual sounds of language (Wren, 2004). The United States’ National Reading Panel (NRP, 2000) found that phonemic awareness improves children's ability to read words and comprehend what they read, and helps them learn to spell. Phonemic awareness is the basis for learning phonics.

_Phonics_ , on the other hand, is the ability to pair sounds (phonemes) with the letters (graphemes) that represent them. Phonics is also a widely used method of teaching children to read and decode words (Abadzi, 2006). Children begin learning to read using phonics usually around the age of five or six. USA-based research has found that phonics instruction benefits all ages in learning to spell in English (NRP, 2000). In the case of some alphabetic languages, such as Spanish, the spelling systems are even simpler because there is nearly a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and the letter patterns that represent them.

_Fluency_ is the ability to read a text accurately and quickly. Fluent readers read aloud effortlessly and with natural expression, as if they are speaking. Readers who have not yet developed fluency read slowly, word by word, in a choppy manner. Reading fluency consists of precision and speed. Precision is the percentage of words read correctly and speed is the number of words read per minute. Thus, a common measure for fluency is the number of words read correctly in one minute. A review of hundreds of empirical studies concluded that fluent readers are able to focus their attention on making connections among the ideas in a text and between these ideas and their background knowledge and, therefore, are able to focus on comprehension. Non-fluent readers, on the other hand, must focus their attention primarily on decoding individual words, and therefore, they have little attention left for comprehending the text (Armbruster, Lehr, & Osborn, 2003; NRP, 2000).

_Vocabulary_ refers in general to “the words we must know to communicate effectively” (Armbruster, Lehr, & Osborn, 2003, p. 34). Specifically, reading vocabulary refers to words we need to know to understand what we read, that is, the words we recognize in print. There is growing scientific consensus that breadth of vocabulary increases comprehension and facilitates further learning (Hirsch Jr., 2003). Vocabulary experts agree that adequate reading comprehension depends on a person already knowing between 90 and 95 percent of the words in a text (Nagy & Scott, 2000). Knowing that percentage of words allows the reader to get the main thrust of what is being said and therefore to guess correctly what the unfamiliar words probably mean (Hirsch Jr., 2003).

5