Word Study: Phonics

Ay! Que Grande! When I think of the topic of word study, this Spanish phrase is the first thing that comes to my brain. The phrase doesn’t come across in English the same as it does in Spanish. - How Big! - How Grand! NO, it just doesn’t work very well. But when I think of the chore of teaching our kids decoding skills, high frequency words, vocabulary, spelling, and word analysis – It gets to be a bit overwhelming.

Let’s break it down and look just at the phonics portion of this monster. Steven Stahl has an article in The Reading Teacher called “Saying the ‘p’ Word: Nine guidelines for exemplary phonics instruction.” In it he says,

Your phonics program:

1. Should be built on what readers already know about the functions of print i.e. teachers must use the words and knowledge of print and stories that children possess to teach phonics – NOT begin by teaching letters and sounds and blending those into words.
2. Should be based on strong phonemic awareness – Phonemic awareness is essential and is easy to teach.
3. Should be clear and direct e.g., show a word like dog in context or by itself and say that it begins with the letter d and that the letter d makes the /d/ sound. This is a clear and direct approach. It should be followed by children reading words that begin with d.
4. Should be integrated into the total reading program – Phonics cannot be the reading program. 25% or less of the time in a reading program should be spent on phonics instruction and phonics practice. Use quality children’s stories that match the high utility element that you are teaching. For example, when teaching the short /a/ sound, you might use The Cat in the Hat (Seuss, 1957).
5. Should focus on reading words, not learning rules. Effective decoders see patterns that they recognize from words they know and apply that knowledge to the new situation. Less than ½ of the rules we usually teach work even as much as 75% of the time. Pointing out rules to aid in spelling doesn’t hurt but we should NOT have children memorize rules.
6. May include onsets and rimes. Letter-sound correspondences are more reliable when readers look at rimes than looking at letters in isolation. In addition, 500 words can be learned from 37 rimes.
7. May include the opportunities for readers to experiment letter-sound correspondence through invented spelling.
8. Should develop independent word solving and word recognition strategies by focusing on the structures of words. For example, a teacher might explicitly teach readers to look for rimes they know in the unknown word that will help decode it.
9. Should develop automatic word recognition skills so that readers can apply their energy to meaning rather than words. “The purpose of phonics instruction is not that children learn to sound out words. The purpose is that they learn to recognize words, quickly and automatically…”
10. Should be over quickly. Studies show that phonics instruction should be finished by the end of second grade. Once readers can use spelling patterns to recognize words fluently, it is time to move away from phonics instruction so that they have more time to read and write. (Stahl, S., 1992, V. 45)

So, how does your phonics program compare to this? Is this a bunch of mumble jumble to you? Let’s start a dialogue about this important subject.

Writing Instruction: In Days of Yore?

As I think about the kind of writing instruction I received as a student, I cringe. Most of my teachers would say something like this:

“I want a 3 page research report. Make sure you cite your sources and use strong topic sentences. Be sure to check for errors and spelling.”

Not having much writing experience, I would find a topic that I hoped my teacher would like. I would look in encyclopedias for information on the topic. (Give me a break. I’m old!) I would try my best to paraphrase the information I had read because I knew that I wasn’t supposed to copy or I would be thrown into jail for plagiarism. I didn’t really understand the idea of topic sentences so I just wrote things that made sense to my ears. After plodding my way to the end of the 3^rd page, I would check to see if everything “looked” right.

I turned these labors of... dread into the teacher and would wait in anticipation. (Picture the boy in A Christmas Story and you’ll have a vision of me.) After 3 days or 3 weeks, the teacher would return the graded report. I would look at the red marks on the paper and try to decipher the hieroglyphics. I would glance at the grade (usually a C), try to figure out what those marks meant, wonder why the teacher’s word choice was better than mine, and then stuff the assignment in a tattered folder.

I never saw a teacher write. The writing process was not discussed. Conferencing was yet to be invented. I never had a mini-lesson on word choice. Instead, I had the privilege of matching topic sentences to pre-written details. I had the opportunity to memorize and identify the parts of speech and diagram sentences...but I did not know how all of those things should affect my assignments.

My hope is that the kind of writing instruction (or lack of it) that I experienced has retired along with my teachers. (By the way, this is not to wag my finger at my teachers. This was before researchers were looking so closely at what effective literacy instruction looks like.) Unfortunately, I am not sure writing teachers of today know how to deliver the kind of writing instruction that research has shown to be effective. I do not know if they know how to teach differently than they were taught. For example, when I mention to folks that Writing Next reports that explicitly teaching parts of speech and sentence structures has shown to have negative results with low achieving students ( 2007, p. 21), many retort with something like, “That is how I was taught. It is important that students know these things.”

