Teach Them ALL to Read

Catching Kids Before They Fall Through the Cracks

Elaine K. McEwan, Elaine K. McEwan-Adkins

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781412964982
• eBook ISBN: 9781452273129
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Methods for Reading

"The second edition of Elaine McEwan?s book is a user-friendly guide that integrates research into practice. It carefully explains the research behind reading development and provides truly clear, no-nonsense steps to implement the best practices of instruction. McEwan does not sugar-coat how difficult teaching reading can be, but she provides powerful methods for achieving it."
—Jennifer Sandberg, Curriculum/Reading Coordinator
Sutherland Public School, NE

Provide effective reading instruction for every student in your classroom and schoolwide!

To successfully teach reading, teachers have to first believe that all children can learn to read—and then they have to turn that belief into a reality. In this thoroughly updated and revised version of her best-selling book, Elaine K. McEwan guides educators through the challenging but crucial work of teaching every child how to read.

Written for all teachers as well as administrators, this resource covers strategies for nine essential components of effective reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, spelling, fluency, developing a reading culture, providing opportunities to read, writing, word knowledge, and comprehension. This second edition features:

• The most up-to-date research in reading instruction
• Effective instructional practices and strategies
• Brief vignettes and graphic organizers that illustrate and summarize key concepts
• A comprehensive case study of one district?s remarkable success

This resource reveals precisely how educators in successful schools are teaching students to read—and how all educators can achieve the same results in their schools!

1

Phonemic Awareness

Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify and manipulate the sounds letters represent, including blending sounds to make words, creating rhyming patterns, and counting phonemes (individual sounds).

In my early reading workshops for principals shortly after the publication of The Principal’s Guide to Raising Reading Achievement (McEwan, 1998), I routinely asked participants if they had heard of phonemic awareness (PA). There were seldom more than one or two individuals in a group of 50 to 100 principals who knew the term. It was exciting to share the power of PA instruction with practitioners, to help struggling readers learn to read. Years later, one of the earliest attendees contacted me to report that she had dubbed PA “the magic words.” As she and her staff implemented explicit, systematic PA instruction in kindergarten and first grade, their student achievement started climbing and never stopped. Their previously low-achieving school went on to become a National Title I Distinguished School (Dobberteen, 2000) and a Chase Change Award winner (Dobberteen, 2001).

WHAT IS PHONEMIC AWARENESS AND HOW DO STUDENTS ACQUIRE IT?

The most important insight of modern reading research has been the recognition that phonics instruction may not “take” with young readers unless they are aware of the segments of speech represented by the graphemes used to spell words in an alphabetic writing system.

—Moats (2006, p. 3)

Although PA has only become an essential aspect of reading instruction during the past 10 years, research investigating the role of this constellation of skills in learning to read has been ongoing for over two decades (Liberman & Shankweiler, 1985; Wagner & Torgesen, 1987). The terms phonemic and phonological are often used interchangeably, but technically, phonological awareness is a more encompassing concept that includes all levels of the speech sound system, including words, syllables, rimes, ¹ and phonemes (Moats, 2000, p. 234). Think of phonological awareness as an umbrella and the various levels of the speech system as its spokes.

Examples of PA abilities include blending sounds together to build words, generating a list of rhyming words, or counting the number of individual sounds (phonemes) that are heard in a given word. Following are the PA skills that are most commonly assessed and taught:

• Phoneme Isolation. Recognizing individual sounds in words; for example, “Tell me the first sound in paste” (/p/).
• Phoneme Identity. Recognizing the common sound in different words; for example, “Tell me the sound that is the same in bike, boy, and bell” (/b/).
• Phoneme Categorization. Recognizing the word with the odd sound in a sequence of three or four words; for example, “Which word does not belong: bus, bun, rug?” (rug).
• Phoneme Blending. Listening to a sequence of separately spoken sounds and combining them to form a recognizable word; for example, “What word is /s/ /k/ /u/ /l/?” (school).
• Phoneme Segmentation. Breaking down a word into its sounds by tapping out or counting the sounds or by pronouncing and positioning a marker for each sound; for example, “How many phonemes in ship?” (three).
• Phoneme Deletion. Recognizing what word remains when a specified phoneme is removed; for example, “What is smile without the /s/?” (mile).

