Transcript for:
Understanding and Overcoming Reading Challenges

Welcome to Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties, a professional learning series presented by David Kilpatrick, sponsored by the Exceptional Student Services Unit, and created in collaboration with specific learning disability specialists, Jill Marshall and Veronica Fiedler. The Colorado Department of Education's vision is that all students in Colorado will become educated and productive citizens capable of succeeding in society, the workforce, and life. The mission of the CDE is to ensure all students are prepared for success in society, work, and life by providing excellent leadership, service and support to schools, districts, and communities across the state.

in multiple ways. You can complete all 13 modules. Participants who engage in all 13 modules will be provided a comprehensive learning experience encompassing research, impact, and critical elements of assessing, preventing, and overcoming reading difficulties.

You can complete individual modules. Participants may view a session or sessions for specific information and guidance on topics related to assessing, preventing, and overcoming reading difficulties. This format is ideal for short professional development opportunities.

For example, during an impact team meeting or professional learning community. You can also complete this as a book or chapter study. Participants may view all or part of the series as a tandem companion or supplemental resource for supporting a study of the book, The Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties.

Module 4, Word Level Reading. Session 1, The Challenges of Word Level Reading. Hello, this is David Kilpatrick and I am the presenter for these 13 On Demand webinars. And through these webinars, participants will learn about reading research and see how that reading research affects our ability to assess, prevent, and overcome reading problems. We are now in module 4. You see the 13 modules that we have here.

We have seven sessions within the fourth module and we're going to be doing the first looking at some of the challenges involved in word-level reading. As a result of this particular session, participants will be able to describe the difference between word identification and word recognition. They're often used interchangeably, but you will learn the difference.

Also, identify the challenges in developing word-level reading. Most word reading instruction focuses on word identification, not word recognition. Word identification can occur in multiple ways. For example, you can recognize a familiar word. You've seen it before.

You know it. It jumps out at you. You've identified it.

But at the same time, you can identify a word that you don't know by sounding it out phonically, or maybe by guessing from context. Those are also forms of word identification. But word recognition is really like a subcategory.

category under word identification. It refers to words that you already know that jump out at you. Yes, you're identifying them, but you're identifying them because you already know them.

In other cases, you're identifying them in spite of the fact that you didn't know them before. Instant accurate word recognition for all the words you're reading, or at least most all the words you're reading, is a hallmark of skilled readers. Struggling readers do not have a large orthographic lexicon or large sight vocabulary, so many of the words in the passage are not instantly jumping out at them.

They're putting effort into identifying those words either through sounding out or guessing. As mentioned in an earlier session, sight word has multiple meanings in education, at least four that I've been able to identify, and I'm not going to review all those, but I do want to point out that one of the four ways in which the term sight word is used overlaps with the one way that researchers use the term. Researchers use the term sight word to refer to any known or familiar word.

It jumps out at you instantly. It's effortless. It's a word you recognize. Recognition assumes prior experience or knowledge. You don't recognize someone you've never seen before you may recognize someone you've never met before but you've done it because you've seen a picture of them or seen a video of them etc so you're still working off a prior memory sight words and this definition can be regular or irregular they can be low frequency or high frequency And a sight word vocabulary refers to all the words that a person knows.

The alternative term for that that researchers use is orthographic lexicon. Skilled readers have large sight vocabularies and poor readers don't. So here are some questions that we're going to pose for this module.

Module four is the longest one and the most in-depth one and here are some questions we're going to pose about this that by the time you're finished with module four you should be able to answer all of these questions. The first one is why do Why do some students have difficulties with word-level reading and others do not? The second question is why do some children struggle in learning phonics?

Some kids pick up on it easily, some kids can't pick up on it, and some kids seem to learn to read even without it. Why do struggling readers have such limited sight vocabularies? Why do some students struggle with fluency? And are there differences in terms of acquiring reading competence for students who are learning English? And finally, why do some word reading interventions have such limited results while others have very large results?

This is going to be covered in much more detail in module 11, but we will introduce it here in module 4. To sum up this session, word identification and word recognition can be distinguished from one another. Word recognition assumes that you already know a word, while word identification doesn't presume that. Word identification is sort of a broader category that means you properly identify. a word, either because you already knew it or because you were able to figure it out from sounding it out or guessing at it.

