A Fresh Look at Phonics - Book Summary
Written by: Brianna Guild, MHSc SLP(C)
Date: April 27, 2023
This post summarizes what I learned while reading A Fresh Look at Phonics: Common Causes of Failure and 7 Ingredients for Success by Wiley Blevins.
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Reasoning: While this book is clearly written for teachers, as a Speech-Language Pathologist who works with literacy clients, I found this book very informative and easy to apply to my literacy instruction. I immediately started putting what I learned from this book into practice, and believe it is improving my literacy lessons. I will continue to use this book as a reference for phonics instruction and supporting other educators.
Ingredient #1. Readiness Skills
- The two best predictors of early reading success are alphabet recognition and phonemic awareness.
- For alphabet recognition, focus on a sensible sequence, teach the name, shape and sound of each letter to mastery, connect handwriting to letter sounds, and use mnemonics and action rhymes as appropriate.
- For phonemic awareness, focus on the "power skills" of oral blending and oral segmentation, and provide supports during phonemic awareness activities, such as manipulatives, to make activities more concrete.
Ingredient #2. Scope and Sequence
Your phonics scope and sequence should:
- Build from the simplest to the most complex skills.
- Be created so that many words can be formed as early as possible.
- Teach high-utility skills before less useful sound spellings.
- Separate easily confused letters and sounds to avoid potential difficulties.
Ingredient #3. Blending
There are two types of blending:
Final blending: blend one sound at a time as you work through the word. Recommended when first introducing the principle of blending to students, and helpful to continue for struggling readers.
Success blending: run your finger under the letters in a word as you string together the sounds without pausing between sounds (each sound "melts" into the next sound).
- Create blending lines with review, target, and challenge words.
- Model only 1-2 words at the beginning of a word set. Let students do the bulk of the work!
- Use the same blending lines for multiple days of instruction for review, warm-up, or extension activities (e.g., dictation, and sentence writing).
- Have students apply blending work to connected text daily— do not limit phonics work to isolated word lists!
Ingredient #4. Dictation
- Dictation is guided spelling. It is modelling and providing supported practice for a student in how to transfer phonics skills from reading to writing.
- Begin dictation as early as kindergarten. Dictation can start with the educator saying a phoneme and students writing the letter, and progress to simple words with taught phonemes.
- When using sound boxes and counters to segment words into phonemes during phonemic awareness work, extend the work by having students replace each counter with the corresponding letter(s) to spell the word in print.
- Give students increased opportunities to write words, and monitor their free-writing, such as journals, to see if they are applying recently taught phonics skills.
Ingredient #5. Word Awareness Activities (Word Building and Word Sorts)
1. Word building: students are given a set of letters and asked to create a series of words in a specified sequence.
Blending focus: students are asked to make a word, such as cat. Then they are told to change the letter c to b and read the new word, bat. The primary goal it for students to blend (sound out) the new word formed.
Word awareness focus: students are asked to make a word, such as cat. Then they are told to change cat to bat. Students must determine which letter to remove, which letter to add, and in which position.
2. Word sorts: students are given a set of words that have something in common, and are asked to sort the words by their common feature.
Open sorts: students are given a set of words to sort by a common feature.
Closed sorts: students are told how to sort words (e.g., long-o words with oa versus ow).
Timed sorts: students are told how to sort a set of words, but are given a limited about of time to do so.
Ingredient #6. High Frequency Words
- 13 words account for more than 25% of the words in print: a, and, for, he, is, in, it, of, that, the, to, was, you.
- Irregular high frequency words are often treated as words students have to memorize. However, some of these words have something in common and actually form their own word families (e.g., could, would, should). Reorganize the sequence in which you teach irregular high frequency words to take advantage of word families.
- Research shows that readers store "irregular" words in their memory in the same way they store "regular" words— readers attend to letters and associate these with the sounds that they represent.
- Read-Spell-Write-Extend routine:
Read: write the word in a sentence and underline the word. Read the sentence aloud, then point to the target word and read it aloud. Have students say the word.
Spell: spell the word aloud and have students repeat. Point out any letter sounds or spelling students might already know, or that are the same as other words students have learned.
Write: ask students to write the word multiple times as they spell it aloud.
Extend: connect the word to other words students have learned, and ask students to generate oral sentences using the word.
Ingredient #7. Reading Connected Text
- There needs to be a connection across the literacy lesson— the same skill is the focus of phonics instruction, reading connected text, and writing.
- Controlled, decodable texts should be comprehensible, instructive, and engaging.
- Don't forget to work on comprehension and vocabulary when reading decodable texts! Use additional books for read-alouds, and use these read-aloud as an opportunity to front-load concepts and vocabulary that can then be reinforced through the photos and discussion during a decodable text routine.
- Complete writing activities based on the decodable text. This will require students to use the target phonics skills/words from the story, and the text will offer students scaffolded support in selecting and spelling words.
- Decodable book routine:
Preview and predict
First read - read together
Check comprehension
Second read - develop fluency
Retell and writing extensions
If you want more information on these 7 ingredients for phonics success, and the 10 common causes of phonics instruction failure, I highly recommend you check out the full book!
Reference:
Blevins, W. (2016). A Fresh Look at Phonics: Common Causes of Failure and 7 Ingredients for Success. Corwin Press Inc.