Many children acquire PA effortlessly, but there are many more, irrespective of their IQs, for whom PA tasks are extraordinarily difficult. Without PA, a child will have difficulty with seemingly simple tasks, such as generating some words that rhyme with cat or substituting the /h/ sound for the /k/ sound in cat and figuring out what the new word is. Before children can accomplish those tasks, they must be able to identify and manipulate the individual phonemes in words. This skill is a critical prerequisite to acquiring the alphabetic principle: the concept that there is a systematic relationship between the sounds of our language and the written letters. Students who enter kindergarten with low PA skills are at high risk of reading failure and need immediate and intensive interventions. Children do not tend to outgrow phonemic deficits or develop PA skills with physical maturation (Liberman & Shankweiler, 1985).

There are four ways students can acquire PA. They can be genetically endowed so as to acquire PA skills in a seemingly effortless way. They can be environmentally blessed with parents and other caregivers who have talked to them constantly, played word games incessantly, and read aloud nursery rhymes and poetry every night at bedtime. Students can even be doubly blessed with great genes and a fabulous environment. Or, failing the advantages of nature, nurture, or both, they can acquire PA skills from highly effective teachers using research-based curricula taught explicitly, systematically, supportively, and intensively.

WHEN SHOULD PHONEMIC AWARENESS BE TAUGHT?

Students who have difficulty acquiring PA may lack the experiences with language necessary to foster it, and/or may not be “wired” or biologically predisposed to figure out the structure of speech and connect that with print.

—Moats (2006, p. 3)

In a meta-analysis of early literacy studies, the National Early Literacy Panel (2008a) found that conventional reading and writing skills that are developed between birth and five years (preschool and kindergarten) are strongly related to later conventional literacy skills. Among the variables was PA and the ability to detect, manipulate, or analyze the auditory aspects of spoken language (including the ability to distinguish or segment words, syllables, or phonemes), independent of meaning.

Teaching children about the alphabet (e.g., letter names or letter sounds) or simple phonics tasks (e.g., blending letter sounds to make words) seemed to enhance the effects of PA training. The National Early Literacy Panel (2008b) found the following in their synthesis of scientific research on the development of early literacy skills in children from birth to five years of age:

The code-focused instructional efforts reported statistically significant and moderate to large effects across a broad spectrum of early literacy outcomes. Code-focused interventions consistently demonstrated positive effects directly on children’s conventional literacy skills. (p. 3)

This report confirms and builds on the findings of the Report of the National Reading Panel (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [NICHD], 2000), finding that children’s PA skills (their ability to distinguish sounds within auditory language) are an important predictor of later literacy achievements and suggesting that preschool is not too early to begin PA instruction.

In a comparison of studies conducted with kindergarten through second-grade students severely at risk, those programs with a literacy focus [i.e., explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and decoding] yielded an estimated mean effect size between approximately three and a half to four times larger than those for studies that did not use a literacy-focused curriculum (National Early Literacy Panel, 2008a, p. 196).

For students who are deficient in PA skills as determined by an assessment or students who exhibit other signs of disability or delay in kindergarten, the time to begin PA training is immediately, before formal reading instruction is initiated (O’Connor, Jenkins, & Slocum, 1993). If students begin formal reading instruction and fail, which they are almost certain to do without the ability to identify and manipulate the phonemes of the English language, both teacher and students will be frustrated. As students learn to read, PA diminishes in importance (Mehta et al., 2005), but at the preschool and kindergarten level, it should be the central focus of instruction for those students who do not have it.

THE ROLE OF PHONEMIC AWARENESS IN SKILLED READING

Effective preschool and kindergarten teachers have always included word play and rhyming games in their lesson plans. Perhaps they have instinctively known that children need these language skills to be successful readers. However, the difference between that kind of incidental instruction and the way we now know PA must be taught in order to catch students at risk of reading failure is huge. Our earlier conception of language skills as developmental in nature permitted us to explain away those students who didn’t get it as not ready (Francis, Shaywitz, Stuebing, Shaywitz, & Fletcher, 1996). We believed that students who didn’t readily catch on to natural and informal language activities just needed more time to mature. We retained them in kindergarten to give them another year to mature or placed them in a developmental first-grade or an ungraded primary class. Marilyn Adams (1990) reminds us that

