Cracking the Code and Tying the Strands: Integrating Structured Literacy Across All Ages

In this episode of Literacy Talks, Donell, Stacy, and Lindsay dive into Linnea Ehri’s article from Perspectives on Language and Literacy, exploring how reading proficiency develops over time through explicit, systematic instruction. From early learners to older struggling readers, the hosts reflect on the power of Structured Literacy to support all students—unpacking the phases of reading development, the role of decoding and spelling, and why practice and integration are key. If you've ever wondered how reading really takes root, this episode offers valuable insights—and maybe even a few laughs—along the way.

Article link: https://www.flipsnack.com/B88EAE88B7A/perspectives-winter-2024/full-view.html?p=48

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Steve, welcome to literacy talks, the podcast for literacy leaders and champions everywhere, brought to you by Reading Horizons. Literacy talks is the place to discover new ideas, trends, insights and practical strategies for helping all learners reach reading proficiency. Our hosts are Stacey Hurst, a professor at Southern Utah University and Chief Academic Advisor for Reading Horizons. Donnell pons, a recognized expert and advocate in literacy, dyslexia and special education, and Lindsay Kemeny, an elementary classroom teacher, author and speaker. Now let's talk literacy. Welcome to this episode of literacy Talks. My name is Stacy Hurst, and I'm joined by Donnell pons and Lindsay Kemeny. And as you know, this season, we are focusing on the idea perspective 75th anniversary edition. And today, Donnell is going to lead our conversation about one of the articles in that edition. So Donnell, we'll just turn the time right over to you. Great. Thank you, Stacey. So it must be the mid winter thing, because I think we're all just a little bit, just need a little break, right? So this might be a little zany this episode. We'll see. I get the the pleasure, and it really is, of introducing this particular article out of the perspectives publication. And it's by Linnea airy, and it's page 45 if you have or 46 if you've got your issue in front of you, or you have it available and you want to look it up. That's page 46 and this is really good. I really enjoyed it, so it'll be fun to have a conversation about it. The title is, it's part of the what, like I said, and the title is developing word reading and spelling skills with a structured literacy approach. So that's the title, but she really gets into the nitty gritty of the alphabetic principle, which is fantastic. And this will be following on from that overview episode where we discuss Barbara Wilson's article, the structured literacy and integrated approach to the science of reading. And so now we're going to be discussing this. So we've had some really good topics. I mean, just thinking back about things that we've been able to discuss so far, it's been really interesting. And page 47 I want to note as well, has a part of the info what we're calling an info map, and it's the portion that is the what. And so if you want to take a look at that as well, help guide our conversation here, that that's the portion of the info map that we're talking about. And I just wanted to begin by saying that one of her quotes, so she's really good. She's got some really good quotes in here, she says, attaining reading proficiency is a complex process that involves the learning and integration of knowledge and skills that emerge and grow over time. Just think about that for a second, because there's a lot of things that are not very clear about how you teach reading. It feels like, oh, but this is really clear. So let me read that again. Attaining reading proficiency is a complex process that involves the learning and integration of knowledge and skills that emerge and grow over time. So a lot of things that she's saying there. So how can our understanding of this process be complicated for educators as they may only be involved in maybe one year of a student's life, when it really is a complex process. What do you guys think? Lindsay, how about you? Because you have those early learners. You've got them for a year. Yeah, it is a complex process, and I think for many of us, maybe we didn't think that at first, because we thought that learning to read was natural. You know, this is kind of grilled into us, at least me in my training, so I just thought it just kind of happened, and I just had to have students read a lot, and I would read to them a lot, and they would learn to read. And the thing is, is, you know what? For a small portion of students, it's really true, they can pick up on the code themselves. It's not really that simple as but because there's things happening, right, that they can make those connections. But for so many more. It's much you know, the process of learning to read is much more complex and takes, you know, in addition to having them read, and in addition to reading to them, takes a lot of explicit instruction, which is like the critical piece. So, yeah, I just think it's interesting to think back in my early years of teaching, that I really thought it was much more simple, but also it was really kind of a mystery for me, like, I'm just gonna have them read these levels, and when we're exhaust the levels, oh, we're going up a level, and I'm doing my running records and all the things, and now, yeah, it's, it's much more. Uh, complex, but it's also much more clear. So in some ways, it's not as complex as it was before, because before it was a mystery, and now I understand what to do to help a struggling reader. Does that make