Mark Weakland Literacy

To more effectively build students' foundational reading skills, help children build a storehouse of words in their brain, and teach this basic body of store-able words in in a way that is different than traditional "sight word" instruction.

Over the last three years, as I have read the research and writing of Linnea Ehri, Mark Seidenberg, and Maryanne Wolf, I often found myself reflecting upon how words are really learned and read, and how the sight word instruction I gave to my reading impaired third graders and developmentally-typical kindergarten children was, at times, inappropriate and ineffective. In March of 2018, I wrote a blog titled “No More Sight Words.” Then, just this month during a spelling presentation and in an email response to a teacher, I found myself once again discussing sight word instruction. So I thought it appropriate for me to devote this month’s blog to the body of words that many call “sight words” and a few call “early automatic reading vocabulary words” (Rawlins & Invernezzi, 2019). But my preferred term is brain words, a term coined by Richard Gentry and Gene Ouellette in their book Brain Words: How the Science of Reading Informs Teaching (Gentry & Ouellette, 2019). 

I prefer the term brain words because I want to move away from the term “sight words," its associated meaning, and its associated method of word instruction: presenting high-frequency and “irregular” words on cards, four to five at a time, using instruction routines that force kids to rely solely on sight to move the words into long-term memory.

I’m using quotes around “sight words” and “irregular" because as we will soon see, words such as when, said, all, and some aren’t solely learned through sight, nor are they outrageously difficult to decode (and thus they are not truly irregular). The term brain words more accurately reflects how foundational reading is brought about by the workings of our brain, which encodes words in the dictionary of the mind, and best-practice instruction that presents highly-usable words in activities that connect meaning, pronunciation, and spelling. Here’s what Gentry and Ouellette have to say about words and instruction: “Teaching students to read [is] about fostering developmental changes within each student’s brain that lead to improved reading. The missing piece of effective reading instruction enables the brain to become specialized for reading so that it can store brain-based spelling representations. This process is called orthographic learning, and the resulting brain-based representations are what we call brain words” (p. 3).

As I have discussed in previous posts, Mark Seidenberg’s Eternal Triangle is my go-to model for understanding the foundational workings of the reading brain. The three points of his amazing triangle are sound, spelling, and meaning (or phonology, orthography, and semantics). When we consider the triangle in light of Linnea Ehri,'s research, we know that fluent word reading occurs when children immediately pronounce and understand the words they see. These instantly recognizable words are read from memory, with no need to sound them out (Ehri, 2005, 2014). In other words, they are brain words.

All words recognized automatically are brain words. A brain word is stored in the brain’s dictionary, ready for instant use in reading (or writing) whenever it is seen on a list or in a sentence. It can, of course, be found on the Dolch list and the Fry list, but it can also be found on a word wall, in a picture book, on a spelling or phonic list, and in early chapter books found in your classroom library.

Linnea Ehri’s research illuminates how words are stored in the brain through repeated opportunities to engage in a process that involves decoding (turning letters into sounds) AND attaching a meaning to the combined sounds. Unfortunately, some teachers try to get children to store words in their brain dictionary through instruction that looks and sounds like this:

• Teacher pulls five words - does, said, put, the, of - from a stack of the 100 most frequently occurring words.
• Teacher (holding up the word card does): “Children, this is the word does. ‘He does most of the cooking.’ D-O-E-S, does. What word is this?”
• Students: “Does.”
• Teacher (holding up the word card said):, “Children, this is the word said. ‘She said his food is tasty.’ S-A-I-D, said. What word is this?”
• Students: “Said.”
• Teacher (holding up the word card put): “Children, this is the word put. ‘She put salt on her food.’ P-U-T, put. What word is this?”
• Students: “Put.”

A week later the teacher presents five more words in the same manner. Then, a week after that, five more are given. At the end of the month, the teacher pulls the students aside, one at a time, and tests each child on the twenty words. What does she typically find? After four weeks of instruction, a few kids know most of the twenty, some know ten or twelve, some know only five, and one has failed to store any words.

Presenting high-frequency words on cards to children and drilling them in a sight-based routine is something of a tradition in schools. Now, I am not necessarily knocking tradition. Traditions preserve history, foster togetherness, provide comfort, and build strength in a community or family. But some traditions hold us back and shield us from the truth. The traditional word instruction routine described above falls into the latter category. It is a practice that results in too little learning over too much time, it ignores the neuro-scientific truth of the reading process, and when students fail to master the 100, 200, or even 500 words their teachers are trying to cram into their heads, it causes worry and stress in the kids and their parents.

The “learn it strictly by sight” method is problematic because it doesn’t make use of the way a human brain actually encodes written information. The human brain is a pattern recognition machine and a meaning making machine, and at its most foundational level it reads words through a seamless process of connecting sound, spelling, and meaning. This means that to efficiently and effectively teach children brain words - words that are instantly pronounced and understood when they are seen - we need instructional routines that:

• Connect sight, sound, and meaning;
• Directly and explicitly point out letters and letter chunks that are mappable (regularly phonetic and pattern-based);
• Directly give word definitions, engage children in discussions of meaning, and provide context; and
• Offer many opportunities for interacting with the words, both in writing and in reading.

For example, the word ME is best taught by teaching a child to recognize the letters M and E, associating the sounds /m/ and /e/ with the letters, building the word from letter tiles or blocks, presenting the word ME in association with other similarly patterned words (such as BE, WE, SHE, and HE, as in the "Keys of e" shown below), reading the word in books, and writing the word in sentences such as “Look at me” or “My mom wants me to go to bed.”

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Many, if not most, high-frequency words contain highly mappable (phonetically regular) letter-sound associations. These associations often appear in analogous words that demonstrate the same pattern. Thus, most “irregular words” aren’t very irregular! One truly irregular word is OF. It has no analogies and thus no mappable sounds. But many other words, such as put and said have highly regular consonant pronunciations -it is only the vowels that are out of the ordinary. And so, a teacher can point out that the P and T in put is the same as the P and T in pot, pit, pat, and pet, just as the S and D in said is the same as the S and D in sad, sled, and slid.  And most words on the Fry  and Dolch lists, such as in, that, it, just, him, ask and day, contain totally predictable patterns found in many analogous words (like spin, cat, little, must, rim, little, and say).

One last thing: teachers miss the boat when they concentrate too much on brain words that convey little meaning. These are the words of Fry’s First 100 Words, words like the, was, have, are, for and from. Rawlins and Invernezzi remind us that the research of Ehri (and others) has repeatedly shown that children learn concrete nouns, adjectives, and action verbs more readily than articles and prepositions. This means it makes more sense to emphasize words such as these: food, woman, water, people, run, play, happy, and big. These are the words we want to teach to the point of becoming brain words, for once children have a repository of brain words, they are ready for guided and independent reading and writing.

In their excellent Reading Teacher article Reconceptualizing Sight Words (May/June, 2019), Amanda Rawlins and Marcia Invernezzi offer five helpful assertions that speak to word learning and teaching early readers (and I would add struggling readers). They are:

1. The term sight words does not mean these words are learned solely by sight.
2. Words are easier to learn when they are concrete, high-imagery nouns, adjectives, or action verbs.
3. Words chosen for sight word learning must include more than high-frequency words; they should be purposefully chosen from the texts students are reading.
4. Words stick in memory through careful mapping of pronunciations to meaning through spelling.
5. Sight word learning requires instructional activities depending on the student’s level of word knowledge. 

