Matt Burns discusses the importance of phonemic awareness in reading instruction. Phonemic awareness is an outcome of skilled reading, not a precursor, and it has a reciprocal relationship with reading. Matt also emphasizes the need to focus on decoding skills in second, third, and fourth grade, rather than solely on phonemic awareness. Matt provides practical takeaways for teachers and recommends additional resources for learning about phonemic awareness.
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Helping teachers learn about science of reading, knowledge building, and high quality curriculum.
Matt Burns discusses the importance of phonemic awareness in reading instruction. Phonemic awareness is an outcome of skilled reading, not a precursor, and it has a reciprocal relationship with reading. Matt also emphasizes the need to focus on decoding skills in second, third, and fourth grade, rather than solely on phonemic awareness. Matt provides practical takeaways for teachers and recommends additional resources for learning about phonemic awareness.
Takeaways
Resources
We wrote a book! The Literacy 50-A Q&A Handbook for Teachers: Real-World Answers to Questions About Reading That Keep You Up at Night
Don't miss an episode! Sign up for FREE bonus resources and episode alerts at LiteracyPodcast.com
Helping teachers learn about science of reading, knowledge building, and high quality curriculum.
You're listening to Melissa and Lori Love Literacy. There has been a lot of attention recently on phonemic awareness. Most people can agree that it is important, but there are still a lot of questions like whether to teach phonemic awareness with or without letters, and which phonological awareness skills are the most helpful for students. So today we'll be talking to Matt Burns, professor at the University of Florida, who will help us answer these questions and more, by sharing what the current research says.
Lori:Hi teacher friends. I'm Lori and I'm Melissa. We are two educators who won the best for all kids, and we know you do too.
Melissa:We work together in Baltimore when the district adopted a new literacy curriculum.
Lori:We realized there was so much more to learn about how to teach reading and writing.
Melissa:Lori, and I can't wait to keep learning with you today.
Lori:Hi everyone, welcome to Melissa and Lori Love Literacy. We are excited today because we are digging deep into phonemic awareness.
Melissa:Yeah, and we have a great guest. We're here with Matt Burns, who is a special education and RTI researcher and a University of Florida professor, and he recently presented a phenomenal webinar that I watched, titled Phonemic Awareness Research, misconceptions and FADS with Dr Matt Burns, and today he'll talk to us about what the research says about phonemic awareness instruction. So welcome to the podcast, matt.
Matt Burns:Thank you, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be part of this conversation.
Lori:Yeah, Matt, I'm excited because you're very level headed. I appreciate you on social media as just being the like this. You're just reasonable. I love reading what you what you post and how you respond.
Melissa:So thank you for your voice of reason and we had so many topics we wanted to talk to him about, it was hard to choose which one.
Lori:I'm wondering if we just kind of kick it off with the basics, right. So what's phonemic awareness and why is it important to teach?
Matt Burns:OK, well, phonemic awareness is the knowledge that that words are made of sounds and we can break those words up into individual sounds. We can take sounds, put them together to make a word and even manipulate those sounds. So that's the basic idea of phonemic awareness. And you can't, you can't sound out a word if you can't take the sounds you make and blend them together. Right, you can't, you can't. Also, you can't sound out a word if you can't segment the sounds. So those basic skills of blend, isolating, blending, segmenting are absolutely crucial building blocks to being a good reader.
Melissa:So can we dive in a little bit more to those? I'm going to talk about those that you mentioned isolating, blending, segmenting. I know a question that comes up a lot is there. There are more skills than that, especially under the bigger phonological awareness umbrella. So when we're talking about you named three specific skills that we need to target, but can you talk about the other skills that teachers might see in in a curriculum or in in suggestions from people online of like, what should we focus on? What should we not focus on? What's important? Why is it important? Why is it not? Yeah, that's, that's really important.
Matt Burns:So you're right, you use the right term phonological awareness. If phonological awareness is, is the larger units of sound like knowing that sentence has words in it and be able to tell you you know, the dog the dog ran fast has four words. That's phonological awareness. Knowing that words can have compound words, you know, that's phonological awareness. You know saying to a kid fire truck, what words do you hear Like? That's all phonological awareness. Those are important building blocks too. But there's a couple of things about that. Number one most kids not most most kids come to school with those basic skills in place Most, not all, but most. And what we found is we want to get to the phoneme as quickly as possible. So we started. If we were to start at teaching that words have sentences, have words and down to compound words and syllables and stuff, then you really want to get on the phone as quickly as you can, because that's what really drives understanding of reading. So we really want to get to phoneme as quickly as we can. So what I say to teachers is I'm going to go to the other side of the continuum a second, but what I say to teachers is assess your kids. Just, it takes just a few minutes to assess these basic skills and if they have them already, then don't teach them. If they don't, you may want to review, but I wouldn't spend a ton of time.
