Sound wall expert Mary Dahlgren explains how sound walls differ from word walls, why it's important to teach all 44 speech sounds, and how sound walls can help students make sense of English. She shares evidence to support the use of sound walls in your classroom and gives practical advice for implementation.
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.
Sound wall expert Mary Dahlgren explains how sound walls differ from word walls, why it's important to teach all 44 speech sounds, and how sound walls can help students make sense of English. She shares evidence to support the use of sound walls in your classroom and gives practical advice for implementation.
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. Do you sometimes feel like everybody is talking about sound walls? Do you have a sound wall in your classroom, or maybe you just want to learn more about them? Well, you're in the right place. Today we'll be talking to expert Mary Dalgren all about sound walls. You will learn what sound walls are and how they differ from word walls, what research supports the use of sound walls and what knowledge you need to make the most of a sound wall in your classroom.
Lori:Hi teacher friends. I'm Lori and I'm Melissa. We are two educators who want 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. Today we can't wait to talk about sound walls from an expert who's been talking about them for a very long time.
Melissa:You might even know who it is already. It's Mary Dalgren is here with us today, who is a teacher at heart. She has over 25 years of experience in education and she's currently the president of Tools for Reading. Welcome to the podcast.
Mary Dahlgren:Thank you all so much for inviting me to come and speak today, and I've got to get my updated bio on there, but I actually it's been 40 years 40 years. Another thing to know is that Tools for Reading is now a 95% group company. So, yeah, we have some big changes that occurred last year and we're just growing and growing and it's exciting to see all the work that's being done.
Lori:That's awesome. Yeah, congratulations.
Mary Dahlgren:Thanks.
Lori:Alright, so we're gonna jump right into the content here. We know our listeners want to know all about sound walls. It's a hot topic and I'm hoping you can start us off just by telling us what are sound walls and how they're different from word walls.
Mary Dahlgren:Alright, well, let me start first with how did I end up creating sound walls? Is that okay? Just, oh my gosh. Yes, please Tell people, kind of getting some insight into what the work is around and about and why and the how.
Mary Dahlgren:I was a National Letters Trainer for 18 years. I mean, my dream was when I was in graduate school to work with Louisa Mottz, and I was fortunate enough to get to do that, became a Letters Trainer and there were about a dozen of us for a number of years that worked together and then that kind of dwindled down to about seven or eight and anyway, but many, many years of teaching in many weeks in a row. I would go in and work with school districts and teach them about the 44 phonemes of our language. That's part of our Letters Training and the phonology learning about the consonants and the vowels. And one for me when I actually went to the Greenwood Institute in the mid 90s to study with Louisa and I learned about these charts and one of my huge ah-has was the fact that I was teaching sixth grade at the time and I had kids that made all these weird spelling errors. They would write a J for a Ch sound, so this instead of a CH, they write a J, and instead of DR they write a J, and or TR they write a CH. And I'm thinking you know my response to the kids at that point was you obviously didn't study right the words five times each. Nothing to do was with really giving corrective feedback, because I did what I had been taught right, and that tends to be the way of education.
Mary Dahlgren:Often we tend to fall back on how we were taught. But then I learned about the, the consonants and the vowels and how those two sounds and the sound are made in the same place in the mouth. Children easily confuse them. The children are actually the linguists. They're the ones that are thinking about these sounds and hearing these things and they're trying to write them down. Why was completely visual right? I just I knew the spellings. I had no idea how phonology impacted how children wrote and how they had, why they had confusions about things.
Mary Dahlgren:So that was my first real insight and the value of understanding why it's important to actually be aware of all 44 speech sounds rather than just 26 letters. Right, and I and I still had us had a word wall, but then the more that I, I taught and I worked with the charts, I began to realize, you know, if we, if we taught all 44 speech sounds and came at that from that perspective, then rather than the 26 letters, it would really make more sense for kids. It doesn't always make sense for us as teachers and adults because the way that we've always done things, but this whole idea of if there's 44 sounds and then there's multiple ways to spell those sounds, if I know the sound and then I can use my sound as the resource to say now what are my choices for spelling oh, for example and. And then in a classroom, what have I been taught? I've learned that oh might be in a word like no or go open syllable, or I learned oh constantly, and maybe that's at the beginning of first grade. And then I learned oh a and a w and I begin to understand what my choices are. But, as I know, it's the sounds and children tend to and I and I base this around Becky Treiman and Charles Reed's research that they did in the the 70s and 80s on preschoolers writing errors and really beginning to see kids are thinking about these things. They're trying to figure out the sound because if they knew how to spell the word or they knew where to look on a word wall, they, they go there. But if I have a sound, they're more likely to come at it from that perspective. So make just learning to make the shift from word walls to sound walls has been something. I've seen it spread across our country. It's kind of been interesting how it's spread like wildfire.
