Chapter 5-Cracking the Alphabetic Code

Overview

Children learn about phonemes as they notice rhyming words, segment words into individual sounds and invent silly words by playing with sounds.  They learn about letters while singing ABC song, they learn graphophonemic relationships as they match letters and letter combinations to sounds.

• Phonemes-a sound; its represented in print with slashes (/s/ and /th/) which is the smallest units of speech
• Graphemes-a written representation of a sound using one or more letters
• Graphophonemic-sound; symbol relationships

This is not all phonics, but children actually develop three separate but related types of alphabetic code knowledge…

• Phonemic Awareness-children learn to notice and manipulate the sounds of oral language, they understand that spoken words are made up of sounds and can segment and blend sounds in spoken words
• Phonics-children learn to convert letters into sounds and blend them to recognize words, they apply phonics concepts to understand that there are predictable…
  • Phoneme-grapheme correspondences-relationship between a sound and the letters representing it
• Spelling-children learn to segment spoken words into sounds and convert the sounds into letters to spell words, they can use spelling strategies to spell unfamiliar words

Phonemic Awareness

• Is children’s basic understanding that speech is composed of a series of individual sounds and it provides the foundation for phonics and spelling-they are able to take words apart and put them back together again
  • (Ex.  when children can choose a duck as the animal whose name begins with /d/ from a collection of toy animals, identify duck and luck as rhyming words in a song and blend the sounds /d/ /u/ /k/ they are phonemically aware)

Phonemic Awareness Strategies

• Identifying sounds in words-children identify a word that begins or ends with a particular sound (Ex. when shown a doll, they identify doll as the word and it ends with /l/)
• Categorizing sounds in words-children recognize the ‘odd’ word in a set of three words (Ex. when teacher says ring, rabbit and sun, they recognize that sun doesn’t belong)
• Substituting sounds to make new words-children remove a sound from a word and substitute a different sound, can be either beginning sound, middle sound or ending sound
• Blending sounds to form words-children blend two, three or four individual sounds to form a word (Ex. teacher says /b/ /i/ /g/ and children repeat the sounds blending them to form the word big)
• Segmenting a word into sounds-children break a word into its beginning, middle and ending sounds (Ex. segment the word feet into /f/ /e/ /t/)

Teaching Phonemic Awareness

• Sound-matching activities-children choose one of several words beginning with a particular phoneme or say a word that begins with a particular sound.  Use familiar objects and can play a sound-matching game.  Also identify rhyming words.
• Sound-isolation activities-teachers say a word and then children identify the sounds at the beginning, middle or end of the word.
• Sound-blending activities-children blend sounds in order to combine them to form a word (ex. teacher sounds out the word /d/ /u/ /k/ and children say duck)
• Sound-addition and -substitution activities-children play with words and create nonsense words as they add or substitute sounds in words form songs they sing or books read aloud to them
• Sound-segmentation activities-one of the more difficult phonemic awareness activities is segmentation, where children isolate the sounds in a spoken word (ex. truck starts with /t/)
  • Teachers also use Elkonin boxes to teach students to segment words (comes from the work of Russian psychologist D.B. Elkonin).  Where students draw a box to represent each sound when segmenting sounds (see figure 5-1)

Phonics

• Is the set of relationships between phonology, the sounds in speech and orthograph (the spelling patterns of written language).  The emphasis is on spelling patterns, not individual letters because there isn’t a one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes in English.  Phonemes are spelled in different ways, and words sound differently according to their location (es. go-got) and adjacent letters often influence how letters are pronounced (ex. bed-bead) and vowel markers (ex. bit-bite)
• Etymology-or language origin, of words also influence their pronunciations (ex. ch is pronounced in several ways chain, chauffeur and chaos)

Phonics Concepts

• Phonics explains the relationships between phonemes and graphemes.  There are 44 phonemes in English and are represented by 26 letters.  The alphabetic principle suggests that there should be a one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes, but it doesn’t (Ex. day-you only have two phonemes /d/ /a/)
• Consonants-there are 21 letters (NOT a,e,i,o,u) and most represent a single sound, but there are some exceptions (some letters sound different when followed by vowels).  Two kinds of combination consonants are blends and digraphs.  Consonant blends-occur when two or three consonants appear next to each other in words and their individual phonemes are ‘blended’ together (Ex. grass, belt and spring).  Consonant diagraphs-are letter combinations representing single sounds that aren’t represented by either letter; four most common are (ch, sh, th and wh).
• Vowels-remaining 5 letters (a,e,i,o,u) and w,y are vowels when used in the middle and at the end of syllables and words.  Often represent several sounds, but usually short (breve) and long (macron) sounds.  Short vowel sounds don’t say the vowel names (ex. cat, bed, win, hot, cup).  Long vowel sounds say the name it is (ex. make, feet, bike, coal, rule).  Most vowel combinations are vowel digraphs or diphthongs.  Vowel digraph-when two vowels represent a single sound, the combination is a vowel digraph (Ex. nail, snow).  Vowel diphthong-when two vowels represent a glide from one sound to another it is a vowel diphthong (Ex. oi and oy, house, ow, now).  When one or more vowels in a word are followed by an r, it’s called an r-controlled vowel (or bossy r because the r influences the pronunciation of the vowel sound (Ex. star, word, pearl, cheer, here, cure)
• Blending into words-readers blend or combine phonemes to decode words (short vowel sound ex. the word best   /b/ /e/ /s/ /t/ and combine the sounds to form the word (long vowel sound ex. the word pancake   /p/ /a/ /n/ /k/ /a/ /k/)
• Phonograms-one-syllable words and syllables in longer words can be divided into two parts the onset and the rime.  Onset-is the consonant sound, if any, that precedes the vowel and the rime- is the vowel and any consonant sounds that follow it (Ex. show, sh is the onset and ow is the rime—-ball, b is the onset, and all is the rime) for up and at there is no onset just the rime
• Phonics rule-one rule is the q is followed by u and pronounced /kw/ (Ex. queen, quick).  Another rule that has few exceptions relates to r-controlled vowels; r influences the preceding vowels so that they’re neither long nor short (Ex. car, wear, four)   *many rules aren’t’ very useful because there are more exceptions that words that conform (see figure 5-4)