In conclusion, I encourage you to talk to parents and other teachers about how children best learn words and I challenge you to swap out the term "sight word" for the term brain word. And keep your eyes on the prize: promoting lots and lots of real world language comprehension and extended reading in school and at home. As Gentry and Ouellette say in Brain Words: “The more you read and study and experience life, the more words you add to that dictionary in your brain.” (p. 4).

Articles and Books Cited and Referenced

• Ehri, L.C. (2005). Learning to read words: Theory, findings, and issues. Scientific Studies of Reading, 9(2), 167–188. https://doi. org /10.1207/s1532799xssr0902_4 
• Ehri, L.C. (2014). Orthographic mapping in the acquisition of sight word reading, spelling memory, and vocabulary learning. Scientific Studies of Reading, 18(1), 5–21. https://doi.org /10.1080/10888438.2013.819356
• Rawlins. A. & Invernizzi, M. Reconceptualizing Sight Words: Building an Early Reading Vocabulary. The Reading Teacher. May/June, 2019. Vol. 72 No. 6 pp. 711–719. doi:10.1002/trtr.1789 
• Gentry, R. & Ouellette, G. Brain Words: How the Science of Reading Informs Teaching. Stenhouse Publishing: Portsmouth, NH. 2019.

Mark Seidenberg's eternal triangle shows the fundamental elements of reading and gives a visual for the reading process. One reading pathway uses all three points of the triangle. This is the sublexical (decoding) route and it is wired through instruction that teaches young children phonemes, letter identification, sound-letter associations, and phonic/spelling patterns. Another pathway is the lexical, the reading circuit that utilizes whole words and flows between orthographic processing and semantic processing.  As  readers become more accomplished, this pathway is used more often because perceiving whole words and instantly connecting them to sound and meaning is more efficient than perceiving chunks, matching them to sounds, and blending everything into words.

​THE REALITY OF DYSLEXIA
“No single truth does not mean no truth.” 
-    Iain McGilchrist

We live in a time when observable facts, documented information, and scientific findings are not only questioned but are aggressively replaced by misinformation, false dichotomies, and downright lies. “Vaccines cause autism, its either jobs or the environment, climate change is a hoax and the earth is flat…” Good grief!  Although debates about serious two-sided issues are healthy and necessary, and scientific truths often emerge only after decades of deliberation and argument, not all thoughts and ideas are worthy of equal consideration and, after a point, some are not worthy of consideration at all.

When it comes to teaching reading, vast troves of information are available to answer questions about what constitute effective foundational literacy practices, why reading difficulties arise, and what teachers can do to prevent and correct them. Likewise, there is much evidence to support the idea that dyslexia is a biological, brain-based condition that affects how some children (and adults) think and learn, and that certain types of instruction help readers surmount difficulties caused by the condition. Dr. Sally Shaywitz said this almost fifteen years ago: “As a result of extraordinary scientific progress, reading and dyslexia are no longer a mystery; we now know what to do to ensure that each child becomes a good reader and how to help readers of all ages and all levels” (Shaywitz, 2005).

Knowing the science of reading and the biological basis of some reading difficulties is tremendously important. Over the years I have talked with many parents whose children were having a hard time learning to read. These parents were distressed to see their children falling behind, upset when no one knew why their kids were struggling, and angered when they had to do battle with school systems that were unable or unwilling to assess their child fully and provide some kind of meaningful help. Unattended / unassessed dyslexia can be extremely difficult for kids, too. I have seen them frustrated, angered, and intimidated by their reading difficulties, and I’ve felt for them. 

If the educational community could straight up acknowledge dyslexia, it would accomplish a number of important things. First, children would be in a better position to understand themselves and not engage in blaming themselves for their difficulties. As they grow older, they could play to their strengths and work around their weaknesses. Knowing that dyslexia is a real condition helps parents, too, because they can better help their kids navigate their feelings and struggles.  Finally, acknowledging dyslexia and educating others about it would help teachers understand how to instruct their students, both generally and specifically, and support children with dyslexia as they engage in the difficult task of learning to read.

Acknowledging the truths of dyslexia allows us to move on to the business of “preventing and overcoming reading difficulties.” (Kilpatrick, 2015). And we need to get moving because the times in which we live demand action on many fronts.  Concerning dyslexia, one action is using foundational literacy instruction that can be used to both prevent many reading difficulties and overcome them. This instruction is grounded in both science and common sense, logically arrived at, relatively easy to implement, and far removed from “pendulum swings” and “paradigm shifts.”
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In general, this type of instruction addresses the needs of many children, not just those with reading difficulties, takes place in general classrooms, and with some tweaking and connecting, functions in Tiers II and III as well. Also, it need not be program-based. More specifically, the instruction that prevents and overcomes reading difficulties (regardless of whether they arise from dyslexia), includes building language comprehension and background knowledge, as well as regular doses of phonemic awareness instruction (and more for those who need it), lots of phonics and spelling instruction, and many opportunities to read extended text (during all types of reading times, such as guided, independent, literature circles, and so forth).

Here I want to clearly state that teaching kids phonics and teaching kids “reading” are in no way antithetical and attempts to frame reading instruction as a war between two camps is misleading and unhelpful. Teaching is inclusive, not exclusive. Thus, in all grades, kids are learning to read and reading to learn. There is decoding and encoding instruction (sometimes a lot of it) as well as metacognition and meaning instruction. And many opportunities for extended reading are present so that kids can practice their reading skills, and here I am talking about both phonics and meaning-making skills.

There is too much ideological and binary thinking in our world. This is why I am dreaming of informational books devoted to literacy instruction based on multiple areas of theory and comprised of science-based, positive, and practical teaching actions that work with both whole groups and small groups, with young children and older children, and during dedicated phonics/spelling time and extended reading time. These practical actions form a foundation of basic classroom instruction as well as the bones of specialized interventions for those children who need them.

In conclusion, dyslexia does exist. In the words of Dr. Timothy Shanahan, “There is a group of learners whose struggles to read are not due to any environmental problem or crummy parenting/teaching or low intelligence… These individuals, for some organic or developmental reason, can’t master reading without extraordinary effort. Whatever is disrupting the learning of these kids is within them, not around them.”

The sooner we get onto the business of acknowledging truths about reading difficulties and dyslexia, and the sooner we take science-based action, the sooner we can take some weight off the shoulder of kids with dyslexia and help make their extraordinary reading efforts easier.

(Thanks to Tori Bachman for inspiring this post)


Citations and References

• Sally Shaywitz quote comes from the introduction to her book Overcoming Dyslexia: A New and Complete Science-Based Program for Reading Problems at Any Level. (2005). Vintage. See also...http://dyslexia.yale.edu/articles_directors/a-major-step-forward-dr-sally-shaywitz-writes-about-the-september-18-congressional-hearing-on-the-science-of-dyslexia/
• Quote from David Kilpatrick comes from his book Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties. (2015). John Wiley & Sons.
• Information in the chart comes mostly from Seidenberg but also Wolf and Kilpatrick.
• Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryann Wolf. (2008). Harper Perennial.
• Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can’t, and What Can Be Done About It by Mark Seidenberg (2017). Basic Books.
• Ian McGilchrist quote comes from his book, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. (2019). Yale University Press.
• Timothy Shanahan quote comes from his blog: https://shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/what-about-that-pbs-news-hour-report-on-dyslexia-and-the-controversy-it-set-off (retrieved June 3, 2019).

The Eternal Triangle - it sounds mysterious, like a Masonic symbol or a stone carving on an ancient Celtic tomb. Actually, the eternal triangle is a brain-based model of how we read. To understand it, let’s start with a few facts about the brain itself.

