Literacy Development and Components of Literacy Literacy development begins much earlier than formal schooling. During the emergent literacy period phonemic awareness, letter knowledge, and vocabulary are considered the most important precursors of conventional reading achievement (Adams, 1990; NRP, 2000; Snow et al. 1998). The primary purpose of this section is to examine five major aspects of reading and reading instruction (e.g., phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension) that are identified by the NRP that is a comprehensive meta-analytic report. The first element of a balanced reading program is phonemic awareness that “is the ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds in spoken words” (Partnership for Reading, 2006, p. 1). Children have to understand that spoken words are made up of phonemes. The development of phonemic awareness begins about 3 years of age and improves gradually over the years (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998), and most of the phonological rules are internalized by the age of 6 or 8 years old (Paul & Whitelaw, 2011). Moreover, phonemic awareness requires a hierarchy of abilities, and Adams (1990) proposed five hierarchical levels of phonemic awareness: (1) nursery rhymes, (2) oddity task, (3) blending and syllable-splitting, (4) phonemic segmentation, and (5) phoneme manipulation. Phonemic awareness instruction helps children learn to read and spell, and it is more beneficial when taught with
