Understanding How Words are Read
Words are read in 5 ways: they are predicted, sounded out, chunked, read by analogy, or recognized immediately. Words that are recognized immediately are often referred to as sight words, and the ability to recognize words on sight reflects well-established connections between the word’s printed form, its pronunciation, and its definition.
Stages of Reading Words
Research reflects that students’ ability to recognize, decipher, and read words occurs in fluid, often overlapping stages. The existence of stages of reading demonstrates that learning phonics is a fundamental aspect of learning to read, and failure to integrate knowledge of phonics and phonemic awareness can result in a range of reading challenges. Once a student’s reading level, or stage of reading, is identified, instructors are best advised to meet the students where they are. Instructors should assist in the development of new skills to help raise them tot he next level while being careful not to reteach what students already know. Phonological awareness – simply one aspect of phonics learning – also occurs in a series of stages that can best be described as a continuum of skills. The stages of reading words include the prealphabetic, partial alphabetic, full alphabetic, and consolidated alphabetic stages.
The Prealphabetic Stage
The prealphabetic stage, which is alternatively referred to as the prephonemic stage, is defined by students’ recognition of words based upon selective association. Students may recognize a word based upon its length, number of vowels, or other distinctive features. Unfortunately, however, children are only able to record and decipher about 40 nonphonemic cues, which is a limited few in the scope of an early elementary level vocabulary; thus further development of phonics skills is necessary in order to facilitate more fluid reading of text.
The Partial Alphabetic Stage
The partial alphabetic stage is characterized by students’ use of partial cues, such as a word’s initial consonant, in order to decipher words. Students at this level combine letter cues with their understanding of the word’s context in order to arrive at meaningful conclusions.
The Full Alphabetic Stage
Students have arrived at the full alphabetic stage once they have developed the ability to use their knowledge of letter-sound relationships to process the letters in any given word in their entirety. In this stage, students recognize commonalities in words and are able to spell vowel sounds, oftentimes erroneously. Also, because their focus in this stage is so heavily focused on pronunciation, students’ comprehension of the text is likely to be limited.
The Consolidated Alphabetic Stage
The consolidated alphabetic stage is marked by students’ ability to process longer and more complex units. In this stage, the relationship between the printed and spoken forms of words are solidified and well-established. More developed readers in this stage are basically able to determine nearly all the words that they encounter as sight words – with immediacy and as whole units. Additionally, over time students develop the ability to anticipate meaning and decipher new words.
Basic Principles of Phonics Instruction
A primary function of phonics instruction is to teach the skill of decoding words. In addition, the skills taught should be new and unfamiliar to the student, as reteaching skills that the student has already acquired is counterproductive. Further, the skills should be applicable in a student’s daily life and reading practices.
Like all other topics of instruction, phonics instruction should be differentiated in order to serve students of various levels of ability. It is also important that teachers factor and address dialect variation as a part of phonics instruction, as many English speakers’ pronunciation has been adapted to their regional settings or cultural norms. African-American Vernacular English and Southern Appalachian speech, for example, are two well-known and widely acknowledged dialect variations that influence the ways in which common words are spoken or pronounced.
Phonics Elements
Phonics elements include consonants, vowels, onsets, and rimes. Consonants can be broken down into individual letter sounds, digraphs, and clusters. Vowels consist of at least 16 sounds, most of which having two to four major spellings. Onsets are defined as “the consonant or cluster preceding the rime” and rimes are “the vowel or vowels and consonants that follow” (Gunning, 2012, p. 195).
Approaches to Teaching Phonics
Phonics instruction is best suited for small, highly targeted groups as opposed to whole classes. Because four processors – the othographic, phonological, meaning, and context – are active in the decoding process, phonics is considered just one component of a larger language process. Instructors are best advised to present phonics in context, as this approach allows students to derive greater meaning and “connect phonics functionally to the total language system” (Gunning, 2012, p. 193).
While the analytic approach allows instructors to teach consonants in the context of the whole word, the synthetic approach helps students to learn to decode words sound by sound. Best practices in the teaching of phonics include the use of both approaches. Additionally, whole-to-part instruction is a top-down approach that allows instructors to present words in context, then proceed to explain individual elements, whereas part-to-whole approaches allow them to teach the skill first, then apply it in context. Other alternatives include the embedded and systematic approaches. Unlike the systematic approach, which allows teachers to teach phonics concepts in logical order, the embedded approach helps teachers present target skills and concepts as they arise in context.
The recommended process for presenting phonics concepts include enhancing phonemic awareness and letter-sound integration skills, conducting guided practices, applying the skill, writing and spelling, and evaluating and reteaching the skill. Instructors are encouraged to teach initial consonants first, then build up to decoding and other more complex concepts and operations.
References
Baker-Bell, A. (2013). “I never really knew the history behind African American language”: Critical language pedagogy in an advanced placement English language arts class. Equity and Excellence in Education, 46(3), 355-370. doi:10.1080/10665684.2013.80684
Dunstan, S. B., & Jaeger, A. J. (2015). Dialect and influences on the Academic experiences of College Students. The Journal of Higher Education, 86(5), 777–803.
Falth, L., Gustafson, S., & Vensson, I. (2017). Phonological awareness training with articulation promotes early reading development. Education, 137(3), 261-276.
Folsom, M. & Folsom, M. (1986). Easy as Pie. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Garten, J. (1964). The Alphabet Tale. New York, NY: Harper Collins.
Gunning, T. (2012). Creating literacy instruction for all children (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.
Pufpaff, L. (2009). A developmental continuum of phonological sensitivity skills. Psychology in the Schools, 46(7), doi:10.1002/pits.20407
