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The affect of learning Phonics on young readers

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The affect of learning Phonics on young readers

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Research

How Phonics is Taught Can Affect How Well a Child Learns To Read

New readers who focus on sounding out letters rather than learning whole words tap into that part of the human brain best wired for developing reading skills. The phonics approach to teaching reading has long held sway in early learning; now educational neuroscience can prove that approach. That's the overall finding from research recently published by Stanford University, the Child Study Center at New York University's Langone Medical Center and the Department of Communication Sciences & Disorders at the University of Texas at Austin.

Working with adults, Stanford's Bruce McCandliss, New York U's Yuliya Yoncheva and U Texas' Jessica Wise found that brain circuitry changes when students memorize entire words or link a letter to a specific sound.

For the experimentation, 16 "literate adults" were asked to read two made-up scripts of glyph words containing embedded letters. For one script, learners were asked to link each embedded letter to a sound within the word (known as a "grapheme-phoneme mapping" in learning parlance). For another script entire words had to be memorized. After the training, brainwaves were monitored during a reading test with a technique that could record brain responses to practice words and newly learned words. That brain activity was influenced by how the words were learned.

Response to activity done through sounding out letters called on left-brain activity, where visual and language regions reside and that predominate among people who are skilled at reading. The activity of memorizing words in their entirety tended to show up in the right hemisphere of the brain.

As people in the study tried out new words they'd never practiced before using the grapheme-phoneme focus, they could read new words, and within seconds, the process of figuring out the new words triggered activity in their brains' left hemispheres.

"Ideally, that is the brain circuitry we are hoping to activate in beginner readers," McCandliss said in a prepared statement. "This research is exciting because it takes cognitive neuroscience and connects it to questions that have deep meaning and history in educational research."

While many teachers are now using phonics to teach reading, some may be doing it better than others, said McCandliss.

"If children are struggling, even if they're receiving phonics instruction, perhaps it's because of the way they are being asked to focus their attention on the sounds within spoken words and links between those sounds and the letters within visual words," he explained. As he noted, parts of words and whole words are present during exposure to print. "We can direct attention to a larger grain size or a smaller grain size, and it can have a big impact on how well you learn."

Selective attention can help support later word recognition, the paper reported. "This study thus provides a model example of how different instructional approaches to the same material may impact changes in brain circuitry."

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal and Campus Technology. She can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @schaffhauser.

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department of communication sciences and disorders

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How Phonics is Taught Can Affect How Well a Child Learns To Read -- THE Journal

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Research New readers who focus on sounding out letters rather than learning whole words tap into that part of the human brain best wired for developing reading skills. The phonics approach to teaching reading has long held sway in early learning; now educational neuroscience can prove that approach.

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An Introduction to Phonics and learning to read

Throughout this article, I aim to provide you with a clear understanding of teaching phonics effectively in the classroom and offer a variety of strategies and proven ideas to teach phonics.

WHAT IS PHONICS? A DEFINITION FOR TEACHERS AND PARENTS.

Phonics can be defined as a body of knowledge and skills regarding how the alphabet works.

In the context of this article, phonics refers to the method of teaching a student to read by developing their phonemic awareness and an understanding of the links between these sounds and how we use the letters of the alphabet to represent them.

This understanding is essential not only to read well but to bridge the gap between reading and writing.

With a good foundation of phonics knowledge, students can quickly become confident readers and independent solid writers.

PHONEMIC AWARENESS IMPROVES READING FLUENCY

When students develop phonemic awareness, it dramatically enhances their reading fluency which is a reading "superpower", allowing students to read with speed, accuracy and expression. Reading fluency dramatically enhances students' ability to read with intonation and energy that translates into expressive writing skills.

A COMPLETE DIGITAL READING UNIT FOR STUDENTS

How To Teach Reading Using Phonics

The use of phonics, or synthetic phonics as this method is technically known, is an effective and efficient means of teaching young students how to read. For this reason, phonics is the primary methodology for teaching reading in the school systems of many English-speaking countries.

