Phonemes: The smallest units of pronunciation in spoken words that distinguish one word from another.

Graphemes: The smallest units in written words, which are made up of single letters or letter combinations.

Phonics: The connection between spoken sounds (phonemes) and written symbols (graphemes).

The National Reading Panel (2000) concluded three essential phonemic awareness skills to help students acquire foundational literacy skills:

• Isolating: To isolate phonemes, a student needs to recognize an individual sound and note its position within the word.
• Blending: To blend phonemes, a student needs to hear the individual sounds in a word, put the sounds together, and say the word that is made.
• Segmentation: To segment phonemes, a student needs to pull a word apart into its individual sounds. Elkonin boxes are a great resource when teaching segmentation initially. One sound represents one box.

Efficient decoding and encoding is dependent upon accuracy and automaticity in pairing letters to the sounds they represent. While the above tasks are oral language tasks, they can and should be done in tandem with phonics instruction with learned letter-sound correspondences. By integrating phonemes and graphemes, teachers establish the cognitive groundwork for fluent and proficient reading and writing.

• Feedback is provided in several ways: verbal or written responses and nonverbal gestures are all forms of feedback.
• Feedback may be formal or informal, simple or complex.
• Awareness of the different forms of feedback and what each accomplishes can enhance instruction and impact student learning outcomes.
• Feedback is classified by timing (immediate or delayed).
• Immediate feedback is most effective in supporting the acquisition of new information and immediate recall (Cohen, 1985; Gaynor, 1981).
• Delayed feedback is more effective for supporting the application and generalization of previously learned or more complex processes (Gaynor, 1981; Cohen, 1985).
• Feedback may also be classified by form (validating and corrective). The form may also be concise or elaborative.
• Corrective feedback coupled with active student responses produced higher retention rates and information generalization rates than corrective feedback without active student responses (Barbetta et al., 1993).

• When students are learning new material, provide immediate feedback. Validate correct responses and provide simple corrective feedback, verbal or visual, when needed.
• Feedback may be more delayed when students are applying known skills or working at higher levels of complexity. Adaptive feedback, based on the nature of the error, may be more effective in supporting corrections.
• Provide students with opportunities to practice applying corrective feedback to generate the appropriate response.