Reading skills

Reading proficiency is an essential skill for students of all ages. A fluent reader is able to decode what they are reading automatically, freeing up their attention to focus on a text’s meaning rather than on decoding each word on the page.

Within LiteracyPlanet, our Reading Comprehension program develops reading fluency by providing primary and secondary students with practice of reading both short and long texts. With exposure to texts in a variety of genres, students develop their reading proficiency which is crucial to schooling progress and academic achievement.

Younger readers also have access to a range of short stories that cover a range of interesting topics. These are supplemental to the curriculum material addressed by the other strands, and provide an opportunity for children to flex their reading muscles at their own pace, or with the support of a fluent reader. Each word within these readers can also be listened to for additional learning support.

A LiteracyPlanet levelling system has been used to indicate the reading challenge presented by each text, which has been determined by vocabulary difficulty and text complexity.

Although there is no direct correlation between a specific reading level and a specific grade level, as students will be at various stages of proficiency, guidance is provided on the suitability for each text against the following commonly used levelling systems: Lexile®, Reading Recovery, PM (Progress for Meaning) Benchmarks, Fountas and Pinnell (F&P), and Developmental Reading Level Assessment (DRA).