Mary Dahlgren:But my, my colleague, antonio Fietto, and I decided, well, we're gonna take our charts that we use in letters and we're going to make them come alive by using children's mouth pictures and you know, things that kids can identify in classrooms, so that they can begin to compare what are their, what is their mouth look like when they're making that sound and is that they? Is that the sound that they're trying to produce? And then again, what are the choices? So really getting teachers to think about it's not just the, the first letter, and I think of a word and I use examples in in my talks when I show us a word wall that has, for example, under the letter t, easiest one to talk about they the that you know, why do kids say to he and to hat? Because they think when anything's posted under the letter t it's a sound.
Mary Dahlgren:But why aren't we teaching the in the sound right, the th sounds? Because kids have to read the right from the start the get go. So why not teach them those things? So those are. I was probably a longer answer than you wanted, but, thinking about the sound walls and word walls and and how you know why, why did we start developing them really to start thinking about things from a child's perspective and making along with making sense of the language?
Lori:yeah, so sound walls help kids see, sounds right see sound.
Mary Dahlgren:Yes, see the sounds, see the sounds and spell the sounds, because it's really and I and I know, especially in a couple of states where they really tried to kick off sound walls oftentimes people would say, well it's, you don't add any print to it. Well, you can't read if you don't have the print. So that was a misconception that occurred. So I feel like you know things are getting straightened out and and yeah, so would you mind just giving a rundown, mary, of like.
Melissa:You know, if I had no idea, my my administration says you need to start using a sound wall and I'm like I never even heard of it. I don't know what to do. Can you just give a rundown of like, what should be on a sound wall?
Mary Dahlgren:okay, well, first of all I'd say, make sure you attend a training or coaching or something, because it's it's not just, it's not something that we naturally do. So what's on a cell wall? A cell wall is made up of two parts a consonant chart and a vowel valley, and so to represent all 44 speech sounds and I tell teachers, because they start to panic about wall space, they don't take up much more room than a word wall does. But I tell teachers, you can have the consonant chart in one place in your room and the vowel valley in another place. We really look at, and again, the linguistic perspective, the speech language pathology perspective of how do we produce sounds in our language, how, what is the place and manner of articulation, where in your mouth do you produce those sounds, and then what happens with your airflow and your voicing and things like that. So those are two main organizers on the consonant chart and again, as a teacher appreciating the fact that, ok, so the way we have this, the sound wall set up is by the front of the mouth. So the first sounds listed on the sound wall are the p and the b sound which we use, the p and the b to represent those sounds in print and then the m sound. So those are all made with your lips together.
Mary Dahlgren:And I tell teachers one of the things to notice is what do babies? What sounds do babies start making right from the beginning? Those sounds the mam, mam, pap, pap, pap, pap, and then the da, da, da. What can you see the caretaker's mouth doing? And that's babies rely on that. I think it's so fascinating when you start thinking about that, that's really cool, yeah, and you start thinking, wow, this is how language begins to work and develop. But again, it's so new to us as teachers and understanding, unless you've been through it as speech path program or linguistics brilliant depth study. So understanding the why of how a sound wall is set up and it is set up in a specific order in the consonant chart and the vowel valley, but because of the way the sounds are produced and from the front of the mouth to the back of the throat, and the setup also has to do with understanding when children make spelling errors. It gives me insight and I'm going to use another example that often has to do with dialect and just my environment.
Mary Dahlgren:So many of my kids say both of us or birthday bathroom instead of the th, they use the f sound and when you have a sound wall set up, the f sound and the f sound are right next to each other. They're next door neighbors. Antonio and I call them. What's in your neighborhood? Where are your neighbors? Your next year, who's your roommate? And then, who lives next door? And those two sounds easily confused very common, also easy enough to talk to kids about.
Mary Dahlgren:How do we produce that sound and what does it look like in print and learning. Also. I've learned from people like Julie Washington right, and we love Julie Washington, she's amazing. But I'm not going to say that you're wrong. When you say both of us right, I'm going to say I know that's how you say it at home, but when you're reading and writing you have to know the standard American English representation here and having that confidence to be able to do that with kids. But also being able to I can show them why. Why they have that confusion and I think that's also that supports me as the teacher. I'm giving them that ladder for that scaffolding to build their confidence and I'm not feeling like I'm making a judgment. This is how language works.
Melissa:It's probably helpful to see that it's so close, you know, for the kids, not just feeling like, oh, it's wrong, but it's like, oh, you're just like, you're just off by one, just right there.
Mary Dahlgren:Right and to be able to validate them and say, you know, it makes sense and this is not uncommon for people to say, and so just being able to point that out, yeah, that they're just right there and validating what they're thinking and doing and grappling with too.
