Melissa & Lori Love Literacy ™

Ep. 147: Hot Topic Series: What is Speech to Print?

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In this episode, we’ll discuss an approach to teaching foundational skills known as speech to print. The speech to print approach consists of 4 concepts with consistent logic: 

  1. Letters spell sounds (alphabetic principle) 
  2. Sounds can be represented by one or more letters 
  3. Sounds can be spelled different ways
  4. Spellings can be pronounced in different ways 

What is the difference between speech to print and a traditional print to speech approach? What does the speech to print approach look like in practice? What does the research say about this approach?  

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Melissa:

You're listening to Melissa and Lori Love Literacy. Today, we will talk about a topic we have a lot of questions about; the idea of teaching foundational skills as speech to print. What does this mean? Speech to print is an orientation towards teaching the code based on spoken language to written language. And today we talk to two experts, Marnie Ginsberg and Tami Reis-Frankfort, about the research and practical aspects of what speech to print looks like with students. Let's jump in.

Lori:

Welcome, teacher friend. I'm Lori.

Melissa:

And I'm Melissa.

Lori:

We are two literacy educators in Baltimore. We want the best for all kids, and we know you do too.

Melissa:

Our district recently adopted a new literacy curriculum, which meant a lot of change for everyone. Lori and I can't wait to keep learning about literacy with you today.

Lori:

Hi everyone, welcome to Melissa and Lori Love Literacy. Today, we can't wait to deep dive into something we've seen a lot in the literacy world, the idea of teaching foundational skills using an approach known as speech to print. We're wondering what does this really mean? We have so many questions. Melissa, I know you have so many questions too.

Melissa:

Yeah, and I think we have two wonderful people here today to answer some of our questions. So, we have Marnie Ginsberg, the founder of Reading Simplified, and Tami Reis-Frankfort, she is the founder of Phonic Books, and they're both experts in speech to print approach, and I would say just teaching reading in general. So, we're so excited, and can't wait to learn from them today.

Lori:

All right, so I'm going to start with a little bit of context and then I'm going to pass it to Melissa, and then we will ask you both to jump in.

Melissa:

Start teaching us.

Lori:

Yes, help us learn. So we've read and seen this approach called speech to print. I think it might be helpful to start by sharing a common understanding about what we mean when we say speech to print. And we've learned from you all that speech to print is an orientation towards teaching the code based on spoken language to written language. We know that concepts, skills, and knowledge are foundational components of this approach. So, we are going to focus today on the concepts that underlie this approach. Melissa and I were thinking about what concepts underlie speech to print. So we know that there's four. And Melissa, you're going to share those four with us. Right?

Melissa:

Yeah, I'm ready. Ready.

Lori:

Okay. All right.

Melissa:

All right. So the four concepts are, number one, letters spell sounds, and I think they'll talk a bit about the alphabetic principle that goes along with that. Number two, sounds can be represented by one or more letters. Number three, sounds can be spelled different ways. And number four, spellings can be pronounced in different ways. And so we are going to, in this whole episode, talk through those four concepts and what do they mean, what's going on with letters and sounds with all of those, and what actually happens with students and when you're trying to teach someone, what do I do with that, in real life with students? So we'll talk through all of those with each of those concepts. So we'll start out and let's dive into our first concept. Number one is letters spell sounds. Marnie and Tami, take it away.

Tami Reis-Frankfort:

Well, I just wanted to start by saying that there's a lot of discussion now in cognitive psychology about schemas. Schemers are basically conceptual frameworks that you use to teach complicated things or things which have got lots of bits and pieces that need connections inside. It's a bit like you can say probably the engine of a car. You've got lots of different parts of the engine of the car, but they all need to work together. And I think because the English script or English alphabet code is complicated, it's really useful to have a schema. And I would say that the conceptual framework of schema for the alphabetic code are those four concepts that you just laid out. And that means that they are the guidelines for everything we do, the guidelines for how we teach, they're the guidelines in how we introduce the language we teach, the error correction all the way to this is how it works really. Not only this is how each part works, but this is how the different parts work together.

And I think Marnie and I are going to argue that the speech to print approach is a very logical schemer because we have 26 letters, 44 sounds, and more than a 165, or some people say 167 spellings to represent those 44 sounds. And I would argue that the schema of organizing and understanding the relationship between different spellings and different sounds, et cetera, the bonds that we need to create in order to develop good reading and fluent reading, that organizing all this information according to sounds is a very logical way because we only have 44 sounds to start with. We don't have all those multiple spellings that are so confusing. So I would start and say, first of all, it's a really logical way to organize this rather large piece of information or lot bits of information, lots of bits of information the children need to learn when they learn to read.

And the other thing I'd like to mention about it is that this is how the alphabetic code or the alphabetic principles actually devised. It was devised about 4,000 years ago by some workers in Sinai who couldn't read hieroglyphics. It was just too difficult for them. And they said, let's do something simpler. And the simple thing they did is they took a picture from the hieroglyphics, they took the image for water, and the image for water was a zigzag horizontal line like a river. And then they said, well, our word for water is maim. I happen to know that because I speak Hebrew and that's the word. Any Hebrew speakers will know that the word for water is maim and we're going to take the first sound mm, and that letter, that squiggly letter, which today looks like an M, came from the picture of a river from hieroglyphics, but from now on, it no longer represented a word. It represented the sound mm. And that's how the alphabetic principle was devised.

