Phonics is the first step that all of the oral work with language takes toward building a strong relationship with written language. The word phonics is based on the root phon or phone which means sound. You may remember from my post on Phonemic and Phonological Awareness that the suffix -ic means “having to do with or in regards to”. That means at its “root” (pun intended!!) Phonics just means having to do with sound. And that is what it is. It is teaching children what sounds each letter makes. ALL of the sounds each letter makes (long and short vowel sounds, soft and hard c and g sounds, or multiple sounds for a digraph). It is also what sounds different digraphs, trigraphs, quadgraphs, diphthongs, and vowel teams make.

Here is some more information about what each of those letter combinations are. Di-, tri- and quad graphs are just letter combinations that make a new/different sound. Di is a root that means two, so these are the two letter combinations of sh, ch, wh, and ph. Tri means three so that includes combinations like igh, tch, dge. Quad means four so that means a four letter combination like eigh. Diphthongs are vowel or vowel and consonant combinations that make a blended or new sound. Some examples of these are ou, ow, oi and oy. Vowel teams are two vowel combinations that follow the rule of “when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking and says its name”. The term vowel team is used for various combinations in different programs and trainings, but to me there are only 6 true vowel teams because they include only vowels and they follow the above rule. They are ea, ee, oe, oa, ai, and ie.

Once learners have mastered with BOTH accuracy and automaticity the sounds of the letters, they can start using their Phonemic Awareness skills to put those sounds together to sound out AND spell words. This is a key thing to remember. True phonics should include instruction in both decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling) words. Learners do not have to have all the letter combinations mastered before starting to use phonics to read and spell. In fact they can begin using their Phonological skills to read and write as soon as they have mastered with accuracy and automaticity as few as two letter sounds like /a/ and /m/ or /o/ and /n/. As learners are working on and mastering their letter sounds they should be using them to read and write as soon as possible. Doing this will help their learning in two ways. First, it will help them see the value of what they are learning and help them remain engaged in the learning. Second, it will help ingrain their learning deeper as they practice applying their new knowledge in different ways.

This is essentially all that Phonics is. It is teaching learners explicitly the sounds that go with each letter symbol and then giving them as many and as varied opportunities to use/apply that information in BOTH reading and writing. There are just a few more things I would like to mention though, that strengthen a good phonics foundation.

One of those things is the rules that govern many of the sounds letters make. Although, typically these rules are more important for spelling, they do affect reading skills as well. One of the rules that affects reading is the type of syllable you are reading. A closed syllable (one that ends in a consonant) uses a short vowel sound. An open syllable (one that ends in a vowel) uses a long vowel sound. Recognizing and understanding this will help readers gain efficiency because they no longer have to try both vowel sounds, they can just read the correct sound the first try. There are between six and eight syllable types depending on the program you are using or learning from. Each of these syllable types gives specific information to help with reading and spelling. A strong foundation in Phonemic Awareness is again important here because it will allow children to know where words break between syllables. Other rules like an a says /o/ when it follows a w or comes before an l, help with both reading and spelling. Words like want are no longer just sight words, they are words that follow a specific rule. This is an example of how, although there are certainly exceptions to the rules in the English language, there are fewer than many of us think or thought, once we learn the rules that govern our language. I am only now starting to feel like I know about more of these rules than I don’t thanks to a mentor of mine who is a Dyslexia interventionist and whose original degree was not in teaching, but in English itself. It is vital that there is instruction in these rules that govern our language within Phonics instruction to ensure students can read AND spell unknown words based on rules and sounds, not just the words included in the lessons or weekly spelling list or the word list in the back of their decodable reader.

