How the Brain Learns to Read

  • Larger to smaller units. Move from the larger units of words and onset-rimes to the smaller units of individual phonemes.

  • Additional strategies. Use additional strategies to help struggling readers, such as concrete objects (e.g., bingo chips or blocks), to represent sounds.

  We have already discussed how early awareness of phonemes is a strong indicator of later reading success. Further, the research on interventions clearly demonstrates the benefits of explicitly teaching phonemic awareness skills. No students benefit more from this instruction than those already burdened with reading problems. The development of phonemic awareness occurs over several years. It is the last step in a developmental continuum that begins with the brain’s earliest awareness of rhyme. Figure 6.1 illustrates the continuum from rhyming to full phoneme manipulation (Ehri & Roberts, 2006).

  General Guidelines

  The five steps in Figure 6.1, from recognizing and generating rhymes to blending and segmenting phonemes, can occur during the preschool years in the appropriate environment. If the parent sings rhyming songs and reads to the child from rhyming books, the child’s brain begins to recognize the sounds that comprise beginning language. However, many children begin school with a very weak phonological base. As we mentioned earlier, teachers must then assess where students lie on the phonological continuum and select appropriate strategies to move them toward phonemic awareness. Teachers should consider the following guidelines when selecting strategies to help students recognize and successfully manipulate phonemes (Edelen-Smith, 1998; Ehri & Roberts, 2006; McGee & Ukrainetz, 2009).

  Figure 6.1 The development of phonemic awareness is a continuum that begins with recognizing and generating rhymes and ends with the successful manipulation of individual phonemes.

  • Be specific. Identify the specific phonemic awareness task and select the activities that are developmentally appropriate and that keep the students engaged in the task. Select words, phrases, and sentences from curricular materials to make this meaningful. Look for ways to make activities enjoyable so students see them as fun and not as monotonous drills. Use chants, poetry, rhymes, and songs to stimulate the students’ curiosity about language structure and to develop their awareness of phoneme manipulation.

  • Avoid letter names. Use the phonemic sounds of the alphabet when doing activities, and avoid letter names. Letters that sound as they are named only confuse the learner. Keep in mind that one sound may be represented by two or more letters. Target specific sounds and practice beforehand so students can hear them clearly.

  • Treat continuant and stop sounds differently. Continuant sounds are easier to manipulate and hear than the stop sounds. When introducing each type, treat them differently so students become aware of their differences. Exaggerate continuant sounds by holding on to them: ssssssing and rrrrrrun. Use rapid repetition with the stop consonants: /K/-/K/-/K/- /K/-/K/-/K/-athy.

  • Emphasize how sounds vary with their position in a word. Generally, the initial position in the word is the easiest sound. The final position is the next easiest, and the middle position is the most difficult. Use lots of examples to make this clear, such as mop, pin, and better.

  • Be aware of the sequence for introducing combined sounds. When introducing the combined sounds, a consonant-vowel pattern should come first, then a vowel-consonant pattern, and finally a consonant-vowel- consonant pattern. For example: first tie, then add, and finally bed.

  Simple Phonemic Awareness

  Young students are usually unaware that words are made of sounds that can be produced in isolation. This leaves it up to the teacher to find ways to emphasize the concept of speech sounds through systematic and direct instruction. A multimodality approach facilitates the processing and retention of sounds. This approach can include techniques such as illustrating, tracing, and chanting of sounds so that the students’ brain processes sounds in different ways. This is particularly effective with children who have dyslexia as they usually have difficulty recognizing and processing phonemes. For students with phonological difficulties, the teacher may call their attention to how their mouth forms various sounds, or ask them to place their hand in front of their mouth when making voiced sounds.

  An effective reading program should include activities that help children manipulate phonemes. Here are some ways to do this (Daly, Chafouleas, & Skinner, 2005; Edelen-Smith, 1998):

  • Recognizing isolated sounds. Associate certain speech sounds with an animal or action that is familiar to the students. For example, the buzzing sound of a bee or snoring in sleep is zzzzzzzz-, the hissing of a snake, ssssssss-, the sound of asking for quiet, shhhhhhhh-, or the sound of a motor scooter or motorboat, pppppppp-. Alliteration also helps with this task. Talking about Peter Piper picking a peck of peppers affords the valuable combination of sound recognition, storytelling, and literary context. It also provides self-correcting cues for initial-sound isolation and for sound-to-word matching.

  • Counting words, syllables, and phonemes. It is easier for a child’s brain to perceive words and syllables than individual phonemes. Thus word and syllable counting is a valuable exercise for sound recognition that can lead later to more accurate identification of phonemes. Start with a sentence from the curriculum and say it aloud. Do not write it out because the students should focus on listening. Ask the students to count the number of words they think are in the sentence. They can use markers or tokens to indicate the word number. Then show or write the sentence and have the students compare the number of words to their own count. Syllable counting can be done in many ways. Students can count syllables in the same way they identified the word count. Also, they can march around the room while saying the syllables, or they can clap hands, tap pencils, or do any other overt activity that indicates counting.

