Melissa & Lori Love Literacy ® | Science of Reading for Teachers

Research-Based Shifts to Strengthen Phonemic Awareness with Marianne Rice

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Episode 253

In this episode, we talk with Marianne Rice about key findings from a Tennessee report examining how well early literacy materials align with research on phonemic awareness and early reading instruction. Marianne walks us through five essential practices that can help teachers make the most of their instructional time: 

  • focusing on phoneme-level work
  • using articulatory gestures
  • connecting phonemic awareness to print
  • being mindful of instructional time
  • prioritizing blending and segmenting.

Throughout the conversation, Marianne shares practical ways teachers can evaluate and adjust their current curriculum without starting from scratch. 

The big takeaway: small instructional shifts, especially connecting sounds to print and focusing on blending and segmenting, can have a big impact on helping students become strong readers and spellers.

Resources

Looking for more literacy support and resources? Explore all of our podcast episodes, free listening guides, and classroom tools at literacypodcast.com.

Interested in bringing Melissa & Lori Love Literacy to your school or event? Email us at literacypodcast@greatminds.org.

Why Curriculum Alignment Matters

Melissa

Today we're talking with researcher Marianne Rice about a new report that reviews how several commonly used kindergarten and first grade literacy curricula align with research.

Lori

We focus on five phonemic awareness practices highlighted in the report, along with what the research says and what teachers might look for in their own curriculum. 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 worked 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. Lori and I can't wait to keep learning with you today. Hi Marion, welcome to the podcast. Great. Thanks so much. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, so today we're really excited to talk about a Tennessee report that you were a part of. It examined whether kindergarten and first grade instructional materials aligned with the research on phonemic awareness, phonics, and early reading instruction. So we're going to focus on five phonemic awareness practices highlighted in that report. And those are focusing on phonemic awareness, which I've said a couple times already, so very clear, right? We're talking about that. Using articulatory gestures, connecting phonemic awareness and print, dosage of isolated phonemic awareness, and focusing on blending and segmenting. That's a lot. We're going to break it down. Melissa, tell us more. All right.

Melissa

Well, you've already said it several times, but we're going to start with the first one, which is that focus on phonemic awareness. And really what we're talking about here is, you know, that focus in the focusing instruction on that phoneme level rather than spending too much time on other phonological awareness skills, which I'm sure you'll talk about. But we want to hear about it and why is that phonemic awareness so important and where teachers should be really spending a lot of their time.

Marianne Rice

Yes, so you're right. So those two terms get mixed up, right? Like phonological awareness, phonemic awareness. So phonological awareness is that broader term. So sometimes we focus on things like word awareness with young kids or rhyming or syllables, right? But phonemic awareness also falls under that same umbrella of phonological awareness. And that's really where we want our focus to be is at the phoneme level. And so the reason is because the phoneme level is what students really need to understand for reading and spelling. So if I want to be able to read a small consonant, vowel consonant, CDC word like hop, I have to say the phoneme for each of those letters, h, uh, and then I have to blend them together. Hop to read that word. Or to spell a word, same thing. I have to take the word and break it into its phoneme. So if I wanted to spell the word mop, I have to break it into its sounds, mm, ah, p, and then write the letter for each of those sounds that I hear. So although the phonological awareness skills like word awareness and rhyming and syllables have often been thought of as building blocks, and they are in some ways, we don't want to spend a ton of our time on those, especially once kids are in kindergarten and first grade, is because we want them to become readers and spellers. And those are much less associated with reading and spelling outcomes than the

Phonemic vs Phonological Awareness

Marianne Rice

phoneme level awareness is. And so that's really the idea behind it is that we want to see the most of our instructional time and quickly getting to that phony level with kids rather than spending a ton of time on those earlier skills that we can still build in in small ways throughout, but just really thinking about I gotta get them to the phoneme level if I'm gonna build a reader and speller here.

Melissa

Great. And just in case anyone's listening and doesn't has never even heard the word phoneme before. Yeah. We're really just talking about the individual sounds here. Is that correct?

Marianne Rice

That's correct. So the smallest unit of sounds. So usually we think of these as like the letter sounds, right? So like the letter M is associated with the phoneme m. That's one sound or one phoneme. Yeah. Great.

Melissa

And they can even have more than one letter representing them, right? They can.

Marianne Rice

They can. So yes, sometimes there's a couple of letters that represent one sound. And so when when kids get the sort of the hang of the early ones, then we start to throw in those more complicated ones for them.

Melissa

So I'm assuming this is pretty easy for teachers to spot in their own curriculum. I mean, you can kind of see like, is there a lot of rhyming? Is there a lot of syllable work? You know, like versus this phoneme level or sound level. So I think it's probably pretty easy for teachers to spot, but maybe not. Maybe there are some other signs that you know they should be looking for. So can you tell us like what should teachers look for in their own curriculum to make sure it is focused on the phonemes? And then also like, if there is a lot of that other stuff, what can teachers potentially do to get it focused where it needs to be?