The other is the VITAL importance of teaching spelling as a part of Phonics instruction. Yes, this series of posts is about the pillars of Reading, but without using Phonics for spelling you are taking half of the equation and ability from the learners. Students will progress more quickly with reading the letter sounds they are being instructed in than they will in spelling them. However, once they have mastered letter sounds and practiced applying that knowledge in reading they need to be given the opportunity and expectation to use that same knowledge in writing/spelling. If they cannot use the known letter sounds correctly and consistently in spelling and writing, both scripted like a spelling test and free like journal writing, it should not be considered a mastered skill and more practice must be given.

Here are some things to remember about Phonics:

It is the explicit instruction of letter and letter combination sounds

It must include application practice in BOTH decoding/reading and encoding/spelling

It must include instruction and drill of the rules that govern which letter/letter combination sound OR letter/letter combination to use when spelling a sound (i.e. both ch and tch say /ch/, but are used in different words and places in words)

If you have any great tips to share about teaching Phonics to your students please share in the comments so that we can all learn from you! What has been your best resource for learning the rules that govern our language? What questions do you still have about Phonics? I look forward to hearing from you.

As I dive more and more into the Science of Reading, I am actually surprised that fluency remains one of the pillars for reading. Before you jump to conclusions that I’ve lost my mind or any understanding of what reading has to accomplish to be successful, let me explain.

First, I would like to say how grateful I am for the chance to write these posts. What started as a way to help readers, specifically my sister, understand more about reading as they work to help children learn to read, has become a way for me to understand reading better and organize my thoughts more about it. Writing these has helped bring more clarity to each piece of reading and the way they fit together and I am SO grateful. Having that clarity gives me more focus and the combination of the two will help me to do a better job of helping my daughters and my students traverse the sometimes rocky terrain of reading.

Back to fluency and explaining my thoughts on why it seems odd as a pillar of reading. First, why I think it remains a pillar. To be sure you must be a fluent reader to comprehend well. Fluency is also what takes reading from a lesson or a chore to a pleasure and an adventure. And these facts are, I’m sure, the reason it IS one of the five pillars of reading. The reason I say I am surprised that it is left as a pillar is that the more I read and learn about the Science of Reading, the more I realize that fluency is a byproduct of accuracy and automaticity of the foundational skills of reading.

To kind of paint a picture of this, I find it helpful to think of Scarborough’s Reading Rope which is based on the Simple View of Reading. The Simple View of Reading says that reading is made up of two parts: decoding and language comprehension. Decoding is a blend of Phonemic and Phonological Awareness. As a learner becomes accurate and automatic in both of these skills, they become a quick and efficient Orthographic Mapper. Once they become an efficient orthographic mapper, they build a larger and larger sight vocabulary and reading becomes more and more effortless. This then adds the third element of decoding which is sight recognition. This would reach by many definitions or assessments fluent reading. Strength in these three areas alone would give students a high score on tests like DIBELS ORF, it would aid them in the timely completion of STAR and MAP tests. But, without the other half of the simple view of reading, all of these abilities come to naught. That is because if all the learner has is decoding fluency then they cannot understand or remember or apply anything they read. Reading has become almost rote memorization. To me this drains reading of all of it’s color, drama and interest. It truly just becomes the job that so many struggling readers see it as. Interestingly enough, most struggling readers see it as a dreary chore, not because of a strength in decoding alone, but rather a deficit in decoding even if they have a strength in Comprehension. This leads us to the other half of the Simple View of Reading.

The second part of the Simple View of Reading is Language Comprehension. Now, like was discussed in my post on comprehension, comprehension is truly the understanding of BOTH what one reads AND what one hears. That is why it is called language comprehension in this view and not reading comprehension. According to Scarborough’s Rope, Language Comprehension is made up of background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge. As you can see very little of this comprehension is actually based on reading. Rather it is based on talking. That is why when a teacher is trying to help students grow in comprehension their lessons must include lots of conversations. It is also why we need to facilitate conversations with our students, with our children at home, with our nieces and nephews and grandchildren. The more they talk and the more words they are exposed to in conversation, the greater their reading comprehension will become. This is because they then already have a foundation of strong knowledge of word meanings. Then as that Comprehension or knowledge of meanings is mixed with their decoding skills of Phonemic and Phonological Awareness and Orthographic Mapping then a reader is truly FLUENT. They are able to read accurately, with a natural rate of speed AND with the appropriate expression based on their understanding (comprehension) of the text.