The key to phonemic awareness seems to lie more in training than in age or maturation. If these children have not received the proper exposure to print and sound in either their homes or their kindergarten classrooms by age five and a half, what is there to suggest that they will by the time they are six and a half? (p. 331)

The big idea of learning to read is known as the alphabetic principle. This principle has nothing to do with knowing the alphabet song or being able to identify isolated letters by name. It is “the understanding that there are systematic and predictable relationships between written letters and spoken sounds” (Armbruster, Lehr, & Osborn, 2001, p. 12). When students understand that spoken sounds correspond to letters of the alphabet, they are on their way to becoming skilled readers and writers. As students acquire PA skills, they are gradually led to an understanding of the alphabetic principle (Liberman, Shankweiler, & Liberman, 1989). Absent PA skills, students come to a dead-end on the learning to read road.² Students without PA can be found in affluent suburban schools as well as in high-poverty inner-city schools. One cannot assume that any given child has PA skills; that is why early assessment is critical. When eager kindergarten teachers launch immediately into their favorite food phonics activities or begin to teach the letter names along with the sounds, they are literally closing the door to literacy for students at risk.³

Most published phonics programs assume that students already have phonemic abilities, and some students do. However, those students who do not have PA will struggle to make sense of phonics instruction and exhibit difficulties with sounding and blending new words, retaining words from one day to the next, and learning to spell (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998, p. 55). These students will muddle through kindergarten, hit a brick wall in first grade, and shortly thereafter begin to exhibit behavior problems, emotional distress, or even symptoms of physical illness.

If you have ever tried to teach a very bright student who had reading difficulties and you were unable to solve the riddle of why nothing seemed to work, lack of PA may well have been the reason. Because phonological abilities are relatively independent of overall intelligence (Vellutino & Scanlon, 1987; Wagner & Torgesen, 1987), a teacher can fairly assume that if a student with a normal or even high IQ and satisfactory listening comprehension is floundering in reading, one highly probable explanation for the problem is lack of PA skills. The student who cannot hear the individual phonemes in spoken words is unable to take the next step in acquiring the ability to read: learning how these sounds correspond to the letters of the alphabet.

When I asked one researcher about the importance of PA, he called it the “500-pound gorilla.” The description is not terribly scientific, but it succinctly summarizes the major role that PA plays in reading success. If a 500-pound gorilla doesn’t get your attention with regard to the importance of PA instruction, consider the scientific evidence found in the next section.

SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE FOR PHONEMIC AWARENESS INSTRUCTION

The Report of the National Reading Panel (NICHD, 2000) reviewed multiple experimental and quasi-experimental studies of PA instruction and reported positive effects on reading, spelling, and phonological development, not only for students at risk but also for normal achievers (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1989; Cunningham, 1990; Lie, 1991; Lundberg, Frost, & Peterson, 1988; O’Connor et al., 1993; Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 1997; Vellutino & Scanlon, 1987). In a comprehensive review of the following most time-intensive intervention studies (Brown & Felton, 1990; Foorman, Fletcher, Francis, Schatschneider, & Mehta, 1998; Iversen & Tunmer, 1993; Torgesen, Alexander, et al., 2001; Torgesen, Wagner, Rashotte, & Herron, 2003; Torgesen, Wagner, Rashotte, Rose, et al., 1999), Torgesen (2002) concluded, “Intensive preventive instruction can bring the average word-reading skills of children at risk for reading disabilities solidly into the average range” (p. 94). There are several prerequisites to implementing the kind of PA instruction that Torgesen describes:

• Knowledgeable, skilled, and committed teachers
• Strong instructional support from administrators, specialists, and coaches
• Adequate amounts of time to bring students to mastery

EFFECTIVE INSTRUCTIONAL PRACTICES FOR TEACHING PHONEMIC AWARENESS

In order to teach them all to read in kindergarten, instruction must be differentiated, explicit, systematic, supportive, intensive, and specialized...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• About the Author
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Phonemic Awareness
• 2. Phonics
• 3. Spelling
• 4. Fluency
• 5. Word and World Knowledge
• 6. Comprehension
• 7. Reading a Lot
• 8. Writing
• 9. A Reading Culture
• References
• Index