Unlocking Literacy: The Role of Phonemes

Keynote: What Do Phonemes Have to Do With It? | 2022 Literacy Symposium

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Summary

The 2022 Literacy Symposium, hosted by PaTTAN, explores the crucial role of phoneme awareness in literacy. Dr. Louisa Moats leads the keynote, delving into the nuances of phoneme awareness versus phonics, the impact of phonological processing on reading and spelling, and effective teaching strategies. Through research-backed insights, Dr. Moats highlights how phoneme awareness aids in mapping speech to print, emphasizes the importance of teaching phonemes explicitly, and addresses common misconceptions about phoneme and grapheme associations. Her in-depth discussion sets the stage for educators to refine their practices, ensuring foundational literacy skills for all students.

Highlights

Dr. Louisa Moats emphasizes the essential role of phoneme awareness in literacy 🗝️.
Phoneme awareness involves understanding the distinct sounds that make up words 🔤.
Addressing misconceptions, phoneme awareness differs fundamentally from phonics 📚.
Effective literacy instruction requires embedding phoneme awareness into lessons 🌟.
Research shows phoneme awareness as a critical predictor of literacy success 🏆.

Key Takeaways

Phonemes are essential in linking speech to print for effective reading and spelling 📖.
Teaching phoneme awareness aids in developing solid foundational literacy skills 🧩.
Phoneme awareness and phonics are related but distinct instructional elements 🎯.
Understanding and teaching the nuances of phonemes can improve literacy outcomes dramatically 🚀.
Explicit instruction and practice in phoneme awareness can resolve common literacy challenges 🎓.

Overview

Dr. Louisa Moats passionately underscores the critical nature of phoneme awareness in strengthening literacy skills. Through her engaging keynote, she navigates the distinct yet intertwined roles of phoneme awareness and phonics, providing clarity amid ongoing debates among educators and researchers. Her insights aim to empower educators with evidence-based strategies to enhance reading and spelling instruction.

Drawing from extensive research, Dr. Moats highlights the importance of understanding phonemes as abstract yet pivotal components of language. She explains how phoneme awareness supports the mapping of sounds to print, a foundational literacy skill, and addresses how misconceptions can hinder teaching efforts. This deep dive into phonological processing reveals the necessity for precise and conscious teaching methods.

The symposium serves as a platform to disseminate evidence-based practices, bringing renewed focus on phoneme awareness as a cornerstone of literacy instruction. Dr. Moats calls for educators to integrate phoneme awareness closely with phonics in lesson planning, focusing on the development of nuanced phonemic skills that are tailored to individual student needs and aligned with broader literacy goals.

Chapters

00:00 - 03:00: Introduction and Opening Remarks The chapter opens with Carol Clancy, the Pennsylvania Bureau Director of Special Education, giving a warm welcome to attendees at the 2022 Patent Literacy Symposium. She emphasizes the importance of literacy skills for full participation in society and the workplace, highlighting the ongoing challenges many citizens face in achieving these essential skills.
03:00 - 05:00: Welcome by Carol Clancy The chapter, titled 'Welcome' by Carol Clancy, highlights the low percentage of the population possessing necessary literacy skills according to the National Council on Teachers of English standards. The literacy symposium aims to tackle this issue by presenting the latest evidence-informed literacy research and instructional practices to over 4,000 attendees.
05:00 - 08:30: Introduction of Patent Literacy Team The chapter introduces the Patent Literacy Team, highlighting their determination to make a cohesive impact across Pennsylvania. The symposium features presentations by leading researchers and practitioners who focus on translating research into practical applications in classrooms throughout the commonwealth, aiming to achieve significant learning gains for all students. The event includes over 75 sessions with various focal points.
08:30 - 10:00: Keynote Speech by Dr. Louisa Moats: Introduction Dr. Louisa Moats delivers the keynote speech focusing on various educational strands such as equity, leadership, writing, word recognition, oral language, secondary literacy, MTSS, and implementation science. The symposium aims to enhance knowledge and practice for all attendees. Dr. Pam Casler also greets the audience.
10:00 - 30:00: The Role of Phoneme Awareness The chapter titled 'The Role of Phoneme Awareness' begins with an introduction by the state lead for literacy, expressing gratitude to various individuals and teams that contributed to the event, particularly acknowledging the leadership of Carol Clancy at the Bureau of Special Education, the patent directors, the support team, program assistants like Kelly Capp, and the tech team. It also mentions that before each keynote speaker at the symposium, members of the patent literacy team will be introduced.
30:00 - 45:00: Phonemes and Phonics The chapter titled 'Phonemes and Phonics' begins by acknowledging the immense contributions of various individuals who have worked tirelessly to make a literacy symposium possible. The event boasts over 4,300 participants and offers 75 literacy sessions led by some of the world's most respected literacy leaders and dynamic practitioners. The chapter introduces the patent literacy team from the central office in Harrisburg, starting with Dr. Jenny Alexander, who is prompted to unmute to speak.
45:00 - 60:00: Research and Practice in Phoneme Instruction The chapter, titled 'Research and Practice in Phoneme Instruction,' begins with introductions from key members of a literacy team who express excitement and gratitude for the opportunity to share and gather valuable information. Jenny Alecandry, having been part of the team for over five years, highlights the stellar lineup of presenters and the valuable insights expected from them. Karen Brady and Dr. Stacy Cherny from the central office convey their support and appreciation for the participants' attendance, setting a collaborative and appreciative tone as the session opens.
60:00 - 61:30: Conclusion and Closing Remarks The chapter titled 'Conclusion and Closing Remarks' appears to involve closing remarks or concluding statements for a session or series of sessions. It opens with speakers introducing themselves and expressing excitement about the upcoming days. Maggie Serpalowski and Karen Jerry extend their welcomes to the participants, expressing their gratitude for the attendance and their anticipation for the learning experiences shared over the coming days. The chapter ends with acknowledgments to the literacy team from the central office, leading to a forward momentum to continue with the planned activities or discussions.

