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Episode 6: Deconstructing the Reading Rope: Background knowledge with Susan Neuman

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High-quality K–12 Curriculum and Assessments

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Meet our guest(s):

Tanya S. Wright, Ph.D.

Tanya S. Wright is an associate professor of language and literacy in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University. A former kindergarten teacher, Wright's research and teaching have focused on early childhood and elementary language and literacy curriculum and instruction. The author of several books for teachers and parents, Wright's work has been published in journals such as American Educator, The Elementary School Journal, The Reading Teacher, and more.

Wright was the winner of the International Literacy Association Outstanding Dissertation Award in 2012 and the Jerry Johns Outstanding Teacher Educator in Reading Award in 2022. Teacher and lead author of SOLID Start Curriculum, and leads the literacy integration team/serves as co-lead of the K-2 instructional design team for the OpenSciEd Elementary curriculum development project.

Meet our host, Susan Lambert

Susan Lambert is the Chief Academic Officer of Elementary Humanities at Amplify, and the host of Science of Reading: The Podcast. Her career has been focused on creating high-quality learning environments using evidence-based practices. Lambert is a mom of four, a grandma of four, a world traveler, and a collector of stories.

As the host of Science of Reading: The Podcast, Lambert explores the increasing body of scientific research around how reading is best taught. As a former classroom teacher, administrator, and curriculum developer, Lambert is dedicated to turning theory into best practices that educators can put right to use in the classroom, and to showcasing national models of reading instruction excellence.

Transcripts and additional resources

"We need kids to be able to sound out the words, but we also need them to know what they mean. Otherwise, the text won't make sense. So we really need to be working on both of these at the same time." -Tanya S. Wright

"Really value what kids bring to the classroom, even if it's not perfect yet, or if it's not exactly what adults would say." -Tanya S. Wright

"It's really important that we're thinking about purposeful, planned, and intentional vocabulary supports to make sure that everybody is included in the learning and can participate in the classroom." -Tanya S. Wright

"Realistically, kids love to learn big words. They make use of them. They don't really differentiate it. So that's an adult imposition, right? Which ones are the big ones or which ones are the hard ones? If we use them with kids, they will use them too. And enjoy it." -Tanya S. Wright

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Episode 7: Vocabulary is unconstrained, with Tanya S. Wright

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Listen as Tanya S. Wright discusses her research teaching vocabulary to young children and the strategies for early literacy development.

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Make a scrambled sentence activity for your online classroom.

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Sentence Scramble generator

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Interactive games, puzzles, activities and exercises aimed at learning and teaching English and other subjects online.

Create your Own Activities

Put together your own shareable online activities.

Use the scrambled sentence maker to make fun jumbled word activities.

Create a card set. Great for refreshing vocabulary, grammar prompts and conversation questions.

Make a matching activity. Match the item from the left column with the correct item from the right column.

Create test questions with multiple options.

Create gapfill or cloze questions exercises.

Create a shared online board game for up to 8 players.

Create a hidden picture quiz. Reveal the picture one numbered square at a time.

Create a scatter sheet word guessing game. Great for reviewing vocabulary and encouraging fluency.

Conversation Questions

A huge deck of random questions which can also be selected by topic with sets of themed conversation starters. You can also find a random topic generator here which works as a more free-form conversation starter.

Other Activities

Displays 8 random pictures to prompt creative story telling and writing.

Guess the sound quizzes. Great for picking up everyday vocabulary.

A variety of photosets designed to elicit suitable grammar and vocabulary.

A predict what happens next quiz. Good for practising future tenses.

Make predictions about the future with this fun 'rune' generator.

Players have to describe a photograph or use their creativity to describe an imaginary picture.

Puts together a random verb and preposition to test knowledge of phrasal verbs.

Test your ability to recognise and produce different English language phonemes.

Find suitably sized articles for creating your lesson.

Make the longest word you can from the randomly chosen letters.

Test your vocabulary with these picture quizzes.

Other Resources

Lots of online-teaching ideas from elsewhere on the web.

ESLgames.com

If you are classroom-based teacher, our partner site ESLgames.com has lots of activities for use in a more traditional setting. Among the many resources there, you will find plenty of teaching ideas, grammar games, speaking activities and printable worksheets.

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Activities for Teaching and Learning Online

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Interactive games, activities, puzzles and exercises for home schooling, learning and teaching online.

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MEETING THE NEEDS OF ENGLISH LEARNERS  WITH AND WITHOUT DISABILITIES 

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MEETING THE NEEDS OF ENGLISH LEARNERS  WITH AND WITHOUT DISABILITIES 

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Promoting the Educational Success of Children and Youth Learning English

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Promoting the Educational Success of Children and Youth Learning English

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Promoting the Educational Success of Children and Youth Learning English

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Teaching Academic Content and Literacy to English Learners

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Teaching Academic Content and Literacy to English Learners

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How To Set Up a Sound Wall in Your Classroom

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A step-by-step guide and plenty of tips.

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5 Documentaries Every Educator Should Watch

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5 Documentaries Every Educator Should Watch

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Lexia Learning Systems https://www.lexialearning.com/Assets/img/logo.svg 1984 978-405-6232 info@lexialearning.com 300 Baker Avenue, Suite 320 Concord MA 01742 USA

4/3/2024

Documentary film offers an avenue to raise public awareness about critical issues in an easy-to-digest and shareable way. Its storytelling properties focus the audience's attention on important issues and make a real impact through memorability and relatability.

Emmy award-winning filmmaker Harvey Hubbell V recently joined host Dr. Liz Brooke on the All For Literacy™ podcast for a firsthand look into how documentaries affect the educational system, specifically the science of reading movement. "This has been a long, crazy journey of me trying to figure out what the heck is going on with education," Hubbell says about his path from struggling student to education advocate.

Here are five impactful documentaries about the learning landscape every educator should watch.

5 Documentaries Working to Create Change in Education

"Hopeville: How to Win the Reading Wars" Hubbell's most recent release, "Hopeville: How to Win the Reading Wars," addresses the controversy surrounding the science of reading movement. Hubbell and his team talked to scientists, educators, and parents to show that literacy in the United States can be drastically changed for the better when the right teaching methods are employed.

"Our hope for 'Hopeville' is that...it brings policy-makers together, it brings elected officials, it brings school superintendents, boards of education, and everybody into the same room and says 'Hey, we have to do something about this,'" Hubbell explains in the All For Literacy episode.

"The Right to Read" "The Right to Read" shares the stories of people fighting to provide the children in this country with the "most foundational indicator of lifelong success: The ability to read." The film heavily features the voice and experiences of Kareem Weaver, an Oakland NAACP activist and founder of FULCRUM-Oakland, who joined All For Literacy last year to discuss literacy as a human right. Statistics like 37% of fourth grade students in the U.S. reading below a basic level and 54% of adult Americans reading below a sixth grade level drive the film's exploration of the connection between literacy and long-term success.

"The Truth About Reading" From Emmy award-winning director Nick Nanton and literacy advocate John Corcoran, "The Truth About Reading" aims to fuel the science of reading movement and promote high-level literacy for all. The film shares the stories and research-backed conclusions of parents, individuals who learned to read much later in life, and literacy experts-including Emily Hanford, an All For Literacy Season 1 guest.

"Most Likely to Succeed" While not specifically centered around literacy, "Most Likely to Succeed" is a highly praised documentary about education and curriculum reform in the 21st century. The documentary follows students at High Tech High, a public charter school in San Diego, California, as they navigate the school's project- and presentation-based curriculum. Viewers will get an insightful look into the potential shortcomings of today's education system and what can be done to ensure higher levels of student success.

"Dislecksia: The Movie"Another of Hubbell's films, "Dislecksia: The Movie" helps viewers understand the condition itself, the problems that arise for the people and families affected, and the programs and methods needed to help. Hubbell was inspired to make this film by his struggles in the classroom-"It's kind of strange that I make educational films now," he says, "but I kind of understand what it's like to be those kids."

The film can help educate the wider public about dyslexia and help people understand it's not a sign of a lack of intelligence but of a need to learn differently. Hubbell helpfully points out, "Dyslexia doesn't discriminate and it doesn't care if you're a male or a female, what your religion is, what your race is," making this documentary one for every educator to watch.

The Power of Film to Educate and Create Change

Documentary films are uniquely positioned to create change in the education system. The storytelling abilities of film give audience members a human experience to relate to, potentially leading to higher levels of relatability and impact than other mediums.

Gain an in-depth understanding of how documentaries fuel the greater literacy conversation, how film tells stories in digestible and impactful ways, and where the next need for advocacy is by listening to Episode 6 of All For Literacy, Season 2 with documentary filmmaker Harvey Hubbell V.

A Cambium Learning® Group Brand

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5 Documentaries Every Educator Should Watch | Lexia

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Documentary films are primed to make a real impact on the educational landscape. Here are five documentaries that every educator should watch.

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Sound Cards - IMSE-Recipe th (voiced) and w - Sound cards - S and W Blends Story - Red Word Activities - nk Sentences - Beginning Blends

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Let's talk sound walls - A conversation with Gina from Get Literacy

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Let's talk sound walls - A conversation with Gina from Get Literacy

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Hello, Anna Geiger here from The Measured Mom, back with another episode in our Old and New summer series.

If you checked out last week's episode, you got to hear a replay of my conversation with Gina from Get Lit. She shared her very interesting story of coming out of balanced literacy because she discovered that her daughter had dyslexia. It's a story with a wonderful happy ending, and now she continues to teach her students, her first-graders, as well as help many people on her Instagram account.

Today we're going to continue the conversation from last year and we're going to talk all about sound walls, what they look like, how to use them, and how they can help your students.

Anna: Welcome back, Gina!

Gina: Thanks for having me again. I'm so excited to be here!

Anna: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself for the people who maybe didn't catch last week's review episode?

Gina: Sure. I am a first grade teacher in a public school and I also tutor. I am an Orton-Gillingham Academy trained associate, working under the mentorship of a fellow, LETRS trained, and I was a balanced literacy teacher until my daughter was diagnosed with dyslexia. That brought me down the road of evidence-based reading instruction and the science of reading.

Anna: Tell us really quickly about how you share that with other teachers.

Gina: On my Instagram, I try to educate and advocate for dyslexia, and I just do little reels and little educational posts on my Instagram account, @get_literacy.

Anna: So the last time you were on the podcast, about a year ago I think it was, we talked a little bit about sound walls and how it would be great to have you come back and tell us more about that. Now you have another year behind you of using sound walls with your students. Maybe we could start by helping people understand what a sound wall is.

Gina: Sure. Okay. So a sound wall is a combination of a mouth picture, I like to use real mouth pictures, and the graphemes that match that sound. So there is the vowel valley which has all the vowels on one side, and then the consonant chart is on the other side. It is a visual for students, and I do explicitly teach everything on the wall throughout the school year.

Anna: All right. So just for people new to sound walls, there are two parts to it, like she said, there's the vowel valley and the consonant sound wall. The phonemes, the sounds, are usually represented by pictures of a mouth.

Now I listened to Jan Wasowicz, she was with SPELL-Links. I watched her training on sound walls, and she was not a fan of putting the mouth pictures up, so everybody's different. Just know that there are many different ways to do this. Most people, myself included, appreciate the mouth pictures, so those are there. That's representing the phoneme, the sound. Then when Gina mentioned grapheme, she means the letter or letters that represent the sound.

So a sound wall with a mouth making the sound of /ch/ would eventually have CH and TCH listed underneath because those are both ways to spell the /ch/ sound.

Maybe you can tell us what research says about sound walls.

Gina: There is not any research that I know of and that I can really speak to. I'm not sure if they're starting to do research, but there is research... This is more of a tool for students and for teachers to use that does have research behind it.

Anna: Exactly. I think some people are against sound walls because there is no research that I know of right now. There may be some being done, in fact I think there is, but there's no published research about the use of sound walls.

So we have to be careful when we talk about them. We don't want to say first of all, that they're not "the science of reading" because the science of reading is research. It's not a thing or a tool. But we can say that it's a tool to teach the things we know are we are supposed to teach like phonemic awareness and phonics.

We know very much that phonemic awareness is very important for success in reading, things like isolating, blending, segmenting, and manipulating phonemes.

Then, of course, we know that a systematic phonics instruction is also important.

Can you talk to us a little bit about your sound wall routine and how you use it to teach phonemic awareness and phonics?

Gina: Absolutely. Going back to even the mouth pictures, I know some people aren't fans, but having first graders, I really think it's an important tool for them to have that visual. I really got into it during COVID when we were still wearing masks, and I feel like it was very helpful, that's when it began.

What I do is, in beginning of the school year I put post-its over all the letters, the graphemes, and I unveil whatever the sound is that we are working on.

In first grade we start with short vowels, so I'll probably do one short vowel a week. My first graders are coming in already knowing their basic sounds of the alphabet, so we fly through that.

So I'll unveil the sound and let's say we're doing short A, I will hold up the short A card. I use Tools 4 Reading, that's where I was trained and that's the sound wall and the cards that I use. I'll hold up their card with A on it. All my students have a mirror, and so we practicing saying /ă/, and we look at what our mouths are doing. We talk about what our mouth's doing.

