A recent paper caught my eye, Ontogenesis Model of the L2 Lexical Representation, and despite the immediate mind glazing effect of the word “ontogenesis,” I found the model well worth digging into and sharing here—and it may bear relevance to conversations on orthographic mapping.

• Bordag, D., Gor, K., & Opitz, A. (2021). Ontogenesis Model of the L2 Lexical Representation. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728921000250

How we learn words and all their phonological, morphological, orthographic, and semantic characteristics is a fascinating topic of research—most especially in the areas of written word recognition and in the learning of a new language.

This paper thus struck me as an especially insightful attempt to synthesize much of that research. To be clear: this is a model that has not been directly tested, but it seems well-aligned to other theories like orthographic mapping and the lexical quality hypothesis, as well as explain some of the tension between regularity and irregularity in word forms and frequency.

“In intentional word learning from definitions, L2 words with easily encoded orthographic form are better retained. In incidental word learning, words with unusual form are more salient and more easily detected.”

I enjoyed especially the visualizations of phonological, orthographic, and semantic mapping and how they can develop at different rates and trajectories but with interdependence.

A couple of terms that are key to the ontogenesis model (the authors should perhaps come up with a catchier name):

• Fuzziness: “inexact or ambiguous encoding of different components or dimensions of the lexical representation that can be caused by several linguistic, cognitive, and learning-induced factors. These factors include, among others, changes in neural plasticity, the complexity of mapping L2 semantic representations on the existing L1 semantic representations and of mapping L2 forms on the semantic representations, and problems with L2 phonological encoding”
• Optimum: “the ultimate attainment of a representation (or its individual components), i.e., the highest level of its acquisition, when the representation is properly encoded and no longer fuzzy”

These concepts give us a way of visualizing, as per the graphs above, how different dimensions of a word may develop over time. Our goal, of course, is to reach optimum encoding across the sounds, spelling, and meaning so that it is anchored in our long-term memory (i.e. fluent, automatic access and retrieval).

“Each lexical entry can comprise representations from the three domains, and each representation is interconnected with other representations of the same type. Each domain representation can thus develop its own, idiosyncratic network of connections to other representations. Together they constitute the phonological, orthographic, and semantic networks in the mental lexicon.

“The model sees a word’s lexical integration as a gradual process, in which connections to other representations grow in number and strength until the optimum is potentially reached. The optimum in this dimension can be described as an adequately rich network of appropriate connections. Fuzziness in this dimension then refers primarily to an inadequate number of connections to other representations (typically too few) and/or to their inadequate strength (typically too weak), as well as inappropriate connections (e.g., an erroneous connection between the phonological forms of through and dough due to the influence of orthography).”

The added complexity of learning words in a new language is that there are variable interactions across phonological, orthographic, and semantic dimensions with our native language.

“Depending on the grapheme-phoneme relationship between the L1 and L2 and within L2, simultaneous acquisition of orthographic information may thus move the phonological representation closer to or further away from its optimum (and vice versa). Furthermore, the effect of L1 orthography on spoken word recognition in L2 is modulated by L2 proficiency and word familiarity

…a new L2 form representation is connected not only to other, previously established, L2 form representations, but also to L1 forms. The OM thus differentiates between two subnetworks within the form network: an IntraNetwork and an InterNetwork. The IntraNetwork refers to the connections between a given L2 form and other L2 forms, as discussed above. The InterNetwork refers to cross-language connections, i.e., the connections between a given L2 form and L1 forms.”

An interesting and insightful model! I look forward to seeing further studies drawing upon it.

#language #literacy #models #learning #phonology #secondlanguageacquisition #multilingual

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I am honored that a version of my blog post about my shift in thinking on phonemic awareness has been published in the latest Nomanis. Do check out this newer version for the research goods. And a big thank you to Tiffany Peltier for pushing my thinking on the matter and sharing much of the research that I cite in that piece. Check out her blog for sound guidance on phonemic awareness instruction.