Keynote: What Do Phonemes Have to Do With It? | 2022 Literacy Symposium Transcription

00:00 - 00:30 much angela and good morning everyone my name is carol clancy i'm the pennsylvania bureau director of special education and it is my honor to welcome you to the 2022 patent literacy symposium we know how critical literacy abilities are to participate fully in society and the work place in 2022 we also know that many citizens continue to struggle to possess those level literacy skills to participate fully in
00:30 - 01:00 those settings in fact according to the national council on teachers of english standards for english language arts a very small percentage of our population possesses all of those necessary skills the goal of this literacy symposium is to address this problem by offering the latest evidenced informed literacy research and its related instructional practices with over 4 000 attendees here right now
01:00 - 01:30 today we are determined in pennsylvania to be cohesive to make a difference across the commonwealth so i thank you for attending today and doing your part the symposium includes presentations from the world's most respected researchers and practitioners who are translating research to practice each day in pennsylvania classrooms resulting in significant learning gains for all students with over 75 sessions with focused
01:30 - 02:00 strands to include equity leadership writing word recognition oral language secondary literacy mtss and the implementation science the symposium's breadth and depth is certain to enhance the knowledge and practice of all who attend so thank you so much and for joining us today and enjoy your day hello everyone my name is dr pam casler
02:00 - 02:30 and it is my honor to serve as patent state lead for literacy before we launch our symposium i'd like to thank carol clancy for her leadership at the bureau of special education our patent directors and most importantly our support team we want to extend our sincere gratitude to our amazing program assistants especially kelly capp and to our spectacular tech team each day of the symposium before our keynote speaker we will introduce you to patent literacy team members
02:30 - 03:00 who without their tireless work dedication expertise this literacy symposium with over 4 300 participants and 75 yes 75 literacy sessions of the world's most respected literacy leaders and dynamic practitioners would not be possible today let's welcome and meet the patent literacy team from the central office in harrisburg let's start with doctor there you go dr jenny alexander you can unmute
03:00 - 03:30 hi my name is jenny alecandry and i've been a part of the literacy team for about five or six years now and i'm so excited to be here we have such amazing presenters and we'll be getting such valuable and incredible information from these people so thank you so much for coming and joining us and we're excited to be here good morning i'm karen brady from the central office and i'm so glad to be here to support all of you and thank you all for coming good morning everyone i'm dr stacy cherny and i am from the central office
03:30 - 04:00 patent team and i'm happy to uh support you over the next couple of days welcome good morning i'm maggie serpalowski once again i am excited to be here with everyone today in the next two days actually good morning i'm karen jerry welcome all of you thank you for joining us looking forward to learning over the next three days with all of you and now thank you literacy team from central office and now let's get this
04:00 - 04:30 literacy celebration started and sorry p.m good morning i'm nicole kopko from the central office and i'm excited to be here with you and support you over the next three days thank you so much for coming sorry nicole i think our excitement just got too much there all right and now let's get this literacy celebration started and who better to launch our symposium than dr louisa moats dr louise emotes has been a long time partner of patent and we are forever grateful to her for all she has
04:30 - 05:00 taught us and all she continues to teach us so without further ado dr remotes and her keynote address what do phonemes have to do with it hello everyone i'm so pleased to be able to participate in yet another wonderful conference put together by the patan leadership i commend all of you who have been doing this essential work in teaching reading over the past
05:00 - 05:30 year and into the future the topic i've chosen for my keynote is an old topic that's gotten new life in the last year or two because we've had some rather i would say vociferous voices on social media in particular but also in some publications questioning whether or not we should be teaching phoneme awareness
05:30 - 06:00 how we should be teaching phoneme awareness whether it's distinct from phonics whether it's appropriate and necessary for older students and there's been a debate that has been unsettling not only for practitioners in the field but also for those of us who've been working in the research community and in the practitioner community for decades
06:00 - 06:30 so my talk is titled what do phonemes have to do with it meaning what does this have to do with teaching reading and spelling and vocabulary so i thought i'd go over some of the basics including what is a phoneme and why is attainment of phoneme awareness challenging even for adults how does phoneme awareness differ from phonics what is the goal of phoneme awareness
06:30 - 07:00 instruction and what do we know about instruction from research and practice i'd like to acknowledge before i launch into the content that the content of this talk has been shaped by a co-authored paper i've been working on with jane ashby lucy hart paulson marion mcbride shira niftel david kilpatrick and myself and that
07:00 - 07:30 will be made available to all of you i'm hoping before too long so let's start with this at the haskins laboratories at yale university where the original work occurred in the actual early 1970s into the 1980s on the relationship between speech and print the key