Marianne Rice

Yeah, that's a great question. So I'm we looked at a lot of curriculum products or you know, materials and kinds of things. And so usually there's a scope and sequence, and there's often sort of that phonological awareness part. So that's a good place to start as a teacher, is see if you can look at your scope and sequence and see what it is saying. And, you know, at the especially beginning of kinder, even first a little review time, you know, like you might see some of that rhyming, word awareness, syllable type things at the beginning. But if you're not also seeing things that have the word phoneme in it, so phoneme isolation, phoneme blending, phoneme segmenting, those kinds of things early on, that might be starting to raise some of your like red flags of like, oh, where's where are we doing the phoneme practice here, right? So you want to look at your scope and sequence and see what it says for those things.

Melissa

Marian, when you say early on, like if you're in kindergarten, what might that mean for a teacher? Is that like the first month, the first half of the year?

Lori

Well, I was thinking the first day of school, but that's the way all the analysts came out.

Marianne Rice

I mean, I'm not opposed to you starting on the first day of school. Um, but I think the for me, there isn't like a hard and fast rule, but as soon as you're introducing some of the letters, we want to see you quickly moving to phoneme. So we don't want to see this like, I'm gonna teach you all the letters of the alphabet, and then I'll teach you phoneme things later, right? So we want to see it connected. Well, we're gonna talk more about that in a minute, but yeah, we want to see it when you're starting to teach letters. So there might be a few weeks of sort of building a classroom, practicing this, but once you're starting letters, soon after that, you should start seeing phoneme being part of that phonological awareness piece in there. That's a great question. Um, so I have a couple other thoughts around just what you can do. So you see this, and you're saying, like, man, for the whole first semester of kindergarten, it's doing syllable and rhyming, and I'm not seeing the phoneme piece in there. How can I adjust this? And so there's a couple of suggestions. So one is a lot of times the syllable tasks are asking you to do the same kinds of skills, but at a broad at a bigger chunk, right? So you're using words and they're asking you to put two syllables together. And often with little kids, these are like compound words, right? So take rain and bow and make the word rainbow, right? They're doing the same kind of skill, that blending or that breaking it apart, segmenting kind of skill. So the easiest trick for teachers is to don't use their word and do it at the syllable level and go get you a small single syllable word and do it at the phony level. So you're doing the same skill, you're just moving it to the right level that we want kids to be focused on instead of spending so much time focused on those bigger levels of sound. For rhyming, it's actually also the same kind of thing. Um, a lot of times we get stuck on these words, right? So, like onset rhyme is oh, things teachers might have heard. So the onset is the initial sound, which not always, but in a lot of words is a single phoneme. And so, so the word hop again, right? The that H sound is is the onset, and then op is the rhyme. And so if we take the word hop and the word mop, those are rhyming words. And so instead of just asking kids about rhyming words or to say, do these words rhyme, I can actually teach them phoneme isolating, which is a great building block for segmenting that they're gonna be asked to do. And we can take those words and instead of just saying, do hop and mop rhyme, yes or no, right? I can say, let's let's break these words apart and see if they rhyme, right? Let's say op, mmm, op. And the kids can break it down with me. They're isolating. Now we're now we're doing phoneme isolation. We're isolating it for a time. And then we can say they're these do rhyme because they both have op at the end. So we've kept, again, sort of that rhyming task, but now we're focusing on the phoneme level rather than just teaching rhyming for rhyming, right?

Lori

So, Marianne, I have one quick follow-up question on that. Because I know, you know, the example that we asked you about was kindergarten. But um I did read a little bit about phoneme chunking, and there is benefit to that. But what I'm hearing is that might not be the benefit in kindergarten. Maybe later on down the pike, like when we're teaching a compound word, and we can always cut this out. Tell me what you mean by chunking, just because I I want to be clear. Um yeah, yeah. So like phoneme, so instead of doing something like if kids have a word like sunset, like a comp like m right, say I'm a second grade teacher and I'm teaching a compound word. So let's say the word is sunset. Um and we're doing like on, sun, at set. Okay, sun, set, sunset. So you actually do chunk that in chunks after going at the phoneme level. Is it so? I'm curious like to hear about that, like what your reaction is.

Marianne Rice

Yes. So I was actually gonna say, so syllable work actually makes a lot more sense later on once kids are working with multi-syllabic words that they're reading and spelling. So I think a little syllable work at the beginning is just helpful for again, building some of those blending, segmenting ideas with bigger chunks that might be a little easier for kids to manipulate. But then really syllable work comes when you're doing multisyllabic words, because yeah, we don't want them reading phoneme by phoneme the word sunset. We want those bigger chunks in the words and recognizing and breaking a word into syllables before I'm gonna write it down to spell it. So once kids get to bigger words, we're not breaking multisyllabic words into phonemes when we try to spell it. We're gonna try to break it into syllables. So they're gonna get to syllable work later on when they're working with bigger words and they're reading and spelling.

Lori

Okay, that's really helpful. I just I know we have so many teachers listening, and not all of them are kindergarten teachers, right? So I wanted to make sure we're also addressing

Shift Tasks Toward Phonemes

Lori

everybody's questions. All right, cool. Thank you for that. Um, so I would love to talk a little bit more about articulatory gestures. It's just so fun to say, first of all, but um you you highlighted this practice in the review, and I would love for you to explain what are articulatory gestures and why do they help students learn sounds.

