Reading Mastery represents an inclusive reading program aimed to help students in mastering basic skills of decoding and comprehension through the use of the Direct Instruction approach. In particular, the program emphasizes strengthening the students’ thinking capabilities and acquiring background knowledge. Additionally, Reading Mastery contains various materials in the form of scripted lesson guides on how to model new lesson content, guide practice, inform the individualized approach, and apply learned skills (McGraw Hill Authors, 2012). Apart from that, students can benefit from a unique orthography tailored to provide support in terms of sound-letter identification. As the class progresses further into the book, this orthography changes to a traditional one. Meanwhile, in order to keep lesson pacing and ensure students keep up with the class and are involved in teaching, the program utilizes special signals and group responses. In case students struggle with the class pace, it can be indicated with a student performance check and addressed by specific remedial tasks. The program books’ covers and page samples are featured in figure 1.
The program is organized into several levels, each of which spans a single academic year. A typical program’s lesson lasts for either 30 or 45 minutes and consists of up to nine educational activities with diversified content (McGraw Hill Authors, 2012). Namely, it can include particular reading capabilities, such as phonemic awareness, correspondence of letters and sounds, pronunciation, and word recognition, along with general skills – vocabulary level, fluency of oral reading, and comprehension. Phonemic awareness stands for identifying and manipulating phonemes – individual sounds – within spoken words. Letter and sound correspondence refers to the ability to affiliate sounds with specific symbols. Pronunciation tasks monitor the correct sounding of words by students; in this context, word recognition is evaluated as well. Finally, vocabulary level, oral fluency, and comprehension of reading exemplifies general reading skills.
References
Engelmann, S. (1999). Word-attack basics. Teachers guide. Decoding A. SRA corrective reading. McGraw Hill Education.
McGraw Hill Authors. (2007). Corrective reading decoding level B1, student book (1st ed.). McGraw Hill.
McGraw Hill Authors. (2012). Reading mastery signature edition grade K, core lesson connections (1st ed.). McGraw Hill.