07:30 - 08:00 the leading researchers at that institution stated this as a consequence of their multiple studies the most powerful predictors of later reading and writing skills turned out to be those requiring phonological awareness specifically the analytic ability to manipulate in words so what i'm going to be talking to you
08:00 - 08:30 about today is not news it's not new news it's old news but somehow or other over several decades some of the key findings about the speech to print relationship have been lost in the shuffle and we need to bring them back into focus let me remind everyone of something most of you are very aware of and that
08:30 - 09:00 is when we talk about building the architecture of a reading brain we're talking about teaching the left cerebral hemisphere primarily to connect areas of the brain that are specialized for different aspects of language processing including those that are specialized for phonological processing those that are specialized or become specialized for orthographic
09:00 - 09:30 memory or the word form area those that are specialized for connecting uh graphemic images with phonemes and those that are specialized for making sense of the words that we have identified and this is illustrated this is a slide that jack fletcher gave me from the university of texas houston many years
09:30 - 10:00 ago one of their studies using imaging on a seventh grader who was a very poor reader and we should look at the left hemisphere here primarily but the left hemisphere of this young person you can see was activating areas in the phonological processing system trying to activate the word form area or orthographic processing system
10:00 - 10:30 and was not able to uh show or didn't show much activation in the area in which phonemes and graphemes become connected and then connected with meaning but after remediation of intensive remediation in which the connections between speech and prints specifically phonemes and graphemes was emphasized
10:30 - 11:00 the brain activation patterns were very different first of all there was much more activation here as a consequence of pathways being built to connect these key areas and to connect the speech to print association area with the meaning making capacities of the brain in the left temporal lobe specifically but meaning making i also have to add in general when we talk
11:00 - 11:30 about we're talking about text reading does involve the entire brain there was also in this young person less attempt to compensate for the lack of left hemisphere activation with right hemisphere activation as reading as basic reading processes were gained so what's going on here what is the role of phonology in learning to
11:30 - 12:00 read and spell well dave kilpatrick has done a wonderful job describing this process relying uh heavily on lynnea erie and david share in particular because over many decades they have built coherent theories of word recognition and the nature of this orthographic processing process that must go on for us to be able to read printed words
12:00 - 12:30 but one of the main points that he and others make is that even if a word is somewhat irregular we still go through the same process of mapping phonemes to graphenes so if we're learning to read a word like red which is perfectly regular if we have the word in our vocabulary we need to break it down into its component phonemes to match those phonemes to the letters the same process occurs even if
12:30 - 13:00 there's a somewhat less direct relationship between the sounds of a word like has where the last sound is but it's represented with s and kids have to you know learn that uh with and develop a set for diversity in understanding phoneme graphene correspondences and it even is the same with so-called sight words like have which we have in the past treated as totally irregular and needing to
13:00 - 13:30 be learned through some kind of visual imprinting process or using the using the eyes like a camera however we talk about it but in fact that's a mistake to think about how we learn words like have we learn them by matching speech and print but there's more distance between the print and speech and as we learn uh how the system works it may take us a little more time or a
13:30 - 14:00 little more cognitive effort to map the sounds to the print but nevertheless we do go through that process and we do not bypass the phonological processor even in learning words that are somewhat irregular in our english print system so this is why uh many leading researchers who've studied the role of phonological processing and specifically phoneme awareness and
14:00 - 14:30 learning to read and spell have offered these conclusions and statements and you can find them in many many things that they've written every level of word reading and spelling depends on phoneme awareness an internal representation or mental image of the phonemes in words serves as and this is my term velcro or parking spots to anchor or match the
14:30 - 15:00 strings of phonemes that are in written words and if phoneme awareness is incomplete inaccurate or out of focus and think of a fuzzy mental image then anchoring or mapping print to speech will be adversely affected in addition not just the print to speech relationship but also vocabulary learning itself may be adversely affected so that individuals have
15:00 - 15:30 trouble sorting out the differences between words that sound very much alike and connecting the right form of a word to its meaning in the lexicon so we see errors sometimes humorous between words like relevant and reverence syllabus and syllable flesh and flesh prude and prune and these are real substitutions that students or adults that i've known have made
15:30 - 16:00 so let's do a little test for me to make a point here how many speech sounds are in each of these words how many speech sounds would you say are in sod how many are in no and how many are in shrimp now i will warn you that every time i have done this with a live audience and i'm sorry we're not live today but every time i've done this with a
