Literacy Talks

Can We End “the Reading Wars?” Part Two—Cracking the Alphabetic Code

• Reading Horizons • Season 4 • Episode 8

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This episode focuses on cracking the alphabetic code in part two of studying the article Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition From Novice to Expert by Anne Castles, Kathleen Rastle, and Kate Nation. The discussion emphasizes the significance of spoken language comprehension for young learners and the crucial role of engaging students in the writing system in connecting spoken and written language. Debunking myths about phonics and highlighting the years of practice and instruction needed for reading proficiency, this episode serves as a comprehensive guide where research meets classroom practice. Let’s explore this crucial intersection together in Literacy Talks.


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Narrator:

Hello literacy leaders and champions. Welcome to literacy talks, a podcast series for Reading Horizons dedicated to exploring the ideas, trends, insights and practical issues that will help us all improve our professional practice knowledge and confidence in teaching reading. Our host is Stacy Hurst, professor at Southern Utah University and Chief Academic Advisor at Reading Horizons where reading momentum begins. Joining Stacy are Donell Pons, a recognized expert in literacy and special education. And Lindsay Kemeny, an author, speaker and a first grade elementary reading teacher. Today's episode is part two of our four part miniseries as we unpack ending the reading wars reading acquisition from novice to expert by castles wrestle a nation from cracking the alphabetic code and important background on the writing system to phonics myths and instructional tips. There's a lot of literacy landscape to travel. Let's get started.

Stacy Hurst:

Welcome to this episode of literacy Talks. My name is Stacy Hurst. I'm the host and I'm joined by my co host, Donell Pons and Lindsay Kemeny. And if you listened to our last episode, we are on part two of a four part series about the article called ending the reading wars, reading acquisition from novice to expert by Anne Castles, Kathleen Rastle and Kate Nation otherwise known as Castles, Rastle, and Nation, just fun to say, I think we established that today we are going to be talking about Section One cracking the alphabetic code pages eight through 16. If you have the document, and if you listen to our last episode, we linked the document so you should have access to that. And we have lots of exciting things to talk about today, Lindsay and Donell, we're going to start with a little bit of background from them about the importance of the writing system. And then we'll be covering some tips that they give for instruction. They have a lot of really great questions that they mentioned that we still don't know about this aspect of reading. And of course, we get to cover the myths about phonics instruction, which I'm looking forward to Donell, Lindsay overall, anything stand out to you and this one, I just

Lindsay Kemeny:

love that box that they have with the myths for a phonics and I so I'm excited to talk about that.

Donell Pons:

I really love the beginning with the cracking the alphabetic code when it talks about the difference between spoken language and written and I think that one paragraph right under one dot cracking the alphabetic code, if you just read that paragraph would be very helpful to a lot of educators and parents is broken down so well. i That's

Stacy Hurst:

one thing I love about this article, it just puts into the best possible combination of words, the way to describe these things. And I think we mentioned this last time too. But you can tell the authors have a sense of humor, because of the quotes that they insert. Like from Steven Pinker when Donell they're talking about the difference between learning to speak and learning to read. And they're quoting him as saying there's almost no way to prevent it from happening, meaning students learning how to talk. And here comes the kind of funny part short of raising a child in a barrel, which is just an interesting visual, but

Donell Pons:

researcher humor, yes. The other thing I really liked is the next sentence. Well, it's a sentence after although reading is a heritable trait, influenced by multiple genes, interacting with environmental factors in complex ways, it is nevertheless a learned skill that typically requires years of instruction, and practice. Wow, just that sentence right there for understanding right?

Stacy Hurst:

Pretty clarifying. I'd say I actually highlighted this part too, because I think it does get to the point quite nicely. The challenge of reading is to learn to associate arbitrary visual symbols, patterns of lines, curves and dots with those meanings with the word meanings like we do with spoken words. So we have lots of experience, the three of us teaching people have read and using this writing system to do so that section 1.1 gives a nice overview I'd say to have kind of the history while they just mentioned that writing is a recent cultural invention. And all writing systems are kind of code for spoken language. Any insights in that section that you thought were noteworthy?

