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[Listen Again] What Research Says About Phonemic Awareness Instruction with Matt Burns

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We’re revisiting this episode with Matt Burns because it offers one of the clearest explanations of phonemic awareness and how it fits into reading instruction.

In this conversation, Matt helps unpack what the research actually says and what that means for what we prioritize in the classroom. He explains why phonemic awareness is not a standalone precursor to reading, but develops alongside it, and why decoding should take center stage as students move into the upper elementary grades.

If you’ve ever felt unsure about how phonemic awareness fits into your instruction, or what to focus on as students progress, this episode brings clarity and practical direction.

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Why Revisit Phonemic Awareness

Melissa

We're revisiting an episode this week because whenever we talk about phonemic awareness, this episode comes up.

Lori

Matt is right, because it's one of the clearest explanations of what the research actually says and what that means for instruction.

Melissa

Researcher Matt Burns joined us to talk all about phonemic awareness and how it fits alongside phonics instruction and why it shouldn't be taught in isolation.

Lori

He also helps clarify which phonemic awareness skills matter most and how that focus can shift as students become more proficient readers. 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.

Melissa

Lori and I can't wait to keep learning with you today.

Lori

Hi everyone. Welcome to Melissa and Laura Love Literacy. We are excited today because we are digging deep into phonemic awareness.

Melissa

And we have a great guest. We're here with Matt Burns, who is a special education and RTI researcher and a University of Florida professor. And he recently presented a phenomenal webinar that I watched titled Phonemic Awareness Research, Misconceptions and Fads with Dr. Matt Burns. And today he'll talk to us about the res what the research says about phonemic awareness instruction. So welcome to the podcast, Matt.

Matt Burns

Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be part of this conversation.

Lori

Yeah. Matt, I'm I'm excited because you're very level-headed. I appreciate you on social media as just being the like this, you're just reasonable. I love reading what you what you post and how you respond. So thank you for your voice of reason.

Melissa

And we had so many topics we wanted to talk to him about. It was hard to choose which one.

Lori

I'm wondering if we just kind of kick it off with the basics, right? So what's phonemic awareness and why is it important to teach?

What Phonemic Awareness Means

Matt Burns

Okay. Well, phonemic awareness is the knowledge that that words are made of sounds, and we can break those uh words up into individual sounds. We can take sounds, put them together to make a word, and even manipulate those sounds. So that's the basic idea of phonemic awareness. And you can't you can't sound out a word if you can't take the sounds you make and blend them together, right? You you can't you you can't also segment the sounds. So those basic skills of blend isolating, blending, segmenting are absolutely crucial building blocks to being a good reader.

Melissa

So can we dive in a little bit more to those? Um, I'm gonna talk about those that you mentioned, isolating, blending, segmenting. I know a question that comes up a lot is there there are more skills than that, especially under the bigger phonological awareness umbrella. Um so so when we're talking about you you named three specific skills that we need to target, but can you talk about the other skills that teachers might see in in a curriculum or in in suggestions from people online of like what should we focus on, what should we not focus on, what's important, why is it important, why is it not?

Matt Burns

Yeah, that's

Phonological Skills And Rhyming Limits

Matt Burns

that's really important. So you're right, you use the right term, phonological awareness. If phonological awareness is is the larger units of sound, like knowing that a sentence has words in it and and be able to tell you, you know, the dog, the dog ran fast has four four words, that's phonological awareness. Knowing that uh words can have uh compound words, you know, that's phonological awareness. You know, uh saying to a kid, uh fire truck, what words do you hear? Like that's all phonological awareness. Those are important build-in blocks too. But there's a couple things about that. Number one, most kids, now most, most kids come to school with those basic skills in place. Most. Not all, but most. Uh and what we found is we want to get to the phoneme as quickly as possible. So we started, if we were to start at teaching that words have uh uh sentences have words and down to compound words and and syllables and stuff, then you really want to get down to the phoneme as quickly as you can because that's what really drives uh uh understanding of reading. So we really want to get to phoneme as quickly as we can. So what I say to teachers is uh and I'm gonna go the the other side of the continuum in a second, but what I say to teachers is uh assess your kids. Just it takes just a few minutes to assess these basic skills. And if they have them already, then don't teach them. Uh if they don't, you may want to review, but I wouldn't spend a ton of time. We did a study and uh we looked at rhyming, which is phonological awareness. I think of rhyming as the bridge between phonemic and phonological. I think rhyming is a nice way to get kids focusing from sort of word level down to the phoneme level. It's a bridge. Uh but we did a study and we found that kids in urban schools, uh in the urban schools in which we did the research, uh, rhyming didn't predict reading very well at all. And we don't know why. Our hypothesis was well, rhyming is a problem for kids if they don't have good vocabulary. You know, we don't know. We don't know why. But we saw that blending, segmenting, isolating absolutely in kindergarten, first grade predicted reading really well, but rhyming did not. So I I if I was a teacher, I would start with rhyming. And if they have rhyming, I'm not gonna worry about the rest. If they don't, I'll try and teach rhyming. If they don't pick it up, I I'll probably move forward to teach isolating, blending, and segmenting before I'll go backwards. Because chances are you could just start right there and dive in, and the kids would do just fine. So my rule is that when I say assess the kids, I really mean start with it with rhyming. If they have rhyming, then I wouldn't worry about the rest of phonological awareness and start moving towards phonemic awareness. Now, the other side of the continuum are the more advanced phonemic awareness skills. Um things like elision, which I'm not sure exactly how to pronounce that because people pronounce it differently, but E-L-I-S-I-O-N, elision, elision, whatever, however you say it. Um you know, the idea of deleting sounds. So take cat and drop the in cat, and now you have add. And more advanced um manipulation as well. And those skills aren't really shown to be related to reading. At least the jury is still out. Right? There's not a lot of research on those types of skills. And what we do have suggests that's really it's it's related to reading, but doesn't really help kids learn how to read if you teach those advanced skills. And once kids learn letter sounds and start to have orthographic mapping, start to understand that they look at a word and you just can, you know, without sounding it out, basically tell you what the word is because they've learned the sounds. Um once they're able to do that, then that skill drives phonemic awareness. So so that's a long way of saying really you're better off to teach basic phonemic awareness and get kids really good at sounding out words and building orthographic maps than you are to teach advanced phonemic awareness. So that's why I always talk about there's a holy trinity of of uh phonemic awareness. And in my opinion, uh, that is uh isolating, blending, and segmenting. Those are those are the those are what we need to teach kids. Those are what among all the skills the kids don't have, and those are the ones that predict reading the best.

