The Combination of Phonemic Awareness and Phonics Instruction

Maura--

No, your district has made a good choice. Adding Letter Name knowledge to Phonemic Awareness at kindergarten tends to pick up more variation in learning that Letter Sound Knowledge and PA. That means that your district's approach will be likely to identify more kids who are actually struggling. The other approach would probably identify a larger number of kids as being in need -- but many more of those would be false positives (kids who are doing okay and who won't need Tier 2 support).

With development that pattern changes... later on, it would be better to do what you suggest.

Great question.

tim

The fundamental problem in teaching approach is that both teachers and school districts have this idea of "scope and sequence" (which is valuable) as well as teaching to "mastery" baked into their pedagogy. In consulting, I have heard pre-K through early elementary educators concerned even more broadly that their students have not mastered phonological tasks such as rhyme awareness or onset/rime awareness. They have stalled out before even addressing phonemic awareness because they view the overarching phonological skills as sequential rather than intertwined (i.e. "How can I teach phonemes if my students cannot master rhyme?"). Language acquisition and the development of phonemic awareness and word recognition (decoding) and spelling ability is not neat and clean. While awareness of the challenges and scope of difficulty in developing phonemic awareness and decoding/spelling skills should inform the progression of skills, phonemic awareness, phonics, spelling, and the other language comprehension areas in the other strand of the reading rope should be intertwined just as the Scarborough rope illustrates. Moreover, the interconnectivity corresponds to the processing centers in the Reading Brain which work in a web of supportive functions that strengthen each other and build deep word knowledge. If you look at the Seidenberg-McClelland model, Phonological, Orthographic, and Semantic regions in the brain interact. Phonics occurs at the intersection of speech and sound. Teaching Phonemic Awareness absent Orthographic Awareness treats the regions of the brain like islands without established trade routes. The developing reader needs to build those neural pathways and redundancies of support in order to achieve the automaticity with word recognition necessary to approach reading comprehension. Phonemes are, as Seidenberg says, a useful abstraction. They are more difficult to conceptualize absent connection to alphabetic letters and the graphemes that are taught through phonics and spelling instruction. Phonemes can be heard, felt, and described through linguistic (oral-motor) training, but spelling instruction grounds them in the concrete realm of the written word. Phoneme manipulation is a vital skill that assists word recognition, but pure phonemes do not exist in spoken words (just as a musical note within a chord is influenced by the notes around it and sounds different from an isolated note). Skilled readers can usually work backwards and conceptualize phonemes to teach them to unskilled readers. However, the spelling convention of a word like "can" helps to ground the notion of the phonemes within the word. Allophonic variations in words like "can" would be hard to abstract as phonemes without the "c - a - n" (CVC) spelling convention. There is a certain reciprocal value in the connection between sound awareness and print awareness, just as there is in oral/written receptive and expressive language. What is the conclusion? A "logical" sequence of instruction on paper (or legislation) does not always match the developmental and NEURO-logical progression of the reading brain. Reading instruction is more of a complex flowchart than a neat bulleted checklist.

credit to:
Scarborough
Seidenberg
Moats
Shanahan
Ehri
Dehaene
Wolf
Gaab
and others -- doing their best to connect the Science of Reading to the Institutions of Learning.

I have seen value in teaching some isolated PA to all kindergarteners, but not to the exclusion at other times of the day of teaching PA and phonics in a coordinated instructional sequence. I was curious, is it fruitful to continue teaching isolated PA, completely unrelated to our phonics work to some or all older students?

Sheila--

I don't think I would focus on "unrelated" PA... that is just trying to teach phonemic awareness as a general ability. However, I have no problem with lessons on PA that only focus on PA without letters or sound-letter connections. One of the benefits of that approach is that it does not allow students to use what they know about sound-letter relations as a help to perceiving the phonemes. Thus, you very well might focus on students' ability to perceive particular sounds... and then, sometime after, focus on matching those sounds with letters.

tim

2 follow-on questions if I may?

1) how soon after entry to primary education would you recommend beginning a PA/phonics programme?

2) more of a clarification really…no matter the phonics skill that is being taught, the PA element should be included (even if the children are already ‘expert’ in rhyme awareness for example) & feature the phonics skill being targeted?

Thank you in advance, Carolyn

Our elementary school is in the process of developing a k-2 quality reading instruction. Our school data shows that only about 41% of our k-5 students are proficient and on grade level in reading. The majority of on level students are the same from K-5...so we feel our current tier 1 instruction/interventions is not helping below level or struggling readers get the skills they need. Any suggestions to help us ensure each child is given what they need to become successful readers.