In English, there are around 44 sounds or phonemes. Given that there are only 26 letters used in the language and that many sounds have more than one possible spelling, it is helpful that students learn the relationships between the letters and sounds in a straightforward and explicit manner.

To achieve this, phonics centers on the relationship between sounds and how they can be spelled.

It focuses on the letter and sound correspondences to enable students to break written words down into their component sounds before later recombining them to read the whole word. This process is known as segmenting and blending.

SEGMENTING AND BLENDING

Rather than allowing students to struggle to recognize complete words, as in the whole word method, or to look for contextual clues to figure out what is being said in a text, phonics teaches students to look at the letters of a word and segment it into its component sounds, before blending these sounds back together to read the entire word.

For example, when faced with the word cat, a student might run their finger under the first letter and make the initial /k/ sound, then /a/, and, finally, /t/.

Once they have successfully segmented these individual sounds, they then blend them together to say the word /kat/.

With practice, the speed with which students can look at a word, segment the sounds, and then blend these sounds together to read the word rapidly increases. This makes learning to read through the phonics method the most efficient way for most children to learn not just to read but to write too.

DECODING AND ENCODING: THE BRIDGE BETWEEN READING AND WRITING

Initially, phonics reaps rich rewards for students in terms of the passive skill of reading. This is also known as decoding.

Later, the student's knowledge of phonics can help them develop the active skill of writing or encoding.

For this reason, teachers will often weave emergent writing skills, such as letter formation, into their phonics lessons to take advantage of the opportunity to bridge this gap between reading and writing skills.

WHAT ABOUT SIGHT WORDS?

As effective as synthetic phonics are in teaching students to read, they won't be enough on their own to unravel all the opaque mysteries of English orthography.

English is something of a mongrel language. Over the centuries, it has been influenced by the German, Latin, French, Greek, and Celtic languages, among others.

This fact has led to many inconsistencies in spelling surviving in the modern language. Sometimes phonics won't be enough to decode these words. That's why students need to learn to read some words by sight alone.

Sight words, or high-frequency words as they are also known, are those extremely common words used time and again in most texts. Many of them are phonetically irregular and follow no conventional spelling rules. For children's reading books, sight words can account for up to 75% of the words in the text.

Therefore, it's best to combine the study of phonics with the learning of these sight words for maximum effectiveness. This is something to consider when engaged in your long-term planning.

The most effective strategy for learning these sight words is for discussion another day; for the remainder of this article, we will focus exclusively on the teaching of phonics.

THE STAGES OF PHONICS TEACHING

Before beginning to teach phonics, it is helpful to have a broad overview of the various stages that comprise a comprehensive synthetic phonics program. The following outline can serve as a practical general guide.

1. THE PRE-PHONICS STAGE

Before beginning to learn phonics in earnest (e.g. sound/letter correspondences), certain prerequisite skills need to be developed, including:

LISTENING SKILLS:

Children must be able to listen carefully to the sounds of speech. They must learn to filter speech sounds from other unrelated environmental sounds. This is usually best achieved by playing various listening games. When children have developed good aural comprehension, the game Simon Says is a fun way to further develop listening skills.

SOUND REPRODUCTION SKILLS:

Once the children have learned to discriminate between various sounds, they should learn to reproduce these themselves. This is usually achieved by modelling the sounds carefully for the children and encouraging them to copy these with particular attention paid to the shape of the mouth when making each sound. The popular fun game Telephone is excellent for this.

SEQUENCING SKILLS:

It is essential for children learning to read to be able to sequence not only the events of a story but the individual sounds of the words they hear. They must be able to recognize which sound comes before or after another. They should also be familiar with sequencing language such as first, second, before, after, then etc.

We have a complete guide to sequencing for teachers and students here.

2. SOUNDS AND ACTIONS

With our younger kids, it can be challenging to give them an anchor to 'hold on to the sounds of language.

To help build such an anchor to these sounds, which will later help link sounds to written letters, actions are often connected to each sound to aid in memorizing them. This is especially useful in the early stages as it works well for the most basic of sounds.

For example, when making the /m/ sound, children could be taught to rub their tummies as if they have eaten something delicious while saying " mmmmm ".