Along with this criticism against phonological awareness practice without letters, two recent pieces have addressed critiques against David Kilpatrick’s “phonemic proficiency hypothesis” and against advanced phonemic awareness in general as well:

• Tim Shanahan’s blog post, “RIP to Advanced Phonemic Awareness,” in which he lays out the state of research alongside of a conversation directly with David Kilpatrick, and two important takeaways emerge: 1) Kilpatrick no longer uses the terminology “advanced phonemic awareness” himself, and instead uses “phonemic proficiency”; and 2) Kilpatrick’s “phonemic proficiency” hypothesis remains just that, and still needs to actually be tested. Oh, and also, read the comments on this post. A number of researchers add their thoughts on this, and Kilpatrick himself jumps in to address some of their points.
• In addition to that post, a pre-print pushes the conversation yet further in “They Say You Can Do Phonemic Awareness Instruction “In the Dark”, But Should You? A Critical Evaluation of the Trend Toward Advanced Phonemic Awareness Training.” In this piece, the “empirical and theoretical basis for advanced phonemic awareness training” is evaluated and they find that “at present, there is no evidence that targeting phonemic awareness separate from print differentially benefits reading skills over integrating phonemic awareness activities with letters.”
• UPDATE 2/10/22: David Kilpatrick, Louisa Moats, and others posted a response to the Clemen’s et al. pre-print and gave some pretty poignant critiques that tell us we should wait to read the peer-reviewed version before drawing any firm conclusions. Main takeaway: phonemic proficiency is about orthographic mapping, not decoding.
• UPDATE 2/25/22: Clemen's et al. posted a rebuttal to Kilpatrick et al.'s response
• UPDATE 10/1/23: I think it's important to highlight that the Clemens et al. remains a pre-print and has not yet been published after peer review, to my knowledge. This further suggests the pre-print should be taken with a strong grain of salt. If and when it does make it through peer review, please let me know so I can update it here.

To continue on the phonological tip, David Share, most well known for his “self-teaching” hypothesis of reading, also has a recent piece, “Common Misconceptions about the Phonological Deficit Theory of Dyslexia” that provides some further food for thought on the relation of phonology to print and to dyslexia. There’s a lot of interesting tidbits in this paper — one of the takeaways I had was the insight that dylexia only becomes “‘visible’ in literate societies.” In a pre-literate world, we didn’t need to recall “addresses, telephone numbers, the days of the week or months of the year, foreign names and places,” for example, so spoken-language phonological weaknesses may have existed, but don’t surface until the sub-lexical work needed for print. In other words, the “phonemic awareness” problem children with dyslexia have isn’t just about phonemic awareness, it is related to a phonological issue that only becomes most evident in the demands of phonemic awareness required for reading with an alphabetic system.

He also has a great passage on learning the “infrastructure of the orthography”:

“In addition to learning the specific symbol-sound mappings of the orthography being learned, the learner must “get inside words”, go below the level of meaning and penetrate their sound structure. This phonological analysis or “meta-linguistic” awareness is an inescapable pre-requisite for literacy learning enabling the learner to exploit the combinatoriality of writing, decipher novel letter strings, match up spellings and pronunciations, and begin the process of building the orthographic lexicon by unitizing or chunking sub-lexical symbols into higher-order meaning units—the key to rapid automatic word recognition. It follows that any difficulties that a novice reader may have in processing speech sounds (e.g., hearing loss) or difficulties (in the absence of hearing impairment)) in processing the nuances of phonology (speech sound disorder, dyslexia) will almost invariably impair learning to read. Here, the evidence is incontrovertible and goes well beyond phonological awareness to early pre-literate spoken language competencies in processing (receptive and expressive) the sounds of speech as discussed earlier. Phonology, therefore, is necessarily a major source of variability in reading ability and hence a core deficit (or at least one core deficit) among struggling readers whether dyslexic or non-dyslexic.” [bold added]

There’s much more to say on phonemic awareness — David Share has another recent piece in ILA, “Is the Science of Reading Just the Science of Reading English?” well worth unpacking, but I’ll leave that for a separate post.

Also worth spending your time investigating — I highly recommend watching all three of Mark Seidenberg and Molly Farry-Thorn’s Miniseries on Phonemes and Phoneme Awareness. I found the first two especially enlightening and clarifying.

Enjoy geeking out in between some grog, coquitos, and COVID minimal family time, and wishing you a most restful and restorative break.

#phonology #phonemicawareness #research #dyslexia #Kilpatrick

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We know that phonological awareness develops in a manner that moves from large grain sizes (syllable, onset-rime) to small grain sizes (phonemes). Furthermore, we also know that phonemes are at a greater level of abstraction — they are harder to hear and speak — then something like a syllable, which is relatively easy to hear. So it certainly makes sense that instruction would follow the same trajectory in order to support that progression towards greater abstraction. It’s a compelling idea that unfortunately does not appear to be backed up by anything other than anecdotal evidence.