Tim--

I recently published an article on that in Reading Research Quarterly. I'll send you a copy.

tim

Let's not mix the terms here. Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear a spoken word and to isolate, identify, add, delete, substitute, and even transpose the individual speech sounds. Phonics is the ability to map speech sounds to signifiers of those speech sounds which we term graphemes. Those graphemes may be a letter or letter combination in an alphabetic orthography. Let's make sure that we are not encouraging going back to the days of a "The letter for this week "says"! Letter's do not "say" - people do! For some students secure phonemic awareness is the challenge and in reality teaching it with fun integrated activities for 12 to 15 minutes a day in PreK and K along with phonics would be great! Let's not forget the phonological hierarchy so that we don't jump to the most difficult skill first. Let's have those toddlers repeat a sentence that has been dictated, note word boundaries heard in a sentence, note incorrect syntax heard "I go will" - no - "I will go." The phonological sensitivity moves to sense of syllables heard in spoken words and the level of onset-rime. Finally we have arrived at the top of the phonological mountain with phonemes and phonemic awareness. Proficiency here secures the mapping of speech to print in phonics that has to be taught with phonemes. However, if the students do not know the place and manner of articulation of those speech sounds (phonetics) they will have grave consequences later on in reading to automaticity and encoding (spelling). I have seen many fifth graders spell tree - chree which could have been remediated back in K with an informed teacher giving a child a mirror, a quick look at the sound wall, and feeling the teeth behind the alveolar ridge differently. Twelve to 15 minutes of focused study alongside of phonics, yes!

I really feel that this shift back to phonics is wonderful, but we need an expert to give recommendations. School systems are picking programs that seem to have a phonetic component but they are very cumbersome and hard to implement. Help

How do I reconcile these two statements? They seem to contradict?

On the one hand you state: "We reviewed studies in which phonemic awareness OR phonics were taught – ignoring studies that combined their instruction. If a study evaluated their combined teaching, we didn’t include it in our review."

and then...

"...the Panel noted that phonemic awareness programs that included letters (the connection of sounds and letters being the beginnings of phonics) did better than those programs that did not include letters."

How pure were the phonemic awareness programs studied vs those that introduced letters either simultaneously or eventually? What am I missing? Thanks.

While I have been out of the elementary setting for several years now, when I taught first grade our commercially purchased program was set up perfectly. In every lesson, phonemic awareness was taught and then segued into a phonics lesson on the same letter/sound. The students made meaningful gains in reading each year. Of course, there were many times throughout the day when we played with sounds without teaching phonics such as rhyming words or using the 'Name Game' song, etc.

Kelly--

It is not contradictory at all.

There are phonemic awareness studies which do not include letters in their instruction and there are some that do include them at some point as a visual representation of what the children are hearing. A third set of studies (ones not included in NRP) include a full program of PA instruction, along with a program teaching decoding.

It is worth noting that PA instruction that includes letters obtains higher effect sizes than those that do not. Whether this superiority is due to the visual representations aiding in the perception of the sounds or whether it simply takes students closer to decoding is unknown.

tim

I have been creating PA activities for the homeschooling families I work with and I didn't include letters. Then, I read the IDA report on this topic several weeks ago and paused my project. I'm wondering if I should edit the materials to include letters and not just working with the sounds of our language. Thoughts? Thx!

Jennifer--

In a word, yes.

tim

Mav--

You are correct that you would benefit from recommendations on specific programs. However, those should not come from me. I help design some commercial programs and therefore am ethically precluded from making such recommendations. I would suggest that you look at the evaluations provided by the What Works Clearinghouse. Those analyses are based on research data.

good luck.

tim

Phyllis--

I'll stay with research proven approaches. Of course, attention to articulation can be helpful in phonemic awareness and phonics instruction, at least with particular children or particular sounds. Nevertheless, there is no research showing that 15 minutes a day of such teaching improves students' spelling or decoding.

tim

Carolyn--

1. Research has found PA and phonics instruction to be beneficial as early as age 3 in preschool -- though most of the studies are with 5 year olds and 4 year olds. I would start that instruction the first day I was responsible for the children.
2. There is no research that I'm aware of that sorts out the relative benefits of teaching PA generally (like trying to get students to segment any and all sounds) versus developing it for each phoneme as the phoneme-grapheme relations are taught). I think you can make it work either way, though personally, even if a student had the desired PA skills, I would still check each phoneme as I was teaching phonics (just to be certain that the students could perceive the particular phoneme of interest).

Oh, and by the way, the least important phonemic awareness skill is rhyming. If your kids can't rhyme very well, it may indicate a more general problem with PA, but it is not one that I would work particularly hard on.

tim

Dear Tim,
talking about grafemes and letters Is there any research on the benefit of teaching cursive all through. Starting in KG up to primary school without change? In Argentina there's a tendency to change from small print or capital letters to cursive for writing.
what are your thoughts about using only cursive?.Thank you in advance.

Dora--

I would initially teach manuscript hand and would start cursive later -- teaching students both to write cursive and to read it. Initially, stay with the kind of text that students are going to be trying to learn to read, and delay cursive until that has satisfactorily been accomplished.

tim

What are your thoughts on phonics instruction for older students, grades 9-11 specifically? We are in the process of developing a new program to better meet the needs of these students. We will have small groups of students, 3-5, every other day for 42 minutes. What do you feel should be included in such a program?

Thank you for your time.

Denise--

High school phonics can be essential for students who lack those skills. The teaching of phonics is no different than it is early on... it is essential that the teaching explicit and ongoing. I would suggest that you type "high school phonics" into the search box on my website and you will find some blogs that talk about this issue.

tim