  • Synthesizing sounds. Sound synthesis is an essential yet easily performed skill for phonemic awareness. Start with using the initial sound and then saying the remainder of the word. For example, the teacher says, “It starts with b and ends with -and; put it together, and it says band.” The students take turns using the same phrasing to make up their own words. Variations include limiting the context to objects in the classroom or in the school, or to a particular story that the class has recently read.

  Guessing games can also be productive and fun activities for playing with sounds. One game involves hiding an object in a bag or some other place and then giving clues to its name sound-by-sound or syllable-by-syllable. When a student guesses the word correctly, you reveal the object. Songs can also be used. Blending the music with the sounds of words increases the chances that the phonemes will be remembered.

  • Matching sounds to words. This activity asks the learner to identify the initial sound of a word, an important skill for sound segmentation. Show the student a picture of a kite and ask, “Is this a dddd-ite, or a llll-ite, or a kkkk-ite?” You could also ask, “Is there a k in kite?” or “Which sound does kite start with?” This allows the students to try three onsets with three rimes and to mix and match until they get it correct. Consonants make a good beginning because they are easier to emphasize and prolong during pronunciation. Have students try other words in threes. Be sure to use the phoneme sound, not the letter name, when referring to a letter.

  • Identifying the position of sounds. Segmenting whole words into their components is an important part of phonemic awareness. This ability is enhanced when learners recognize that sounds occur in different positions in words: initial, medial, and final. Edelen-Smith (1998) suggests explaining that words have beginning, middle, and end sounds just like a train has a beginning (engine), a middle (passenger car), and an end (caboose). Slowly articulate a consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) word at this time, such as c-a-t, and point to the appropriate train part as you sound out each phoneme. Then have the students sound out other CVC words from a list or recent story, pointing to each train part as they say the parts of the word.

  • Segmenting sounds. One of the more
difficult phonemic tasks for children is to separately pronounce each sound of a spoken word in order. This process is called sound segmentation. Developing this skill should start with isolating the initial phonemes. The previous activities—matching sounds to words and identifying the position of sounds—help the learner identify and recognize initial phonemes. Visual cues can also play an important part in segmenting sounds. Select words that are familiar to the students (or have the students select the words) so that they can use contextual clues for meaning. After sufficient practice, eliminate the cards so that students can perform the sound-segmenting task without visual cues.

  • Associating sounds with letters. For the reading process to be successful, the brain must associate the sounds that it has heard during the prereading years of spoken language with the written letters that represent them. This is particularly difficult for students with disabilities that hamper the learning of reading. Consequently, extensive practice is essential. Nearly all of the activities mentioned above—especially those involving visual cues—can be modified to include associations between sounds and letters. As the students master individual sounds, their corresponding letter names can then be introduced. A type of bingo game can also be used to practice sound-with-letter association. Each student gets a card with letters placed into a bingo grid. Draw a letter from a container and call out the phoneme. Students place tokens on the letter that corresponds to the phoneme. The student who first gets “phoneme bingo” names the letters aloud. Teachers can devise all types of variations to this bingo game to maintain the practice while keeping the task interesting and fun.

  Compound Phonemic Awareness

  In compound phonemic awareness, the learner must hold one sound in memory while matching it to a second sound. For example, “Do dog and deer begin with the same sound?” The two activities that develop compound phonemic awareness involve matching one word to a second word and the deleting of sounds in a word.

  • Matching one word to another word. Byrne (1991) has suggested three games to develop phonemic word matching skills. The words and pictures used in each of these games should relate to themes and readings done in the classroom. One involves making a set of dominoes that have two objects pictured on each tile. The students have to join the tiles showing objects that share the same beginning or ending sounds.

  A second game uses picture cards that are placed face down in a pile. Each student draws a card from the pile and places it face up. Students continue to draw cards and place them in the face-up pile. The first student to match the beginning or ending sound of a drawn card with the top card on the face-up pile says the match aloud and collects the pile.

  The third game is a variation of bingo. Each bingo card contains pictures, which the students mark when their picture has the same beginning or ending sound as the word said by the caller (student or teacher).

  • Deleting sounds. Deleting sounds from words and manipulating phonemes within words are more difficult tasks for the young brain to accomplish. Studies show that most children must attain the mental age of 7 years before this task can be accomplished adequately (Cole & Mengler, 1994). Furthermore, segmentation skills and letter names must be mastered before sound deletion tasks can be successfully learned.

  Three tasks seem to be particularly important to mastering this skill: deleting parts of a compound word, identifying a missing sound, and deleting a single sound from a word.

  1. Deleting parts of a compound word. To illustrate deleting parts of a compound word, point to a picture or an object that is a compound word and demonstrate how each word can be said with one part missing. For example, “This is a classroom. I can say class without the room. And this is a farmhouse [or greenhouse]. I can say farm [green] without house. Now you try it. This is a playground.” Use other common examples, such as lighthouse, airplane, grandmother, seashore, sandbox, toothpaste, and nightlight.

