A teacher is planning reading instruction for a small group…
A teacher is planning reading instruction for a small group of students who exhibit the following characteristics.Students can use complete letter–sound correspondences to decode words (they attend to all letters, not just some).They sound out words phoneme by phoneme, often slowly and deliberately (e.g., /c/-/a/-/t/).They begin forming secure connections between graphemes and phonemes, enabling them to read simple, regularly spelled words without guessing.They rely heavily on decoding each word, because they have not yet formed larger chunks or patterns (such as rimes or syllables). They use decoding to remember words, so each successful sound-by-sound reading helps build their sight vocabulary over time. They can decode unfamiliar regular words, but they may still struggle with irregular or multisyllabic words because they rely mainly on basic grapheme–phoneme patterns, not larger chunks. Given these characteristics, the students are most likely beginning to transition to which of the following phases of word reading?