Matt Burns:We did a study and we looked at rhyming, which is phonological awareness. I think of rhyming as the bridge between phonemic and phonological. I think rhyming is a nice way to get to the phoneme. It's a nice way to get kids focusing from sort of word level down to the phoneme level. It's a bridge. What we did, a study, and we found that kids in urban schools, in the urban schools when we did the research, rhyming didn't predict reading very well at all. And we don't know why. Our hypothesis was, while rhyming is a problem for kids, that they don't have good vocabulary. We don't know, we don't know why, but we saw that blending, segmenting, isolating, absolutely in kindergarten, first grade, predicted reading really well, but rhyming did not.
Matt Burns:So I, I, I, I, as a teacher, I would start with rhyming. If they have rhyming, I'm not going to worry about the rest. If they don't, I'll try and teach rhyming. If they don't pick it up, I'll probably move forward to teach isolating, blending and segmenting before I'll go backwards Because chances are you could just start right there and dive in and the kids are just fine. So my rule is that when I say assess the kids, I really need to start with with rhyming. If they have rhyming then I wouldn't worry about the rest of of, of phonological awareness and start moving towards phonemic awareness.
Matt Burns:Now the other side of the continuum are the more advanced phonemic awareness skills, things like elision, which I'm not sure exactly how to pronounce that because people pronounce it differently, but E-L-I-S-I-O-N elision, elision, whatever car we say it, you know the idea of of, of deleting sounds. So take cat and drop the in cat and now you've at a more, more advanced manipulation as well. And those skills aren't really shown to be related to reading. At least the jury is still out Right. There's not a lot of research on those types of skills and what we do have suggests that's really it's.
Matt Burns:It's related to reading but doesn't really help kids learn how to read. If you teach those advanced skills and once kids learn letter sounds and start to have orthographic mapping, start to understand that they look at a word and you just can you know without sounding it out, basically tell you what the word is because they've learned the sounds Once they're able to do that, then that skill drives phonemic awareness. So so that's a long way of saying really you're better off to teach basic phonemic awareness and get kids really good at sounding out words and building orthographic maps than you are to teach advanced phonemic awareness. So that's why I always talk about there's a holy trinity of of phonemic awareness. In my opinion, that is isolating, blending and segmenting. Those are, those are those are what we need to teach kids. Those are what all the skills the kids don't have and those are the ones that predict reading the best.
Lori:So we? The key point here, if I'm summarizing, is that we teach phonemic awareness to help students break the code right. It's a, it's a means, it's a means to an end, but it's not that desired outcome. Can you say more about that?
Matt Burns:Yeah, I don't. Phonemic awareness is how we help kids break the code, as you just said. So just because a kid has learned phonemic awareness doesn't mean they're going to learn how to read. We have to teach them the, the phonetic code as well. So, in fact, multiple studies and multiple meta-analyses have found it's more effective to on on phonemic awareness outcomes, if you teach letter sounds as you're teaching phonemic awareness. And so, yeah, phonemic awareness is an important prerequisite to reading, but it is not reading and it's just a step along the way. So that's why I like to research, I like the National Reading Panel reported outcomes for for the on the, the, the phonemic awareness meta-analysis. The National Reading Panel reported outcomes on phonemic awareness, reading and spelling, and I like to look at the ones on phonemic awareness because unless they learn how to read or spell, it doesn't really matter.
Lori:All right. So, speaking of teaching, what should teachers focus on for phonemic awareness and in what grades? And I also have a follow-up question that you can choose to answer within that question. But should teachers be teaching to mastery or should they be using a practice called interleaving, and we can define that as well?
Matt Burns:So, okay, I'll come back to that. That's a really good question. So what should they teach? Well, again, I would look at rhyming. Try and teach rhyming if the kids don't have it. If they have it, move on. But again, don't spend a lot of time in that, don't. But let me rephrase that Don't stop moving forward in the progression because the kids aren't doing well with rhyming. Again, we've seen too many kids who read just fine who may struggle to learn rhyming. So I'm gonna start with isolating the National Reading Panel again. I refer back to that quite a bit, but the National Reading Panel found that if you taught one or two skills at a time, the effect sizes were point. I read point 71 to point 79. So if your listeners aren't familiar with that, you know point five is considered a pretty good effect. Point eight is a large effect. So those are really good effects.
Melissa:And you said one to two skills at a time.