Here’s a recap. Fluency remains a pillar of reading because without it reading doesn’t work. However, it is a pillar that, even more than the others, CANNOT stand alone because it is gained only through the development and success of the other pillars. Therefore, fluency rarely if ever needs to be targeted for remediation or intervention. It will naturally occur as you strengthen the other skills necessary for reading. It stands as a good example and important reminder that NONE of these pillars are meant to be alone. There are five pillars because the institution of reading cannot be held up by any one of them. If a learner is only strong in one, then that part of their reading will stand tall, but it will always be skewed as the other parts fall and slide and slant every which way. Fluency sets the example and the is the final marker of how reading is the coming together of five key parts to create one whole and balanced reader!

Happy reading! Let me know of any examples you have of seeing fluency grow, not from explicit fluency instruction, but from a learner growing either in a deficit pillar skill or in all of them simultaneously. I look forward to hearing your success stories, both to learn from you and to celebrate your victories!

Vocabulary is what most of us would think it is. It is the knowledge of the meaning of words. The difference from what I thought of as vocabulary and what I have come to think of it is how much oral language contributes to it. When I think of vocabulary I think of the vocab tests I took in school and that I have given to my students. However, I have come to understand that those types of vocabulary lessons and tests will have a limited impact on students’ vocabulary skills. However, a students’ oral vocabulary can have a big impact on their learning and vocabulary skills.

Just like the phonemic awareness skills that I have talked about in another post, vocabulary can be learned orally. As children learn to speak and they have conversations with their families and the people around them, they are developing their strongest vocabulary skills. If there is not enough conversation or the people they talk to have limited vocabularies, then their vocabularies will be limited too. This is why it is imperative that we force children to put their devices down and have conversations. They need to talk to each other and to their families and to their teachers. They need to research things they love and talk about them. They need to do book talks and describe the meaning of unknown words that they learn in their reading. This is because their oral vocabulary is the biggest indicator of their vocabulary skills. If a student has accurate and automatic Phonemic Awareness, accurate and automatic Phonological (phonics) Awareness and a limited oral vocabulary they will still struggle to map words efficiently. Because words are mapped by meaning, students who can decode words, but don’t know what they mean will struggle to map them quickly. They can still map them based on their knowledge of the meaning of the letter sounds and the reasons for the letters making those sounds. This knowledge and meaning will not be as useful as the meaning of the words themselves, though. However, if a student has that accurate and automatic foundation in phonemic and phonological awareness AND a strong oral vocabulary then they will grow their sight vocabulary much faster. This means that they will increase their fluency in reading much faster and efficiently.

This does NOT mean that there is no place for vocabulary tests, roots lessons and learning new words during Read Alouds, Book Studies, Science and Social Studies lessons. It does mean that we cannot rely on them for the building of students’ vocabularies. We need to build students’ vocabularies through class discussions, debate and life experiences and activities. We need to share with our students the value of face-to-face conversations. We need to draw them in by using big words and calling things like sounds by their actual names like phonemes. We need to call digraphs digraphs instead of just letter teams or pairs. Every opportunity you have to expose children to new words and meanings we must take.

The main takeaways are that vocabulary comes mainly through oral language and that we should do our best to provide our children and students with a rich oral vocabulary environment. When children or students have a limited oral vocabulary we can help them by providing these rich oral environments. We can still use vocabulary tests and roots lessons to build on what they know, but we need to remember that there is no substitute for having conversations! That is why we feel like we know that students or children have learned or mastered words when they start to use them when they talk. Vocabulary should be a never ending adventure in learning, there is always more to learn! Let me know some of the strategies that you have used successfully to help children grow their vocabularies!