Marianne Rice

I love these, and kids actually really love it too. So the idea behind articulatory gestures is just being explicit in what your mouth does to make these different phonemes or sounds. So when we talk in oral language, what kids have been exposed to up until this, right? We don't tend to think about words in these small chunks that we need to think about them in order to read and spell. And so it helps kids to kind of start to make sure that they're separating these phonemes correctly and that they make them. And so it doesn't need to be too in-depth. They're not becoming um, you know, speech language pathologists here, but we're just talking about like fun. Where what are your teeth, tongue, and mouth do, you know, teeth, tongue, and lips do when you're making um one of these sounds, right? And do you use your voice or do you only use air to make the sound? That's really what goes by in the articulatory gesture. So I'll give an example. So, like for the letter F, the sound for it, in order to make that sound, I take my teeth and I put them on my bottom lip and I blow air. Right? That's all I have to do. And so kids love that. Little mirrors are great. They love to hold little mirrors and look at themselves while they do this. And so that's that's really what it is. The reason why they're really important is because some of our phonemes also have um other letters that are very similar. So the one I just gave, the letter F has a what we call phonetically similar sound, which is from the letter V. So to do that, I make the exact same thing with my mouth. I take my top teeth and put them on my bottom lip, but now I use my voice to make a vibration to make that sound. Vv. Okay, so that can be confusing for kids. You see that in their spelling all the time, right? They'll use an F when they should have used a V and the word have, right? They spell it H A F. You see this all the time in little kids' early writing. And so you can see where they're already mixing up those two ones. So it just helps them kind of um discriminate between those sounds a little more, understand it. And like I said, they think it's really fun to think about this kind of um work in when they're learning these sounds initially and learning how to separate these sounds from each other.

Lori

Yeah, that that is so much fun and really helpful too. And I think helps to get at some misconceptions that students have early on. Um, so if student, I'm sorry, if teachers don't have like any kind of guidance for these articulatory gestures in their curricular materials, what are some ways that we can incorporate this into lessons? Do you have any advice?

Marianne Rice

Yeah, so I always use like when you're first teaching a new letter sound. So in part of your instruction when you're introducing or in first grade, if you're reviewing some letter sounds, you want to practice this and make sure everybody's really clear on it. And so if you don't have it, one we found most of them did. They just weren't always obvious. So they might not be right in your teacher guide. So look on the back of like letter sound cards or other materials, because they're usually there and it'll explain. If you're unsure, you're like, wait, how do I make that sound? Because it it's a little bit different for us two, you know, who haven't done that and separated those sounds. Like, what do what does my tongue do? Does it go up? Does it stay down? What are my lips closed? Are they open? You know, like those kinds of things. And so it'll be there. If you cannot find it in your curriculum, the internet is actually a really great resource for this. Like AI, um, Google, there's lots of videos on YouTube that you can find and source and just kind of check and make sure they're that that makes sense when you try to follow their directions, that that would be clear. If you're like, that's not for me, the other person, there's a speech language pathologist probably in your building or that comes to your building at some point. They are the resource. Go to them. I guarantee they have some sort of resource they can give you that will help you with those, especially those, like I said, those ones that are difficult for kids because that's what they do. They help kids who have that articulation problem. So go to that person and say, can you help me make sure I can explain each of these letter sounds correctly before I go teach them to the kiddos?

Lori

Yeah, I love that. One of the things that stood out to me, Marianne, when you explained it to us is just that it was so simple and clear. You didn't add a lot of extra language. You just said, you know, take your teeth, put them on your bottom lip, and now move air through to say, pfft. That's it. It was very clear and simple. And so maybe that's like a hot tip for teachers too. That that was my takeaway just from listening to you explain it. 100%.

Marianne Rice

I want to be clear. Like, this is simple. We're not using big terms. Kids don't need to know the complicated terms that, like, again, an adult learning that you know, it's a nasal. We're not doing that. Where are your teeth, tongue, and lips? Like, how do those go together? And then the kids love the air or voice, because you can put your hand on your voice box and feel that vibration. They think that's super fun too. I mean, I taught kindergarten, first grade for a long time. Kids love this part, they think this is fun. Um, I also want to be clear like the research behind this is about explicitly explaining, showing kids with your mouth. Um, I know there's a movement for like mouth pictures, but that isn't as helpful because if you think about F and V that I just explained, your mouth looks exactly the same. So showing a kid a picture of that isn't helping them discriminate. So it really has to be this interactive thing that kids are doing to understand the difference between these sounds.

Melissa

Yeah, I was just gonna ask you about sound walls. I mean, that was definitely in my head because I know there's not a lot of research necessarily for sound walls, particularly we have heard teachers who said it has been helpful for some to have that like resource to go back to. So I don't know. I feel like we've always said like if it helps your kids, it can help your kids. But I think what you're saying is like it has to have, it can't just be on the wall and we expect that to help kids. It has to have the teaching part of it that you just went through, at least to start, so they know what they're looking at. Yes.

Marianne Rice

And then you think you could put those up with maybe some little note about it for kids to show like air versus vibration, something to differentiate those so they remember when they look at it, like, oh, my mouth is the same for those two, but I do this other thing. You know, I think again, showing kids a few things and reminders up there can be helpful, but you have to do the interactive piece with it. Just showing them a picture isn't enough, right? Yeah.