Donell Pons:

I just love how it helps to distill if you've heard that, you know, teaching children the code or whatever it helps to you to understand what that means. And what it means to crack the code, right is to get what the letters do with the sounds, and how that applies to this particular language. I thought that was really great too.

Stacy Hurst:

And Lindsey, you and I have taught littles to learn how to read in English, but they also mentioned other writing systems, and the history of those, and they call out alphabetic, syllabic and Morpho phonetic. And then this is just a fun little fact. But they they're giving an example of how spoken Mandarin Chinese is characterized by just a small number of syllables, and consequently a high number of homophones. But they're talking about they give an example of a troublesome instance of this, their words, obviously, with different meanings, but are pronounced the same way. So you really do have to know the context. But they say a troublesome instance of this is the word. I'm going to slaughter it. I don't know how to pronounce anything. I don't know the phonemes. In Mandarin Chinese. It's spelled Si, which means both the number four and death. No problem there. Which is why it's quite common for hotels in China to skip from the third floor to the fifth. Yeah.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Yeah. What did you think of that? Oh, yeah, that was just so interesting. Yeah.

Donell Pons:

I also think that's a really good point for when we're working with speakers of other languages that are learning English context, even more important, right? Because you, you don't realize what context is for them in their original primary language and how meaningful it is in learning another language. That's another reason why context context, when we're teaching,

Stacy Hurst:

and again, we're especially when we're focusing on that meaning meaning, meaning, that's the important thing. Okay. This is what I thought was really interesting. And actually, as you know, I use this article in some of my coursework with my students. But it literally took me a few times of reading it to really notice how poignant this part is. And to you too, it's gonna be like, Oh, that's obvious, Stacy. But they mentioned this, a crucial point is that most appropriate way to learn, they're talking about mapping sounds to the symbols, is governed not by pedagogical philosophy, but by the nature of the writing system the child needs to learn. So I'm thinking there is no debate here, we need to teach the phoneme graphing correspondences. I don't know of anybody that teaches reading this as we shouldn't. But as we have talked a lot about teaching whole words, as opposed to the individual graphemes in the sounds they represent

Lindsay Kemeny:

The fear by those that are against explicit phonics instruction, I guess is that we're putting that ahead of meaning. But you can see here I mean, in that first paragraph, it's talking about how you're connecting these things, with meaning all along, we're not neglecting meaning and just creating word-callers. We are attending to meaning as we also explicitly teach the letter sound correspondences.

Stacy Hurst:

And because of the nature of the English writing system, you have to know those to access that information and meaning really is critical. And then they call out a term Donell, I know you're really familiar with this paired associate learning tasks. If we don't teach it that way, then we are putting a lot on them cognitively, to memorize words as a whole. And the way they look, again, this to us this stating the obvious, but they do make mention that that kind of strategy is useful for a relatively small number of words. But it's hard to imagine memorizing 10s of 1000s of words that way. And they also call out the if we teach phoneme grapheme correspondences students are more likely to make other connections like if we teach the word vet, then it will be easier that for them to learn a word like that vow because of the consonant that's the same or van. And then they bring up orthographic depth. What do you guys think of that concept?

Lindsay Kemeny:

is definitely true of English, right? We have a really complex orthography, whereas other languages are maybe very consistent. Like here are the five vowels and they always represent these different, these five different sounds. We have 18 vowel sounds and multiple ways to spell them. And there's so many layers to English, like the etymology, the history of the word.

Stacy Hurst:

Yeah, it was just something that's useful for those of us who are teaching reading in English to know right, because I think we're always compared. I used to hate this. We always get compared to Finland. Yeah, notice that and their literacy rates, but when you learn that their orthography is so shallow. They literally have one sound, one symbol, and it takes their students about a year to learn to read. So they can't even wait till what we would call first grade. To start teaching reading. We can't we have a little, we have a little bit more complex of a code. Yeah, I just thought that was really interesting. Donell, anything. Oh, sorry.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Just gonna add I just think our language is so interesting. So, because there's reasons a lot of times it's so fun to find out the reason a word is spelled the way it is or the reason we retained that spelling like you have sign S I G N and that's related to signature, you hear the G there and so it just makes sense to me why we kept certain spelling's even though we changed how we pronounce them because it shows the relationships among the words.

