How the Brain Learns to Read
Page 11
• Explicit instruction in the phonological structure of speech and of phonemes and their spellings helps children acquire the alphabetic principle and use it appropriately when they encounter unfamiliar words in text. Neural circuits help to map these new graphemes onto known phonemes.
How Do I Teach Phonemic Awareness?
• Assess each child’s phonemic awareness capabilities before beginning instruction. This will help identify which students should start with simple manipulation and which can move on to more advanced manipulation activities.
• A complete phonemic awareness program provides activities that include matching, isolating, substituting, blending, segmenting, and deleting sounds in words (Yopp & Yopp, 2000).
• Teach one or two types of phoneme manipulation to produce a greater benefit rather than teaching several types at once.
• Teach students to manipulate phonemes along with letters to enhance their mental lexicon. Have them say the whole word aloud and then the individual phonemes. Then write each letter on the board as they sound out its phoneme. This helps the students acquire the alphabetic principle.
• Remember that phonemic awareness instruction can benefit all children, including preschoolers, kindergarteners, first graders, and even less able readers.
• Avoid spending too much time on phonemic awareness activities. The whole program should average out to about 10 minutes per day. Obviously, some students will need more time than others, perhaps up to 30 minutes per day.
• Small groups are usually more productive for phonemic awareness instruction. Children can benefit from hearing their classmates and receiving feedback from the teacher.
• Preschool (and parental) instruction should focus on
developing an awareness of rhyme; and
separating words into syllables and syllables into phonemes.
• Kindergarten instruction should focus on
practicing the sound structure of words;
the recognition and production of letters; and
knowledge of print concepts.
• Grade 1 instruction should provide
explicit instruction and practice with sound structures that lead to phonemic awareness;
familiarity with sound-spelling correspondences and common spelling conventions and their use in identifying written words;
sight recognition of frequent words; and
independent reading, including reading aloud.
• Remember that phonemic awareness instruction is only one important part of a reading program. How well students learn to read and comprehend will depend not just on phonemic awareness but also on the effectiveness of the other components in the literacy curriculum.
• Keep in mind the importance of practice. When children learn new letter-sound correspondences, they should practice them in isolation and then in reading aloud simple sentences and books. With every bit of practice and corrective feedback, the word form that will be stored in the brain’s memory is likely to be accurate in pronunciation, spelling, and meaning. Through additional practice in spelling-sound patterns, a precise replica of the word form will be established in the neural circuits, and recognition of that word again in the future becomes easier.
Phonics Instruction
Phonics instruction teaches the relationship between phonemes of spoken language and the graphemes of written language, and how to use these relationships to read and write words. It includes helping children use the alphabetic principle to recognize familiar words automatically and accurately, and to decode unfamiliar words. Critics of phonics say that English spellings are too irregular for phonics instruction to be of any value. Nonetheless, phonics instruction teaches children a system for remembering how to read words. For example, when children learn that ghost is spelled this way and not goast, their memory helps them to remember the spelling and to recognize the word instantly. Although many words are spelled irregularly, most of them contain some regular letter-sound relationships that help children learn to read them. Moreover, students at risk for reading failure, such as those in special education and Title I programs, benefit the most from phonics-based programs (Foorman, Francis, Fletcher, Schatschneider, & Mehta, 1998). An examination of 22 studies showed that phonics instruction resulted in significantly higher achievement for elementary students, especially minority students (Jeynes, 2008). Phonics instruction that is systematic and explicit does all of the following:
• Makes a bigger contribution to a child’s growth in reading than little or no phonics instruction.
• Significantly improves kindergarten and Grade 1 children’s word recognition and spelling when compared to children who do not receive systematic instruction. It should be noted that the effects of phonics instruction on students in Grades 2 through 6 are limited to improving their oral text and word reading skills. Explicit phonics instruction beyond Grade 6 is not generally productive for most students.
• Significantly improves children’s reading comprehension. This is because their increased ability for automatic word recognition allows them more time to focus on and process the meaning of text. Contrary to what some believe, research studies indicate that phonics instruction contributes to comprehension skills rather than inhibiting them.
• Is effective for children from various economic and social levels.
• Particularly helps children who are having difficulty learning to read and who are at risk for developing future reading problems.
• Is most effective when introduced in kindergarten or Grade 1.
How Do I Teach Phonics?