Then I'll give them words with a short A sound in there for them to repeat. I want to know, "Where do you hear the short A sound - beginning, middle, or end?" I'll give them all different words, and they'll tell me where in the word they hear that sound. They'll continue to look at the mirror to make sure of their articulation and they're doing it to match the picture on the wall.

Anna: Is that when you're teaching the spelling of short A as well?

Gina: Yes, but this can go deeper once we get into long vowels. I won't be teaching all the long E spellings because I teach first grade. So I'll unveil it when we do maybe busy E, and then all those different spellings will still be up there, so my higher readers will look at it. But I tell them not really to pay too much attention to that, and we just focus on the one spelling at a time.

Anna: Okay, so you actually reveal all the spellings at once, but you just focus on one, is that right?

Gina: Right, yes, because I'm not going to cut that little post-it up and try to make it harder.

When it is helpful too is in the second half of first grade, when now my students are encountering more of these patterns. I see them look on the sound wall all the time, and they'll look at the pattern that they're trying to figure out. They'll look at the mouth picture, and they'll figure out on their own, "Oh, that's a long E, I should try the long E sound for this word." So it is helpful for them when they're trying to decode on their own.

Anna: Well, it's interesting too because I watched a live presentation with Wiley Blevins at the Wisconsin Reading League Conference last fall and he actually said that he doesn't like it when people are covering up everything before they teach it because there are advanced kids or kids who are further along that could use that information. So I think it has to be a balance for teachers. Having the whole wall open at once can be very overwhelming, but at the same time, we don't want to block information from kids. So it's probably just a trial and error kind of thing.

Gina: It is. That's really interesting, and it is what works in your classroom. I feel there are some people that like to put words under there too, instead of using a word wall, they move their words and put them up on their sound wall as they go. So it's whatever really works for your classroom and your students, and I think it depends on what grade you're teaching as well.

Anna: So what you're saying is that some sound walls have the phoneme pictured by the mouth and then underneath it, they reveal the graphemes in isolation, right? So if you're teaching the sound of /ē/ and the spellings of /ē/, then you might have just the letter E, the letter EE, letters EA. But the other option is to have an actual keyword with maybe those letters highlighted or in a different color or underlined-

Gina: Right.

Anna: ... so two different ways. I know Tools 4 Reading does the individual graphemes and not actual words.

Gina: Right.

Anna: So there's lots of different ways to do it. So that's how you introduce a new spelling, by having them practice the sound.

Tell us more about how your students use the wall.

Gina: So they will use the wall for both spelling and reading. I got really excited when last year I had a parent send me an email that said, "My daughter's in the mirror right now."

What's great about the wall and the mirrors and really diving deeper into the sounds and their articulation is a lot of students will spell "train" instead of with TR, it might be CHR or JR. So I teach them, "Look in the mirror. What is our mouth doing?" And they will even start doing it at home. They'll pay attention.

I don't remember which sound it is, because a lot of our sounds are very similar in how we articulate them. It's just a matter of if they are voiced or not.

So my students will use it to self-correct, to help with if they see a spelling pattern they don't know, or when they need to spell to remember it.

Anna: So maybe can you give us a very specific example of a child trying to read or spell a particular word and then how the sound wall would help?

Gina: Sure. So short I and short E are very easily confused by students, and if you start with short E, if you say /ĕ/, /ĭ/, it's just a slight movement in their mouth. So for a word like, "pen." If a student is trying to figure out if it's short E or short I, my student would grab a mirror, go up to the wall, look at where if they're trying to say "pin" or "pen," look at which sound they want, and try to make sure they're matching their mouth in the mirror to the picture on the wall.

When I do teach it, we talk about the vowel valley, which I don't know if you know, but the way it is set up is helpful for them as well.

Anna: Sure. The vowel valley has to do with how open your mouth is, so it's shaped like a V and like a valley. I'll provide links to my blog post about the sound wall in the show notes, but it talks about how you can actually have your students say all the sounds with you as you go down the wall and go up the wall and notice in a mirror how their mouth is getting more open.

There's other things you can do I've heard where you have kids see how much of their finger can fit between their teeth when they're saying certain sounds, and then how as you move down the wall more of your finger can fit. That can help them just think more about the distinction between those vowel sounds, which are very close.

What about your students that are more natural at reading and writing? Do they use the sound wall very much, or is this really more a tool for kids who are struggling?

Gina: You know what? Actually my high readers really were interested in the sound wall this year. I had the schwa covered up because we really don't get too much into that and they were BEGGING me. They're like, "We want to know what the banana sound is because it's awesome." There is also a picture that matches besides the picture of the mouth. There's also a visual of a picture, so it was a banana. So it actually was fun for them.

They liked learning that, and they're reading words that would have the /zh/ sound in it for like treasure. So it was helpful for them for words that they were encountering, and they picked up on how to use it really quickly. At times, they would even ask if they can look under a post-it and I would say, yeah, they could run up there and look.

Anna: Yeah.

Gina: It's not in hiding, it's not secretive. It's just to, like you said, to me it's not to overwhelm all the whole class.

Anna: Sure. So what is your feeling on teaching kids the words, the big words, that are connected with the sound wall like fricative, stop, and affricate? Have you tried it, not tried it?

Gina: Yes, I do use the words. I'm not expecting them to use those words with me. I'm not expecting them to know it either. I personally don't know if there is any research or anything that says that that helps kids when learning sounds.

I'll use it because my consonant chart is set up with tongue placement and then airflow. So I'll say, "Okay, this is a stop. That means we can't hold that sound." So I use it as an instruction when I'm doing the explicit instruction, but I don't know if it really makes a difference.

They love learning nasals for instance, because we all plug our nose when we're doing the nasals, so I'll say, "Oh, that's a nasal." But getting them to say fricative and know that is tricky. Plus, whenever I say that in my classroom, they all start cracking up. They think I'm saying a bad word when I say fricative.

Anna: I know.

Gina: I go, "That just means there's friction," and then I've got to explain what friction is...

Anna: Yeah. Well, I know there's some people that really love teaching it, and this is all just from basically what I read in Facebook groups. I don't think there's any research at all on this, but just they like teaching it because their kids like the big words. Then there's plenty of other people who are concerned that you're filling their brain up with something that's not useful, and you should make space in their working memory for what they really need, and you're wasting time. So again, it's really got to be just what a teacher feels best fits their class. But I would definitely want to say that that's not necessary for kids-

Gina: Right.

Anna: ... to know those big words.

Gina: No. No. They're still learning it. It's just, to me, a matter of instruction where I might as well say the word, but I'm not expecting them to know it on their own.

Anna: Yeah, no, I agree. What would you say might be some challenges with using a sound wall or things to avoid?

Gina: I think like you said with overloading them, their working memory, and giving them too much at once, like trying to do a bunch of sounds at once because you're trying to fly through it or catch up.

Also giving them sounds before they're ready. I've noticed with some kids, it is still overwhelming for them. It is still a lot to say, "Okay, now we're doing long E, now we're doing long A, all in one week."

Really, you have to be very prescriptive about it, I guess, to your class, and to your students. Maybe it's more of a small group thing that teachers can do if they feel like their class is such a wide span if they have their struggling readers all the way up to very high readers. Maybe it's too much to do whole group instruction, and they could do it more small group and really hone in on to what their student needs and how much they need of it.

Anna: And wouldn't you say that the sound wall lessons are coinciding with your phonics lessons, right?

Gina: Oh, yes, yes.

Anna: So then if you're teaching whole class phonics, then it would be probably whole class.

Gina: Right.

Anna: But if you're teaching new skills in small groups, then it would be there. The tricky part with that, I would think, would be when you're teaching phonics and small groups, which I'm all for if that's what needs to be done, then you have different parts of the wall revealed for different groups.

Gina: Right.

Anna: Have you run into that being an issue or a challenge for you with your class?

Gina: No, you know what I've gone through with what to do with the sound wall even with my tutoring kids more one-on-one. There are pictures, I think, printables that you can get of a sound wall. So I would just have my students have their own little individual sound wall in a binder or in a page projector and just do it more that way than having the visual up on my wall.

That is a question I get a lot on my social media and my Instagram. People say, "I don't have that kind of wall space." If you see a picture of mine, it is taking up a lot of real estate and I still, with my district, I am required to have a word wall as well.

Anna: Okay.

Gina: So people are asking, "How do you find the space?" and I said, "Well then find an individual one for each student or a smaller printable one that you could just have at your desk. It might not have the mouth pictures, but it's better than having nothing."

Anna: It's a reference for students.

Gina: Yeah.

Anna: So that's interesting that you're required to use a word wall. I know nowadays there's a million conversations out there, articles and everything, about, "Take down your word wall, put up a sound wall." Are you finding that you can still make use of a word wall or is it just a compliance thing?

Gina: I am still making use of it because if it's going to be up, I want it to have a reason. So the way I actually adjusted it, I asked for permission, and they said it's fine as long as I have my word wall up. I don't need to have the word coffins, like the shapes of the words.

Anna: Yes. Oh, yes.

Gina: Yep. So because now that we know we don't visually memorize words, we don't need to do it like that. So what I am creating, it's my summer project, I started doing it throughout the year, is sound boxes and putting those words in sound boxes. If they are irregular, I put the heart part, the heart on there for the irregular words, and I added digraphs, because my biggest aha for when I started studying about the sound wall was that our students are trying to find the word "there" and how to spell "there." What sound on the alphabet starts with nothing on our word wall? If there's a T, how do they know it's a T? T says /t/. So that was one of my big aha moments, plus knowing we don't need to memorize the word shape and the word coffins. So I added digraphs to my word wall, and I'm changing all my words that I'm required to have into sound boxes.

Anna: Oh, yeah. Tell me what you mean by sound boxes.

Gina: So if the word is "chat." "Chat," if you segment it, it has three sounds, /ch/ /ă/ /t/. So then I'll have the CH in a box, the A in a box, and the T in the box because I do a lot of word mapping in my small groups so my students are used to seeing that.

Anna: Yeah, that's really smart. Of course, I know what sound boxes are, I'm not sure why I was brain freezing there, but I had never thought of doing that for a word wall. That's really cool. Of course, doing the digraphs makes perfect sense. I don't know why that never came to my mind. How do you choose what words you put up there?

Gina: It's the words that we're required to. I think they're the Dolch list.

Anna: Oh, okay. Okay. Gotcha.

Gina: Yeah.

Anna: Okay.

Gina: So that's what my district wants up and that's fine. Like I said, as long as I can alter it to make sense to my students and how I'm teaching those words, then let's give this a try. Again, I'm just coming up with this on my own, so we'll see how that works next year.

Anna: Yeah, I'd love to talk to you about that after you try it, because that makes perfect sense. When you're teaching the words explicitly and showing them why you spell each part the way you spell it, having it as a reference can be perfectly fine. I think the issue with word walls so much was that it was supposed to be like a memorization piece.

Gina: Right. Yes.

Anna: Then also, like you said, it was so hard to find some of those irregular words because of how they started.

Anything else that you'd like to share about sound walls? Maybe questions that people ask you on Instagram, commonly asked questions that you could answer for us?

Gina: Yes. A lot of questions are how do I use it? I think we covered a lot of them.

What does my instruction looks like? I do believe that with the sound wall, having a mirror available to your students is very important for them to make sure they're looking at their mouth themselves. So there is a mirror set up by my sound wall so that my students can walk up and self-check on their own.

Another question, "Is the real estate available in a classroom or in a reading specialist or interventionist office going to be enough?" Tools 4 Reading, who I took their course and whose materials I use, do have posters too. I don't know if I mentioned that.

Anna: Okay.

Gina: So it's a poster with the real mouth pictures. I actually have those in my basement where I tutor for my tutoring students.

Using the other question, do we really need to say affricate, fricative, stop, nasal? Again, like I said, I don't know if you really have to hone it in and have your students repeat those words to you, but use them for instruction.

What was the other one? I just think it's that I've seen huge gains with it with my first graders with just confusion of sounds.

Anna: Sure.

Gina: This is such a big age when they're coming in and they're spelling and we're not overloading, but their memory is becoming very loaded with this sound this week, this spelling, and now we're adding another spelling for the same sound, and it sounds so similar to this sound. Their little mouth without their teeth and everything else that's going on, they're growing, trying to figure it out. The sound wall really has made BIG improvements in my classroom, and I really see my students using it daily.

Anna: That is wonderful to hear. In the show notes for this episode, I'm going to share a free sound wall lesson. I don't at this time have a full set of lessons, but it's basically a template that somebody could follow to create their own. Also, if you would buy Tools 4 Reading, I'm assuming lessons are included with that.

Gina: Yes, they have a manual.

Anna: Also, Gina mentioned the Tools 4 Reading training, which I have taken as well for sound walls. We'll provide a link to that so you can check that out. Then also, I'll provide a link to Gina's Instagram where you can find her.

Also, she's got a special way where you could set up a consult call because anyone who runs an Instagram account knows how hard it is to keep up with all of those messages. I let so many go, it makes me feel really bad, but they just float away. I lose them if I can't answer them in the moment. So that would be a way to really pick her brain and get some really good answers.