Lori:Mary, can you share a little bit about why they're neighbors, Like what makes them neighbors? I assume, because the sound I don't know.
Mary Dahlgren:Yeah, no, that's a great question.
Lori:And roommates. You said roommates too earlier, so that was. I was curious for a roommate example.
Mary Dahlgren:Oh, ok, I'll give you some examples that I'm going to use. I'm going to use those phonemes that we call fricatives because they're always continuous, so easy to start with in instruction, because you can hold that sound longer. But, for example, we always talk about the unvoiced and the voice. So these two sounds are I start with my lips together and then I put my teeth on my lips, so this is the second column and when I put my top teeth on my bottom lip and I blow, I get the unvoiced sound, the sound as in fish, which is hard to hear in doing a talk like this because you can't see my mouth necessarily. Or if I turn my voice on, I put my top teeth on my bottom lip and blow, I get the vvv sound. So those are roommates. They're produced in the exact same place in my mouth. The only difference between those two sounds is voicing.
Mary Dahlgren:And I'll give you another example of, as a teacher, noticing when my students, and again sixth graders would write E-F-R-Y for every every. I mean, think about it. It's like when you say it in your head and even if you whisper the word, you can see why they might have a hard time with the fvv sound. Those were huge insights for me. F and V are nothing alike, they're not close to each other, they don't look alike. Why would a child write that? But then I begin to understand the phenology of the language, and then it makes sense. Oh and again.
Lori:And it's probably not that they don't need more practice. They don't need reteaching in anything, they just need to understand. Or maybe they I don't know what I'm hearing you say is they really just need to understand why these sounds are related, how they look when they're saying them? Would you say that that's a kid who needs? I mean just this specific example, say this is what we're seeing in a child? Would they need reteaching or would they just need to understand this idea?
Mary Dahlgren:No, I don't think they need reteaching. I do. I think you're exactly right, lori, it is just pointed it out, clearing it up and talk about immediate corrective feedback. I mean, I have the opportunity to do that. Show the kids they can see it right there and they can make sense of that. Yeah, really, we've been criticized a little bit for teaching articulation and spending too much time on that. We're not really teaching kids how to articulate the sounds, we're teaching them to notice how they're producing those things. And boy, the loss we had during COVID because of face masks.
Mary Dahlgren:And I think that people really realized how much we rely on looking at your mouth and what you're saying, right, and so yeah, it's very validating for kids and that example of every EFRY to EVRY, but understanding as a teacher, like being able to give them that insight. So you don't say, write the word five times each. That's not helpful at all, but why did I make that error? So okay, let me take that in one step further. So we've got the roommates, the F and the V sound, or F and V orthographically, and then right next door. So teeth on the lip, the next place in your mouth, moving the sound a little bit further back is my tongue, between my teeth. So if I put my tongue between my teeth and blow and some people call these the naughty sounds because you're sticking your tongue out right, the F and the V sound, so we were just talking about both, or with, and the F sound is right next door to the F sound, tongue between the teeth.
Mary Dahlgren:The TH, as in we use the word feather because it's well, or we use the word thimble as an example, as the end voice TH. It's hard, it's really hard because most of our function words that have the voice TH, they, that, the, these. You can't put a picture on a card. So what's a keyword? Right? So keywords are really critically important when teaching that also. So kids have a reference when they're not sure, like, what am I doing with my mouth there? But I have a keyword to help me think about that sound and say that sound, and then I uncover the print. I put the print on the sound wall as soon as I've taught the phonics concept.
Melissa:And then you can keep adding to it right, so as they learn more letter pat letters and letter patterns that make that sound, you can keep adding.
Mary Dahlgren:Yes, and I was actually in a school yesterday and I was working with kindergartners and they had just learned that the S can also make the sound. So when we talk about words that we call what we call temporarily irregular, as is has right, but they have that S on the end, but the S doesn't make this sound. But the sound and the fun thing was is that I talked with these kindergartners about that and I I wrote those three words down and I said now you know, and we talked about this and the, those are made in the same place in your mouth. What happens? What's the difference between those two? My voices turned on my, my teeth are closed together, my tongue is touchy, is lifting up behind my teeth as I'm making those sounds, and they're continuous. So those are things we talked about, to get them to notice them.
Mary Dahlgren:But then talking about the voicing and then reading is as has together, blending those sounds together and talking to the children. When you see these short little words, you have to try S as the sound and then you know. Obviously our goal is to the whole point of a sound wall, is to build to automaticity and to begin to well, you know, it's the steps to orthographic mapping, storing words in our visual work form area so that we can increase our fluency. It's not so that kids can tell me the 44 speech sounds. It's a, it's a tool to to move things along more effectively and more efficiently.