Stacy Hurst:

And that's because we have a Morpho phonemic language. Some of those spelling's are determined by the meaningful parts of the word.

Donell Pons:

And I think this also gives a nod to why those sound spelling walls rather than just calling it a sound wall sound spelling walls are also so useful and effective, right? And if done well, when you organize things, there's a real base or a foundation that students can anchor in, in terms of how the students learn the progression of sounds with grapheme appropriate grapheme. And then as with development, they add additional graphemes. The organization is as important as understanding the depth of the orthography. Right, it's the organ that's key to everything. I think it's really interesting.

Stacy Hurst:

Yeah, it's like, it's like a filing system. Once you understand that, then your brain can file the information where it needs to go. So you can readily access it. It definitely makes all the sense in the world, once you understand it, which has taken me a while. And then they do call out that 80% of English mono syllables can be pronounced using a relatively small set of rules, relating graphemes to phonemes. In the remaining 20% of cases, typically only one grapheme deviates from its most frequent pronunciation. So they're called, they'll get into this, but we need to teach the most frequent phoneme grapheme correspondences. The really interesting thing that I thought they mentioned here is that most of that work on those sound spelling relationships had been conducted with single syllable words, which made sense to me. As I was reading, I was thinking, oh, yeah, makes sense. But then it says researchers are only just beginning to consider spelling sound relations in letter strings with more than one syllable. And that immediately makes me start thinking of areas phases, and then how we separate words into syllables. And I think there's been a lot of conversation about that lately, as well,

Lindsay Kemeny:

that quote on the 80% of the, you know, single syllables are consistent. In other words, English is not so crazy that we just throw our hands up and say, Oh, why teach it? It's just crazy. No, look, how many of those sound spellings are consistent, and reliable.

Stacy Hurst:

If any of my students listen to this podcast, this will be familiar to them. I threaten them. I'm like, if I ever hear you say after this class, that English is crazy. I will be on the news because of my reaction to that. You better not tell your students because they don't need to know that right. And that makes sense, though, because if we're teaching the most consistent phoneme, grapheme correspondences, and then we layer on explanations of those spelling that may not follow directly, it just starts making sense for students and clicking. And then we've got things going rather than saying English is crazy. Why even bother? Right?

Donell Pons:

Something I think is interesting. My my son, I think I've talked about he's he had a very difficult road to reading and dyslexia being part of the story, the challenge, and now in adulthood, he'd love to hear me calling him an adult. That's so great. I hope he hears that his early 20s. But it's interesting because he he now he's able to put words to things that he felt when he was younger learning to read. And it's been really interesting to hear him give me kind of a narrative of what it felt like, one of the things that he said about when we were discussing English going over spelling, and he said, You had such confidence that you could explain it. And you were willing to take the time to listen to my challenge. And my question, and then find a way to explain it to me that made it seem very understandable. And he said, That was fantastic. Because up to that point, it was, oh, it's crazy. It's wacky. Any of those number of words you hear people say, I don't know why. They said you would take the time and you had a confidence that no, we know why. Let's let's let's talk about this. We can figure it out. And he said that it was half of the battle right there was just to have that confidence behind now there's an answer for this. Let's talk about

Stacy Hurst:

Yeah, There are more explanations than exceptions far more, far more. They mentioned one that I thought was interesting. We know this, we teach it that sometimes EA can make the sound of short e like in the word bread instead. And there very few words. If you enough that you could just teach the words that that is the case, then that they call out that if you teach something like those combinations are usually followed by the letter D, then it just makes that even more consistent, right? Then they have an option to be flexible when they get to word with that spelling, when they're trying to figure out the pronunciation.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Okay, but we're not skipping the alphabetic principle section, right? Because

Donell Pons:

talk about that. No, we're not.

