Problem of Practice: Emergent Decoding

Just in case you’re in a rush, we don’t want you to miss out on this limited-time offer: Use coupon code LLN50-OFF for 50% off your first month of the Literacy Leadership Network.

Plus: We have an exclusive offer for D.C. educators. Thanks to the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE), 4th-12th grade educators in Washington, D.C. can register for our self-paced course, Addressing Learning Gaps with Syllable Instruction, for free! Strengthen your understanding of how to use syllable knowledge to improve students' multisyllabic word reading skills by registering today.

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One of our favorite ways to collaborate with literacy leaders like you is to work together through problems of practice. If this is a new concept for you, a problem of practice is just like it sounds – a problem or challenge from a practitioner within the science of reading community that’s left them scratching their head. Here are a few places we’re leading this type of collaboration:

• Texas charter leaders take up problems of practice monthly at our Science of Teaching Reading Community of Practice,
• LLN members have monthly consultancy meetings and office hours to talk through problems of practice, and
• Literacy Masterminds are an incredible community of weekly collaboration and problem-solving.

Sometimes, we educators can fall into the habit of reinventing the wheel, but our colleagues are a wealth of ideas and resources! Because consulting on problems of practice has been so impactful in these different spaces, today we’re bringing a problem of practice to all of our newsletter subscribers. This problem of practice came from our recent PD series, Moving from Letter Knowledge to Blending, with PreK-2nd grade teachers in DC Public Schools.

Problem of Practice

One of my kindergarten students has mastered most of their letter sounds. When they sound out a word they say all the letter sounds correctly, but then they say a completely different word than what is written on the page in front of them. It sounds like “mm…aa…nn... Cat!” Help!

This can be such a frustrating roadblock, for both students and teachers! Let’s take a step back from the specific error and first examine the skills that are needed to become proficient at decoding and ultimately automatic word recognition. So what is required for a student to be able to decode?

Well, students need to be able to look at letters on a page and connect those letters to the sounds they make. But that doesn’t happen at the snap of a finger! Phonemic awareness and letter recognition are the base skills that support students on their way to word recognition. We’ll take a closer look at both of these, starting with letter knowledge.

Decoding Prerequisite: Letter Knowledge

“Letter-sound knowledge is a prerequisite to effective word identification. A primary difference between good and poor readers is the ability to use letter-sound correspondences to identify words (Juel, 1991).” This makes intuitive sense – to be able to read words that are made up of letters, readers need to recognize letters and connect them to sounds.

Because this specific student is successfully able to identify the isolated letter sounds in a word, we may be able to rule out letter knowledge as the issue. The teacher could confirm this by collecting or consulting letter-sound assessment data. For now, though, we’ll assume that this student has a firm grasp of letter knowledge and take a closer look at the other prerequisite skill for decoding: phonemic awareness.

Decoding Prerequisite: Phonemic Awareness

Phonemic awareness skills are often thought of as existing as a hierarchy. Phoneme isolation is typically easier for students, followed by blending and segmenting. Blending and segmenting are the most critical for literacy development. And it isn’t hard to imagine why. Let’s consider the WHY behind why we teach these two skills:

• Blending: Our ultimate purpose is to support blending with letters to decode words.
• Segmenting: Our ultimate purpose is to support writing with letters to encode words. Research also indicates that segmentation proficiency helps students read more sounds accurately within words, as opposed to attending to only some of the letters (Ehri and Wilce, 1987).

Phonemic awareness isn’t a skill that we develop just for fun – all of this work is in service of making reading possible. When working with a student who struggles to blend sounds to read words, it’s helpful to see if this is a task they can complete at the phonemic awareness level first.

So here are some next steps for our teacher:

• Collect or consult phonemic awareness data, specifically data that shows the student’s ability to blend sounds together into words. This data should represent this skill as an auditory-only task.
• If the student cannot blend sounds together into words, provide explicit and systematic instruction to support this student in developing their phonemic awareness skills with a specific group of phonemes (e.g., /a/, /m/, /n/, /s/).
• After the student is successfully able to blend phonemes into words, use the letters that represent those same phonemes to practice blending letter sounds into words (Aa, Mm, Nn, Ss, etc.).
• Bonus tip: If the student continues to struggle with phoneme blending, try reducing the number of phonemes within words from three phoneme words (e.g., man) to two phoneme words (e.g., an).

For our kindergarten teacher, thinking through this problem of practice was empowering and impactful. Instead of struggling to figure out what to do next with their learner, they received validation from other teachers struggling with the exact same thing, as well as actionable next steps to target the root of this student’s difficulties. In the words of a participant, “This course has been so exciting and helpful to really learn more of the science behind blending and decoding. I have been able to put all that we discuss and share into practice and see how it has helped my students. THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!”

Do you have a community to support your problems of practice as they arise? If you’re looking for collaboration, we’re always here for you.

What We're Working On

Announcing March’s Literacy Leadership Network Topic: Crafting Effective Literacy Blocks

Here's what's on the Literacy Leadership Network Calendar:

?? March 4: Live webinar to help you translate reading research into concrete plans for instructional change. (Can't make it? Catch the recording!)

?? March 5: Webinar recording + members-only resources and downloads so you can take your learning with you.

?? March 11: Three short videos aligned to March's topic so you can further your learning.

?? March 18: Live consultancy meeting to give you the time and space to receive feedback from and exchange ideas with peers.

?? March 25: Office hours to ask our literacy specialists questions about your specific school or district situation.

Register today. For a limited time, use coupon code LLN50-OFF for 50% off your first month!

Attention D.C. Educators!

We have an exclusive offer for D.C. educators. Thanks to the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, DC educators in grades 4–12 can register for Addressing Learning Gaps with Syllable Instruction for free! Strengthen your understanding of how to use syllable knowledge to improve students' multisyllabic word reading skills by registering today.

Here’s what one participant had to say:

“I enjoyed this mix of in-person and individual learning. The asynchronous lessons were organized and allowed me to work on them as I had time. The content was beneficial and helped me understand how I can help struggling readers.”

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