Melissa:That's such a good point. That's not like we just want you to memorize all of these 44 sounds.
Mary Dahlgren:No, no, no. And again, I think there's misconceptions about the purpose of a sound wall and but it it really is to get to sight word automaticity and and to get to fluency. And do you mind if I take another little deep dive here with someone with talking? So just talking about this and this sound with those children and I, so I couldn't just stop with is as has we had to bring up cats and dogs, right? So we were talking about, I said you know so, and they, they've been learning about plurals and I said so when you add an S it means more than one, and we talked about that and then I wrote the words, the word cat.
Mary Dahlgren:But then I said what happens when you have one more than one cat? The word becomes in the kindergarten or said cats, and so the idea that cat is unvoiced is unvoiced. So when I add these suffix S my voice stays off. So it's cats, right, so it's that sound, but dog. And when I have more than one dog, I have two dogs or I have 10 dogs, but the idea of dog is voiced. So my voice stays on when I have the plural and it's dogs. So now I have the sound.
Lori:I didn't. I didn't even know that.
Mary Dahlgren:I mean, it's it that. So we say the English language is morpho phonemic, it's meaning based and it's sound based and we're getting at that and that's kindergarten, first grade understandings, when I'm teaching inflectional endings and suffix S, and then we can add in suffix ed. It's the same thing that happens with ed for the and the or when does it say that it sound? And? And even further, when I start, when I'm working with my older students and talking about prefixes on words and I asked my kids why do we say words like impossible instead of impossible? Right, so it's for ease of articulation, it's for ease of processing. So, instead of saying impossible, why am I and I? This is you know, instructionally, as I'm working with teachers I talk about the, the and the are in the same column together. It's easier to say impossible because my lips are together for the sound, because I need to prepare to make the sound in the base word possible, right.
Melissa:That's when you, when you see like lists of prefixes that mean the same thing, like what you just said, what we call chameleon prefixes.
Mary Dahlgren:They adapt. There's nine chameleon prefixes and they adapt to join onto base words so that the, the knots, impossible, illegal, irregular, right, so that that prefix means the same thing but it's being added to different base words. The same thing with co in right, like connect, and I need a calm word, complex. You know, having having that prefix, that means the same thing. But noticing, I don't have to learn meanings for all these prefixes If I can group them by those nine chameleons, and then there's many others. But that's a. That's a big insight and quick, make us the quicks and easy to learn. Also, knowing our longer words. I'm going off in a kind of a little different direction, but this is where we get. This is what I get excited about with sound walls is that it's not just about phonology, it's about orthography and it's about morphology and but helping kids to understand how how our words actually work together to that for meaning, the sound and and for spelling patterns.
Melissa:This is so amazing. I just want to stay up to that. I mean, we are. You already mentioned all the reasons why it's, you know, would be more beneficial to have a sound wall than a word wall. But I'm just thinking, as you're talking, like if you're just putting them up by the first letter, you miss all this rich conversation that you're talking about. That we just went through and that, if you're just putting it up by the first letter, yeah, Right, right.
Mary Dahlgren:And yeah, if I'm just using the first letter and I'm not thinking about what's that, what's what's that, what sound is that graphing actually represents? Because that's, that's a really important part of our as a teacher inside and as a child inside and learning.
Lori:Yeah, I'm also thinking too about you mentioned that idea of and I asked you about it, right neighbors and roommates. The whole time you've been sharing these examples. I'm thinking, and me as a grown adult now, right, I'm like, oh, is this a root or S and Z roommate? It's like the sounds, the sound tests, Right, I just I'm getting excited about it, Picturing a class full of students. I imagine also getting very excited about trying to figure out what's what. That's really exciting. Right, or like impossible. That's really hard to say with your mouth. Impossible is so much easier. Just finding that out on their own is obviously they would want to teach that, but giving them the tools to be able to figure that out and work through that on their own is really exciting.
Mary Dahlgren:Yeah, and creating a curiosity. The amazing thing is is that I've been in so many classrooms and I have to give a shout out to Alabama classrooms In the state of Alabama they really embrace some walls and getting to here. We're just waiting for some studies to come out, because I know that's also a big question is where's the data and the research to show up? But we're seeing just in outcomes in classrooms and so the anecdote data, as we call it, instead of we have anecdotal information but data coming in from small numbers but having teachers say, at Christmas time there were kids that I know I was going to have to refer to be tested, but then they come back in January and things begin to click and they're using the sound wall as a resource and they're having conversations with their peers in the classroom and they're beginning to make sense of the language themselves and my kids begin to take off and I don't have to refer those kids. And so it is like, and I talk about we've learned so much about the neurology of reading and that thanks to brilliant researchers like Stanislaus DeHaan and Mary Ann Wolfe and talking about those neural networks that we build in our brain but a lot of phenology is stored up in that front temporal lobe that's up by my temple and if I were pointing at my head, and then that occipital where I begin to store print is all the way back in my occipital area, back by my ear. There's a distance there and I've got to build those neural pathways. How do I make those connections for my students? I've got to teach about the sound and I have to teach the print and then I have to make those connections.