Lindsay Kemeny:

We're not there yet.

Stacy Hurst:

I do want to mention before we get there, and that's section 1.2, by the way, but I like the paragraph that kind of sums up the previous section. Okay, although orthographic depth affects the time taken to learn the sound of spelling mapping, it seems to be the same cognitively what is required in any language that is European in nature. So even though we're teaching English or any language that is similar, you still need to teach those sound spelling correspondences. So we can talk a little bit about sounds, but then you have to attach those two symbols, right. So this is where the alphabetic principle comes in. Lindsay, I know you have something to say about this.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Well, I just okay. I love that the very beginning it's talking about, students don't learn the alphabetic principle on their own, it's not natural. And they have this study, they talked about where it was pre literate students like preschoolers three to five, and they would show him written words like they like fat, and that they were taught to read those. And then they were given a transfer task. For example, they'd have fun, they'd have fun. And then they were asked is the word fun or bun after they had learned, you know, the words fattened back. And there were 80 students in the experiments, and none of them succeeded on the transfer task, none of them. And it just I love that they said their children showed no evidence of inducing the alphabetic principle. I love that because it points out that we have to explicitly teach them this, it's not going to happen naturally. And you hear over and over adults, or, you know, youth, teenagers who don't know this. And they, they find out Wait a minute, you know, these symbols represent a sound p h represents, why didn't anyone tell me this? Because what happens when sometimes we start with these, like whole word approaches, and we're not, you know, systematically, explicitly teaching these little points that you might think they are going to figure out on their own, but most of them will not.

Stacy Hurst:

And I don't know about you. But as a pre service teacher, I was literally taught that you don't have to spend a ton of time on this. You just have to surround students with text. And once they know a few of those correspondences, they'll generalize them. Now this study did say that if you're teaching those sounds simple correspondences they're more likely to generalize, like the task you just described. But we can't assume it. We know what happens when we do

Donell Pons:

I thought this was really interesting. Because in the adult space, that's where I'm hanging out, right. And I'm working with people. And consistently, adults will attempt to read unfamiliar words, and they're all levels of literacy that I encounter, they will attempt when pushed against the wall, like, I don't know this word, they will attempt to read with the letter name. And when you backup the bus and say, letter sound for reading. And you've done work with the sounds, the whole thing shifts, but it's just interesting to see what they're attempting to do on their own. So what's what are you using on your own to get through a word that you don't know? And they are going by letter name, and trust me, that is not a way to try to get through reading in a world when you're an adult. That's not a great way to do things, but consistently, that's what's happening. So we're talking right here about this very thing, the alphabetic code. Yeah,

Stacy Hurst:

even with older learners, it's so critical. And this is one of my favorite sentences in that section when they sum up that steady, reliable success on the transfer task was typically achieved only when children are trained, such that they could segment phonemes in spoken words and identify their initial phonemes and be recognized the graphic symbols that course On to the key sounds in the transfer task. I know we're not to the section of instruction yet, but that's what we need to be teaching. Right?

Lindsay Kemeny:

Exactly. So what do they need to know, to gain the alphabetic principle they need to be able to segment and identify the first sound in words. And then they need knowledge of the letter sounds.

Donell Pons:

Yep. And critical also for older learners as well.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Yes.

Stacy Hurst:

And I think I've heard the alphabetic principle described somewhere else as an insight. And I think there's two parts to that, right, it is the understanding of what the alphabetic principle is that insight, but then the actual information that goes into being able to make those sounds-symbols correspondences,

Donell Pons:

these are not small things when you're when you're asking an older learner who has worked with this and worked with this for decades, and has not been able to crack the code, when you start really honing in and pinpointing these things, segmenting blending. And it immediately becomes apparent that that was never a skill that the student ever achieved. Not even an insight. Really?