  2. Identifying the missing sound. In this task, focus on deleting the initial and final sounds instead of the medial sounds, which is the first step to master for the young brain. Take word pairs, such as ate-late, and ask, “What’s missing in ate that you hear in late?” Other examples are ask-mask, able-table, and right-bright. After a few trials, have the students make up their own word pairs, preferably from lesson material.

  3. Deleting a single sound from a word. This task should begin with segmentation practice. First, separate the sound for deletion. For example, separate g from glove. “Glove. It starts with g and ends with love. Take the first sound away, and it says love.” Use words for which a sound deletion results in another real word. Other examples are spot-pot, train-rain, scare-care, and snap-nap. After practicing this skill, say a word aloud and ask students to say the word with the initial sound missing: “Say mother without the m.” Visual clues can help those who have difficulty saying a word with the deleted sound.

  Onset and Rime

  The young brain’s awareness of onsets, rimes, and syllables develops before an awareness of phonemes. Onsets are the initial consonants that change the meaning of a word; rimes are the vowel-consonant combinations that stay constant in a series. For example, in bend, lend, and send, the onsets are b, l, and s; the rime is -end. Note that the first step in Figure 6.1 is recognizing and generating rhymes. Rhyme generation can be used as an instructional strategy to develop explicit phonemic awareness skills by providing students with practice in manipulating the onset and the rime.

  Rhyme Generation. Rhyme generation is a sequence of steps that starts by introducing the notion of rhyme generation to students. The teacher presents the concept of “rhyme” and asks students to define it and give examples. In the next step, the teacher presents rhymes in context, such as in a poem or song, and then asks students to identify the rhymes. Now the teacher demonstrates how to manipulate the onset and the rime. Using visual tools such as color codes on chart paper or word ladder graphics, the teacher shows how to generate new rhymes from previous words. First list the initial consonants and demonstrate how to manipulate the onset to create a new rhyme. For example, the word bet may be changed to pet by selecting a new onset.

  In the next step, the teacher displays selected sentences from the original song or poem on sentence strips. Students show what they have learned by creating their own sentence that generates a new rhyme for the song or poem’s context. Finally, the teacher encourages the students to do rhyme generation with their names. They use their own names to generate rhymes on a word ladder as well as those of their classmates. Teachers can use literature, word families, and direct instruction as strategies that focus on word play designed to enhance onset and rime recognition (Edelen-Smith, 1998; Ehri & Roberts, 2006; Joseph, 2007). Here are some examples of those strategies.

  • Literature. Books with rhyming patterns (like many books by Dr. Seuss) are easily recalled through repeated exposure. Almost any literary source that plays with word sounds is valuable. Books that particularly develop awareness of sound patterns associated with onset and rime are those using alliteration (the repetition of an initial consonant across several words, e.g., Peter Piper picked a peck of peppers) and assonance (the repetition of vowel sounds within words, e.g., The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain).

  • Word families charts. Using words from a story or book, construct a chart that places a different beginning letter in front of a rime. For example, start with the rime -at and add f, h, b, and s to form fat, hat, bat, and sat. Have the students make up a story line whenever the word changes (e.g., The fat cat chased a hat). Encourage the students to make their own charts with different rimes and to keep them for future reference.

  • Direct instruction. Students who have difficulties distinguishing the sounds among rhyming words need more direct instruction. Model rhyming pairs (e.g., sun-fun and hand-band) using flash cards so students match what they see with what they hear. Be sure they repeat each rhyming pair several times to reinforce auditory input. Another activity includes three cards, on
ly two of which have rhyming words. Ask students to pick out and say the two that rhyme, or the one that doesn’t. Later, change the rhyming words to two rhyming pictures out of three (e.g., a nose, a rose, and a horse).

  Successful Early Intervention Programs: Some Surprises

  Numerous programs claiming to be effective intervention programs for struggling readers are available. Although controlled studies are needed to determine whether a program is truly effective, schools often purchase programs based on the strength of their marketing. Researchers supported by the U.S. Department of Education issued a report in 2009 that examined several hundred studies that looked at commercial programs and instructional approaches that focus on helping struggling readers (Slavin, Lake, Davis, & Madden, 2009). After screening these studies for controls, duration of study, and valid measures of effectiveness, 96 studies, involving a total of more than 14,000 children, were included. Table 6.1 shows those programs that were rated as having strong evidence of effectiveness based on the results of their studies. All the programs in Table 6.1 had large effect sizes—a statistical measure of the strength of an intervention.

  Table 6.1 Programs for Struggling Readers With Strong Evidence of Effectiveness

  SOURCE: Slavin et al. (2009).

  It is interesting to note that none of the dozen or so programs for struggling readers that rely essentially on computer-assisted instruction (CAI) had sufficient evidence of effectiveness to be on this list. A few CAI programs did show modest achievement gains, but they were too low compared to the programs cited in the table. Given all the focus these days on using technology in the classroom, the low effect size scores for CAI are particularly intriguing. It may be that the students involved with the computer instruction do not get enough teacher input, guidance, and supervision while they are working their way through the program. As a result, the CAI programs may not provide the intensity of instruction that we know struggling readers need to develop phonological awareness and to master the alphabetic principle.