Mary Dahlgren:So this opportunity, and I'm going to say I was in two pre-kate classrooms yesterday and we were talking about these things, playing with language, playing with words, thinking about sounds, and of course we did head, waist, knees, toes and we stood up and did typical phonemic awareness task, jumped up when we said the whole word back together and fun things like that. So we're using the sound wall as that starting point. But it's part of teaching the phenology and getting down to phonemic awareness, which we know we need to get to the phoneme as quickly as possible and then add the print to develop the alphabetic principle, to move on into deeper phonics instruction and more complex phonics. But if our kids can't do that, first that basic alphabetic principle and match the one sound to one letter. It's hard to build if they don't have that starting point.
Lori:Yeah, that's what I was thinking we could dig into a little bit more is what research or what theory support the use of sound walls. I know you had mentioned in our pre-call articulatory gesture research, but I didn't know if there's anything that you wanted to elaborate on other than that.
Mary Dahlgren:So Clore is yours. I really think so. When Antonia and I began working on the sound walls, really building on our knowledge from letters, working with so many teachers and the work of Linnae Ares' research, so understanding that pre-alphabetic phase, that children they come to us typically in kindergarten and pre-K and how do I move them from pre-alphabetic to early alphabetic? What do they need to know and understand? And then moving from early alphabetic to later alphabetic what are those? What's involved in those phases? How do I help move a child from one phase to the next? So our work is oftentimes organized around Ares' work and her phases of reading development reading and spelling development, but also her papers that she's written which, when you go back, she's been writing about this type of thing with children for a number of years, when in the 90s I think, possibly the 80s, but then papers from 2014, 2022,. This work and this fascination continues to grow. And while she didn't teach students all 44 sounds, they saw a benefit when they were teaching the children the sounds and the letters versus kids who were just taught letters, versus kids who were doing business as usual, whatever they typically did in a pre-K or kindergarten classroom. So much of my work. We're expanding on that and, as I said, waiting.
Mary Dahlgren:There's several people who are in their doctoral studies right now and I think that they're I know that they're working on putting together research studies to study how does sound walls have this effect and what is the work behind it, and which I think is important. I also think it's funny that people always say where's the research on sound walls, where's the research on word walls? We use those forever but it, yeah there's. It makes me nervous when we saw sound walls blow up on the internet and that people think it's just about mouth pictures and there's so much more to understanding the use of the sound wall, the phonology, the orthography and then moving into morphology. I mean there's so many things that you can rely on and talk about in making those connections.
Melissa:So, speaking of that, you mentioned earlier too, that you know the teacher, all of us, if we're using sound walls, need to have some knowledge in order to be able to use them. What would you say is what knowledge is needed and what are the best ways for teachers to get that knowledge if they don't have it already?
Mary Dahlgren:Well, so understanding the organization of the charts, and so I have to do a shout out. Many of our teachers have been through letters in the United States, so letters unit two. This information is scripted out in there and at Tools for Reading we have Selmo classes we offer, and they're six hour classes just to get teachers started and to begin to understand these things, and they're open. They're posted on our Tools for Reading website and so you can go and find those there or under 95%groupcom. We offer those six hour classes to start with, and then we really like to work with coaches that go back into the district to help them have a deeper understanding, because it's there's some study, it's not just, it's not a quick and easy something to learn about, but I think strengthening teachers' knowledge and depth of knowledge is so understanding and it's never too late to learn. Being a lifelong learner is really an important part of being a teacher.
Lori:That's right. Well, speaking of that, I know that so many of our listeners that resonates with them, I know because they message us all the time and have so many amazing questions. And I'm thinking of teachers who are listening, thinking, okay, I wanna get started with this. I don't wanna not take action, but I'm not sure I have all the knowledge I need in order to jump in right this moment. So how can we work this balance of, okay, I need to learn more and I wanna learn more and I'm learning. Maybe I'm signing up for a course that's starting soon or I'm reading some of the Tools for Reading stuff on your site. But also, hey, the school year's, you know, in full swing and I wanna try this now so it doesn't feel overwhelming to me in you know, august or September, whenever maybe I do a soft launch of a sound wall. We could call that right now. What advice would you give to a teacher now?