Teaching Phonics

• The best way to teach phonics is through a combination of explicit instruction and authentic application activities.  Most useful phonics skills are taught in a predetermined sequence.  Teachers begin with consonants and then introduce the short vowels (known as CVC-pattern words, ex. dig cup).  Then children learn about consonant blends and digraphs and long vowels (known as CVCe-pattern words, ex. broke, white) and then CVVC-patterns words (such as clean, wheel and snail).  Finally, students learn about less common vowel digraphs and diphthongs (ex. claw, shook and boil) and r-controlled words (ex. square, four and year). (see figure 5-5)
• Teachers use minilessons on phonic concepts to the whole class or small groups depending on instructional needs.  Teachers use activities to provide guided practice opportunities for students to manipulate sounds and read and write words. 
• Children apply phonic concepts they are learning as they read and write in interactive writing where children segment words into sounds and take turns writing letters.

Spelling

• As children learn about phonics, they apply what they’re learning through both reading and writing.  Early spellings reflect what they know about phoneme-grapheme relationships.  As their knowledge grows their spelling increasingly approximates conventional spelling.
• Stages of Spelling Development (see figure 5-6)-young children begin to write they create unique spelling, called invented spelling which is based on their knowledge of phonology

Teaching Spelling

• Best known way to teach spelling is through weekly spelling tests, but tests should never be considered a complete spelling program.  Students need to learn about the English orthographic system and move through the stages of spelling development. They develop strategies to use in spelling unknown words.  A complete spelling program should include…
  • Teaching spelling strategies
  • Matching instruction to students’ stage of spelling development
  • Providing daily reading and writing opportunities
  • Teaching students to spell high-frequency words
• Important spelling strategies include…
  • Segmenting the word and spelling each sound, often called ‘sound it out’
  • Spelling unknown words by analogy to familiar words
  • Applying affixes to root words
  • Proofreading to locate spelling errors in a rough draft
  • Locating the spelling of unfamiliar words in a dictionary
• Word Walls-use word walls to feature important words from books/units being worked on and/or high-frequency words.  This is a good resource for students to look at when writing
• Making Words-teachers use a five to eight-letter word and prepare sets of letter cards for a making words activity
• Word Sorts-students use to explore, compare and contrast word features in a pack of word cards.  They sort into two or more categories based on their spelling patterns or other criteria
• Interactive Writing-teachers use to teach spelling concepts along with written language.
• Proofreading-is a special kind of reading that students use to locate misspelled words and other mechanical errors.
• Dictionary Use-students need to learn to locate the spelling of unfamiliar words in the dictionary

Weekly Spelling Tests

• Use an individualized approach to spelling instruction and use this procedure for studying spelling words…
  • Say the word-students look at the first word on their spelling list and say it to themselves
  • Read the letters-students pronounce each letter int eh word to spell it aloud
  • Spell the word-students close their eyes, visualize the word and spell it aloud
  • Write the word– students write the word and check that it is spelled correctly, if it’s misspelled they repeat this step
  • Write the word again-students write the word again and check that it is spelled correctly, if it’s misspelled they repeat the procedure with the same word again

(some helpful/useful spelling programs—Kids Spell, Puzzle Maker, Spelling City and Spelling Wizard)

Classroom Application: This chapter allows me to better understand the alphabetic code and how children develop their phonological awareness by manipulating sounds in word, by matching letters and sounds to decode words and by representing sounds using letters as they spell words.  Doing this will require that I use different teaching techniques with the students.  Having different techniques gives students time to practice and work on a combination of oral and written activities is important because they are developing phonemic awareness, phonics and spelling knowledge (the three components of phonological awareness).  It is my job as an effective educator to teach my students to use phonemic awareness, phonics and spelling to decode and spell words.  In my future classroom, I will specifically use phonemic awareness by teaching students to manipulate words, I will teach high-utility phonics concepts, rules, phonograms and spelling patterns, and lastly, I will make sure that students follow a series of developmental stages as they learn to spell words conventionally.

Source: Tompkins, Gail E. (2017). Literacy for the 21st century: A balanced approach (7^th ed.). Boston: Pearson.