Lori

And the interactive piece is the most fun. Yeah. I remember, I mean, we're going all the way back to 1987 now. I remember I had speech, and that was the number one thing that I remember. If you were to say, like, Lori, what do you remember from speech when you were five? I remember holding the mirror in front of me and doing that over and over and over again. But I didn't get tired of it. I mean, it's fun. I I remember that was exciting. I would go home and tell my parents I looked, looked in the mirror and figured out where my lips go and I said this. So I mean, it is so fun. I just want to add that a little bit.

Marianne Rice

I'm right there with you. I was in speech in kindergarten in first grade. I could not say the letter R correctly. And so, like saying that's what we did, it was fun to learn. I mean, I just needed someone to explain how to make that sound with my tongue correctly, you know, like in the right place.

Lori

Oh my gosh. And your name has an R in it. So that was very tricky. It was. Yeah. Well, you're doing great now. You did it.

Melissa

I'll just add in, I also was in speech. So we can, I really was. I couldn't say the gh sound. So we're all there. All there.

Articulatory Gestures Kids Remember

Melissa

Look at us now. All right, Marianne. So let's go to the next one, which was about connecting phonemic awareness with print. Um, there's a lot of confusion about this idea. Um, you already mentioned it, it's important to connect phonemic awareness with print. But you know, some people say once you add those letters in, well, now it's phonics instruction, and you know, phonemic awareness can be done in the dark. So we don't want to add those letters in yet. But can you help just make some sense of that and why that connection to letters is actually really important?

Marianne Rice

Yeah, I'm I'm pretty passionate about this. If you um know my research or or listen to me talk before, so we know that phonemic awareness in print is most effective when it's connected. And that's because phonemic awareness, although it is a skill about the sounds and manipulating the sounds, and then you also need the alphabet knowledge of what the printed letter looks like and that and the sound that connects to that. To be a reader and speller, you have to connect those two pieces together. You have to take your alphabet knowledge of recognizing what it looks like on the page and them being able to manipulate sounds and put it together in order to read and spell words. And so connecting those two helps make that process really explicit for kids rather than just hoping they're gonna figure out the connection between this letter sound instruction that I'm doing over here and this oral phonemic awareness instruction that I'm doing over here. And then somehow they're gonna figure out how to connect those two things together to read and spell words on their own. So we want to make that connection more explicit for them. It's also a way, so even though those skills are separate and we often assess those skills separately, okay, right? So if I want to know, are you having difficulty with phonemic awareness? I'm probably gonna do an oral-only test because I want to remove it from anything else. If I want to know if you know letter sounds, I'm gonna remove that from your ability to blend or segment sounds together because I wanna know, do you know what this letter represents in terms of a sound? But when I instruct, I don't have to keep them separate just because they are separate skills. I can teach those two skills in connected ways within my instruction, and that helps maximize my time. And it also builds to what we want kids to be able to do. So I rely on Linnea Ares' work a lot around orthographic mapping. And if you haven't heard of that, it's this idea that in order to store a word in your brain, I'll be, you know, kind of make it a symbol, right? I want to store this word in my brain so that I can start to recognize it instantly. That's what we do, right, by sight. I don't have to sound out words anymore at this point. I can recognize them by sight. In order to do that, I have to connect the sounds with what the print looks like or the spelling and what it means. I have to connect all three of those things in order to store this word in my brain. So by trying to connect phonebook, orness, and print more often, we're giving kids more opportunities to orthographically map words that they can store in their brain rather than thinking that that practice is gonna happen in some magical way for them, right? So we really want to maximize our instructional time by connecting these two things. We're getting a bigger bang for our buck out of our time, and we're building towards orthographic mapping and helping kids store words in their brain.

Melissa

Yeah, I'm so glad you brought up the difference between assessment and instruction, because I do think sometimes we our assessment messes with our instruction, you know, because we see things separate, then we think we need to teach those things separately. Um so I'm really glad you brought that up. That, like, yes, you do want it separate for assessment, but in teaching, it's actually not as beneficial, not beneficial at all to teach it separately. Yep. And so I'm curious, I know oral only phonemic awareness activities sort of have had a had a moment too, right? Um so if teachers are being told That they have a lot of time to do that oral phonemic awareness. I would guess the suggestion is bring in some letters. But I'm going to turn it to you to see what you say. Yes.

