Should Students See the Letters During Phonemic Awareness Lessons?

??????????? In this Hechinger Report, Jill Barshay says there is some concern about how phonemic awareness lessons are being handled. Responding to “science of reading” advocacy, many schools have purchased phonemic awareness programs (including Heggerty, which claims to be in 70 percent of U.S. districts). These programs have students sound out the component parts of words – “kuh-aah-tuh” for cat – as they learn the 44 phonemes in the English language. But in many lessons, students are not being shown visuals of the letters that make up the words they’re sounding out.

The question, says Barshay: “Should kids in kindergarten or first grade be spending so much time on sounds without understanding how those sounds correspond to letters?” According to a January 2024 meta-analysis in Scientific Studies in Reading, the answer is no. The authors found that struggling 4-to-6-year-olds plateaued after about 10 hours of just-auditory instruction, but their progress picked up again if teachers used cards with visual displays of letters along with the sounds – C A T.

This not a new insight. Back in 2000, the National Reading Panel found that phonemic awareness instruction was almost twice as effective when letters were presented along with the sounds. A 2022 meta-analysis of 130 studies came to the same conclusion – that phonemic awareness should be taught in tandem with phonics. The new 2024 study echoes those conclusions, making clear that there are diminishing returns to auditory-only instruction. But in many primary-grade classrooms, students are doing daily phonemic chants and songs without seeing the letters.

“If you teach phonemic awareness,” says Tiffany Peltier of NWEA, “students will learn phonemic awareness. If you teach blending and segmenting using letters, students are learning to read and spell.” Different students need different amounts of time on phonemic awareness – students with dyslexia need more – but it is clear that very early on, students benefit from seeing the letters as they learn the phonemes.

Barshay interviewed Susan Brady, a reading expert at the University of Rhode Island, who concurred with the importance of integrating instruction on the sounds of words with visuals of the letters. Brady says there’s a widespread misconception that students need to learn all the phonemes before moving into phonics. Sound training should be taught at the same time as new groups of letters are introduced, she says: “The letters reinforce the phoneme awareness, and the phoneme awareness reinforces the letters.”

Officials at Heggerty told Barshay they were aware of the new findings on phonemic lessons, had revised their program in 2022, and introduced a new program in 2023 pairing phonemic awareness with phonics. For schools using outdated materials, Heggerty is reaching out with suggestions on how they can modify the lessons to include visuals of letters.

A related question, says Barshay, is how much time students should spend on phonemic awareness. Heggerty recommends 8-12 minutes a day, but Barshay interviewed reading researchers who said most children don’t need that much; phonemic awareness continues to develop automatically as reading skills improve. NWEA consultant Peltier suggests that phonemic awareness can be tapered off by the fall of first grade, making room for phonics, building vocabulary and background knowledge through reading books aloud, classroom discussions, and writing.

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“Proof Points: Controversies within the Science of Reading” by Jill Barshay in Hechinger Report, February 26, 2024; Barshay can be reached at [email protected] , summarized in Marshall Memo 1061