​Weighing only three pounds, the human brain contains approximately 85 to 95 billion branching neurons, each one firing between 5 to 50 times per second. These neurons connect and communicate with each other through more than 100 trillion synapses. Yet for all its billions of neurons, trillions of connections, and gazillions of synaptic firings, the brain requires only 20 watts of energy to run, barely enough to power small incandescent light bulb!

Having evolved over millions of years, our brain is really three brains in one. First is the reptilian brain. Evolutionarily very old, reliable but rigid in its operation, and consisting of the brainstem and cerebellum, our “lizard brain” sits in back of the skull and above the spinal cord, automatically controlling vital body functions such as heart rate, breathing, and body temperature.
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Next is the limbic brain, which evolved in the first mammals. Its main structures are the hippocampus, amygdala, and hypothalamus. The limbic system records behavioral moments and the agreeable or disagreeable experiences associated with them. From these records, our emotions are generated. So the next time you feel angry, fearful, or joyful, thank your limbic brain.

The crowning glory of the human brain is the neocortex, which first arose in the primates. Our modern-day neocortex consists of two large hemispheres, each divided into four folded lobes (frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital) and connected by a thick band of neurons called the corpus collosum. The hemispheres of our neocortex – packed with neurons, unbelievably rich in synapses, and communicating at lightning fast speeds – give us much of what makes us human: complex language, music and song, abstract thought, imagination, and high levels of consciousness. Our hemispheres also bequeath us with the ability to read.
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It was eight to nine thousand years ago that humans first started using their brains to read. To turn spoken language into written text, areas of the non-reading brain were pressed into action. Parts of the visual center, typically used for facial recognition, began to process and perceive letters. Memory centers then stored these letter forms for later identification. They also stored the correct spellings of entire words, as well as their associated meanings. And sound processing centers were trained to parse speech into tiny parts called phonemes. Our brains then linked those phonemes to specific letters and letter sequences.

Today, in classrooms across the country, the brains of children are shaped and trained so they can read. This teaching is necessary because unlike spoken language, reading must be taught. The teaching of reading is sometimes done by parents but mostly done by teachers. Once the basics are mastered, however, children and adults continue the teaching on their own. This is possible because the very act of reading wires each brain to read in increasingly complex and rich ways. 

THREE IS A MAGIC NUMBER
Coined by cognitive scientist Mark Seidenberg and described in his book Language at the Speed of Sight, the eternal triangle describes the brain areas and circuitry that give rise to reading. Like all good triangles, it consists of three points and three lines. We can think of the points as areas of brain processing and the lines as the pathways (or circuitry) of language and reading. 

When connected, the three areas of processing that lead to reading are, in no specific order:

• Phonology (or sound); 
• Semantics (or meaning), and; 
• Orthography (or spelling).

Here’s a brief description of each:

• Phonology: The patterns of sounds in language. Going a bit deeper, phonology is the study of how speech sounds of a language (here we are talking about English) are organized and categorized in the mind, parsed and blended, and ultimately used to create words that have meaning.
• Semantics: Regarding reading, it means the study of word meanings. Because the word semantics is a broad term, meaning different things to different people, some use the term lexical semantics to be clear about its meaning.
• Orthography: The conventional spelling system of a language. Put another way, orthography is the study of how every word (which by definition has meaning) has a correct letter sequence. Orthography also encompasses the rules that create a standardized representation of a language.

​Now let’s consider the lines of the triangle, which we can think of as pathways. One line denotes the pathway of spoken language. Another is the pathway of fluent reading. A third, which is actually two lines connecting three points, describes a second reading pathway.

THE LANGUAGE PATHWAY
​The eternal triangle shows that language is the interaction between phonological processing and semantics. Some educators add syntax to the mix. But according to Seidenberg (as well as Kilpatrick and others), research has shown that syntax has little to no effect on one’s ability to read. Thus, syntax is not included in the eternal triangle.

Spoken words are stored via phonological processing. Word meanings are stored via semantic processing. The two are inextricably linked in the pathway of spoken language. As very young children, we hear words spoken by others and quickly associate their meaning, and we engage in these associations mostly on our own. As infants, we hear and observe. Soon we understand that /mama/ refers to a specific person and /dada/ refers to another.

One amazing aspect of the language pathway is that it wires itself. But the wiring is sometimes given a boost by others. “Where’s your nose?” asks Grandma. A toddler touches the rubbery little lump in the middle of her face. “Good job!” grins Grandma.  “Where’s your chin?” she asks next. The toddler grabs the bump below her mouth. “You’re a genius!” Grandma exclaims.
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As in any spoken language, English is made up words. Each word is a “blob” of sound and each blob has meaning. For example, WORM has come to mean a small, wriggling  ropelike creature that lives in the ground and eats dirt. Another blob – HOP – has come to mean an action with both vertical and horizontal dimensions, is something less than a LEAP, and is probably done on one leg. Sometimes a word meaning is specific and narrow; at other times it is rich and multi-faceted.

Each spoken word – NOSE, CHIN, WORM, HOP – consists of co-articulated sounds. When we are young and have not yet learned to read, or if we are living in a pre-literate  society, we don’t think in terms of the individual sounds of word (phonemes). Phonemes are an artificial construct. They are, however, a construct foundational to the act of reading. And so, teaching the skills of phonemic analysis, segmentation, and manipulation is a critical part of reading instruction. This is because phonology anchors word learning and enables the act of word reading.

SOUNDS TO LETTERS
So far we have discussed two points of the triangle: phonology (sound) and semantics (meaning). We must add the third – orthography or spelling –for reading to occur. 

Orthography ultimately has to do with entire written words. But it also encompasses “chunks” or word families (both rimes, like ANK, and morphemes like DIS-), as well as single letters and letter combinations that represent single sounds. In a letter-based writing system, the individual phonemes of a language are represented by letters, which are then sequenced to create written words that can be read. We call this sound-letter association the alphabetic principle and it is a huge part of learning how to read. If children don’t master the alphabetic principle, their reading is greatly impaired or non-existent.

Because encoding (spelling) is the flip side of decoding (reading), thinking of them as two sides of an inseparable whole helps us to understand how the reading process works. Once we have mastered sound-letter associations, we represent sound combinations through letter combinations. For example, we represent the spoken word /pat/ with the letter combination P-A-T. Conversely, when we read PAT, we hear /pat/  in our mind.

When a young child reads various letter combinations, he works to put the sounds together into the co-articulated spoken words of language. If through spoken language the “sound blob “has been stored, and if the word has a stored meaning, then the read word (a combination of sound, meaning, and spelling) will be stored in memory. Amazingly, most children only need 4 or 5 reading repetitions to store a word in memory. Some children, however, need many more. 

PATHWAYS OF READING
With the addition of orthography (spelling), we have the third point of our reading triangle. Now we can discuss how reading in the brain occurs along and between two basic pathways.
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The first reading pathway is the one that mature, competent readers use most of the time. Known as the lexical pathway (or whole word pathway), it  is dependent upon only two points of the triangle: semantics and orthography.

To understand how this pathway works, let’s take a minute to consider orthography. We can think of our brain’s orthographic system as a brain dictionary, a term I learned from the writings of Richard Gentry and Daniel Willingham. Stored in the brain’s dictionary are the correct letter spellings of thousands of words. We store them through a process known as orthographic mapping (more on this in another blog post) and in brain areas that were once used for non-reading purposes. Hooray for brain plasticity! 