16:00 - 16:30 live audience i have gotten what i would describe as a fairly wide range of responses to this simple question or it would seem simple everyone talks about phoneme awareness as if it were simple but let's look at the responses here sod has three phonemes but it has five letters
16:30 - 17:00 and the word no o has two phonemes but four letters and the word shrimp has five phonemes and one two three four five six letters one of the studies that i did on teacher knowledge and how teachers thought about these words before they took some courses in what was and
17:00 - 17:30 learned what was what showed that the relationship between print knowledge and our ability to segment phonemes is affected by how many letters are in the printed word once we're already literate so if we know what a word looks like in print or we see a word in prince and then are asked how many sounds are in the word
17:30 - 18:00 the typical mistake now this this was um the rate of accuracy in my teacher group it was about two-thirds of the teachers counted the number of phonemes inside correctly but the ones who did not count correctly which was uh over 25 percent count over counted the number of phonemes now why would that be because the number of letters exceeds the number of phonemes
18:00 - 18:30 and influenced the teachers thinking about what was in the spoken word the same thing with the word no which you would think might be pretty straightforward but the um we had less than 70 accurate on that and about 30 percent over counting the number of phonemes in the word but the picture changed with the word shrimp and the word shrimp we had less than 60
18:30 - 19:00 percent accuracy but under counting with those who were inaccurate under counting of the number of speech sounds in the word and why would that be because maybe they were treating the consonant blends this is my theory they were teaching consonant blends as single speech sounds perhaps
19:00 - 19:30 um and that may be not only because it's hard to separate the sounds in a blend and we know that from working with children but also it may be that these teachers had been using an instructional program that taught them that a blend was one sound which is inaccurate so uh repeatedly in the mostly qualitative research that i've
19:30 - 20:00 done uh very simple straightforward surveys of teacher knowledge words that do not have a direct relationship between the number of letters in the word and the number of graphs uh phonemes in the word um are more problematic for teachers to count the number or identify the number of phonemes accurately
20:00 - 20:30 and we so fix for example it has four phonemes but three letters the word quack uh four phonemes but teachers tend to under count because they treat the qu as one sound which is inaccurate string they under count then the number of phonemes but also tend to treat the ng as two phonemes rather than one
20:30 - 21:00 and so forth so why would we have such a high rate of disagreement on this very simple question how many phonemes are in a spoken word and it's very important to think about this for our own sake as professionals what do we need to go through in order to become aware of the difference between phonemes and phonemic awareness instruction and
21:00 - 21:30 phonics well what i've found is that um if we can read and there are others who found this as well holla scarborough linnea erie if we can read our knowledge of print influences our perceptions so we think about the word in its printed form but its printed form may be misleading and prevent us from either being able to explain explicitly what is in the spoken word or
21:30 - 22:00 prevent us from understanding where the student is coming from if they have spoken language but not good reading skill and obviously the letters especially in english do not represent the phonemes directly phonemes also are hard to distinguish in the spoken word because they are smushed together in speech and they're hard to separate cognitively
22:00 - 22:30 and finally no one has taught us what the speech sound inventory is unless we've been through a course that makes all this explicit and uh or unless we've been through something like articulation training for being a professional singer or a professional actor or we've been through comparative language instruction so let's contemplate this a little bit more in depth the fact of the elusive phoneme the
22:30 - 23:00 stream of speech is unsegmented we do not go around speaking in separate speech sounds phonemes overlap and are co-articulated in spoken words co-articulation in turn causes subtle variations in how phonemes themselves are formed in the mouth so this reality contributes to the difficulty of phoneme segmentation and ultimately the mental mapping of sounds
23:00 - 23:30 to letters and spectrographs are very useful tools because they show these variations in real time in terms of the frequencies that are coming out of our mouths as we form the sounds in words so the next slide shows that initial it the short eye vowel is different depending on the sounds that follow it in a spoken word so thanks to ann whitney for
23:30 - 24:00 recording uh these spectrographs so we have indian igloo and itch and we tell kids that all of these start with but if you look at the difference between what's coming out of the mouth with the e flows into the following nasal sound and in fact is nasalized say it's a nasalized vowel with egg glue
24:00 - 24:30 the vowel is shorter in duration and raised uh raised up um and there's a division here between and uh the stop and the o and with itch the vowel is a little less distorted and there is a little bit of a stop between the vowel and the
24:30 - 25:00 ch that follows it or that includes a stop a push of uh breath and then the ch plosive sound so it's a fiction in a way that we tell kids that all of these words start with because what they start with are variations of it so an allophone is a variation of a phoneme that we
25:00 - 25:30 think exists at least in the abstract and these variations are unconsciously produced and they're produced according to an underlying system of phonological rules none of us i mean when i say rules these are unconscious automatic they affect our speech and allophones although they are slightly varying from the prototype so we say there's such a thing as it are still recognized as belonging to the