Or, they could open their mouths wide as if they were eating an apple while saying the /a/ sound.

It is easy to devise customized actions to go along with the various sounds of English and then teach these to your class. Ensure you consistently use the same actions every time for a specific sound to avoid confusion.

Later, when students come to segment words into their individual sounds, they can use these actions to help recall them.

3. THE LETTER AND SOUNDS CORRESPONDENCES

Explicitly teaching the letter and sound correspondences lie at the heart of good phonics teaching.

It is essential to understand a little of the theory of synthetic phonics to be effective here. Here are a few important points to consider:

● Letter Names vs. Letter Sounds

It is crucial that children understand the difference between the names of the letters of the English alphabet and the sounds, as these are two very different things. For example, the letter c is called / see/ but the letter itself usually denotes either a /k/ or /s/ sound. It may seem obvious, but many teachers not trained in the teaching of phonics overlook this distinction and unwittingly make learning to read much more difficult for their students as a result.

● Letters Don't Make The Sounds

As the limited letters used in English are needed to represent many different sounds, it's important to point out to students that letters don't make the sounds; they are simply an option for showing the sound. Often there will be more than one way to show the same sound; for example, the sound /s/ can be encoded in several different ways, including as s, c, and ps. When you are asking your students to write something, you can make the sound and ask them what letter they could use to show this sound. This type of phrasing reinforces the correct relationship between the letters and sounds.

● Avoid The Lazy Vowels

It is also important to remember that when teaching the letters and sounds to avoid making the lazy vowel or schwa sound at the end of a sound. For example, when pronouncing the /k/ sound, make it crisp and short, rather than adding in an extra -uh sound at the end. This will make it much easier for the students to blend sounds together later.

HOW TO PLAN A PHONICS LESSON FOR YOUR CLASS

The detail and delivery of your phonics lessons will depend greatly on the specific situation of your students. However, some general points will be helpful to consider when planning a phonics lesson for your class.

● Keep Phonics Lessons Short and Sweet

To avoid getting bogged down and boring your kids, keep phonics lessons short. In and around 10 to 15 minutes is ideal and no more than 20 minutes. Remember, we want our kids to be lifelong readers, and that means they need to enjoy it!

● Be Consistent

There is a lot of ground to cover here, and consistency is key. If your students are learning to read, they'll need to practice and study their phonics every day - preferably at the same time each day too.

● Keep on Moving

While a lot of reinforcement will be required over the course of the year, research has shown that keeping a brisk pace through a phonics program achieves the best results. Don't get bogged down waiting for everyone to get everything before moving on. You will be revisiting the material.

● Keep Things Fun!

Learning to read should be a positive experience, particularly as learning to read means acquiring one of the most empowering skills a child will ever have. To keep things fun, be sure to incorporate lots of enjoyable activities and games into your phonics lessons.

TEACHING ACTIVITIES FOR ANY TEXT - GREAT FOR GUIDED READING

Phonics Games and Activities
I Spy
This perennial classic is a fun way to get some phonics practice in. You can adapt it to say, "I spy with my little eye something beginning with..." and say a sound rather than a letter. If you wish to work on letter recognition rather than sound, simply hold up the letter itself quietly.
Sorting Activities
Sorting activities are a great way for students to practice their phonics knowledge and can take on an almost infinite number of variations. For example, younger kids may enjoy sorting objects into two hula hoops on the floor, which are labelled with their initial consonant sounds, while older kids might work on consonant blends.
Bingo
Bingo is another very versatile game that can be used to practice sound and letter recognition. Simply decide what you want to work on and place those into suitably sized grids (9×9 works well). These could be initial consonants, vowel digraphs, or pictures of nouns. If you set up some blank grids on laminated sheets, you can save yourself a lot of prep time too. Simply write a broad selection of sounds you are working on onto the whiteboard. Students can select 9 of them to fill in their laminated grid. Now each student will have their own unique bingo card!
Partner Reading
Partner reading is a great way to practice listening skills, as well as reading. Organize students into pairs and provide them each with a copy of the same text. One partner reads the text while the other follows closely with their own copy. The listening partner helps the reader decode difficult words when they have trouble. After a time, partners switch roles. This usually works best when partners are of a similar ability. You can further differentiate here by choosing different texts to suit the abilities of each pair.
Shared Writing
Shared writing is an effective means of introducing independent writing activities. For beginning students, it may take the form of simply spelling a basic CVC word together. For example, to work on the spelling of the word cat, you could draw three cradles on the whiteboard and say each sound; in turn, challenge the students to come up and write the corresponding letter in the cradle until they have written the word - -.