And it was an absolute revolution. It was probably like the invention of the internet or the invention of the printing press because it spread like wildfire with the Phoenicians who were traders around the world. And I can say that were it not for this athletic principle being developed in many countries, including Greece and then in Israel itself, probably we wouldn't have Homer's works and we wouldn't have the written Bible. That's how important this revolution was. And so all I'm trying to say is the way it developed, the way it was devised is speech from sounds, two letters and it's very helpful if we stay consistent with that approach.

Marnie Ginsberg:

Yes, this is the roots of the system tell us how to go through the same process to reveal it to children. We are going to draw their attention to the sounds and words when they say the word mat, we want them to hear that the beginning mm, that's same mm in the water from way back when. We want them to hear that sound and then attach a symbol to it. And so we can start with their language. This is such a big part of what speech to print approaches have in common is that we are not starting with letters, we're not starting with phonological awareness and isolation. We're not starting with any sub skills in isolation. We're actually putting them all together in an integrated way to help them understand this whole concept of the alphabetic principle, because it's not natural for the child to intuit this, because the written language is a code for sounds which Tami explained. If it's a code, we need to show them the code. And the access key for that code is the phoneme.

So we draw their attention to the word mat, and then what sound do you hear at the beginning? Mm. Okay, now which of these little squiggles up here, these spellings, T, A or M, which of them is mm? And so then they move from sound to symbol, phoneme to grapheme and they start to build a word. And this is at the very beginning, unlocking, oh, I get it. This is a code, I can play with the sounds in the language I already know and start to lift meaning off the page because I understand the code and how all the pieces fit together. It's not a letter. And then later phonemic awareness. And later a real word, it's actually starting with the word and showing how the code works, putting those pieces together, phoneme and grapheme.

Melissa:

I'm curious, this is a really selfish question, but I'm sure that this happens to more than just my child, but he has picked up a lot of letter names and he knows a lot of, he can point out letters, this is P, this is M, this is L, and I didn't really do that. He's picked it up from Sesame Street, from, they do it at preschool, he's picked it up in different places. And I'm just wondering is that something where if people are listening now and they're like, well, my kid already knows their, they know letters. Can you still go back to this speech to print and focus more on the sounds first?

Marnie Ginsberg:

Well, there are certainly not at a disadvantage. One of the early things you need to do is be able to recognize those symbols, because those symbols are very distinct. The M is different from the N, and it's different from the P. And so that's great. He's on his way. If I could devise a world where kids would be most rapidly introduced to reading, then he wouldn't have started with the letter names, he would've started with the sounds, because the sounds, as I just mentioned, they unlock the code not only the knowledge of how to put the things together, but the knowledge of how the system works. A child can be completely knowledgeable of every single letter of the alphabet and not be able to crack the code. In fact, if you work with an adult who's completely illiterate, they probably know the letters of the names of the letters. They just don't know the code.

So he's certainly not at any disadvantage by being ahead and recognizing the visual array, but his next step will be let's figure out the alphabetic principle because that's really the entree to real reading. The other stuff is preliminary, it's fine. And it is really curious to hear in the US, we do, as you said, you didn't teach this, it's just everywhere. It's in the air we breathe that we're going to teach the letter names, but that's not the way it is in all cultures. And even in the UK, I'll let Tami speak to that, they start not with a letter name, but the letter sound. Right?

Tami Reis-Frankfort:

There is different preference not only in the speech to print, actually in most programs to start with letter sounds because as even now I think it's Dehaene says what the teacher needs to be focused on is those sound to letter bonds. Initially we don't need the letter names, we don't need letter names until we need to actually possibly do more complex spelling. So we have to use the letter names or if we do need to learn the skills of ordering by alphabet, or organizing by alphabet. But we find also in my experience, there's a lot in special needs that often letter names are obstacles because so many letter names, like take the letter W, children come away with the notion that D is the sound that's linked to W, or the letter Y that wa is connected to the letter Y.

And that sows confusion. And, of course, it's many children don't experience that. But I think that many interventionists will say that this is a problem for those children who don't get around the obstacle of learning two things at the same time, both letter name and sounds. So one of the thing that's common to all the speech to sound is a preference or a clear priority for sound first, securing sounds and then introducing letter names.

Melissa:

Do you want to talk any more about specifics for teachers? What would this look like if you, let's say a student was walking into your classroom or you're teaching a whole class of students, or you have one student who you're maybe tutoring or giving some special attention to, where do you even start? How does this actually look?

Marnie Ginsberg:

That's one of my favorite things to talk about because I think so many traditional phonics programs will start with letter names for weeks and weeks and weeks and you don't actually get to decoding a real word maybe till the 13th week of kindergarten or the first year of school. And that is not only a sluggish start, it's also not revealing the alphabetic principal, all those weeks. It's just let's learn this letter and then let's learn that one. So I like to begin with what I mentioned earlier. We're just going to build a word and I'm going to have a board with some lines on it, with three letter sound cards and they're going to be scrambled. So let's go back to mat. I like it because it begins with a continuant consonant, so this child can hear that mm more easily and start to separate it from the rest of the word in mat.

So that's how she can begin to segment. So she sees, oh, this beginning sound connects to that beginning letter and that's how the alphabetic principal works. Dehaene says, let's help kids attend to the phoneme so that they can build these bonds. So the child is presented with this board some letter sounds, we're going to build a word and I'm going to draw my finger along the bottom of the lines and say we're going to build the word mat. So I connect it, but exaggerate and elongate it. And then that starts to draw her awareness. That might have been really hidden. She didn't really notice that mm is the first sound in mat if she's a beginner, but we can learn it right then and there, and then we can then connect it to graphemes, her spelling. So I say, what do you hear at the beginning of mat when I say it? And hopefully she can come up with mm, and if she doesn't then I can say, well, I hear mm at the beginning of mat, can you say that with me? Mm.

