What do I do when they find it difficult?
Part 1
Of all the aspects of teaching reading and spelling, perhaps the trickiest is blending, especially when teaching those learners who find it difficult. Blending is the cornerstone of reading and without this skill learners will find it hard to make progress towards independent reading.
Blending is described as the ability to combine phonemes (speech sounds) to make a meaningful spoken word, and it is part of the process of decoding written words. Let’s look at an example, a simple CVC word:
mop
When we read this word, we use our knowledge of the alphabetic code and our skill at blending to decode it. We look at the graphemes (letters) one by one and say the matching sounds /m/ /o/ /p/. Then we blend the sounds to get the word ‘mop’.
On the surface this seems to be a straightforward process, and for many learners it is, it’s something they pick up and incorporate into their reading with ease. But for some of our learners, especially those with additional or special educational needs, blending is difficult to unpick, understand and do.
Let’s think about it from their perspective and look at that word again.
mop
/m/ /o/ /p/
We said three separate things and ‘somehow’ we got from those to one thing – the single word ‘mop’. Working out that the word is ‘mop’ seems like ‘magic’.
Let’s ask ourselves what we are asking our learner to do.
1. The child looks at the first grapheme (letter), recalls which sound it represents and says it either out loud (or in their thinking voice in their head).
Then they move onto the next grapheme (letter), think of that sound and say that, then move onto the next and so on until they have worked through the word. They are segmenting the word in response to a visual cue – the grapheme (in this case it is a single letter but, in some words, this could be 2, 3 or 4 letters). We can describe this way of sounding out as segmented phonation.
2. Then the child goes back and remembers the sequence of sounds they just said.
3. Finally, they process the sounds, blending them to make the word.
Step 2 relies on having a good auditory sequential memory (an aspect of working memory), which may not be an area of strength for our learners with additional or special educational needs.
At Step 3 many learners simply cannot work out precisely what it is they need to do. What does blending the sounds actually mean? What do I do with the sounds? How do I blend them?
Let’s look at a subtly different approach.
After the child has said the sounds first time round (just as described previously), ask them to go back to the beginning of the word and actively or dynamically blend through the word, grapheme by grapheme, and then listen out for the word at the end.
In essence, they ‘pick up’ each sound, ‘pushing them together’ as they track left to right through the word. It’s a personal preference of my own to refer to blending as ‘pushing together the sounds’ rather than ‘blending’ as it is more obvious and therefore accessible for learners with additional or special educational needs.
Let’s think about what this approach means for the word ‘mop’. The child looks at the first letter and says the sound /m/ but keeps saying it as they glance at the next letter and then say the sound that matches that one. They can’t help but push the sounds together /m/>/o/, which will sound something like “mmmooo”. It’s difficult to capture this in written form so please bear with me on this and use your imagination or try saying it out loud yourself! Then our learner, whom we have left saying the /o/ sound, glances to the next letter and says the sound that matches. Overall, they will hear /m/>/o/>/p/ “mmmooop”. We tell the learner to listen for a word (it’s forming as they work through the word in this way) and say what word they hear.
Let’s think about what we are asking the pupil to do now.
1. Just like before they need look at the first grapheme in the word, recall which sound it represents and say it.
But this time they keep saying that sound until they are ready to say the next and so naturally push the first sound into the next – they pick up each sound and run with them through the word. All the pupil has to do is…
2. Listen to the word (forming) and say what word they hear.
This approach shifts the emphasis from memory to listening, which is much more accessible. This type of blending is called connected phonation and has been the subject of research1 which indicates that it is beneficial for all pupils. Perhaps the most well-known article is that by Linnea Ehri2. In my experience, this subtle shift in practice can have a massive impact on a learner’s blending.
Teaching our learners to blend using a two-step strategy is beneficial, especially for those with additional or special educational needs:
Step 1 – Segmented phonation, which supports the mapping within the brain of phonemes and graphemes for the individual word (a process referred to as orthographic mapping). This, in turn, supports the development of reading automaticity and has the additional benefit of connecting, at a brain-based level, the meaning of the word (semantics) to the phonology (sounds) and orthography (graphemes).
Step 2 – Connected phonation, which enables easier access to the blended word and greater success in reading the word.
When we use the connected phonation technique, we do need to acknowledge that we are sort of saying the word very slowly and in a slightly lyrical, stretched out manner. We need to ask our learners to think about what it would sound like at an ordinary speed.
Luckily a natural feature of the brain comes into play and helps us to manage our blending and pinpoint the word. Set for variability is described as cognitive flexibility and is related to our innate ability to learn spoken language. This flexibility enables us to clean up any mispronunciations when we hear them, and our learners can apply this to when they are sounding out for reading words. The child notices that they have said an approximation of a word and matches it to a word that exists in their vocabulary – a word that they have heard and know the meaning of. So, they can easily hear, “mmmooop” and work out that it is “mop”.
Now that we have an accessible strategy for decoding words that employs two steps to blending, we need to consider how we teach this to our learners. Watch out for part 2 coming soon…
References
- Connected Phonation is More Effective than Segmented Phonation for Teaching Beginning Readers to Decode Unfamiliar Words June 2020 Scientific Studies of Reading Gonzalez-Frey & Ehri
- Ehri, L. C. (2020). What Teachers Need to Know and Do to Teach Letter–Sounds, Phonemic Awareness, Word Reading, and Phonics.
Footnote: This work was shared with the DfE and incorporated into their ‘Reading Ambition for All’ training delivered by the English Hubs.