Marianne Rice

So if when you're looking through your instructional materials, your curriculum, if it's asking you to spend a lot of time on oral-only phonemic awareness, I'm going to make the suggestion that you try to connect it back to print. And we'll talk more about like how much time I know that's coming in the next one. But just really think about how you can connect those phonemic awareness activities with print. And so the easiest one to do is whiteboards. You know, like that's an easy thing that most teachers have. If they're on the carpet whiteboards, if they're on their desk, my students just love to write with the dry erase marker right on their desk, right? And so my curriculum asked me to do these oral-only segmenting tasks for, you know, five or 10 minutes before we get into our phonics lesson. So instead of just having the kids segment some words on our fingers or on our arm, wherever they're having them do it orally, I'm still gonna do that. But then I'm gonna immediately connect it to print. So I'm gonna take that word bat, we're gonna sound it out, b, at, and we're gonna write the letters for each of that, right? And so I've done the same task. I still had them orally segment it, but then I immediately connected it to print. Now they see the print. Then we read it again back together. Let's say those sounds, put it back together, b, at, run your finger under bat. Now they had a chance to orthographically map the word. It's gonna take multiple exposures before a word gets stored in our brain. So we want to provide more exposures to words that we want them to store. So that's the idea behind sort of connecting it to print. So you don't have to change too much about it. It's just how can I get this connected to print? If it's a quick one and you're like, getting out all the whiteboards and all the markers is too much. Like, even you, as the teacher, having the kids, you know, help you write it on the board can just be a quick one, or big letter cards on a pocket chart that you're building it while they're saying it, and then you touch it. It's just about getting that print in front of them so that they're connecting it to those sounds that they're manipulating. And so those are those are the easy ways to sort of tweak what you already have, is just add the letters as much as possible. And when I think about me as a teacher, like the choral responding is great and you can kind of get a vibe. But if every kid has a whiteboard and then they hold it up, I know who's got it and who doesn't. It helps me be like, I gotta pull them in a small group. And then I'm gonna see more specifically. Is it that they don't know their letter sounds very well yet that I've taught them, or is it that they're having trouble hearing the sounds? And then I can work more specifically with what they're having difficulty with. But in that whole class, we want to give as much exposure to print as possible.

Lori

Yeah, it's such a fabulous formative assessment in the moment for the teacher, right? Whiteboards, uh whiteboards on your desk, whatever we want to call deskboards. Um, I like that. Yeah, and you can even do a scaffold too, right? If you're sounding it out at on your arm or you're using your fingers, and then you go ahead on your desk and they're drawing a line, right? B at okay, now I'm saying it again, and now I need to write the letters. B. There's so many ways to do this, and so many creative ways to get students saying and doing over and over and over again and practice, but big fan of having those markers in hands and doing, doing, doing.

Marianne Rice

And there's so many ways to scaffold this. So just another idea. Like if you're, you know, you've got kids who know a few letter sounds, but not all, you're like, I can't do that yet. They don't know enough letter sounds. Sure they do. Do they know you've taught A and T, but you haven't taught the B sound yet? No problem. We're gonna do that line idea. And then all of them have like a little marker or a holder. They don't know like I don't know that letter yet. Okay, well, put your holder there. You know, just drag a little circle that they put in a sp in the space of the letter they don't know yet, and then they write the letters that they do know. So we, you know, we haven't mapped the whole word, but now we're practicing with those letter sounds that we do know. We're connecting it to print. And then once we know that other letter, we don't need the the little marker holder piece anymore, and we can write the letter. Or if you've got a kid who does who has more trouble with the writing, you know, they can do that as a scaffolded piece for the ones that they might still be having trouble with.

Melissa

Just and I was just thinking about the teacher that we're talking to this month as well, Anneette, who does word chains, she uses magnetic letters. She's a kindergarten teacher. So, you know, especially at the beginning there when they're still just learning all of the letters, it's a faster way to get them into that.

Marianne Rice

Cookie sheet with some magnetic letters, drag them down instead of having to move the markers down, you know, just drag the letters down. And if they're not perfect yet, it's okay. We'll we'll work with you to get the right letters to the right sounds, but that gives us more practice with what we want you to do and getting to that reading and spelling piece.

Lori

Yeah. And I almost love that, like you said, Marianne, that uh placeholder piece. It's almost like a game. Oh, which spot's gonna be the placeholder? Oh, what letter goes there? You know, I mean, it's just like, oh, so fun. Ah, I love this. I love talking about this. Okay, so I want to kind of take us into something we've been alluding to. We talked, we we didn't actually say uh the dosage of isolated phonemic awareness, but I do want to talk about that. Um, we know that students don't need huge amounts of isolated phonemic awareness instruction. So, Marianne, what does the research say about the amount of time that is effective?

Marianne Rice

Yeah. So as part of this study, we looked at this isolated oral only. So we're talking about oral only, no print, no letters, any of

Connect Sounds To Print

Marianne Rice

that. And we found in the research of, you know, reviewing lots of studies that have been done that when you do oral only, there comes a point of what we call sort of this like a large gain and then diminishing returns. So continuing to do oral only practice isn't giving students a bigger bang for your buck anymore. And the reason why is likely because it's sort of a constrained skill, right? Once you can do it, you can do it. You're not, you know, like there's there's a cat, it's not an endless skill. Like once you can blend, you know, the three sounds together to make the word, you've got that skill. So continuing to work on that isn't necessarily giving you more bang for your buck with kids. So we did not see the same pattern of this diminishing return once letters were added to phonemic awareness, which makes sense because that's reading and spelling. And we know from research that kids actually get better at PA as they become better readers and spellers. They're able to manipulate sounds in in more complex ways once they can orthographically map words and see those in their brain. They can do these more complex phonemic awareness tasks with words that they can picture. Um, so right now the research would suggest around 10 hours is what's sort of the point of that high gain and then diminishing returns. In a student's lifetime. So these were studies that were done with students. So we don't have a study that necessarily like did cumulative. So we just saw that like when you start teaching, because these are usually intervention studies, right? So from the time you started till the time you finished, if it was a lot more than 10, you were gonna see sort of not as much gain as right at 10. Does that so this matches what the National Reading Panel found? So they sort of chunked it into groups and they also found this sort of U upside down U-shape pattern, right? So like five to nine and 10 to 18 were their chunks that they found were most effective, which makes sense. 10 is kind of right in the middle of that. So somewhere around that was probably that peak point. But there's likely a range, you know, like we're not saying 10 is exactly the minutes, right? Somewhere between five and eighteen is probably still okay. But if you're way off from this, like way more than that, or even way less than that, you might not be getting enough practice. But it is likely cumulative, but we don't have studies that went across multiple grade levels. So it's hard to say that piece yet. But I think within any grade level, within a couple of grade levels, if you're looking, which is what we did, to see like how much was really going on when we added up all of those minutes, because people often say they've that it's just a couple of minutes a day, but we're like, well, when you add it all up, what what is that actually when you add up those couple of minutes a day? And we found some of them were likely probably right in line, you know, maybe five to six hours in kinder and five to six hours in first might get you that 10. Some might have been 10 in kinder and then less in first, but there were a couple that there's a few that are way, way more than that. And we just would question whether that might be a little too much and whether we could just again add the print to what's there to sort of make it more beneficial for kids rather than continuing with too much oral-only practice.