Matt Burns:Yes, one to two. If you try and teach three or more, it drops all the way down to point 27, which is a small effect and significantly smaller. So I would say my sort of rule of thumb and I don't really have research support about to say as I, start with isolation, start with rhyming, move on, start with isolation, teach kids how to isolate the sounds, and then I kind of teach blending and segmenting together. Now I keep asking that question to people who are practicing teachers et cetera, and I get different answers all the time. Is it better to teach segmenting first? Is it better to teach blending first? I don't have a good answer to that. I think there's probably. There probably is an answer, I just don't know it. So maybe we can research it and see if that really matters. But I think it works to teach those two together, then move into once they can blend and segment. If you want to do some basic manipulation, I think that's fine too. You want to teach kids take the cat to make it a that word is bad that's fine, that's fine, but I'm probably going to stop there. So isolating first, then blending a segment, usually together, and then, once they've mastered that, move on to some basic manipulation, but absolutely along the way.
Matt Burns:I'm teaching phonics Like I'm not teaching phonics. Or you can basically letters and letter sounds until they've mastered through blending or segmenting. No, no, you incorporate that right away, but then once they get to base, but then some of the more advanced skills, like reversal. So we teach a kid the word net, say it backwards, what word is that? 10? That doesn't. That's not really. That's not been shown to help reading. So I'm gonna hit those four, probably in that order, and along the way I'm gonna be teaching letters and letters sounds as well.
Matt Burns:So you mentioned interleaving. So interleaving versus mastering, so those are not mutually exclusive approaches. All interleaving means is include review as you're teaching new, basically. So we have three concepts. Don't teach. Well. Let me say it more clearly this way you're teaching three concepts and you're teaching concept C and you previously just taught concept B and concept A. So as you're practicing concept C, include A and B while you're practicing it. That's called interleaving.
Matt Burns:I've done lots of research on that, although we are a more specific model. It's just a great way to help kids. It's a great approach to practice. So once I see a kid can do a skill with about 85 to 90% accuracy and I based that on a meta analysis I did way back in 2004. So I probably need to update it, but we found 90%, generally speaking, worked pretty well. And so once we see a kid can do this with a high accuracy, that's when you start practicing, and you practice it by interleaving concepts they already learned and that helps them learn the new concept and retain the older concepts better. So I hope I answered that question well. But I think you teach kids to mastery, but one of the best ways to do it is through interleaving.
Lori:Yeah, one of the things Melissa and I are always talking about and we've talked about it on the podcast before is, like we love to connect the idea of mastery and interleaving to sports practice. Thinking about, if you're teaching kids how to shoot a basket or score a goal or do a move in soccer, you're not going to stop all the other things you're doing and you're also not going to just do that one move all practice until you've got it right For like two straight hours. You're gonna be working it in over time and then coming back to it and back to it and having different scenarios for it. So it's funny how it just like naturally occurs in other areas, but when it comes to reading, we often are like, oh no, we've got to master it. Well, I mean, that's just not how the real world works and it doesn't work that way for kids, it doesn't work that way for adults, and so I just always think like sports are just such a great metaphor for what we do here in reading and writing.
Matt Burns:Yeah, and we actually we take kids with behavior problems. We did a couple of studies on this kids with who were I love those ADHD non-medicated. You know those kids are very active and they had IEP. They were learning disabled in reading, so IEP goals for reading and were ADHD diagnosed, adhd non-medicated. And if we include an interleaving, I use a model called incremental rehearsal which is basically an applied approach of interleaving. So if I want them to learn, you know, t, I just taught them whatever S and D. Well, as I'm teaching T, I'm gonna use those two and doing so A helps them retain it much better, retain the new one, and their time on task goes way up. We see a lot of kids get frustrated if the task is too difficult. So taking all things that you're teaching to them, all new stuff, and practicing that can sometimes get really frustrating. So simply adding in some review as you're practicing the new increases time on task, even among kids who have behavior problems.
Melissa:That's great news.
Matt Burns:And, by the way, one of the kids was a kindergarten who was diagnosed with emotional behavioral disorder in kindergarten. Right? Isn't that sad, the poor little guy. He was off, he was moving around a lot and we got him on task. You know, 75, 80% of the time Now, kindergarten emotional behavior disorder. I was pretty darn excited about getting him on task 80% of the time.
Melissa:For sure.
Lori:So I feel like we should chant this add in review, as you're practicing the new Like isn't that a great lie? Right, like we can make a little cheer. You could tell that's what I did at some point in time. Yeah, I'm gonna make a little slogan for you, matt. You can hang it in your office and make a little canva of that.
Melissa:Well, I have like a million questions for you, but as I'm listening, I'm thinking there might be some listeners out there not all of our listeners, but some who are thinking I don't even know what he means when he says isolating, segmenting and blending. So I'm wondering if we can just take a pause to just like define, give some examples of what those three are, especially since we're saying they're like the most important ones.
Matt Burns:Yeah, sure, you know I meant to do this. I swear when it comes to teaching reading. I mean when I'm teaching pre-service teachers how to teach reading. For anybody in the country who engages in teaching future teachers cat is the most commonly used word and I- meant to or bat.
Melissa:I've heard bat or bat.
