The Major Phonics Dimensions and Details of Instructional Content

Join us for this fascinating and informative conversation with Dr. Patricia Vadasy, researcher and literacy expert, as we explore phonics instruction, and the research behind it. We will consider the critical nature of alphabet knowledge in teaching young learners how to read and spell words. Throughout her career, Dr. Vadasy has worked to develop effective approaches to early phonics instruction. More recently, she published her research about instructional details that enhance phonics instruction, and effective approaches and details of preschool alphabet instruction. Her school-based intervention research has been funded since 1998 with grants from the U. S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences. 

For classroom teachers and administrators who are determined to give early learners the best possible foundation to become successful readers, this conversation will give you the facts behind phonics instruction, the strategies, and impetus to move forward knowing your instruction is the best it can be.

Dr. Vadasy will review and discuss:

• The National Reading Panel findings about effective features of phonics instruction, including explicit, systematic, and synthetic phonics instruction
• How the research informs effective phonics instruction, including applying taught letter-sound correspondences and application to beginning decoding
• Individual differences in learning these skills and where students struggle
• The benefits of practice in reading words in isolation and in sentence and story contexts
• Providing student support in the classroom and in supplemental instruction

Chapters

• 0:00 The Science of Reading and Phonics
• 16:50 Effective Reading Instruction for All Students
• 26:12 Advanced Strategies for Teaching Reading

Transcript

Narrator:

Welcome to EDVIEW360.

Dr. Patricia Vadasy:

I think that with more attention to translating these findings into classroom instruction, into the design of reading programs and curricula, this evolving understanding of the science of reading, specifically here about phonics instruction, would benefit all beginning readers but in particular the students who have difficulty building this time-sensitive and essential foundation in accurate word reading curate work reading.

Narrator:

You just heard from author and literacy expert Dr. Patricia Vadasy, senior research scientist at the Oregon Research Institute. Dr. Vadasy is our guest today on EDVIEW360.

Pam Austin:

Hello, this is Pam Austin. Welcome back to the EDVIEW360 podcast series. We are so excited to have you with us today. I'm conducting today's podcast from my native New Orleans, LA. Today, we are excited to welcome a respected literacy expert, researcher, and a science of reading advocate, Dr. Patricia Vadasy. She's a senior research scientist at the Oregon Research Institute with a background in early reading acquisition, instructional design. and school-based intervention research. Dr. Vadasy led the development and research on the Voyager Sopris Learning® Sound Partners program. Throughout her career as a researcher, Dr. Vadasy directed a series of randomized control trials on supplemental phonics instruction and beginning word reading skills. She also examined the long-term effects of kindergarten and first grade Sound Partners tutoring at two years post-intervention at the end of second and third respectively.

In later research, Dr. Vadasy examined details of beginning phonics instruction and approaches in details of preschool alphabetic instruction. She conducted two efficacy studies of vocabulary interventions for kindergarten and middle school students. Her reading research has been funded with grants from the U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Science. She currently co-directs projects funded by the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities on bilingual academic STEM vocabulary learning for English learners and their parents, and a bilingual mobile app for parents of preschoolers who have a sibling with special needs. She is widely published and very respected, and we're excited to talk to her today. Welcome, Dr. Vadasy. Let's get started.

PV:

Thank you.

PA:

When we talk about how the science of reading informs the content of our early reading programs and it involves instruction as well it's so important. What are the large guiding assumptions that we make or assumptions that we should have?

PV:

First of all, I want to remind the audience that the science of reading encompasses all aspects and elements of reading, even though it's often, most often, talked about in regards to phonics instruction. But that said, today, I will be talking about phonics and, looking inside, teaching foundational reading skills. In 2000, the National Reading Panel reviewed the status of research, all of the research, on reading instruction, and they set out at that time really clear findings on the global effective features of phonics. And those findings were that effective instruction was systematic. Instruction was systematic. It breaks down larger tasks into smaller tasks. It's sequenced. The entire instruction is laid out so that prerequisite skills are taught before later skills that are needed. For example, teaching letter-sound correspondences before introducing decoding words with those correspondences. And it was explicit, effective instruction directly taught the phonics components like the letter-sound correspondences needed for spelling or decoding. But there are many more details about phonics instruction to consider under that umbrella of assumptions.