So that's step one. That's the beginning of how the alphabetic principle works, it's the phoneme. The second step is which of these is a picture or spelling of mm? She may know this because she's in an environment like your son, Melissa, but it's just... Even if you're not trying to teach it, they may be recognizing the letters from Sesame Street or whatever. So she has opportunity to pick the letter M, but if she doesn't, then I say, well, this one, and I tap it, this is mm. Now pull that mm down and put it right there at the beginning of mat. And then you continue the process. What do you hear next when I say mat and we exaggerate and elongate so she can start to be aware of things that's not really been part of her consciousness, and she's hopefully can come up with ah, and which one is the ah? And notice the whole time I'm saying the sound or the phoneme. I'm not saying which one is A, because there's no A in mat in terms of sounds.

And then we build the word and when we check it, oh yeah, you built the word mat, tell me each sound. And I tap and she says mm, ah, did you know you could build a word? You just built your first word, mat. She's done so many things with that. She's not learning the letter sounds, which we all think is the beginning's first step in reading education, but actually she's doing much more. She's getting the alphabetic principle, which I think is the real first step of cracking the code, which goes back to what Tami said. This is how the code was devised. So the alphabetic principle, let's teach them the written code is a picture for sounds. So she's doing letter sounds, the alphabetic principle. She's developing early phonemic segmentation, early spelling, and maybe a little bit of decoding, all of that bundled up into one little game that she's probably had fun with. And then we could continue from there what's into more letter sounds and more complex words, but that's how you begin.

Tami Reis-Frankfort:

Well, I'd like to just go back to the word schema of see how many things have slotted in just from that little lesson. You're looking at the skills, of the one-to-one correspondent skills. You're looking at the blending, the segmenting. So much has happened in that one very small lesson, so much conceptual understanding and skills building and it's very, very coherent. You notice that Marnie didn't introduce the letter separately. They were within words. And that's very typical of speech to sound. We actually teach within words. We don't have flashcards of just saying this is ss or this is mm. Everything works together because actually building a word is more meaningful if you're building the word mat, it's much more meaningful than just flashing the mm act separately. And so this is very important and everything we do, like the language that Marnie used, which is the word, what is the sound here and connecting the letter, all that supports that alphabetic principle. So you can see that.

And, of course, this is also very important for error correction when you're reading with a child and they make an error. So for example, if they read the word blog as bog, then you would point out that you don't hear bog, you hear a blog and you'd point your finger underneath that L, blog and get them to identify the missing, the connection between the letter and the sound that they'd missed when they read the word bog. So everything we do goes back to letter spelled sounds and the letters represent phonemes. So I'd just like to mention also that this raises the issue of whether it's worthwhile to spend a lot of time teaching pH phonemic awareness without letters if we're actually aiming, if we're aiming to get those letter sound bonds that we know we need to develop, that Dehaene talks about so, so importantly about making automatic recall connection between the lexus you see on the page and the sound. Should we be spending a great deal of time on phonemic awareness activities which are not at the phoneme level?

And there's been some discussion about that recently, I think was it Dr. Susan Brady who was talking about it that some other skills like rhyme, they are useful but not at that early stage and that especially now that we are working with children who might have had learning loss, we should focus on what's important, what's essential. If we're working at the phoneme level and we're trying to connect the phoneme to a symbol, then we should stick with that.

Melissa:

Absolutely. I was just going to, before we move to the next one, I was going to ask about, you all mentioned Dehaene a few times and we were going to ask you about research, but you already dropped it in there throughout. So just for anyone who doesn't know who that is or what his research is, can you just give a very brief recap?

Marnie Ginsberg:

Well, Stanislas Dehaene is a neuroscientist and he has a lot of interests. Lately he's been talking about consciousness and before that he did math and before that he did reading and his very influential work and he summarized his work and the work of others in the book called Reading and the Brain, and it's over 10 years old now. But it's helped a lot of people understand the process that we've been talking about that the brain does not recognize whole words at the beginning stage and how do we go through the process of, from the very earliest stages of a child only recognizing language to moving to the spot where they can lift the word off the page in one millisecond.

He explains that in depth. And there are also some nice YouTube videos where he shows brain scans that show the, wow, different regions of the brain as they're attacking the different parts of what we're calling the reading triangle of phonology, semantics and orthography. All those parts are working together and his work and among many others shows that what people have studied before with psychology experiments, we can actually now see with these scans and it's really stunning. Partly one, just stunning that we can see it, but also it's really amazing how fast it happens, everything connecting so quickly.

Tami Reis-Frankfort:

Yeah, it's amazing, it's a wonderful book to read. Because of these connection, he does recommend that the teacher time is best spent on developing those automatic bonds. So basically what we are trying to get is the recognition of the letters and the immediate, the automatic millisecond attachment of sound that we need in order to become fluent decode as an eventually fluent readers when the birds just fly off the page.

Lori:

Before we move on to the second concept, is there anything that you briefly want listeners to know about this first one, letters spell sounds to pull it together?