25:30 - 26:00 category of sound that we identify as a phoneme and obvious examples of this are the different d sounds in words like ladder where it's a tongue flap desk where it's pretty straightforward dress where the d is puckered up or affricated and educate um where it's also affricated but it's voice
26:00 - 26:30 so we have um dress and educated both with affricated d sounds and then with look at the difference if we say table that's pretty straightforward but sweat we don't explode a push of air in that final sound it's just a mouth form without that push of breath and in the middle of little it's a tongue flap we don't say
26:30 - 27:00 little and trey it's affricated again before the um and here's a concrete example of how this reality manifests itself in how kids think about what is in speech and how they try to use letters to show us what they think is in speech and this is why i think it's so important for all of us to become sensitized to what kids are trying to do
27:00 - 27:30 as they try to learn how to spell but this first grader i often use as a writing sample for various things in the word dig the student perceived very clearly that the first sound was d and wrote it but in dream the student used the j the g to represent the first sounding dream which is quite clever and the student obviously is paying attention to what
27:30 - 28:00 his or her mouth is doing and selects the letter name that is closest to what that first sound seems to be that affricated here's another example of this phenomenon at work this was a second grader again asked to write the ingredients and directions for making rice crispy treats and he writes butter
28:00 - 28:30 butter and here a stick of butter let it melt and i also want you to notice that stick is missing the inside consonant in a blend and melt is missing the inside consonant in a blend and we'll come back to this but here's butter and butter so this student is showing us what the sound feels like in his or her mouth and um it's a very
28:30 - 29:00 uh good uh phonetic spelling in that sense so let's ask then well what so what what are the implications for teaching well first of all students perceptions of the sounds and words may be driven by the surface characteristics of speech because that is what they have to go on the identity of some sounds is obscured
29:00 - 29:30 by co-articulation of the sounds in spoken word letters are often a rough approximation of speech so it doesn't make sense to advocate that we teach phoneme awareness by using letters because letters are limited letters are complex letters can be outright confusing if we use them to teach kids about phonies
29:30 - 30:00 therefore students benefit from explicit instruction in what the phonemes are as speech entities and which ones are in a spoken word so if we had that student in a class who was writing butter b-u-d-e-r it would be a mistake to do as i used to do before i understood any of this to say now say it slowly say butter
30:00 - 30:30 we should say butter now don't slur your speech say the word correctly butter but if i said that as a teacher i'd be reinforcing a fiction which is that everybody says butter the only people who say butter are pretty straight-laced british who do a lot less tongue flapping than we americans do so i would say to the student oh that's very good that's what your mouth is
30:30 - 31:00 doing but you're going to have to learn to think of this sound in words like butter and water and better as you paid attention to what your mouth is doing and that's very good but we're going to have to think about the written word in a different way because is a chameleon sound it can change a little bit depending on where it is in a word and we just have to learn more
31:00 - 31:30 about how words like this are actually spelled now um let's look for a minute at linnea erie's phase theory of reading and spelling development which again is one of these anchor theories or reference points for understanding how to approach the issue of phoneme awareness with the students who are in front of us one of the first questions we need to ask is where are they in reading
31:30 - 32:00 and spelling development in order to determine what the goals of instruction should be so if a student is in the pre-alphabetic stage and doesn't understand the alphabetic principle the first thing is to make the student aware that letters stand for sounds in the first place and to do very early phonemic awareness activities which we'll talk about in a second the second if students are at this phase and able
32:00 - 32:30 to extract a first sound from a spoken word and for boy write for make m.c for will the letter y which is for farm to get a couple of the sounds there and for think to put the fricative which is like the same category of phonemes and uh it's a substitute for a voice voiceless substitution so he's in the ballpark he's trying to segment
32:30 - 33:00 the sounds he's not being terribly successful but it's just at the point of being able to get first sounds and some last consonants in a single syllable word this student needs more emphasis on simple phoneme segmentation and phoneme identity so that he can move he or she can move into the full alphabetic stage
33:00 - 33:30 in which uh any single syllable word can be segmented into its component sounds so this student who's in the full alphabetic stage can write boy make will farm and think almost all the sounds are represented except for the nasal and think and that's a very common omission because of the nasalized vowel losing
33:30 - 34:00 causing us in speech to spread the nasal consonant between the vowel and the consonant that follows now in order to get to the consolidated phase of accurate spelling the student is going to have to also be able to do what liberman shankwaler and liberman talked about in the first quote i showed which is to consciously engage
