FHSU Language and Literacy Institute
FHSU Language and Literacy Institute
The FHSU Language and Literacy Institute in Partnership with Hays Masonic Lodge 195 provides free in-person and online literacy tutoring and English language services. Providing one-to-one support, the Language and Literacy Institute utilizes instructional methods based on the Science of Reading to enhance and advance literacy and language skills for struggling PK-12 students including those students with dyslexia and dysgraphia and those new to the English language.
How We Support You
- Professionally trained tutors provide services during a convenient after-school schedule. These services align with the principles of structured literacy, ensuring a systematic, explicit, and cumulative approach to reading instruction.
Additional Support
We host a variety of programs such as:
- Parent and caregiver workshops to help support literacy at home
- Summer reading programs aimed at preventing summer reading loss and increasing reading motivation
- Family literacy events to encourage a love for reading that engages the entire family
Why We Do It
- According to the U.S. Department of Education, about 54% of U.S. adults -130 million people- read below a sixth-grade level with many living in poverty.
- By teaching students using phonics and the science or reading, struggling readers can be taught to successfully read, leading to a lifetime of success.
Structured Literacy Instruction
- Multi-Sensory: The teaching of new concepts incorporates visual, auditory, and kinesthetic pathways. With this approach, students learn language by ear (listening), mouth (speaking), eyes (seeing), and hand (writing).
- Structured, Sequential, and Cumulative: Through direct, explicit instruction, it progresses logically at the primary level and progresses to more advanced concepts that build upon the previous skill learned, with practice and review.
- Diagnostic: Through assessment, differentiation, and grouping, teachers can instruct students based on their needs.
- Language-based: Directly teaches the fundamental structure of language, starting with sound/symbol relationships and progressing to more complex concepts such as higher-level spelling rules and Greek and Latin Bases.
The Five Pillars of Literacy
- Phonological Awareness: The awareness that words are composed of sounds and those sounds have distinct articulatory features
- Phonics: The ability to recognize letter-sound relationships in words
- Fluency: The ability to read with speed, accuracy, and proper expression
- Vocabulary: Size and word-meaning strategies predict comprehension
- Comprehension: Understanding the meaning of text and integrating it with previous knowledge