Skilled readers have a very large pool of words that they already know that they draw from when they read. We refer to this as a sight word vocabulary or an orthographic lexicon. Either way, it refers to a data bank of words that the reader already knows before they start to read any given passage.

You may want to stop here if you're doing a small group and reflect upon this particular question. Consider ways that you and others have tried to get students to remember the words they read. How well have these worked?

Do they work better with some students than others? In the next session of this module, we're going to explore word reading development. Module 4, Word Level Reading. Session 2, Word Reading Development.

Hello, this is David Kilpatrick, your presenter for these 13 on-demand webinars. And as you go through these webinars, the participants should be able to learn a lot about reading research, particularly as it applies to assessing, preventing, and overcoming reading difficulties. We are now in Module 4, and Module 4 has seven sessions. We're in the second session, and the presentation will be about word reading development. As a result of this session, participants should be able to describe why phonological skills are central to learning to read an alphabet-based writing system.

Also, participants will be able to identify the developmental levels of phonological skills and the developmental levels of word-reading skills and how they interact with one another. Let me begin by talking about the alphabetic principle. Consider Chinese writing versus alphabetic writing. In different parts of China, there are different Chinese languages. For example, there is a language that in the West we call Mandarin, another one that in the West we call Cantonese.

And these are different enough languages that a Mandarin speaker and a Cantonese speaker would have a very difficult time communicating because the language is so different. But yet the two of them could read the same newspaper at the same time. How is that possible?

It's possible because the Chinese writing system is not designed to capture the sounds of spoken language. Alphabetic writing is very different. The nature of alphabetic writing is to capture the sounds within the speech stream. And so as a result, each letter is designed to represent a phoneme in the spoken language.

In English, or French, or German, or Spanish, we don't write words. we write characters that are designed to represent phonemes in the spoken speech stream. We align those phoneme-based characters, leave a space between, and we call it a written word.

The alphabetic principle is not a teaching method. It's an insight. It's an insight that beginning readers develop that the written letters represent the spoken phonemes. It's so obvious to skilled readers, it's hard to even remember a time when we didn't have the alphabetic principle.

And poor access to the phonemes in spoken language makes reading an alphabet-based written language very, very difficult because it's based on phonemes. And if you're not able to recognize or be aware of the phonemes in the speech stream, it's very difficult to interact with a phoneme-based writing system. And phoneme skills are necessary both for sounding out new words most people are at least aware of that but what fewer people are aware of is how important phonemes are to remembering the words we read. That's going to be covered in great depth later in this module. Remember, we don't read words based on visual memory.

That was covered in module 2. In the late 1960s into the early 70s, it was discovered that phonological awareness correlates with word reading. Correlate meaning individuals that had good phonological awareness tended to be good readers. and individuals with poor phonological awareness tended to be poor readers.

One of the problems with correlations is which caused which. Is phonological awareness a byproduct of learning to read? Or is phonological awareness a cause of learning to read? Or are the two of them not directly related but both of them caused by some third factor?

We now know with the last 35-40 years of research that there is an interactive reciprocal relationship between phonological skills and learning to read. Historically when we've looked at the development of reading skill children develop letter name knowledge, letter sound knowledge, and it is important to notice as we go forward that both of them involve phonology. A name is a phonological memory. You look at somebody and you can't remember their name it's because you're not retrieving the proper phonological code in your brain.

to say, oh that's Brian or that's Megan. Letter sounds, of course, are even more abstract versions of phonology because letter sounds we don't use in English independently of words. We have the article A or A.

We have the word that can be spelled either O or OH, which is O. And in some parts of the country, I would also be a single phoneme. So those are two to three words in English that are single phonemes.

All other words in English are multi-phonemic. And so in spoken language we don't use phonemes in isolation. So there's a phonological skill involved in developing those abstract phonemes of spoken language when kids learn letter sounds.

L, M, T, K, R. etc. So kids take those letter sound skills and they apply them to sound out words or to do spelling at least if the words that they're trying to spell are phonically regular.

And for the most part this is where our phonic and spelling instruction revolves around these skills here but you're going to notice off to the left a big empty space and that's because these skills are based on phonology as hinted at when i mentioned the phonological storage and read retrieval of letter names and letter sounds. So we need to look at phonological skill development alongside word reading development. In fact, because of the alphabetic nature of the written language, we have to look at the phonemes. It's a phoneme based writing system.