As we can see, the teaching of phonics is a highly efficient and effective means of teaching our children to read and, ultimately, write. It works on training students to be able to hear the various sounds of English, identify these sounds, and link these sounds to the symbols we call letters.

While there are other methods of learning to read employed with emergent readers in the classroom, in two decades of teaching, I've never seen another methodology come anywhere close to phonics for overall effectiveness.

And, best of all, phonics can be a lot of fun to learn and teach too!

OTHER GREAT ARTICLES RELATED TO PHONICS

The content for this page has been written by Shane Mac Donnchaidh. A former principal of an international school and English university lecturer with 15 years of teaching and administration experience. Shane's latest Book, The Complete Guide to Nonfiction Writing, can be found here. Editing and support for this article have been provided by the literacyideas team.

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Teaching Phonics: A Complete Guide for Parents and Teachers

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A guide to teaching phonics to students including phonemic awareness, reading fluency, phonics sounds for reading and, phonics games and activities. Teach kids to read through a logical research based method.

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Phonics First® Orton-Gillingham in Action

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How Do I Teach Phonics? Games and Activities to Review Letter-Sounds

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Digraphs Matching | Game | Education.com

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Do some quick digraphs review with this short-and-sweet matching game.

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Grade 1 - Reading, Phonics, Spelling game: Find a word to fit the topic and special sound.

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Ari Cotton, a first grader, reading a book at Garrison Elementary School in Washington, D.C., one of only two jurisdictions in the country that saw rising scores on national reading tests last year. Credit... Lexey Swall for The New York Times

As test scores lag, there's a growing debate between proponents of the "science of reading," which emphasizes phonics, and traditional educators who prefer to instill a love of literature.

Ari Cotton, a first grader, reading a book at Garrison Elementary School in Washington, D.C., one of only two jurisdictions in the country that saw rising scores on national reading tests last year. Credit... Lexey Swall for The New York Times

WASHINGTON - "Bit!" Ayana Smith called out as she paced the alphabet rug in front of her kindergarten students at Garrison Elementary School.

"Buh! Ih! Tuh!" the class responded in unison, making karate chop motions as they enunciated the sound of each letter. In a 10-minute lesson, the students chopped up and correctly spelled a string of words:

Top. "Tuh! Ah! Puh!"

Wig. "Wuh! Ih! Guh!"

Ship. "Shuh! Ih! Puh!"

Ms. Smith's sounding-out exercises might seem like a common-sense way to teach reading. But for decades, many teachers have embraced a different approach, convinced that exposing students to the likes of Dr. Seuss and Maya Angelou is more important than drilling them on phonics.

Lagging student performance and newly relevant research, though, have prompted some educators to reconsider the ABCs of reading instruction. Their effort gained new urgency after national test scores last year showed that only a third of American students were proficient in reading, with widening gaps between good readers and bad ones.

Now members of this vocal minority, proponents of what they call the "science of reading," congregate on social media and swap lesson plans intended to avoid creating "curriculum casualties" - students who have not been effectively taught to read and who will continue to struggle into adulthood, unable to comprehend medical forms, news stories or job listings.

The bible for these educators is a body of research produced by linguists, psychologists and cognitive scientists. Their findings have pushed some states and school districts to make big changes in how teachers are trained and students are taught.

The "science of reading" stands in contrast to the "balanced literacy" theory that many teachers are exposed to in schools of education. That theory holds that students can learn to read through exposure to a wide range of books that appeal to them, without too much emphasis on technically complex texts or sounding out words.