Stacy Hurst:

Yeah, do you know I, I know in my own students who are going to be teachers, that is always revelatory to them, honestly, because they've been speaking and reading and writing for so long, that they don't think of it on those. I always say our automaticity gets in the way of our instruction sometimes. And I think that's a case in point. Then speaking of that, they transition nicely. They mentioned Ehri's Phases, two, specifically when we're talking about the alphabetic principle and phoneme, grapheme correspondences, the partial alphabetic phase and the full alphabetic phase, can I just say that, as an educator, I cannot overstate the importance of that research that Dr. Ehri has done. Those phases are so critical to learning how to recognize words automatically. So we're looking at partial phases, the partial phases when students are able to recognize with their spelling, their spelling, some of those sounds, but maybe not all of them. In the full alphabetic phase. They're representing every sound in a word, even if the grapheme is incorrect. And those are things we're looking for as teachers. So I think that's important. And they do they mentioned it, they don't go fully into it, but they're going to talk about that, I think later to. Okay, so we are to the implementation or implications for the classroom. What stood out to you guys in this section?

Lindsay Kemeny:

Well, the phonics myths, but is that a little bit more? Do we have a little?

Stacy Hurst:

Um, that is sound a little? Yeah, yeah, we're on page 12. And for those who are following along to 1.4,

Donell Pons:

Lindsay's anxious to get to those, I know.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Well, I'm just like, Okay, that's good. Now stood out. There's another part that stood out, but I think it's a little bit it reminds me the shares self teaching hypothesis, when it's saying that teaching students a limited set of the grapheme phoneme correspondences, when they're taught really well, early on, they put them on the path to independent reading, where they are going to gain some of those more complex phonics concepts through their text experience. So I just thought that reminded me of the self teaching hypothesis, they have the basis of the code, and they can start to kind of figure the other stuff out as they experience it.

Stacy Hurst:

Yeah. Also mentioned vocabulary is important in that process to access the meaning. Donell.

Donell Pons:

So within that systematic phonics instruction, this is so important and vital, all for all learners, but particularly adult learners, because they, they're like Swiss cheese, right? There are holes everywhere. And there is no other way than to go back and figure out where you need to fill in, right? And that systematic explicit instruction that allows you to be able to do that to go back and, and trust me, you can be built on a shaky foundation and be able to do a few things. But you don't have everything and you're not fully automatic, you're not completely fluent, you have challenges. And so going back and being able to fill in, and that's done because it's systematic, systematic and explicit.

Lindsay Kemeny:

So us lower grade teachers, you know, that's really on us have a solid phonics scope and sequence that you're following to make sure that we don't have this Swiss cheese effect. Of course, some students are going to need more practice with that, but starting that right away in your tier one, and following up with extra practice in small group, for students who need it is going to be key.

Stacy Hurst:

Love it. And then they also mentioned the National Reading Panel findings, which at this point to some of us are old news, but they're still relevant. And I thought it was useful that they pointed out that in those studies that were mentioned in the National Reading Panel, when phonics instruction in a systematic and sequential way began in the first grade. It improved decoding spelling and text comprehension. Now we know that as students get older language comprehension plays more of a role, perhaps than decoding. But they also said more recently, two meta analyses have been conducted that conclude that phonics instruction is an effective intervention, intervention for poor readers no matter their age, and that there's benefits on spelling as well. And as you guys probably know, in England, they mentioned also they did meta analysis, the rose report, and as a result of that, which was one of the findings was how important phonics instruction is they started giving an assessment in England every year to their students, the whole country takes it. And I what I thought was cool was they met, they described the test and then they mentioned some of the results in this section, which I always wondered about. So the check requires children read 20 words and 20 non words aloud. The non words are critical to assess pure spelling to sound knowledge, which we refer to those sometimes as nonsense words, without any impact of memory for individual words. And then they stay that since 2012, when the test was introduced 58% of their students passed in 2012 69, in 2013 74%, and 2014 77%, in 2015 81, in 2016, and 81, in 2017. Any thoughts about those numbers?

Lindsay Kemeny:

I don't know. I guess I'm not surprised. Yeah, because I think, yes, they're doing the thing, right. And it

Stacy Hurst:

matches what we know about an MTS S model, right? We learn that 80% of students in that tier with tier one instruction can respond if it's good, high quality tier one instruction. And that is, that's representative of that, and I and that's pre COVID. So I'm not sure what their data looks like since then.