Lori

So

Breaking The Code Needs Phonics

Lori

we we the key point here, if I'm summarizing, is that we teach phonemic awareness to help students break the code, right? It's a it's a means, it's a means to an end, but it's not that desired outcome. Can you say more about that?

Matt Burns

Yeah, I don't uh phonemic awareness is how we help kids break the code, as you just said. So just because a kid has learned um phonemic awareness doesn't mean they're going to learn how to read. We have to teach them the phonetic code as well. So, in fact, uh multiple studies and multiple meta-analyses have found it's more effective to on on phonemic awareness outcomes if you teach letter sounds as you're teaching phonemic awareness. Uh and so, yeah, phonemic awareness is an important prerequisite to reading, but it is not reading. And it's just a step along the way. So that's why I've looked at research, like the National Reading Panel reported outcomes for um phonemic on the phonemic awareness meta-analysis, the national reading panel will reported outcomes on phonemic awareness, reading, and spelling. And I don't even look at the ones on phonemic awareness because unless they learn how to read or spell, it doesn't really matter.

Lori

All right,

What To Teach And When

Lori

so speaking of teaching, what should teachers focus on for phonemic awareness and in what grades? And I also have a follow-up question that you can choose to answer within that question. But should teachers be teaching to mastery or should they be using a practice called interleaving? And we can define that as well.

Matt Burns

Oh, so okay, I'll come back to that. That's a really good question. Um, so uh what should they teach? Well, again, I would look at rhyming, try and teach rhyming if the kids don't have it. If they have it, move on. But again, don't spend a lot of time on that. Don't let me rephrase that. Don't stop moving forward in the progression because the kids aren't doing well with rhyming. Again, we've seen too many kids who read just fine who may struggle to learn rhyming. So I'm gonna start with isolating. The National Reading Panel, again, I I refer back to that uh quite a bit, but the National Reading Panel found that if if um if you taught one or two skills at a time, the effect sizes were 0.71 to 0.79. So if your listeners aren't familiar with that, you know, 0.5 is is considered a pretty good effect. Uh 0.8 is is a is a large effect. So those are those are really good effects.

Melissa

And you said one to two skills at a time?

Matt Burns

Yes, one to two. If you try and teach three or more, it drops all the way down to 0.27, which is a small effect and significantly smaller. So I would say my sort of rule of thumb, and I don't really have research support I'm about to say, is I start with isolation, start with rhyming, move on. Start with isolation, teach kids how to isolate the the sounds. And then I kind of teach blending and segmenting together. Now, I I keep asking that question to people who are practicing teachers, et cetera, and I get different answers all the time. Is it better to teach segmenting first? Is it better to teach blending first? I don't have a good answer to that. I think there's probably a there probably is an answer, but I just don't know it. So maybe we can research it and see if that really matters, but I think it works to teach those two together. Then move into once they can blend and segment, if you want to do some basic manipulation, I think that's fine too. You want to teach kids, you know, uh take the cat to make it a that word is bat, that's that's fine. That's fine. But I'm probably gonna stop there. So, so isolating first, then blending a segment, usually together, and then once they've mastered that, move on to some basic manipulation. But absolutely along the way, I'm teaching phonics. Like I'm not teaching phonics or using basic letters and letter sounds until they've mastered through blending or segmenting. No, no, you you incorporate that right away. Um but then once they get to base, but then some of the more advanced skills, like like reversal, so we teach a kid the word net, say it backwards. What word is that? 10? That doesn't that's not really really that's not been shown to help reading. So the four I'm gonna hit those four probably in that order. Okay, and along the way I'm gonna be teaching letters and letter sounds as well.