Eye-tracking studies and brain scans now show that the opposite is true, according to many scientists. Learning to read, they say, is the work of deliberately practicing how to quickly connect the letters on the page to the sounds we hear each day.

The evidence "is about as close to conclusive as research on complex human behavior can get," writes Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist and reading expert at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Phonics has gone in and out of style for decades, and the current conflict over how to teach reading is only the latest in a tug-of-war that dates to the 19th century. A major push for phonics instruction under President George W. Bush, through a federal program called Reading First, did not produce widespread achievement gains, raising questions about whether the current efforts can succeed.

Phonics boosters say they now know more about what works, and that phonics alone isn't the answer. Alongside bigger doses of sounding out, they want struggling students to grapple with more advanced books, so they won't get stuck in a cycle of low expectations and boredom. Some schools are devoting more time to social studies and science, subjects that help build vocabulary and knowledge in ways that can make students stronger readers.

States have passed laws requiring that schools use phonics-centric curriculums and screen students more aggressively for reading problems - or even hold back those who struggle most. In January, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos castigated colleges of education for teaching what she described as "junk science" about reading.

But the education establishment is pushing back, worried that too many lessons like Ms. Smith's could be stultifying - a poor substitute for a teacher reading aloud from a book of Shel Silverstein poems, or guiding children through lushly illustrated stories by Ezra Jack Keats. They blame low student performance on such factors as inexperienced teachers, school funding inequities and homes that lack books or time for parents to read to their children.

The guardians of balanced literacy acknowledge that phonics has a place. But they trust their own classroom experience over brain scans or laboratory experiments, and say they have seen many children overcome reading problems without sound-it-out drills. They value children picking books that interest them and worry that pushing students into harder texts could turn them off reading entirely.

Karen K. Wixson, an author of a recent report warning that too much phonics can harm children, called the new push "incredibly, scarily naïve."

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Madisyn Hall-Jones, 5, working on a reading lesson at Garrison Elementary School. Credit... Lexey Swall for The New York Times

In Ms. Smith's classroom in Washington, Madisyn Hall-Jones, 5, demonstrated her progress by reading aloud a short story about picking apples that she had written and illustrated herself.

"It's not rote," the school's principal, Brigham Kiplinger, said of the phonics-driven curriculum. "It's joyful."

Washington is one of only two jurisdictions, along with Mississippi, to increase average reading scores on National Assessment of Educational Progress tests between 2017 and 2019. Both did so despite high-poverty student populations, and both are requiring more phonics.

"For us, this is social justice work," Mr. Kiplinger said. The majority of students at Garrison Elementary come from low-income families. If parents express concerns about the new curriculum, he invites them to visit a classroom like Ms. Smith's and see the difference.

Parents in suburban St. Louis are looking for similar results. More than a third of kindergarten to third-grade students in the highly regarded Lindbergh school district tested as "at risk" for dyslexia last spring, after Missouri instituted mandatory screening. Angry district residents sent an open letter to the school board in November, demanding that the district embrace the science of reading.

The district said it had added a new phonics sequence in the early elementary grades and retrained some teachers. But it stands by its broader balanced literacy approach, which it said gives teachers the autonomy to tailor instruction to students at all levels.

That's not enough for parents like Diane Dragan. An attorney who has three children with dyslexia, Ms. Dragan noted that well-off parents in her area regularly pay thousands of dollars to have their children taught intensive phonics at private tutoring centers.

"The irony to me is that the public-school teacher who teaches balanced literacy during the day moonlights to do science-based tutoring for kids who fail to learn to read," Ms. Dragan said.

In Mississippi, all prospective elementary schoolteachers are now required to pass a test in the foundations of reading, including phonics. The state has also dispatched literacy coaches to struggling schools.

More controversially, it passed a law in 2013 requiring third graders to be held back if they score poorly on an end-of-year reading exam; last year, about 10 percent of them were retained, for reading difficulties or other reasons.

Some reading experts have called Mississippi's recent gains into question, arguing that by retaining so many of the lowest-scoring third graders, the state had stigmatized students and manufactured a higher-performing pool of test takers. But Shannon D. Whitehead, the principal of McNeal Elementary School in Canton, Miss., supported the state's decision to get tough.