Thanks so much, Gina, for joining us. I always like talking to you.

Gina: Oh, me too! Thank you again for having me. I was so excited to come back.

Anna: You can find the show notes for today's episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode128.

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Let's talk sound walls - A conversation with Gina from Get Literacy

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TRT Podcast#128: Let's talk sound walls: A conversation with Gina from Get Literacy Everyone's telling us to switch out our word walls for sound walls... but what are sound walls, and how do you use

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Implementing a Sound Wall: Because We Need to Distinguish Between Sounds and Letters

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Implementing a Sound Wall: Because We Need to Distinguish Between Sounds and Letters

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Sound walls are becoming more common in classrooms thanks to a clearer understanding of the science of reading.

A quick search on Teachers Pay Teachers shows there is a demand for materials for sound walls, but not all the information out there is accurate. While well-intentioned, we need to understand why a sound wall is set up differently than an A-Z alphabetical word wall and how to use a sound wall effectively. The goal is to elevate daily instruction during Tier 1 by reviewing the 44 speech sounds and the options for spelling each of the sounds. By doing this daily review, it becomes automatic for students to access sounds and know how to match spelling to each sound. A confusion between letters and sounds still exists on the part of the teacher in many situations. For example, the silent letter grapheme represents the /n/. (When you see the diagonal lines with a letter in between, this represents the sound.)

Our goal is to help you transform word walls into sound walls. Many practices are being used with word walls that we can adjust to use with sound walls. Following is some advice for teachers making the change from a word wall to sound wall. These tips can be used to guide the explanation of how to set up a sound wall.

Step 1:

We begin with the speech sounds and then add the print. Phonemes can be classified by articulatory features that have to do with placement in the mouth, airflow, and voicing. Begin by talking about how your lips come together when saying the /p/. Notice what happens with your tongue when you say /l/, it is lifted in the top of your mouth behind your teeth. There is also a vibration when saying /l/, and we call that voicing. During a two- to three-week period, introduce all of the 44 speech sounds by the articulatory features.

Don't confuse this with all of the spellings of the sounds. By introducing each phoneme, you are giving students an organizational structure to understand the foundation of our language. Even in kindergarten, you are asking children to blend and segment words with all of the speech sounds. Segment the sounds in book, /b/ /oo/ /k/. You wouldn't teach students to read with /oo/, but they use the sound in their speech all of the time. Why not teach the sound explicitly and discuss how we make that sound, what it looks like, and feels like? Once the sound is obvious, it will be much easier to attach the different graphemes for reading and spelling.

Step 2: Attach a keyword to help students remember the sound.

It is unnecessary to print words on different colored paper or outline the shape of a word. Please do not do those things that distract from learning about phonemes (sounds) and graphemes (print).

Once a sound is introduced, teach the most common letter or grapheme that represents the sound. For example, after introducing /p/ teach them that is the most common spelling for that sound. This is easy initially in kindergarten but becomes more complex in first grade because children have to learn about digraphs and vowel teams that are used to spell many sounds.

Step 3: Daily review and discuss all of the sounds that have been introduced.

What are the six stop sounds? /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /g/

What are our vowel sounds? Ask children to repeat each vowel sound as you point to either a picture of a mouth forming that sound or a keyword that represents the sound. Find the / ā/, and what are the spellings we know for this sound? Commons spellings for / ā/ ai, ay, a_e, and a. These will be the most common spellings used in first grade. Use this information to help students attend to sounds as you are segmenting and blending words during your phonemic awareness practice. As they focus on phonemes during their phonological awareness exercises, this connection between speech and print is enhanced and elevates the understanding of how the two work together.

Step 4: Engage in activities using the sound wall.

Identify the distinguishing features of voiced and voiceless consonant phonemes; orally produce individual consonant phonemes after correct teacher modeling of the voicing distinction: /p//b/; /k//g/; /t/ /d/; /f/ /v/; /sh/ /zh/; /th/ /th/; /ch//j/; /s/ /z/

Explore the way related groups of phonemes are pronounced: stops /p/, /b/, /t/,/d/,/k/, /g/; hissy sounds /f/, /v/, /th/, /th/, /s/, /z/,/sh/; nasals /m/, /n/,

/ng/; glides /h/, /w/, /wh/, /y/; and liquids/l/ and /r/.

Play the speech-sound guessing game. Students imitate the sounds and/or look in a mirror to answer questions such as, which sound is made with the lips-/p/ or /k/? Which sound is made with the mouth wide open-/ŏ/ or /w/? Which sound is made with the tongue between the teeth-/f/ or /th/?

Say /b/, /b/, /b/, and then try saying the same sound with your lips together and popping the air out with your voice on. Now, keep doing the same thing with your lips and your breath but turn your voice off. What sound? /p/ /p/ /p/.

Do a picture sort with /p/ and /b/. In this classroom, the teacher has the students working with the confusing sounds /p/ and /b/ which are only differentiated by voicing.

Step 5: Use the sound wall for independent learning by problem solving.

When a student asks how to spell " meet," ask them to find the /ē/ and look at the choices for spelling that sound. This is much more efficient than asking them if they can find a word that sounds like or rhymes with " meet." By using a sound wall and connecting directly to the graphemes, students have much quicker access to mapping speech to print.

If a student stumbles on the word like " night" while reading, point out the and direct them to the long card on the sound wall. What do we know about this spelling and the sound it represents?

Let's keep this conversation going. Please add your comments and questions below so we can add to the understanding of sound walls at work in a classroom.

Listen to Mary's podcast about the importance of Sound Walls here.

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Implementing a Sound Wall: Because We Need to Distinguish Between Sounds and Letters

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Sound walls are becoming more common in classrooms thanks to a clearer understanding of the science of reading. We need to understand why a sound wall is set up differently than an A-Z alphabetical word wall and how to use a sound wall effectively to elevate daily instruction during Tier 1 by reviewing the 44 speech sounds and the options for spelling each of the sounds.

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Sound Walls: Using the Science of Reading to Help Students Spell Video
This video on Sound Walls presented by the Pennsylvania Training and Technical Assistance Network (PaTTAN) walks teachers through the reasons for and how to set up a sound wall in the classroom. The video covers how learners perceive words, what a word wall is and how it is organized, the limitations of a word wall, and finally sound walls and how to incorporate sound walls in the classroom.

Sound Wall Cards
Printable sound wall cards to use in your classroom. Watch the presentation above by Pennsylvania Training and Technical Assistance Network and learn how to create a sound wall in your classroom, how to incorporate it into your instruction, and how to teach your students to use this as a spelling tool. There is a basic version of the sound wall cards that include the most common orthographic patterns, a more advanced version that includes more advanced spelling patterns, and a placemat or desktop version.

Most Frequent Spelling for Each Phoneme
This resource provided by Dr. Bruce Murray, Professor of Reading Education at the Auburn University, gives the top spellings for phonemes and percentage of occurrence. Understanding the frequency of spelling patterns can help both teachers and students when thinking about phoneme/grapheme correspondences.

Teaching Schwa
Schwa is the most common vowel sound in the English language and can be spelled with any of the vowel letters. In English, the vowel in an unstressed or unaccented syllable often reduces to schwa. Vowel reduction and schwa are prominent features of English. This resource covers what schwa is, why it's important to teach, and signs that a student might be struggling with the concept.

Common Spelling Rules
Phonics instruction teaches how the 26 letters represent 44 sounds in the English language. Quality phonics instruction includes encoding (spelling) practice as well as learning spelling patterns and rules. Learning that there are predictable relationships between sounds and letters allows students to apply these concepts and read and spell both familiar and unfamiliar words. This resource includes some common spelling rules and the explanation of why the rule works.

Web Link Disclaimer
Because of their potential interest or usefulness to the education community or the general public, the Colorado Department of Education (CDE) occasionally provides links from this site to external web sites. It attempts to monitor such links on a regular basis. However, the Department cannot be responsible for the content of any site external to its own.

Further, by linking to other sites, CDE is not endorsing any particular product, practice, service, provider or institution, nor does it necessarily endorse views expressed or facts presented on these sites.

In addition, neither CDE nor any of its employees makes any warranty, express or implied, or assumes any legal liability for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information linked to from this site.
← Back to READ Act Educator Resources

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Sound Walls: Using the Science of Reading to Help Students Spell Video This video on Sound Walls presented by the Pennsylvania Training and Technical Assistance Network (PaTTAN) walks teachers through the reasons for and how to set up a sound wall in the classroom.

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Sound Walls: A tool for students to use when problem solving

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Sound Walls: A tool for students to use when problem solving

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One of the biggest shifts in implementing reading science in classrooms today is the use of sound walls. This term is becoming more and more common, and we are seeing sound walls in general education classrooms across the country.

I was visiting a classroom that had been working with sound walls for several months and the teacher told me about a conversation she overheard between two students. Student #1 was trying to write the word good but wrote god. The student across from him said, "That can't be the right way to spell good." Student #2 was accurate that it was not correct, but how did he know that?

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Sound Walls: A tool for students to use when problem solving

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Student Reading Achievement & Teacher Development

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How To Set Up a Sound Wall in Your Classroom

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A step-by-step guide and plenty of tips.

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Resources linked here on the website are "featured" in the presentation or referred to specifically as a resource. There is much more information beyond these links above, and they can be found on our PaTTAN Padlet- associated with the training.

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PaTTAN Literacy Resource Hub - Sound Walls

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Using Sound Walls in Early Elementary Classrooms

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Using Sound Walls in Early Elementary Classrooms

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Sound walls guide students to investigate phonemes and make informed choices when they're unsure how to spell out a sound.

Dominic Trevett / Ikon Images

A colleague recently messaged us, "How and why should teachers use sound walls-and are they different from word walls?" We believe that both word walls and sound walls can be of value in the classroom, but there are distinct differences between the two.

Word walls, a print-to-speech tool, are organized by a word's initial letter. This can get tricky when you have a word like knot, which begins with the letter K and the sound N. That's where the sound wall comes into play, helping students spell words by listening to the phonemes, or the smallest unit of sound in speech in a word.

Sound walls are speech-to-print tools used to categorize phonemes. The word cat, for example, has three phonemes, c/a/t. In the English language, we identify about 44 phonemes using the 26 letters of the alphabet. In many ways, grasping the sounds of the 44 phonemes is like cracking a code for our early learners. Sound walls allow students to investigate sounds and eventually learn high-frequency words.

Some common materials for sound walls include mouth articulation cards, phoneme group labels, sound cards for phonemes, and sound spelling cards with power bar. For instance, the power bar is a visual cue to show how often the particular spelling of the sound is used. The sound /k/ has three different spelling patterns: "c," "k," and "ck." The power bar cards give clues to show students how often a certain spelling pattern is used in words. This way, students can make more informed spelling choices when they're unsure about how to spell out a sound.
Courtesy of TN Department of Education
Here, the "c" spelling has the largest bar, so this is the spelling most often used for the /k/ sound.

Organizing the Wall

Creating the sound wall before school begins can help teachers consider exactly where each new sound should be positioned. Arranging common sound patterns, mouth position cards, and power bar cards together creates organization.

When setting up the sound wall, arrange consonants on the left and the vowels on the right. The consonants are organized according to the type of sound/phoneme (stops, fricatives, affricates, glides, liquids, and nasals) and if the sound is voiced or unvoiced. The vowels are organized in a V shape called the vowel valley. The vowel valley on your classroom wall will show how the mouth looks and feels as each vowel sound is vocalized. At the top of the valley, the mouth is mostly closed, and slowly, as you descend in the valley, the mouth opens.
Courtesy of Danielle Rusk Carter
Once the sound wall is organized and affixed to your classroom wall, cover each sound with a piece of paper (in the image above, blue paper was used). When sounds that have not been taught are concealed, the wall is initially a mystery to students. Each day, review the sounds already introduced, and reveal a new sound by removing the blue paper. Finally, if appropriate, add the sound card. The sound card is an image and matching word serving as the example for the phoneme.

Depending on the grade, sound walls may look and progress differently. In kindergarten, for example, not all sound patterns are introduced, so the wall may not be completely uncovered at the end of the year.

In my (Danielle's) kindergarten classroom, the following five steps help me support my students:

1. Review: Reviewing all previously learned sounds and reciting a chant for each sound: /d/, /d/, /d/, /d/ as in dog (the word being the sound example for that pattern).

2. Practice: Practice the new sound for the day, focusing on mouth and tongue positions. We use small mirrors when possible to observe our mouths.

3. Notice: Notice if the chin drops to determine whether the sound is a consonant or a vowel. Ask students to place the top of their hand flat under their chin to feel the drop. Query students, "Did you feel your chin drop? Does the sound belong in our vowel valley?"

4. Explore: Explore the new sound. Practice singing the sound together. Can the sound be held out, or does it stop? Query students, "Can you hold the sound out like a musical note?"