Interleaving Practice Builds Mastery

Matt Burns

So you mentioned uh interleaving. So interleaving versus mastering.

Melissa

Okay.

Matt Burns

So those are not mutually exclusive uh approaches. All interleaving means is uh teach include um review as you're teaching new, basically. So if you have three concepts, you know, don't teach uh well let me let me say it more clearly this way. You're teaching three concepts and you're teaching concept C, and you previously just taught concept B and concept A. So as you're practicing concept C, include A and B while you're practicing it. That's called interleaving. Um, I've done lots of research on that, although we a more specific, uh specific model. It's just a great way to help kids, it's a great uh approach to practice. So once I see a kid can do a skill with about 85 to 90 percent accuracy, and I base that on a meta-analysis I did way back in 2004. So I probably need to update it. But we found 90%, generally speaking, worked pretty well. And so once we see a kid can do this with high accuracy, that's when you start practicing. And you practice it by interleaving concepts they already learned. And that helps them learn the new concept and retain the older concepts better. So I hope I answer that question well. But I think teaching you teach kids to mastery, but one of the best ways to do it is through interleaving.

Lori

Yeah. Well, one of the things Melissa and I are always talking about, and we've talked about it on the podcast before, is like we're we love to connect the idea of mastery and interleaving to sports practice. You know, thinking about if you're teaching kids how to shoot a basket or, you know, score a goal or or do a move in soccer, you're not going to stop all the other things you're doing. And you're also not going to just do that one move, I'll practice until you've gotten it, right? For like two straight hours. You're gonna be working it in over time and then coming back to it and back to it and having different scenarios for it. So it's funny how it just like naturally occurs in other areas. But when it comes to reading, we often are like, oh no, we've got to master it. Well, that I mean, that's just not how the real world world works, you know, and it doesn't work that way for kids. It doesn't work that way for adults. And and it's so I just always think like sports are just such a great metaphor for what we do here in uh in in reading and writing.

Matt Burns

Yeah. And we actually we take kids with behavior problems. We did a couple of studies on this, kids with who were, I love those ADHD uh non-medicated, you know, those kids are very active. Um, and they had they had uh IEP, they were learning disabled in reading, so IEP goals for reading, and were ADHD, diagnosed ADHD non-medicated. And if we include an interleaving, I use a model called incremental rehearsal, it's just basically an applied approach of interleaving. So if I want them to learn, you know, T, and I just taught them whatever, S and uh D, well, as I'm teaching T, I'm gonna use those two. And doing so, A helps them retain it much better, retain the new one. And their time on task goes way up. Uh, we see a lot of kids get frustrated if the task is too difficult. So taking all things that you're teaching to them, all new stuff and practicing that can sometimes get really frustrating. So simply adding in some review as you're practicing the new increases time on task, even among kids who are have behavior problems.

Melissa

That's great news.

Matt Burns

And by the way, one of the kids was a kinder, one of the kids was a kindergartner who was diagnosed with an emotional behavioral disorder in kindergarten, right? That's isn't that sad? The poor little guy. He was off, he was, he was um, he was moving around a lot. And we got him on task um, you know, 75-80% of the time. No, kindergarten emotional behavior disorder. I was pretty darn excited about getting him on task 80% of the time.

Lori

For sure. I so I feel like we should chant this add-in review as you're practicing the new. Like, isn't that a great right? Like we can make a little cheer. You could tell that that's what I did at some point in time. Um, yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna make a little slogan for you, Matt. You can hang it in your office and make a little canva of that.

Melissa

Well,

Simple Examples Teachers Can Use

Melissa

I have like a million questions for you, but as I'm as I'm listening, I'm thinking there might be some listeners out there, not all of our listeners, but some who are thinking, I don't even know what he means when he says isolating, segmenting, and blending. So I'm wondering if we can just take a pause to just like define, give some examples of what those three are, especially since we're saying they're like the most important ones.

Matt Burns

You know, I I I meant to do this. I swear, when it comes to teaching reading, I mean, I mean, when I'm teaching pre-service teachers how to how to teach reading, for I think it's true for anybody in the country who engages in uh teaching future teachers, cat is the most commonly used word.

Melissa

And I meant I've heard bad more bad.

Matt Burns

Yeah, I meant to come up with a better one, a new one, and I forgot. So I have to use cat. Isolating, so to all the listeners out there who've heard the cat example 538 times. Well, here's 539. So isolating is knowing that cat is at. And it's not um actually let me be more clear. Let me be more clear. That's segmenting. Isolating is knowing cat starts with k okay, and knowing ends with t like that's isolating. So see it to a kid, what's the first sound you hear in cat? That's isolating. If a kid can then say cat is k at, that's segmenting. And being able to see it to a kid, k at say it fast. What word do you hear? And they could say cat. Those are those are that's isolating uh segmenting and blending.