Her school put in place a phonics sequence that continues through fifth grade, and started assigning more challenging literature, including Langston Hughes poems. It hosts early-morning, after-school and Saturday tutoring sessions for students at risk of failing state tests. Scores have improved modestly.

As painful as it can be to tell a child they have to repeat a year, Dr. Whitehead said, "in order for us to ensure that our students are able to compete globally, we have to have an accountability system."

One of the most popular reading curriculums in the country - used in about 20 percent of schools, including the Lindbergh district near St. Louis - was developed by Lucy Calkins, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is widely admired for her emphasis on helping students develop a love of reading and writing.

But her curriculum, which follows the balanced literacy model, has come under increasing fire from critics who say it devotes too little time to phonics practice and gives teachers and students too much choice over what books to read, allowing them to avoid more challenging texts. Earlier this month, the public schools in Oakland, Calif., told staff members that the district would move away from Professor Calkins's materials after the city's N.A.A.C.P. chapter and parent activists demanded the use of "research-proven" strategies.

In an interview, Professor Calkins decried what she called a feeling of "animosity and mistrust" between the camps in the reading wars. She acknowledged that many teachers needed more training on how to teach phonics effectively, and said she was working with schools in her network to provide that.

But she pushed back against a key argument of many phonics activists - that there is no downside to all of the children in a classroom getting the type of repetitive practice in letter-sound relationships that struggling readers need.

"There's not a chance we're going to want to hold an entire class to the pace of the 5 percent that have dyslexia," she said. "Other children need opportunities for comprehension, for writing instruction and for analytic thinking."

Wiley Blevins, a phonics expert who considers himself to be in the center of the reading wars, acknowledged that phonics instruction is often implemented badly. Texts created to help students practice sound-letter combinations can be boring and even nonsensical, he said.

Ideally, students in early elementary school would spend about half of their reading and writing time on phonics, he said, using quality materials. If this happened consistently, by third grade, most students would not need explicit phonics anymore.

Even some leading researchers in the science of reading, including Professor Seidenberg, acknowledge that studies do not yet point toward specific curriculum materials that will be most effective at teaching phonics.

"The science that you need to know it is good," he said. "The science on how to teach it effectively is not."

Ms. Smith, the Washington kindergarten teacher, has embraced her school's new focus on phonics, which she said had engaged both low-achieving and high-achieving students.

She reads to her class each day from beloved children's literature, like the "Elephant and Piggie" series by Mo Willems. But it is the simple phonics texts, she said, that have done the most to build the students' confidence, because over time, they are able to accurately read them aloud to their classmates.

"They will get to the end of the sentence and see a period," she said, "and their face will light up."

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An Old and Contested Solution to Boost Reading Scores: Phonics

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As test scores lag, there's a growing debate between proponents of the "science of reading," which emphasizes phonics, and traditional educators who prefer to instill a love of literature. Ari Cotton, a first grader, reading a book at Garrison Elementary School in Washington, D.C., one of only two jurisdictions in the country that saw rising scores on national reading tests last year.

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I've worked with hundreds of struggling readers ages 5 to 81. Almost all students I meet who have decoding weaknesses share a common behavior. Can you guess what it is? They look up from the page before they finish reading a word or sentence.

Many just glance at the word and guess what it is as they look at me for approval. Others may look at the word more carefully, yet they still look at me for approval after they say what they think the word is. A few look at the word before staring at the ceiling or somewhere in space while they try to figure out what the word is. Every elementary school teacher and every reading interventionist I meet recognizes these behaviors and can associate them with specific students.

Teachers often ask how to help their struggling readers. My first response is, "Make sure all students keep their eyes on the words the entire time they read." I also suggest that teachers avoid saying things like "good job" or "nice work" when the student looks up for approval. The only time a student should look up from the page when reading is to say, "I need help with that word." In that case, the teacher either helps the student sound out the word or gives the word if it is too difficult for the student to decode.