Matt Burns:Yeah, I meant to come up with a better one, a new one. I forgot, so I have to use cat Lysolating so it all listens out there. You've heard the cat example 538 times. Well, here's 539. So isolating is knowing that cat is cat and it's not. Actually, let me work clear. Let me work clear. That's segmenting. Isolating is knowing cat starts with k, Okay, and knowing ends with t, like that's isolate. So if you see a new kid, what's the first time you hear in cat, that's isolating. If a kid can then say cat is cat, that's segmenting. If a new kid can say it fast, well, where'd you hear? And they can say cat, those are, that's isolating, segmenting and blending.
Melissa:Yeah, that's so great. I have a five year old now. He's still in pre-k, but he can do that isolating really well, oh good. But we're not to the segmenting and blending at all. I've tried it with him and I'm like he's not there, but he's really good at the first sound.
Matt Burns:Good that's great, that's good. So I get a little frustrated with companies that sell phoemic awareness programs and they're expensive. Because phoemic awareness is cheap. It requires no materials basically, although eventually requires letters and stuff, and it's fun. The whole universe of reading and teaching, that's probably my favorite, Because you literally sit around with kids and play little games, little work games to get them to say these sounds and bledding stuff and it's so much fun and that's what I do with my son, just for everyone out there.
Melissa:I don't sit and have phonemic awareness time with him when we're driving in the car and we're talking about something and we just talk about what that starts with or what sound he hears.
Matt Burns:Yeah, yeah, and then eventually have them just practice saying the sounds fast. Let's say the sound fast, act, say it fast. Let me know if you hear a word, that type of thing, and there's a whole bunch of you, Google it. There's all kinds of games and for this type of thing you're talking about, they're quite fun.
Melissa:All right. So I'm also wondering, because we mentioned you don't necessarily need to go to those advanced kind of skills, right, that these are the key ones isolating, blending and segmenting. And we talked about interleaving and like you keep coming back to it, and I'm wondering about, I would imagine kids don't necessarily just become like I am now an expert segmenter and blender and I can do that with anything, but that you it gets harder because of what words, what sounds they're doing it with, like as you get to. I mean, multi-syllabic words would be really tough to do that with, compared to CVC words, and so I'm imagining that's kind of how it gets more difficult, but that you stick with those kind of three basic skills. Yeah.
Matt Burns:And there's and there's, yes, and you move up a number of sounds, like there's words with two sounds and then three sounds and four sounds, and I want you to multi-syllabic that you're probably not doing phonemic awareness, then you're probably doing other things. But yeah, you, eventually you start with the. You know the shorter, the two sounds and move, you work your way up by numbers of sounds and it doesn't. So phonemic awareness it's the. The type of sound isn't as important as the number of sounds. So you know it's SH for all of us. That's something very different than, but for a kid hearing sounds and working on phonemic awareness, it's not that different, it's more important. Yeah, yeah, it's still one sound. So number of sounds in the words is probably more important. I base that comment on experience of working with kids, not on a study.
Lori:I've done so so that's where those like Elkonnen boxes would be.
Matt Burns:Oh gosh, those are great.
Lori:Helpful tools Okay.
Matt Burns:Yeah, yeah, if you know what that is, they're wonderful, they're. They're basically just you have a box divided up into sub boxes based on number of sounds and as the kid segments or blends or whatever, they simply move a marker up and down into the box and just Google it. It's ELKONIN, pronounced Elkonnen. By the way, most people don't pronounce it, so that's the well done, yeah.
Lori:I'll link those in the show notes as well. I'll link some some to that. Yeah, that's awesome. Those are great tools and, like you said, pretty, pretty free. I mean you could use them on a whiteboard, you could use them draw some boxes, it's very easy.
Matt Burns:I literally my my universe of of of intervention, because I do interventions, for the instruction is materials are a whiteboard and a box of magnetic letters. I got off Amazon for 20 bucks and then everything. Of course I know teachers need a lot more than that, but but if you know it's a box of letters is cheap and a whiteboard is a couple of bucks at Target. So and those right there are powerful tools to use. And actually one time in the school in Minneapolis we asked they didn't have. They didn't have whiteboards. This was, you know, a few years ago. They have whiteboards for other kids and they had no money to buy them. So we went to the dollar store and bought cookie sheets and those worked really well. You could write on them and erase them. The magnetic letters stuck to them. It worked really well. So we've got really and the kids thought it was fun. They didn't care, it was cookie sheet and we loved it.
Melissa:I've seen it for the magnets, but I've never seen writing on it.
Matt Burns:Yeah, you can write on them just like you do it, just like a, just like a whiteboard.
Lori:Yeah, oh, and I love that Like if you kind of shook up your letters a little bit, they'd still stay.
Matt Burns:Yeah, yes, that's important. I always use magnetic with kids because for that very reason, they tend to get shaken.