I know it’s compelling, because that’s what I believed. There’s a lot of romanticism in our field, and–like many others–I have a tendency to fall for ideas that sound right. One of them is the idea that learning must always progress from concrete to abstract, from easier to harder. Furthermore, like so many others, I am easily taken up by the idea that learning progresses in stages, in which each stage must be mastered in order to progress to the next. These ideas certainly do pan out for learning in some specific concepts or tasks, but are not universal. We can see this point more clearly when we consider phonological awareness instruction.

Instead of teaching first the syllable level, and then the onset-rime level, and then the phonemic awareness level, the instruction that appears to be most effective starts with the smallest grain size, at the phoneme level, and then moves to larger grain sizes from there. Why would this be?? It could be that our priors (learning moves from concrete to abstract and progresses in stages) mislead us. Sometimes, it may be that aiming first for what is more difficult and complex can be what enables us to develop underlying skills.

And there’s yet another facet where I will hereby admit I seem to be mistaken: that phonological awareness practice without graphemes is a valuable activity. I’ve argued that a phonological awareness program, such as Heggerty, could be beneficial, and I argued this because I thought that 1) it won’t do harm, and 2) it may be of potential benefit to students who are struggling to hear and speak the sounds, thus facilitating phonological sensitivity. So in a school that has a large number of students struggling to learn to read, it seemed like a win-win — short amount of instructional time (10-15 minutes daily), an easily deliverable set of routines and lessons that required little planning nor training, and a potentially large payoff for students who need it the most.

But it seems my priors again misled me. I assumed that phonology = important to reading and language, and extra practice = good, so therefore: extra phonological practice is a net positive.

I recently posted this tweet where I made the point that we need to fight our tendency to add more and instead pare down to focus on what is most critical. And as I waded into some of the great phonological awareness debates on social media, I found myself defending the idea that adding more would be the right thing! I was also getting my assumptions about PA challenged by reading stalwarts on Twitter.

I haven’t been the only one having my assumptions challenged as of late– a mini-controversy erupted over a virtual session with researchers Susan Brady, Mark Seidenberg, and Molly Farry-Thorn in which the Heggerty Program and David Kilpatrick’s Equipped for Reading Success were explicitly challenged based on their promotion of phonological practice without letters. Many took issue with some of the criticisms and on some inaccurate portrayals of Kilpatrick’s program — most especially practitioners in the field who have seen results using guidance from either. The video of the session was not released, and Seidenberg and Farry-Thorn instead released a follow-up discussion as well as a statement apologizing for muddying the waters, (and Seidenberg revealed that he had never heard of Elkonin boxes (!)). Susan Brady also released a statement clarifying some points she made about Kilpatrick’s Equipped for Reading Success program.

I agree that online forums may not be the best venue to critique specific programs or sling mud against other people who are dedicated to improving literacy outcomes. What needs to happen is to let the science speak, and gather empirical data to revise inaccurate assertions and theories — and this needs to happen on all sides. I’d posit, for example, that both David Kilpatrick and his critics have some revision of their theories to do.

I recently listened to a podcast interview of Julia Galef, in which she discusses her concept of a “scout mindset” vs. a “soldier mindset.” I found this distinction useful, because we have quite a number of soldier mindsets when it comes to talking about reading, and I find myself falling into that mindset when I am challenged in my own thinking. But by consciously adopting a scout mindset, an attitude of curiosity and an openness to revising my thinking, I can ward off my tendency to dig my heels in.

I realized as I defended some of my positions on phonological awareness recetly that I was taking on a soldier’s mindset.

At some point, we need to look to the evidence and acknowledge when it is substantive enough to challenge the neat theories we hold about learning.

So here’s where I’m revising my thinking: phonological awareness practice without pairing sounds to spelling is inefficient and unsubstantiated by research. Instead, research points to the greater robustness of pairing sounds to print from the beginning of reading instruction. This then, in turn, leads to greater phonological awareness.

The more I have learned, the more I have realized that almost every source of expertise on matters of literacy holds ideas that must be questioned in light of the evidence. That’s all part of the journey of knowledge, man. No one person holds all the pieces of the puzzle.

Phonology is important. It’s important to both language and to literacy. And it’s that reciprocal relationship between print and speech that develops skilled reading.

So let me state my revised thinking as clearly as I can: we should focus our classroom instruction in the earliest grades — and in spaces of intervention in later grades — on supporting students in connecting sounds to letters in print, and core instructional time should not be spent practicing sounds without print.