Many teachers tell us they need to give students, especially struggling readers, positive feedback for the student's self-esteem and confidence. At first blush that seems reasonable because beginning and struggling readers want to know if they read correctly, and teachers want students to feel good about reading. In reality, teachers are training students to rely on them for affirmation rather than helping students develop confidence in their emerging skills. Instead of saying "good job" or "nice work" when a student looks up, the teacher can reinforce the importance of looking at the words by saying, "Remember to keep your eyes on the words when you read. I'll let you know when I need to help you."

Recently I was in a school to work with students, and the reading coach was with me all day. I started with four students in a low second-grade reading group who were working on phonics at the silent "e" level. These students had scored between 28 and 42 words-correct-per-minute on mid-year DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency (benchmark is 68). Their accuracy ranged from 76 to 91 percent. They were reading decodable text focusing on words with silent "e." All four students had the habit of looking up for approval at the end of each sentence. And, not surprisingly, all four often misread the final words in the sentence. I had them practice keeping their eyes on the words for all four or five sentences that were on the page. Their habit of looking up was not easy to change. By the end of 25 minutes, albeit with conscious effort on the students' part, all four were keeping their heads down and their eyes on the words while they read. Just this small change in behavior noticeably increased their accuracy.

The reading coach and I spent the afternoon working one-on-one with four third-grade and fourth-grade students who had the lowest reading scores in their grade. They were all receiving decoding intervention. We assessed the students' decoding skills by having them read words in isolation. None of the students did more than glance at words and look up before saying the word, and none read more than 18 of 30 decodable and high-frequency words accurately. It was apparent that these students weren't looking at the words long enough to apply any decoding strategies. We worked with each student for about 20 minutes, reviewing the short vowel sounds and encouraging them to keep their eyes on the words. After this short time, they were all able to read with greater accuracy and more confidence. None had fully overcome their habit of taking their eyes off the words before finishing reading, but all were catching themselves every time they did look up.

Early in the day, the reading coach remarked that she was surprised at my "fixation" on teaching students to look at the words until they finished reading. At the end of the day, she told me she fully understood why I was such a zealot about insisting students keep their eyes on the page. Yes, I am fixated on having students look at the words when they read because we can read only when we look at the words.

I implore all kindergarten, first-grade, and second-grade teachers - as well as reading interventionists - to teach students to keep their eyes on the words so that they do not have to later struggle with breaking a habit that hampers effective, efficient reading. After all, the first step good readers take is to look at the words they are reading. In my experience, many struggling readers have difficulties partly because they never mastered this first step.

About the author

Linda Farrell is a founding partner at Readsters, an Alexandria, VA-based firm that helps schools implement research-based reading instruction. She is committed to effective early reading instruction in, to helping struggling readers become strong readers, and to ensuring that strong readers achieve their full potential. Linda works in schools throughout the U.S. training and coaching teachers and modeling effective reading instruction. She also has designed curricula in Niger and Senegal for children to learn to read in their local languages. Linda is a former English teacher. She was a National LETRS trainer for seven years. She has co-authored assessments and curricula for teaching reading, as well as several other published works. Linda can be reached at linda@readsters.com.

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First Rule of Reading: Keep Your Eyes on the Words

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All kindergarten, first-grade, and second-grade teachers - as well as reading interventionists - should teach students to keep their eyes on the words on the page so that they do not have to later struggle with breaking a habit that hampers effective, efficient reading.

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How to teach reading with phonics - 1/12 - The Alphabet & Letter Sounds - Learn English Phonics!

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Preview: Phonics for the Struggling Readers in Your Classroom

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This is a preview version of the 2015 Reading Matters to Maine’s Sixth Annual Conversation about Reading, Phonics for the Struggling Readers in Your Classroom.
 
For information about viewing the full-length video of this presentation, please visit:  The University of Southern Maine’s SMART Learning Lab   http://smartlearninglab.org/webinars/
 
If you wish to earn contact hours by completing any of the full-length webinars, first contact your local or district school personnel responsible for professional development as to its policies and procedures for webinar credit.

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Understanding phonics: Why is teaching this way effective?