Melissa

Yeah, that's so great. I've I have a five-year-old now, he's he's still in pre-K. Um, but I he can do that isolating really well. Oh, good, but we're not to the segmenting and blending at all. I've tried it with him and I'm like, he's he's not there, but he's really good at the like first sound.

Matt Burns

Good. That's great, that's good. So I get um I get a little frustrated with with companies that sell phonemic awareness programs and they're expensive because phonemic awareness is cheap. It requires no materials basically, although you know, eventually it requires letters and stuff, but and um it's fun. Like that is of the whole universe of reading and and teaching, that's probably my favorite. Because you literally sit around the kids and play little games, little word games to get them to say these sounds and blending stuff.

Melissa

And it's so And that's what I do with my son, just for everyone out there. We're not I don't sit and have like phonemic awareness time with him. Like it's when we're driving in the car and we're talking about something, and oh, like if we just talk about what that starts with or what sound he hears. Yeah.

Matt Burns

Yeah, and then eventually have him, you know, just practice saying the sounds fast. Let's say the sound fast, act, say it fast. Let me know if you hear a word, like that type of thing. And there's a whole bunch of you Google it, there's all kinds of games. And and for this type of thing you're talking about, they're they're quite fun.

Melissa

All right. So I'm also wondering, because we mentioned like you don't necessarily need to go to those advanced kind of skills, right? That these these are the key ones, isolating, blending, and segmenting. And we talked about interleaving, um, and like you keep coming back to it. And I'm wondering about I would imagine kids don't necessarily just become like, like, I am now an expert segmenter and blender, and I can do that with anything, but that you it gets harder because of what words, what sounds they're doing it with, like as you get to, I mean, multisyllabic words would be way really tough to do that with compared to CVC words. Um, so I'm imagining that's kind of how it gets more difficult, but that you stick with those kind of three basic skills.

Matt Burns

Yeah. And there's and there's, yes, and uh you you move up a number of sounds. Like there's words with two sounds and then three sounds and four sounds. And I mean once you're into uh multisyllabic, then you're probably not doing phonemic awareness then. You're probably doing other things. But yeah, you you eventually you start with the you know the shorter, the two sounds and move you work your way up by numbers of sounds. And it doesn't so phonemic awareness it's the the type of sound isn't as important as the number of sounds. So shh, you know, it's sh for all of us that's something very different than but for a kid hearing sounds and working on phonemic awareness, it's not that different. It's more important, uh yeah, it's still one sound. So number of sounds in the word is probably more important. I basically comment on experience of working with kids, not on a study I've done.

Elkonin Boxes And Cheap Materials

Lori

So that's where those like Alconan boxes would be.

Matt Burns

Oh gosh, those are great helpful tools.

Lori

Okay.

Matt Burns

Yeah, yeah. If you know what that is, um, they're wonderful. They're they're basically just you have a box divided up into into sub boxes based on the number of sounds. And as the kid segments or blends or whatever, they simply move a marker up and down it into the box. And just Google it. It's E L K O N I N. Pronounced L Conan, by the way. Most people don't know how to pronounce it, so that's well done. Yeah.

Lori

So I'll link those in the show notes as well. I'll link some some to that. Yeah, that's awesome. Those are great tools. And like you said, pretty, pretty free. I mean, you could use them on a whiteboard, you could use them, I draw some boxes, it's very easy.

Matt Burns

I literally, my my universe of of uh intervention, because I do interventions board and instruction, uh, is materials are a whiteboard and uh a box of magnetic letters I got off Amazon for 20 bucks. And then everything, of course, I know teachers need a lot more than that, but but if you you know it's uh and a box of letters is cheap and a whiteboard is a couple bucks at Target. So uh and those right there are powerful uh tools to use. And actually, one time in the school in Minneapolis, uh we asked, they didn't have they didn't have whiteboards. Um, this was you know a few years ago, they didn't have whiteboards for all their kids and they had no money to buy them. So we went to the dollar store and bought uh cookie sheets, and those worked really well. You could write on them and erase them, the magnetic layers stuck to them, it worked really well. So we got really and it the kids thought it was fun, they didn't care it was cookie sheet, uh, and we loved it.

Melissa

I've seen it for the magnets, but I've never seen writing on it.

Matt Burns

Yeah, you can write on them just like you do, just like a just like a whiteboard.

Melissa

Yeah.

Lori

Oh, and I love that like if you sh kind of shook up your letters a little bit, they'd still stay.

Matt Burns

Yeah, yes, that's important. I always use magnetic with kids because for that very reason they they tend to get shaken.

Lori

I love that. That's so cool. Thank you for that that hot tip for teachers.

Matt Burns

But now magnetic boards are pretty cheap. But but uh to but if you have for some reason you can't. Those for us, those work really well.

Melissa

Neat.