Time and money will be best spent on enhancing a core school-wide systematic phonics program through training and re-training, and providing ongoing coaching supports and peer feedback, oriented around ensuring that speech sounds are connected to spelling in every lesson, with sufficient opportunities to practice in reading and writing.

I still think there is a place for phonological practice outside of letters, but only when wielded by a knowledgeable practitioner or interventionist, who uses it when it is evident that it would benefit specific students as a bridge back to application with letters. Otherwise, pending any research that shows it is effective as a core instructional move, it appears to be a waste of time.

I admit I was wrong — or at least, I seem to be as of now, pending any further studies. 😉

In terms of the language piece, which I stressed in my last post on phonology — I still think it’s critically important. But what I realized is that the place to do that kind of work is in interactive read-alouds, rather than isolated phonological practice. In other words, as we read text aloud to students, we can pause and amplify the sounds of words and sentences, ask students to repeat them after you like an echo, choral read them together, and savor their sounds, prosody, and meaning. Embedding phonological sensitivity practice in the course of authentic reading experiences will be more powerful — and most importantly — will not take time away from core instruction.

And if any of this is wrong, please tell me where so I can revise my thinking!

Note: This piece has since been updated with research and published on Nomanis:

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#phonology #phonemicawareness #phonics #reading #literacy #research

The Simple View of Reading, to review, is a well-researched theoretical model of reading that delineates two primary components that are interrelated but substantively distinct: decoding and language comprehension. It positions phonology as a sub-component under the umbrella of decoding.

Yet phonology is by nature also a component of language comprehension. It is purely the sounds of words, and clearly, the sounds of words are critical to an understanding of language. Such sounds include all the components necessary to clearly articulate and hear a word: its syllables, intonation, vowels, consonants, and all the myriad of other terms Louisa Moats outlines in Speech to Print that I seem to never be able to retain.

To be fair to the Simple View of Reading, it is obviously focused on reading, and the strand of language comprehension noted there is specific to the language of written text, so any misapplication or misunderstandings remains in the mind of someone who generalizes it beyond that. Yet I felt the need to express this because I could feel such a fuzziness occurring within my own mind. Because I focus primarily on reading, it gains an outsize focus, even though I also know that language is foundational and interwoven with reading at every step of the way.

Reading success is a primary goal of education, of course. I concur with many others that the ability to record and transmit our language in written form is the most incredible technology invented by humankind. So of course we will orient our educational focus and our goals on what is most important to successful reading. Yet I feel like the more I learn about learning to read and write, the more I see the importance in a concurrent and ongoing stress on language development.

So let’s bring this back to phonology. The abstraction that we have invented that allows us to translate spoken language into print is the ability to parse a stream of sounds within words into individual units called phonemes. These phonemes translate into letters and letter sequences (graphemes) that are the word in its written form. So the ability to hear and speak phonemes (phonemic awareness) is fundamental to learning to read and write.

There is a a debate within the science of reading nerd community about whether phonemic awareness should be taught as a scope of sequence that moves from syllable, to onset/rime, to phonemic awareness, as well as about whether phonemic awareness should be taught and practiced outside of connected letters in print. Emerging evidence seems to indicate that explicit phonemic awareness instruction is the key differentiator in reading outcomes.

It can be hard to make sweeping statements about what is happening in the field, given the incoherence and local nature of American school systems, but it seems that there may be a lot of phonology practice (onset-rime, syllables) happening out there without adequate phonemic awareness in Kindergarten and 1st grade. Furthermore, there also may not be a whole lot of systematic phonics instruction at all. Due to this, some are rightfully pushing to try and make it clear that phonemic awareness instruction should be the main driver leading into systematic phonics instruction.

Yet I worry that we may also end up oversimplifying phonology and losing sight of the forest for the trees in this drive to clarify for the field. I reread Susan Brady’s article in the Sep/Oct Reading League Journal updating research findings on phoneme awareness and phonics, and noted that while she stresses the need for phonemic awareness in K-1, she does not suggest that activities promoting phonological sensitivity are not important — she instead suggests that instruction there should be relegated to PreK, rather than Kindergarten. Furthermore, she notes that “analytic and synthetic methods do not have to be an either/or choice, but a question of when and for what purpose,” and that work with word families may be useful after 1st grade.

All of that I agree with. Phonemic awareness is a key to decoding and encoding, and we should focus on this as we begin reading instruction. Yet remember also that phonology writ large remains a central component of oral language, and our ability to hear and speak words does not solely pertain to print.

