As mentioned in the September newsletter, we will focus our attention this year on some of the earlier pillars of reading instruction to help understand the current interventions being employed within our curriculum and to potentially play with some of their elements in our own classrooms.
To establish some common language, I am going to begin by defining three important terms of reading: dyslexia, phonemic awareness, and phonics.
The first, dyslexia, is an often used, and largely misused term. Depending on who you ask, you are likely to get a different answer. In a general sense, people use it to indicate someone struggling with reading. Perhaps they have observed that the reader or writer transposes letters backwards or flips the order of the letters as they decode. Perhaps the reader struggles with multisyllabic or unique words. Or perhaps they read very slowly and deliberately. While all of these are characteristics of dyslexia, many times people confuse one or two of these symptoms as concrete evidence of a formal diagnosis, when the severity and frequency of these symptoms probably do not rise to the level of that label. Technically speaking, dyslexia can only be diagnosed by a trained licensed psychologist or neurologist. Its most telling indicators include a lack of phonemic awareness (being able to recognize the different sounds that a word has in it), disfluent and error prone oral reading, reduced processing speed, limited knowledge of orthography / spelling, deficits in working memory, and limits on vocabulary size. Using the word dyslexia casually can-- like any false positive-- create a number of problems. Not only would a misdiagnosis lead to unnecessary or even harmful remediations, but it can have a detrimental impact on a reader's sense of efficacy. Depending on which definition you accept, researchers put dyslexia rates from a small proportion of the population to as many as 15 to 20 percent. Generally speaking, I am less concerned with the specific label as I am diagnosing where the breakdown is occurring: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, or comprehension.
This brings us to the term of phonemic awareness. By and large, as readers, we have not given much thought to the actual sounds that comprise a given word. Once we mastered the concept as young children, it became almost involuntary. Phonemic awareness is the first step in the reading journey. We came to some sort of understanding that words like “cat” have three different sounds in them /c/ /a/ /t/. There is no print text involved in learning phonemic awareness. It comes even before we start playing with the alphabet.
Once people master the principles of phonemic awareness, they begin to learn the alphabet and eventually begin to explore the combinations of letters to create sounds and ultimately words. Phonics is the study of how these printed letters operate under a system of rules and patterns that we use to decode for meaning. We learn things like the letters c-a-t indicate three sounds /c/ /a/ /t/ which can be blended together to make the word “cat”. It is learning that words that end with a vowel, consonant, and “e” indicate that the vowel will have a long vowel sound to it and the “e” is silent, along with many other patterns and rules of letters and sounds that enable us to quickly piece together the code of reading.
For the vast majority of our high school students, they have mastered both phonemic awareness and phonics instruction. A very small number of students, either because of a neurological condition, a profound trauma, or a significant disruption to their schooling, will need help with phonemic awareness, but the vast majority of our reading impaired students at the high school level struggle with fluency (the ability to read smoothly in phrases), vocabulary (the knowledge of words), and comprehension (the ability to employ strategies to make meaning of sentences, paragraphs, and chunks of text).
Here are some things you can do to play with rules of phonics in your classrooms:
Word Patterns: Maximize the impact of vocabulary work in your class by choosing to center words that have patterns. To avoid an elementary feel, I choose words that belong to the pattern but that students might not know. For example, “irate” might be the focal word. I revisit the pattern -VCE (vowel, consonant, silent e), and then have them repeat and guess words like migrate, elaborate, elucidate, emancipate, reprobate.
Prefix Patterns: While a number of prefixes are more commonly known (eg pre-, in-, un-), there are a few others that are worth introducing or reviewing: con- (“with”), sub- (“underneath”, “lower”) , af- (“to”, “towards”).
Suffix Patterns: Unlike prefixes, I like to put up a number of words with the same suffix to simply get students to determine the word type (eg - noun, adjective, verb etc). For example, I’ll put up five words with the suffix -al (equal, jovial, dismal, brutal, formal), and ask students if they can determine what part of speech they all belong to.
Find the full newsletter here.