Mary Dahlgren:So I would say look at how a sound wall is arranged. Don't be afraid to take your words off your word wall. Set up a sound wall and the most important thing is is that you take your words from your word wall and you talk to your students about what's the first sound? Where are we going to put these? Let's look at this new arrangement that we have.
Mary Dahlgren:So I love the soft launch idea and I encourage people all the time at this time of year to say you know, try it out. It's certainly not going to hurt building your own confidence, getting the kids comfortable with that. But looking at learning how to set it up and then thinking about what is that first sound? How am I going? How are we spelling that in this word? What is our reason for putting it on the word wall? And? But your students have to analyze it with you. It's not any good If I take it down, if I take down a word wall, post a sound wall and just put the words up the kid. You want the kids to be engaged in this, you want them to make decisions, and and then there are funny things like the our nasal sound that only comes in the middle or the end of a word, the mm, as in sing. That is long.
Melissa:A lot of confusion about that sound.
Mary Dahlgren:What I'm a goodness again. In first grade yesterday they were learning I and G and they kept saying and I said honestly, do you all say thing? But they were that bless you. And which is natural is trying to say both sounds in that digraph in G, and and getting them to really think about what. What are you doing when you're making that sound? What does it sound like in spoken words? So that's that's another question that yesterday the teachers asked me. Then they said we're not confident with all the sounds and I said say the words. How do you say the words? Don't try to over say this sound, but think of a list of words and you know just the I and G on on verbs, right that, but how many? We have a number of words that end with in G. So I've got to think about how do I say that and I will tell you, depending on where you're on the country people do. They do say longer, right, like if I'm on the island, right?
Melissa:I see that on the Facebook groups all the time we're full of I say it this way, and I say it this way. It's kind of cool actually to hear it is it is cool to hear and then.
Mary Dahlgren:but then I also say to teachers I say well, let's say it in a sentence. So the thing that was bothering me was the ringing of the phone. So did I say, the thing that was bothering me was the ringing of the phone? You know it's like you. Honestly, in running speech, when you put words into a phrase or a sentence, it's easier to think about how do I say that then, just saying the single word.
Lori:That's really helpful. I feel like we sometimes get caught up on that in speed. You could? You said you know, like you said, the dialects everywhere so different and yeah, we were playing talk last week as for you, and a lot of lovely southern accents, and yeah, I'm sure if we just said one word, it would be very different Then if we stood up and all read a sentence together Right, right and and even the vowel sounds which, which really tend to Be the things that changes in dialects and the way that we use the word.
Mary Dahlgren:Be the things that changes in dialect and how we pronounce words in the northeast, how you all might pronounce a word. I might say it a little differently here In the most common example we use because I'm in Oklahoma, so definitely much more southern. But in Oklahoma we say we. We say to our kids get in the car, get right, g I T get in the car and so we don't say get and, and 10 is always the one that we I'm going to say pin and pen and right, and a pin that I write with is the same thing as the pin that I.
Mary Dahlgren:But I know the difference right and, and that dialect has a lot to do with that.
Lori:And it's almost like, once you know the difference, then you can play with it even more right. It makes it more usable rather than less usable.
Mary Dahlgren:Exactly exactly, yes, yes, and. And being able to appreciate. And you know, the ultimate goal is that my children, my students, can read multi syllabic words because I, once I start to grow my, my knowledge and my phonics skills and I master those decoding skills, or that one side of the simple view, the bottom strands of the rope, you know the ones, those become automatic. I don't have to keep learning those. Now I can read my, my longer words, longer text, developing my background knowledge, my vocabulary, so I can make the inferences and all of those things that they play together. But our goal is to get our kids to that as quickly as possible and and truly, you know, mid year, second grade, end of second grade, if I can get my kids really moving in that direction, they're ready to start really growing their content knowledge even more on their own. So I'm reading independently, right?
Melissa:So, speaking of these language variations that we were just talking about, I'm also wondering about English learners, right? So students who are coming in with a whole different language than English, would a sound while still be helpful? I'm assuming yes, but I'd love to hear your reasons for, for why.
Mary Dahlgren:So thank you so much for asking that question and, as I've said a couple of times, my colleague, antonio Fierro and I really worked on developing sound walls together, the reason being, antonio is a Spanish speaker and really has worked so intensely to help teachers understand how to support our kids in classrooms, and doing that work and phenology and orthography are very important. In Spanish, there's 22 sounds in language and you heard me say in English there's 44. So realizing and I'm going to jump to the vows now and in Spanish and this is the insight that Antonio has given me again this is taught throughout the letters course and, and as Antonio is in the instructor in the online portion of that but helping teachers to understand my Spanish speaking children, and we use Spanish because that's that tends to be the highest number of our EL students in the world, el students in our classrooms. There are multiple languages and we recognize that.