To read, we visually take in letter sequences that represent sounds (words, in other words) and then we match them to meanings stored in our semantic system. The automatic action of matching a spelling sequence to a pronunciation and a meaning is known as word recognition and word recognition is the beating heart of the reading process. For word recognition to occur, all three chambers of the triangular reading heart must be beating in seamless and unending cycles of spelling-sound-meaning. 

Because you are a mature reader, you are using the lexical reading pathway to read most of the words in this blog. And you would certainly use it to read: The big dog ran after the ball. But even competent readers like yourself use a second reading pathway, especially when you encounter unfamiliar words in a sentence such as this: Nursultan Nazarbayev, the President of Kazakhstan, has resigned.
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The second reading pathway, called the sub-lexical pathway, is the sounding out or decoding pathway. Decoding can occur at the level of letters and sounds but in more advanced readers, it occurs at the “chunking” level. We break apart a word (Nur-sultan or Nur-sul-tan) to read it. And we may chunk in a few different ways (Ka-zak-hstan, Ka-zakh-stan, Kaz-akh-stan) and compare their pronunciations, all the while searching our brain’s semantic center to see if one of them matches a known word. Using context and background knowledge, we attach meaning to the decoded word. After enough practice, the word (made up of its sound, its spelling, and its meaning) becomes fully stored in our brain dictionary.

Young readers rely on the sub-lexical pathway a great deal. Picture how a kindergarten reader who is just learning to “break the code” would read the sentence: Mom and Dad like the cat. At first, the sounding-out pathway is the exclusive pathway for reading. But as readers become more accomplished, they use the efficient lexical pathway more and more. The two pathways, however, are not binary (either/or). Rather, they are both/and, meaning that they function at varying levels of co-activation according to a reader’s level of reading ability, as well as a text’s level of reading difficulty (which varies according to each reader).


CONCLUSION
​I find the process of word reading to be fascinating. And I am in awe of the researchers who have discovered, and are continuing to discover, how the pieces of the process work together to give us the ability to effortlessly decode and deeply understand big, beautiful blocks of text. I hope you have enjoyed exercising your lexical and sub-lexical reading pathways as you’ve read this post. And I hope you find the information as interesting as I do!

​In June, I’ll use the language of the Eternal Triangle to describe the reading difficulties many children experience. I’ll also talk about dyslexia and how the eternal triangle informs our understanding of that condition. Until then, I wish you the best with you're the end of the school year. Happy almost-summer!

For more than thirty years, neuroscientists and reading researchers have been collaborating to discover how reading “happens” at the level of brain structures, neural circuitry, and even the neuron itself. It’s exciting to know that their hard work is paying off. 
 
Now, many parts of the “reading brain” have been identified and the reading process is generally understood, including how letters and sounds are visually and aurally processed, how letters and sounds are associated and turned into words, how word spellings are stored in brain areas, and how decoding, word spellings, and language comprehension (or meaning) come together and give rise to the act of reading. Last but not least, instructional practices have been created from this knowledge. These practices activate and strengthen the brain areas and circuits involved in reading and writing. In many classrooms, teachers are using these practices to teach reading and to help struggling readers become successful and confident readers. If the word keeps getting out about the science of reading and its related instructional practices, a preponderance of schools will make use of these practices and this, in turn, will increase reading achievement, especially for those children who struggle.
 
Who will get the word out on the reading brain and the instruction that strengthens it? In the book Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading(ILA, 2013), George Hruby and Usha Goswami present a chapter titled Educational Neuroscience for Reading Researchers(p. 558-588). Early in the chapter, one sentence caught my eye: “… the field [of neuroscience] has a clear need for literacy education scholars who are knowledgeable about the developmental and life sciences – individuals who could make use of insights from the disciplines such as neuroscience to help inform reading theory, policy, and research.”
 
The sentence spoke to me for two reasons: 1) it neglected to specifically mention classroom instruction as an area in need of informing, and 2) I believe that  literacy education scholars, ones who might make use of neuroscience insights, are on the scene now and are actively engaged in the process of “informing reading theory, policy, and research.” In addition, these scholars are taking their insights to the next level by explaining how the science of reading can be turned into classroom reading instruction beneficial to all learners and critical to struggling readers. 
 
There are many of these literacy education scholars. Five of them have special importance to me. Because they wear many hats (author, researcher, scientist, presenter), the five are able to synthesize information to explain the workings of the reading brain, as well as offer effective classroom instructional practices (based on science) that help teachers alleviate and possibly eradicate reading impairments. Here are my top five literacy education scholars, along with their must-read books:
 
Maryann Wolf: Proust and the Squid (2008)
Mark Seidenberg: Language at the Speed of Sight (2015)
Sally Shaywitz: Overcoming Dyslexia (2008)
David Kilpatrick: Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties (2015)
Richard Gentry & Gene Ouellette: Brain Words (2019)

T​o be clear, these science-minded writers are the ones who have helped me deeply understand how reading “works” at its most fundamental levels. You might have your own gurus (Daniel Willingham immediately comes to mind). And of course both the writing and the research of these five is based on a body of work – broad and deep and more than thirty years in the making – that was built by dozens of brilliant researchers, including Linnea Ehri, Marilyn Adams, Nicole Speer, Bruce McCandliss, Allan Paivio, and many others.
 
My journey of understanding brain-based reading began with a two-year exploration of spelling and some direct and explicit instruction from Dr. Richard Gentry, who told me why spelling is for reading. Thanks, Dr. Gentry! It grew as I explored the work of Allan Paivio (the dual coding model of reading) and Linnea Ehri (the phases of word learning). Next, I synthesized that information with what I learned from Mark Seidenberg’s reading framework, which he calls the Eternal Triangle. Most recently, I’ve connected all of this to the Simple View of Reading, a brilliant and elegant formulation of what reading is (at a fundamental level). I know many teachers have been aware of the Simple View's formula (Reading comprehension = word level reading x language comprehension) for many years now. I was late to the table, but better to feast later than never, right? I do remember the "Rope of Reading" that was popular in the early 2000s, but some reason I never connected it to the framework that is the Simple View of Reading.

​Perhaps you have your favorite group of research-writers who have informed your practices. If you are reading this blog, I bet you do!
 
As for me, I’ll continue my exploration with more reading and teaching, as well as more commentary (in upcoming blog posts) on the Simple View of Reading and the Eternal Triangle. In these posts, I’ll make connections from the two frameworks to the condition of dyslexia, as well as to engaging and effective classroom instructional practices that, in the words of literacy guru David Kilpatrick, “prevent and overcome reading difficulties.” 

Human beings acquire language naturally, progressing from babbling babies to phone conversing adults with hardly a hitch. During our language development, we hear words spoken by others (our mother says “Look at the doggy”), we process these words via our brain’s meaning and memory functions (learning that “doggy” means the furry thing that runs around and licks our face), and eventually we speak these words to communicate our thoughts and feelings (we say, “I like the doggy”). Unless our language system is malfunctioning, the process develops naturally and effortlessly from the moment we are born up to and through our early childhood years. 

Reading and writing, however, are not acquired naturally. Although our brains come equipped with the necessary circuitry to read words (and conversely, to write words), someone must help us to train our brain circuits to perform the acts of reading and writing. This is true even for children who seem to acquire reading and writing skills effortlessly.  