We now know that early phonological awareness skills have a causal relationship with letter name and letter sound knowledge. Why do I say causal? Well, once again, when two things things correlate you don't know which one causes the other or is there a third factor that's causing both of them but there are two ways we know that there's a causal relationship between early phonological awareness and letter name and letter sound knowledge the first you might call soft causal evidence the second you'd call hard causal evidence the soft causal evidence is developmental so for example you take data on three and four year olds who have not learned letter names and letter sounds you take data on their phonological skills And how do we get at phonological skills?

We can't look at them directly, we can't observe them. It's a mental construct, it's a cognitive construct. So we use different types of tasks that we assume tap into those phonological skills. And those include when kids are three and four, the ability to rhyme, the ability to identify first sounds and words, and the ability to do syllable segmentation, maybe clap out syllables or tap out syllables.

And children who are three and four, the that are more skilled at that pick up on letter name and letter sound skills more quickly than kids who are weaker at that. So we know if we're testing kids in the fall of kindergarten with their letter name and letter sound skill, we know that age five kindergarten letter name and letter sound skills didn't cause age three phonological skills. But that's soft causal evidence because there could still be a third factor that influences both of those.

So the stronger causal evidence comes from study. in which three and four year olds were trained on those types of early phonological skills on rhyming on first sound awareness and on syllable segmentation and children are randomly assigned to groups so both groups start out with equivalent skills and one group is given those phonological awareness skill training another group may be given vocabulary training and then either immediately after the training is over they try to teach children some letter names and letter sounds or they tuck that information aside and they come back after the child has entered kindergarten and see how they did and see how many letter names and letter sounds they know when they enter kindergarten. In that case they find that the children who had gotten the training do better at letter names and letter sounds than the children who had not gotten that training. So that is pretty strong causal evidence.

So we now know when children show up to kindergarten and they have strong or weak letter name knowledge we pretty much assume that the onus of responsibility is on the parents. We know that kids that come into kindergarten with 26 uppercase letter names and 23 lowercase letter names and 14 sounds, we know that those children are going to do just fine in learning to read for the most part. But you have those other kids that come in with 9 uppercase, 4 lowercase, and only one sound, and that one sound happens to be the first sound in their first name. We know that that child is at risk for reading problems.

And it's very tempting for us to just assume the parents didn't do what they should have done. with a lot of letter names and letter sounds earlier on. Now that may well be the case and there's no question that early home environments influence early reading. But at the same time we have to look at another factor and that is whether or not the children have the phonological core deficit. And how well children do in early letter names and letter sounds may well be a pretty reliable marker for the phonological core deficit.

So when you have children throughout kindergarten and into first grade focus on letter sounds. Those are phonemes. So you focus on t and l and m and a and a and all the other letter sounds. That's helping kids isolate phonemes within words.

And guess what happens? We now know there's a causal relationship between learning letter sounds and developing phoneme awareness. Now notice the causal arrows.

Early phonological awareness is foundational for basic phoneme awareness, such as segmenting and blending. But exposure to an alphabet-based writing system system and focusing on those phonemes is also causal. There's some ways we know this.

Way back in the 70s when they first started noticing a relationship between phonological awareness and reading, they wanted to ferret out the relationship in terms of causality. One of the studies that was done was they went to Chinese adults back in the 70s and they found that Chinese adults couldn't do the kind of phoneme segmentation of spoken words that our first graders could do. That seemed a little odd, didn't it?

reality is their writing system never demanded it. Interestingly, you can't do that study in China anymore because since that time Chinese children are trained on what's called pinyin and that's using the Roman alphabet like English uses the Roman alphabet with some little diacritical marks on top to teach children to read at the earliest stages using an alphabet, and then they transition to the traditional Chinese characters. So as a result, current Chinese adults have been trained on a phonology-based writing system, the pinyin, which they eventually abandoned, but which allowed them to develop phoneme awareness.