sense? No, it does. Yeah. And Stacy, I find it interesting. It'll be interesting your perspective, because you're teaching the teachers and trying to give them this understanding many of them haven't been in a classroom before. Yeah, I also come at this from the perspective, not only as a classroom teacher, and I have my students for a year, but then as a literacy coach, where suddenly I was seeing the patterns over time in a school for these students. And as you read the quote Donnell, it reminded me of Hollis Scarborough's reading rope, of course. But I think it was during the 20th anniversary. She gave a speech, 20th anniversary of the reading rope, and she said, I think she was asked if she could change one thing, what would she change? And she said, I would put at the bottom of the rope that these things happen over time, and we have as in in education, the education system, we have created the construct of a grade level, but maybe for teachers, and I put this to my pre service teachers like this, that we need to not necessarily think in just black and white, grade level development, but also over time, more like and we're going to get into this because it's linears article, but phases of reading development, no matter the grade the student is in, and that might help them reframe the way they think about that kind of progress. We're talking about literacy, yeah, and you know, the second part to that was, how can educators reframe how they see their impact on a student's reading acquisition? And you kind of both touched on that a bit too, and I was just thinking about the work that I do with older students, so I'm getting them long after they've gone through all those sort of developmental, what you might think developmental stages within a school setting, however, developmentally, in reading terms, they didn't get the help they needed. And so they are, in a sense, stuck, and they're they're using inefficient, ineffective habits, techniques, whatever you want to call them, that they've developed over time, to try to make the thing happen because they didn't have the skills that they needed. So that's kind of interesting, too. So I kind of get kind of get to see the end result of over time, not getting the help that you need, because anywhere along that way. Because I've had students of many ages, middle school, high school, college, it is a lot easier to intervene if I'm able to get to them sooner, even a middle schooler versus a high schooler, and a high schooler versus someone who's in adulthood. And I think even my students would say the same thing, boy, if I'd have had you like, you know, so many years ago. And I think they say that many times, and that is true. So that's kind of interesting. Okay, just add to that, because you have just sparked a thought in me, because I know that middle school, high school teachers, they don't know oftentimes, which students are struggling with reading or not, but maybe if we could reframe that for them as well and let them to know that they might be assuming that they're coming to them reading, but helping them to understand that they're not, and then also what to do if they aren't, I think that would be helpful. As you said, some students are stuck and nobody notices it for a long time, or, like you say, doesn't know. They don't know what to do about it because they weren't given the tools, right? So yeah, that's a something to think about. She goes on to describe the reading rope, or Scarborough's rope, that has become so familiar to reading teachers, by reminding us that students learn components represented by strands of the rope. As these are learned, they become integrated with other components, and skilled reading emerges. So again, we're still hitting on the same thing, but giving us a little more understanding. And she's emphasizing that developmental framework of reading. And it takes time, as you said, Stacy, that time is so important, tasks build as they are taught over this developmental time frame. How do you see this understanding impacting tiered supports with reading and Stacy? I'll start with you. What do you think? Well, as I read this part of the article, I was thinking about that the overtime thing and what exactly takes the time, right? We have explicit teaching, which is essential, but then it's what happens the thing that takes the time is the self teaching that the student essentially has to do when they're applying the thing right, when they're reading. And I think it's on page 48 that she she words it like this, teacher managed structured reading and writing instruction, and student managed reading and writing practice. And oftentimes it's the practice that we are cutting short, and that is. Students integrate all of this, that's where it becomes subconscious or automatic, yeah. And that drove home for me, in the our tiered support system, how important it is that it's dynamic. It has to be dynamic to be effective, right? And this drives that home too. Lindsay, how about you got any thoughts on this conversation we're having? Yeah, I was just thinking, Well, okay, let's look at your tier one. It's important to remember, like Stacy was saying about that arrow going under the Scarborough's rope, where we're working on all of these skills. So I'm a first grade teacher. I'm not only working on those word recognition strands, and then going to wait until those are good before I start working on the language comprehension. Then my rope is going to be like half of it is still going to be frayed, and the other half is going to be tightly wound. And, you know, students are behind. So I am thinking about all of those things right now as a first grade teacher, but