Earlier this week I was concerned to read that an early years teacher new to Structured Literacy (SL) was saying she was ‘mixing it up', and combining elements of explicit, direct instruction in phonics as well as some ‘look and say’ high frequency word teaching using predictable readers.
I’m sure she is a well-meaning teacher and believes some of her methods of old are effective. However, in SL our teaching is meant to follow the evidence-based, peer-reviewed science and not just what we ‘feel’ works or the results we get with a particular set of students. SL is designed to work for the most children at any given time or place.
All the terminology to be used perhaps complicates understanding. For instance, common or high frequency words (HFWs) get called ‘sight words’ by some, and then there is the difference between decodable words and irregular words (or ‘heart’ words!) to learn, too.
There are a very few HFWs that beginner readers do need to be exposed to frequently as they begin to apply their phonics knowledge to hearing, saying, reading, and spelling or writing sounds.
However, my understanding is that we need to still explicitly explain which parts of the high frequency word they could decode and which parts are ‘tricky’ or advanced code they have yet to learn, and need memorising at this stage by ‘heart ’= hence ‘heart words’.
Brain research shows that teaching words phonetically helps strengthen the pathways in the brain that lead to efficient and effective reading, whereas ‘look and say’ methods train the brain to read inefficiently, by treating whole words as pictures rather than a sequence of sounds.
Why am I bothering to post about this? Because refining our teaching practice is a journey that takes time, but we can also take mis-turns or end up in cul de sacs if we ignore helpful navigation. Yet we have a duty of care to our learners to speed up our skills as soon as possible, so we shouldn’t waste time in personal experiments if there is a reliable method shown to get the best results.
So, I recommend, we do the PD readings and don’t skip over the background science when adapting our teaching practice from ‘balanced literacy’ to Structured Literacy. Know ‘why’ we do something this way, and not just ‘how’.
As to any teacher using predictable readers, I advise caution: while ‘look and say’ can help children learn HFWs, we want most of their words to be mapped orthographically, rather than through visual memory, as there is a limit to how much information children can store in their working memory.
It is far better to remember sound/spelling patterns, to build hundreds and thousands of words, rather than clogging up the working memory with only a few hundred rote memorised words.
Furthermore, guessing words by context or picture clues undermines the role of teaching children to read phonetically. It is far more important to teach children to keep their ‘eyes on the words’.
Ten HFW to teach beginner readers: the, a, I, to, and, was, for, you, is, of
https://www.readingrockets.org/article/new-model-teaching-high-frequency-words
Further reading:
https://www.phonicbooks.co.uk/advice-and-resources/free-teaching-resources/phonic-high-frequency-word-chart/ HFWs sorted by phonetic difficulty, starting from CV pattern.
https://keystoliteracy.com/blog/high-frequency-sight-words/
https://www.reallygreatreading.com/content/make-tricky-sight-words-sticky-really-great-reading-blog
No comments:
Post a Comment