Mary Dahlgren:But in Spanish, just, and I always say to teachers how do you say yes in Spanish? Everybody knows how to say yes in Spanish C, right. So how do you spell that vowel sound? You spell it with an I. In Spanish I represents E, as in equal and cheese, but in Spanish I don't have an sound or an I sounds. When my children, who are Spanish speakers, see the word it, they say eat, because it's the closest sound, next to the, to the if sound.
Lori:E.
Mary Dahlgren:IH those are. So one appreciating why my Spanish speakers keep saying the E sound because I don't have IH and you have to teach me the IH sound and that's going to take multiple repetitions to build that neural network in order to develop a new phenology in my brain. And Antonio says, you know Spanish speakers, that neural network is even thicker and broader and wider because they've got, you know, I'm developing a second language, I'm becoming bilingual, and then, of course, we encounter people who are trilingual, multilingual students, which is fabulous. But appreciating the fact that my students don't have all of those sounds in their own language and and being able to support that, and so we've written a lot about that in our sound wall manual so that teachers can gain insight into what sounds don't exist for my Spanish speakers and what do I need to do to support them. So there's five vowel sounds in Spanish, there's 18 vowel sounds in English. So just instructionally thinking about and and again, not saying it louder, right, but but having more practice and really zeroing in on those phonemes and and helping our students develop that awareness. And I'll use another example that I use with my Spanish speakers.
Mary Dahlgren:Oftentimes our Spanish speakers will say cheese instead of cheese. Well, the letters Z exist in Spanish, but it's the sound as in sun. So they say cheese instead of cheese, and we notice those things but we don't ever think about why do they do that? Why does that happen? Because I don't have the sound. Can I teach it to them? Yes, do we have to practice it? And then I have to create that awareness of when is it the sound and when is it the sound so much more complicated it is. And then and then thinking about, there is no other language that has the exact same phonology as English and I might not know anything about the language of one of my students that comes into the classroom, let's say, from the Marshall Islands. Right, they have a different, they have a different set of phonemes in their language, and I don't have to know all the phonemes in their language, but knowing the phonemes in our language and making sure that I'm teaching those and practicing those and putting the print with them so they can begin to read words, then I'm really starting to build that for them and I.
Mary Dahlgren:We have so many schools that have EL teachers that don't necessarily speak the language that they're working with with their ELs, but giving them insight into this also, and that's that's one of Antonio's goals.
Mary Dahlgren:There's, we know we have to build vocabulary and background knowledge with those students, as we do with all children, but we also have to build the phonology and the orthography because, again, even in Spanish, they have some letters in their alphabet that we don't have in our alphabet.
Mary Dahlgren:So, thinking, keeping in mind those things, and also, just, you know, I, when I'm talking about EL students, thinking about I'm going to jump from from phonology to syntax, but the syntax of language. I just have to throw this in when I'm teaching sound walls with teachers and talking about these things, that in Spanish the words don't don't go in the same order as they do in English, and we oftentimes don't think about that as teachers, especially with our little ones that are coming in, and and how they hear. And I always use the example of Casa Blanca, the house wide, but we would say White House, right, and so just adjectives and and the nouns, they go in a different order and and real, it's not that they don't have the words, but now I'm having to do double, double work, thinking about the sounds and the order of the words. So I mean, those are all important things in learning about the layers of our language.
Lori:Such a good point and you mentioned that you wrote about this in. I'll say a manual. It's. It's the kid lips manual, Am I correct?
Mary Dahlgren:Yes.
Lori:Yes, tools for reading with an tools number four reading, yes, yes, okay, that's great. Do you want to share anything else about that? I think that's really helpful for teachers like this is a reliable source. You are a reliable source. If they they're looking to try this out, I have it up. Is the whole set kid lips picture cards? Look, look to be forty seven dollars, and then there's a manual, so that I mean very affordable and you know something that's graph themes and the graph themes, the spelling patterns and keywords that go with them.
Mary Dahlgren:So we put all that in a in a sound while kit for teachers to pick up. But yeah, the manual is designed for teachers to be able to pick up and we have a scope and sequence for teachers to follow in there. It's it's optional. We also encourage teachers follow your phonics scope and sequence when teaching sound walls.
Mary Dahlgren:But the other thing that happens in kindergarten I'm not teaching all the sounds, right, but I'm not. I'm sorry I'm not teaching all the, all the spellings for the sounds, but it's not unusual for me to go into a kindergarten classroom and hear teachers say let's tap the sound segment, the word book, right, so what's the middle sound and book? It's the oh. I'm not teaching my kids to read and write with OO and kindergarten, but I can talk about that sound and I can talk about the sound and we can talk about words that have that sound. In first grade I am going to introduce that spelling. But if I already have the phonology for that sound and I and this is what I feel like is so important for kids is that there's a sound, and if there's a sound there's a spelling for it, they can begin to make that connection and understand. You know, if I, if I know these sounds, then I can, I can figure out how, make a close approximation of how to spell them. They might not be exact, especially with vowels, every time, but at least I I can get close to what that spelling is. And if I know the sound exists and I I might not know how to spell it, but I realized that it's. It can't just be oh, right, and but there's got to be something more to the spelling. And I will tell you.
