Over the coming weeks, Think Forward Educators will be posting a series of blog articles written by educational experts providing ready-to-use tips on how to implement the Science of Reading into the classroom.

Inspired by Tom Sherrington’s Five Ways Collection, the posts have been edited and curated by Brendan Lee and Dr Nathaniel Swain.

The second blog post of the series comes from structured literacy specialist, Lindsey Bates.

Phonics is simply the correlation of sound and symbol in an alphabetic writing system.

As Steve Dykstra says “No one reads English or similar, phonetic languages, without phonics instruction. No one. No exceptions. Ever. The only difference is whether we teach it to them, or they teach it to themselves. We all do some of the latter, and most of us need some of the former, but no one learns to read without phonics instruction."

There are different schools of thought as to what phonics instruction might look like. Synthetic phonics, analytic phonics and embedded phonics all focus on teaching the correlation of sounds and symbols, but they look quite different in the classroom. The evidence is incredibly compelling that the most effective phonics instruction is both explicit and systematic. Only systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) truly meets both those criteria, and since we’re being strategic, in this article the term phonics will be used in reference to SSP. 

The English language has 26 letters (symbols), used individually or in combination, to represent 44 sounds (phonemes). These symbol-sound correspondences are referred to as Grapheme Phoneme Correspondences (GPCs). Now, English doesn’t have a transparent orthography, so sometimes the letters in our words don’t align particularly well to their pronunciation, and morphology or etymology can help us understand those irregularities better. About 95% of words can be decoded at the word level with basic phonics and morphology knowledge. Students’ automatic recognition of GPCs allow students to become proficient decoders and creates a strong foundational understanding of how words work.

Putting it into Practice

As a teacher, educational coach and parent, I see and hear a lot about what phonics instruction looks like in different classrooms. Here are five ways teachers can be strategic in their phonics instruction.

1. Use a scope and sequence from a high quality published program, or at least adapt their principles. 

2. Begin working on segmenting and blending as soon as possible, and allow for plenty of practice

3. Find ways to extend your students by adding breadth and depth

4. Recognise when adaptations and modifications are needed

5. Trust the process

(1) Use a scope and sequence from a high quality published program, or at least adapt their principles. 

No one has yet established a perfect order in which to introduce Grapheme Phoneme Correspondences (GPCs). Generally the scope and sequences from high quality published programs follow these principles:

• Introduce common GPCs early

• Introduce at least some vowel GPCs early

• Introduce similar sounds (/f/ and /v/) or symbols (d and b) separately  

• Include opportunities for teachers to check for understanding, and for students to develop mastery

• Provide opportunities for application and revision

• Instruction happening at Tier 1, 2 and 3 all follow the same principles 

If the scope and sequence you select follows these principles, then you’ll set your students up for success.  

A few other things to note when assessing a scope and sequence:

• With a good scope and sequence, and strong explicit direct instruction, there shouldn’t need to be more than about the equivalent of 20min of phonics instruction each day. A good scope and sequence should leave you with plenty of time for addressing the members of The Big Six.

• There’s little evidence to support the benefit of phonological awareness (PA) work in isolation from phonics. If you want to be strategic, weave phonological awareness into your phonics instructional time.

• A systematic synthetic phonics scope and sequence will not include explicitly teaching consonant blends in isolation (for example bl, sp, tr etc), or include an onset-rime focus. If students are developing strong segmenting and blending skills, this is unnecessary and simply creates unnecessary teaching and learning. Louisa Moats (2010) reminds us, “Blends should not be described as one sound in phonics or spelling instruction”. 

(2) Begin working on segmenting and blending as soon as possible, and allow for plenty of practise

As mentioned, a good scope and sequence introduces at least some vowel GPCs early.  This allows readers to begin applying their new knowledge of letters and sounds to decoding actual words as early as possible.

The ability to make the connections between symbols on the page and word pronunciation is the most important first step in developing fluent decoding skills. Students who understand that a word itself contains all the information they need to read it, are able to extend this to complex code and irregular code, and apply this to understanding spelling patterns connected to morphology and etymology. 

Some students will seem to move quickly and effortlessly into fluent decoding of words with familiar GPCs, while others will need to spend much more time on this before those connections become firm. This is where taking advantage of opportunities to weave PA into your instruction would be wise. When segmenting and blending doesn’t come easily to a student, it is all the more important to foster this foundational skill. 

This attention to word-level reading contributes to the development of orthographic processing: The ability to create, remember and retrieve letter sequences for words, and connect them effortlessly to sounds and meaning. The storing of these sequences, for instant word-recognition, is often referred to as orthographic mapping, a term coined by Ehri (2014) and explained beautifully by linguist Lyn Stone.  

In short, the clumsy and slow sounding out that we hear when our youngest students first begin decoding is what sets them to eventually recognise tens of thousands of words instantly. Begin segmenting and blending early and provide opportunities for practice. There are no shortcuts.