then I realize that some students are going to need more support in some of these strands. So maybe you could look at it that way, where as, okay, you know, this student has great vocabulary and background knowledge, as I'm, you know, doing our read alouds, and this is like, let's say, beginning of the year, first grade. I'm doing lots of read alouds where they have great oral language skills. They can converse with others, but wow, their phonological awareness, you know, is really weak, and that decoding and so I'm going to need to provide an intervention for them on those they're going to need to get some more practice and instruction in those areas of the rope, but I'm not neglecting the other areas. We're still working on those, but they're getting a double A dose of those. So perhaps that's just one way to think of it. Some students will need more support than others in some of these areas. I love that, Lindsay, that's that dynamic piece. You've spoken to it beautifully. That's exactly it, and I hope that's got people thinking about that integrated as well? You're very good to point that out. You're not just attending to one portion that's that integrated piece. And do you think we acknowledge the developmental time requirements needed for students to acquire the various skills and integrate it as well? Do you think we acknowledge that Stacy? What do you think I think I think probably it's not second nature, right, like we I was thinking about this in the MTSS context, because we do short change sometimes what a student needs, like Lindsay was saying, maybe we don't address the oral language strands if they need that, or even acknowledging that they need more time, more instruction. We're maybe over concerned with schedules, which I understand. I've been teacher, you know how how tough it is to fill a day with really meaningful instruction and practice. So, yeah, I think that system of support is essential, and sometimes there are parts of the system that aren't really online, and we can think about integration in several different ways. And as a first grade teacher, like at the beginning of the year, these strands really are, like, I have separate times a day where I'm focusing on on different things. So like my phonics lessons, I'm more focused on, you know, those the word recognition strands. Doesn't mean I ignore the other ones. Like, I'm still going to pull in vocabulary. If we need background knowledge to help us with, like the Decodable text, I'm going to pull that in, but it is still my main focus. And then later in the day, when I do my close reading lessons, you know, my focus there is on the language comprehension. That's why, at the beginning of the year, it's a lot of read alouds in the lower grades, because they can't decode yet. And I want to work on those. And then as the year goes by, you know, I can be introducing them into, you know, more authentic texts, where we're going to start integrating the skills of decoding and thinking about what we're learning. And, you know, all all this, you know, the critical thinking, that verbal reasoning, all that comes in, but, and especially, I think, as as they get older. So I don't know, I just, I was thinking about that word integrate, because at first I'm like, Well, yes, but I still have main focuses, and as students get more proficient in reading, then all those strands can come closer together. Just kind of like how the rope is I like how you've said that, because that's making me think we need to integrate, obviously, our instruction, but also the student needs opportunities to integrate it in practice, like you're talking about the opportunities you give them Lindsay, and I'm thinking about it in that older space, the adult space, and how oftentimes I'm pulling the strands apart to see what parts are less strong than other parts so I can make them stronger to bring them back together again. But it's interesting to think about that, because I think I, too, am also concerned. Learned all the time about integration. Eventually, I'm bringing it all back together to make sure. Okay, so now, how does it come together? Is it working really well for the student? Altogether? That's really interesting looking at it from both ends and hard for those secondary teachers, because, you know, most of them are not as familiar with learning to read, and so they're looking at it with just that tight rope, and they're just like, they can't read. And it's usually like, oh, they they don't have good reading comprehension, but they've really got to break those strands apart to say, let's see which area is it vocabulary? Fine, you know, do they do they have an understanding of the syntax and semantics? Fine. You know, it's usually the decoding piece, right? So, I mean, it could be a variety of things, but just kind of interesting. You can see the problem, especially with secondary. We really need them to learn some of these basics, things that go into reading. It's tough. Yeah, I thought about that too. It's like, oh, wow, what a tough job. So she continues by discussing phonemes and graphemes. And this is all page 48 still. And of course, we're going to start there with the phonemes and graphemes. We had a conversation in one of our past podcasts too that dives into this. So that's a good one to listen to as well. But she continues by discussing them, and I love her explanation. She says, when young children first read their names or recognize words in environmental print, such as the word stop on a stop sign. They do this by remembering salient visual cues, rather than letter sound cues to move students to an alphabetic phase of reading using letter sound cues, direct and