Systematic instruction is characterized by the direct teaching of the letter-sound relationships of both consonants and vowels in a clearly defined sequence. Such programs give children substantial practice in applying these relationships as they read and write, as well as opportunities to spell words and write their own stories. Several approaches to teaching phonics exist, depending on the unit of analysis or how letter-sound combinations are presented to the student:
• Analogy-based phonics—using parts of word families to identify unknown words that have similar parts
• Analytic phonics—analyzing letter-sound relationships in previously learned words
• Embedded phonics—learning letter-sound relationships during the reading of connected text
• Onset-rime phonics—identifying the sound of the letter or letters before the first vowel (the onset) in a one-syllable word and the sound of the remaining part of the word (the rime)
• Phonics through spelling—learning to segment words into phonemes and to make words by writing letters for phonemes
• Synthetic phonics—learning how to convert letters or letter combinations into sounds, and then how to blend the sounds together to form recognizable words
Effective programs for phonics instruction
• include knowledge of the alphabet, phonemic awareness, vocabulary development, the reading of text, and systematic instruction in phonics;
• help teachers systematically and explicitly instruct students in how to relate sounds and letters, how to break words into sounds, and how to blend sounds to form words;
• help children understand why they are learning relationships between sounds and letters;
• help children apply their knowledge of phonics as they read text;
• help children apply what they learn about sounds and letters to their own writing; and
• can be adapted to the needs of individual students.
Systematic programs in phonics introduce the child to different letter-sound pairings, starting with the simplest and most frequent combinations and then progressing to more complex and unusual ones. One approach (Carnine, Silbert, & Kame’enui, 1997) suggests these steps:
• Start with one-to-one letter-sound relationships. Introduce consonants that are predictable in their relationships between the letter and their sounds. A possible sequence could begin with m, t, s, f, d, and r, and
end with k, v, w, j, p, and y.
• Continue with vowel sounds. Vowels are needed to help make up words, but they can be more difficult for young children to pronounce than consonants. Identify long vowels that say their name, as the /a/ in made, the /e/ in be, the /i/ in mine, the /o/ in row, and the /u/ in used. Short vowels do not say their name, such as in dad, tell, kid, top, and run.
• Introduce phonic units. These usually contain six to eight consonants and two vowels. As the children master more phonic units, they should be able to pronounce a larger number of words.
• Finish with complex letter-sound combinations. Introduce common digraphs, such as sh- in should, ch- in chip, th- in thing, and wh- in what. Later, the children will recognize larger phonetic combinations, such as -tch (witch), -dge (fudge), and -ough (cough, rough).
Practice materials should include stories that contain words using the specific letter-sound correspondences the children are learning (often called decodable texts). Students should also have practice writing letter combinations and using them to write their own stories.
• Phonics instruction can be taught effectively to individual students, small groups, or the whole class, depending on the needs of the students and the number of adults working with them.
• Phonics lessons should last typically from 15 to 20 minutes a day, but should also be reinforced during the remainder of the day with other activities in the child’s reading program, including opportunities to read and write.
• Phonics instruction should be taught for about two years for most students, usually kindergarten and Grade 1. If begun in Grade 1, it should be completed by Grade 2.
• Phonics instruction is but one of the necessary components of a comprehensive reading program, including phonemic awareness, fluency, and text reading and comprehension skills.
• Role reversal can be an effective strategy for helping children acquire the alphabetic principle. Ask the students to make up vocabulary words for you to write down. They should be nonsense words that the children create. Ask them to clearly enunciate each sound so that you can write the word down accurately (SEDL, 2001).
• Pay close attention to how children write. To assess their understanding of the alphabetic principle, it is not necessary for them to write accurately. It is important, however, that they write one symbol per sound; that is, a word with three phonemes should be represented in writing by three symbols.
Spelling and Invented Spelling
In Chapter 2, we discussed the challenges of English spelling, especially compared to the transparent orthography of other common European languages, such as Spanish and Italian. Learning to spell in transparent languages requires only a modest set of brain regions to detect letters and morphemes. Although there are some rules of spelling in English, it takes more brain areas to remember and encode complex exceptions—that is, words whose pronunciation strays far from the expected. Examples are words containing the fragments -tion, -ough, and -ould. Spelling is closely linked to reading because it involves breaking apart a spoken word into its sounds and encoding them into the letters representing each sound. While learning to read words, children also learn how to spell those words. As children try to represent words with the alphabet, they often encode words by their initial consonants, followed by their ending sounds. Middle sounds, usually vowels, are omitted at first. Thus, horse might be written as hrs, and monster as mstr. The pronunciation of this invented spelling is very close to that of the intended word. Invented spelling allows children to practice applying the alphabetic principle and gain in phonemic awareness. It serves as a transitional step and assists in the development of reading and writing.
Studies on early literacy development have shown that invented spelling is a reliable measure of early reading achievement. One study found that preschool and kindergarten children who were inventive spellers performed significantly better on word reading and on storybook readings. In a literacy study of four Grade 1 classrooms, two teachers encouraged invented spelling while the other two teachers encouraged traditional spelling. The inventive spellers scored significantly better than the traditional spellers on several measures of word reading that were administered during the second semester in Grade 1 (Ahmed & Lombardino, 2000). Invented spelling was the best predictor of how well kindergartners could match, through finger-point reading, spoken words to printed words in reading a sentence—a skill known as concept of a word in text (Uhry, 1999). In a study of kindergarteners, the invented-spelling group learned to read more words in a learn-to-read task than groups trained in phonological awareness or drawing pictures (Ouellette & Sénéchal, 2008). The researchers suggested that invented spelling encourages children to use an analytical approach to spelling and facilitates the integration of phonological and orthographic knowledge.