Also, if you enjoyed this post you may enjoy these posts on the other pillars of reading:

Phonemic Awareness, What Is it and Why Does It Matter?

Orthographic Mapping

The Difference Between Phonemic and Phonological Awareness

These two terms are often used interchangeably and they are related. However, they are not exactly the same. Some of the differences can be found or highlighted in looking at the roots within each word.

Let’s start with Phonemic Awareness. The root phono means sound. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in language. So Phonemic Awareness is the awareness of all the small sounds that fit together to make words in our spoken language. Then, it goes beyond just hearing all of those sounds to being able to delete them or add new ones or move the sounds around in words. All Phonemic Awareness skills are based in oral language. They are aural skills, aural meaning “relating to the ear or the sense of hearing”. A person does not have to be able to read at all to be able to learn Phonemic Awareness skills. Phonemic Awareness skills include things like rhyming (identifying and producing), segmenting words into syllables (and being able to accurately drop syllables and know what portion of the word if left), segmenting words into individual phonemes/sounds, blending individual phonemes/sounds into words, deleting individual phonemes and knowing what is left, changing individual phonemes to create new/different words.

Then there is Phonological Awareness. Since this still has the root phono in it, it still related to the sounds of our language. It includes now the root logos though which means “reason, idea or word”. Phonological Awareness is taking the knowledge of and ability to hear the multiple sounds in a word and recognizing that each of those sounds are attached to some symbols in written language. These skills are the ability to sound out a written word by knowing which sound goes with each letter or letter combination in a word. Phonemic Awareness skills should be in place PRIOR to developing Phonological Awareness skills so that a person is only learning to match sounds to symbols and they already have the ability to segment, blend and manipulate those sounds once they are matched.

One MAJOR thing to remember about both of these skills is that they need to be accurate AND automatic! In education we have often fallen short with these skills by only teaching to accuracy. However, if it is not also automatic then reading is often still labored, slow and inefficient. When measuring automaticity in his book, Equipped for Reading Success, and his subsequent assessment, the PAST, David Kilpatrick sets the measure of automaticity as being able to respond correctly within 2 seconds. This means that when you are working on letter names and sounds and you show a learner the letter b and ask for the name they should correctly name it within 2 seconds before they can be considered to have mastered that skill. It also means that if you say time and ask for a rhyming word, that the a correct answer like lime should be given within 2 seconds to be considered to have mastered producing rhymes. This rule of thumb can be used for checking to see if learners have actually mapped words later on in their reading journey by showing a word you think they have mapped and asking them to read it. You will know they have mapped it if they correctly identify the word within 2 seconds without sounding it out. This idea of teaching to accuracy AND automaticity should be applied to all areas of memorization skills and many other types of learning skills like math facts, patterning, suffix and root meanings or even vocabulary word meanings.

In this post I am going to try to explain orthographic mapping. I will not be able to fully explain it because I am still adding to my understanding of it. When you read texts, books or publications from the experts in the Science of Reading, you may hear about a person’s orthographic lexicon and their sight word vocabulary. Understanding what is meant by those two terms will help you understand orthographic mapping a bit more.

First up, orthographic lexicon. This is simply an individual’s lexicon, which means a vocabulary (dictionaries are sometimes referred to as lexicons) of words that they recognize and can read on sight. They no longer have to sound them out, they recognize that string of letters as a word instantaneously EVERY time they see it. It is called an ORTHOGRAPHIC lexicon because ortho means right, correct or straight and the person reads these words correctly every time they see them. Graph means to write or draw, so again the person reads these words correctly every time they see them written. The suffix -ic simply means having to do with reminding us that the lexicon/vocabulary has to do with correctly read written words. So an Orthographic Lexicon is a person’s VOCABULARY or collection of words that they read CORRECTLY every time they see them WRITTEN down.