Lori:I love that. That's so cool. Thank you for that. That hot tip for teachers.
Matt Burns:But now magnetic boards are pretty cheap, but, but. But if you have some reason, you can't those for us, those work really well.
Melissa:Neat. Well, you've mentioned this already, but I'm bringing us back to it because I still find myself even confused about this sometimes, and I hear a ton of questions about this, which is about bringing letters in, and so and I know there's some debate about it, because you mentioned Hagerty already, which we know spends most of the time without bringing letters in and so there's a lot of discussion about, okay, how long before you attach letters to these sounds. But I think there's some confusion too, and just know some people say, yeah, but once you bring in the letters, now you're teaching phonics, because that's what phonics is right is connecting the actual grapheme to the sound. And so people then think, well, then I'm not teaching phonemic awareness If I'm moving to the letter. So I think there's some confusion there and I just love to dig into this.
Matt Burns:Yeah, it's a really interesting conversation. So I would suggest a couple of things. Number one the National Reading Panel. Again, I refer to their work. Others have done this as well.
Matt Burns:If they included letters as part of their phonemic awareness instruction, the effect size was 0.67. So good, good, good effect. If there were no letters, it was 0.38. And we recently reanalyzed the data. I have them right here Because someone people have been saying well, you should most of the research in the National Reading Panel.
Matt Burns:They they taught phonemic awareness for some period of time and then used letters. So we looked it up and up. The 5051 studies that looked at phonemic awareness, only seven of them did that and unfortunately, the seven of them that did didn't give us good guidance. They didn't say we taught phonemic awareness for two weeks or we taught phonemic awareness until until they mastered blending. They didn't give us that. 35 studies used letters, 28 of them used them every single session from day one and only 26 didn't use letters. And if you did use letters it was significantly more effective. In fact, we looked at what predicted reading based on the National Reading Panel data. Great was significant predictor. We took them back to that Dosage was not and whether or not they used letters? Was Whether or not they use letters really mattered? No, I know, that baffled me. In fact, dosage added zero, variants, literally zero. I don't know why that is.
Lori:Dosage is how much, how often?
Matt Burns:Yes, my only hypothesis is that some kids were getting as an intervention and the intervention stopped if they learned it and kept going if they didn't, and so the kids that didn't do well got more dosage. So that's why you'd see no, and then some just did set dosage. I don't, I mean that's a hypothesis, I don't know, but I was shocked to do dosage added zero variants, not zero, but less than 0.01.
Lori:I had to confirm the meaning of dosage because I was shocked by it. I'm like, wait a minute there's. How is that possible? Wow.
Matt Burns:So we probably need to dive into that to really understand what that means. The only reason I bring it up here is to say that using letters mattered more than how often you did the instruction Okay, and so using letters did matter. Now, is it teaching footy macarena or teaching phonics? Well, it's teaching reading number one, and I will say that if your target is to help kids learn how to blend and segment sounds, but you're happening using letters, well that's still footy macarena, that's okay. If you're teaching graphing, phonics and correspondence at the same time, they're blending and stuff, they're teaching phonics. That's kind of the difference. What are you teaching? Not the tools you're using aren't what's driving the instructions? What are your desired outcome?
Melissa:And often you're doing them kind of read at the same time You're doing right at the same time.
Matt Burns:Right In, doing them right at the same time is more effective. Now, what I don't know and I'd love to see more research on is is there, because I said seven studies did something else first and I can't tell you what they did. So I'd love to see more research on do kids have to be able to isolate before we start doing letters? Or I have no idea. I made that up. I could be totally wrong. I have no idea. All I know is in the long run, it's better to include letters. So I include letters as often as you can. I mean as soon as you can. Now, having said that, doesn't always have dev letters. So I know some, some teachers. I think this is very common practice.
Matt Burns:Second and third grade you're teaching a finance lesson. Use might start by doing a blending warmup Great. You might begin with a segmenting game for just a minute or two Great. The only issue I have is when we see on social media people say, hey, I got this third grader. They're not learning how to read. Very well, what do I do? And they say well, do footy McAwerness, do you know? Practice these drills? Well, that's fine if you're teaching finance too. But if you're only intervention for that kid, it's just a practice blending orally only, probably not going to help that kid. If you're, if you're really in depth, you're going into a finance for that kid and along the way practicing some blending for a couple of minutes a day, that's, that's great. So so I don't. I don't advocate for oral only instruction in footy McAwerness, but certainly an occasional daily quick review. That's oral only. That's that's totally fine.
Melissa:And what about with younger kids? I'm just thinking about what I do with my son is oral only, but it's I mean, he's still just learning his letters too.
