How does EMC Literacy Standard 1 describe the relationship between decoding development and reading comprehension in early and middle childhood?

• A. Interdependent; instruction should support accurate word recognition while teaching meaning-making strategies, with progress monitored through both word-level and text-level analyses.
• B. Decoding skills and comprehension are separate; instruction should focus only on word recognition first.
• C. Comprehension should drive decoding; students decode only after comprehension is secure.
• D. Decoding and comprehension are unrelated and develop independently.

Answer: (A)

Decoding and comprehension develop together; they influence one another as children grow. In EMC Literacy Standard 1, instruction is designed so students build accurate word recognition while also learning strategies to interpret and make meaning from texts. Teachers monitor progress using both word-level measures (how well students read individual words) and text-level measures (how well they understand and interpret passages). When decoding is reliable, students can devote more cognitive resources to understanding, and practice with meaningful texts reinforces vocabulary and comprehension skills that, in turn, support better decoding. That’s why the best choice emphasizes their interdependent relationship and the need for integrated, ongoing assessment of both word and text levels. The other approaches—that decoding and comprehension are separate, that decoding must wait for full comprehension, or that they’re unrelated—don’t align with how literacy develops.