When their invented spelling is accepted, children feel empowered to write more and with purpose, communicating their messages from the very beginning of school. Writing slows down the process of dealing with text, allowing children more time to recognize and learn about sound-letter relationships. For some children, writing may be an easier way to literacy than reading. In reading, the process involves changing letter sequences to sounds, whereas in writing the process is reversed—going from sounds to letters. Accordingly, writing may be a simpler task because it involves going from sounds in the child’s head, which are already known and automatic, to letters, rather than from the unknown letters in reading to what is known (Dehaene, 2009).
Some researchers in the past have raised concerns about whether the persistent use of invented spelling leads to confusion and the formation of bad spelling habits. But research studies indicate that, with appropriate teacher intervention, the invented spellings gradually come closer to conventional forms. Consequently, spelling errors should be seen not as an impediment to writing but as an indication of the child’s thought processes while making sense of letter-sound relationships. From that perspective, the errors could yield important information about a child’s internal reading patterns (Sipe, 2001). On the other hand, remember that practice eventually makes permanent. The consistent repetition of incorrect spellings will, in time, lead to their storage in long-term memory. Therefore, teachers should use strategies that will help children transform invented spelling into conventional spelling.
Does Texting Lead to Poor Spelling?
With so many young children having access to texting devices in recent years, parents and educators are wondering whether the spelling shorthand used in texting, often called “textese,” will cause children to become poor spellers. It seems like a sensible fear, but recent research studies do not support this idea. In one study, 86 children aged 10 to 12 years read and wrote text messages in conventional English and in textese, and then completed tests of spelling and reading (Kemp & Bushnell, 2011). Children took significantly longer and made more mistakes when they read messages written in textese than in conventional English. Moreover, they were no faster at writing messages in textese than in conventional English, regardless of the texting method they used or their experience. However, those children who had greater speed and accuracy in reading textese also demonstrated better literacy skills. A similar study of 227 Australian children found that the students who sent more text messages had better general spelling ability than those who sent fewer (Bushnell, Kemp, & Martin, 2011).
These findings add to the growing evidence for a positive correlation between texting proficiency and traditional literacy skills, including spelling. But why? The best guess for now is that the child’s brain needs to perform a mental word analysis to decide how best to abbreviate the word. This very act requires neural circuits to remember the word’s correct spelling in order to convert it to textese.
Developing Spelling Skills
Recent research studies suggest that children move through five stages as they develop their spelling skills (Bear, Invernizzi, Templeton, & Johnston, 2008). Figure 3.4 illustrates these five phases and some
of their characteristics. Essentially, brain networks are not only mapping sounds to letters, but also looking for patterns to remember that will help the child decode and encode unfamiliar words in the future.
Figure 3.4 Research seems to indicate that when learning to spell, children go through five stages. The first two stages deal with sound, both emerging sounds that resemble words and the recognition of short vowels and consonants. The next two stages deal with patterns, including diphthongs, syllables, and homophones as well as affixes. In the final stage, the child recognizes how prefixes and suffixes alter not only a word’s meaning but its use in a sentence (Bear et al., 2008).
How Do I Teach Spelling?
• Effective spelling instruction focuses on helping children go from sound to letter, which strongly reinforces their reading—going from letter to sound. Spelling instruction is more than memorizing word lists. It should follow a logical sequence that starts with phonemic awareness, demonstrates which letters represent which sounds, and introduces the notion that the same sound can have different spellings (Shaywitz, 2003).
• Studies show that effective primary-grade teachers combine three methods for teaching spelling (Schlagel, 2007): (1) memorization, whereby students memorize how specific words are spelled; (2) generalization, whereby students are taught directly the skills and rules for spelling unfamiliar words; and (3) developmental, whereby students extend their understanding of spelling rules through word study activities, such as word sorting.
• Moving away from invented spelling. Techniques, such as using sound boxes (also known as Elkonin boxes) drawn on paper, can help the child enunciate the word slowly and recognize other sounds that need to be represented by letters. For example, if the child spells dog as dg, you draw a box for the first sound, /d/ = duh, and the child enters the letter d and puts a marker or coin on it. By stretching out the pronunciation of the word, the child hears the /ô/ = auh sound. Now draw another box, enter the letter o, and ask the child to push a marker into it. This continues until the last phoneme, /g/ = guh, is represented by the letter g. The process can be repeated until the child is confident in hearing the middle vowel sound (Figure 3.5).