Matt Burns:I don't have data on this. That's a darn good question, but this is the. What I'm talking about. Today is kindergarten up, so I think it makes a lot more sense for preschoolers to do oral only, and I don't have a data to pull that up. I'm moving about. That's the case, that that with preschoolers, you know what, when you're driving down the car, you're playing a reading game with a kid. That involves with your own child, involves listening for sounds. Please do that a lot, do that every day. Yes, that's a great thing that you.
Melissa:You can hear the rhyming sounds. Yes, absolutely.
Matt Burns:There's no. Yes, do that all the time.
Lori:I'm thinking of those silly songs that we used to saying like, and where you would rhyme like down by the bay, down by the bay right, like those little, like one of the raffy songs that are just.
Matt Burns:Yeah. So what they are to do for those is emphasize the rhyme. So I think it's actually kids love this too. Like I'll go I won't yell too loudly because I don't want to employ any of the speakers, but you go, twinkle, twinkle little star. How I wonder what you are. So if you sing it, still emphasize the word. That helps them hear it as well.
Lori:Oh yeah, I'm sure they would get into yelling.
Matt Burns:Yes.
Lori:I'm also thinking of I've never sung this much on a podcast. I'm thinking of some of the other ones where what is it? Where you change the sound? So I'm thinking there's lots of ways to do this, you know even the apples and banana song. Yeah, I like to eat, eat, eat right. Eples and baninis right. So you're like you know what song it is, but the I do.
Lori:But I think like you want to really keep going. You're like God you haven't sung for a while. I'm going to get you know what this is like my American Idol debut. I'm going to be killed.
Matt Burns:Yeah, those are fun. I think it's advantageous if they're, if the words are are actual words. But yeah, it's yeah. Eples and baninis yes.
Lori:I mean, I kind of sounds like paninis. So who knows? You know it does that's fair. No, these are great.
Melissa:Yeah, there's just, there's just so many fun ways to work this in, yeah, and especially at the younger you know, I mean before they even start kindergarten, like, like you're saying, these are, these are fun ways to just have them start hearing sounds, thinking about the sounds and words, those kinds of things. But I like what you said about once once we hit kindergarten, let's get those letters as soon as possible. So one question, another question I had, just because I've seen this floating around very recently Mark Seidenberg, who is another researcher. He recently shared some slides on his website of a presentation he gave which a lot of people are talking about for a lot of different reasons, but there was one about phonemic awareness that I saw a lot of questions, specifically on Facebook, where he and it's so hard because all you're seeing is his slides and so you have no idea what he said about these slides but what it said on the slide was that PA, or phonemic awareness, is the outcome of skilled reading, not a precursor, which I think blew some people's minds, because I think people often think of it as the step before.
Melissa:Right Before we get to phonics, we we get kids going with phonemic awareness and so I think that kind of like shocked a lot of people to hear that or just see that statement without any context. But do you want to do? You want to speak to that? Do you have any thoughts? I'm not sure what.
Matt Burns:what he meant about speaking for him. Here's what I say is, once you learn how to, once you start orthographic mapping, that is what drives your reading, and in fact, once you learn the letters and the letter sounds, that makes it easier to do phonemic awareness tasks. So I think he's talking about that. That's really. I wouldn't think of it as a precursor, by the way, like I wouldn't use that and think of it that way either. It's more reciprocal. So as you're learning phonemic awareness, you're getting better at sounds and reading the sounds and stuff. And as you're getting better at reading the sounds and letters that make the sounds, you get better at phonemic awareness. So I think they're really somewhat reciprocal.
Matt Burns:So I'm not sure if that's what he meant. I think so. Is my guess that really, especially the more advanced phonemic awareness tasks that really want you to know how to do basic, even basic reading, that you see that go up. So those are more of an outcome of reading. But the more isolating, blending and segmenting, I think it's a little less true than the more advanced, but I still think it's pretty much reciprocal?
Melissa:Yeah, that one you mentioned about the reversal. I think you did 10 and the reverse of it is net. I know I did that, something similar, and when I went to the reading league conference I was at a presentation about it and they were like how many of you actually pictured those letters in your head when you did it? I was like, yeah, I think I did it. I was like, yeah, I totally did. That's how I did it. I just pictured the T, e and I flipped it and I knew it was net. I didn't even really need to listen to the sounds. I knew the word, I knew 10, and then I knew what it is when you flip the letters.
Matt Burns:Your 10 second answer response was explained to better than mine. Well said, that's exactly right. You picture the letters. But see, the other thing is I was at a conference and the speaker was presenting some advanced phonemic awareness skill. I didn't, I'd never heard of it. And I was sitting at a table with people I don't know they're all teachers and I'm like, wow, this is really cool. And so I asked everyone did you know this? I'm like no, this is new to me too.