PA:

You just detailed a lot of information from the National Reading Panel report that was first published, as you said, in 2000. Can you outline any other practices within their summary? On phonics instruction, you told us about systematic instruction, how it's sequential and it's explicit. You mentioned that there are more details. Are those details included in that report?

PV:

Well, the NRP panel, the subpanel on alphabetics and phonics, 25 years ago they noted that there were questions that needed more research to address in phonics, as well as the sub-panels in the other areas of reading and for phonics. They identified the need for further research on questions like how many letter-sound relations should we teach? What's the rate we should teach them at? One a week? One a day? And what are the ways, the teaching activities that we should use to help students practice using those letter-sound relations in authentic decoding and spelling tasks authentic decoding and spelling tasks? I think that when we talk about the science of reading today, we're talking about the NRP findings, the collection of what we knew back then and all of the subsequent research that helps us know how to make reading instruction most effective, including the beginning alphabetic and phonics instruction that we're talking about today.

PA:

So, this collection of research that we found has really fine-tuned. We've already have uncovered for lack of a better way of saying this from the National Reading Panel, right? So, just the idea of what's the sequence? What's the number? What's the rate for students?

You know your work has focused on three foundations of reading, in particular beginning phonics instruction. You told us that's that one piece, but reading is so much more. But we are honing in on phonics instruction. Tell us about how you came to your work to translate this research to early phonics instruction.

PV:

Well, I began working back in 1993 with a series of seven research jobs from the Institute of Education Sciences and those extended through 2021, and they resulted in publications on our findings from 10 randomized control trials and eight quasi-experimental studies, and these were all school-based interventions testing variations of K–2 phonics instruction, details of how to teach it effectively. And back then, like in the late ‘90s, we were looking closely at who could supplement this instruction, because at that time, in the late ‘90s, there was limited phonics instruction included in many K–2 reading adoptions. So, we were setting out to determine how could non-teacher tutors effectively supplement classroom phonics instruction, where many students weren't getting enough intensive instruction. So, that research informed the content of the Voyager Sopris Learning Sound Partners programs. And then later in 2015 to 2018, I worked with my colleague, Dr. Theresa Roberts, and we conducted a series of experiments just focused on the important details of alphabet instruction for preK students, and they were set out to answer some of those questions that the NRP outlined about how best to teach letter-sound correspondences and, for example, how many should we teach before we have children apply those correspondences to beginning reading and spelling tasks? Is it more effective to teach letter names first? Letter sounds first? Should we teach them both together when we introduce them? Because letter sound learning is what's known in cognitive psychology as a paired-associate learning task, can we make instruction more helpful for learning those visual-verbal associations like having instruction include more practice retrieving the labels for the printed letters or sounds? The labels for the printed letters or sounds. And finally, is it more effective to teach the correspondences explicitly or in the context of storybook reading, which was often advocated and practiced in preschool settings?

So, we looked at those details in studies. We randomly assigned small groups of three to four students to either a treatment or a control group, looking at those details, and provided nine to 10 weeks of instruction, 10 to 15 minutes a day, introducing about eight to 10 correspondences. And across those studies we found students in the treatment group learned both names and sounds. They learned significantly more than the control students. So, that was really encouraging for those types of instruction. But there was a cautionary finding because we found that about a third of students had more limited learning than we expected, despite what was really intense explicit instruction.

And we think that you know, Dr. Roberts, and I thought that you know that really underscores the difficulty of this task for some students. It is a constrained skill. It is a constrained skill. We all learn the names and the sounds of the letters, but it's a time-sensitive skill. It's really important that students learn this early, because now we teach decoding in kindergarten.