5. Determine: Determine if the sound is voiced or unvoiced by feeling for vibrations in the throat. Ask students to place their entire hand lightly around their neck. Then, make the sound and feel for vibrations, and ask them, "Can you feel the vibration?"
Courtesy of Danielle Rusk Carter
Spicing Up the Sound Wall

If you're looking to add some color to your basic sound wall configuration, consider taking photos of your students' mouths making the stops, nasals, fricatives (and so on) and post their mouth images on classroom walls or on your classroom digital portfolio. Students can then use these images to make individual mini-books for future reference; and if they have access to iPads, the Book Creator app works nicely for this purpose. Teachers can even generate QR codes on each sound and capture video of student mouth positions with sound. Now students can use the QR code to verify sounds and mouth positions.

Highlight use of the sounds; continually refer to the wall throughout the day and not just during the literacy block.

When teachers notice that students have mastered a sound, it can be uplifting to let students teach their peers about the sounds they're familiar with-for example, saying "Wow, Oliver and Samhar both have the "oo" sound; if you need help, ask Oliver or Samhar."

Set up mirrors in front of the sound wall to get students to practice the sounds as part of their daily routine.

Add a lowered table or floor space under the sound wall where students can freely sit while writing. They can use the wall for referencing sound card words, self-checking spellings, and practicing sounding out to support independent writing.

To ensure that students retain the sounds they've learned, here are a few tips to incorporate sound wall learning into the existing school schedule:

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Using Sound Walls in Early Elementary Classrooms

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Sound walls guide students to investigate phonemes and make informed choices when they're unsure how to spell out a sound.

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Science of Reading: Sound Walls in the Classroom

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Science of Reading: Sound Walls in the Classroom

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Sound Walls and the Science of Reading

If you've ever used a word wall in your classroom, or have seen one in use, you may be aware that these displays of high-frequency words, arranged alphabetically, have long been used to help students identify patterns, expand vocabulary, reinforce spelling, and more. However, as an alternative to word walls, many literacy experts find the use of sound walls to be an effective tool for phonics instruction, which helps students visually see how letters and their associated sounds correspond.

Based in the science of reading, sound walls in the classroom help educators reinforce the importance of explicitly teaching the skills of letter-sound correspondence. The research behind the science of reading suggests that while learning to speak is, for most children, a very natural and intuitive process, the same is not true of reading. It simply doesn't come naturally and so must be taught in a systematic and explicit way.

Sound walls support key aspects of learning to read that are backed by the science of reading. These include phonemic awareness (the ability to isolate and manipulate the smallest units of sounds within spoken language) and phonics (the ability to make the connection between the sounds of spoken language and the printed letters and words on a page).

Sound walls are a logical, effective way to teach these skills in a way that works for students. Let's dive deeper to learn what sound walls are and how we can implement them in classrooms!

What Is a Sound Wall?

Sound walls help children isolate and identify the individual sounds that make up words and link how a word is spoken to how it is written and spelled.

In Sound Walls: Why Do We Need Them and How Do We Use Them?, the Mississippi Department of Education explains that "a sound wall supports students by focusing on the articulation of sounds/phonemes and the various letter or letter patterns that represent the sounds/phonemes in words." Sound walls and phonics fit naturally together, as a sound wall "supports explicit instruction of phonics" and "grouping words by their sounds is an effective strategy for teaching reading and spelling."

Sound walls group words by the 44 speech sounds, or phonemes, that make up the English language. A phoneme is the "smallest unit of speech distinguishing one word (or word element) from another, as the element p in "tap," which separates that word from "tab," "tag," and "tan." Similarly, sh is a phoneme in the word "shape" and ch is a phoneme in the word "chip." These subtle changes-affecting just one sound in these words-can dramatically change the word's meaning.

Phonemes can have different spelling variations, called graphemes. One example is the phoneme for the soft /c/ sound in "cell" and the /s/ sound in "sell"-they sound the same, but use different letters of the alphabet. "Blue" and "blew" also sound the same but have different meanings and spellings.

A young learner might hear the word "knee," and think it's spelled "nee." On a traditional word wall, that child might look in vain under "N" for the word "knee." When starting to read, the child might see the word "knee" in a story and experience confusion. Thinking the printed word ought to start with a /k/ sound, the student might miss the link between the word on the page and the spoken word.

Because a sound wall arranges words by sounds, not by the alphabet, they help students to properly associate spoken sounds with printed words-and to match phonemes with graphemes.

For example, a sound wall might include a section for the /k/ sound. That section would feature a "phoneme card" with a "/k/" printed on it. Under that card, the teacher could include a number of examples of how that sound is represented in printed words, each accompanied by a picture. For example:

This shows students that the "/k/" sound can have different spellings.

Sound walls also have a unique component, according to this resource from the Louisiana Department of Education, in that they also include images of students' mouths articulating the different phonemes. "Students can make the connection between what a phoneme sounds like and what their mouths should be doing when they are saying that phoneme. These images should be placed directly over the phoneme card on the sound wall."

Courtney Schoen, an educator in Las Vegas, Nevada, created a sound wall that she could share with more than 40 teachers in the district and got a student volunteer to model the mouth shapes in photographs. "I started utilizing it last year and saw so many lightbulbs go on for both the students and the teachers with whom I work," she says.

In addition to including illustrations or photos of students' mouths, you can also use mirrors in direct instruction with the students, as did April Atkins, a third-grade teacher from Alabaster, Alabama. During her second year of implementing a sound wall, she learned a great deal about students' needs for explicit instruction on air flow, teeth/tongue placement, lip position, and voiced versus unvoiced sounds:

As I assessed my students' spelling errors, I now knew why they mixed up "f" and "th" in their writing...at the speech level, they were not placing their teeth and tongue correctly! And now it made sense why "ch" and "sh" confused the students...they just didn't understand the air flow differences between those two sounds. It started to make much more sense to me. The sound wall gave me a deeper understanding. Now I was equipped with the strategies to help my students. I pulled out mirrors, and I worked with the students who needed guidance, holding up the mirrors as they spoke the sounds so they could see the shapes their mouths made. The progress was exciting. I had never been able to help kids in this way. They started to connect the phonemes and graphemes more easily and consistently.

Try it yourself! Say the word "cheese" out loud. Your mouth makes the shape of a slight smile, your teeth part, and your chin drops slightly. Now say the word "shut." Your mouth purses, and your chin pushes forward slightly. While /ch/ and /sh/ may seem to be very similar at first glance, illustrations or photographs that show what the mouth looks like as it is making these sounds can help solidify students' understanding of phonemes-leading to improvement in reading and writing skills.

Sound Wall vs. Word Wall

In what other ways do sound walls differ from word walls?

Word walls are arranged by the beginning letter of the words, displayed alphabetically from A-Z. Under the letter "A," a teacher might attach cards for words such as "are," "and," and "any." The idea is that students can easily see the word wall when refreshing their memory on how to spell a word, for example. Teachers have historically used word walls to cement knowledge of common sight words and to introduce new vocabulary.

Sound walls, on the other hand, are arranged by sounds rather than by printed letters. How does that make them more effective than word walls?

Sound walls are built on the premise that students need to be explicitly taught phonological and phonemic awareness. The ability to decode and identify sounds is a vital part of learning to become a fluent reader. So rather than starting from a focus on print, sound walls start by focusing on speech.

The ways in which the 26 letters of our alphabet can be grouped to make the 44 phonemes in the English language can be confusing for a beginning reader. Imagine a sentence such as, "Hey, the fish ate eight pieces of fake bait in one day." In just this one sample sentence, we can see that the long vowel sound of /ā/ is spelled in six different ways (h ey, ate, eight, f ake, b ait, d ay)! Sound walls can help students make sense of how sounds and speech translate to letter patterns.

April Atkins, the third-grade teacher from Alabama, says, "I initially put a sound wall up in my room three years ago after learning about the importance of learning to read from speech to print. Connecting the speech sounds, or phonemes, to the letters, or graphemes, is crucial for young children learning to read."

Sound Wall Examples

To build a sound wall, you may need a lot of dedicated space! One teacher to whom we spoke, Angela Premo, a first-grade teacher in Malone, New York, printed and laminated all the components of a comprehensive sound wall and quickly discovered it took up an entire wall of her classroom! However, she's committed to bringing more science of reading practices into her teaching, so the sound wall is there to stay.

But some teachers have found clever ways to display sound walls in smaller spaces. Courtney Schoen, the educator from Nevada, used a trifold poster board. There are even virtual versions of sound walls available online so that students can access them on their devices.
(Take a look at these sound wall examples from Courtney Schoen.)

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Science of Reading: Sound Walls in the Classroom

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Based in the science of reading, sound walls in the classroom help educators reinforce the importance of explicitly teaching the skills of letter-sound correspondence.

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The Kastner Collection: Sound-Spelling Walls

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This Wakelet includes professional learning resources related to the knowledge and practices necessary to effectively implement sound walls. This Wakelet will have ongoing updates. You may also access every Wakelet from the Kastner Collection at this link: https://wke.lt/w/s/mcU0bZ

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Science of Reading Learning Lounge Padlet

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Science of Reading Learning Lounge Padlet

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Transitioning from Word Walls to Sound Walls

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Transitioning from Word Walls to Sound Walls

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You are welcome to print copies for non-commercial use, or a limited number for educational purposes, as long as credit is given to Reading Rockets and the author(s). For commercial use, please contact the author or publisher listed.

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Transitioning from Word Walls to Sound Walls

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Sound walls support students with learning those tricky high-frequency words. They also support students in retaining and learning to read unfamiliar words on their own. A sound wall does the work of matching our articulation of speech sounds/phonemes to the letters/graphemes that represent those sounds.

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Sound Walls 101 - Connecting Phonemes to Graphemes by Michelle Trostle | This newsletter was created with Smore, an online tool for creating beautiful newsletters for individual educators, schools and districts

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Families want to help their children become strong readers but don't always know where to start.

At the Mississippi Department of Education, we provide the necessary resources, activities and information, so you can help your children become strong readers and strong leaders.

The activities you will find are useful to all students at all levels. Families can move within the grades to provide their children with the activities that are on their level.

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We provide the necessary resources, activities and information, so you can help your children become strong readers and strong leaders. Get started today.

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Build a word chain by selecting correspondences you want to see in the words. Word chains are created by adding, deleting, and substituting one sound between words.

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The word mapping tool lets you type in a word and see its graphemes and phonemes mapped out. It’s great for teaching phonics!

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The morpheme mapper lets you type in a word and see its morphemes and meanings mapped out.

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Moats, L, & Tolman, C (2009). Excerpted from Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS): The Speech Sounds of English: Phonetics, Phonology, and Phoneme Awareness (Module 2). Boston: Sopris West.

For more information on Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS) visit Voyager Sopris .

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Phonological Instruction for Older Students

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Additional and explicit instruction in phonological awareness is a critical component in helping fourth grade readers who struggle with phonological deficits. The exercises can be used as a warm-up prior to reading, spelling, or vocabulary instruction.

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A recent blog post by Tim Shanahan titled "What should morphology instruction look like?" reminded me how important it is to teach students about word parts (i.e., roots, prefixes, suffixes) as a useful tool for determining the meaning of unfamiliar words and growing academic vocabularies.

One of the five components of our Key Vocabulary Routine is Teach Word Learning Strategies, which includes how to look for clues outside the word (use of context) and inside the word (use of word parts) when encountering an unknown word while reading. Outside clues include rereading the sentences before and after the word and using the context of the text. Inside clues come from recognizing meaningful parts of the word, i.e., using morphological knowledge.
Morphemes and Morphological Awareness
Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in a language. The dictionary defines a morpheme as "a word or part of a word that has a meaning and that contains no smaller part that has a meaning." Morphemes include base words and roots, prefixes, and suffixes. They can be combined in different ways to express particular meaning or to fill grammatical roles. Some morphemes are free - they can stand alone (e.g., cat, walk, govern). Other morphemes are bound - they cannot stand alone and must be attached to another morpheme (e.g., re-, un-, geo, phon, -ed, -ment). Here are some examples:

The word cat contains one free morpheme

The word cats contains one free morpheme (cat) and one bound morphemes (s)

The compound word sandbox contains two free morphemes (sand, box)

The word unfit contains one bound morpheme (un) and one free morpheme (fit)

The word transportable contains three bound morphemes (trans, port, able)

Morphology means the study of word parts, and morphological awareness refers to the ability to recognize the presence of morphemes in words. Research suggests that students can be taught various morphemic elements as a way to determine the meaning of new words (Edwards et al., 2004). Carlisle (2010) analyzed 16 studies about the relation of morphological awareness instruction to key components of literacy development. The findings showed that instruction about word parts was associated with improvements in word reading and spelling, and in determining the meaning of unfamiliar words.
Academic, School Morphemes
Academic vocabulary that must be learned beyond grade three often consists of words that combine a root, prefix, and suffix (e.g., poly + nom + ial = polynomial; manu + script = manuscript). In the upper elementary grades and higher, there are many opportunities to find words in content reading that contain Greek and Latin morphemes. Children in primary grades can begin to learn how morphemes combine by adding common prefixes and suffixes to short Anglo-Saxon words and also compounding them. For example:

jump, jumps, jumped, jumping, jumper

read, reread, reader, nonreader, reading

sunshine, schoolhouse, upstream

There are some limitations to morphemic analysis. Although it is useful, teachers must also make students aware that it doesn't always work. This is because some prefixes are not consistent in meaning (e.g., in- means both not and in). It is also because the meaning of many Greek and Latin roots have changed substantially over hundreds of years, so they no longer lend themselves to literal translation. For example, the literal translation of circumspect should be look around ( circum means around, spect means look), while the real meaning is to be cautious, careful.
Introducing Morphology
One way to introduce word analysis skills is to teach students how words are made up of word parts, and how words can be related in word families, such as the word family below for the Latin root port (to carry).