Donell Pons:

And a nice reminder, while we're in this section, to to think about, likewise, if I have a student that I've moved too quickly, I know where to go, because I know where I've been, in order to go back and say maybe we moved a little too quickly from from where we were. And usually I can find that place where yep, this was just a little too quick. We need a little more time here. So again, it's each student to or going back to that beginning phrase to this whole section that, you know, sentences that they said about, there's a heritability factor. There's the environment. So we're all moving at different, right, we might require different things. And that's where that small group instruction and being able to, to know exactly where you've been with a student to where you want to go with a student to allow that time to be able to pick up the skills and I think that's the real sweet spot right in there too with instruction.

Stacy Hurst:

Yeah, and assessment is part of that instruction. They also make mention of this. In the United States, we have different states that are we have local locus of control when it comes to education. So we don't have a nationwide test for like phonics for example. I think every state does something different with screening, but in Utah, we did we do Acadience, and there's no phonics screener, in that phonics screener would be more diagnostic at that point. So we screen them with oral reading fluency and some nonsense word fluency tasks. But there are some really great free phonics screeners out there that I would recommend any teacher to use. The core phonics survey is one of my favorites. If you've taken letters, there's a spelling inventory that is helpful there. Do any of you have any other tools that you use for that?

Lindsay Kemeny:

Those are the two that I use, I think really

Stacy Hurst:

great reading has a phonics survey to

Donell Pons:

that just being aware of what they are to and in the fourth, fifth and sixth grade spaces, being aware of what those are for your students to write and not losing track that a student may not be one and done by third grade.

Stacy Hurst:

And I know at least the core phonics survey they have pseudo words and real words so that you're not especially with older students who have learned to recognize some of these words, and print whether they can spell them or not. And sometimes I will say if your student can accurately recognize these words, you might want to give them a few of the real words, ask them to spell them and see how they do with that

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Donell Pons:

So Stacy, you've made me think about something with these statistics that you read before. And then, you know, we got done with him. Do you have any thoughts? And you said, Well, yeah. But also, do we have any really good? And again, we've got COVID hanging out in this whole situation as well, we have to recognize, but do we have any really good studies yet that have indicated? And do we have any places where this has been done well enough, that have indicated that Yep, once we've implemented phonics in a certain way, we do see later comprehension improvements. So down the road for those students great, because this is early right this, this real influence and the K through three space. This is pretty early days.

Stacy Hurst:

The only research that I know, I don't know, I can't cite it. But I think there's a larger impact on comprehension. If a student can accurately and fluently decode in grades K through two and beyond that that's where that language comprehension and makes more of a difference. But it's still essential, right? We can't eat. We know Anita Archer says it all the time. There's no strategy that can compensate for not being able to read the words. I just wanted

Lindsay Kemeny:

to point out. I don't think this was in the article, but I just was thinking about it that this phonics instruction, I think is so beneficial also for our strong readers. Because a lot of times, you know, we think, Oh, this student can already read they don't need phonics. But you watch them spell, and a lot of them need these phonics concepts to help their spelling, and it doesn't like some people worry, it's boring for them. I don't see that my strong readers are bored in our phonics lessons. In fact, they're the ones are usually like kind of eating up this informa, like they love to learn, oh, English words don't end with V. Oh, my gosh, that's so interesting. And they love this stuff. And I do think there's a study. I can't think of it right now. But it was in, I believe it was second grade. And they found that phonics instructions showed, you know, benefits for the strong readers as well. So don't just think your students who struggle with reading are the ones who needs phonics, it's really beneficial for everyone.

