The Survey Says
New research in education has led to new methods of instruction in language arts. According to educator Sharon Linde, young children in kindergarten still learn the basics, but the methods of instruction have shifted towards a hands-on approach that allows them to experience learning.
ESGI and ThinkFives polled hundreds of ELA teachers to create this Top 5 list of ELA activities that successful teachers use with their students.
Read-Alouds
“Teachers have been reading aloud to students for years and the research base on the power of read-alouds is extensive and well-documented. Research has shown that read-alouds improve comprehension (Duke & Pearson, 2008), vocabulary (Massaro, 2017), and fluency (Trelease, 2001). Read-alouds allow the teacher to model expert, fluent reading of the text.
This liberates the students from having to do the work of decoding and allows them to focus on comprehension, acquisition of new vocabulary, phonemic awareness, etc.,” according to Dr. Betsey Okello of the Notre Dame Center for Literacy Education.
Benefits of Read Alouds
The read-aloud process has enormous benefits to literacy learning. Read-aloud is an instructional practice where teachers, parents, and caregivers read texts aloud to children. The reader incorporates variations in pitch, tone, pace, volume, pauses, eye contact, questions, and comments to produce a fluent and enjoyable delivery. Reading texts aloud is the single most important activity for building the knowledge required for successful reading (McCormick, 1977).
Sources
Phonological Awareness
“Phonological awareness (PA) is the ability to attend to the sounds in language and the ability to manipulate those sounds. Children attend to and reflect on the phonological components, separate from meaning. PA includes the ability to detect, isolate, manipulate, blend, or segment units of sound in spoken language (Ehri, 1989). Research has found that children who do well on PA tasks at the end of kindergarten will be good readers in fourth grade.” (NEFEC)
According to Lauren at The Teachable Teacher, “Phonological Awareness is a broad term and comprises a group of skills that progress developmentally, but of course, overlap as children mature. As phonological awareness skills develop, children will begin to attend to, discriminate, remember, and manipulate (segment/blend) words and sounds at these levels or chunks.”
For example:
- Segmenting syllables: What parts do you hear in rainbow? >> rain and bow
- Deleting rimes: Say pencil without cil. >> pen
- Isolating phonemes: What’s the first sound you hear in cup? >> /k/
- Blending onset and rime: What happens if we put ch and in together?
- Matching phonemes: What’s another word that starts like lap? >> like (or any word that starts with /l/)
Sources
http://www2.nefec.org/erf/phonologicalawareness/
https://www.ateachableteacher.com/phonological-awareness-vs-phonemic-awareness/
Heggerty Phonemic Awareness
To build its case for phonemic awareness, the Heggerty organization shares several statistics:
- 65% of 4th graders and 66% of 8th graders are reading below a proficient level, according to 2019 NAEP scores.
- 95% of elementary students are capable of learning to read when they receive sufficient instruction on foundational reading skills.
- 99% of teachers surveyed said Heggerty meets or exceeds expectations when it comes to having a positive impact on learning outcomes.
Studies have shown that phonemic awareness is a foundational skill, essential for learning to read. As students learn to identify sounds through oral and auditory activities, they become phonemically aware. Engaging in phonemic awareness instruction develops students’ understanding of sounds, and that knowledge directly impacts their spelling and writing.
Source
Word Blending/Building
“What is Word Building? Both The Montessori Method and The Orton Gillingham Approach utilize the instructional strategy of word building with a moveable alphabet of some sort, as an inherent tool for literacy instruction. Word building is the act of sounding out and then spelling words with a moveable type of alphabet, which can be made out of paper, foam, or wood.”
Santina DiMauro, a teacher and phonics consultant shares, “blending is not a difficult skill to master. It simply requires PRACTICE and lots of it. It’s critical to introduce children to the phonemic awareness skills of oral blending at an early age. Modelling how to orally blend to create a spoken word and how to break a word apart is how to start a child’s blending and segmenting journey. Once children can blend at an oral level, the blending of words in print becomes a lot easier. There is a great blog post on oral blending and segmenting.”
Sources
https://www.lilreadingscientists.com/word-building-as-a-tool/
https://phonicshero.com/blending/
Segmenting and Blending
According to reading specialist, Kelli Johnson, MA, “Blending involves pulling together individual sounds or syllables within words; segmenting involves breaking words down into individual sounds or syllables. Both processes require a student to hold the individual elements in mind as the word is created or taken apart. This ability to hold sounds or syllables on a ‘thinking counter space’ is facilitated by a student’s active working memory.”
Among her tips:
- Use pictures to develop students’ blending and segmenting skills.
- Let students practice counting syllables by clapping or using their fingers to tap out the number of different sounds, or phonemes, in a word.
- Follow a systematic sequence for teaching blending and segmenting activities to students.
- Give students various opportunities throughout the day to practice blending sounds to create words, and segmenting words into sounds or syllables. For example, sound games can be played while driving in the car, shopping in the grocery store, etc.
- Provide reinforcement for learning consonant blends that are particularly challenging to students.
“Segmenting sounds is the opposite of blending sounds. While segmenting sounds is an important reading skill, I find that the best application for it is for writing. If students can hear and say each sound in a word and match it to a symbol, they can write words!” (Jessica, What I Have Learned)
A few things to keep in mind when teaching students to segment sounds:
- Have students use their hands and fingers.
- Little kids are tactile creatures. They love using their hands. Teach students to use their hands to count the sounds in a word.
- Make stop sounds quick.
- When counting sounds, be sure that the stop sound has a distinct, quick stop sound. Be sure that the stop sounds don’t have a schwa sound attached to the end of it.
- Make continuous sounds a little bit longer, but not too long.
- When students say a continuous sound, don’t make it too long. You don’t want students to blend the sounds, but count them quickly.
Sources
https://www.allkindsofminds.org/word-decoding-blending-and-segmenting-sounds-impact-of-memory
https://www.whatihavelearnedteaching.com/tips-student-success-blending-segmenting/
Have you tried any of these methods? What methods are we missing that will help student’s English knowledge or understanding?