Keys to Literacy trainers often see examples of teachers using word families when we visit classrooms. Here are some examples:

Another instructional strategy is to have students build word families by providing a main root and then prefixes and suffixes that can be combined with the root to generate words. Word Matrix boxes such as the examples below can be used for this purpose. For more examples, visit Peter Bowers' website
convoy, envoy, convoys, envoys, convoying, convoyed, voyage, voyages, voyaging, voyaged, voyager, voyagers retake, retakes, retaken, retaking, untaken, mistake, mistakes, mistakable, mistakably, mistaken, mistakenly, mistaking, intake, intakes, overtake, overtakes, overtaken, overtaking, undertake, undertakes, undertaker, undertaken, undertaking, undertakings, uptake, uptakes, breathtaking, caretaker, caretaking, takes, taker, taken, taking, takeaway, takeover Teaching Morphology
Here are two additional suggestions from our Key Vocabulary Routine professional development program:

Find opportunistic moments: Often, unplanned moments come up during content instruction to provide examples of word analysis. Words from content vocabulary lists may include common word parts, or an opportunity to make a connection between the root of a new word and a word previously covered in class may arise. Content teachers in particular are in a position to point out examples of words that contain roots, prefixes, and suffixes from content reading material.

School-wide focus: Most of the general academic words that students need to learn are derived words with word parts. A school-wide approach to teaching academic vocabulary involves teachers from different grades and subjects agreeing to focus on a few root words and their associated word families each week or two.

A 2015 piece posted by the Institute for Multi-Sensory Education's blog suggests these strategies for teaching morphology in the classroom based on research by Dr. Nonie Lesaux:

Morphology should be taught as a distinct component of a vocabulary improvement program throughout the upper elementary years.

Morphology should be taught as a cognitive strategy to be learned. In order to break a word down into morphemes, students must complete the following four steps:

Recognize that they don't know the word.

Analyze the word for recognizable morphemes, both in the roots and suffixes.

Think of a possible meaning based upon the parts of the word.

Check the meaning of the word against the context.

Students also need to understand the use of prefixes, suffixes, and roots, and how words get transformed.
Lists of Roots, Prefixes, Suffixes
There is a significant body of research indicating that instruction of prefixes is beneficial, and many vocabulary researchers recommend instruction of the most common prefixes as the first and best component of word analysis (Graves, 2004; Carlisle, 2007). White, Sowell, and Yanagihara (1989) found that 20 prefixes account for almost 97% of the 2,959 prefixed words that most frequently appear in school reading materials. Given how often these 20 prefixes occur, it makes sense to teach their meaning and use. To access a free list of these prefixes, visit the Keys to Literacy free resources page at our website, and go to the Vocabulary section. You will also find free lists of the following:

Common Numerical Prefixes

Common and Useful Suffixes

Common Greek and Latin Roots

References:
Carlisle, J.F. (2010). Effects of instruction on morphological awareness on literacy achievement: An integrative review. Reading Research Quarterly, 45 (4) 464-487.

Carlisle, J.F. (2007). Fostering morphological processing, vocabulary development, and reading comprehension. In R.K. Wagner, A.E., Muse, & K.R. Tannenbaum (Eds.). Vocabulary acquisition: Implications for reading comprehension. New York: Guilford Press.

Edwards, C.E., Font, G., Baumann, J.F., & Boland, E. (2004). Unlocking word meanings: Strategies and guidelines for teaching morphemic and contextual analysis. In James, R. Baumann & Edward J. Kame/ennui (Eds.). Vocabulary instruction: Research to practice. New York: Guilford Press.

Graves, M.F. (2004). Teaching prefixes: As good as it gets? In James, R. Baumann & Edward J. Kame/ennui (Eds.). Vocabulary instruction: Research to practice. New York: Guilford Press.

White, T.G., Sowell, J., & Yanagihara, A. (1989). Teaching elementary students to use word-part clues. The Reading Teacher, 42.

Joan Sedita

Joan Sedita is the founder of Keys to Literacy and author of the Keys to Literacy professional development programs. She is an experienced educator, nationally recognized speaker and teacher trainer. She has worked for over 35 years in the literacy education field and has presented to thousands of teachers and related professionals at schools, colleges, clinics, and professional conferences.

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Using Morphology to Teach Vocabulary - Keys to Literacy

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Suggestions for teaching vocabulary by analyzing word parts.

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The Power of Morphology
Morphological awareness is the recognition, understanding, and use of word parts that carry significance, but it is often overlooked in the learning process. Learn activities that help integrate morphological awareness for students learning to read and write.
For example, root words, prefixes, suffixes, and grammatical inflections (e.g., -s or -es for plurals) are all morphemes which can be added or taken away from a word to alter its meaning.

Morphology is one of the often-overlooked building blocks for reading fluency, reading comprehension, and spelling. Research is now demonstrating the importance of strong morphological teaching as early as first and second grade (Apel & Lauraence, 2011), where traditionally it has been the focus in middle and high school years.
"By 10 years of age, knowledge about the structure of words is a better predictor of decoding ability than is phonological awareness."
(Mann & Singson, 2003)
In addition, there is evidence that students learn orthography (phonics), phonology, and morphology in concert rather than in stages, when learning how to read and write. Students with strong morphological skills possess a distinct advantage over students who use a "whole word approach" to decode words. With strong morphological skills, students can approach a novel multisyllabic word and break it into parts in order to predict the meaning. This skill helps in all areas of literacy: decoding, spelling, comprehension, and oral language. Many times struggling readers are unable to identify a word they encounter in the text, even though they know it in their oral language. As a result, their expressive vocabulary remains quite limited compared with proficient readers who incorporate novel vocabulary from their reading into their oral language. Strong readers accomplish this because they recognize the word, infer its meaning, and are able to pronounce it. They efficiently map the vocabulary from their reading with previously known oral vocabulary as well.

As previously mentioned, children seem to simultaneously learn and integrate their phonological, orthographic, and morphological knowledge as they learn to read and write. Early learners may not always do so efficiently or completely, but they do show evidence of emerging awareness. Therefore, instruction and intervention might also be most efficient when these skills are explicitly taught in parallel. There are many ways in which this can be done. Several types of activities will be outlined with specific examples following in the appendix:

Word sorts with self-discovery to aid in recognition of word families based on morphology or orthography.

Explicit instruction of syllable types to recognize orthographical patterns.

Scaffolding to turn patterns into "rules" about meaning and spelling.

Word manipulation through blending and segmenting morphemes to further solidify patterns. Flashcards, syllabication, Word analysis while reading, letter tiles, etc.

Practicing both decoding and encoding activities in tandem is like strengthening both tricep and bicep muscles to maximize the outcome. They are held in tension and the knowledge of one supports the other.

In sum, morphological awareness is an integral part of reading instruction and is especially so for struggling readers. Explicit instruction that integrates morphological awareness with orthographical knowledge (e.g., phonics), and phonological awareness provides the greatest impact. Students who learn how to attach meaning to parts of words will be empowered to be better readers and spellers. Success starts here!

Find the Roots: Teach the concept of root words to your students. You might say, "A root word is the 'main' word in a longer word." Give examples and then have your students practice identifying the root words.

Ask your students to highlight the root words in following complex words.

Fix the Affixes: Explicitly teach students that affixes are extra parts that are "fixed on" to the root word. The affixes at the beginning of words are called "prefixes" because "pre-" means before, and a "suffix" comes at the end of a root word.

Ask your students to "fix" the broken root words with the correct "affix."

Love -ful

Treat -ly

Grate -less

Mood -able

Do -ing

Sad -tion

Pink -y

Tempt -ish

Move -ed

Aggravate -ment

Word Sort: Ask students to sort the following words according to their affixes. Then they should guess the meaning of the affix based on their prior knowledge and the patterns they see.

Building Blocks: Make flash cards and ask your students to make as many real words as they can with these cards. Make sure that the cards contain several root words and multiple affixes.

A starter set of morphemes might include:

En- -ous

Courage -ing

-Ment Dear

Trust Fold

-Y Humble

Syllabicating the "Big Words": Ask your students to preview the next chapter of their textbooks and write down 10 "Big Words." Next, have them highlight the root words that they recognize and take off any affixes that they see. Next they should break up the remaining parts of the word into syllables. Encourage them to infer the meaning of the word based on these word parts. Ask them how they would pronounce the word. A couple of examples follow:
Metamorphosis:

Root: Morph (change)

Affix: meta (whole/big picture)

Possible meaning: change of the whole thing

Possible pronunciation: meta/morph/a/sis

Root: Oxygen (an element on the periodic table)

Affix: -ate (to fill)

Possible meaning: to fill with oxygen

Possible pronunciation: ox/y/gen/ate

There have been many studies done on morphological instruction and its effects on literacy abilities. Joanne Carlisle published a research article in 2010 compiling the results of various morphological instructional studies whose results overwhelmingly show improvements in literacy abilities of the participants. Carlisle suggests that these studies' results support the teaching of morphological awareness in order to improve students' reading abilities. Read her article "Effects of Instruction in Morphological Awareness on Literacy Achievement" to learn more about the connection between morphological instruction and increased literacy.

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The Power of Morphology Morphological awareness is the recognition, understanding, and use of word parts that carry significance, but it is often overlooked in the learning process. Learn activities that help integrate morphological awareness for students learning to read and write.

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Teacher question:
Are there any resources that provide a list of morphemes to teach at each K-5 grade level? I have been looking for a definitive list of morphemes that is organized by grade level like the Fry sight word list. I often come across research about how L1 and L2 students acquire morphemes, but I am looking for a list that represents the morphemes that students will most likely see in print at each K-5 grade level. Does anything like that exist? Thank you for your time.
Shanahan's response:

The short answer to this question is, "No, I don't know of such a list."

But when have I ever been satisfied with the short answer to anything?

Let's make sure we're all in agreement as to what constitutes a morpheme? Basically, a morpheme is the "smallest grammatical unit." It isn't the same thing as a word, and yet many words are morphemes. The distinction turns on whether the unit (the morpheme or word) can stand on its own. Words have to have that kind of independence, while morphemes don't require it.

Thus, bags, trucked, running, and redirect are all words in the English language while bag, s, truck, ed, run, ing, re, and direct are all morphemes. Each morphemic unit carries meaning, but sometimes morphemes can do that independently (bag, truck, run, direct), and sometimes they need to be combined with other morphemes to be considered a word (s, ed, ing, re).

I admitted ignorance on this issue, and I've tried to turn that ignorance to your advantage. I contacted Jeffrey and Peter Bowers. Both are outstanding scholars (Jeff at the University of Bristol in the UK, and Peter at WordWorks Literacy Centre, in Ontario) who are particularly knowledgeable about teaching morphology to improve literacy. They've both published widely on the issue, and both have chided me when they felt I wasn't paying sufficient attention to how words work morphologically. These days I know no one better able to provide you with a thoughtful answer to your question, and boy was I right!

Word Matrix: a map of a word family

Word Sums: reveal underlying structure of any complex word (a word with more than just a base)

un + help + ful + ness > unhelpfulness

Here is Peter Bower's response (with my light editing)

I have no knowledge of such a list, but I wouldn't recommend one anyway.

My recommendation based on theory not direct research evidence - is that the main value comes from teaching all or many members of a morphological family at one time with the matrix and word sums (see the attached figure illustrating a matrix and word sum). In the younger grades I start with free bases [those morphemes that stand alone as words], but once that is established, I have no trouble introducing bound bases [the units that can't stand alone]. This relates to the research we cite about the value of studying meaningfully related items at one time rather than disconnected items.

Instead of a "scope and sequence" of morphemes to teach, what I recommend is starting with words in the children's vocabulary, analyzing such words to find their bases, then looking for other members of that family.

The point is not that there is a "scope and sequence" of morphemes to teach. Rather there is a kind of a "scope" of orthographic concepts that we want students to learn, and teachers can address those concepts based on whatever words are central to the readings they are introducing to the students.

A brief list of those concepts that should be taught would include:

Every word is a base or a base with something else (another base or affix)

Bases and affixes (morphemes) are the meaningful building blocks that construct words.

We can analyze complex words into constituent morphemes with word sums and show their interrelationship with a matrix.

English spelling prioritizes consistent spelling of morphemes over consistent pronunciation of morphemes. (This is why we refer to morphemes by their spelling not their pronunciation. The base of the word action is not referred to by the pronunciation of the word act. Instead it is referred to by its spelling. The base "a - c - t". This is the same as the fact that we don't refer to the <-ed> suffix by one or all of its three pronunciation, we call it by it's spelling "e-d suffix.")

Thus, we need to understand grapheme-phoneme correspondences from within the context of morphological families. (e.g. we learn the phonology of the grapheme by studying morphological families).

There are reliable conventions for the three suffixing conventions.