To get kids to read and write, sometimes only minimal amounts of training and support are necessary. At other times, a great deal of instruction must be given, and support must be constant over many years. Regardless, learning to read and write begins with language (spoken words), moves to the understanding that words can be segmented into individual sounds (awareness of phonemes), and then progresses to associating letters and letter combinations with the phonemes of language to form words that mean something. At this point, letters and sounds can be combined to create basic words that can be read and written.

When it comes to time to begin moving young children from listening and speaking to reading and writing, what instruction is most powerful? Four practices immediately come to mind: 1) phonemic segmentation and blending, 2) a carefully considered yet vigorous introduction of letters and their associated sounds, 3) repeated practice in printing alphabet letters and noticing the component parts of their written form, and 4) quickly moving from pairing letters and sounds to spelling and reading basic words. Today's post will focus on number one.
  
Phonemic Segmentation and Blending: Stretch, Zap, Tap, and Blend

Teaching young children to focus on the sounds of words (phonemes) is a critical part of early reading instruction. When it comes to early phonemic awareness instruction, get the most bang for your buck by focusing on instruction that teaches children how to segment, blend, and manipulate phonemes. A regularly-used routine of stretch, zap, tap, and blend is a practical yet powerful way to get that  concentration into your instruction. 

The beauty of stretch, zap, tap, and blend is that the routine is also a strategy that children can use to both spell words (encode) and read words (decode). To teach it, begin with CVC, CCVC, or CVCC words, especially ones containing continuant letters that can be “held out,” such as the vowels, the consonants F, L, M, N, S, V and Z, and the digraphs SH and TH.  For example, here is a list of words that work well for teaching stretching, zapping, tapping, and blending.

Begin by teaching your students how to “stretch the word.” Tell them a word is like a big rubber band. Model how to say the word, grab hold of either end of it (make two fists and hold them in front of you), and then slowly stretch it by pulling your hands away from each other as you say the sounds of the word, holding out the vocalization of each phoneme. For example, map becomes mmm-aaaa-p and flop becomes fffff-lllllll- oooo-p. After stretching out the word, say the word again and let the rubber band snap back. This shows that the sounds must be blending back together (quickly) to make a word.
​
​To combine stretching and zapping, I suggest this language, which gives the outline of a small routine you can repeat daily.

​Finally comes tapping and blending, a technique used by Wilson Reading. This technique involves the fine motor skills of tapping the individual fingers of one hand off a thumb. Thus, it may be too difficult for most kindergarten and some first-grade children. But it works for second grade children, as well as older children.
​
The process for teaching the technique is much the same as zapping and blending. To model tapping, say a word like sock as you hold your hand up, your fingers loosely curled but not touching. Next, segment the sounds by saying each sound separately as you touch each finger to your thumb. The word sock gets three taps. The pointer finger comes down to the thumb when you say /s/. The middle finger down to the thumb when you say /o/. And the ring finger comes down for /k/. Finally, pull all the fingers to the thumb to blend and say the word sock.

The Real Reason to Use It
According to the New York Times, the Taa language, spoken by a few thousand people in Botswana and Namibia, may have upward of 200 identifiable sounds! Most linguists believe that Taa has the largest sound inventory any language in the world. Thankfully, our English language contains a mere 44 separate sounds, ranging from /s/ and /ch/ to /oi/ and /ay/. Even better, research has identified some very effective ways to teach the sounds. 

Instruction that teaches young children to hear the individual sounds of English words and then blend them back together to make words is more effective than instruction that emphasizes alliteration, rhyming, and vocabulary. This does not mean you should not teach alliteration, rhyming, and vocabulary to young children who are beginning to develop reading and writing skills. But it does mean that you should regularly teach phonemic segmentation and blending in a concentrated manner, and you should give it more emphasis than alliteration and rhyming, as well as structured vocabulary lessons. 

Research that demonstrates the importance of phonology (the processing of sounds in general) and phonemic awareness (the understanding that words are made of discrete sounds, and the ability to manipulate those sounds) has been around for decades. In her book, Beginning to Read, famed reading researcher Marilyn Adams was one of the first to tell the public about the importance of phonology and phonemic awareness. A decade later, phonemic awareness rose to special prominence when the National Reading Panel put out its report in 2000. Since that time, researchers have bolstered the argument that phonemic awareness is a critical skill for future reading, and they’ve honed-in on the benefits of segmenting and blending. In his excellent 2018 article on early literacy research, D. Ray Reutzel cites numerous studies that clearly show that for younger readers, “reading skill is better predicted by phonemic skills than rhyming skills” and that phoneme segmenting, blending, and letter-sound relationships are “more likely to promote future reading ability than rhyming, alliteration, or vocabulary activities, even for highly disadvantaged children as young as 4 years old.” (Reutzel, 2018).

Young students progress from being able to hear and say the sounds in words (in the initial, medial and final positions) to segmenting the sounds in words (and then blending them back together). And as they continue to develop, they can even manipulate the sounds in words, adding, deleting, and even substituting phonemes to make new words. Phonemic skills, however, don’t exist in a vacuum. They are co-dependent with phonic skills, an idea I'll explore in some upcoming post.

• Adams, Marilyn J., (1990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Murray, Bruce. (2009). Making Friends with Phonemes. Retrieved 1/10/19 from http://www.readingrockets.org/article/making-friends-phonemes
• Rousseau, Bryant. (2016). What language has the most sounds in the world? Click 5 times for the answer. The New York Times. Retrieved 1/11/19
• Reutzel, D. Ray. (2018). Early literacy research: Findings primary-grade teachers will want to know. The Reading Teacher. 69(1), pp. 14-24, DOI.10.1002/trtr.1387.
• Yeh, S.S. (2004). An evaluation of two approaches for teaching phonemic awareness to children in head start. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 18(4), 513-529.

Teaching is hard work. So, it makes sense that you carefully consider how you spend your instructional energy each and every day. You want to maximize your efforts, minimize wasted time, and ultimately enjoy the fruits of your labors. What general instructional practices help you do this? Five immediately come to mind: 1) think time, 2) direct and explicit instruction, 3) descriptive reinforcement, 4) repetition, and 5) instant error correction. These five have a terrific research track record, lead to great gains in learning (when effectively employed), work with all children, are especially helpful to those who struggle to learn, and can be used to teach all subjects, including reading, writing, and spelling. 
 
Think Time
Today’s post concentrates on think time, an instructional technique that promotes comprehension and language use. At its core, think time involves 1) a teacher asking a question or requesting an action, and 2) students thinking silently for three to five seconds before raising their hands to answer or turning to talk to a partner to discuss. Consistently fold think time into your instruction and I guarantee you’ll be amazed at how student answers become richer and more sophisticated, and children become more engaged.
 
During instruction that does NOT provide think time, a teacher might ask her kindergarten students (after reading the book Swimmy by Leo Leonni), “Who is the main character?” Immediately, two, three, or four hands might shoot up. The teacher quickly calls on one of the hand-raisers, listens for the correct answer, and then moves on. 
 
With think time, you ask students the same question. But then you require them to think a little before raising their hands. Your requiring looks like silently counting: 1, 2, 3. As you count, the children think quietly and you scan the group, checking to see that everyone is thinking. Next you give a signal that it’s time to raise their hands. This time, twelve or more hands whoosh into the air. Finally, you call on a student, or even better, you give a signal to the children that tells them to turn and tell a partner the answer. As the children whisper their responses, you listen. 
 
Three seconds of think time is suggested for kindergarten children because their attention span is very short (roughly that of a gnat or hamster). If you provide too much time, you’ll lose them. For first and second graders, keep think time at three seconds, or increase it to four or five. For older students, give up to seven or eight seconds. Decide what amount of time works best for your students. The general behavior of different groups may demand more or less time. Also, vary the amount of time depending upon the task. Students benefit from four or five seconds, or maybe a bit more, if the question demands a longer, more complex answer. 
 
