Reading - Phonics & Spelling
Gary Obermeyer, Mon October 31, 2005, 04:24 PM
The reading for Session Three is Teaching Decoding, by Luisa C. Moats.
Please read the article (attached below) and summarize what it is telling you. Share what you saw as the highlights of the article. Note any information and/or concepts that were new to you. We are most interested in knowing how it applies to your practice and what it will mean for your students.
One interesting part of the article talked about teaching speech to print, not print to speech. As I read on it made perfect sense on how you should teach the different sounds and then go into letters. I also didn't know that almost all phonics programs teach the code backwards. I will have to look out for this in the future.
Just recently at a training we discussed decoding and its importance. it wasw interesting to get more information on that. I thought the teach speech to print section was really interesting. at first i was sure exactly what it meant, but the article explained more as i read and it did make sense. i found their version of the word wall very interesting.
We thought as a group that the portion about aligning instruction with the stages of reading development made a lot of sense. Decoding inparticular as to how language is acquired was interesting to each of us.
The teaching speech to print rather than print to speech idea in this article makes a lot of sense. However, I still am confused as to how the author wants us to do this. Does she want us to pick words we say every day and then teach each sound in the word or does she want us to teach that the letter A has a number of different sounds and the students have to learn them all at one time. I know she said to wait with the que and ch spellings until later but still don't really understand.
I was happy to read in the article the stress upon teaching decoding to our students. I like how she covered a wider variety of grades, not just K and first. I agree with statement of "systematic explicit instruction", and not leaving anything out when teaching students how to read. In our school's intervention program Reading Mastery, a big component is immediate corrective feedback. I was glad to see that this was addressed in her article. I agree that I found their version of the word wall interesting as well.
The part of of this article I liked the best was organizing a word wall by sound rather then letter. I feel this is very important however, the questions I have are:
1. How do you get your principal and staff to buy into this? 2. When do you implement- meaning we wouldn't beable to start it now? Or could we?
I agree with Rebecca, the speech to text rather that text to speech really made sense. I had never thought of it that way. To go along with this idea, I liked the Consonant spellings, sound-to symbol organization chart. I also found the part on the origins of words to be helpful to me but still have a hard time seeing if this would be able to help my students much. Lastly, I found the chart and paragraph discussing the pairs of consonants that only differ in a feature called voicing very interesting. Kids still have problems with these pairs in the 4th grade.
It is startling to see the number of children who come to 4th grade not knowing how to fluently read. I agree that decoding plays a large role in their learning to read and learning to read fluently by the 4th grade. This article stated that it is important to align decoding instruction with the structures of the English language. I found it interesting that we need to teach sounds first and then the letters, teach speech to print, not print to speech.
This is a great article. It such a good idea to teach speech to print instead of the other way around. The students are then able to take what they have learned into literature and apply the skills. Decoding and learning spelling patterns are such an important skill for students to have, and they give the students the knowledge to be more successful in literacy when they apply them to what they are reading, such as; new words they encounter, and in their writing.
I was glad to see our intervention program used at Greenbrae (SRA) corresponds to the findings in this article. Such as, the core activity for systematic, explicit phonics instruction is blending single sounds into words, and this is what SRA does with every lesson in reading mastery. Plus, morphemes are taught explicitly in Corrective Reading. The only concern is SRA might not be active enough in using many learning modalities. Activities haven't been kinesthetic at all. Improvement can result from this. Maybe I can incorporate something kinestheticly myself, like I did for my Kindergartners a few years ago when I used Houghton Mifflin phonics. Hmmm....
I relearned the basic steps for teaching reading from sound to letter recognition, then sounds and phonemes to form words, then using words in a meaningful sentence. Teaching the sound to the letter was important...I am using what I am learning with my beginner 1st graders and struggling ESL 3rd graders...Using phonemes such as "oa" or "ight" rather then following the random list of words given each week to learn and spell...Then I am following with a meaningful story using the phonemes learned as a follow up.
I relearned the steps to teaching reading from sound to letter recognition,the sounds to form words to word recognition and then to forming meaningful sentences for reading. I am using what I am learning with my beginning readers in 1st grade intervention and ESL 3rd grade literacy block. Good reading and reinforces what we do daily for our students.
This article was very good. I also agree with many of you that we should teach speech to print rather than print to speech. I liked the idea of the word wall; having the sound and then many different words and spellings of that sound. It is true that word study is very important even in the upper grades.
Since I work with much younger students it was nice that the article specifically addressed logographic reading as this is where my students are. We do many of the activities listed in the article. This is a very exciting stage to be involved with. There is something almost magical about watching as a child starts to connect spoken language to written language.
I feel like students that have come into 4th grade do not have the skills to decode words or look for patterns. It is very necessary in my classroom for us to look at patterns in words and look for simmilarities between them. It is a weekly routine for us to spend quite a bit of time looking at how to find these patterns. It is now almost a game to figure out what the pattern is and to be able to sort our words and hunt for them throughout our daily reading.
