Literacy Mini Series: Part 2 - Managing the Impact of Technology with Core Tenets of Effective Literacy Instruction
When helping a struggling reader, teaching the right strategies at the right time is essential.
In Part 1 of this series, I talked about how the best way to mitigate the impact of technology is to ensure kids still have access to instruction focused on core tenets of best practices.
Those core tenets include:
- Structured Intervention
- Active and Generative Use
- Integration of Skills
In this article, I’m going to talk about structured intervention/instruction.
There are a lot of strategies promoted by popular publishing companies that sound logical, but aren’t designed to help kids develop word attack skills.
Here are a couple of common ones:
Ask an adult for help.
Look at the picture for a clue.
Let me preface this by saying that there is no shame if you have done any of these or if you have ever recommended any of these strategies. These mistakes are very common, and often encouraged by well-meaning professionals who simply haven’t had the right professional development. However, there is a much better way we can empower kids.
Let me explain why the first two examples don’t typically work.
We’ll start with “Ask an adult for help”.
While it’s great to teach kids to advocate for themselves, there are no actual reading skills in this strategy. It doesn’t really belong in the category of “What to do when you don’t know the word.” If I’m going to give someone a swimming lesson, I’m not going to tell them to “ask a lifeguard for help”, I’m going to teach them a set of swimming specific skills. The same thing applies with reading and spelling.
With the “look at the picture” strategy, this might apply for some basic entry level readers for a few words here and there, but a large portion of the words that kids actually need to learn how to read can’t be easily portrayed with a picture.
It’s great to teach kids to look around for the information they need; but in this example we’re teaching kids to look away from the things on the page that are going to help them: the letters and words.
When we’re teaching kids “word attack” strategies, we want them to focus on the information that’s going to help them do that consistently; not things that may only work in a few, unique situations.
So, how do we actually do that? What skills do kids actually need?
The short answer is that they need to learn the STRUCTURE and rules for how words are spelled.
When we’re talking about structured literacy intervention, we’re talking about teaching the skills kids need to read and write individual words. In the coming sections, I’m going to talk about 3 of the essential areas we need to address in order to do that: phonology, morphology, orthography.
>>>That’s why I created this toolkit to help build these skills.
Phonology
Phonology is the study of how languages organize their sounds. “Phonemes” are the sound units in language that we perceive. In order to be able to learn to read, kids need to have what’s known as “phonological awareness”.
Common phonological awareness skills include things like rhyming, being able to blend sounds together to form words, or being able to segment sounds in words (e.g., being able to say that the sounds in “bat” are “b…a…t”.). Phonological awareness skills can predict later reading performance, and working on them gives your kids the skills they need to read and spell (Carson, Gillon, & Boustead, 2013). In order to be able to make sense of reading and spelling, we have to be able to pay attention to the sounds we’re hearing.
When we’re spelling a word, we need to think about the phonemes in the word in order to be able to pair that with the symbols that represent the sounds in a particular word. This is how we remember how to spell words; and it’s also how we problem solve and figure out how to read words. When we tell kids to “sound it out” as they’re reading or spelling, part of what we want them to do is think about the sounds and the letters, and then figure out what to do with that information.
Our brains are wired for language, but they’re not necessarily wired to learn to read and write. That’s why most people need at least some instruction in order to learn to read, while simply being around people speaking a language is enough for most of us to learn oral language. This is especially true for people who are diagnosed with disabilities that impact their language processing skills (van Kleeck, Gillam, & McFadden, 1998).
When we teach kids to read and write, we’re layering ADDITIONAL knowledge on top of the language skills they’ve already started to develop (oral language). Since they’re already producing speech sounds (a.k.a., phonemes), we want to layer reading and writing skills on top of that.
I haven’t talked about the “sound it out” strategy yet, so I’ll do it here.
Telling kids to “sound it out” when they’re struggling is definitely more specific and helpful than saying “just ask an adult or look at the picture”; so we’re at least in the ballpark now because we’re paying attention to the right skills. But we can actually get more specific than that. The mistake that many people make is that they skip right over the phonemes (a.k.a. speech sounds) and go right to focusing on the letters.
When they want to help a child spell a word, they go straight to having kids memorize sequences of letters without teaching them the meaning behind those letters. As a result, kids might be able to copy or reproduce a word during a drill-type activity, but then when they try to spell it later in a different context, like writing a story, they can’t remember how to do it because they have no strategy for recalling the letters in the word.
The way we fix this problem is to make sure to focus on phonological awareness while we’re talking about letters. We can draw attention to the SOUNDS in the word first and THEN start thinking about what letters would go along with those sounds.
For example, if you were spelling the word “bat”, you could say, “Let’s think about the sounds in that word.” And you could help the child along to come up with “b….a….t”. Then once you’ve identified the SOUNDS, you could say those sounds aloud as you are writing the letters. That way the child has a STRATEGY that can be applied to many words, instead of memorizing a string of letters without grasping WHY those letters are sequenced together in the first place.
So instead of saying “sound it out”, take it a step further.
“Let’s think about those sounds. Now, let’s think about the letters.”
Morphology
Morphology is the study of the forms of words known as morphemes. There are two types of morphemes: grammatical morphemes and derivational morphemes.