Lori

Yeah, and just to be clear, Marianne, what I'm hearing you say is that the curricular materials that you reviewed did do this. So you're you're basically saying what you're seeing. You saw some materials have this um nice distribution of maybe like, you know, five hours in kinder, five hours in first, but that some materials really did do a a lot more than maybe what was recommended by research.

Marianne Rice

Yeah, there were if you go look the report, which I think you'll link, you can go look into what they were and how much it it was for some of them. There were a few that were a little higher than sort of that. So we sort of be cautious here, like think about whether you could, you know, improve upon this or leave leave some of it out. But the other piece that for me that was kind of interesting um in this is that these are these are like the big core programs, right? So if if your core program already has this and then you're adding additional oral-only phonemic awareness, you're probably getting into that too much too much range. Okay. Um so just think about that too when you're keeping in mind the minutes that you're spending on this and whether that's what's best for students or whether what would be best is again more practice with connected phonemic awareness in print.

Lori

Okay. And so let's pretend I'm a teacher who notices my curriculum materials have a lot. And I'm like, okay, I want to add in these letters. Do you have any recommendations?

Marianne Rice

Yeah, I think some of the examples that we gave in the last one are great, but I'll do another one, like word chaining, right, is a way to do that. And if you think about it, when you think about those tasks or whatever, right? Just think about your you really are doing both. And so that is great practice. And so you can ask yourself, like, do I need to do the separate oral only piece, or can I just emphasize the oral only piece within the the word chaining, the word um building kinds of activities that are already there? So, like if you're gonna do um one of those activities, right? You think about taking a word, like tap, right? Let's stretch it out, app, now let's build it with our word chain. Like I've built in that oral only practice that I would have done at the beginning, but now it's connected to print. And so think about whether you still needed to have that oral-only practice separate, or can you sort of combine it into this one practice? Um, and we found a lot of times they were practicing in the oral-only piece the words that they were gonna build later. So it's sort of like, can I just put those together in my lesson rather than having these two separate pieces and expecting kids to figure out how those connect together.

Melissa

Yeah, I'm so glad you said that, Marianne. I know Lori and I have had a lot of conversations recently with people who have said, like, oh, they're doing word change, sure, and they're doing like dictation, but they're not that's not phonemic awareness, right? Like that doesn't count as phonemic awareness. But they like literally, if they're hearing the word and having to think about the sounds and then connecting it to the letters, like they are doing that phonemic awareness and then and then taking it to the letter.

Marianne Rice

They are, and if your kids are having difficulty, you can make that piece explicit. So that same, you know, way you would have had them do it in the oral only piece, have them do it right before they build the word. So, okay, before we build it, everyone stop. We're gonna, we're gonna count it out together. You ready? Tap t. App. Okay, everyone got it. Let's do it one more time. T. App. Now let's build the word. And then we go and we build the word, right? So you're just you're doing the same practice. You're just then doing it with the print that's gonna connect it. And then the kid sees the word along with those sounds they just made. Now we're gonna read the word again together. Now we've had a chance to orthographically map that word as long as they know what the word tap means, or we can explain it to them if we've got a kiddo that isn't sure what tap means, or show a picture of something that would help them sort of finish the triangle and store the word.

Melissa

Yes. And this counts, everyone. You're doing phonemic awareness when you're doing that.

Marianne Rice

Yes. If you if they're doing this before they build the word, they've done phonemic awareness. So we're we're all good.

Lori

Feel so efficient. You know, it's like a twofer.

Melissa

Isn't that what we're all looking for?

Marianne Rice

Less less transitions of activities, like, oh, we're doing this part, now we're doing this part. Like, just say, like, oh, it wants me to do five words oral only at the beginning with segmenting. I'm just gonna build that segmenting practice into my word chaining. Now done. I don't have to have these separate pieces.

Melissa

We love this. And speaking of efficiency, let's talk about where we should

How Much Oral-Only Is Enough

Melissa

be focusing. I know that the report talks about blending specifically and segmenting as the most important phonemic awareness skills. I'm wondering if you could actually talk about like, well, what other phonemic awareness skills might I see that aren't the ones that are the most important ones? And then why are these two blending and segmenting so important?