Marnie Ginsberg:

It might be helpful to bring up right now the connectionist model of reading popularized by Seinberg and McClelland and I alluded to it earlier, the child comes to school already having a very amazingly sophisticated language network. She knows tons of words, that's the semantics or meaning, and she has connected those also to the sounds and words, that's the phonology. So I'm just, right now I've built a line between two points of a triangle. If you can keep those points in your mind, semantics and phonology like connecting line that's already really sophisticated for the child, it's amazing. They can note 5,000 words, maybe 10,000, I don't know. It's hard to pin down how many words a person knows. So all that we have to do, all that we have to do, it's not that big a deal. We just build off of that existing system.

We say, oh, as I mentioned earlier you have the word mat, well, how does it connect to these spellings or orthography? And now we fill in the rest of the triangle. So semantics, phonology and orthography are the points of a triangle that defines the process that we go through to recognizing words. Both in the early stages when we're doing the hard work of sound-based decoding, what sometimes people call sounded out. And then also when we're sophisticated mature readers and we lift a word off the page, our brain is connecting all of those networks, as I mentioned earlier, in a split second. So if I say the word zebra, you bring up the orthography to some extent, I'm triggering you to think about Z-E-B-R-A. And you're also thinking about the image and the meaning of an animal with black and white stripes and maybe some associations of that zebra, maybe from a zoo or in Africa running away from a lion.

And you also hear the sounds, the phonology zebra. And so this is what we know about how the brain learns to read. This triangle model is a great model or just a picture of what's going on in a very integrated way. It's not like you go from A to B to C in a very linear way. They're all connected and mingled together. The brain just, on these brain scans, it's just lights up all over the place, figuratively speaking. To us it looks like it's lighting up. So I bring this up here because it's telling us that language we already know is very integrated, but also recognizing words is all integrated with language. And we can then use the skills and the aptitudes that the child brings to the first day of school to connect to the printed language instead of parking that language system for several weeks and saying, we're going to work on P, this is P, everybody say P or say pa.

That's hard to connect to that other part of the language system, at least for the beginner who doesn't get what you're doing. Some kids, of course, get it because they've had other experiences or they're really good with phonemic awareness. Some children have a natural aptitude to pick it up really quickly, others do not. And so when we don't make these connections very plain, we can befuddle some kids, especially in the beginning stages or even if they're struggling and we're intervening and we're spending a lot of time with phonics knowledge in isolation, it's hard for them to connect it to the bigger picture. So the more that we can take these principles, these four principles or concepts and including letters spell sounds, and think of them in light of this connection, this model where everything is connected. And so if our instruction can be connected, we're probably going to make better sense to the children. If we can do that, I think they will pick up reading much more rapidly and we will feel so much more success as teachers.

Lori:

Yeah, that's really helpful. Thank you for bringing up that model right here. I know that helps me situate this within that. So thank you. Okay, I want us to move to the next one because this is one of my favorite ones. This is one of my favorite concepts. I feel like it just, I love seeing it blow kids' minds when you tell them this. So the second concept is sounds can be represented by one or more letters. And I just want to make sure I have a clear understanding here. Is it one, two, three, of four letters that sounds can be represented by, is it up to four letters? Okay. So can I start by giving a couple examples to situate us? Okay, here we go. So I'm going to give a couple examples here. You tell me if these are right or not. All right through.

Marnie Ginsberg:

Through, start with a hard one.

Lori:

You, boo, who. So each of those words has the oo sound represented by one, two, four, I think I skipped three maybe, but four letters. So there's one or more letters making that sound. So I'm wondering if we could start with those same questions that we asked about the first concept, which are what does this mean in a speech to print approach? And then we can get really practical and practice after that. But want me to hand it over? Who would like to go first? Marnie, you want to go ahead, or Tami.

Tami Reis-Frankfort:

So I just wanted to start to say that this is a result. This is not in every script. This happens to be one of the most difficult scripts of all scripts and it's a result of historic loaning and borrowing and taking words from every different culture. And for lots of reasons, which we won't go in right now, but if you're Italian, are probably going to learn to read in three or four months because there's one to one correlation in most words, there might be one to two, but you don't have this complexity. What this principle or this concept means is that English has a very complex alphabetic code. So it's all the more reason necessary to teach it in a very systematic and logical way, and to organize it in a logical way. And that goes back to that schema we were talking about it, organizing in a way that it's understood. How do we organize all these different spellings, a 165 or more?

If you wanted to go down looking at words like Pharaoh or indict or, I've got a list here, zucchini, behold, all these are very unusual spellings that stand on their own. They don't even belong anywhere. And apparently they're 500 of them. So what it means is, this is something complicated and we need to teach it in an explicit systematic way but also in a logical way. And that doesn't always happen if you're starting from the letters. Give you an example, O-U-G-H is often a family that is used for spelling, but it can be through, which is [inaudible 00:30:54], three sounds and the U is the O-U-G-H. It can spell dough like, D-O, and some people it also include the words like rough, which is completely different sound, which actually is not an ough spelling, it's [inaudible 00:31:14].

So you have the [inaudible 00:31:17] for OU, and the [inaudible 00:31:18] for GH. This, you can sow a lot of confusion if you start from those 165 spellings and try and teach them and not start from the sounds because we only have 44. So that's a much more organized and if I think of my draw at home when I have my jewelry in one place and my whatever, my wickers in the other and my stockings in the other, it's much better to organize it in that way and be consistent and logical.