When Letters Belong In PA

Melissa

Well, you've mentioned this already, but I'm bringing us back to it because I still find myself even confused about this sometimes, and I hear a ton of questions about this. Which is about bringing letters in. And so, and I know there's some debate about it because you mentioned Hagerty already, which we know spends most of the time without bringing letters in. And so there's a lot of discussion about okay, how long before you attach letters to these sounds. But I think there's some confusion too in just, you know, some people say, yeah, but once you bring in the letters, now you're teaching phonics because that's what phonics is, right? Is connecting the actual grapheme to the sound. And so people then think, well, then I'm not teaching phonemic awareness if I'm moving to the letter. So I think there's some confusion there. And we I just love to dig into this with you.

Matt Burns

Yeah, it's a really uh interesting conversation. So I would uh uh suggest a couple things. Number one, the National Reading Panel, again, I'll refer to their work, others have done this as well. If they included letters as part of their phonemic awareness instruction, the effect size was 0.67, so good, good, good effect. If there were no letters, it was 0.38. And we recently reanalyzed the data. I have it, I have them right here. Um, because someone uh people have been saying, well, you should most of the research in the National Reading Panel, they they taught phonemic awareness for some period of time and then used letters. So we looked it up, and of the 51 studies that looked at phonemic awareness, only seven of them did that. And unfortunately, the seven of them that did didn't give us good uh good guidance. Like they didn't say we taught phonemic awareness for two weeks, or we taught phonemic awareness until until they mastered blending. Like they didn't give us that. 35 studies used letters, 28 of them used them every single session from day one, and only 26 didn't use letters. And if you did use letters, it was significantly more effective. In fact, when we looked at it, what predicted reading based on the National Reading Panel data, grade was significant predictor, we're gonna come back to that. Uh dosage was not, and whether or not they used letters was. So whether or not they used letters really mattered. No, I know. So that that baffled me. In fact, dosage added zero variance, literally zero. Um it did so I I did I don't know why that is.

Lori

Um dosage is like like how much how often?

Matt Burns

Yes, yes. So my only hypothesis is that some kids were getting it as an intervention, and the intervention stopped if they learned it and kept going if they didn't. And so the kids that didn't do well got more dosage. So that's why you'd see no, and then some just did set dosage. I don't that I made that up. That's that's a hypothesis. Um, I don't know, but you I was shocked too. Dosage added zero variants, not zero, but less than 0.01.

Lori

I had to confirm the meaning of dosage because I was shocked by it. I'm like, wait a minute, there's how is that possible? Wow.

Matt Burns

So I we probably need to dive into that to really understand what that means. The only reason I bring it up here is to sh uh say that using letters mattered more than how often you did the instruction. Okay. And so using letters did matter. Now, is it teaching photonic awareness or teaching phonics? Well, it's teaching reading, number one. Uh and I will I uh um I will say that if your target is to help kids learn how to blend and segment sounds, but you happen to be using letters, well, that's still photography awareness. That's okay. If you're teaching graphing and photon correspondence, and at the same time they're blending and stuff, well, that's teaching phonics. That's kind of the difference. What are you teaching? Not the tools you're using aren't what's driven in the instructions. What do you what is your desired outcome?

Melissa

And often you're doing them kind of right at the same time.

Matt Burns

You're doing them right at the same time. Right. Uh and doing them right at the same time is more effective. Now, what I don't know, and I'd love to see more research on is is there because I said seven studies did something else first. And I don't, and I can't tell you what they did. So I'd love to see more research on do kids have to be able to isolate before we start doing letters? Or I have no idea, I made that up, I could be totally wrong. Um I have no idea. All I know is in the long run, it's better to include letters, so I include letters as often as you can. I mean, as soon as you can. Now, having said that, it doesn't always have to have letters. So I know some some uh teachers, I think this is very common practice, second and third grade, you're teaching a finance lesson, you might start by doing a blending warm-up. Great. You might begin with a a segmenting gig. Great. Um The only issue I have is when we see on social media people say, Hey, I got this third grader, they're not learning how to read very well, what do I do? And they say, Well, do phoneic awareness, do you know, practice these drills. Well, that's fine if you're teaching phonics too. But if your only intervention for that kid is just to practice blending orally only, it's probably not going to help that kid. If you're if you're really in-depthly going into uh finance for that kid, and along the way practicing some blending for a couple minutes a day, that's that's great. So so I don't I don't advocate for oral only instruction in pretty much awareness, but certainly an occasional uh daily, quick review that's oral only. That's that's totally fine.

Melissa

And what about with younger kids? I'm just thinking about what I do with my son is oral only. Um, but it's I mean, he's still just learning his letters, too.

Matt Burns

I don't have data on this. That's a darn good question. Uh, but this is the what I'm talking about today is kindergarten up. So um I think it makes a lot more sense for preschoolers to do oral only. And I don't have uh uh a data set to pull that up on William, but that's the case that that with preschoolers, you know what? When you're driving down the car, you're playing a uh a reading game with a kid that involves with your own child, involves listening for sounds. Please do that a lot. Do that every day. Yes, that's a great thing to do.

Melissa

We can hear the rhyming sounds. That's awesome.

Matt Burns

Yes, absolutely. There's no yes, do that all the time.