34:00 - 34:30 in the manipulation of speech sounds and that refers to the more complex phonemic awareness capacities of being able to compare words that are similar but may differ only in one sound and to know that those words are different and especially to compare words with different vowel sounds to detect what those sounds are and then
34:30 - 35:00 relate the sounds to the spelling that has to be anchored in memory so in order to address students at these different levels we do different things so if we have kids at the early phonological stage moving from pre-alphabetic to alphabetic partial alphabetic reading and writing we might start with a syllable level task
35:00 - 35:30 it has a role here in helping the students sort of laying the table as we say setting the table to focus on the phoneme uh we we've seen many students who come into kindergarten who can't pay attention to language who don't understand that language can be reflected upon and we can play games with it we can think about it we can do things to it it's an object that we can think about so we might do syllable level
35:30 - 36:00 deletion tasks and substitution tasks and then we're going to start focusing on the first consonant of a single syllable word without consonant blends and maybe deleting a first sound and seeing what it is and seeing what's left if we take that away um and then with a student who is moving from partial alphabetic to later alphabetic
36:00 - 36:30 we're going to up the ante we're going to expect segmentation uh of uh simple words we're going to be able to delete a final phoneme as well as an initial phoneme and say what's left and then we're going to be able to substitute an initial phoneme in a word beginning with a blend but the substitution of an inside phoneme in a blend becomes more demanding more complex and
36:30 - 37:00 is typical of what we do with students who are moving from a later alphabetic phase into consolidated reading and writing and have to be able to do this because the learning print demands it especially spelling so here we have the task we call them more complex the term advanced phoneme awareness has gotten a bad name because of the arguments going on so let's just call them more complex tasks that involve substitution and
37:00 - 37:30 manipulation of sounds substituting a medial vowel deleting the inside phoneme in a blend substituting the inside phoneme in a blend substituting a final phoneme deleting the internal phoneme in a final blend and substituting the internal phoneme and final blend these are quite demanding and yes they do develop in as reading and spelling are developing and there is a reciprocal relationship
37:30 - 38:00 between being able to perform these tasks and being able to read and spell words of increasing complexity now before we get into talking about instruction and some of the ins and outs of instruction beyond what i've already said let's remind ourselves why it is important for everyone to understand the consonant phoneme chart
38:00 - 38:30 it helps us zero in on what sounds to teach to what kids when so we need to understand and if you um who are listening to this haven't already learned this i strongly encourage you to commit the the consonant and vowel charts to memory the chart is organized to assist us in understanding what is confusable for kids
38:30 - 39:00 so the stops may be confusable especially the ones who are who share um the same uh place and manner of articulation except for voicing so then the three nasals then uh eight fricatives plus which we now put in the fricative category two affricates that differ only in voicing and the glides the liquids
39:00 - 39:30 so the reason these phonemes are classified in these ways by by position of articulation and by the manner of articulation is that they have overlapping features they can be confused thinking of thinking of our student who substituted for not knowing how to spell and feeling that these sounds had properties in common that wasn't a random error
39:30 - 40:00 that was a good uh stab in the right direction right and with the vowels keep in mind that a vowel is not a letter it's not the letters a e i o and u and please stop teaching kids that a vowel is a e i o or u because that's way too simplistic a vowel is not a middle sound although a vowel is the peak of a syllable and you can't have a syllable
40:00 - 40:30 without them vowels are open speech sounds made with little obstruction of the tongue lips teeth or air passage vowels are continuous and voiced that every syllable has to have a vowel phoneme there are 18 vowel phonemes in english plus schwa is not technically a phoneme but it's in the vowel chart and vowels are what we sing okay so we put the vowels of english into words
40:30 - 41:00 in order to contrast them the front vowels are uh e e e the low open vowels are i which also technically is a diphthong but it belongs here because of the uh it we also call it a long vowel i ah uh and then the back rounded vowels and the glided u which is u so there's a
41:00 - 41:30 difference between boot and butte very important to notice that we have three are controlled on the chart that i use for the sake of teaching spelling primarily er rn or as single uh we treat them we tell them they are unitized sounds but er is definitely unitized whereas or and r are halfway divided and that's you can treat it as you like i'm not going to
41:30 - 42:00 quibble oy and ow the two diphthongs that don't fit in the array here and so learning this is a really helpful aid in becoming very strategic and targeted in teaching phoneme awareness um so let's contemplate now back to this is a second grader
42:00 - 42:30 we use this writing sample for various things this second grader was referred to a learning specialist for a reading fluency problem back in the day when no one was teaching phoneme awareness other than a few enlightened souls so here we have the word drive missing the internal sound in a blend uh taking a wild stab at the vowel and
42:30 - 43:00 substituting a voiceless for the final v sound in the word here we have bump also not knowing the medial vowel but leaving out the internal sound in the blend uh and that nasal final nasal blend here's another uh issue with a blend here terrain um she got this one closet and she got this one float
