Thoughts on teaching phoneme blending

As I discussed in my last post, phoneme awareness (PA) is a critical skill to develop in beginning readers, and one of the most important PA skills is the ability to blend the isolated phonemes that comprise a word (e.g., /m/ /o/ /p/) and translate them into the whole word (“mop”).  This skill is generally referred to as phoneme blending.   

Anyone who has worked with beginning readers knows that this skill can be difficult for some students to develop.  Before I developed ABeCeDarian, I worked with many kindergarten and 1st students who didn’t learn this skill in spite of the instruction and practice I provided using techniques from the generally excellent Lindamood Phoneme Sequence Program (LiPS), Reading Mastery, and Phono-Graphix.  Almost invariably, these student with severe difficulties learning how to blend phonemes were significantly behind their fellow students in reading skill, often able to read just one or two words even after many hours of intensive individual instruction.

At some point in my studies and experiments to improve my teaching I was struck by a very interesting fact about PA, namely that PA and decoding have a reciprocal relationship.  What that means is that while improving PA generally improves decoding ability, improving decoding ability also generally improves PA.  Being able to identify and manipulate speech sounds helps a student learn to read more words accurately and quickly, and reading more words accurately and quickly helps a student identify speech sounds.  This relationship should not come as much of a surprise.  My first grade teacher in 1965 never even heard the term “phonemic awareness”, let alone tried to actively stimulate it in her students.  And yet, nonetheless, I developed PA, and I did so, most probably, because of what I learned about the structure of our language as I learned to read and spell.

Another way to think about this reciprocal relationship is that the development of PA occurs in both a bottom-up and a top-down way.  It occurs in a bottom-up way as students learn letter/sounds and are encouraged to use these letter/sounds to sound out words.  PA develops in a top-down way as students learn through repeated exposure to read whole words and have to spell or analyze the words they have learned back into individual speech sounds.  

So the key is to have students hear the isolated phonemes connected to the whole word (This is the word “mop,” /m/ /o/ /p/ /mop/), but also to learn how to read a number of words as wholes.  When I say this, I do not mean that the students are asked to memorize the word just by looking at it as an unanalyzed whole.  On the contrary, students are constantly doing some activity that requires them to say all of the individual phonemes of the words they are learning and then immediately hear the whole word.    Yet many students do memorize these words by dint of repetition before they can sound them out because only 6 words are presented in each unit, and students practice reading these until they can do so easily. 

Thus, what I’m doing now in these routines that I didn’t do before when I failed with a number of students is to have them focus their attention on a small number of words until they have learned to recognize them easily without necessarily yet being able specifically to sound them out.  At the same time, the students are hearing the isolated phonemes of the word connected to the whole word dozens if not hundreds of times.  Added to this regimen is a key support offered by the teacher.  If a student looks at a word he has been studying and he says all the isolated speech sounds but can’t figure out the word, the teacher offers to say the word in Turtle Talk, that is, with all of the continuant sounds elongated (/mmmooop/).  (I really should offer these as podcasts!  Coming soon, I hope.)  This combination seems to give students just what they need to develop phoneme blending skill, and to do so relatively quickly.  As we have shown in our extensive kindergarten study, a group of students who were one standard deviation below average on PA skills at the beginning of the year advanced as a group to the average range by the end of the school year (www.abcdrp.com/support.asp).  Moreover, it can be done with essentially no frustration on the part of the student because of the adroit teacher support, such as the use of Turtle Talk, built into the activities.

In my next post I will share thoughts about teaching letter names and sight words.  Happy Teaching!