So now Chinese adults can segment where they couldn't have done so 40 years ago. There are other studies to show that illiterate adults in some countries who were never taught to read they may be able to clap out syllables but they can't break words down into phonemes they don't have to so phoneme awareness is not a natural part of oral language in fact it's something that develops as a result of being trained on letter sounds which are phonemes so you have this basic phoneme awareness by the end of first grade most children can blend or segment just about any word you throw at them at the level of the phoneme. And so if you can do blending and you can do segmenting, you become pretty good at phonic decoding and basic spelling. We now know that phonic decoding and basic spelling is a product of knowing your letter sounds, but it's also a product of having the phoneme skills that allow you to apply that letter sound knowledge. So up until this point, we're talking about roughly a first grade level of development in both phonological skills and in word reading skills.

Now children can do basic phonic decoding. They can spell phonically regular words. And they start doing that throughout first grade, and they do that throughout second grade.

You're focusing on phonemes and letters. Phonemes and letters. Phonemes and letters.

Well, guess what happens? Now you eventually become really good at your letter sound knowledge, and you become really good at the phonemes within spoken words. That results sometime around late second into early third grade. What I refer to as advanced phonemic awareness or phonemic proficiency.

Let me explain what I mean by this. We now know from a number of studies, some very large studies, that phonemic awareness continues to grow, continues to develop, and continues to correlate pretty strongly with reading beyond first grade. So even though blending and segmenting are pretty well mastered by typically developing readers, they become much more proficient at segmenting and blending to the point where things become automatic.

Now at a later module, module six, we're going to talk about the different ways of assessing phonemic skills, and we're not going to delve on that at the moment, but in short of it right now, we're going to say that phonemic skills become automatic behind the scenes to the point where children have access to the phonemes without even thinking about it. That's advanced phonemic awareness. So whereas segmentation skills may be a conscious skill at the end of first grade, they're instant and unconscious by late second or early third grade in most kids, at least typically developing readers. So that's what I mean by advanced phonemic awareness or phonemic proficiency. Advanced phonemic awareness I define as the phonemic awareness that continues to develop after first grade and that plays out as highly proficient access to the phonemes.

It's hard to understand this next step. until the next session in this module, but it becomes the driver for what is referred to as orthographic mapping. So if you're good at phonic decoding and you're good with the letters and sounds and you have advanced phonemic awareness and proficiency, you can become good at orthographic mapping.

What's orthographic mapping? Simply put, orthographic mapping is the mental or cognitive process that we use to store a word for permanent retrieval later on. It's the foundation of building our sight vocabulary, our orthographic lexicon. It is not the least bit obvious how that could be, and so we have an entire session devoted to that. But for our purposes here, what we can talk about is by late 2nd, early 3rd grade, is when you have the sight word explosion in children's development.

In fact, researchers have a term for it. They call it the sponge-like development of written vocabulary. Orthographic mapping...

is supported by very proficient phonic decoding and by very proficient phonemic awareness. After this point, as the orthographic lexicon gets built up, kids have large sight vocabulary, they become fluent, now the shift is to focus primarily on comprehension and move away from the building blocks of learning to read the words because now the mechanics of that is very well in place by late second into third grade, even within Typical development there's going to be some variation. So it should be clear that phonology is foundational all the way through at every single level. Phonology is necessary for learning letter names because that involves phonological storage of those names. Phonological skills are necessary for letter sounds because those letter sounds are phonemes that don't exist independently in our spoken language except in maybe three two or three words in English.

All other words are multi phonemic. And phonic decoding and spelling are both dependent very much on the phonology of the spoken language, the phonemes and the blending. And in ways that are not obvious that will be explained in the next session, our ability to anchor words into long-term memory so they jump out at us in the future and we don't ever forget them is based upon highly proficient phonemic skills.

So in summary, an alphabetic writing system is based upon the phonemes of spoken language. Phonological skills are a foundational aspect of every level of word reading development. An exposure to an alphabetic-based writing system promotes the phoneme skills in typically developing readers.

So what has been your understanding of the role of phonological skills in reading? And how would you characterize that understanding after watching this session? In the next session we're going to talk about why some children struggle in learning to read as a result of having poor phonology. And I apologize for misspeaking, it's actually two sessions from now that we will cover orthographic mapping.

Module 4, Word Level Reading. Session 3, How Poor Phonological Skills Hinder Word Reading. Hello, this is David Kilpatrick, and I am your presenter for this series of webinars. This series of webinars is designed to help you understand the meaning of word level reading. to present the highlights from a vast amount of reading research that has been generated over the years and apply it directly to issues of assessment, prevention, and overcoming reading difficulties.