43:00 - 43:30 so perhaps um the l blends were easier for her than the ones with er as the second sound or the nasal blends that could be because of the nature of the sounds involved here so if we're to think about how to teach that student that second grade student or the other second grade student who
43:30 - 44:00 wrote stick without and melt without uh these students have a lot in common which is they are ready for instruction that will heighten their awareness of the phonemes in consonant blends especially the internal sounds so that their spellings will be accurate and also so they can distinguish words that are similar except for those internal sounds in the blends now where does this fit
44:00 - 44:30 so i like to position or think about phoneme awareness instruction in the context of a whole code-based lesson which takes between 30 and 45 minutes depending on your students and your grade level and so on but think about this as think about phoneme awareness as having a role in preparing kids to learn the correspondence pattern or phonics pattern that is going to be taught
44:30 - 45:00 in that lesson that's really where it should be rather than sort of a separate thing that happens at a different part of the day or with a different handbook with exercises in it that has nothing to do with a specific lesson that you're teaching so the aim here is to bring phoneme awareness instruction into closer contact with what we are teaching why we are teaching
45:00 - 45:30 and to whom we are teaching so for example if the goal of our lesson was to teach kids to be aware of both sounds in a consonant blend what would we do we would uh design a warm-up activity where students had to focus on the internal sound in a blend
45:30 - 46:00 before we taught a code-based lesson so for example we might say um say stick say each sound and count each sound on your finger stick but a more demanding or complex task which i think these second graders needed given the kinds of spelling uh spelling uh attempts that they were making would be to do something like
46:00 - 46:30 this where you say say scab now say um now change to all what's the new word that is much more complex than just saying sk ab it requires being able to say sk ab but then to hold that in memory take out the k put in the o and reconstruct the word say scant change
46:30 - 47:00 to o what do you get change or say clap change or say clap say clap without uh what do you get say clap say clap without oh what do you get another way of getting at this um building the ability to mentally manipulate sounds
47:00 - 47:30 when students need extra help with this is to use tokens or colored blocks in a sound chaining activity so we might for example say show me lamb with different colors oh am now if that is lamb show me clam so we would add a different color there oh am now if that's clam show me cram and this is very demanding the student
47:30 - 48:00 would have to realize that the second sound had changed and we needed a different color here show me cam then the student would have to realize that this one had been taken out now why don't just why don't we just do this with letters as some of my colleagues are advocating i think that's a real problem and
48:00 - 48:30 first of all about 95 percent of the phonemic awareness studies that were included in the national reading panels analysis used oral activities and or tokens to teach phoneme awareness at first and many then linked the phoneme awareness activities to instruction with letters but that in itself meant that these were two different things two different targets for instruction phoneme awareness and
48:30 - 49:00 awareness of letters and graphemes secondly letters can add to the confusion that students are experiencing if the goal is phonemic awareness if the goal is phonemic awareness then adding letters as a means of instructing kids about the phonemes can muddy the waters because the some of the graphemes are complex some of the graphemes are varied
49:00 - 49:30 and the students are in essence having to learn two things at once they're having to learn the letters and the sounds but if the problem if the foundational problem includes having fuzzy phonology not paying attention to and not being able to uh consciously reflect on and manipulate the sounds in speech then the student is constantly turning
49:30 - 50:00 to print to try to figure out what's what when what's helpful is cultivating their ability to pay attention to sound which they aren't easily able to do until we teach them and give them practice also i see no basis in the research literature for saying that students should see the letters associated with the sounds rather than blank tokens
50:00 - 50:30 during phoneme awareness instruction to me if the student needs to pay attention to speech we use blank tokens at first to help the kids just focus on what their mouths are doing what they're hearing what they're seeing someone say and cultivate that awareness in the phonological processing system so that there is an internal velcro or those parking spots exist for attaching the letters
50:30 - 51:00 when uh when they have to learn the print so here's some big picture ideas for all of you remember that consonants and vowels are speech sounds they are not letters so in instruction we need to say this is a vowel letter or this is a vowel sound these two things are not the same sounds or phonemes are distinguished by
51:00 - 51:30 place and manner of articulation and we can use that knowledge and that reality to our advantage to target our instruction toward the sounds that kids may be confusing and we can see which sounds they're confusing by looking at their spelling their writing their reading errors and diagnostic surveys phonemes are articulatory gestures or mouth formations as well as
51:30 - 52:00 things that we say so we can see them we can feel them and we can hear them consonants are closed sounds vowels are open sounds two basic categories in phonol and phonology phonemes are elusive because they're buried in the continuous stream of speech and we need to honor that reality uh and and pay attention