And that's why the speech to sound always starts from speech, from the sound and then goes to the spelling and not the other way around, because the other one is very confusing and even in really good books you find errors such as the one I've explained to you that you look at the OUGH spelling and think it's one sound, it's not, sometimes it's two, sometimes it's one, et cetera. So this is an example of the confusion that sets in if you work from the 165 towards the 44 sounds and not the other way around.

Marnie Ginsberg:

And Luisa Motes who wrote the book Speech to Print and is the developer of letters, she explained this mismatch in 1998. She wrote one of the most fundamental flaws found in almost all phonics programs, including traditional ones, is that they teach the code backwards. That is they go from letter to sound instead of from sound to letter. The print to sound or conventional phonics approach leaves gaps, invites confusion and creates inefficiencies. So Laurie, you actually provoked a very advanced concept because you were pointing out that one sound could be multiple spellings. And one thing that happens in a lot of speech to print programs is that we try to reveal as much of the code as quickly as possible, but we don't dump it all on them immediately. So-

Tami Reis-Frankfort:

Did I pick a bad example. I went in-

Marnie Ginsberg:

No, no, it's very sophisticated. I don't start with oo because I don't even think I know all the oo spellings. They just go on and on. It's just been repurposed ad nauseum. So I think some people that may have a traditional phonics approach, they might hear what we're saying and they say, yeah, you can say you can organize it, but you're going to get to cough and you just told me it was oo and through, and how... Well what we do is a gradual revelation. So we give them order. This schema that Tami was talking about, that one sound could be multiple spellings and many programs they just start with a high frequency spellings. For instance, with reading simplified, I start with a sound O and it can be the O in go, the O in show, the O in boat, the O in home, the O in tow.

There's others like the O and dough, like pizza dough, that Tami pointed out, but we just don't begin there. You could, for sure, give them all many of them, but it's low frequency. There's only a few words that have it so you can leave it off. And so they can get the concept that one sound can have multiple spellings and that gives them order and organization from the first time you introduce it, or within a few days or hours. It's more logical. What happens with traditional print to speech, print to sound programs is that the child can't possibly figure out this logic because in September, on Wednesday it's OA, or actually maybe September it would be the O by itself like in go. And then two months later you see OA and three months later you see OW. You may never see OE in your first year.

And so only the very swiftest kid can cobble together this behind the scenes on their own, or we could just present it, Hey, this is one sound and it's got multiple spellings. And so it's a hook, it's a schema. It helps them have a way to organize that information. We wouldn't teach the solar system by not showing the whole picture of the solar system. And we don't just teach, today is Jupiter, let me teach you all about Jupiter, but I'm not going to show you Jupiter in relation to earth or relation to the sun. And next week I might show you something, a planet called Mercury. Is it still a planet? No, Pluto's the questionable one. Yeah, mercury sound, I got my hands on my solar system. We don't teach many things in a haphazard way. We try to create organizing schemas, but because of our history of thinking that English was so illogical, we've just had a lens of a mature adult reader analyzing the spelling system instead of analyzing the way the code works, which is a much more natural way to figure it out.

And there is a pretty consistent logic to it. This was I think a revolutionary discovery of Diane McGinnis and a lot of speech to print programs have been born out of her work and she organized these four principles and showing us this is how the code works, it's going from sound to symbol, and organize this, let's organize it by sound. Let's do all this week and next week we're going to do E and there's multiple spellings of E. And then later, back to the original point about the complexity, it can be released to kids later that actually, and we'll get to this, the OW, it was O last week, but now it's ow, what are we going to do with that? And we can get to that and as we develop their understanding, but we don't have to start with all of the information in the first few weeks, but give them the sound as a hook, which really helps them sort that information. And we can talk also if it's timely about activities that make this really doable and it doesn't overwhelm kids.

Lori:

Yeah, I would love that. I think the examples are always so helpful.

Tami Reis-Frankfort:

I'd like to jump in here and just to say that with regards to the second principle that sounds can be spelled by one to four letters, it's really important to understand the concept that children are at. For example, we start with one-to-one correspondences and words like cat, which every letter spells one sound. And from then some programs, the one that we follow, then goes onto double consonant. Well, the leap isn't very big to understand that if L usually, well if L spells the sound all, two Ls in dull also spell the sound all. So that's not a very big step. And then from that step onwards, we introduce two different consonants can spell one sound, so the letter S and H spell sh, as in ship. And then once we've done two, we can then move to three. And we look at we word build in exactly the same way that Marnie described for the word mat, we build the word night [inaudible 00:38:55]. And now we're working with a grapheme which has three letters.

So if you are aware of that concept, the whole way you teach is scaffolded. So the children are following you and they're not surprised when they get to the word through because they know that in English, a sound can be spelled by one to four letters and this is one of the four, one of the graphemes that has four letters. It's very natural if you are using exactly the word building practice that Marnie gave an example even for a word like through. You put them on cards in front of the child, build the word, and that immediately unlocks the code, demystifies the complexity. And, of course, you do that with coffin, with rough and with through. But each time that would belong to a different family of sounds because you're not talking about the same thing. It's the same thing if you look at the spelling, it's not the same thing if you start from the sound to the spelling.

Marnie Ginsberg:

And Tami helps disentangle some of what I said because I cannot help myself from jumping ahead. So I was mixing in all of these principles basically when I was answering that question. But that's a really good response from Tami to really zero in on that concept, that sounds can be represented by one, two, three, or even four letters.

Lori:

Yeah. So final question here for sounds can be represented by one or more letters. What does the research say about this concept?