systematic instruction is necessary. This approach requires teaching students letter, shapes, names and sounds and phonemic awareness. Boy, is she clear. That's what I loved about the quote. It's so clear. Okay, so right here. This may be very, very different way of thinking about how children learn to read, from many educators who were never taught that learning to read requires explicit instruction in the various skills needed. What do you think about how directly she gives this sort of piece of background knowledge and understanding and in your own personal experiences? Do you meet people who have this understanding, or are you still trying to find common ground with people about where the understanding is. What do you think Lindsay, it's, it seems so obvious, you know, like it's almost embarrassing that you know it has to be stated. Because I think sometimes, if you ask people outside of education, you know about the whole reading wars or anything. They're like, Well, yeah, it's like, teach them the code, you know, like, that seems, of course, but you know, I don't know, and I think you know, for some of us, where we don't remember being taught the code, and maybe we cracked the code ourselves. A lot of us in education are, you know, like to read, and so it came easily for us. So maybe that's another reason why. But, you know, I talked earlier about my early years of teaching, and it what learning to read was kind of a mystery, and I just thought it happened, and I just was really more reactive. What did they miss in that, in that passage they read and that? But what was it? What was hard there? Okay, I guess I'll teach that, you know, and, and so I love, you know. I love the clarity here. How about you, Stacy, I was thinking the first time I learned the phrase environmental print was in my balance literacy and whole language instruction. And, of course, what Dr Erie is describing. Here is the pre alphabetic phase, right? But it's not something we want to spend our time on. And I was led to believe we did want to spend time on this. And so I had students bring you know, cut out like the name of your favorite cereal and and bring you know, something that you recognize, a symbol or whatever, and I wasted a lot of instructional time. What she describes here is such a clear process of moving them out of that phase, which I would argue comes naturally, right? Like we all start to learn to recognize things by their salient features, but as we teach the code and letter formation and phonemic awareness, then we're moving and we're building parts of the brain that need to be able to map those graphemes to the phonemes and the phonemes to the graphemes, right when we're reading and spelling. So like Lindsay said, It's so obvious, but, man, I really embraced and leaned into, let's, let's spend a lot of time on environmental print. Yeah. You know, it's interesting listening to the two of you talk. It's really made some things clear for me about my students and working with older students, and many of them this environmental print piece, because they didn't move along and they didn't take the next step progress. Uh, environmental print, signs and signals, that is still a real struggle. So I cannot tell you how many times some of my students with dyslexia will say, boy, if they change what they want us to do, when you go to a certain office and they put some I'm lost during COVID, how many times they were yelled at because they weren't following, they didn't know, they weren't reading, they didn't look at because you, you learn to, as many of them say, you for you learn to ignore it because you is, I'm never gonna be able to get through that. I won't be able to understand it. And it's really interesting just though how important that progression is really made me think about as you two were talking. So that's interesting. Now, I love the way she continues to explain how words are read by sight. So here's her quote, a powerful mnemonic system is needed that glues written words into memory. The glue that bonds them consists of the grapheme phoneme writing system. Graphemes, or letters, are combinations of letters that represent phonemes, the smallest segmented parts of spoken words. So how has this understanding impacted your practice? How about you? Lindsay, well, now I know I need to teach that right? Instead of just saying, here we're gonna gonna give you this book you're gonna learn how to read. You know, before I give them the book, well, we're going to skip all those books where they just read and look at the pictures and memorize the patterns, right? We're going to skip all those and I'm going to teach them those phoneme graphing correspondences and then give them a book that has those phoneme graphing correspondences that I've given. So it's much different than before. Yeah, and Stacy, how about you? And in teaching pre service teachers, because now you get to give them this good news, right? Yeah, well, and it really has refined my practice, and I've mentioned many times on this podcast, thankfully, thank you. National Reading Panel, I was able to teach phonics at a time when most people were teaching balanced literacy. I taught very systematic and explicit method, and so I saw that, but honestly, I was teaching it. I didn't understand it on the level that I do now. I think your knowledge just becomes more and more refined, but I feel lucky that my pre service teachers get to learn even something as simple to us as there are about 44 phonemes and over 250 spellings for those, even that piece of information by itself, I think, really helps frame the way they approach their reading instruction. Yeah, and for older learners, this