Lori

I'm thinking of those silly songs that um we used to sing, like, and you where you would rhyme like down by the bay, down by the bay, right? Like those little, like one of the Rafi songs that are just Yeah.

Matt Burns

So one thing I would do for those is emphasize the rhyme. So I think it's actually the kids love this too. Like, I'll go, I won't yell too valid because I don't want to blow any of the speakers, but you go, twinkle, twinkle, little star. How I wonder what you are. So if you sing it, still emphasize the word. Um that helps them hear it as well.

Lori

Oh yeah, I'm sure they would get into yelling.

Matt Burns

Yes.

Lori

I'm also thinking of I've never sung this much on a podcast. Um I've I'm thinking of some of the other ones where um what is it, where you change the sound. So I'm thinking there's lots of ways to do this. You know, even apples and bananas songs. Yeah, that we're like to eat, eat, eat, right? So you're like, you know what song it is.

Matt Burns

But the um but I think like you wanted me to keep going.

Lori

You're like, God, you haven't sung for a while. I'm gonna get, you know what, this is like my American Idol debut. I'm gonna become pregnant.

Matt Burns

Uh yeah, those are fun. Yeah, I I think it's advantageous if they're if the words are are actual words. Um but yeah, it's right. Yes. I mean it's never studied it.

Lori

Kind of sounds like panini, so who knows, you know? It does. That's fair. No, these are great. Um there's just there's just so many fun ways to work this in.

Melissa

Yeah. And especially at the younger, you know, I mean, before they even start kindergarten, like like you're saying, these are these are fun ways to just have them start hearing sounds, thinking about the sounds and words, those kinds of things. But I

Is PA A Result Of Reading

Melissa

like what you said about once once we hit kindergarten, let's get those letters as soon as possible. So one question, another question I had, um, just because I've seen this floating around very recently, um, Mark Seidenberg, who is another researcher, he uh recently shared some slides on his website of a presentation he gave, um, which a lot of people are talking about for a lot of different reasons. But there was one about phonemic awareness that I saw a lot of questions um specifically on Facebook, where he, and it's so hard because all you're seeing is his slides. And so you can you have no idea what he said about these slides. But what it said on the slide was that um PA or phonemic awareness is the outcome of skilled reading, not a precursor, which I think blew some people's minds because I think people often think of it as the step before, right? Before we get to phonics, we we get kids going with phonemic awareness. And so I think that kind of like shocked a lot of people to hear that or just see that statement without any context. Um, but do you wanna do you wanna speak to that? Do you have any thoughts?

Matt Burns

I'm not sure what what he meant about speaking for him. Here's what I say is um once you learn how to once you start orthographic mapping, that is what drives your reading. And in fact, once you learn the letters and the letter sounds, that makes it easier to do phonemic awareness tasks. So I think he's talking about that. That's really I I wouldn't think of it as a precursor, by the way. Like I wouldn't use that to think of it that way either. It's more reciprocal. Uh so as you're learning phonemic awareness, you're getting better at sounds and reading the sounds and stuff. And as you're getting better at reading the sounds and letters that make the sounds, you get better at phonemic awareness. So I think they're really somewhat reciprocal. Um, so I'm not sure if that's what he meant. I think so is my guess that that really, especially the more advanced phonemic awareness tasks, that really once you learn how to do basic, uh, even basic reading, that you see that go up. So that's those are more of an outcome of reading. But the more but the isolating, blending, and segmenting, um, I think it's a little a little less true than the more advanced, but I still think of him as as pretty much reciprocal.

Melissa

Yeah, I that that one you mentioned about the reversal, I think you did 10 and the the reverse of it is net. I know we I did that something similar in when I went to the Reading League conference. I was at a presentation about it, and they were like, How many of you actually pictured those letters in your head when you did it? I was like, Yeah, I totally did. That's how I did it. I just pictured the T E and I flipped it, and I knew it was N-E-A-T. I didn't even really need to listen to the sounds. I knew the word, I knew 10, and then I knew what it is when you flip the letters.

Matt Burns

So Yep, your your 10-second answer or response was was explained it better than mine. Well said. That's exactly right. You picture the letters. But see, the other thing is um we uh I was at a conference and the speaker was presenting some advanced phonemic awareness skill I didn't I'd never heard of. And I'm sitting at a table with people I don't know, they're all teachers. And I'm like, wow, this is really cool. And so I ask everyone, Did you know this? I'm like, no, this is new to me, too. I'm like, oh good. And writing it all down, taking notes. I look up and say, Wait a minute. Can you can you do this? Like, well, I'd have to practice it. I don't know. Oh, okay, well, can you all read? And they all went, Well, yeah, we're good readers. So if we can all read and none of us knew this, or we think we could even do this, do we need the skill to read? So I think oftentimes we get a little uh wrapped up in these great ideas, interesting ideas, and we really lose sight of boy, the basic foundations of what we need. And and those are what should be working on.