So now, I put it to you…

If you examine your writing instruction, does it look like it came from "days of yore"? What do you need to align your instruction with what research has to say about effective writing? (See Writing Next, 2007 for a reference point. There is a link to it on my website: www.comprehensiveliteracysupport.com)

Frontloading Vocabulary

Someone asked about this idea of frontloading vocabulary as opposed to teaching vocabulary. What might that look like in real life - with a text? Let's use an excerpt from an on-line Newsweek article by Nick Summers and Barrett Sheridan called "Browsing the Future" (March 5, 2009):

"At least 18 percent of you already know what Firefox is, because you're using it to read this interview. (Or so says the statistics engine behind Newsweek.com, which tracks things like that.) For the unfamiliar, Firefox is a free Web browser that is built by coders around the world whose open-source work is organized by the Mozilla Corp. and its nonprofit parent, the Mozilla Foundation. Introduced in 2004 as an alternative to Microsoft's ubiquitous, but buggy, Internet Explorer, Firefox has been a force for innovation in the browser category, with improvements such as tabbed browsing and plug-ins that work on any operating system. Commissions from search engines appear to keep Mozilla awash in revenue for now ($75 million in 2007; the foundation has not released 2008 data), although the vast majority of that comes from a company, Google, that now has its own competing browser, Chrome. Mozilla's plans for 2009 include a new version of Firefox, which will focus on user-interface polish; an overhaul of Thunderbird, its e-mail client; and taking Firefox mobile."

If a technology teacher was using this article in his/her class, s/he might decide that the following words were important to teach as vocabulary words:

• coders, open-source work, tabbed browsing, plug-ins

These words, because they are the academic vocabulary, would be taught with effective vocabulary instruction methods throughout the week. However, the teacher might also identify ubiquitous and revenue as words that will interrupt comprehension for some students. Therefore, as part of the front loading the teachers says:

"We are going to read an article about the browser Mozilla. In the article you will come across a couple of words that might trip you up. One word is ubiquitous. (The teacher displays the word.) Ubiquitous means widespread. For example, the talk of Obama's victory was ubiquitous. Another word has to do with income - the amount of money someone makes. The word is revenue. The revenue for the project grew every year. (The teacher displays the word.)"

Let me know if this example helps.

Struggling Student/Difficult Text

I've been thinking a lot about students who face difficult text everyday and the teachers who teach them. We know that students learn best when the text they confront falls in their instructional level (95 - 97% word accuracy, 75 - 89% comprehension). But let's face it, when students hit middle school and go on to high school, more often than not they are given materials that are too difficult for them. This is a very common problem! In most classes in middle and high school, teachers have lots of content to cover. In addition, these teachers don't feel they know a lot about reading. So, what's a teacher to do?

There are several things teachers can do to deal with this problem but in this posting I would like to begin to address a question I get asked a lot.

"What can I do to help my students read (and learn) from materials that are too difficult?"

First, teachers must plan ahead!

• You must know what text students will be expected to read for the week.
• Once you have chosen the amount of text for the week, split it into sections students can read each day.
  
• Sometimes it is helpful to split the daily sections into small bits so that you can guide students at the breaking points.
  
• You must identify vocabulary in the week's section of text that students need to know.
  
• Finally, it is good to know the structure of the text to be read i.e. cause/effect, problem/solution, sequential, concept/definition, etc.

Once you have chosen the text and vocabulary and have identified the text structure, it is important to think about three steps:

1. Before-reading activities
2. During-reading activities
3. After-reading activities

For now, I am only going to address the Before-reading Activities. Before-reading involves a couple of things:

• Frontloading vocabulary
• Activating prior knowledge
• Making Connections
• Setting a purpose for reading
• Giving readers a way to organize learning as they read

Vocabulary Frontloading
Teaching vocabulary and frontloading vocabulary are a bit different. In direct instruction of vocabulary you teach with the goal of students KNOWING these words - at least to a level of knowledge that they know the words in context. However, when a teacher frontloads vocabulary, s/he is giving the students a synonym or brief description of the word to avoid comprehension interruption when students are reading.

Activating Prior (Background) Knowledge and Making Connections
We know that learning occurs when we connect new learning to something we already know. We've all heard the analogy of the file cabinet in our brains with certain file folders containing knowledge of what we have already learned. The idea of activating prior knowledge plays on that same idea. Teachers want to give students an activity that forces the learner to file through his/her brain for any background knowledge s/he already has on the subject. One of the most common ways teachers do this is with the KWL (Ogle, 1982). (This strategy is actually a before-, during-, and after-reading activity.)

• Know - You ask students to brainstorm what they already know about a subject.
• Want to learn - You ask students to identify what they want to learn about the topic.
  
• Learned - You ask students to record what they have learned about the topic.

Setting the Purpose
Now that students have identified what they already know about a topic and therefore, connected it to their own lives, it is time to set a purpose for reading. (In the KWL, the "want to learn" can be the purpose.) Setting the purpose sounds something like this: "The subheading says 'Causes of the Civil War'. Read the next section of text and find the causes of the Civil War." When setting the purpose the teacher should ask a question or give a task that requires students to locate information in the text they are about to read.

Organizing New Learning
Although the organization of new learning is the during-reading activity, students must get instruction on this activity. This instruction should include teacher modeling of the activity and some guided practice of the activity. For example: The students are to read to find the causes of the Civil War. As they read, the teacher might want the students to organize the information in a bubble map or a graphic organizer. If that be the case, the teacher might begin the lesson, demonstrating finding causes of the Revolutionary War using the same bubble map the students will be using. After finding two causes from the text the teacher is reading, the teacher might have students work in pairs to find the third cause.

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any questions about what I have shared. I will be happy to go into further detail if someone wants more information.