If this article is valid, and I think it is, is it any wonder that so many children are struggling to learn to read in our modern culture? Phonological awareness of the sound system begins long before a child ever gets to school and it has become increasingly difficult for families to provide a language rich environment for their preschoolers. Television, computers, and sadly all too often poor quality child care has replaced conversation, and Dr. Suess. How can our society get help to these families and reverse this trend?
I really like the part about speech to spellling or sounds to print. In Reading Recovery we always started with sounds and asked the students to say the word the ask them "What sounds do you hear?" Then we got them to write it and read it etc. But starting with hearing sounds in words first!
Our team feels that “Teaching Decoding” is a great article. It was interesting to read about the history of letters and sounds. We sometimes forget to look at how difficult the English language really is. Seeing how it is broken down made us realize how confusing it really can be. All teachers need to read this because it helps to see why students might not be picking up on the language.
For a Kindergarten teacher, the core activity involves blending single sounds into words (Kindergarten teachers need to keep it simple!). L. Moats’ view of word walls struck a chord with all of us - the words must be related. One of our team members taught at a school where word walls were very popular, for a short time. He found them to be less effective the longer they were up. We agree that fluency is gained by digesting many books at the right level!
In short, we found this article extremely enlightening. It touched on most of what we discussed as a group during the presentation, as well as clarified some very specific language acquisition and speech-to-print concepts.
I thought that this was a great article. I found the part about teaching speech to print very interesting. It makes sense to first teach the sound and then the letter that matches the sound.
Teaching speech to print - it sounds very much like visual phonics that is taught in the resource room at Alice Smith. The student love that they learn the sounds. There are alot of exceptions to the rule but it gives the students a good starting point.
The article was a refresher for me. I was taught all of the things mentioned in the article during my literacy methods course in college. I actually do some of the things mentioned in the article, such as having my students touch their throats to feel the vibrations of voiced sounds and the non-vibrations of the voiceless sounds. To help students make the /p/ sound, I have them put their hands in front of their mouths to feel air coming out of their mouths if they're saying /p/ correctly. One of my students seems to be unable to decode words and just guesses sounds that are not even in the word. I'm not sure if it's because he has no decoding strategies or because he is lazy. I'm going to try reteaching the sounds he is having trouble with using decodable books that contain mainly those sounds.
This article validates some of the activities that I have been doing in the Scott Forseman program. During modelled writing, the program has the teacher write a high frequency word on the board and ask the students to sound out each word. This is difficult for most of my students since even though they may know the individual sound, they are unable to blend the sounds into a word. After reading this, I can see that repetion and lots of practice is needed so that the students can become proficient. I have been teaching both speech to print and print to speech--- According to the article I should concentrate on teaching print to speech. Am I confusing my students by using a word wall?? This is something to analyze more closely.
I liked how the article talked about teaching speech to print, this was new for me. Also when you see all the different influences in English (Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Greek, Germanic, etc.) it is no wonder our ELL students get confused and behind because of all the phonemes in English.
The concept of teaching speech to print makes sense because we learn how to speak long before we learn how to write. It is surprising that many phonics programs still teach with an alphabet-to-sound approach. The author recommended using a word wall that is arranged by sounds instead of beginning letters. Because our language is so confusing and has many letters that represent the same sounds, I think this is a good idea; however, changing to this new type of word wall would require teacher buy-in and school-wide acceptance and usage (at least in the primary grades).
I thought this article was helpful because it explained the levels of learning to read. I felt that the most important part was that we need to teach speech to print. This makes complete sense due to the fact that within the English language there are more sounds then there are letters. The section about the historical perspective was quite interesting because it was straight to the point in delivering the message how difficult our language can be to learn to read. This idea solidifies the fact that we need to teach to children the way it is most easily understood, hearing the sound and then putting a spelling to that sound.
This was a fascinating article! I was particularly shocked when it talked about the word walls being utilized and how they can actually cause confusion because we have so many different pronunciations in our English language! Houghton Mifflin encourages the "word wall" but article is contradictory and says that bulletin boards should be used for predictible patterns and correspondences.
The article also discussed how the print-to-sound strategy of phonics is actually flawed because language developed from sound-to-print and that is how alphabetic writing was actually invented. So the sound to spelling stategy is more logical and ultimately more effective.
The article is about teaching decoding and techniques that are logical based on the development of language from sound to letters.
I really liked the idea of changing the word wall to reflect the predictable patterns and correspondences but we cannot do that with our reading program because it is so structured. That would be something I would adopt if given the opportunity.
Great article! I learned a great deal about speech to print. In my Kindergarten class we teach the sounds of the letters and then the letters. It sounds like we are on the right track. We have our alphafriends that help the children a great deal to remember the sounds of their letters. Each alphafriend has a song to help the children remember its sound. It is wonderful to hear them recite the song as they are writing to figure out what letter goes next. The English language is so tricky that our little ones need all the fun and helpful ways learned from their teachers possible. This training is teaching me a lot.
I thought that the article had a lot of really good ideas about teaching decoding. I was particularly interested in the suggestions of phonological awareness tasks, since the children that I teach are so young (ages three to five). It was nice to see tasks such as beginning sounds, counting, etc. discussed, because these are some of the things that we are working on. We do a lot of alphabet matching and most of the children are able to recognize their name and the names of some of their friends! I thought this article was great!