oftentimes being this clear and explicit about what didn't happen is like an aha, as to why they're I'm still guessing at everything. All right, why this is so difficult. So I think that's interesting as well, offering you know, an explanation. So on page 50, Ari continues to explain this foundational alphabetic principle and how it impacts spelling. So she says, in the structured literacy approach, right from the beginning, it is important to teach students grapheme phoneme relations, how to segment spoken words into phonemes, and how to select the graphemes corresponding to the phonemes they detect in spoken words. So let's talk about how different this approach to spelling is compared to how we probably all learned to spell, right? Yeah. And what I did early in my teaching was, you know, basically I did not teach spelling. I assigned spelling. Yep, we did that pre test. I send those words home, and I didn't do anything with them until they came back on Friday and tested like, how pathetic is that? Why are we putting the bulk of this on parents, you know, or kids themselves to teach them. So now I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm not even going to give them a list, you know. I'm going to teach the spelling correspondence, and then I'm going to assess on Fridays whether they can apply that or not, not with like, I'm not going to give them a list of words. I might say, Oh, we're practicing O, W and O, U, ow, this week, you know, you know, but it's on me. Now. The heavy lifting is on me. The responsibility is on me. If they don't do well on that on Friday, if they don't do well, then I've got to re teach it. And Lindsay, I love you, took the responsibility for that. Sounds like it's heavy, but at the same time, Lindsay, it gives you it gives you the thing to do when things aren't going well for a student, right? It also gives you answers. Stacy, how about you? You giggle too, because we both learn to spell the same way, right? I know I was thinking back to growing up, and I do remember lists of words that I memorized. I don't know that they had any pattern associated with them. I don't really know how I learned to spell, but I was a spelling bee champion, by the way, just PS, so somehow I was able to hold that in my memory. But I'm thinking about I'm thinking about the way I. Taught spelling when I taught first grade, I did have we had a spelling test every week on high frequency words that went on the word wall, and I missed an opportunity because I was teaching decoding and phonics in a way I didn't know how to highlight spelling. In that sense, I wasn't sending home spelling words that match the patterns that we were learning in phonics is very separate from what I was doing in phonics instruction. We know it should be connected. So, yeah, definitely that's changed over time. If you're wondering where to find proven outcome focused ways to put the science of reading into practice, you're in the right place. Reading Horizons, Discovery product suite is a foundational literacy program for grades K through three that leverages a versatile instruction method, a personalized student platform, and accessible learning aids that include phoneme cards, student transfer books and decodable books. The program streamlines literacy instruction and empowers teachers so all learners can achieve reading proficiency. Go to Reading horizons.com/discovery, To Learn more and download the complete program details today. You know what one of the coolest things I think we could do for students who struggle is to give them a theme based spelling list, where we do these spelling lists, like on, oh, it's, you know, it's December. We're gonna do December words. We're gonna do spring words. Oh, this is fun. We're gonna do all these words from our text about astronomy. No, that is the worst thing for them, it is cruel. There's no rhyme or reason. You haven't taught the reason those things are all spelled. Those words are all spelled. You know, that is just, I mean, that's just setting kids up to fail. You're bringing a very specific memory to my mind. I worked with this student as a reading specialist who is in fourth grade, and she was making great progress with our intervention. However, in her classroom, she was being given lists. They were reading black beauty, and she could not get the word beauty correct, you know, for all of her effort. And I remember at the time feeling like and learning since then that research supports us. We shouldn't be asking students to spell words that they can't read. Why would we do that, if we haven't explicitly taught them? So you're right. It is cruel and and she goes on, so this is really good, because we've talked a little bit about spelling, and she goes on to really take apart that decoding piece in the structured literacy approach, teachers help students learn how to decode a word synthetically. And if that term is new for some what that means is that it's not naturally occurring, so it's a contrived way of having students attend to the sounds and letter correspondences. That's what's meant by that term, by transforming each grapheme into its corresponding phoneme and then blending the phonemes to pronounce the whole word and find its meaning. Blending is made easier if children are first taught to decode with continuant consonants. So she's giving us a little bit of pedagogy here. It might be easier if you do this in the initial position. These are consonants that can be spoken without schwa and can be stretched and held. It's like she does this as in sip. Once the decoding process is learned with continuance, other consonants can be introduced. So she gives just a little mini