Studying and understanding the suffixing conventions is not primarily about improving spelling accuracy, it is about being able to analyze hypotheses about connections between words. We can test the hypothesis that has a base only if we know vowel suffixes replace final, non-syllabic s (image/ + ine -> imagine).

The "structure and meaning test": To determine that two words share a base, we need evidence from both structure (word sum) and meaning (etymology). So with the earlier example of words related to (play, playing, playful, replay, playhouse), we can prove all of those words can be analyzed with word sums with coherent affixes and bases. But we can also show that they all go back to an Old English root plegan, plegian for "frolic, move rapidly". However, the word which can be analyzed structurally turns out not to be related. It does not belong in the morphological family with the others because it goes back to a Latin root plac(ere) for "fold". So to "display" is to "unfold".

If we are going to teach children how their writing system works, we need to teach them the interrelation of morphology, phonology, and etymology. As we have pointed out, this is why Structured Word Inquiry (SWI) is not about "adding" morphological instruction to phonics instruction - its about teaching how the system works.

This is why I argue that SWI teaches grapheme-phoneme correspondences more explicitly and accurately than phonics. Phonics instruction (under the definition of associations of pronunciations and letters without reference to morphology or etymology) cannot explain the grapheme-phoneme correspondences in countless words like does or rough or every or homophones, and so on. So many people miss the absolute detail into orthographic phonology that comes with SWI.

Here are some videos to illustrate my point.

Grade 2 Morphology

A teacher showing investigations from his class.

Grade 1 Morphology

Investigating grapheme-phoneme correspondences - with the context of morphological word sums.

Kindergarten Morphology

A kindergarten lesson I taught introducing the word sum and matrix that touches on grapheme-phoneme correspondences like the pronunciation of the <-s> suffix for /z/ and /s/.

It's as simple as starting with the "known" and then expanding from that. Even if kids know all the words in a morphological family (e.g. play, playing, playful, replay, playhouse) the lesson is not about new vocabulary, but learning how word structure links words. That concept can then be applied anywhere.

The other thing I keep in mind when choosing morphological families to investigate is the orthographic concepts a family has to offer. If I've established the fact that words that share a base share a spelling and a meaning connection, then I can introduce a base like with words like actor, acting, react, and action as a way to introduce the fact that the pronunciation of morpheme might change but keep the spelling. In that way we learn the phonology of t is not the "t sound", but that the grapheme can write /t/ when that is the appropriate sound. I've attached an example of a lesson I've used for that before.

I also draw on the <-ed> suffix from early on to highlight this same concept that morphemes do not have pronunciations until they are in a word. The pronunciation of a word like is another useful one to get rid of this idea of a "t sound" since this very common pronunciation of a very common suffix is what is typically thought of the "t sound," but their ain't no /t/!

And then you also encounter words that give rise to the need to teach all the suffixing changes.

These are concepts teachers need to learn and they can bring into work with their class as they investigate words."

Shanahan again

I don't disagree with Peter on any of this, except I'm not as dismissive of the kind of list that you are requesting. I don't see it as mutually exclusive from the curriculum goals that he specified or contradictory of the kind of instruction he described.

Many teachers, when referring to morphology or "structural analysis", actually are talking about affixes alone, and not the bases. If that is the case here, there are some lists like that which present the most common prefixes and suffixes from textbooks in grades 3-9 (White, Sowell, & Yanagihara, 1989). You can easily find those lists on line and you could definitely make use of those lists to make sure that you are hitting all the notes if you do the word sums and matrixes that Peter recommends.

Otherwise, I haven't been able to come up with a graded list of bases for you to use. But I have passed your letter along to my friends at MetaMetrics (the Lexile people) and have asked if they could produce such a list from their language corpus of more than 1 billion words. Stay tuned!
See comments here ›

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What Should Morphology Instruction Look Like?

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Are there any resources that provide a list of morphemes to teach at each K-5 grade level? I have been looking for a definitive list of morphemes that is organized by grade level like the Fry sight word list.

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What is a morpheme? A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning within a word. These units of meaning are spelled consistently even though their pronunciation may change within words, e.g., child/children, heal/healthy. Understanding morphemes is important for understanding reading and spelling. English has a complex writing system that is representative of both sound and meaning.

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Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade

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WHAT?

Literacy is the ability to read and write well. You and the school share responsibility for your child's language and literacy learning. Collaborate with your school to make decisions about your child's literacy education right from the start.

WHY?

Your child benefits when you and the school work together to support her literacy development. Working together promotes faster development and catches trouble spots early.

HOW?

1. COMMUNICATE AND INTERACT OFTEN

Ask the school how you can communicate with each other. Find out how you will receive communication from the school and ask questions if you need more information.

Ways to share your experiences and thoughts with the school:

Help in the classroom

Go to meetings (school/teacher orientation, parent-teacher conferences)

Join school groups (Parent-Teacher Association or Organization, Family Advisory Council)

Ask, "What are the school's literacy goals for children and families?"

Ask, "How does the school partner with families when developing its language and literacy goals for students?"

Ask, "How can I support my child's language and literacy goals?"

2. DISCUSS LITERACY INSTRUCTION AND INTERVENTION

Understand the literacy standards your child is working on at school. Talk about how you and the school can partner to help your child and others get high quality and effective literacy instruction. Review the literacy expectations set for your child and make sure they are appropriate for your child. Ask if the literacy instruction and intervention is evidence-based. Check if the instruction and intervention targets the skills she needs most. Ask:

"What does my child need to know and be able to do?"

"How is reading taught and by whom?"

"When does literacy instruction and intervention happen and for how long?"

"How many other children join?"

"What school materials or trainings about literacy are available to families?"

Tools to help your child read and write may be available. Tools for reading include audio books, screen readers, speed control tape recorders, and devices that can scan printed material to be read aloud. Tools for writing include special keyboards, speech recognition software, proofreading software, and pens that record someone speaking.

3. PRACTICE LITERACY SKILLS AT HOME

Talk with schools about what home literacy activities match your child's skill level. Ask:

"What activities will help her practice the skills learned at school?"

"What strategies should I use to help my child read or write?"

"What tools are available to help my child practice these skills?"

Try out different activities and tools and share with the school what worked well and what did not. Explain your role in the activity. Let the school know if you or your child need more information or support. Discuss other ways your child can practice the skills learned at school, such as at the library or through literacy services in your community.

4. ADDRESS CONCERNS TOGETHER

Discuss what your child has learned and what skills she is still working on. Share your understanding of your child's learning needs. Tell the school what activities or tasks are giving her trouble at home and how you helped. Learn about the school's system of learning support. Ask:

"How is my child's language and literacy learning being supported in this system?"

"How are you monitoring my child's language and literacy progress?"

"What might happen next if my child continues to struggle?"

Take time to understand the school's position and openly communicate your view. Work together to find a solution to address your child's learning needs that you both can support. If you and the school disagree, get advice from others on next steps.

Infographic

Enlarge Infographic

Suggested Citation

Sayko, S. (2017). Partnering with your child's school. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, Office of Special Education Programs, National Center on Improving Literacy. Retrieved from improvingliteracy.org

References

Epstein, J.L. (2013). Summary: School, family, and community partnerships to improve students' reading and literacy skills and attitudes. In B.W. Toso (Ed.), Proceedings of the 22nd National Conference on Family Literacy 2013 Research Strand (pp. 15-22). University Park: PA.

Hall, S.L. & Moats, L.C. (2002). Parenting a struggling reader: A guide to diagnosing and finding help for your child's reading difficulties. New York, NY: Broadway Books.

Henderson, A.T., & Mapp, K.L. (2002). A new wave of evidence: The impact of school, family, and community connections on student achievement. Austin, TX: National Center for Family & Community Connections with Schools, Southwest Educational Development Laboratory.

Mapp, K. L., & Kuttner, P. J. (2013). Partners in education: A dual capacity -building framework for family-school partnerships. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, SEDL. Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/documents/family-community/partners-education.pdf

Related Resources

Abstract

You and the school share responsibility for your child's language and literacy learning. Collaborate with your school to make decisions about your child's literacy education right from the start. Your child benefits when you and the school work together to support her literacy development. Working together promotes faster development and catches trouble spots early.

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Literacy is the ability to read and write well. You and the school share responsibility for your child's language and literacy learning. Collaborate with your school to make decisions about your child's literacy education right from the start. Your child benefits when you and the school work together to support her literacy development.

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Identifying and Teaching Students with Significant Reading Problems

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"No child is born a reader; all children in literate societies have to be taught to read." 1
"We are all good at speech, but disabled as readers and writers; the difference among us in reading/writing is simply that some are fairly easy to cure and some are not." 2

Helping children learn to read is big business. From expensive literacy curricula and remedial programs to one-day workshops and brain-training fads, there are too many claims of guaranteed success and too little focus on trustworthy findings. Having been researchers studying mechanisms for improving literacy outcomes for more than 30 years, we offer a more sober-and sobering-review of what is known about how to help struggling readers.

To begin, we confess that there are some rather large holes in our collective knowledge. We know more about the science of reading than the science of reading instruction. In other words, we know a lot more about what components are associated with improved outcomes for each stage of reading development (e.g., phonemic awareness and the alphabetic principle are essential for beginning readers) than we do about how to teach all these components to a class of students with diverse learning needs. Similarly, we know more about interventions for students with mild to moderate reading difficulties than we do about students with severe reading difficulties. Students with very low reading skills-those at the bottom 10th percentile of word reading and lower-have been challenging to impact. Finally, in policy development, we have not capitalized on theory and science for effectively implementing new practices in schools. 3 Still, there is much we do know that can support excellent instruction. Both here and in two online supplements- "It's Time to Act on a 20-Year-Old Consensus" and "Three Things We Need to Learn" -we offer guidance to prevent and address reading difficulties. There is no doubt that some children have reading disabilities, but the key to improved outcomes for the vast majority of struggling readers, including those with a reading disability, is enhanced core instruction-and that means enhanced curricula, assessments, pre-service and in-service professional development, and supports.

In the high-functioning system we describe below, the primary focus is on assessing changes in children's reading abilities as a response to instruction and on building educators' capacity to deliver more intense, customized interventions. To be effective, such assessments and interventions need to be delivered through a seamless system of well-coordinated general and special education supports that emphasizes prevention, reduces inappropriate referral to and placement in special education as a function of low reading ability, and provides more intensive interventions for students with reading disabilities. Inappropriate referral to and placement in special education is often a function of identifying students as needing special education who have not received an adequate opportunity to learn, as well as the view that special education is the solution for all children who do not readily learn to read. Some students are not given an opportunity to learn because they move frequently or are absent often; others are present day after day but are taught with programs and practices that are not based on the science of reading. Because so few teacher preparation programs, school districts, and commercially available programs have implemented consistently what we have learned from the science of reading, far too many students struggle-feeling like they are reading failures, not realizing that they were never provided the explicit instruction they need to succeed.* The vast majority of students with low reading achievement have preventable problems: with explicit, evidence-based instruction, they would learn to read.

These evidence-based practices are fundamental and necessary not only to develop strong readers but also to discern the differences between students with reading difficulties that can be readily supported through general education from those with serious reading disabilities or dyslexia. For the purposes of this article, we are using reading disabilities and dyslexia synonymously to refer to children with foundational decoding and spelling problems.

Students in classrooms where evidence-based fundamentals of reading instruction are deliberately implemented are far less likely to demonstrate reading difficulties. Enhanced general education instruction in the early grades reduces the number of children who do not meet grade-level benchmarks and start to fall behind, and therefore it reduces eventual referrals to special education.

We recognize that teachers-even those with the most advanced knowledge and skills-cannot and should not be asked to carry the entire burden of improving reading outcomes for all learners. We think there is ample evidence to suggest that educational systems can be organized so that the vast majority of students-close to 95 percent-will be reasonably successful readers when these organized systems are effectively implemented. 4 The roughly 5 percent of students who do not make adequate progress when these systems are in place are likely truly reading disabled because of the persistence of their reading difficulties. They too can improve their reading skills, but they require highly specialized, intensive interventions and may have difficulty reading throughout their lives.

Why Do Some Children Learn to Read Easily, While Others Struggle?

Learning to read is a process that occurs so readily for some youngsters that it seems to develop almost naturally. With minimal guidance and feedback, some students are on their way to recognizing the patterns of written words and inferring the ways in which our phonological system (sounds of language) map to our complex orthography (written system). But for other students-anywhere from 40 to 65 percent-the task of learning to read is much more challenging. If these students do not receive highly explicit instruction with additional opportunities for implicit learning, difficulties in learning to read proficiently are inevitable. These more challenging readers are the ones who require the most knowledgeable and skillful teachers.