Marnie Ginsberg:

Well, as I mentioned of it before, I think Diane McGinnis was the one that made the biggest impact to point this principle out. Just this is how the code works and there's a logic to it. And then we have programs that then you could study that use that logic. But we have less evidence on if you organize your reading instruction this way per se, then do you get X outcomes. We just don't have that level of sophistication yet with the research on programs or individual elements, we have so much more research on how the brain learns to read and then we have research and thinking on the linguistic system. And I think that's what Diane McGinnis did so well, that this is the way the system works.

And if you examine everything through the lens of the phoneme, the system is consistent. Almost all the time there's going to be VE at the end of a word. That doesn't just happen the word have, it happens multiple times when you see a pattern that this spelling is representing a sound V in a certain way over and over again. There's a logic to it. And so I think what's helpful is to tie back this principle to the models of the brain of how we learn to read, that triangle model. It's a connectionist model linking these things. And this just is, our argument is it's a logical common sense way to be in alignment with what we know about how the brain learns to read.

Tami Reis-Frankfort:

I think that McGinnis's work is huge contribution simply to understanding this is how it works, this is how it's constructed. And you can't really argue with that because of the history you have and lots of very random reasons why words are spelled. If you actually analyze how the relationships between the phoneme and the different spellings are, you've come to the conclusion that phonemes can be spelled with one, two, three, or four. It's description. And that can't be disputed in a way because that's the way it's built. That's the way with all the layers of French and German and Saxon and all the other language, Greek, Latin, we've come away with a very mixed salad of a language in which phonemes can be represented not by one to one correspondents like in many languages or two maximum, but four. And that is a very difficult script.

Lori:

I want to head into that fourth concept. Spellings can be pronounced in different ways, and I think we've been maybe talking a little bit about this throughout, it's like, again, it's all integrated. It makes very logical sense. So what does this mean in a speech to print approach that spellings can be pronounced in different ways? I'll hand it to Tami first.

Tami Reis-Frankfort:

Well, Marnie gave that example of the letter, the spelling OW, it can sound ow like in snow, and it can sound ow like in how, and this is very confusing because often children learn the sounds of the alphabet and very soon for example, they learn that the letter A, they see the letter A inside the word was, and it's not A as an apple. And they see it in any, it's not A as an apple, or they see it as in table and it's not A as an apple. So confusion. Coming back to the complexity of our code, this is just the other side of the complexity of our code, we need to teach this explicitly. So in the same way that children realize, oh, that's just another way of spelling A, no problem, it just adds to our understanding that A can be spelled in different ways.

We then reverse that and after we've taught a little bit of the code, we say we've just learned OW in snow. And we've also learned OW in how. You are right. OW can spell, can be sounded out two different ways. And you teach this explicitly. You teach it explicitly. And the best way to do that is again, by sorting activities. You give them a list from the two different sounds that, that spelling can represent and they have to sort them out into teams and then they see for themselves, well that's just another feature of English, but sometimes letters can be pronounced in different ways. And that demystifies the complexity of the code. Goes back to the schema. And this is why these four principles are very important because they're actually just descriptors, this is how it works, let's work with how it works.

Now this is very, very important in reading because often children make mistakes like they'll read the word, let's say snow, they might read it as snow, and you can tell them that can be ow, but in this word it's the other one. No problem, no failure. It's just the way it works. We have to try this, we have to try that. And that one works in this sentence because we're talking about snow, we're not talking about cows or whatever. Now Marnie has a really good demonstrations on her website of actually a little exercise of doing that, of deciding where does this OW spelling belong? Does it belong with the ow group or does it belong with the ow group? And you have to sort the words. Great activity.

Marnie Ginsberg:

And what research is showing us is that this is actually the second decoding skill that kids need. Just in the last few years, there's been a flurry of research on this concept of set for variability, which is a big term that means mispronunciation corrections. So as Tami pointed out, if the kid reads snow as snow, they've mispronounced it, then they have to have the cognitive flexibility to play around with the sounds and that word to come up with snow. And that's different than blending the sounds because the child actually blended the sounds right. That's the first decoding skills. Mm, ow. Blending's not a problem. That's the first decoding skill. The second one we have to build is the cognitive flexibility, at Reading Simplified we call it Flex It.

Yes, that could be ow as Tami said, but snow's not a word. What else could this be? And try to put the burden on them to develop that cognitive flexibility. And if they can't do it, then you say, well, this is ow. And this is what we are still using today as mature readers, when we come to a funky pharmaceutical word that we've never seen, we play around with the sounds. We don't know if it's ow, or ow, or oo, or ah, we have to play around with the sounds. And this all comes back to the triangle model and phonology. So we need to build the rapid processing of phonemes and graphemes and words and phonemic awareness unlocks the code, but it also develops our knowledge of the code. And as we develop our knowledge of the code, we get better and better phonemic awareness.

So we want to give children the opportunity to try one sound. And if it doesn't work, try another to develop this cognitive flexibility. And a lot of curricula protect the child from untaught information for months, if not years. And as a result, they don't actually have many opportunities to practice this cognitive flexibility.

Tami Reis-Frankfort:

And to say, because you need to know a certain amount of the code, you need to know that the possibility is our ow, ow to choose. And so there's no agreement on how much of the code you need to teach, but you need to teach a significant amount of it. And those concepts that we talked about for the child to know well could be this, could be that, otherwise they don't have the tools at their fingertips in order to do that. And that also connects very, very well to two theories that I'm going to hand over to Marnie. One is statistical learning and the other is the David Share's, now what's this theory come, I've forgotten it. The David Share's theory, self cheating theory, both connected to this flexibility to use the tools you have in your toolkit to teach yourself. Marnie, you explained this very well.

