Inside Phonics: Design Details and Teaching Strategies

The 2000 National Reading Panel (NRP) subpanel report about phonics instruction received a great deal of attention, for at least one important reason. The subpanel examined research about the critical learnings for reading words: Learning about the alphabetic system, and how to use letter-sound correspondences to read words. The subpanel concluded effective instruction in these word reading foundations is explicit, systematic, and sequenced.

Word reading is the major obstacle for students who have difficulty learning to read and become strong readers. Students with reading disabilities, the largest group of children in special education, as well as students in general education who do not read well, all experience word-level problems that can be prevented or remediated with early evidence-based instruction (Vaughn & Fletcher, 2020).

Students who struggle with basic word reading face an obstacle that holds them back from learning other necessary reading skills, including:

• Understanding sentence syntax
• Reading “big words” that develop independent and motivated readers
• Learning about morphology and vocabulary that build word reading and meaning
• Developing comprehension strategies

Students need accurate and automatic word reading skills to comprehend text, and to experience the enjoyment and benefits of wide reading. Dr. Louisa Moats describes how students with efficient word reading learn to coordinate sentence-level reading skills in her blog, Sentence by Sentence: Reading Comprehension in Grades 4–9 Students.

Since the NRP report, research from many fields—including cognitive psychology and linguistics—has added to understanding why some students find these early sound and word reading skills difficult to learn. For example:

• Learning letter-sound correspondences is a paired associate learning (PAL) task, and there are individual differences in PAL.  
  
• Individual differences influence how easily students learn to blend letter sounds to read words—a very challenging task for some students. Student language and vocabulary knowledge influence decoding—which is more difficult when students can’t recognize or don’t know the word they are sounding out.

High-intensity tutoring is one way for schools to provide more intensive early K–1 phonics interventions, early, when this is most effective. We developed the Sound Partners tutoring programs with the specific goal to help non-teacher tutors supplement beginning phonics instruction. Lessons were designed to enable tutors to effectively deliver the additional modeling, scaffolding, and practice that some students need to learn these skills. Lesson design incorporated the evidence about early reading, as well as research about effective instruction. For example, we incorporated features of Direct Instruction (DI) found in programs like Reading Mastery. Dr. Jean Stockard describes in her blog post the evidence about the effectiveness of DI programs, with effect sizes twice as large as for other curricula. In addition to the explicit, systematic, and sequenced design of DI, two important factors in DI interventions influenced their effectiveness: Fidelity and dosage. When instruction is delivered by non-teachers, it is even more important that the lesson design and tutor training support fidelity, with a considerate Scope and Sequence that helps students make progress through the lessons.

Sound Partners lessons support strong instructional delivery. Directions provide clear tutor models. Activities provide examples and non-examples for new skills (e.g., noticing words with and without inflections), discrimination practice (e.g., identifying words with similar sounds or letters), and a sequence that progresses from the letter, word, sentence, and text level. In training, tutors learn how to adjust practice opportunities based on student responses and progress on mastery tests, and how to adjust levels of scaffolding and corrective feedback.

Students experienced declines in reading during the pandemic, and it remains important to find ways to help every student gain this foundation in word reading. State and benchmark tests show there continues to be widening achievement gaps in reading, compared to pre-pandemic years, for students in high-poverty schools and for students of color (Goldhaber et al., 2022). Others have confirmed children from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds experienced the largest learning deficits, increasing educational inequalities present prior to the pandemic (Betthauser et al., 2023).

Phonics is the bedrock for reading instruction, and research continues about how to teach it well. Important areas of research about details of phonics instruction include:

• Providing evidence-based alphabet instruction with a faster rate of introducing letters, allowing for more practice with difficult letters, and cycles of distributed review (Jones & Reutzel, 2012; Sunde et al., 2019).
• Teaching decoding more effectively with connected phonation, or stretched blending, rather than stopping between the sounds (Ehri, 2022; Gonzalez-Frey & Ehri, 2021).
• Explicitly teaching young readers and emerging decoders a skill known as “set for variability” to correct imperfect pronunciations of words (Dyson et al., 2017; Savage et al., 2018).