That wasn't the case back in the ‘90s so much, and there are individual differences. It's much harder for some students. They need more modeling, more repetitions, more practice. So, a takeaway from those studies is it's really important to monitor this learning, because time is so much of the essence, because my work has been inspired and guided by the research I read and consume. My teams and I have published all of our research in peer-reviewed journals and in all of these projects I've been so fortunate to work with first and outstanding data analysts, Dr. Elizabeth Sanders at the University of Washington, and strong teams of research assistants, including graduate students and teachers, and those are all the things that go into doing school-based intervention research.

PA:

Just through what you've shared already, you've answered my next question that I have, but I do want to summarize some of the points you made. Just to repeat some things, thinking about the extensive studies that you have had that led to questions. Right, it's always the question: Is this working? How is it working? It leads you to pulling out those details of that effective instruction and it's not really just as simple as that, right? Because it identified a need and what you ended with, Dr. Vadasy, was the fact that some kids, they still need more, despite the explicit direct instruction. There is a need. Some students need more repetition. Some students need more time, and time is of the essence. Did I pull all that together?

PV:

You did, you did. And just to reiterate, school-based intervention studies … It's an important kind of research, and it's challenging research to conduct. It's important because it's such a good way to understand the early obstacles that for looking at this area of reading, learning, understanding early obstacles, and seeing how instruction can be improved to address those obstacles, and it always requires a partnership with school sites, a trust on the part of schools, and having a lot of researchers, a lot of outsiders in the schools and in the classrooms assessing and instructing students. And a benefit of having that trust, though, is that in all of our studies, I and my research team were able to be in the schools really all of the time collecting on-site observations, really hundreds of observations, both to document fidelity, which is something that researchers need to do in order to publish in peer-reviewed journals, but also to see all of those tutors. All of those students. The challenges that each of those groups of people experience, and that instructional design, design can be improved, instructional design can help.

PA:

So, first understanding where the struggles are, identifying and then intervening, and this opportunity for school-based intervention research. It allows you to identify what works and what works for varying students and really getting to the nitty-gritty of: “Hey, what does that instruction look like?” Can you tell us how you and your team were able to conduct these school-based intervention studies? You gave us a little bit of information. Could you just maybe give us a little bit more detail in regards to what that looked like?

PV: Well, as I said, it involved having a partnership with schools and often word of month across districts. Principals who had our teams in the schools would see the benefits of the interventions for their students, would see the value of having additional assessment data. And we were able to conduct them for a reason. Timing was on our side. You know. This was, you know, a while ago in a large urban school district and for many of these studies we coordinated with about 30 classroom teachers, maybe 10 elementary schools located from one end of the district to another, and because these were pull-out tutoring slots, they were scheduled at all different times of the day based on teacher preferences. So, that meant that we could go from school to school to capture different sessions and the logistics for that scheduling was daunting, and I have to say I worked with an amazing colleague who worked out schedules with individual teachers to make that happen. But we would travel from the north end to the south end of the district back then, and I can say that we really couldn't do that anymore with the changes in traffic patterns. Simply, we just, it would be impossible. But that's all. I can't overestimate the value of seeing that many students up close and their success and their struggles.

PA:

Now, previously, you mentioned that sometimes the results vary for students. They had different needs. When we think about these alphabetic and decoding skills that are difficult for some students, why is that the case?

PV:

Well, we know that there are individual differences looking at you know from the research in children's ability to learn many of these critical subskills.

So, as I mentioned earlier, learning letter-sound correspondences, it's an associative learning task and there are individual differences in human beings in our facility, in our facility in learning visual-verbal associations.