Reading science has established that learning to read is an acquired process, not a natural process-it's nothing like learning to walk or talk. There are no brain systems evolutionarily designed for reading. Rather, neural circuits for language and visual processing must be repurposed and reorganized to support literacy. 5 One neural circuit involves the ability to process sublexical units of words, initially at the phonological level. The child must take what is essentially an implicit understanding of the sound system of language and explicitly apply it to print. 6 Once this repurposing begins, another neural circuit designed for face and object recognition has to become a rapid letter and word processor; this reorganization of the circuit requires considerable meaningful exposure to print. As these circuits are revamped, they form a system, which usually takes several years to become well developed, that enables the child to process print with immediate access to the meaning of the word, which is sometimes described as "language at the speed of sight." 7 If a child does not have access because of struggles with mastering the alphabetic principle, this system does not develop adequately and the child falls behind in the ability to automatically recognize letter patterns. Reading becomes an effortful, unenjoyable process. Because all children must reorganize these neural circuits into a reading brain, prevention programs must focus on early acquisition of these skills. It is very hard to catch up if mastering the alphabetic principle is delayed. This is why prevention is more effective and less costly than remediation. 8

Students with reading disabilities have great difficulty acquiring foundational, word-level reading skills; they do not decode words accurately or fluently, and often they have poor spelling. Except for assessing to determine children's responses to instruction, there are no effective methods for differentiating subgroups of children with word-level problems. Students with reading disabilities (dyslexia) are real and represent the largest group of children in special education, even though in many cases stronger instruction in the earlier grades may have prevented the special education referral; they also comprise a large portion of the general education population that does not read well but has not been identified for special education.

Preventing reading difficulties is about making sure every child is exposed to reading instruction that is sufficiently explicit and customized to support the acquisition of foundational skills within a language-rich learning environment that promotes vocabulary and background knowledge. This will reduce unnecessary special education referral and identification. Students with significant, intractable reading problems that are not responsive to evidence-based instruction meet an important threshold for special education referral and identification. However, students who have not consistently had access to evidence-based instruction (because they are absent often or because their school district is not aware of the science of reading) are the students for whom reading difficulties can be prevented. While adequately addressing all the issues related to reading disabilities and dyslexia is beyond the scope of this article, we highlight "18 Common Misunderstandings of Dyslexia" in the box on the right.

How Should Educational Systems Be Organized So That the Vast Majority of Students Learn to Read?

Nearly two decades ago, the President's Commission on Excellence in Special Education 17 made three recommendations that-if fully implemented-could dramatically improve the instruction children receive and their reading achievement. The first recommendation was to focus on results, not process. The commission observed that special education was a highly bureaucratic process that did a good job in providing civil rights protection once a child was identified, but did not show strong evidence for accelerated gains in learning. It recommended the simplification of paperwork requirements and a change in monitoring of school-based implementation of special education to a focus on outcomes.

The second recommendation was to embrace a model of prevention, not a model of failure. Many literacy problems can be resolved with early intervention, so the commission advocated for universal screening, progress monitoring, and increasingly intense intervention based on instructional response; prevention was to start upon school entry and be supported by special education personnel. These methods, originally subsumed under a response to intervention (RTI) rubric, are now often referred to as multiple tiers of systematic support (MTSS).

The third recommendation was to consider children with disabilities as general education children first. Although requirements for placement in the least restrictive environment result in many children with reading disabilities spending the bulk of their school day in general education, there is often little alignment between the approaches to literacy instruction in general and special education. The primary special education intervention often involves accommodations, not remedial interventions to significantly improve students' reading ability.

We, as well as others, have summarized a model for preventing reading difficulties that aligns with an RTI/MTSS approach. 23 The fundamental principle of prevention is screening to identify risk early. 24 The idea is that it is better to over-identify children at risk for reading problems as early as possible and provide necessary instruction than to under-identify and have large numbers of students who suffer as their problems linger without the required instructional supports. An overview of this system for preventing reading difficulties is illustrated in the "Tiers of Instruction" below.

Tiers of Instruction
The Tiers of Instruction describes a model for providing increasingly customized reading interventions to students at risk for reading problems. Commonly presented as a triangle, we have tipped the triangle to emphasize the primacy of Tier 1 instruction for all students. Tiers 2 and 3 increase intensity for students who do not respond adequately to instruction. The percentages represent estimates, based on effective implementation of a multi-tiered system, of how many children are likely to be at or near grade level and only need Tier 1 (effective, evidence-based instruction for the whole class), at risk of reading difficulties and require Tier 2 (targeted, efficient supplemental instruction), or at risk of severe challenges and require Tier 3 (intensive, customized intervention, often with special education and/or dyslexia services).

From J. M. Fletcher, G. R. Lyon, L. S. Fuchs, and M. A. Barnes, Learning Disabilities: From Identification to Intervention, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 2019), 91. Copyright Guilford Press. Reprinted with permission from Guilford Press.

In this seamless, supportive system, all students are screened. Those at risk for reading difficulties receive continued evidence-based Tier 1 literacy instruction in the classroom, ongoing progress monitoring, and, if needed, a Tier 2 intervention that addresses their specific literacy problems. This Tier 2 intervention may be provided by the classroom teacher, a trained teaching assistant supervised by the classroom teacher, or an educational specialist such as a reading teacher. Tier 2 interventions are not part of a special education but rather an extension or supplement within general education. Students participate in Tier 2 intervention for a specified period of time, typically 8-12 weeks, with ongoing progress monitoring, approximately every two weeks. Using progress monitoring data and teachers' observations, each student's response to literacy instruction is determined (e.g., is the student reaching expected benchmarks?).

If the student's response is not sufficient to meet progress monitoring benchmarks, there are several options, including adjusting the instruction, changing the group, adjusting the group size, changing the intervention, or providing an increasingly intensive intervention (which may be longer, e.g., 30-45 minutes rather than 20 minutes, and more customized to each student's needs). If inadequate instructional response continues, the educational team or parent/guardian may determine that an eligibility evaluation for special education is in order. The advantage to this approach is that students are provided appropriate, evidence-based instruction early; for the majority of students, this rapid Tier 2 intervention is adequate for becoming strong readers. Only those students with persistent and significant reading difficulties would be referred for special education or dyslexia services.

Throughout this model, screening and progress monitoring are critical. Most schools across the United States are implementing screening approaches to reading difficulties that ostensibly identify those youngsters who are at risk for reading failure. It is mandated for dyslexia in over 40 states. 25 Effective screeners (1) require 10 minutes or less per child, (2) demonstrate strong psychometric properties (e.g., are valid and reliable), (3) provide readily usable data that identify students as either at risk or not at risk, (4) are developmentally appropriate and can be administered two to three times per year, and (5) are easily scored. Errors in identifying which children are at risk of reading difficulties are inevitable, but we think schools should focus on reducing errors that result in not identifying risk (false negatives). In other words, it is better for a child who does not need extra instruction to get it than for a child who does need extra instruction to go without.

For progress monitoring, short probes involving timed word or passage reading are used so that teachers can make instructional decisions. 26 These types of assessments are aimed at improving instruction and determining each student's incremental progress, recognizing that for students who are consistently making inadequate progress, additional interventions may be warranted. (For an easy-to-use review of progress monitoring tools, see here.)

Progress monitoring data can be useful in many ways. First, these data can document that students are learning the critical aspects of reading (e.g., sound-spelling patterns, vocabulary) being taught. Second, the types of responses students provide can guide instruction by highlighting each student's needs for reteaching and additional practice, while those elements that appear to be successfully learned can be monitored for maintenance. Third, data from these measures can facilitate decisions about curriculum (e.g., whether additional or different programs are needed), grouping (e.g., some students may benefit from a more advanced group; others may benefit from a mini one-on-one lesson to enhance performance), and interventions (e.g., whether to continue an intervention). Fourth, these data-especially ongoing progress monitoring data-can inform decisions about referral to and placement in special education. If special education eligibility becomes an issue, the best signal is the intractability of the child's reading problems when provided with the explicit instruction that works for most children.

How Can a Supportive, Integrated General and Special Education System Be Implemented?

Developing a systemic approach to supporting teachers so that they can meet the needs of the range of readers in their classrooms requires ongoing screening, monitoring students' responses to instruction so that teachers can adjust instruction to meet students' needs, and fidelity of implementation to ensure adherence to treatment protocols. But seamlessly assembling all these pieces is not easy.

First, most educators, including teachers and school leaders, would benefit from ongoing situated professional development that builds on the knowledge they have and extends it in ways that may be readily implemented in their school setting. What happens when you say "professional development" to most educators? Do they smile with anticipation about what they will learn and how they can implement it in their school? Typically, no. Too often, professional development is a one-day exposure to ideas (of varying quality), many of which are lost before the next day at school.

We are suggesting a distributed professional development model that provides ongoing learning opportunities as each aspect of the new system is launched. This model can follow standards like those from Learning Forward. Workshops on how to screen children and offer highly effective Tier 1 instruction would be followed with in-class coaching and support until the majority of educators were aligning their practices with data on outcomes. Then, educators would learn how to extend their Tier 1 practices with Tier 2 supplemental interventions, increasing time in literacy instruction for students who are not making sufficient progress. This would ensure that the instruction children receive in Tiers 1 and 2 is well aligned, which increases effectiveness.

Adding Tier 3 instruction requires yet more professional development, coaching, and coordination. Tier 3 more intensively focuses intervention on students' skill gaps and may be guided by more diagnostic and progress monitoring assessments. Students in Tier 3 may be candidates for special education and/or dyslexia identification and services. Because of the focus on individual skill gaps, it is not as tightly aligned with Tier 1 (regular classroom instruction), but Tier 1 remains essential for providing a comprehensive reading program. For example, a child receiving Tier 3 intervention for specific decoding skills needs Tier 1 core instruction to continue progressing in vocabulary, listening comprehension, writing across genres, and other aspects of English language arts.

Building up the seamless system takes time and a great deal of in-class support for teachers-but it is far more effective than scattershot workshops. Preventing and addressing reading difficulties is hard, but the effort pays big dividends in reducing reading difficulties. We urge schools, districts, and states to put far more effort into systemic supports (especially the professional development and coaching for teachers and administrators described here). We recommend beginning in grade 1, where the strongest evidence of the efficacy of these approaches exists, and then expanding to other grades.

What Can Teachers Do Now to Support Students with Reading Difficulties or with Mild to Moderate Disabilities or Dyslexia?

Most of what we describe above requires system-level change. But teachers want to do what's best for their students today. Here are six steps that teachers can implement in their classrooms now (and that school leaders should start supporting immediately).

Use academic learning time deliberately and purposefully to ensure students receive the maximum amount of evidence-based instruction. Academic engagement-i.e., time on task-is an excellent predictor of academic outcomes.27 Consider how much time you spend explicitly teaching and providing highly focused instructional time. Observation studies reveal that surprisingly little class time is devoted to explicitly teaching the high-priority skills associated with improved reading outcomes.28 Consider ways to structure your classroom, teaching, and resources so that maximum time is spent on instruction and minimal time is lost to transitions, over-explaining, and behavioral management.

Consider the value of the one-minute lesson. Many students with significant reading difficulties benefit from a one-minute lesson in which they are provided a mini review of a challenging task, an opportunity to practice word reading with feedback, or a chance to demonstrate what they know with feedback. Time is always an issue, but do not allow it to block you from spending highly focused instructional minutes with the students who need you the most.

Offer customized instruction that reflects students' learning needs. Many of the students you teach learn to read almost effortlessly. However, students with reading difficulties, disabilities, or dyslexia require highly customized instruction that aligns with their specific learning needs. How can you determine what this customized instruction might be? Examine their screening and progress monitoring data. Determine the high-priority areas in which they require additional instruction and practice. Identify ways to include this type of work each day in an individual mini lesson or with a small group of students with similar needs. Provide practice opportunities with feedback so they have multiple opportunities to acquire proficiency.

Give struggling readers instruction in small groups, in pairs, or one on one. Many students with reading difficulties benefit from the specialized instruction that is allowable in small-group, paired, and one-on-one instruction. These formats provide opportunities to tailor instruction to their needs with appropriate practice and targeted feedback.

Create many opportunities to read a range of text types and a range of text levels. Students who struggle with reading benefit from opportunities to generalize their reading to varied text types, including digital texts, informational texts, and narrative texts as well as hybrid informational and narrative texts such as biographies. This variation in text types is not just for older students but can be part of the listening comprehension and text reading of younger students, including beginning readers. Also, consider ways to vary the text levels that students read. Students can read and comprehend more advanced texts when they have adequate background knowledge, are motivated by the topic, and/or have additional instructional support.

Provide explicit instruction that incorporates clear feedback. Explicit instruction with feedback is highly effective, especially when students are having difficulty learning with less explicit methods. Teachers who offer this type of evidence-based instruction do the following:

Identify, prior to teaching, what they expect the students to do or say.

State clearly and in as few words as possible what they need students to know.

Model what they expect students to say or do.

Ask students to demonstrate what is expected (e.g., blend phonemes, read a word, read a text silently).

Provide prompt feedback that is specific and clear (e.g., "I heard several of you blending the sounds /r/, /a/, /t/ and then saying the word 'rat.' That is what I expect. I also heard several of you only saying the word 'rat' and not blending the sounds. I will give you three more sounds, and I want everyone to both blend the sounds and say the word.").

Give selected students opportunities to respond independently (and avoid only calling on the most capable students).

Control the task difficulty by making the task less difficult for students in need of adaptation and then gradually increasing the task difficulty as their performance improves.

Maintain high levels of student success, engagement, and response.