You should expect your students to accurately engage in thinking during your lessons. Many teachers model active listening. Do the same for active thinking. First, you may want to model what non-thinking looks like (gazing around the room, fidgeting, playing with an eraser, poking someone nearby, … the list is endless). Then, model what thinking looks like (furrowed brow, squinty eyes, general looks of concentration and pondering). You can also do a think aloud, saying something like, “I was just asked to name a color I see in the classroom. I looked around and saw yellow, blue, and red. Now I am thinking that I will pick blue. Blue is my answer.”
 
Take the technique to its next step by modeling what “turn and tell” looks like (a short burst of quiet talking in which one student turns to another and tells her partner an answer). Also model “turn and talk” (a longer period of quiet talking in which two students share their thoughts related to a question or direction given by the teacher).
 
One suggestion is that you identify classroom activities that benefit most from think time. I like to use it in almost every questioning situation. But open-ended questions, or a question that begin with “why,” are especially appropriate times to use think time. Another suggestion is to use hand signals for “think,” “answer,” “turn and tell,” and “turn and talk.” This keeps students focused on you, as well as insures that your instruction isn’t broken up with too much teacher talk. Here are some signal suggestions. But if you have your own clever alternatives, please, be my guest!

Here are two more examples of think time in action. Although the examples are labeled first and third, it’s best if you think in terms of a grade band. Depending upon the needs, behaviors, and achievement levels of the majority of students in any classroom, any one of the scenes in this section could play out in any grade level.

The Real Reason to Use It
Often called wait time in research literature, think time gives your students time to think more broadly and deeply about the questions you are asking them, as well as to mentally rehearse an appropriate response. In turn, this thinking and rehearsing enables kids to speak more fluently while answering, give longer answers, and use more sophisticated and appropriate vocabulary words.
 
Additionally, during any instruction, be it large group or small, social studies or math, think time engages more students, many more than during a call-and-response questioning. By call-and-response, I mean this: the teacher asks a question, a few kids raise their hands, the teacher calls on one student, that student answers while the others sit mutely or stare into space, and then the teacher repeats the sequence with another question. Think time is more effective than call-and-response because when you scan the room as you silently wait for students to think, you send the message that engaged thinking is expected. And if you couple think time with “turn and tell” or “turn and talk” (a.k.a. discuss), you crank up the engagement level even more.
 
Another benefit of think time is that it allows for what I call “self-differentiation.” For example, when a teacher asks her class to recall the events in a story, children who are less advanced at thinking and remembering can focus on the lastevent of the story, while more advanced students can recall the middle or beginning events, too. If you call on the less advanced student first, you build in an opportunity for that child to 1) share, and 2) be successful. After that student’s response, call on a child who is more likely to remember a middle or beginning event. Viola! When you insert a three to five second space for thinking into your questioning, you allow your students to think at the level most natural for them. This increases the engagement of all your learners and  provides more opportunities for every student to experience success. This is also why think time is a must when working with children in special education classrooms or inclusionary settings.
 
Research on the effectiveness of wait time began in the 1970s, hit its stride in 80s, and still regularly appears in journals. More than 40 years ago, Mary Rowe may have been the first to coin the term wait time and describe its importance to the overall quality of student responses (and thus of learning). Later, Robert Stahl expanded on Rowe’s concept and recommended three second “waits” at various points during class periods. The research of Rowe, Stahl, and others shows that wait time is a powerful way to increase the length and quality of student responses, as well as boost student motivation. More recently, studies done by Barbara Wasik, Annemarie Hindman, and others have examined the effectiveness of wait time with students in first and second grade, kindergarten, and even preschool.

• Hindman, Annemarie H., and Wasik, Barbara, A. (2018). Why Wait? The Importance of Wait Time in Developing Young Students’ Language and Vocabulary Skills. The Reading Teacher. 72 (3), pp. 369-368.
• Lee, Julie, O'Shea, Lawrence J., and Dykes, Mary K. (1987). Teacher Wait-Time: Performance of Developmentally Delayed and Non-Delayed Young Children. Education and Training in Mental Retardation. 22 (3), pp. 176-184.
• Rowe, Mary B. (1974). Wait-time and rewards as instructional variables, their influence on language, logic, and fate control: Part one – wait time. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 11(2), 81-94. https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.3660110202.
• Rowe, Mary B. (1986). Wait time: Slowing down may be a way of speeding up! Journal of Teacher Education, 37(1), 43-50. https://doi.org/10.1177/002248718603700110.
• Stahl, R.J. (1994). Using “Think-time” and “wait-time” skillfully in the classroom. ERIC Digest. Retrieved from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED370885.pdf​

The connections between spelling, vocabulary, and reading continue to be on my mind.  Recently, I was excited to see an article in the latest Reading Teacher (Nov/Dec 2018) that spoke directly to my wonderings.

Authored by Patrick Manyak, Ann-Margaret Manyak, and James Baumann, the article has a long and somewhat dry title – Morphological Analysis Instruction in The Elementary Grades: Which Morphemes to Teach and How to Teach Them (The full citation for the article is given later in this post). But I found the second half of the title intriguing enough to read on. Boy, was I glad I did.

Here are the two big ideas I came away with::

• By teaching a specific set of affixes (and a specific set of Greek and Latin roots), teachers can lessen their work load (teach smarter), create literacy synergy, and help kids connect the dots between spelling, reading, and vocabulary,
• When teachers use specific instructional techniques to present these affixes and roots, they help their students understand them more deeply, as well as make connections between them. They also help kids more easily spell, read, and understand unknown words that use these morphemes. 

The article kicks off with an explanation of morphological analysis (MA), a “process of using affixes, base words, and word roots to infer the meaning of words.” It then cites and discusses the extensive research that supports the following idea: when teachers instruct students in morphological awareness, their teaching contributes to spelling, word recognition, and vocabulary knowledge. As a teacher who is always looking to find the golden threads in literacy instruction, and who strives to identify practices that produce synergy, I love the idea that instruction in one area (morphemes) produces an increased knowledge in three areas (spelling, reading, and vocabulary).

Next, the article describes a few practical classroom tools. The one I found to be most useful was the recommended list of affixes for grades 3-5. The list presents a total of 41 affixes: 14 for third grade, 16 for fourth, and 11 for fifth. If, however, you are using this list for spelling-vocabulary-reading instruction (i.e. Word Workshop), there is no need to stay within your grade level. For example, if you have high flying 3rd graders, then use the suggested 4th grade affixes. Or if you have a heterogenous group of 5th graders, pick a mid-spot affix, such as under-. Then differentiate through word complexity. In other words, for take home spelling lists, give students who need more support words such as undercook and undersea. Then, give higher achieving students words such as underachieve and underrepresented. The concept of differentiating via word complexity is one I discuss at length in Super Spellers and Super Speller Starter Sets.

When it comes to researching morphemes, author James Baumann has a long and distinguished track record. His body of work includes a great deal of examining which morphemes to teach and how to teach them (hence the title of the RT article). His primary objective for selecting affixes to teach was to “identify those affixes that, when taught well, enabled students to infer the meanings of as many novel words containing the target affixes as possible.” In other words, by using specific affixes in your spelling-reading-vocabulary instruction (again, think Word Workshop), you can provide students with opportunities to spell, read, and analyze scores of previously unpracticed words. 