Grammatical morphemes are the grammatical units within words that change the grammatical structure. This includes things like endings on verbs that change the tense (“ed”, “ing”, “s”), or using the “s” to indicate that something is plural or possessive (Bowers, Kirby, & Deacon, 2010).
Derivational morphemes change a word’s meaning and may also change its class; this would include things like prefixes and suffixes; this would include things like prefixes and suffixes. Prefixes like “re” for example can change the meaning of a word, while endings like “ly” or “ment” change the class of a word. For example, “love” changes from a noun or a verb into an adverb when it comes “lovely”, or “ship” changes from a verb to a noun when it becomes “shipment” (Henbest & Apel, 2021).
I provide a ton of examples and further explanations of important morphological skills in my Word Study Toolkit.
Schools are getting better about incorporating phonological awareness into early literacy curriculums; however work on morphology is not done as much as it’s needed. There’s a misconception that it’s a more advanced skill for older students, or that reading skills need to be taught in stages (phonology before morphology, for example).
But recent research shows that this isn’t necessarily true. As early as first grade, kids are able to notice morphemes (like prefixes and suffixes) in words, and use that information to figure out what the word might mean. Additionally, kids who have strong knowledge of morphemes in the early years tend to be better readers in the later grades (Apel & Henbest, 2015; Apel & Lawrence, 2011). It’s also a skill that struggling readers tend to lack through secondary school and even through adulthood (Tighe & Binder, 2015).
By late elementary school, kids are expected to read texts with multimorphemic words, which are words that have more than one morpheme (Nippold, 2016). Phonological awareness and “sounding it out” can be helpful for shorter words with only one morpheme (e.g., cat, bat, hat); but that same strategy doesn’t work as well when you have a word like “recreation” that has four distinct morphemes.
In that case, it would make more sense to help kids pay attention to the four morphemes in the word and break it down that way to “re” “cre” “ate” “ion”. Over time, kids start to realize that sequences of letters like “re” go together for a reason; which makes it much easier for them to problem-solve and read/spell words.
Orthography
Orthography is the study of a spelling system in a language. A lot of people confuse this with handwriting, which is not the same thing. The formation of letters is definitely important, but we also need to pay attention to the meaning behind written symbols and recognize common spelling patterns (Bahr, Silliman, & Berninger, 2020).
The Word Study Toolkit gives some examples of patterns that can help kids learn to spell and read fluently.
Reading and spelling need to be automatic for kids to be good readers and writers. Without automaticity, you’d spend so much time trying to read words that you’d have no capacity left for comprehension of what you’re reading. With writing, you won’t be able to think about the big idea and meaning of what you’re writing if you’re devoting too much energy to “sounding words out”.
That’s why studying orthography, along with phonology and morphology, is so important. When you’re studying morphology by looking at the parts of words (like affixes, root words, grammatical endings) talking about how they’re spelled, you’re also studying orthography. When you’re doing phonological awareness exercises and also talking about the letters that go with the sounds, you’re also studying orthography.
You’re also studying orthography when you’re studying homophones like “are” and “our” or “steak and “stake” or when you’re studying spelling patterns like “ought” or “augh”. One of the biggest inaccuracies in spelling curriculums is that they refer to these more difficult spelling patterns as “exceptions” to the rule because they don’t have a 1:1 correspondence between letters and sounds. This is never the case.
There is ALWAYS a pattern and reason why a word is spelled the way that it is. It does our kids a disservice if we tell them it doesn’t follow the rules and they just have to memorize it. If your child is struggling to spell, the chance that they will effectively memorize it and be able to use it functionally is small (Bahr et al., 2020).
Kids don’t have to learn every single spelling pattern in order to be proficient readers and writers. However, if we explain that they need to look for these patterns and point them out to our kids, they’re way more likely to catch on to the different patterns independently (Fallon & Katz, 2020).
Some people assume that it’s easier to explain more difficult spellings as “exceptions” because they think that kids won’t understand the rule. Sometimes people explain it this way because they don’t know the answer themselves; however a simple Google search is often enough to look up a spelling pattern so you can explain it to a child.
The best thing we can do is give kids the benefit of the doubt and give them accurate information about how language works. They just might be able to understand it.
In the third article of this series, I’ll talk about two additional tenets of effective literacy instruction: Active and Generative Use and Integration of Skills
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan is the founder and owner/operator of Dr. Karen, LLC, a company focused on empowering therapists and educators to design interventions that support language, literacy, and executive functioning. She has a doctorate in Special Education and Director of Special Education and Assistive Technology credentials from Illinois State University, as well as a master’s and bachelor’s from Illinois State University in speech-language pathology. She spent 14 years in the school systems and has held various roles in leadership and higher education teaching and mentoring clinicians. She is the host of the De Facto Leaders podcast, where she shares evidence-based practices, her own experiences, and guest interviews on topics relating to education and healthcare reform. She currently holds a management role with the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.
You can connect with Dr. Karen on LinkedIn here.
Sign up for her “How to Be Evidence-Based and Neurodiversity-Affirming by Supporting Executive Functioning” training here.
Download her “Executive Functioning Implementation Guide for School Teams” here.
Listen to the De Facto Leaders podcast here.
References
National Center for Education Statistics (2020). The condition of education 2020.
