What Does That Mean? A Parent’s Guide to Early Reading Language

If you have a child learning to read, chances are you have heard some version of these phrases before: Your child is at benchmark. She is reading on a Level J. He needs to work on decoding. Her phonemic awareness is strong, but her fluency needs some support.

Maybe you understood exactly what the teacher meant. Or maybe you nodded, made a mental note of the words you heard, and realized later that you weren't entirely sure what they actually meant for your child.

I think this happens to parents all the time.

Schools have a language for talking about reading. As educators, we use words like benchmark, decoding, encoding, fluency, and intervention so often that it's easy to forget that most parents have never been explicitly taught what these terms mean. Even something that sounds fairly straightforward, like reading level, can be more complicated than it seems.

When we're talking about your child's reading development, you should understand the conversation.

Let's translate some of the language you might hear at a parent teacher conference, on an assessment report, or in a conversation with your child's teacher. More importantly, let's talk about what that information can actually tell you.

Benchmark, Above Benchmark, and Below Benchmark

Let's start with one parents hear often: benchmark.

A benchmark is an expected point of performance at a particular time in the school year. If you are told that your child is "at benchmark," it generally means that on that particular assessment, your child is performing where they are expected to be at that point in time. Above benchmark means their performance exceeded that expectation, while below benchmark means it fell below it.

The important part, though, is what was assessed.

A benchmark score doesn't tell us everything about a child as a reader. A child can be doing very well in one area and still need support in another. When you hear, "Your child is at benchmark," one of the simplest questions you can ask is, "What skills did that assessment measure?"

That little question can give you a lot more information.

Reading Level

Reading level is another term parents hear constantly, and I think it can sometimes carry more weight than it should.

Depending on the school and assessment, you might hear that your child is reading at a certain letter, number, or grade level. That information can be useful. It gives teachers one way to describe the complexity of text a child is able to read with a certain level of accuracy and understanding.

But a reading level is not the whole story of a reader.

Two children can have the same reading level and get there in very different ways. One child might decode words easily but need support with comprehension. Another might understand everything they hear and have wonderful ideas about a story but work incredibly hard to figure out the words on the page.

That is why I always want to know what is happening underneath the reading level.

This is where some of those other terms come in.

Phonemic Awareness and Phonics

These two are often confused, and understandably so.

Phonemic awareness is about sounds. It is a child's ability to hear and work with the individual sounds in spoken words. If I ask a child to tell me the sounds they hear in cat, /c/ /a/ /t/, we are working with phonemic awareness. There doesn't need to be a written word in front of them at all.

Phonics is when we connect those sounds to print. A child learns that the sound /m/ can be represented by the letter m, or that the letters sh work together to represent the sound we hear at the beginning of ship.

I like to think of it simply as this: phonemic awareness is what we hear, while phonics connects what we hear to what we see in print.

They work together, but they aren't the same skill.

Decoding and Encoding

Decoding and encoding are another pair that sound much more complicated than they really are.

Decoding is reading. Encoding is spelling.

When your child comes to an unfamiliar word and uses what they know about sounds, letters, syllables, or spelling patterns to figure it out, they are decoding.

Encoding goes in the opposite direction. Your child knows the word they want to write and has to figure out which letters and patterns represent the sounds they hear.

This is also why I pay attention to children's spelling. Spelling isn't just about whether a word is right or wrong. The way a child attempts to spell a word can tell us quite a bit about what they understand about sounds and how our written language works.

Sight Words and High Frequency Words

These terms are often used as though they mean the same thing, but there is a difference.

A high frequency word is simply a word that appears frequently in written language. Words like the, said, and was are examples.

A sight word is a word that a reader recognizes automatically. They don't need to stop and work through it each time they encounter it.

As children become stronger readers and have repeated experiences reading words successfully, more words become automatic for them. That automatic recognition matters because it frees up their attention for everything else they need to do while reading.

Fluency

This brings us to fluency, which is sometimes mistaken for reading fast.

Fluent reading isn't a race.

Fluency means reading accurately, at an appropriate pace, and with phrasing and expression that make sense. Think about the difference between listening to someone read word by word with long pauses and listening to someone read in phrases that sound like natural language.

When children don't have to devote all of their energy to figuring out individual words, they have more mental space available to think about what the text actually means.

That leads us to comprehension.

Comprehension

Comprehension is understanding what we read. It includes remembering important information, making connections, thinking about characters or ideas, making inferences, and pulling together information across a text.

There is something I think is especially important for parents to understand here. Sometimes what looks like a comprehension problem isn't actually a comprehension problem.

A child might listen to a story and understand it beautifully, answer questions, make connections, and talk about it in detail. But when that same child has to read independently, they may struggle to understand because so much of their attention is going toward figuring out the words.

That difference is important information.

This is why looking at one score, or even one area of reading, rarely gives us the entire picture.

Intervention

Finally, you may hear that your child needs an intervention.

I know that word can sound scary. In education, though, intervention simply means providing additional, targeted instruction to address a particular area of need.

What matters is understanding what that intervention is actually targeting.

If your child is receiving intervention, you can ask: What skill are you working on? How often will my child receive this instruction? How will you measure whether it is working? When will we look at their progress again?

Those are reasonable questions. You aren't questioning the teacher's expertise by asking them. You are trying to understand the plan for your child.

What Should I Ask?

When I think about all of these terms together, I don't think the goal is for parents to memorize a new vocabulary list. You don't need to become a reading specialist.

The goal is to understand enough that you can participate in the conversation.

If someone tells you that your child is below benchmark, you can ask what skill was measured. If you're given a reading level, you can ask what your child's reading looks like within that level. If you're told your child is struggling with comprehension, you might ask how their comprehension looks when something is read aloud compared with when they read independently. If an intervention is recommended, you can ask exactly what skill it will address and how progress will be monitored.

Sometimes what you learn will reassure you that your child is progressing just as expected. Sometimes it may give you something to keep an eye on. Other times it may help you recognize that your child needs additional support.

You don't have to make that determination from a single letter, number, score, or phrase.

Parents see a part of their child's literacy development that educators don't always get to see. You know what reading looks like at bedtime. You know whether homework takes ten minutes or ends in tears. You know which books your child reaches for, which ones they avoid, what they remember when you read aloud, and what they tell you about school.

My goal with The Reading Start has never been to turn parents into reading teachers. It is to help parents understand enough about literacy development that when someone talks to you about your child as a reader, you don't have to simply nod along.

You can understand what you're hearing, know what questions to ask, and feel like an informed part of the conversation.

If there is a reading term you've heard from your child's teacher or seen on a report and thought, Wait...what does that actually mean? send it my way. It might be the perfect question for my next Ask Me.