We tend to not dwell on this oral language side of things, however, both because it is harder to measure and consists of skills that are far less constrained than those involved in decoding, as well as because it is largely implicit and innate to learn, at least within our first language. But not all kids learn oral language well, either. Some struggle to articulate and stress the parts of a word, to apply syntactic forms, to develop a diverse pool of vocabulary, or to understand the structure of discourse. Just as with reading, students benefit from a strong core instructional program that provides them with explicit instruction and practice with key aspects of oral language from the onset of schooling– of which phonology is one part.

The good news is that there is a natural vehicle for this work with oral language that pairs reading instruction alongside of it known as interactive read-alouds. Interactive read-alouds are when the focus is on comprehension, rather than the work of print (as contrasted with shared reading, which is when the focus is on gaining fluency). Interactive read-alouds provide a venue for the sophisticated and complex language of written discourse to be transmitted solely in spoken form, and for students to engage in dialogic questioning and responses to the events and ideas in the text.

I would argue that an underutilized practice when conducting an interactive read-aloud is to pause and note specific words not only for their meaning, but also to highlight their sounds — to practice hearing and speaking those sounds (also on highlighting syntactic forms, but that’s another conversation).

My argument is that phonology has a role to play both before, during, and beyond the immediate target of breaking the written code. Before decoding instruction formally begins in Kindergarten, playing with the sounds within words is well-suited to pre-K. And as decoding instruction begins in Kindergarten and continues in 1st and (hopefully) 2nd grades, doing additional phonological practice can support linguistic flexibility — a flexibility that will become especially crucial beyond 1st grade, as words seen in print grow increasingly complex, and students must learn to navigate within word parts based on both morphology and phonology, as well as words of increasing multi-syllabic length. And for those students who–-despite a strong core phonics instruction–-continue to struggle to learn to decode, additional opportunities to identify within word patterns through a word study program can be critical, especially at that 2nd grade/3rd grade transition.

Finally, for students struggling to learn language outside of print, additional practice with hearing and speaking the sounds in words and sentences can ground the development of their vocabulary and comprehension. So while we must certainly stress the importance of phonemic awareness in learning to read and spell and the importance of a strong core phonics program, we also can’t lose sight of the importance of oral language development and the role that phonology beyond phonemic awareness can play in that.

Discuss...

#phonology #phonemicawareness #reading #literacy #language #oracy

Oral language is baked into our brains. We are born to learn to speak.

Similarly, reading our visual surroundings is second nature. Our eyes are neurally attuned to pick out fine-grained distinctions and patterns amidst the noise.

But written language is something we graft onto our existing circuitry. Graphemes get bootstrapped onto our auditory and visual processing neural networks. We need repeated exposure to letters and words and sentences in print to finetune the fluent mapping of letter sequences and syntactical constructions into comprehension. And if our brain’s existing pathways are resistant to these changes—because our prior experiences with oral language do not well align to the written language (we speak a dialect that diverges more in sound from the spelling, or we haven’t had much exposure to the type of vocabulary and syntax more frequently encountered in written language)—than we may need additional explicit instruction and practice to take us to the point that decoding is fluid and effortless.

But unfortunately, children who may need that extra bit of clear and structured practice often do not receive it. Instead, they are allowed to skip over words they can’t read, and passed onto the next grade.

How can we pave the pathway to proficient reading for all our children?

What We Can Hear Is What We Can Read

There is a reciprocal process between learning letter-sounds and reading letter sequences within words.

As we learn more graphemes, we refine our phonemic awareness, and as we refine our phonemic awareness, we further develop our ability to recognize words in print.

Yet whether we should directly and explicitly practice and teach phonemic awareness itself (apart from phonics) is an area of contention amongst reading specialists, it seems. Furthermore, whether we should teach larger units of letter patterns within words (sometimes called ‘word families’ or ‘rime units’ or ‘phonograms’), is another area of contention, which you can see most explicitly in debates about synthetic vs. analytic phonics. There’s also arguments about when to introduce deeper aspects of word study, such as etymology and morphology (some Structured Word Inquiry proponents claim it should start from the very beginning). And an even further area of debate is whether we should teach phonemic awareness to proficiency beyond blending and segmenting to the advanced levels of deletion and substitution of phonemes.

Since beginning my journey into reading research, I’d come across these debates, and dug quite a bit further into more research and still feel conflicted. From a research perspective, the weight does seem to land primarily on the side of teaching the key aspects of phonemic awareness first and foremost, and not bothering with other phonological skills like onset-rime or advanced phonemic awareness activities (see the last issue of The Reading League Journal and the latest findings on PA for more).