Children differ in orthographic learning, how easily they learn to attach verbal labels to printed letters and how easily they can learn written letters and letter patterns to recognize them and recognize spellings for whole words and then eventually being able to recognize previously decoded words by sight. That's easier for some students, more difficult for others. Students come to school with individual differences in their early print and language experiences. Their early reading experiences with printed English orthography and those influence early how easily they learn early reading skills. And you know even individual differences in children's visual attention spans. If they're able to pay more close attention to the individual letter details, that's going to help them learn to identify letters faster than others. But whatever the cause of their early learning struggles, we know that instruction that's explicit, systematic, that teaches the smaller, that breaks down the skills and that provides ample teacher-tutor time for modeling student practice opportunities, cycles of review, carefully monitoring student practice, those are elements of instruction that help build rock-solid skills and confidence for all of our beginning readers so students can overcome those varying differences.

PA:

It all has to do with the type of instruction and you mentioned again I'll just say these descriptors: Explicit, systematic, sequential, lots of modeling, lots of practice. You know, I like to say model/practice, and one thing you said is the fact that these students will build their competence and they can learn.

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Voyager Sopris Learning's evidence-based programs are founded in the science of reading and incorporate systematic, explicit instruction. Our programs include LANGUAGE! Live® by Dr. Louisa Moats and REWARDS® by Dr. Anita Archer. Learn more at voyagersopris.com/reading.

PA:

Let's shift a little bit to our English language learners, our dual-language learners. What about these students? Should things be done a little bit differently for them?

PV:

Dr. Claude Goldenberg said it so well in an earlier podcast in this series that students learning to read in a second language need to learn the same letter-sound correspondences as a native English-speaking student and they use the same reading circuitry to map sounds onto letters. So, what that means is we don't wait for English learners to develop language proficiency before teaching them our reading skills and we begin where they are and we supplement vocabulary when needed. And through this early instruction English learners are learning many English words. When they're decoding, they're developing English language skills.

In the instructional interactions and in our work on Sound Partners, we found that explicit phonics instruction was very effective with English learners.

We had large numbers in our cohorts and we have data that when we compared kindergarten and first grade English learners to native English speakers, the English learner students made similar gains to the native-English speaking students, although their post-test scores were lower and, not surprisingly, their pre-test English vocabulary levels predicted their post-tests. So, that English language proficiency does help learning those beginning reading skills. But even students with lower English proficiency also learn those skills. And then, at two years at follow-up, when we looked at those two groups, well, really four groups of students—English learners, non-english learners, kindergartners, first-graders—at the end of grade two and three they maintained their gains and again the smaller effect sizes for the English learners but maintaining what they learned. And importantly, for the students who had some partners in kindergarten—the English learners—their grade-two reading outcomes were helped by the kind of classroom reading instruction they got in first grade. So, if they had stronger word reading instruction in first grade they were better able to maintain what they learned in kindergarten. Again, emphasizing the importance of strong Tier 1 classroom reading instruction for all students.

PA:

For all students. Well, the idea is, we don't want to wait. Don't wait for ELL students to acquire that English language. They will learn along the way. The instruction is the same with added vocabulary and when we think about those elements of that instructional design I'm going to do a repeat here: We're looking at sequential, systematic, explicit instruction with lots of modeling and lots of practice. Would you like to add anything else in regards to those elements of instructional design that can help all students?

PV:

Sensitive levels of scaffolding. This was something that we worked a lot with tutors on and maybe had more difficulty finding that, what's also called that zone of proximal development, not helping too much, helping them just move to the next stage, so that, for example, if a student comes to a word and they're practicing decoding and they just stop, the tutor, rather than provide the word, would ask what's the first sound, and sometimes the student would be on their way. They were reminded to do the blending task and they would go with it. If they still couldn't attempt the word, the tutor would provide the first sound and then, if the student still couldn't do that, the tutor would say read the word with me and then repeat the word, and it would help the tutor know well what needs more practice More practice in just getting accuracy and retrieving letter sounds or more practice in blending sounds together. So, scaffolding is an important level. It's an important detail of instructional design and also an important focus of professional development.