Melissa

I see that question too a lot where people say, like, I've you know, I I had this student and he's reading just fine, but I did this phonemic awareness test and he bombed it. What do I do?

Matt Burns

Throw the test away. Have have the kid read. Yes. So I do so that's there are some uh phonemic awareness that are presented as phonological awareness, and they're re they they do include phonological awareness, but they also include these more advanced skills. Uh and if if if you've got a kid who's reading well, not even reading well, uh I'll say this. This

Older Readers Need Decoding First

Matt Burns

a study I did, this is under review, under review right now. We looked at this very question and we looked at the advanced skill, and the only one we used was Elysium. And we wanted to see among second and third graders who were struggling readers, first of all, they scored really well on phonemic awareness. Uh in kindergarten, phonemic awareness should be the focus of kindergarten reading instruction. Uh it's absolutely a big part of first grade. By second grade, it starts to, you know, it it's it goes down. So we took second and third graders who were struggling readers, measured their phony week awareness, their finance with a non-sensword fluency measure, and their overall reading skills. And um in second and third grade, blending a segmenting didn't really predict among these struggling readers. Collision predicted literally zero, less than one percent. What but um decoding I mean decoding predicted like 50% of the variance, some crazy amount of of the variance. So so uh decoding among the second and third graders predicted reading. Among the struggling readers, the food-make awareness measures didn't. So second and third grade, if they're not learning, if they're having troubles with reading, you're better off to work on decoding than you are fooding awareness, regardless of the foodie-makerwareness skill. Now I will say that's a nuanced answer. Um I feel badly for practitioners because they email me all the time. I get emails all the time, and I love that. But they say, hey, what do I do? My response is always, well, it depends. Right? Like researchers, we always start with that. Well, it depends on this. So, so it depends. So, if yes, if I have a second or third grader, heck, fourth grader with a reading disability who lacks basic phonemic awareness, you should be working on that, absolutely, but not by itself. While you're working on on phonics. But I'm saying if you're if your kids in second, third, or fourth grade or even older and struggling with reading, you're probably better off to start with phonics than phonemic awareness.

Using Nonsense Words For Assessment

Melissa

That is great. And did I hear in there that nonsense word fluency assessments might be more beneficial than phonemic awareness assessments?

Matt Burns

Well, um, in second and third, second among these kids, struggling readers, second through whatever, fifth grade, uh, yeah, I think a nonsense for fluency measure can really help. So, nonsense, if any teachers out there listening to this cringe at that word, I used to cringe about it too. When I was the director of the Minnesota Center for Reading Research, gosh, nonsense word used to drive me nuts. Yes, because it's not reading, but it's okay. It's not supposed to be reading. It's can they sound out the words? It's all that measure is. Don't overinterpret it, don't underinterpret it, because I think it's gonna be helpful for you to see can the does the kid have basic decoding? Now, it doesn't tell you if they it tells you yes or no, right? So if it says they're low, they don't have good decoding skills, you still don't know really what to do. And I have to get out a decoding inventory to see what skills they have and don't have, but it'll tell you with pretty good accuracy, can these kids sound out words? So, man, I I think nonsense word measures are really helpful when working with kids who are who still have learning uh difficulties.

Lori

And with nonsense words, we're talking about assessment, not teaching those words.

Matt Burns

Thank you very much. Yes, yes, assessment, yes.

Lori

Yeah. Why do we not teach those? Can you just elaborate on that?

Matt Burns

Well, I don't want kids learning learning made-up words. Remember, orthographic mapping. I don't want them to see these and learn this this made-up word, then eventually confuse a real word with this with this made-up word. Um, you know, it's not to say they couldn't practice some or something, but don't teach them.

Melissa

Um same reason we can do eaples and beninis.

Matt Burns

Right. So uh I had a colleague Lori Hellman, she and I were co-directors of the Minnesota Center for Research. She was from Curriculum Instruction, I was from EdSec. And she's wonderful, super smart, really great. She what her area, one of her areas of expertise was emerging bilinguals, uh or emerging, you know, ELL, what we typically call an English language learner. And I was pushing for nonsense word type stuff, and she used to just disagree because the kids were English learners. And she said to me, Finally, Matt, I don't ever want to put a word in front of a kid for whom English is not their first language. That's a fake word. That's not like that was such a good point. So I still think they have utility for assessment for kids who are emerging bilingual, but boy, I'm really cautious about them uh when it comes to teaching.

Three Practical Classroom Takeaways

Lori

All right. So I feel like it's a really good time to kind of pull together. We've talked about a whole lot today. And I know my brain is on fire, Matt. So if we're thinking about teachers listening, what are maybe like three practical takeaways that a teacher could implement in their classroom? And I'm like, I feel like maybe I'll kick you off with the first one is teach, teach blending, segmenting, and isolating. I heard that was very important. Like I'm when I'm thinking of like key takeaways from today's conversation, that's coming with me. That is in my notes, starred, underlined, folded, right? So do you want to elaborate on that uh or any more?