These are promising lines of research that may help us teach word reading skills even more effectively, especially for students who struggle with these reading foundations.

Join me for the EDVIEW360 podcast, where I’ll share more about this topic along with applicable strategies.

Learn more about Sound Partners

References

Betthauser, B. A., Bach-Mortensen, A. M., & Engzell, P. (2023). A systematic review and meta-analysis of the evidence on learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nature Human Behavior. Published online January 30, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01506-4

Dyson, H., Best, W., Solity, J., & Hulme, C. (2017). Training mispronunciation correction and word meanings improves children’s ability to learn to read words. Scientific Studies of Reading, 21, 392-407. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10888438.2017.1315424

Ehri, L. C. (2022). What teachers need to know and do to teach letter-sounds, phonemic awareness, word reading, and phonics. The Reading Teacher, 76, 53-61. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.2095

Goldhaber, D., Kane, T. J., McEachin, A., & Morton, E. (2022). A comprehensive picture of achievement across COVID-19 pandemic years: Examining variation in test levels and growth across districts, schools, grades, and students. CALDER Working Paper no. 266-0522. May, 2022.

Gonzalez-Frey, S. M., & Ehri. L. C. (2021) Connected phonation is more effective than segmented phonation for teaching beginning readers to decode unfamiliar words, Scientific Studies of Reading, 25:3, 272-285. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10888438.2020.1776290

Hall, C., et al. (2023). Forty years of reading intervention research for elementary students with or at risk for dyslexia: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Reading Research Quarterly, 58, 285-312. https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/rrq.477

Jones, C., & Reutzel, R. (2012). Enhanced alphabet knowledge instruction: Exploring a change of frequency, focus, and distributed cycles of review. Reading Psychology, 35, 448–464. https ://doi.org/10.1080/02702 711.2010

Mesmer, H. A. (2024). Big words for young readers: Teaching kids in grades K to 5 to decode-- and understand—words with multiple syllables and morphemes. Scholastic.

Dyson, H., Best, W., Solity, J., & Hulme, C. (2017) Training mispronunciation correction and word meanings improves children’s ability to learn to read words, Scientific Studies of Reading, 21:5, 392-407. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10888438.2017.1315424

Sargiani, R., Ehri, L. C., & Maluf, M. R. (2022). Teaching beginners to decode consonant-vowel syllables using grapheme-phoneme subunits facilitates reading and spelling as compared with teaching whole-syllable decoding. Reading Research Quarterly, 57, 629-648. https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/rrq.432

Savage, R., Georgiou, G.,  Parrila , R., & Maiorino, K. (2018) Preventative reading interventions teaching direct mapping of graphemes in texts and set-for-variability aid at-risk learners. Scientific Studies of Reading, 22:3, 225-247. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10888438.2018.1427753

Steacy, L. M., Rigobon, V. M.,  Edwards, A. A., Abes, D. R., Marencin, N. C., Smith, K., Elliott, J. D., Wade-Woolley, L., & Compton, D. L.  (2022): Modeling complex word reading: Examining influences at the level of the word and child on mono- and polymorphemic word reading, Scientific Studies of Reading, 26, 527-544. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9838127/

Sunde, K., Furnes, B., & Lundetrae, K. (2020). Does introducing the letters faster boost the development of children’s letter knowledge, word reading, and spelling in the first year of school? Scientific Studies of Reading, 24, 141–158. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10888438.2019.1615491

Vadasy, P. F., & Sanders, E. A. (2021). Introducing grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs): exploring rate and complexity in phonics instruction for kindergarteners with limited literacy skills. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 34, 109-138. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-44879-001

Vaughn, S., & Fletcher, J. M. (2020). Identifying and teaching students with significant reading problems. American Educator, Winter 2020-2021.