Matt Burns:I go good and right in the middle of the house, I take a note and look up and see what I mean Can you, can you do this? Like well, enough to practice it? I don't know. Okay, well, can you all read? And they all? Well, yeah, we're good readers. So if we can all read and None of us knew this or we think could even do this, do we need the skill to read? So I think oftentimes we get a little wrapped up with these great ideas, interesting ideas, and we really lose sight of, boy, the basic foundations of what we need, and and those are what should be working on I.
Melissa:See that question to a lot, where people say like I've, you know, I had the student and he's reading just fine, but I did this phonemic awareness test and he bombed it. What do I do?
Matt Burns:Throw the test away. Have have the kid read. Yes, so I do. So that's. There are some funemic awareness that are presented as phonological awareness and they're really. They do include phonological awareness, but they also include these more advanced skills and if, if you, if you've got a kid who's reading well, not even reading well, I'll say this this study idea, this is under review, under review right now.
Matt Burns:We looked at this very question and we looked at the advanced skill and the only one we used was a lesion and we wanted to see, among second and third graders who are struggling readers. First of all, they scored really well on food. We can witness in kindergarten it's funny, we can witness should be the focus of kindergarten reading instruction. It's absolutely a big part of first grade. By second grade it starts to, you know it's it goes down. So we took second and third graders who are struggling readers, measured their phonemic awareness, their phonics, with an onset's work fluency measure and their overall reading skills. And In second, third grade, blending a segment didn't really predict among these drug readers a lesion predicted literally zero, less than 1%. What? But Decoding, I mean decoding predicted, like you know, 50% of the variance. So crazy amount of the variance. So so Decoding among the second and third graders, predicted reading among the struggling readers. The food we could witness measures didn't. So second and third grade, if they're not learning, if they're having troubles with reading, you're better off to work on decoding than you are.
Matt Burns:For me, go in this regardless of the food, make a witness skill. Now I will say that's a nuance to answer. I feel badly for practitioners because they even me all the time. I get emails all the time. I love that. But they say, hey, what do I do? My response is always well, it depends. Like researchers, we always start with that Well, it depends on this, so, so it depends. So if, yes, if I have a second and third grader heck, fourth grader with a reading disability who lacks basic food, you make awareness. You should be working on that absolutely, but not by itself. Why you work in on phonics? But I'm saying if you, if your kids in second, third or fourth grade or even older and struggling with reading, you're probably better off to start with phonics than footy McAwerness.
Melissa:That is great. And did I hear in there that nonsense word fluency assessments might be more beneficial than for the McAwerness assessments?
Matt Burns:well In second and third. Second among these kids struggling readers, second through whatever fifth grade. Yeah, I think in that sense, with fluency measure can really help. So nonsense if any teachers out there listening to this cringe at that word, I used to cringe about it too. I was the director of the Minnesota Center for reading research. Cash nonsense were used to drive me nuts. Yes, because it's not reading. But it's okay, it's not supposed to be reading it's.
Matt Burns:Can they sound out the words? It's all that measure is. Don't overinterpret it, don't under interpret it. I think it's gonna be helpful to see can the kid, does the kid have basic decoding? Now it doesn't tell you if they. It tells you yes or no. Right, so this says they're low if they don't have good decoding skills, you still don't know really what to do and I have to get out a decoding inventory to see what skills they have and don't have. But it'll tell you with pretty good accuracy can these kids sound out words? So, man, I I think nonsense word measures are really helpful when working with kids who are still have learning difficulties.
Lori:And with nonsense words, we're talking about assessment, not teaching those.
Matt Burns:Yes, thank you very much. Yes, yes, assessment. Yes.
Lori:Yeah, why do we not teach those? Can you just elaborate on that?
Matt Burns:Why don't want kids learning learning made-up words? Remember orthographic mapping. I don't want them to see these and learn this, this made-up word, then eventually confuse a real word with this, this made-up word you know, set to say they couldn't practice some or something, but don't teach them.
Melissa:Same reason you do epals and beninis right?
Matt Burns:So I had colleague Lori Helman. She now her co-directors of the Minnesota Center for reading research. She was from curriculum instruction out of some ed site and she's wonderful, super smart, really great. She what her area, one of her areas of expertise was emerging bilinguals, or emerging you know. You know we typically call the English language learner and I was pushing for nonsense, word type stuff and she just disagreed because the kids were English learners and she said to me finally, matt, I don't ever want to put a word in front of a kid from. English is not their First language, that's a fake word, that's not that I'm such a good point. So I still think they have utility for assessment For kids are emerging bilingual. But boy, I'm really cautious about them when it comes to teaching.
Lori:All right. So I feel like it's a really good time to kind of pull together. We've talked about a whole lot today and I know my brain is on fire meant. So, if we're thinking about teachers listening, what are maybe like three practical takeaways that a teacher could implement in their classroom? And I like I feel like maybe I'll kick you off with the first one is teach, teach, blending, segmenting and isolating. I heard that was very important, like when I'm thinking of like key takeaways from today's conversation. That's coming with me. That is in my notes. Start underline bolded right. So do you want to elaborate on that or any more? Yeah, I'll add a couple more.