Matt Burns

Or I'll add I'll add a couple more. So yeah, so um a couple takeaways, yes. Teach those the the the Trinity, as I now will call them. That's that's that's funny. Um, teach those three, absolutely. Uh don't get too hung up on rhyming. It's okay to assess rhyming, it's okay to teach it if they don't have it, but if they don't learn it, move on. Don't worry about rhyming. Um assess decoding in kids who are struggling, older kids, you're probably better off to focus on on decoding, but certainly in kindergarten first grade, phonemic awareness needs to be explicitly taught. Um, and and it's okay to use letters to teach phonemic awareness to help them build that grapheme phoneme correspondence as soon as you can. Because remember, the the desired outcome is always better reading.

Melissa

And you're still teaching phonemic awareness.

Matt Burns

You're still teaching phonemic awareness, yes. It's okay.

Lori

I also love just categorize it as teaching reading, right? I mean, that's the end goal and putting it under that bigger bucket. Like that, that was a great reframe for me today, too. Like not to get too hung up in the minutiae of the details there, just feeling good that I'm teaching the skills that they need because I'm teaching them how to read.

Matt Burns

Yeah, exactly. And and if a teacher is doing some oral-only review, like games and stuff, don't beat yourself up. I'm not saying you can't do that. Absolutely. Just keep it quick, a couple of minutes at the at the most, uh, and then get back when you're doing your primary instruction to be sure it includes letters as as much as you can.

Lori

Um, Matt, I you know, I'm gonna have to follow up with you because I have three uh studies that you mentioned that you were involved in that uh we're gonna we're gonna need links for because our listeners will hunt us down and get there, like I wanna get this is just amazing. Like I I love that our listeners are so excited about everything, like even some things like we don't even catch on, and we're like, oh, I don't remember that person saying that. But and we were in the conversation. So we're gonna make sure that we grab those from you so we can include it all in the show notes.

Matt Burns

Okay, great. Awesome.

Best Resources To Learn More

Melissa

And we'll also include a link to the webinar that you did because it's fantastic. So if people want to hear even more, they can hear more, which I know some of it will be the same as what we talked about today, but that's okay. It's good to hear things more than one time. Um, but do you have any other suggestions for people if they want to learn more about Funny Make Awareness of like where they can go or text to read or anything?

Matt Burns

Yeah, well, you also you mentioned the the uh Florida Center. That's a good one. Uh I have to mention the UFLI Foundations. Um that's a I feel very fortunate to be working here with with that group uh who developed that with you know, Holly, Lane, and uh Valentina contessa. They contest, they developed a really nice um program. So there's really so teacher, people ask me what's a good introduction to reading textbook for pre-service teachers. The UFLA Foundation's manual is really good.

Melissa

The introduction to that manual is gold. Yes. So it's simple simple, but so much information.

Matt Burns

Yeah, it is. It's and very, very easily, very put forward, easy to read. Wow, great.

Lori

I I keep it on my desk all the time. I I know that's really nerdy, but I have a little stack of things that I keep to refer to often, and that is my this is part of my like stack of Bible books, you know.

Matt Burns

Good. That's great. There's others as well. Like Road to the Code is always a go-to for me. That's been around for a while. Um, that's a good one as well. There are there are certainly others.

Lori

Um Road to the Code. Road to the Code. I'm sorry, my rhyming wasn't like spot on in that moment. Okay. Road to the code.

Matt Burns

Yeah, Road to the Code is a is a is a good one too, that I've used quite a bit. Um you know, if you if you go to Amazon and just put in phonemic awareness games, there's like 10 books that are just games that I use all the time. Um but also the Florida Center has has lots of really nice uh activities too. And then the last thing I'll recommend is you if you haven't looked at the National Reading Panel Report, I really encourage you to look at that. Um that's a that's a really helpful tool. Uh it explains things really well. It does get technical in some places, but explains things really well. And then finally, if you Google IES, those letters, IES Practice Guides, it's the Institute for Education Science, the Department of the Branch of the Department of Education that deals with research. IES Practice Guides. There's a whole bunch of free PDFs about all kinds of topics, some many of which are reading. And um, they're written by researchers, but they're written for practitioners and they're really well done. They're super, they say, do this, do this, do this, here's how to do this. It's really, really well done. So Google those, the IES practice guides, and there's some great resources on reading and and and um other, you know, math and and and other things as well. So really great resource.

Melissa

Excellent. Now I'm Googling everything. I can I have to stay focused.

Lori

Yeah. We're we're gonna link all of this in the show notes, including we uh podcasted with uh Holly Lane, who you mentioned. And we'll link that episode as well because she was she was epic. She talked about is science of reading, uh is it science or snake oil, right? And went through, yeah, it was great. So she talked talked about that webinar, which was really awesome.

Melissa

Yeah, you're very lucky to get to work with her.

Lori

Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Matt. This has been amazing. I know I've learned so much, and I know our listeners are so appreciative of your time. So thank you.

Matt Burns

Thank you. I enjoyed it.

Melissa

To stay

Closing And Stay Connected

Melissa

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Lori

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Melissa

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Lori

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