Stacy Hurst:

Yeah, my students currently are I, most of them are proficient readers. And they are so into this, they get so excited about it. And let's get to the myths before we don't. I do want to mention though, that next section talks about some questions that we still have unanswered. When it comes to teaching. There. I read it, it's very interesting one that I think was noteworthy was how much of the code do we need to teach? We still don't know that. So we start, you know, how far along do we need to get into the minutia of some sound spelling correspondences that are very rare? What is the best use of instructional time? I thought that was a great question.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Yeah. And along those lines, also, just comparing phonics programs that teach like the single grapheme phoneme mappings like, okay, oh, is blue, and then another day, they're gonna say, oh, it can also spell a versus phonics programs that will teach multiple, you know, sounds for that spelling at a time. And it's just saying, like, we need more research on that, right. So you know, you're going to have different programs doing different things, and people are going to say what they think but those are their opinions. As far as I know that we we need more research in that area.

Stacy Hurst:

Yeah, I loved that. They called that out, right. I think that's really important. And they had some other great questions involving sight words, meaning high frequency words, and including those in instruction and also decodable text, which I think we know we've done an episode on that, feel free to look back on that, listen to that one again. But there is some research that we still need to know especially when it comes to how much how often

Lindsay Kemeny:

and something that stuck out to me and that decodable text part, was it saying once children move beyond the early stages of reading, the benefits of decodable readers are likely to be outweighed by their limitations. And so and more research is needed to determine when this tipping point occurs. So we don't want to keep them in decodable text too long. This is like our tipping the boat episode we did where we kind of overcorrect. Sometimes we overcorrect and only keep them into quotables. But they should be used for a short amount of time.

Donell Pons:

That syntax being challenging for one thing, right. And for the air of a reader. Yeah, right. Again.

Stacy Hurst:

Great point. Yeah, they do talk about the limitations of that too. Also the types of words, the quality of words, you're exposing them to. Yeah, it'd be limited to. Okay, myths we have four phonics teaches children to read non words, or or words they've never seen.

Donell Pons:

Yeah, new words. That can be an onward. Yeah.

Stacy Hurst:

So they do they list the evidence for that. And then they they also have a reference. So if you have that conversation, come up with your coworkers, which I have before. Yeah, it's nice to be able to say, hey, here's it. Here's some research.

Lindsay Kemeny:

I don't get sometimes why it's so hard. I don't know why it's so hard for people to understand. And then they're going to oh, you know, like, we're going to use these for assessment. We're seeing if they can blend. If they can't read the word, CAC, how are they going to read the word cactus?

Donell Pons:

Right? Like, maybe they've seen some egregious things happening with nonsense, where it's like, you know, yeah, long list, right, and using it as a function that it shouldn't be used as, right. It doesn't have a performance. It's the overcorrection

Stacy Hurst:

thing again, yeah, that's true. And you know, I have refined my practice when it comes to this. Ever since I read the National Reading Panel, I've been using non words in my assessment, and in my instruction as a form of assessment, but I have ceased, I don't ask students to spell non words anymore. I use it for reading only. So. And I don't know if there's research about that. But it kind of makes sense to me.

Donell Pons:

Why in the whole spelling, you're putting a word in context when you have it shuts down interesting.

Stacy Hurst:

And meaning is even more important if you're expressing it not necessarily just receptively reading. Yes. Okay. Myth number two, phonics interferes with reading comprehension. Now, I can say I've heard this before, because sometimes students are take a while to sound things out. What do you guys have to say about that?

Lindsay Kemeny:

They have to go through that process in order to be able to code quickly automatically so they can attend to meaning.

Donell Pons:

We go slow to go fast. Yeah, exactly. Otherwise, you're guessing and going.

Stacy Hurst:

And it's that self teaching hypothesis. It's that too. You need enough data before you become automatic with it. And honestly, they linked to some really no pun intended Hardy research because one of the researchers perfetti and Hart, but also Ehri's research is so solid here. And she did a 2001 meta analysis that found that children taught by systematic phonics method made gains in text comprehension as well as word reading and spelling. All the things right. Okay, English is too irregular for phonics to be of value. Anything else to add to that? It is not English does not crazy people. I guess we summed it up, right? More explanations than exceptions. And then they do refer to share as well here, not the singer but the researcher. See on the phone homophonic. Is that a word? I don't know. Now I'm making stuff up. Okay. And finally, which speaks to the final myth. Phonics is boring for children and turns them off of reading? Why do you think this is a myth? Why do you think people have been saved that? Well, I

Lindsay Kemeny:

think a lot of teachers think it's boring. And they think those texts that they have to read are boring, which, okay, to be fair, there are some horrible decodable ones out there. But it's, it's but there's better and better ones out there. And it see what you bring to it and how you teach it and you're keeping a perky Pete pace, and you're showing excitement. And you're not just up there doing everything very interactive. So students are engaged. And so you know, if you think phonics is boring, yet, your students probably will, because you're coming at it with that attitude, you've got to come at it with a better attitude.