Secondly, we will cover what is meant by sight word vocabulary in the Science of Reading. If you have been teaching for any length of time you have likely heard of sight words. You may even remember learning “sight words” when you were in school. In these contexts “sight words” are actually just high frequency words. This means they are words that appear often in our language and if you can read these words you will be able to read the majority of texts you have to read. However, within the context of the Science of Reading sight word vocabulary refers only to a person’s orthographic lexicon, those words that an individual can read correctly and instantaneously on sight, regardless of context or font.

The process of getting a word from being a random string of letters to a word within a person’s orthographic lexicon is called orthographic mapping. The most enlightening thing about orthographic mapping, in my opinion, is that it is NOT based on sight. Unlike letter names and sounds that are learned by sight, we map words based on meaning. This is where that repurposing of language centers within the brain comes into play. When children or people are learning new words and orthographically mapping them (committing them to memory) they use the portions of the brains where the meanings and definitions of words are stored, not the sight parts of the brain. This explains why you may see someone familiar in the hallway, but not remember their name even though you can tell by sight that you know them. But, if you’ve orthographically mapped the word brown, you will automatically and correctly read it every time you see it. You won’t know it one day and forget it the next.

This understanding of the fact that we use meaning to get to words to “stick” instead of repetitions or visual/sight practice is the biggest game changer for me in understanding orthographic mapping. It means that if a child sounds out a word repeatedly, but has no understanding of the meaning of the word it will take longer to map the word. The meaning can be based on why the letters make the sounds they make in the word. For example, you may teach a student why circle has the /s/ sound for the first c (because it is followed by an i), but it has the /k/ sound for the second c )because it is followed by the consonant l). Or it can be based on the actual meaning of the word circle (that it is a round shape with no corners or sides).

There are several strategies that help readers map words more quickly. One is the use of sound boxes. This is particularly helpful for words that don’t sound like they are spelled like the word said. If you are using sound boxes with said you would need 3 boxes even though there are 4 letters. You only use one box for each sound regardless of how many letters it takes to spell it. The first box would be for the s that says /s/, the second box would be for ai that says /e/ and the third box would be for the d that says /d/. This strategy is actually to help students learn to spell words correctly. However, attaching the meaning of which sound is spelled with which letters can help the reader map the word more quickly. Stopping to discuss the meaning of a word that the reader does not know (how to read OR the meaning of) will also help with mapping. Thirdly, discussing the meaning of the whole sentence after figuring out a word that the reader could not read on their own, but knows the meaning of helps speed up orthographic mapping. A good reader needs 3-4 exposures to words to map them into their orthographic lexicon. Struggling readers need up to 20 or more. Studies have been done up to about 16 exposures, but then the difference in recognition starts to drop off so studies have not really been done on higher numbers of repetitions.

This is where and why having a strong verbal vocabulary is important to people as they are learning to read. As long as words remain simply strings of letter sounds with no real meaning to the reader, they will struggle to map the words and their reading rate (speed of reading) will remain slower. Another interesting thing to keep in mind before we leave this subject is that David Kilpatrick, one of the leaders in the study of the Science of Reading, says that we can work with young children to help them map words, but that mapping doesn’t really pick up until third and fourth grade. This is a tricky and possibly reassuring thought for some of our struggling readers in 2nd grade. It is vital that they have a strong and accurate knowledge of letter sounds and rules, but if they have a strong and complete phonics foundation and are still a slow reader it is likely that their orthographic mapping has just not picked up yet. This does NOT mean we should not be intervening for these students. It does mean that if speed is their only deficit, they may not be behind. Interventions should focus on phonics and phonemic skills to make sure that they are BOTH accurate AND automatic with all of those skills AND on building their verbal vocabulary through read alouds, class discussions and conversations. Their speed should be increasing. If it isn’t or if they are lacking in either ACCURACY or AUTOMATICITY in phonics or phonemic skills they need continued intervention on those things.