In his studies, Baumann used four criteria for selecting affixes:

1. The affixes occur with the highest frequency. For example, the list includes dis- and un- but excludes dys- and hypo-. Having high frequency as a criteria makes great sense, as any word part that presents itself over and over again provides great opportunity for learning many new words.
2. The affixes can be grouped (as much as possible) into semantic categories. Providing categories (showing their relationships between each other) gives children additional support for remembering the meanings of affixes.
3. The affixes have consistent, concrete meanings. For example, in- typically means not and post- always means after. These are in contrast to affixes with multiple nuanced meanings, such as ex-, which can mean out of, from, or former.
4. The affixes meet a strict definition of prefix or suffix. Thus, the affix must be attached to a clearly defined base word, as in unhappy or disability. Conversely, derivational affixes, such ac- in accord (derived from ad-, meaning “to”), were not considered.

Because these criteria are so strongly logical, I feel they produce a list that has practical yet powerful classroom applications. Here’s a taste of the list so that you can see how logically and elegantly its laid out. (It’s also a taste so I don’t violate copyright law!)

To circle around to my own work, many of the ideas I put forth in my two Super Speller books align beautifully with the ideas presented in the RT article. Thus, another reason for my word-nerd excitement! For example, in Super Spellers I suggest teachers create and use a narrow and deep master spelling lists for their spelling instruction. Master lists are lists built upon two to four spelling features and that present at least 30 or 40 words that make use of those features. I also suggest teachers teach student-used spelling strategies, such as “think about meaning.” 

You can see how both of these ideas – a narrow and deep spelling list that promotes students use of the “think about meaning” strategy – appear in the list below, which is from my upcoming Super Speller Starter Sets resource book. I think you’ll also be able to see how this list aligns with Maynak, Maynak, and Baumann’s thoughts on the criteria for choosing which morphemes to teach: affixes that occur with high frequency; affixes that have consistent, concrete meanings; affixes that can be semantically grouped. For the record, the three roots (which also function as affixes) used in the master list below are three of the 22 Greek and Latin roots that the authors present in their table of Greek and Latin roots.

​In conclusion, if you are a teacher of third, fourth, or fifth grades, I suggest you find the RT article (citation below) and consider using the recommended lists of 41 affixes and 22 Greek and Latin roots in your spelling-vocabulary-reading instruction. In addition, consider incorporating some or all of the effective instructional practices laid out by the authors. As always, I am interested in your thoughts on my blog posts, especially if they are helpful to your teaching. Happy reading, happy holidays, and see you in the new year!

References

• Maynak,P.C., Baumann, J.F.,  & Maynak, A-M. (2018). Morphological analysis instruction in the elementary grades: Which morphemes to teach and how to teach them. The Reading Teacher, 72(3), 289-300.  http://bit.ly/morphemes2teach
• Weakland, M. (2019) Super Speller Starter Sets. Stenhouse Publishing. Portsmouth, NH.

The answer is no, and yes.

“Oh come on!” you say, and “Good grief!” Yes, I can hear the gripes and groans, even from my lofty perch on a hill in western Pennsylvania. 

I admit I’ve tried to pull you in with a provocative title. But seriously, I do think the answer to the question is indeed “no” and “yes.” The “no” part comes from my thinking about the nature of how spelling works in the brain, as well as the sometimes impoverished state of spelling instruction in school classrooms. Interestingly, the “yes”  comes from the same line of thinking!

As Dr. Richard Gentry has noted in his presentations, spelling was absent from the report issued by the National Reading Panel in 2000. Comprehension, vocabulary, fluency, phonemic awareness and phonics - they were in there. But there was no Big Idea of spelling. Now, I’m happy to say, spelling is more likely to be considered a critical part of reading . Recently, I’ve seen a number of articles and books about spelling and how it relates to not only the big ideas named by the National Reading Panel,  but also to the seamless act of reading itself.

Now that spelling is once again being talked about and even seriously taught, we can take a moment to note how spelling instruction is something of a paradox. There's no doubt it should be taught as a stand-alone subject (Gentry & Graham, 2010).  During this stand-alone spelling time, patterns and rules are introduced and explored, strategies are explained and practiced, and activities take place. All this activity leads to two important results: 1) children gain control and mastery of word parts, as well the understanding of how sound, pattern, and meaning come together to produce correctly spelled words, and 2) entire words are stored in the brains of the students. More specifically, words are stored in the orthographic processing system (the lexicon or dictionary of the mind).

The paradox comes about because spelling should also be taught through reading and writing. Reading widely gives kids opportunities to encode word spellings and meanings in specific brain areas, as well as build neural circuitry between the semantic, orthographic, and phonological processing systems. Of course, reading also provides opportunities to build background knowledge and vocabulary, practice strategic ways of reading, and so forth. Writing widely does many of the same things.

We cannot, however, rely only on writing and reading to teach students new word spellings and new spelling skills. While reading and writing do lead to spelling gains, the gains are not large (Graham & Harris, 2016). The direct and explicit teaching of spelling, however, leads to much greater gains in spelling competence. Still, stand-alone spelling instruction does not do enough if we want our students to become proficient readers and writers with mature reading and writing skills. In the end, when we look at the big picture, the best way to promote spelling development is to teach a combination of the two approaches: stand-alone and within reading and writing.  

Why, then, would we ever want to abolish spelling instruction? It is because abolishing the idea of spelling instruction just might free us from thinking of reading as a collection of isolated skills. Just as playing music isn’t an exercise in jumping between the skills of playing rhythms, scales, melodies, and harmonies, the act of reading isn’t simply toggling between decoding, word meaning, prosody, visualizing, author’s purpose, and so on. Rather, the act of reading is a holistic and emergent performance. Although a simple formula for understanding reading might be word recognition + language understanding = reading comprehension, this formula is not like a math formula, where 2 + 2 = 4. When it comes to reading, the formula is more like 2 + 2 = 7.

The reason I say that yes, we should abolish spelling instruction, is because I hope this provocation will encourage others (basal publishers, administrators, teachers) to stop thinking of literacy as a collection of isolated silos labeled spelling, reading, grammar, writing, fluency, vocabulary, and so on. Isn't it time that we stopped saying “Open your spelling books” and then, 20 minutes later, “Open your phonics book?” As Linnea Ehri has repeatedly said, phonics and spelling are two sides of one coin. Just as you cannot have a one-sided coin, you cannot imagine writing down the spelling of a word without reading it. Conversely, you cannot read a word without your brain accessing its  spelling (which is stored in your orthographic processing system). Research has clearly shown that when we read a word we do so by instantly recognizing its spelling. Therefore, why would a school district promote spelling and phonics as separate subjects? And with older students, why would anyone want to teach spelling and vocabulary in isolation?

Perhaps we should start teaching within an instructional framework labeled “Word Workshop.” The term Word Workshop occurred to me after a curriculum director in Texas, who described her district as a “workshop district,” said this: “Our district teaches literacy through Reading and Writing Workshop. During our literacy block, we have time carved out for word study. My teachers are also trying to teach phonics. But they don’t know how phonics relates to spelling and they feel they don’t have enough time to teach phonics. How can I help them to conceptualize what they need to teach, and how can I help them save time?”