Marianne Rice

Yes. So I'll start with some of the ones, some of the other ones that sort of fall under what you might see in these phonemic words. We I think we found about eight different ones that people might classify in different ways.

Melissa

I don't even know if I can.

Marianne Rice

Okay, well, here you go. Um, so early ones that sometimes are built in are categorizing or identification. So identification is like asking like, do tap and top have the same sound at the beginning? And the kids thinking, t, you know, they're just having to think about like, do I hear the same kind of sound, right? Categorizing is similar, like putting words together that have the same sound, or maybe finding the word that doesn't have the same sound at the beginning. So you're just those sort of like early play. You might do a little bit of that with some kids who need a little extra practice at the beginning, but the goal is that's just sort of a very beginning intro to sort of this word play, this sound play type of thing. Isolating is where you're separating one phoneme from a word. So usually you start with the initial one, that first sound, the last one, and then eventually you get to where you can do the middle. That's the building block for segmenting. So you should see some isolating at the beginning for kids when they're first starting to do some phonemic awareness work because they're gonna have to be able to isolate each of those three sounds and segmenting. So it's sort of a building block to segmenting.

Melissa

I was gonna ask you that because we had someone else say that isolating, blending, and segmenting were the three most important. And I was I've always thought of it like that. Like, well, that's just really like a building block to try the screen.

Marianne Rice

It's a building block. So if you I'm good with that, um, we tend to say the National Army found like focusing on one or two skills. So I tend to just say, like, if they're not quite there yet, like isolating and segmenting are sort of the the the connected other skills. So you might, it's just like a scaffolded segmenting, if that makes sense, right?

Melissa

Um makes total sense.

Marianne Rice

Yes. And so that's that. Then there's blending and segmenting, which we'll talk more about. And then some of the other ones are what some people have called advanced phonemic awareness. So things like deleting a phoneme from a word. So if you had the word um cat and you took off the k sound, you have the word at left, or um adding a phoneme, so taking at and adding a new sound at the beginning, like m to make the word mat, and then substituting, so trying to do all of that connected to each other. So taking the sound, k, changing it to a m to get the new word from cat to mat. So those are all really connected to each other, but they're also just sort of built on to blending and segmenting. Like you have to be able to blend and segment to do those things, right? Deleting is isolating and then saying what's, you know, like they're connected. And so when you think about it, they're all really connected to blending and segmenting. So we can just simplify it and say, we're gonna focus on blending and segmenting. And the reason why we focus on those is because blending is what you do when you read. So if I'm gonna read a word, I have to say each of the sounds, I have to put those sounds together to make this into a word that I've now read. If I want to spell, that's what segmenting is. I have to be able to separate the sounds in order to write the letter for each of those. And then, like I said, those the rest of them are sort of variations off of that. So if we can try to just make it simpler and keep the focus on blending and segmenting, that's really what we want to do.

Melissa

So quick question for you, because we just brought up word chains, right? So when you talked about the manipulation, it kind of sounded like that's what that is what you're doing when you're doing a word chain, right? You're like changing one sound and then changing the letter. Is it helpful when you add the letters? Or what makes a word chain effective, but not when you do it orally?

Marianne Rice

Yeah, so it is about the letters. What we've what a lot of people have found, especially those more advanced, is that what kids, kids who are really good at that substituting, you know, that changing a sound and make a new one, are often, and what we do as adults, are picturing the word in their brain and they're changing it, and then they're reading the new word. So again, we can do that and we can call it these other things, but what how when you're explicitly teaching a kid how to do word chains, right? So um, you know, if you're gonna change, let's say the word mug and you're gonna change it, you're gonna change the M to a P, what I'm really doing is I'm re-blending that new word. I take the P, I put it in front of the U G, and maybe I have to sound it all out again, pug, or maybe I can keep the chunk if I'm a little bit farther along and I can chunk things ug, right? But I'm I'm re-blending this new word that I've made by switching one of the sounds. And so maybe it's because I can see the letters. If I'm trying to do it orally, I'm having to picture all of this in my head, likely. And so it it's sort of building to that. We find that kids get a lot better at those more advanced once they become readers and spellers because they can picture more words in their brain.

Melissa

Even when you were talking about word chains, you kind of said like kids are kind of like segmenting the sounds in order to do the word chain, and they're blending them back together when they're doing the word chain. So, like, I'm guessing blending and segmenting like are kind of a part of several different activities you might do. But do you have more examples besides word chains that where they're blending and segmenting?

Marianne Rice

To be honest, anytime you're reading and spelling, you're blending and segmenting. So when you look at it, you're thinking about those things, like you were saying, dictation. I'm segmenting and then I'm writing the word. When I'm chaining, depending on the prompts that you give, and we often, like when I teach pre-service teachers, it's all about the prompts and you want to vary those. You want to give kids a chance to practice blending. So I might tell them how to build the word, and then I say, What word did you make? And then they would put, they would blend the sounds together to make the word. And then another time I might give them the word and they're gonna build the word, so they're gonna change it, you know, those kinds of things. And so you want to kind of vary your prompts so that you're getting both blending and segmenting practice in there. And then, you know, I said, even if you're thinking of it, uh, they're doing substitution, they are, but also they're likely blending and segmenting those words. And so let's just keep the focus on that just for simplicity's sake and for our students too. Like there is evidence

Blending And Segmenting Take Priority

Marianne Rice

from the national reading panel that one or two skills at a time is really what's beneficial. So if we can kind of keep kids focused on those two key skills, that's gonna be what's really beneficial rather than overwhelming with. Now let's do categorizing at the beginning, and then we're gonna do blending here, and then we're gonna do substituting over like let's it's mostly blending and segmenting. Let's keep the focus.