lesson, right there. So right here, we can see why structured literacy is imperative for students who may struggle to learn to read, and why it can also improve learning for all students, which is interesting. I think this little example tells you why all students could benefit, not just those who may have dyslexia or another reading difficulty, right? She gives us a good scaffold, right there, in there. So if you have a student that struggles to blend, what did she just say? She says it's easier to be taught first with continuing consonants. So you have the student that is struggling to blend. Go back to words that start with continuous sounds. Those are those sounds you could stretch out so m, s, f, V, do those first. And then, you know when, once they've got the hang of it and you've helped them with blending, then go to stop sounds. I think that simple piece of knowledge, it's teacher knowledge, right? That will make the difference here. It's one little thing that will make a very big difference for a student who's struggling to blend those sounds together. And of course, a teacher is going to be able to help many students just with that piece of information. You know, I was talking with an older learner who does not have a reading difficulty. In fact, loves reading. However, remembered having what to that student their recollection, they called a little challenge, and that's how they termed it in second grade, second going into third grade. And it was blending, and they remembered that pretty vividly. And. And that they were moved into a classroom with a teacher who had received some training, and it was training and how to break things down, synthetic phonics and getting that explicit, direct help took off third, fourth grade just fine. So that's that example of many students may benefit, right? Because that particular student obviously had a lot of other skills, but Right? There was a bit of a hiccup on getting to the blend, right? It could have turned into a big deal, but instead, because a teacher who had the practice, it didn't turn into a big deal, right? Which, going back to our conversation about being integrated, it's important, because it does have an impact on comprehension, and we're talking about an isolated skill, but it ends up being integrated into reading comprehension in general. Yeah, so it's interesting on page 51 so I encourage listeners to read page 51 because Ari does a masterful job, I think, of succinctly describing how teachers facilitate this grapheme phoneme correspondence for students. She also places decodable books in their proper place. So the quote is, reading words in decodable books provides decoding practice and builds students cite vocabulary. Children need to read text aloud rather than silently, so that words are decoded rather than skipped over, and spellings become connected to pronunciations and stores in memory, and then she adds these components. These components are explicitly taught in systematic phonics programs. So let's chat about this for a moment. Decodable books and their appropriate use in reading instruction. We have thoughts. Stacey, why don't you start us? Well, I'm going to start by saying that one of the textbooks I use in my classes is Christopher, such as teaching primary reading, I think is what it's called. And he makes the case for calling it controlled text, because in theory, decodable text is anything you can read, right? But if we're controlling text, I think that even that shift in the way we refer to it might help teachers understand the use of it, right? We're controlling for what we've taught as a scaffold. And of course, authentic text is the goal, but also the most beneficial for learning. So we want to get students there as soon as we can. So I think that is that, I think that's a good call out that he makes. And some call it connected to Stacy, connected to what you taught, right? Yeah. I mean, decodables just made a huge change in my classroom. I mean, I was teaching kindergarten the first time I switched, um, from those terrible, predictable, repetitive texts to decodables. And, um, what a difference, because that's exactly what I want them to do. I want them to practice what I just taught them, and that's what decodables are going to do. We need to be very careful. And we've talked about this before, and I'm still, I still like really worry that we are over correcting, and it doesn't mean now that we only give students to COVID because they only need them for a short amount of time, and the goal is to transition away from them. So, you know, even just this week, I saw, you know, on social media, a teacher saying, Oh, I'm fourth grade, and we're using the you fly passages for a repeated reading practice. And I'm like, fourth grade, those, those are decodable texts. Maybe a few of your students would need them, but not everyone, and that shouldn't be your go to they should be in regular texts. So it's tricky, because not everyone is ready to transition at the same time, but if they're getting good phonics instruction in kindergarten and first grade, then a lot of them will start transitioning the mid to end first grade. Now they still might find a use for decodable, a harder decodable, especially if you've just taught, like IGH or something, and then you want to give them a word or a book with lots of IGH words, wonderful, but you also need to be scaffolding them into grade level texts, regular, authentic texts, yeah? Lindsay, I just want to clarify. How do you feel about level text that wasn't really clear you did use in the magic tips, I think you mean predict, predictable. Yeah? Predictable? Yes, yeah. People are calling them leveled. Get