Donell Pons:

And you know, what's even more boring, not knowing how to take the words apart, not having a clue where to begin? That's even more boring. And I've got students who talk about sitting out in the hall, most of first, second and third grade, because nobody knew quite what to do with them. And that's worse than boring.

Stacy Hurst:

I think it's only boring if you don't get it.

Donell Pons:

I really I do. Don't get how to do it. You mean?

Stacy Hurst:

Yeah. If you can't crack the code, then be a tuckered.

Lindsay Kemeny:

I just think pacing is so important to you've got to kind of pay attention to your students. And then okay, we've done that. We're moving on to this, right. We're not going to stay with one thing for 20 minutes, you know, so it's that pacing is really important in your phonics lessons.

Stacy Hurst:

Yeah, it is definitely where the art of teaching needs to intersect with the art of the art and science of reading, right?

Donell Pons:

Yeah. Keeping an eye on your students, right. That's another thing because it can be very worrying for the student whose needs aren't being met.

Stacy Hurst:

Great point. And you know, I can share anecdotally something that started happening in my school. When we started a, it was Reading Horizons Discovery. My teachers would say, we'd be in the faculty room at lunch or whatever, and then say, You know what, I asked my students what their favorite time of day was in, and the students were like, we like phonics. We live in phonics time. And my, the teachers at my school were like, That's so weird. That I think because the, the conception was that, you know, it's boring, or that students don't like it, but if it's engaging than they absolutely do, like

Lindsay Kemeny:

my first graders last year, whenever we would do a sentence for dictation, I'm like, Okay, now we're gonna write a sentence, they would cheer. I'm not even joking. They they're like, and then they've even asked me, Are we doing a sentence today? They weren't

Stacy Hurst:

motivated, and it's so applicable in everyday life. Right? I love that you can do that. And I think what you said to you about your attitude is so critical as well, no, no,

Donell Pons:

I was just gonna add the one of my adult students just said, we just had a tutoring session, and we're doing phonics, folks. We're doing phonics. And the student at the end of the session says, I'm learning. I'm learning

Stacy Hurst:

Love that and so the authors of this article point out in their evidence against that myth, or why it's a myth. They do cite some research that found positive effects on reading attainment, that phonics instruction is associated with greater motivation to read, more extensive reading for pleasure, and higher academic self esteem. So I

Lindsay Kemeny:

think these myths are so like, there's people pushing back against the science of reading. And sometimes they'll say it's an ideology, or it's just what they think. And here's a great article, you can share with them. And even just this box, because it has the myths, because they're always stating these myths to try to like push back. And this has the myths and then it has, you know, the the references and the evidence right there for you to share it with them.

Stacy Hurst:

Yeah, it goes to show the author's knew the importance of addressing that head on. They know their subject for sure. Well, can you guys believe that we're out of time. And that's just one section of the article. Right. So we do have next time we are going to be addressing the section titled becoming a skilled word reader, pages 16 through 26. For those of you who are you have a week, guys, you have a week to read it, there will be no quiz that we've prepared anyway. But we're in this next section, there's a lot to look forward to. This is where we talk about print exposure in conjunction with phonics instruction, right? And the main message is experience matters. So we get to talk about them applying it, then that's when to me the fun really gets amped up a bit. So I'm really excited to discuss that. Thank you all for joining us. We do look forward to hearing from you and how you're responding to this article. We'd love to hear it. So feel free to listen to the past episodes and join us for the next episode of Literacy Talks.

Narrator:

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