And yet I still resist hardline rigidity against phonological awareness instruction and onset-rime practice. I believe these practices have their place. I should preface this by saying that I’m open to further critique and research that will challenge my suppositions.

Here’s my argument:

What we know about “the reading brain” is that reading is unnatural, and that as I outlined in the narrative at the start of this piece, we are essentially bootstrapping reading onto existing visual and aural brain architecture. For some kids, this process occurs smoothly and implicitly, but for many other students, it doesn’t, and they require not only more practice, but more explicit instruction and practice.

A fluent reader can move almost instantaneously between letter sequences and larger chunks of words (smaller and larger “grain sizes”), depending on the context of the sentence. For students that do not have such fluency, their cognitive energy is taxed by disentangling the sounds and meaning for each word.

Furthermore, for students who are learning English as a new language alongside of learning to read, or for students who speak an English dialect that has greater differences from the written form of English, their brains are doing additional work. For such students, it seems to me that providing more opportunities to gain fluency and move from phonemes to larger grain sizes and back would support the formation of their written English brain. For example, consider a second grade student who speaks Spanish as his first language who just arrived in the U.S. and is learning to both read and speak in English. Spanish is a primarily syllabic language, and phonemes map more directly onto spellings. Providing this student with more opportunities to practice hearing, speaking, and mapping phonemes, onsets, rimes, and morphemes into written words will support his reading development and his language development.

So I argue that the progression and practice of our word-level instruction should move recursively from a hearing a word as a whole, to hearing and seeing its chunks (by “chunks” I mean rime units and roots/affixes), to seeing and hearing its individual letters and sounds, to seeing its chunks, to seeing the word as a whole. Through this recursive movement, we can support the neural connections that need to form in the fluent reading brain.

Honestly, I find the rigidity of some against phonological awareness instruction and onset-rime unit practice misplaced. We’re not talking significant instructional time here. A systematic program for phonological awareness, such as Heggerty, for example, is 10-15 minutes a day. That’s a small investment for a potentially huge payoff in prevention of later reading difficulty for the kids who need it the most.

Since writing this, I have changed and revised my thinking about the teaching of phonemic awareness and of the practice of phonology that is not connected to letters. Read more here

Graphic from Is It Ever Too Late to Teach an Older Struggling Reader? Using Diagnostic Assessment to Determine Appropriate Intervention by Carrie Thomas Beck

On the trajectory of beginning reading skills, onset-rime practice may possibly provide an onramp, though this is contested and some (I think convincingly) argue that focusing on phonemic awareness first and foremost is better bang for the buck. But after phonics instruction has begun and students have acquired their letter sounds to proficiency and are learning the various generalizations and irregularities of the English language in print, I believe that rime units have a critical role to play, along with beginning inflectional morphology like the plural ‘s’, past tense, ‘ed’, etc.

Why is this? It’s because as readers develop fluency in decoding unknown words, they also began to develop greater efficiency in moving between smaller and larger grain sizes within words. For example, a 3rd grade reader encountering a new multisyllabic word in an informational text, such as “additional,” will slow themselves down and pay attention to the word parts, using their knowledge of syllabication and morphemes and word families as needed to break it up and recognize its sounds and meaning.

So gaining proficiency in advanced phonemic awareness alongside onset-rime and morphological awareness can potentially boost those students who are showing up in 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grades as struggling readers, even if they have received systematic phonics instruction K-1.

Here’s a few pieces of research aligning with my claims:

• Reading Acquisition, Developmental Dyslexia, and Skilled Reading Across Languages: A Psycholinguistic Grain Size Theory
• Orthographic processing: A ‘mid-level’ vision of reading: The 44th Sir Frederic Bartlett Lecture
• David Kilpatrick’s “phonemic proficiency hypothesis” (read pretty much anything by him to learn more about this, he has tons of lectures posted online as well. His Essentials book is essential reading indeed

Don’t agree? Fire away! But one thing I want to stress is that you consider the student populations that have been assessed or worked with in your experience or research. Are they historically marginalized and underserved populations? Are they learning English as a new language? Are they struggling with a learning disability? I’m less interested in arguments that center students who typically benefit from the existing methods of instruction.

Since writing this, I have changed and revised my thinking about the teaching of phonemic awareness and of the practice of phonology that is not connected to letters. Read more here

#phonemicawareness #phonology #sounds #speech #reading #literacy #language #neuroscience #research