rid of your level texts. I do not agree with that, because any texts can be leveled. Any text can be leveled frog and toad. It's like a level k or something well, and it can be leveled in different ways. And doesn't mean to get rid of them. The ones I'm saying to get rid of are those predictable, repetitive ones that are like, usually, A, B, C and D. Yes, that's where my mind those are the ones I have very strong feelings about. And I think this is an area like Lindsay, you just gave the example that we can definitely. Overboard on and we need to be really careful about it. And Donnell, I know you and I are on this specific listserv where this has come up recently, and somebody reminded us of something that Louisa moat said, because somebody was calling out, there's not enough research to support the use of decodable text. But specifically about this, Louisa moat said absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And then I did go down a small rabbit hole. And to be fair, I don't know if I should be mentioning it, because I haven't read the article yet or the research study, but I found a research study out of the UK. It's a meta analysis, and it's titled, The use of decodable texts in the teaching of reading in children without reading disabilities, a meta analysis with so I'm really excited to dive into that, but I haven't read it yet, so sorry for mentioning it. I can't give you the the highlights, yeah. And then, just to to include older students here, this is, this is a real challenge, because of you've heard me lament, and many people talk about when you're trying to help an older learner go back and pick up those skills, they need an opportunity to practice. And there isn't a whole lot of text that doesn't feel like it just isn't appropriate text. And I think my husband has talked many times with his own journey, his own reading journey, getting some help and then trying to have the opportunities to read. So he'd take each of our younger children and use their text, and then each one would graduate, and he'd stay and continue to practice. But he called that invaluable. It was just invaluable. And then in talking to my older son, who has dyslexia, and you've probably heard a little bit about his journey, a fantastic reader today, and I just enjoy listening to him read, but he acknowledged we even had this conversation just the other night. He acknowledged how very difficult it was to get to that level, and he said that represents so many hours of reading and reading different kinds of text that he said, I don't even know how I would quantify that for somebody. If somebody if somebody asked me how many that took, I don't even know how I would begin to do that, he said it was countless. And I know that because we were there, we were there. So I think that's really interesting. It's it's important to acknowledge, yeah, and so understanding the use of text is really important. So we're going to continue on just a little bit. We're almost to the to the end of this article. It's been so good, and I'm hoping you guys will have an opportunity to be able to pour over it and read a little bit to yourselves. She also includes syllable and morpheme discussion, which is great. She says readers at the consolidated phase. Remember, as Stacy said, we're going along the phases here, she's talking about them. Here we're at the consolidated readers at the consolidated phase use multi letter units, that is spellings of syllables, morphemes, prefixes, suffixes and root words to store sight words in memory. Instruction in structured literacy classrooms includes teaching students to break spoken word into syllables or morpheme elements and to hear and see these bigger chunks linking each spoken part to its corresponding letters in spelling. And I think we often pass over this phase. I do. I think we do, but it's important, and it's every bit as important as the partial and full alphabetic phases. And I'm not sure why we don't hear more about this phase, actually, which is interesting. What do you guys think, Stacy? Do you know I think a little bit differently about this phase, because this phase, more than any other, I feel like, is kind of an outcome. It's a result of spending so much time with those phoneme grapheme correspondences, and the brain just naturally starts recognizing those chunks faster and faster, right? But I would also say, and I think this is different Donnell with older learners, but with younger learners, sometimes we skip to that phase prematurely in our instruction. I taught with word families, which were chunks, and we know now that you shouldn't be teaching with that approach until students have a solid understanding of phoneme grapheme correspondences, right? So sometimes we rush to that phase and teach things prematurely, I would say as well, but you're right. People aren't really talking about that phase a lot because a lot of my students are stuck here, which is interesting. So yeah, Lindsay, you go ahead. Well, I was thinking the same thing that Stacy was just saying, where it is backwards, because you'll see a lot of people, you know, early phonics, doing those word chunks, word families, and that's what they're focused on too soon. Yeah, exactly. And, and I wonder if it's because, you know, it's we're so focused it seems like, on the lower grades when we're talking about beginning to read, and maybe that's why we don't talk more about this, because this is, you know, this is your which I think it's now getting a little more attention. Is that, you know, I know, right? Because there's a lot of, there's a lot to talk about here, right? And that's that we can see in students, and might inform us