Matt Burns:So, yeah, so a couple takeaways. Yes, teach those, the Trinity as I now will call them. That's, that's, that's funny. Teach those three. Absolutely Don't get to hung up on rhyming. It's okay to assess rhyming, it's okay to teach it if they don't have it. But if they don't learn it, move on. Don't worry about rhyming. Assess decoding and kids who are struggling. Older kids, you're probably better off to focus on on decoding, but certainly in kindergarten, first grade, for me, mcawareness needs to be explicitly taught and and it's okay to use letters to teach, for me, mcawareness to help them build that graphene, phony and correspondence as soon as you can, because, remember, the desired outcome is always better reading.
Melissa:And you're still teaching for me McAwareness.
Matt Burns:You're still teaching for me, mcawareness? Yes, it's okay.
Lori:I also love just categorize it as teaching reading right, I mean, that's the end goal and putting it under that bigger bucket like that. That was a great reframe for me today too, like not to get too hung up in the minutia of the details there, just Feeling good that I'm teaching the skills that they need because I'm teaching them how to read.
Matt Burns:Yeah, exactly. And and if a teacher is doing some oral only review, like games and stuff, don't beat yourself up. I'm not saying you can't do that, absolutely. Yeah, just keep it quick, you know, a couple minutes at the most, and then get back when you're doing your. Your primary instruction, to be sure, include letters as much as you can.
Lori:Matt, I you know I'm gonna have to follow up with you because I have three Studies that you mentioned that you were involved in that we're gonna we're gonna need links for because our listeners will hunt us down and Get there like I want it. This is just amazing. Like I love that our listeners are so excited about everything, like even some things like we don't even catch on and we're like, oh, I don't remember that person saying that, but and we were in the conversation, so we're gonna make sure that we grab those from you so we can include it all in the show notes.
Melissa:Okay, great awesome and we'll also include a link to the webinar that you did, because, yes, fantastic. So people want to hear even more. They can hear more, which I know some of it will be the same as what we talked about today, but that's okay. It's good to hear things more than one time. But do you have any other suggestions for people if they want to learn more about funny, make awareness of, like, where they can go or Text to read, or anything?
Matt Burns:Yeah, well, you also. You mentioned the Florida Center. That's a good one. I have to mention the you fly foundations. That's a. I feel very fortunate to be working here with with that group who developed that with you know, holly Lane and Valentino Contessa. The contest. They developed a really nice Programs and there's really so teacher people asking what's a good introduction to reading textbook for pre-service teachers. It's at the you fly foundations manual.
Melissa:It's really good the introduction to that manual is gold. Yes, so it's simple, but so much information.
Matt Burns:Yeah, it is. It's in very, very easily, very put forward, easy to read, wow.
Lori:I keep it on my desk all the time. I I know that's really nerdy, but I have a little stack of things that I keep to refer to often and that is my. This is part of my, like, stack of Bible books, you know.
Matt Burns:That's great. There's others as well. We wrote to the code. There's always a go-to for me. That's been around for a while. That's a good one as well. There are certainly others.
Lori:Is that one? Can you say it?
Matt Burns:again, road, road to the code.
Lori:Road to the code. I'm sorry, my rhyming wasn't like spot-on in that moment. Okay, road to the code.
Matt Burns:Yeah, road to the code is a good one too. They've used quite a bit. If you go to Amazon and just put in phony micawariness games, there's like 10 books that are just games that I use all the time. But also the Florida Center has lots of really nice activities too. And then the last thing I'll recommend is if you haven't looked at the National Reading Panel Report, I really encourage you to look at that. That's a really helpful tool. It explains things really well. It does get technical in some places, but explains things really well. And then, finally, if you Google IES, those letters, ies Practice Guides it's the Institute for Education Science, the branch of the Department of Education that deals with research IES Practice Guides. There's a whole bunch of free PDFs about all kinds of topics, some money of which are reading. They're really well done. They say do this, do this, do this, here's how to do this. It's really really well done. So Google those IES Practice Guides. It was great resources on reading and math and other things as well. So really great resource.
Melissa:Excellent. Now I'm Googling everything I have to stay focused.
Lori:Yeah, we're going to link all of this in the show notes, including we podcasted with Holly Lane, who we mentioned. We'll link that episode as well, because she was she was epic. She talked about is science of reading, is it science or snake oil? Right, and went through. Yeah, it was great. So she talked about that webinar, which was really awesome.
Melissa:Yeah, you're very lucky to get to work with her.
Lori:Yeah Well, thank you so much, matt. This has been amazing. I know I've learned so much and I know our listeners are so appreciative of your time, so thank you, thank you, I enjoyed it.
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