I can't help but think that a teacher who is trying to teach phonics AND word work, really doesn't understand the definition of either. If I were a teacher using the Word Workshop framework, I would use my Word Workshop time (let’s say 15 or 20 minutes a day), to teach spelling-phonics-vocabulary.By the way, spelling-phonics-vocabulary is one thing, not three. Perhaps we can think of it as three sides of a coin! For example, if my spelling word list included cabbage, baggage, luggage, rummage, cottage, and marriage, I would add the words courage, encourage, package, and repackage (among others). Next, I would devote time throughout the week for directly and explicitly teaching (and then having kids practice) the following: 1) word attack strategies for reading multi-syllable words, 2) noticing and understanding the meaning-making parts of words (-age, bag, lug, marry, pack, re-), as well as the meaning of each word in its entirety, and 3) spelling patterns and rules (such as doubling consonants to preserve vowel sounds, changing a y to an i when adding suffixes) that help students spell, read, and understand the words on the lists, as well as words not on a list (such as scrimmage and discourage) that they may nonetheless want to read or write. The time I spent teaching these ideas, and the ways in which I taught them, would not be silo-based. Rather, I would move back and forth between them and often combine them in one teaching session, determining my focus by considering the needs of my students, as well as the demands of the day.

But even Word Workshop might not be the best way to teach spelling. Perhaps the best way to teach spelling is to simply refrain from labeling any instruction as “teaching spelling.” When I asked my mother, who ended her career teaching first grade, how she taught spelling, she replied, “I didn’t teach spelling.” I was surprised to hear her say this because I knew she had great success in getting her students to read and write. “You didn’t teach spelling?” I asked.  “No,” she said. “In my literacy block I taught reading and writing. I taught reading and writing every day for about two and a half hours. That’s what I did.” When I pressed her on her statement, she admitted that she did indeed teach her students the names of the letters and their associated sounds, she did explicitly instruct her students in letter combinations (and their associated sounds), she did use activities that gave kids practice putting letters and patterns into specific orders to make words (and then noticing and analyzing word parts and their relationships to one another), and she did regularly assess her students to determine their abilities to do these skills. But she did all of this without ever saying to her students, “Now it is time for spelling.” In a way, she had abolished spelling instruction.

I recently returned from the CREST Conference, where I presented on spelling (and its ties to reading) to Texas curriculum and instruction directors. Audience members had great comments and questions. Two questions really resonated with me and I’ve decided to write about one in this blog. I’ll discuss the second, which has to word study and workshop-model teaching, in my October posting, so stay tuned! 
 
At CREST, the most common comment and subsequent question was “We know about sound-letter activities for younger kids, such as stretch-tap-spell, Elkonin boxes, and simple word ladders, and our teachers do them in their classrooms. But what do you suggest for older spellers, especially 4th through 6th?”
 
First, I would suggest that even older students may need a brush up on hearing the syllables in the words. Use the jaw drop for this (tip of the fingers go under the tip of the chin, feeling the jaw as it unerringly moves up and down for the vowel in each syllable). And for any older students who struggle with phonology, teachers may want to have these students stretch some syllables and then tap out their sounds.
 
I would also suggest that patterns are still a foundational place to operate from when it comes to teaching fourth, fifth, and sixth graders. But in these grades, pattern thinking is more sophisticated. First, patterns can be tied to the seven syllable types and the rules that govern their spellings and exceptions. Researchers and writers say there are six, but I like to think of them as seven: 

1. Closed
2. Open
3. Vowel-consonant-E
4. Vowel team
5. R-controlled
6. Consonant-LE
7. Final stable (leftovers).

Second, patterns can be understood in terms of roots, root words, and affixes. Noticing, learning, discussing, and manipulating these meaning-making patterns (or morphemes) helps kids do three things:

• Spell multisyllabic words,
• Read multisyllabic words, and
• Understand what multisyllabic words mean apart from the context of a sentence or paragraph.

When we tie spelling, phonics, and vocabulary together, we maximize our teaching time. I know time to teach is always in short supply.
 
Finally, when it comes to older spellers, I think another foundational place of operation is the idea of a deep and rich word list for each lesson. A deep and rich word list -one with a large number of varied words tied together by just a few patterns- accomplishes a number of things:

• It shows the same pattern in many words. This repetition is especially helpful to children who struggle to read and write.
• It gives students lots of words to see and understand. Thus, it provides an opportunity to strengthen pattern recognition, and it gives a chance to build vocabulary, which can then impact positively on reading. But because the words relate to one another through a limited number of patterns, it doesn’t overwhelm kids with too many unknown variables.
• It gives you, the teacher, more words to use in your spelling activities.

 
For example, here are some of the words from a Unit 17 in Zaner-Bloser’s Spelling Connections. If you use this program, you are already at an advantage because every master list in a Spelling Connections lesson is lengthy and differentiated. In other words, it is already relatively deep and rich. I’ll start with some words (not all) from one of their fourth-grade lists that focuses on “soft G” spellings. I’ve grouped the words so that the patterns are more apparent.

Next, I’ll add a few more words. Adding words provides you with opportunities to easily expand the spelling lesson into reading and vocabulary (more on this in October). The added words also provide words for differentiated take-home spelling lists. 

Now, what activities can we do with this deep and rich word list? Certainly, word sorts. But word dictation is another effective and easy activity to do. Kids can write with paper and pencils, white boards and markers, or an iPads and stylus. 
 
I use the routine of “I say, we say, you say, you write.” Thus, village would sound like this: “The word is village. I live in a village. Say it with me. You say it. You write it.” After the kids have checked their spelling against mine (on the board), I would directly and explicitly give the word meaning. “A village is a small group of houses and buildings. It's smaller than a town. Villages are in the country.”
 
I also like to dictate related words that aren't on take home spelling lists. My little chant is “If you can spell ____, you can spell _____.” Thus, I might do this for the word pillage. “The word is pillage. The Vikings began to pillage the village. Say it with me. You say it. You write it. And don't forget, if you can spell village, you can spell pillage” Once again, after the kids have checked their spelling against mine, I directly and explicitly give the word meaning. “Pillage means to attack a place and take things away. Pillage is like looting or aggressively stealing.”
 
In a seven-minute word dictation session, you can go through 10 or more words if you keep your instruction brisk and explicit and don’t let the kids interrupt the routine with chatter and superfluous talk. At the very end, read the entire list of words written on the board. Do “I Say, We Say, You Say” and you will add repetition for English Language Learners and children who have a reading impairment. You will also effortlessly tie your spelling to phonics (encoding to decoding). Viola! 

​Word ladders are another quick and efficient activity to do. You don’t have to write them out in worksheet form and with older spellers, you don’t have to think “one letter, diagraph, or vowel team at a time.” You can create new words by swapping in entire syllables at the prefix, suffix, root, or root word level. Just be careful that your jumps between words isn’t too dramatic. As you go through a word ladder with a large (or small group), tie in vocabulary by telling the students what the new target word means. Also, discuss rules (when to drop or not drop silent E, how to form the past tense, etc.) when the opportunity presents itself. Here are two word ladders that are based on the fourth-grade words presented above.
 
Cabbage-baggage-rummage-cottage-village-marriage-package-unpackage-repackage
 
Bridge-abridge-abridged-ridge-range-strange-change-interchange-changeable-unchanging

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​Sentence dictation and flip folders are two other 7 to 10-minute activities that work with 4th, 5th, and 6th graders.
 
I’ll mention older spellers again in my October blog when I discuss the second big comment and question from my CREST audience: “How can my teachers teach spelling, then phonics, then vocabulary in when they have so little time to teach, and how does this all work with a workshop-based school district?” My suggestion? Think in terms of Word Workshop! What’s Word Workshop? I’m still figuring it out but I should have a decent answer by October!