about what's going. With a student that's kind of interesting when she was talking about it, and it would be the time to highlight things in instruction, of course, that we've been addressing all along, but to highlight morphemes. For example, yeah, like she mentions in syllables, yeah. And so we're going to finish up on page 52. Of those. Has been a fantastic conversation. I hate to see it ending, but it has been really fun. She's discussing orthographic conventions, and she reminds the reader, contrary to the belief that only irregular or high frequency words are read by sight, all words listen here many times, repeat after me. All words become sight. Words read from memory once readers practice reading them, making text reading much easier. Okay, so again, she makes that point, and I'll become very important to us. And yet I still hear plenty of people only referencing high frequency words in this context. Every word wants to be a sight word when it grows up. Right, right? Jan was we have a whole episode on that, don't we? Lindsay? We do? Yeah, this is one thing that you better not ever hear one of my students say. And I have promised them, if I am in their classrooms at a future day and time and I hear them refer to sight words and meaning high frequency words, I will be on the news and not in a good way. There's a small list of reasons that will put me on the news, and that is, that is one of them. And I think I again, I feel lucky here that we have the opportunity to correct this with pre service teachers, so they can enter the field, not having to rethink the way that they're looking at those words, and that no matter the spelling, we need to teach the correspondences, especially the ones that are, that are consistent, because it will help us to know all the words at site. Right? We use the, I often use the analogy of learning to play the piano, and I'm, I don't know if we were to put learning to play the piano in something like Aries phases, I'd definitely be stuck in in the not even the full I'm in the Parsha, but I know people who you can just put sheet music in front of them, and they just play it like they've played it a million times over again. And that's reading by sight, right? That's reading at sight, we should say. But I think that, you know, most of us adults read by sight now, not because we've memorized them, but because, you know that glue that area is talking about has happened that orthographic mapping process where we've matched the sound of the letter and the meaning, and perhaps that is why some of these incorrect theories of reading exist. Because we just read the words, it seems like we're not decoding them, right. And so then we're making students stop and decode and sound out every word. And this is probably, you know, part of the whole balance literacy, whole language things, because we we wanted them to just sound like readers right away. But in order for all these words, all of the words Donnell to become sight words, we have to slow down and go through that process of bonding them in our memory. So students need to be decoding. They need to be sounding out at the beginning. We can't skip that step because it's a critical one, and that's that for those older learners. And I'm going to put my stamp in seal Onyx is the last thing we're talking about. But from this article, is how often my students tell me that they're so grateful that finally they're able to read a text and not have to think about absolutely everything they're doing and say, Is this the experience everybody else is having? I can't believe it. I can't believe everybody else is believe everybody else is experiencing this. This is what you do. This is what it's like. Well, I think I'd really enjoy reading if it were like this for me. And so it's good to hear that statement over again, because then they have an expectation of what it should be like, right? And they know what it could be like. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for having the conversation. You're right. Donnell, this has been a great conversation, and it's made me think Lindsay, as you were talking about how our own automaticity can somehow get, sometimes get in the way of our own instruction that we read without even thinking about it, speaking of the consolidated phase, and what a gift it is that we can give to our students, literally, that will last their lifetime If we can get them to that phase right where they're reading automatically, it's unlike maybe a science or history test where you cram for the information and then forget it. This is definitely a gift that lasts a lifetime. So thank you for doing the great work you do, and thank you all for joining us for this episode, our next episode, we will be able to visit with Kate Kane, and she is the author of the article titled Making and conveying meaning, how structured literacy integrates comprehension and composition. That's on page 60 of the issue. If you're reading along, you may also want to. Prepare by reading, structured literacy and handwriting, explicit instruction of an essential skill by Steve Graham that's on page 56 and integrated language reading and writing instruction supporting automaticity, fluency and proficient reading, by Jessica Hammond on page 69 and that will finish out the what section of this issue. So we are looking forward to more conversations and looking forward to having you join us on the next episode of literacy talks. Thanks for joining us today. Literacy talks comes to you from Reading Horizons, where literacy momentum begins. Visit Reading horizons.com/literacy talks to access episodes and resources to support your journey in the science of reading. You.