Wrap Up

The degree to which a student expresses a reading difficulty is always an interaction between the child's opportunity to learn (due to absences, instructional quality, or other issues) and the extent of the student's reading impairment. Thus, youngsters who are provided a genuine opportunity to learn to read-including high-quality, explicit, evidence-based instruction-and yet still present with significant reading difficulties are likely to have a severe reading impairment. In contrast, children who have not consistently been able to access high-quality, evidence-based instruction and present with significant reading difficulties are likely to have reading problems that could have been prevented and still can be remediated. This difference is of the utmost importance. Currently, there are students with preventable reading problems who are suffering academically and emotionally, and who are placed in special education often to receive accommodations without effective remediation. And there are students with severe reading disabilities or dyslexia who are not getting the intensive interventions they need-in part because special education is overwhelmed with large numbers of students who do not actually have reading disabilities.

This must end, but teachers cannot solve these problems on their own. These are systemic problems-and that is why we have proposed a new, seamless, three-tiered system of general and special education to address them. Far too many students and teachers are struggling. It is long past time for leaders of schools, districts, and states-not to mention teacher preparation programs, curriculum developers, and professional development providers-to step up, change their policies and programs, and focus on meeting children's needs.

Sharon Vaughn is the executive director of the Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is also the Manuel J. Justiz Endowed Chair in Teacher Education and a professor in the Learning Disabilities and Behavior Disorders program. She has earned a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Institute for Literacy and Learning and the Special Education Research Award from the Council for Exceptional Children. Jack M. Fletcher is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Houston, where he is also the associate vice president for research administration. A former member of the President's Commission on Excellence in Special Education, he has earned the International Literacy Association's Albert J. Harris Award and the International Dyslexia Association's Samuel Torrey Orton Award. This research was supported by grant P50 HD052117 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (the authors are solely responsible for the content).

*To learn more about how preparation programs, professional development, and other key supports could be improved, see "Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science" in the Summer 2020 issue of American Educator. ( return to article)

Endnotes

1. G. R. Lyon et al., "Rethinking Learning Disabilities," in Rethinking Special Education for a New Century, ed. C. E. Finn et al. (Washington, DC: Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and Progressive Policy Institute, 2001), 287.
2. A. Liberman, "How Theories of Speech Affect Research in Reading and Writing," in Foundations of Reading Acquisition and Dyslexia: Implications for Early Intervention, ed. B. Blachman (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997), 5.
3. L. Sanetti and M. Collier-Meek, Supporting Successful Interventions in Schools: Tools to Plan, Evaluate, and Sustain Effective Implementation (New York: Guilford Press, 2019).
4. J. Fletcher and S. Vaughn, "Response to Intervention: Preventing and Remediating Academic Difficulties," Child Development Perspectives 3, no. 1 (2009): 30-37; and A. VanDerHeyden, J. Witt, and D. Gilbertson, "A Multi-Year Evaluation of the Effects of a Response to Intervention (RTI) on Identification of Children for Special Education," Journal of School Psychology 45, no. 2 (2007): 225-256.
5. S. Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read (New York: Penguin Random House, 2009).
6. Liberman, "How Theories of Speech."
7. M. Seidenberg, Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can't, and What Can Be Done About It (New York: Basic Books, 2017).
8. Fletcher and Vaughn, "Response to Intervention."
9. A. VanDerHeyden, M. Burns, and W. Bonifay, "Is More Screening Better? The Relationship Between Frequent Screening, Accurate Decisions, and Reading Proficiency," School Psychology Review 47, no. 1 (2017): 62-82.
10. J. Fletcher and D. Currie, "Vision Efficiency Interventions and Reading Disability," Perspectives on Language and Literacy 37, no. 1 (2011): 21-24.
11. J. M. Fletcher et al., Learning Disabilities: From Identification to Intervention, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 2019).
12. A. E. Cunningham et al., "Disciplinary Knowledge of K-3 Teachers and Their Knowledge Calibration in the Domain of Early Literacy," Annals of Dyslexia 54 (2004): 139-167; and L. Spear-Swerling and P. Brucke, "Preparing Novice Teachers to Develop Basic Reading and Spelling Skills in Children," Annals of Dyslexia 54 (2004): 332-364.
13. J. Worthy, "'We Know for a Fact': Dyslexia Interventionists and the Power of Authoritative Discourse," Journal of Literacy Research 50, no. 3 (2018): 359-382.
14. R. Peterson and B. Pennington, "Developmental Dyslexia," The Lancet 379, no. 9830 (2012): 1997-2007.
15. S. Shaywitz et al., "Persistence of Dyslexia: The Connecticut Longitudinal Study at Adolescence," Pediatrics 104, no. 6 (1999): 1351-1359.
16. A. Ellis, Reading, Writing and Dyslexia: A Cognitive Analysis (Hove, UK: Psychology Press, 1993).
17. US Department of Education, Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, A New Era: Revitalizing Special Education for Children and Their Families (Washington, DC: 2002).
18. M. Snowling and M. Melby-Lervåg, "Oral Language Deficits in Familial Dyslexia: A Meta-Analysis and Review," Psychological Bulletin 142, no. 5 (2016): 498-545.
19. See, for example, M. Melby-Lervåg, T. Redick, and C. Hulme, "Working Memory Training Does Not Improve Performance on Measures of Intelligence or Other Measures of 'Far Transfer': Evidence from a Meta-Analytic Review," Perspectives on Psychological Science 11 (2016): 512-534.
20. Dehaene, Reading in the Brain.
21. M. Scheiman, "Effect of Vergence/Accommodative Therapy on Reading in Children with Convergence Insufficiency: A Randomized Clinical Trial," Optometry and Vision Science 96, no. 11 (2019): 836-849.
22. L. Tamm, "Comparing Treatments for Children with ADHD and Word Reading Difficulties: A Randomized Clinical Trial," Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 85, no. 5 (2017): 434-446.
23. Fletcher and Vaughn, "Response to Intervention."
24. For similar models, see G. Batsche et al., Response to Intervention: Policy Considerations and Implementation (Alexandria, VA: National Association of State Directors of Special Education, 2005); and J. Kovaleski, A. VanDerHeyden, and E. Shapiro, The RTI Approach to Evaluating Learning Disabilities (New York: Guilford Press, 2013).
25. Y. Petscher et al., Screening for Dyslexia (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, Office of Special Education Programs, National Center on Improving Literacy, 2019).
26. L. Fuchs et al., "Bringing Data-Based Individualization to Scale: A Call for the Next-Generation Technology of Teacher Supports," Journal of Learning Disabilities (forthcoming).
27. C. Greenwood, B. Horton, and C. Utley, "Academic Engagement: Current Perspectives on Research and Practice," School Psychology Review 31, no. 3 (2002): 328-349; and J. Stallings, R. Johnson, and J. Goodman, "Engaged Rates: Does Grade Level Make a Difference?," Journal of Research in Childhood Education 1 (1986): 20-26.
28. D. Chard and E. Kameenui, "Struggling First-Grade Readers: The Frequency and Progress of Their Reading," Journal of Special Education 34, no. 1 (2000): 28-38; and S. Vaughn et al., "Reading Instruction for Students with LD and EBD: A Synthesis of Observation Studies," Journal of Special Education 36, no. 1 (2002): 2-13.
29. See, for example, M. Lovett et al., "Treating the Core Deficits of Developmental Dyslexia: Evidence of Transfer of Learning After Phonologically- and Strategy-Based Reading Training Programs," Developmental Psychology 30, no. 6 (1994): 805-822; and R. Morris et al., "Multiple-Component Remediation for Developmental Reading Disabilities: IQ, Socioeconomic Status, and Race as Factors in Remedial Outcome," Journal of Learning Disabilities 45, no. 2 (2012): 99-127.
30. M. Lovett, R. Barron, and J. Frijters, "Word Identification Difficulties in Children and Adolescents with Reading Disabilities: Intervention Research Findings," in Handbook of Learning Disabilities, ed. H. Swanson, K. Harris, and S. Graham (New York: Guilford Press, 2013).
31. Morris et al., "Multiple-Component Remediation."
32. C. Denton et al., "An Evaluation of Intensive Intervention for Students with Persistent Reading Difficulties," Journal of Learning Disabilities 39, no. 5 (2006): 447-466.

[illustrated by Jia Liu]

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Identifying and Teaching Students with Significant Reading Problems

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"No child is born a reader; all children in literate societies have to be taught to read."

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Dyslexia Resource Hub | UF Literacy Institute

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Welcome! This collection of dyslexia resources was compiled and curated by the University of Florida Literacy Institute team.

Our goal is to help parents, teachers, and advocates of students with dyslexia expand their knowledge, refine their practice, and understand their rights.

The Dyslexia 101 webinar gives an overview of dyslexia and provides an introduction to the resources here on the Hub

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Welcome! This collection of dyslexia resources was compiled and curated by the University of Florida Literacy Institute team. Our goal is to help parents, teachers, and advocates of students with dyslexia expand their knowledge, refine their practice, and understand their rights.

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Video 3: Narrative Language, Connectives

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XbHkW0qvmbwjOjUTfHQyIulopVWuYiin/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=100871675445083706363&rtpof=true&sd=true

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Eye Spy, Listen for Sounds — Simply say, “I see a ‘mug,’ what’s the first sound you hear in the word mug.” Hold the first sound to emphasize it to younger children. Think of short 3-letter words that have a consonant, vowel and consonant (CVC), such as sun, sat, sit, mat, man, map, log and nap. Then practice with middle or end sounds. For example, say, “I spy a mmmuuugg.” Students need to blend the sounds together to identify the word.

Simon Says — Play the game in the usual way, but say some of the instruction words in broken down sounds so your students have to blend them to know what they need to do. For example, “Simon says t-a-p your l-e-g.” or “S-i-t down.”

Say the Sounds — Collect objects that the children are familiar with in a bag. Choose objects with 3 phonemes (sounds) that are CVC words (examples: mug, sock, hat, duck, pen). One child chooses an item without showing it to the class. That child segments by saying the name of the object as separate sounds (/d/ /u/ /ck/). The other students practice blending the sounds together to guess the object.

In addition, activities such as Tap It, Map It, Zap It, jumbled sentences, missing sound activity sheets, find the word, and fluency boards can help students with phonics skills and knowledge. And I have one more game to share with you.

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Resources to Support Students With Dyslexia

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Dyslexia is a hidden disability that can affect how children learn. The following resources can help offer support.

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How the Reading Brain Learns to Spell with Dr. Shelley Blackwell 9/20/23

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This reading intervention was developed and tested by Dr. Jessica Toste and colleagues at The University of Texas at Austin. The program materials were redesigned for open access by the Toste Team in October 2022. We are excited for you to use the Word Connections program! We look forward to continued feedback from teachers and students.

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Free Decodable Story Generator for the Science of Reading

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Free Decodable Story Generator for the Science of Reading

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Generate a decodable story compatible with any Science of Reading-based phonics curriculum for free. Download a student-friendly PDF in seconds.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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A Powerful Shortcut To Help Students Blend As They Read

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Suggestion for implementing the strategy Understanding dyslexia and literacy acquisition within the Guide to Dyslexia and learning

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From the Experts-Teachable Moments Videos - AIM Institute for Learning & Research

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From the Experts-Teachable Moments Videos - AIM Institute for Learning & Research

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Teachable Moments Videos - AIM Institute for Learning & Research

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Teachable Moments Videos - These brief conversations with experts in the field of literacy, neuroscience, language and education, filmed during visits to AIM, are intended to address commonly asked questions, preview or review critical information or create further interest in topics related to student achievement.

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Overall, connected phonation has strong research support and is probably my first go-to, but I want my students to learn other ways to decode, as well. I think it makes sense to teach flexibility with blending from the beginning. It's OK for a student to use one method sometimes and another method at other times.

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Phonological Awareness Research & Resources

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Phonological Awareness Research & Resources

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The Decodable Book Webinar Series This is a free webinar series where educators and parents can get free take-aways, learn about various series, gain immediate implementation ideas, earn PD credit, and more... Click a box below to get started! This is a free webinar series where educators and parents can get free take-aways, learn about [...]

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Reading IS Rocket Science – Moats

10 Maxims: What We’ve Learned so Far About How Children Learn to Read(Reid Lyon)

Narrowing Down to Find Common Ground

MTSS for English Language Learners

How the Science of Reading Informs 21st-Century Education

Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition From Novice to Expert

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Professional Learning and Webinars

Glean Education

Free e-learning modules (more modules to come)

The Los Angeles County Office of Education (Getting Reading Right)

Sacramento County Office of Education (California Dyslexia Initiative)

International Dyslexia Association of Northern California

High Frequency Words What, Why, and How It Pertains to the Science of Reading

Cortex in the Classroom: Advancing the Science of Reading in the Early Years

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APM Reports, Emily Hanford Podcasts

Amplify Science of Reading

Teaching, Reading & Learning: The Podcast

Glean Education

Literacy Podcast (Melissa and Lori)

Emily Hanford-Sold A Story

Leading Literacy (LACOE)

A Novel Idea: The History of the Science of Reading

The Structured Literacy Podcast

Triple R Teaching

PodClassed (Reading Horizons)

EdView 360 (Voyager Sopris)

SeeHearSpeak