Mary Dahlgren:I had a teacher tell me when her son was writing the Christmas list and she, she used Salmals in her classroom and the kindergarten kids did too. This was the first grade teacher and she said my kid's not that smart, but it was so funny. He's writing his Christmas list and on his list he wants boots. So now we're talking the sound that he said he writes the B and I'm watching him and he's saying oh, oh, oh. And then he writes oh, oh, and she says Parker, how did you know to write that? And he said well, we learned about in our classroom. And moon, oh, and I looked under the sticky note to see how you so. So now, kids are curious and they're trying to figure out like there's a spelling for this sound. I'm going to look to see because I, I want to, I want to write a word that has the sound, but I can check and figure it out on my own. You know he's going to remember that because he figured that out, yeah, right, and so, yeah, all these things, keeping it simple, keeping it straightforward and I think one more thing that I just want to say about classroom instruction is teachers kind of freak out over Now. Do I have to spend 10 or 15, 20 minutes working with Samwells in my class? No, samwells should be part of your phonemic awareness lesson.
Mary Dahlgren:When I'm talking about doing phonemic awareness, I should talk about some of my phonemes. How do I produce those phonemes? Because many of the the materials that we use in classrooms now are lots of exercises that interspers all of the sounds. They don't focus on single sounds, and so you know, being aware I'm exposing my kids to all this, but why wouldn't I teach the sounds? We do exercises and we manipulate sounds, put in a sound, take out a sound, but we never teach the sound. So this is the teaching, this is what we call the warm up before the workouts. I'm going to teach them and warm them up, talk about the phonology, and then we're going to do our phonemic awareness activities and then I'm going to move into phonics instruction, and all that time I'm referring back and forth to the sound wall. But it's not just something that I teach just as a separate piece of my daily reading program. It's something that should be integrated.
Melissa:I remember we had Lindsay Kemeny on and she said the same thing as a teacher. The sound wall is not my lesson, she said, but it is a tool that is. She actually said it's there for throughout the entire day of her lessons, whether they're they're writing, they're talking about phonics, they're talking about phonemic awareness. She said it's just always there as a tool, as you need it as a teacher, as students need it for what they're doing. It's always there and I love that.
Lori:Yeah, which makes a lot of sense. If we go back to what you shared earlier, mary, that the you know, if we're thinking about sound walls, then we're thinking about phonology, sound orthography, spelling patterns and morphography, meaning, then we're using it all throughout our day, in all subject areas. I mean I even imagine putting words up from content areas when we have those beginning sounds that make sense right With what we've learned, and even some that we haven't, maybe they're covered, and then curious students are going up and pulling our postage up if they want to use them in their writing. I just it's. It's such a great tool to use throughout your day that has such a big, big benefit and, as a teacher who, you know, was required to use word walls back in the day and really had no idea how to, how to really use them effectively, but tried really, really hard, this actually makes so much more sense.
Mary Dahlgren:I think once people get past the fear of like I don't know what to do with all that, but but slowly introducing and and really thinking about it, and I'm going to jump back to if I'm, if I decide to put up a sound wall, this now in January or February. It's more in February, aren't?
Lori:we.
Mary Dahlgren:And in bringing up, putting that up, not being terrified of it, but learning it with your students, keeping graph themes covered that you haven't taught your students yet, because that's a lot of information for them to take in, but learning it with your, with your kids, as you, as you begin to set them up.
Melissa:Well, mary, we cannot thank you enough for sharing all of this information with us today, teaching us some new things, which was really cool, and I know this will be really helpful for all of those teachers out there who are already implementing sound walls or thinking about it. So thank you so much.
Mary Dahlgren:Thank you both for inviting me to be here today. I love, I love talking about these things, so thanks, so much, thank you.
Melissa:To stay connected with us, sign up for our email list at literacypodcastcom, join our Facebook group and follow us on Instagram and Twitter.
Lori:If this episode resonated with you, take a moment to share with a teacher friend or leave us a five star rating and review on Apple podcasts.
Melissa:Just a quick reminder that the views and opinions expressed by the hosts and guests of the Melissa and Lori Love Literacy podcast are not necessarily the opinions of Great Minds PBC or its employees.
Lori:We appreciate you so much and we're so glad you're here to learn with us.