Melissa

Okay. So if teachers are listening right now and saying, like, what you're describing right now is exactly what is happening in my curriculum. There's all kinds of activities for um phonemic awareness. What should they do? Like, just cut them out?

Marianne Rice

What what what's the what's your advice? I I hate to say that because I know there's so different, you know, schools and principals have different expectations. So you can't ever tell teachers to just cut it out. I don't ever want to say, like, just stop doing that because I don't want anyone to be like, well, that doesn't work for me. My principal's gonna come in and be like, oh, you aren't on whatever. I just think when you're looking at those, it's all about the framing in your brain. So it's like, how can I take the same task that these students were at? So those early tasks that are categorizing or um identification and really focus them back to like the isolating piece that really is like even when kids are starting early on, like if you're thinking about do these words go together, you have to isolate the initial sound to see are they all the same or are they different? I can get the focus back on isolating, which is the building a many scaffolded segmenting, right? So, you know, I can get the focus back on that. If I'm doing, if I'm supposed to be doing deletion, substitution, um, addition as these skills or whatever, again, I can highlight it for students as the skills that I'm wanting to work on that I'm they're either blending or segmenting, right? So if I'm deleting, I'm really isolating the initial foam, taking it off, saying what's left, whether I have to blend it back together, I'm able to kind of keep that as a chunk. If I'm substituting, same thing, I'm switching a sound and then I'm reblending this new piece with the chunk that I already had there. If I'm adding, I'm just blending together. Like instead of having to throw, like you are doing these things, just keep the focus for kids on those two things. Like what you're asking them to do is really to blend or to segment. What are they being asked to do?

Melissa

And if we add the letters in, then you can actually do that a lot easier.

Marianne Rice

They can do it a lot easier. They're not having to hold all of this in their brain, especially if they haven't orthographically mapped these words, trying to keep those sounds straight when they don't have a placeholder for them, right? And So if you're doing that within those chaining tasks, so even like I said, get out a whiteboard, let's all write it down, erase, change the letter, now re-reblend this new word together, those kinds of things, you're you're doing it, but you're doing it in a way that builds to reading and spelling. If getting your all your kids with whiteboards for this short little piece that you have to do is too much, again, you writing on the board is better than nothing, right? Just printing along with them, using letter cards in some way to kind of connect it to that so that what they're doing is reading and spelling. Keep that in mind. Phonemic awareness is a building block to reading and spelling. The goal is to be a good reader or a good speller, not to be just good at phonemic aornus.

Lori

I wish we could end there, but I have one more question to ask you. That's a great quote, though. Um so, okay, so let's say I'm a teacher listening, and I I just want to take away like one or two ideas from your work. And I want to think about this in respect of my own curriculum that I have in front of me. What do you suggest that they focus on?

Marianne Rice

Yes, love this question. So I'm gonna leave them with two like guiding questions that I suggest you think about whenever you're looking at your lesson for the day, what your curriculum is asking you to do. So anytime you're looking at that, I call it like the code focus part of your lesson, which probably has your phonological awareness, your phonics, your spelling kind of things in it, is ask yourself these two questions. Is this practice helping connect phonemic awareness with print to build reading and spelling? And is this practice building my students' blending and segmenting skills? And if either of those two things are not true, think about how you can adjust the practice slightly in the ways we've talked about, adding letters, reframing the task for students to focus on that blending and segmenting, to swap those ideas out and make it so that you can say yes to both of those questions. So I'll say those again. Is this practice helping connect PA with print for reading and spelling? And is this practice blending my building my students' blending and segmenting skills? And so just ask yourself that. It it might already be doing it. Like I said, word training, your answer is yes and yes. So you don't need to do anything. Just think about, you know, do my kids need a little bit more scaffolding about how the phonemic awareness that they already have works in this, or that we can practice their phonemic awareness within this, and just keep that focus on those two things.

Lori

Yeah. Oh, those are so good. So great reflective questions to really input into our own practices day to day. And I feel like too, a lot of these just become habits. So once you get going on it, you've got the routines, you've got the habits of mind. You just go for it.

Marianne Rice

Yeah. So that's where that oral only, a little bit of

Two Questions To Guide Planning

Marianne Rice

oral-only practice goes a long way. It builds those habits for kids. However, you you and your or your curriculum set up those habits, and then you're just saying, now we just transfer those habits with learn some letter sounds into our letter sound work, and now we're doing this all together. And that means we're being readers and spellers when we do those two things together.

Lori

Well, Marianne, we're really grateful that you took some time to share all of this awesome phonemic awareness knowledge with our listeners. So thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. This was fun.

Melissa

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Melissa

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Lori

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Melissa

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Lori

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