I found this artile interesting because I have always done word study in my classroom, and I came from a middle school special ed resource positon. This article does a good job breaking down the way to teach decoding into smaller parts. (past just word study) and teaching kids to look for patterns.
This is an excellent article. I think that it is powerful, one that should be read by all. What I highlighted and thought about the most was the paragraph regarding phonic elements "being taught in logical order from simple to complex." In a nutshell, that is SBRR.That is the piece that I observe teachers having the most difficulty trusting. When we look at the order in which phonics are taught in Trophies, teachers might question the rational behind it, I have even engaged in conversations with teachers on the matter. However, it makes sense that we would go from simple to more complex. I also highlighted the comment on a "balance between decodable text, and a comprehensive reading program," and that when given the opportunity we should allow students to read more comprehensive text.When I think about the teachers at my school, what comes to mind is balance. That as we differentiate our instructional approach and level of intensity, we must think about all our students. In one class we have kids that very much still depend on decodable text, and others that need more, so that there fluency and comprehension can go up. As classroom teachers learn more about why they are teaching what they are teaching (in reference to SBRR), then their expertise will increase and they will enage in reading practices that ensure all students are successful.
After reading the article, some misconceptions I had were made clear. I have done plenty of activities that already incorporate many of the phonics and spelling skills mentioned. For example, I have students write words after we do a word search, and we also do making words in which the student has to spell a word with the letters provided. We really want the students to stretch the words to hear the letter sounds. I agree that putting the spelling system in historical perspective is beneficial. However, this was something that was not emphasized for me until middle school. When is this appropriate to introduce? When I read about decodable text being appealing, all I can think about was that is probably why Dr. Seuss books are so popular. Corrective feedback is something I need to improve on. Instead of giving students the answers, we just need to guide them to get where they need to be. I find the skills intervention books to be great models of this for me.
I find the article informative and useful. The most terlling is about my own teaching decoding backward. It makes sense to teach children to relate sounds to letters they see in words. I also appreciate knowing the 40 phonemes in Modern English, and that the vowels actually have 15 sounds. (The reading professor for my teaching credential class, in CA, was a proponent of whole language, and therefore, phonics and phonology were covered as a by-and-by, and not emphasized at all.)
Another important point for me is the word wall as it is usually used by many teachers, including myself. I now want to use it as a tool to anchor each taught sound to a grapheme. This will help my early intermediate and intermediate ELL readers especially while benefitting all the others. The importance of a systematic, organized, sequential and explicitly taught decoding program maybe the eye-opener for me at this point.
The article, Teaching Decoding, was very interesting and a little overwhelming. I agree with the author's postition on teaching decoding taking into account the learner's developmental phase and the phonetic progression BUT I believe teachers will need a lot more direct instruction themselves on how to correctly do this. We are lucky to have access to Bear/Templeton to assist us in choosing effective guided phonics instruction. Another thought I had is that kids respond well to the concept of "interesting words." Perhaps "interesting sounds" could help with motivation.
This article was a little difficult for me to read. I was familiar with the stages of development in reading. I am always facinated with the history of the English language and want to study more. The section on speech to print makes sense. We learn how to listen and talk before we read and write. The same goes for any ESL learner. This article teaches just one of the many philosophies of teaching reading...explicit and systematic.
I found this article very interesting. I thought that the part of the aticle that talked about teaching speech to print rather than print to speech made a lot of since. I thought that this idea was good because by teaching print to speech it only teaches students the 26 letters of the alphabet. This way of teaching doesn't pay any attention to the digraphs or long vowel sounds. Then it seems to cause quite a bit of confusion when you try to go back and teach that the letter a actually has another sound other than the short a sound. I also thought the section forcusing on active, constructive exploration was interesting. I liked that the fact that the author didn't dismiss the usefulness of workbooks but rather clarified how they could be as a means of independent practice if and only if the skill was well taught prior to this practice.
This article was a reinforment of what I had learned during my college classes. The article made me feel like I was on the right track as far as some of my teaching methods in the classroom.
I really like the article about teaching speech to print rather than print to speech. Kids that learn to decode by looking at the word. I learned that I should teach the sound and then the letters that represent the sound instead of the other way around.
Decoding is a vital part of learning for our kindergarteners. Whether it be speech to print or print to speech. We have students focus on being master phonic detectives during their reading groups, as well as other times. They need to work hard to enhance these skills, so that they will excel in their later years of learning. We have our students focus on the sounds of each letter in words they are reading and blend these sounds to generate words. We also enjoy having students illustrate work and then we dictate for them. They have to opportunity to see the words in print they have just talked about and they learn to recognize them as they read what they have told us in their dictations. This article has reinforced the things we already do in the class for our students.
I thought that this was an enlightening article. espceially teaching speech to print. It makes sense to first teach the sound and then the letter that matches the sound. Decoding is really emphasized during my interventions. My lower kids have a hard time, they just don't want to try to decode.