52:00 - 52:30 to the fact that it is not obvious when we say a spoken word what is made up of and i think i've illustrated that already phonemes are abstract categories of sound and so what does this mean for instruction well in order to sort of settle some of these arguments this is what i think
52:30 - 53:00 represents solid ground in phoneme awareness instruction first of all a few minutes daily is sufficient and best practice is embedding phoneme awareness within a lesson framework where the actual content of the phoneme awareness activity or lesson has some relevance to the goals of the code-based instructional lesson plan
53:00 - 53:30 show the students what the speech sounds are with sound cards and mouth pictures i think that is good practice there's some evidence we need more evidence but especially kids who are in the partial uh alphabetic stage needing to acquire full phoneme awareness let's show them what is in the consonant inventory what's in the vowel inventory and then if we display this information
53:30 - 54:00 we can teach one sound at a time we can certainly show what letter or letters or grapheme represents the sound that we're learning but students have in front of them what the whole menu is that the teacher will be treating or going through as the lessons progress we certainly want to use simple syllables first and
54:00 - 54:30 complex syllables later and we've seen over and over again that complex syllables represent a step up in terms of difficulty in both phoneme awareness and letter sound learning begin with first sound identification for kids who are just beginning to learn the alphabetic principle work with isolating isolating that first
54:30 - 55:00 sound and substituting at a very simple level then move to the last sound and then the medial sound in simple syllables then include more complex phoneme awareness tasks for kids who need it that's really important no one uh in at least in my sphere of um uh professional colleagues has ever recommended that older kids be subject to
55:00 - 55:30 a lot of work on advanced phoneme awareness if they are progressing perfectly well and if they are already able to consolidate their word learning and move ahead in reading fluency you may find there's a difference between what kids can do in reading and what they're doing in spelling however so if there are these these sound omissions and spelling and confusions and so on they may need more work than
55:30 - 56:00 would be necessary for kids who otherwise are very good spellers and teach the skill that fits the students and the lesson so what do the national reading panel say actually 22 years ago well at that time there were 52 studies of uh that included phoneme awareness instruction and the nrp rep
56:00 - 56:30 report recommended that all children in k1 should receive instruction and phoneme awareness in addition to phonics so no one was saying that phoneme awareness itself would magically translate into being able to read and spell but it did support learning to read and spell and phoneme awareness and phonics complemented one another to ensure that
56:30 - 57:00 almost all kids would learn the foundational skills phoneme awareness and phonics are two distinct aspects of instruction and both are critical for learning to read and spell i would add and since the nrp there have still been more studies even though the national institutes of health for example felt that the issue had been settled enough that the entire research
57:00 - 57:30 program was moved toward understanding higher level language processes and reading and reading comprehension nevertheless additional studies and additional publications uh such as the human snowling uh uh book on uh that synthesized uh studies of reading stated these studies converge with others
57:30 - 58:00 in demonstrating that phoneme awareness and letter knowledge are critical foundations for the development of reading skills and children just entering school children who have some ability to manipulate phonemes and spoken words when they enter school and who have good knowledge of the sounds of letters make much better progress in learning to read than children for whom either of these skills is weak big picture so to stay on course let's all keep these things in mind
58:00 - 58:30 phoneme awareness and phonics and decoding are distinct but complementary speech sounds have unique properties that are not represented by letters letters must be mapped to sounds but phonemes are the reference point for mapping graphings which themselves have unique properties the problems with phoneme awareness are
58:30 - 59:00 a universal characteristic of dyslexia across languages as it turns out and each of these aspects of instruction is necessary to ensure that most the most kids make the best progress the goal is reciprocity all the way along linking phoneme awareness to decoding and spelling instruction with the aim of promoting progression to the consolidated phase of
59:00 - 59:30 fluent word reading and fluent reading for comprehension gains are going to be more rapid and longer lasting when foundational skill instruction includes both in addition to ample reading practice so i want to thank everyone thanks for revisiting this topic i hope we've put it to rest and i hope you can with confidence go ahead and refine your practices
59:30 - 60:00 continue to refine your practices from what you know about both the structure of language the nature of the difficulties that kids experience and what you know from research on instruction and i'd like to share this quote keep in mind that what we're all about is promoting literacy literacy is a bridge from misery to hope literacy is a platform for
60:00 - 60:30 democratization and a vehicle for the promotion of cultural and national identity for everyone everywhere literacy along with education in general is a basic human right literacy is finally the road to human progress and that was from kofi nm secretary general of the united nations take care everyone thank you so much