Marnie Ginsberg:

So a traditional phonics approach would suggest that a child can't know what sound to produce when they come across an unknown word without having a rule to apply. But actually we know that that's not how the brain learns to read. The brain observes patterns and subconsciously can predict things. So if I show you guys the word J-E-A-D, which is a nonsense word, you'll probably guess it's jead, because you have learned the pattern through repetition of reading from dead and led and red, bread. That even though that's a lower frequency sound for EA, but when you attach it to the D, you've learned that subconsciously, I don't think I'm gambling that none of us here were explicitly taught that rule, so-called rule, but we can extrapolate it because our brain is observing patterns. And this is where we get into some tricky things because in the science of reading movement, we've been fighting for years against the notion that reading is natural like language.

We have been trying to make the case today that we have to explicitly teach things and help kids combine their existing fun language network to this new printed network. Explicit instruction is absolutely critical. And yet we are not actually teaching all of the phonics information. We're not teaching all of the words. The child is, let me stick with the statistical learning information first. So the child is picking things up through observing patterns because they've been exposed to this information in real reading and they've played around with the sounds and they came to the word bread for the very first time, they tried breed and it didn't make sense in the sentence. So then they flipped it to bread and their brain is off to the races. The next time they see a word may be dead, they might just blurt out dead before they say deed.

And yet the child, if you ask the child is there a rule for when EA should be E and when it should be eh, they won't know, because it's a subconscious thing that's happening in the back. So we have to begin the process of teaching reading explicitly. And we also have to trust that the brain is observing a lot of patterns through just exposure to this information, constant exposure to the code and playing around with it. And then that leads into this self-teaching theory, which is well-researched, it began, it got some significant attention in a excellent paper from David Share in 1995. But then there's been other studies that have validated it that we are not explicitly teaching kids every sound, or every grapheme, every bit of phonics information. We're not teaching them every word, rather, they're mostly self-teaching themselves through reading, trying to play around with sounds and words and getting more and more knowledge every day.

So all that's needed is sufficient phonemic awareness, sufficient phonics knowledge, and a decoding strategy. Just three things. You don't have to have all of the phonics information. I remember when I learned how to read the word pterodactyl, I was totally stumped by the PT, but I played around with the rest, erodactyl and I was like, I had heard that word, so I had a semantic connection. And then I said, well, I guess this funny thing at the beginning must be te. And then probably the next time I saw pteranodon, I probably said te. Sometimes it takes some kids more trials, but it's the same process. And if I saw PT by itself in isolation when I was a second or third grader when I figured this out, I might not have known that really quickly it was te, because it wasn't sophisticated knowledge yet. It wasn't really deep in, I hadn't integrated with spelling and reading.

So this is, instead of scaring us as teachers, this should be exciting. We should be eager to explicitly teach our kids how the code works, the alphabetic principal, teach them some core sounds that are high frequency and then give them a lot of opportunities to read where we guide them with feedback, corrective feedback. And this is another element of the speech to print approach that's important because we're organizing the code by the way it's designed and we're giving kids these hooks. They actually learn the code much more quickly so we get into real texts more quickly so then they can have more opportunities for statistical learning. Because if you have a phonics program that's just going to release the EA as E and it's good luck getting to second grade and maybe you'll see that it can be eh. The child cannot possibly observe the pattern and they can't also have tried one sound and tried another.

So all of these things that are developing in the research world about statistical learning and set for variability and self-teaching, they all show us a path towards more and more implicit learning. And Mark Seinberg has been talking about this that, and it doesn't mean that learning to read is natural in any way, but there are some processes of how we learn to read, how we learn the oral language that do relate to how we learn written language. Some of this implicit learning of statistical patterns is similar. It's just that we can't get kids started that way because the code is so complex, it'll just goes right over our head as beginners, we don't see the code, it's hidden. And so we have to reveal it through explicit instruction and then get as quickly as we can to real reading and we just coach them.

And if they come to xylophone, well, this is funny. This is not that common, but in this word and you point to the X, this is the sounds Z. And I don't know, is there another letter that in xylophone? No, it's just the X. I don't write the word xylophone. I don't have great recall of that spelling. But yeah, so you just let them know, isn't that funny? And this word, this is actually a Z at the beginning of this word. And so when you write xylophone, let's write it, Z [inaudible 00:55:54], and you just connects again, speech to print.

Tami Reis-Frankfort:

So that's what I think is so important about the error correction when it really completely circles back to the principle three, that sounds can be spelled in different ways. Oh, this is just another way to spell Z. No big deal. But also when you see a spelling representing a different sound, you say, well, that could be ow, but in this word it's ow, or that could be E, but in this word, it's E like the EA spelling. It's simply the language which totally reduces the stress, the confusion, because it's not something unusual. There are many, many letters that have different combinations. The SH is suddenly a different sound or letters that spell are pronounced different. And it's just the way you speak about it that kids get used to it. Kids can get used to complicated things if they're organized well, and if the language is reassuring and repetitive, we always talk about the same things that sounds can be spelled in different ways and that letters can represent different sounds.

