What Teachers Need to Know & Do to Teach Letter-Sounds, Phonemic Awareness, Word Reading & Phonics (Linnea C. Ehri)
Different ways to read words.
Memory - because you have read the word several times you can read it from memory automatically by sight.
Decode - if you have never read a word before, you might decode it by sounding out & blending letter-sound units.
Analogy - if you have never read a word before, you might liken it to a word you already know that shares its spelling pattern.
Predict - for a word you know orally, but not in print, you might use sentence context & some of the letters to predict the word.
Sight word learning.
Written words are stored in memory when graphemes in spellings are connected to phonemes in pronunciations of words.
Readers encounter an unfamiliar written word - they decode it by converting graphemes into a blend of phonemes.
This secures the spelling bonded to its pronunciation in memory - and once practiced a few times this is retained in the memory.
This is called orthographic mapping - once the graphemes are named, it is easier to clarify the pronunciation of a word.
Orthographic mapping enables students to read words by sight (Ehri, 2014) - this doesn't apply only to high frequency or irregular words, but to all words that are stored in the memory.
To remember irregularly spelled words, partial orthographic mapping between graphemes & phonemes can be activated.
Most words contain at least dome graphemes & phonemes that are regular, so these can anchor spellings in memory.
E.g. the initial & final consonants in 'said' & 'yacht' are regular.
Mnemonics to teach letters.
There are letter-mnemonic characters used to teach graphemes & phonemes used in some SSP programs:
E.g. Annie Apple, Eddy Elephant & Sammy Snake.
Letter-mnemonics are so memorable because of the special relationship linking letter shapes to the objects that they resemble.
This link makes it possible for learners to look at a bare letter & remember its sound because the letter's shape reminds them of the object, its name & the initial sound in the name.
Teachers using letter-mnemonics have reported that children learn the grapheme phoneme relations quickly, & with practice the associations become automatic & the character isn't needed.
Acoustic & articulatory analysis to teach phonemic awareness.
Graphemes in spellings may help you to detect phonemes, but they can be misleading.
Instead you need to focus on analysing the sounds in spoken words & the mouth positions & movements that accompany sounds to break words into their smallest pieces.
Teaching students phonemic awareness can be conducted using several tasks:
The easiest tasks focus on single phonemes - say the first sound in 'cat', the final sound, the middle sound; from an array of pictures, pick two whose names begin with the same sound.
More difficult is phoneme segmentation which requires identifying the sequence of separate phonemes in spoken words.
Phoneme blending involves listening to phonemes spoken separately & then combining them to form a word.
More advanced tasks involve adding phonemes, deleting phonemes & substituting phonemes - e.g. say 'love', now add 'g' as the beginning.
Phonemic awareness tasks involve manipulating phonemes in spoken words.
These tasks can be conducted by having students move tokens to mark the phonemes they manipulate.
If students know grapheme-phoneme relations, they can be given letters rather tokens to select & move onto a line as they say each phoneme.
Boyer & Ehri (2011) - students can also be taught to monitor their mouth positions & movements to segment words into phonemes.
Decoding instruction.
Decoding involves transforming graphemes into phonemes & blending them to form a recognisable word - this enables students to read words they've never read before.
Once words are decoded a few times, their spellings become bonded to their pronunciations & meanings in memory & enables students to read the words automatically by sight.
Some features of words make decoding more difficult:
The longer the spelling, the more graphemes & phonemes the students must remember to blend.
Stop consonants in words are hard to pronounce individually without adding a vowel - which complicates the blending process.
How reading text contributes to sight word learning.
Orthographic mapping creates connections between graphemes & phonemes to secure spellings bonded to pronunciations of words in memory - however, meaning must also become bonded to spellings in memory.
Bonding is facilitated when words are read in meaningful contexts.
Connecting semantic information to spellings of words is especially important for words that have little meaning when pronounced in isolation.
An important function of reading words in text is to activate meanings & syntactic information about the words' roles in sentences so that this information becomes bonded to spellings & pronunciations in memory.
Oral versus silent reading of words.
In order for readers to store words in memory to build their sight vocabularies, grapheme-phoneme connections must be formed between spellings & spoken words.
If readers don't stop & pronounce unfamiliar words, then connections won't be formed & the words will not enter memory - the process of orthographic memory requires this.
It is important to instill this habit of pronouncing words aloud in beginning readers for whom decoding words takes time & effort.
Solutions for teaching students to read irregularly spelled words.
Many high-frequency words are needed to form sentences, yet their spellings don't conform fully to the writing system - e.g. words like 'said', 'the' & 'was'.
Various instructional solutions have been adopted:
One is to have children practice reading these words in isolation on flash cards - however, meanings of these words will not be activated & become bonded to the spellings in memory.
Another is to have beginners read decodable texts that are tailored to the grapheme-phoneme units they have been taught & minimise the number of irregularly spelled words - as students learn more of these units, the word possibilities expand.
Another approach is to teach students to decode flexibly by testing alternative pronunciations of an irregular spelling until they hit upon a meaningful word that matches some of the grapheme-phonemes in the spelling & fits the context.
Finally, the text itself might be written to make decoding easier - e.g. letters in words might be specially marked to indicate how they are pronounced.