PA:

Definitely, and it's based on need, correct? It's based on where students are, where they're having those challenges. It's that differentiation at the time of instruction. Would you say that, Dr. Vadasy?

PV:

Exactly. Noticing and differentiating. Yes.

PA:

All right, awesome. What research informs thinking about these instructional details that you have been sharing with us? What about Scope and Sequence? You talked a little bit about the sequential nature of instruction. You talked a little bit about pacing too. The pacing and the introduction of those letter-sound correspondences and introducing beginning readers to larger phoneme-grapheme correspondences.

PV:

Well, fortunately, since, like the NRP, or since we began our work, there's more research to guide those elements of instructional design.

For example, when we started to develop the Scope and Sequence for Sound Partners, there was very limited research to guide a really basic decision how many letter-sound correspondences should we teach per lesson or per week? We ended up testing iterations of lessons and to discover what was most effective for our K–1 groups of at-risk students.

But since that time, there have been very rigorous studies of instructional pacing for teaching letter-sound correspondences. For example, in the U.S., research on teaching rate, Cindy Jones and Ray Reutzel published a study in 2012 with kindergartners showing the benefits of teaching one letter a day versus one letter a week. Benefits were that students had more opportunities to experience review cycles to go back and practice more difficult letters, more cycles of repetition and exposure, and more opportunities to do discrimination practice. For example, for the letters, there are many similar sounding or similar looking, visually similar letters. So, when you have a bigger group of letters already introduced, you can do that discrimination practice more easily. And those findings were replicated, for example, in other studies. A study by Kristin Sunde in 2015 with first-graders found that introducing letters at a faster pace was positively associated with word reading outcomes, especially for the lower-performing students, and they also commented that what this does is offer more opportunities for discrimination practice, which helps students become accurate and fast, which is what you want to learn with letter-style learning.

PA:

So, what you're saying is opportunities for more practice, which is what I like to say, and the idea of those minimal pairs for looking at these distinctions between letters, whether it's the visual letter themselves and the sound, that may be similar as well. What about teaching students to read longer and more complex words? Let's say they're getting really good at that basic decoding. Students are moving forward, they're gaining that confidence with those consonant-vowel-consonant patterns, right?, and similar word patterns, maybe a CCVC pattern adding those blends. How do we move students from the more simplistic word reading to more sophisticated, complex word reading?

PV:

Well, as you say, Pam, once students achieve that basic skill in decoding those really easy CVC words with accuracy and efficiency, you see them be often highly motivated to read big words, two- and three-syllable words with common prefixes and suffixes and inflections.

And we saw, in developing the lessons for Sound Partners, that students could build on a foundation of basic solid decoding accuracy to learn these reading, these more complex words. When teachers or tutors have a clear sequence for teaching students about syllables and morphemes, how they work, and this continues to build students' skills to read more complex words, to understand how the English language works, and this opens the door to reading more complex texts. And there's a terrific new book by Dr. Heidi Mesmer on reading big words and it lays out, as we were talking earlier, a clear sequence for introducing beginning readers from kindergarten up through grade five, how to instruct students in this progression of beginning by teaching inflections without spelling changes in grades K and one. Teaching those early readers compound words, contractions, and building, right up until you're teaching students in grades four and five about Latin and Greek roots. And again, a sequenced, systematic outline for leading up to teaching big words.

PA:

Well, those words come up again, right? Sequenced, systematic, and also that professional learning for our educators, our tutors, our teachers, so that they've got a firm grasp of that. One thing you said, Dr. Vadasy, was that motivation, that success that students have. Success builds on success and students can see that they can do. One word that pops into my head is fantastic, fantastic. Look at that multisyllabic words, those CVC patterns there. How exciting it would be for students to be able to read such a big word based on what they already know. All right, finally, what does the more recent research on early word reading tell us about directly teaching emerging decoders, who begin to encounter words that seem to have a disconnect between the decoded form and the pronunciation. You know, decodable versus non-decodable words that we definitely encounter in our English language.