Marnie Ginsberg:

And the brain can do the statistical learning most easily, I think. If we present a somewhat controlled environment for them initially and then we just gradually expose them to more and more and more. And so I have often begun programs where we just start with short vowels and that's predictable and it helps me understand the alphabet principles, the beginner, but then I'm going to quickly move into what Diane McGinness called advanced phonics, like the O sound could be multiple spellings because I don't want them to misunderstand the way the code works. We got to hit these four principles as quickly as we can. And so that'll be another revelation as we get to that next level. And then the final level would be, oh, and we've got that ow, we got to deal with that. And so you're just revealing this quickly to children, but not in the first week.

And so it's manageable and the brain does learn ea, it's mostly E and then there's some exceptions, but it's not either or. It's not just it follows the rule, it doesn't follow the rule. It's just actually a continuum of highly regular to less and less regular. And also Dr. Mark Seidenberg has talked about that, which helps us again, release the burden of feeling like you have to teach rules because it's not dichotomous, just it's either A or B. It's really a continuum of highly regular, like the A in cat to less and less regular like the A in yacht.

Melissa:

I was going to say that Tami mentioned it takes stress off of students if they don't have to remember all those rules. But I would say it takes stress off the teachers too, to not have to answer the, well, why is this one spelled this way versus... I don't know all the whys. And you don't have to know, to be able to just say there are different ways.

Marnie Ginsberg:

Yeah, exactly. And the wiser a question of history, and so we can all get into history and etymology is interesting, but it's not what you need to be able to learn to read.

Lori:

Yeah. I think that the set for variability is the thing that to me really gives me the permission to say, okay, let's try it, let's see if those letters make a different sound. Let's try. And it makes me feel more confident as a teacher thinking about, I guess what I said before, giving myself the permission to not have to know all the rules. That feels really scary to me. And I know some of the rules, but I don't have all of them memorized. And I think that that permission to give yourself permission to, if you don't know a rule, even if you are teaching in a "print to speech approach," I think it's okay if you're not sure to just say there's lots of different ways that this could be spelled. And I think that's okay.

So I just want to thank you both for making it so simple and drilling it down to giving teachers and students both the permission to allow themselves to just say, there's lots of different ways to spell this. There's lots of different ways that these letters go together to make this sound. That's it. This one sounds like this.

Tami Reis-Frankfort:

Exactly. One of the things it also does away with, apart from lots of rules, which are quite stressful and often don't actually work, we haven't talked about the fact that the rules don't always work with every word, but the other thing you get rid of is the idea of silent letters. Because if you're talking about phonemes, you have to stick to, let's hear the sound and one of the letters to represent that sound. Take the word climb. I'm sure there's a good reason why there's that be there, but it doesn't matter right now. What matters at the moment is that it spells the sound mm and it's just another alternative. No big deal.

Melissa:

I guess we have to wrap up. Before we leave, I'm wondering if you guys could share one or two resources if people are interested in learning more about this approach. I know we've named a few throughout the episode, but if you want to repeat them to make sure people know where to look to learn more.

Marnie Ginsberg:

Yes. If you go to readingsimplified.com and then there is a little magnifying glass to search and you type sort it, you'll find several free things and lots of video examples of it in action along with this instructional sequence that I was talking about. So you can test this out this week for the, most of the time we have the O Sound available. And with texts that target multiple spellings along with assorted. It's a really a worksheet, one sound, multiple spellings, and along the way we include a key sentence as in [inaudible 01:02:05] because to remember what are all those spellings. So for O, it's go home to show the boat to Joe, and those are the main spellings of O. And then help the teacher and the student remember them.

Melissa:

And Marnie, you have general trainings and things too that people could sign up for on your website if they just want to learn more about speech to print generally.

Marnie Ginsberg:

Yes. Yes. And one of our most recent blog posts is a video about speech to print that I shared with Donna Hejtmanek's group, the Science of Reading: What I Should Have Learned in College Facebook group. And if you're listening to this in the future, just again, just search for speech to print on our website at readingsimplified.com and you'll find that. And we also have one of our most influential workshops, it's called Three Activities a Day to Keep Reading Difficulties Away. And it includes talking about sorted and two other ones that are very quintessential speech to print approach called Switch It and Read it. So we have a lot of complimentary trainings and actual handouts, word lists, how-tos on our website

Tami Reis-Frankfort:

And us here at Phonic Books, we have, as I mentioned, go to our phonicbooks.com website, click on resources, and you have a treasure trove of resources, including charts of different ways to spell the different vowel sounds. You have also charts of one sound, one spelling, different sounds. You have the free decodable books that I mentioned with the sorting activities to go with them, games with multiple spellings in them, and most importantly, templates for games that you could make yourself. Because if you could teach different ways to spell a sound in your classroom and wrap up the lesson with kids working groups of fours, playing games that consolidate the different ways to sound, the different ways to spell a sound, that's a great way to consolidate your teaching. So we have templates for games. They're all free on our website, so have a look, check them out.

Melissa:

Thank you all for sharing that and all that you have available for everybody, we appreciate it.

Lori:

Yeah, I'm looking on both sites now. I'm completely distracted. So thank you

Melissa:

And thank you all for sharing your learning with us or sharing all that with us today. We really appreciate it.

Lori:

Yeah. Thank you so much for-

Marnie Ginsberg:

Thank you for having me.

Lori:

... are so grateful.

Tami Reis-Frankfort:

Well, it's amazing what y'all are doing, so thank you for broadcasting ideas that are in alignment with the science.

Lori:

Aw, thanks Tami.

Tami Reis-Frankfort:

Thank you.

Marnie Ginsberg:

Thank you.

Lori:

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Lori:

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Melissa:

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Lori:

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