(3) Find ways to extend your students by adding breadth and depth

It can be easy to worry that if you’re not extending the students who are quick to master new GPCs and that those students will quickly get bored, or that you’re somehow doing them a disservice by holding them back. Keep in mind the following:

• Some students will learn to read despite your instruction. Once children master the concepts that underpin decoding, the self-teaching principle begins to take over. Armed with the simple code and strong decoding skills, these children will, very likely, develop some understanding of complex code before they’re formally introduced to it.  Moving things along quickly for these students will likely have no negative impact for them long term, but is absolutely detrimental to your readers who are most in need of explicit direct instruction.

• Application of simple code in connected text, and for decoding multisyllabic words, is more complex than simply memorising the necessary GPCs. Providing plenty of practice at these skills will benefit all students, providing opportunities for students to develop orthographic processing and create extensive banks of orthographically mapped sight-words.

• Extension shouldn’t just mean moving more quickly through a phonics scope and sequence.  There’s so much more to proficient reading.  As mentioned above, developing orthographically-mapped banks of sight-words through repetition and exposure to word-level reading and connected text will contribute to more fluent and accurate reading, and more fluent and accurate reading will lead to increased word exposure and provide extension in all of The Big Six.

• For faster decoders and spellers, extend them by giving them bonus words to read or spell, or ask them to add suffixes on the end, while the remainder of the class reads/spells simply the target word.

Put simply, if you want to be strategic, find ways to extend children by building breadth. Extending some children should never need to come at the cost of leaving others behind.

(4) Recognise when adaptations and modifications are needed

Ironically, your students who need SSP least will probably display the greatest gains early on, and the students who need it most may be the students who make you wonder ‘Is this working’. 

A criticism I often hear is that there are no ‘silver bullets’, and that’s absolutely true.  But there are best bets, and know that SSP is our best bet for getting out most at risk students to read.  

So what do we do when it seems like it isn’t enough? Three key things to keep in mind are:

• Working memory/Long Term memory 

• Forgetting curve 

• Cognitive load 

Some students will simply need more exposures or a greater level of repetitions for new information to move from working memory to long term memory. This is where the Response to Intervention model can be quite helpful. Start with the assumption that there will be a small number of students for whom the standard scope and sequence at the standard level of instruction isn’t enough, and plan for it in your intervention model and in your Tier 1 instruction. 

Consider what supports you can put in place to ease cognitive load. Here are just a few examples of simple modifications that can make big difference to instruction:

• Letter cards, tiles or magnets can be used for word-building by a student who struggles with letter formation. Of course, developing accurate and fluent letter formation is important, but it can be the focus elsewhere in your literacy instruction.

• Manipulatives are also helpful for working with non-verbal or low-verbal students, allowing you to check for understanding without requiring high levels of verbal engagement. 

• Anxiety is a source of cognitive load often overlooked.  Front loading a student by giving them a quick preview of the lesson can greatly increase the effectiveness of Tier 1 instruction for these students. 

(5) Trust the process (avoid putting the lipstick on the pig)

Change is difficult, and there are lots of reasons we might not be able to do away with all of our balanced literacy practices at once.  That said, it’s important to understand that practices like teaching large banks of commonly used words as whole-word sight-words, and tools like predictable texts, actively undermine the development of strong decoding skills. 

When we teach commonly used words using a flashcard, whole-word method, we can often see quick success in children memorising these words as images or logographs. Along with predictable sentence stems and supporting images, what we observe is beautiful fluent reading from very early on in their reading instruction.  Pamela Snow refers to this as pseudo-reading.  It is the illusion of reading. We can’t learn all the words we need to learn this way, and when vocabulary steers away from those commonly used words, and picture cues disappear, the illusion vanishes. 

When we teach children that they should ‘just know’ a word by looking at it, or that they may be able to guess or predict a word, we actively undermine the attention to symbol and sequence that underpins effective word mapping, automatic word recognition, and fluent and effortless reading.  

References

1.  Comment from Steve Dykstra, PhD, Psychologist, on the SpellTalk listserve. 

2.  https://www.spelfabet.com.au/2017/08/balanced-literacy-phonics-lipstick-is-not-enough/

3.  http://pamelasnow.blogspot.com/2018/11/who-sank-reading-boat-sad-tale-of.html

About Lindsey Bates

Lindsey Bates is a teacher, Learning Specialist, Educational Coach and Dyslexia Intervention Specialist from Melbourne, Australia. She's been a classroom teacher since 2007, working in government schools across Melbourne Vic, and in Ontario Canada. She became an Associate Member of the Australia Dyslexia Association in 2020 and an Accredited Coach with Growth Coaching International in 2021. Lindsey has also been a mentor as a part of the Think Forward Educators Mentor Program.

She works with schools to build stronger, more inclusive, literacy instruction through her consultancy business, Sound Foundations Education, and is passionate about contributing to a system-wide shift to evidence based classroom practices.