PV:

Well, we know that successful readers develop a skill called set for variability and this is a skill that helps readers clean up that mismatch in English between a word's spelling and its pronunciation. And this is an important more recent line of research. In fact, I just saw a new study this morning and it's looking at how we can explicitly let students in on this secret. For, you know, some students pick up on it, other students it's not explicit. They need help to learn this aspect that we need to adjust many sounds in words in English. So, we introduce our struggling readers to learning the decoding skill with really controlled, predictable, decodable text words with regular correspondences, and this helps them develop confidence and become accurate. And then, many students move on. They learn to adjust when they're less-controlled words. But, as you said, Pam, there are many words in English where we need to adjust, particularly vowel pronunciations, and there are individual differences in students learning this set for variability and, just like we worked with students who had difficulty with basic decoding, other students don't pick up this flexing skill and really, the sooner students learn this skill, the sooner they have access to less-controlled and more interesting and more motivating texts. So, it's important. For example, the researcher Laura Steacy and her colleagues found that set-through variability is a stronger predictor of word reading in grades two to five than phonological awareness, and they and others have described this skill as a second step in decoding for being able to read many of the more irregular words in the English language and even in many early reading texts, which yields examples of effective strategies to help students read these words and to try a different sound, to ask themselves if it's a word they know.

And there are some training studies that are suggesting approaches that we might take to teaching this strategy. Hannah Dyson and her colleagues with 5- to 7-year-olds looked at training students to correct these mispronunciations, to say the word aloud, decide if they know it, think of words that sound similar, check if it makes sense and, very importantly, they found that teaching this strategy with a controlled set of words, it generalized to reading others of those words that need flexing. So, that's kind of the ticket for an effective, worthwhile strategy. And there have been other studies. Robert Savage and his colleagues in Canada have looked at strategies for helping students read those words that breach the most common phonics rules. So, this is a small, quick strategy that we're learning more about and it may be more useful than teaching phonics rules to remember for some types of words. Remember: For some types of words rather than trying to remember a rule, try these other strategies. That often gets you where you need to be in reading the irregular words, and those really describe so many English words.

PA:

Yes, there is a certain percentage. I know that 86 percent of our language is phonetic and pattern-based. Those others that may need you to do a little bit of flexing, they appear the same way, but don't follow those same rules. Word is what we're looking to provide students with what they need to have that skill. They aren't intimidated. They can dive in and do some flexing and read that word, Again, building more confidence. Dr. Vadasy, what would be your parting words for practitioners, for our tutors, for our teachers?

PV:

Well, so many of the missing pieces about effective early reading instruction that the NRP panel members noted in 2000 have been the focus of later studies that have been conducted and published, and I've tried to highlight examples of research that has particularly valuable applications for instruction, practical findings that could help us make instruction better. So, I think that with more attention to translating these findings into classroom instruction, into the design of reading programs and curricula, this evolving understanding programs and curricula, this evolving understanding of the science of reading specifically here about phonics instruction, would benefit all beginning readers. But, in particular, the students who have difficulty building this time-sensitive and essential foundation and accurate word reading.

PA:

You shared a good bit about the value and impact of Sound Partners. Where can we find out more about this effective intervention?

PV:

I think it's quite easy to look at the Voyager Sopris Learning website, and there's information on the new editions of both programs, kindergarten and first grade.

PA:

Thank you, Dr. Vadasy, for sharing your unique expertise with our audience. It's been a pleasure to speak with you. This is Pam Austin, bringing the best thought leaders in education directly to you. Please join us next month for another great EDVIEW360 podcast.

Narrator:

This has been an EDVIEW360 podcast. For additional thought-provoking discussions, sign up for our blog, webinar, and podcast series at voyagersopris.com/edview360. If you enjoyed the show, we'd love a five-star review wherever you listen to podcasts and to help other people like you find our show. Thank you.