Here's an overview of the 13 modules. We're currently in module 4. Module 4 has seven sessions and we're in the third session. We're going to examine how poor phonological skills affects word reading. After viewing this session, participants should be able to understand why students with the phonological core deficit make very limited progress in word-level reading.

Also, they'll be able to identify how students with the phonological core deficit may display different patterns depending on their level of development and the instructional opportunities that they have available to them. This is important because two children may have the same underlying reasoning for why they're struggling in reading, but the way their reading plays out in a real world situation may look a bit different. This session builds upon the previous session, so if you did not view the previous session I strongly encourage you to do so. Recall from the previous session the nature of alphabetic writing. Alphabetic writing is designed to capture the sounds within the speech stream of spoken language and turn that into a written form.

Individuals who therefore have limited access to the phonemes within the speech stream, and it's the phonemes upon which the alphabet is based, they're going to be at a great disadvantage when you're going to try to learn an alphabet-based writing system. The difficulties these individuals face may influence their ability to sound out new words, or it may not, depending on the level of severity of the phonological core deficit that they experience. This will become more clear in future slides. There is a naturally occurring interactive reciprocal relationship between phonological skill development and word reading development that was covered in the last session.

And the phonological core deficit can disrupt that development in various ways. In fact, what we're going to do is go back to the previous slide. back through the same discussion of phonological awareness development and word reading development from the last session, except then we were focusing on typical development. Now we're going to talk about individuals with the phonological core deficit and see how their development in word reading is disrupted by their issues with phonology.

Recall with word reading development, we have letter names and letter sounds, we have phonic decoding and encoding, and for the most part that's been our focus within education. But you also recall that letter name and letter sound knowledge is based upon early phonological awareness. But what if you have very weak early phonological awareness?

If that's the case, then it's going to be much more difficult for you to learn letter names, but particularly it's going to be hard to learn letter sounds. At least letter names are multi-phonemic like other words. So for example, letter names such as b or t or l. If you were to spell them out they would be e l for l and t e e for t etc. They're multi-phonemic.

But When it comes to individual letter sounds, they represent single phonemes. So because letter names are multifonemic, it's typically easier for children to pick up on them, just like names of other things. Letter sounds represent abstractions, those phonemes within spoken words, that we don't have to deal with when it comes to oral language.

If you are a child who struggles with phonological skills, it's going to be very difficult for you to deal with those abstractions that we refer to as phonemes that are represented by the letter sounds. Children come into school and kindergarten and they already have fewer letter names and letter sounds available to them. We've known since the 70s that letter name and letter sound knowledge in kindergarten predicts second and third grade reading skill. In the past we just assumed that's because letter sounds are so important for phonic decoding and certainly that's one of the reasons.

But there may be a deeper and more subtle reason as to why letter name and letter sound knowledge in kindergarten predicts later reading skills. and that may be because doing poorly with letter names and letter sounds in kindergarten may be a marker of the phonological core deficit. So you may have a child who comes into kindergarten and the parents did all the right things, and that child still underperforms when it comes to letter names and letter sounds. That child may have the phonological core deficit. So now you have a child who comes in with an inadequate number of letter names and letter sounds, and throughout kindergarten, As various sounds are being learned and reinforced, they are not benefiting nearly as much as their peers who do not have the phonological core deficit.

Now, with typically developing kids, focusing on those letter sounds naturally produces phoneme awareness. But with children with the phonological core deficit, that doesn't necessarily happen. Children with the milder phonological core deficit issues, they may develop the phoneme awareness as a result of being taught letter sounds. and maybe even some of the children with the moderate phonological core issues.

And if they do so, it's typically about a year late. As I mentioned last time, blending and segmentation at the phoneme level is pretty much mastered by most first graders at the end of first grade. Well, with many children with the phonological core deficit, they may become good at blending and segmenting by the end of second grade. This becomes a problem in recognizing the reason for their difficulties, because what happens is children will be evaluated using a blending task or a segmenting task at the end of second grade or even into third grade and they'll say, hmm, their phonological awareness is just fine. Such an attitude doesn't recognize the fact that phonological awareness continues to grow after first grade and continues to have an impact on children's reading development.

That continued growth beyond first grade is not inconsequential for reading. It's very important for reading development, but it doesn't get recognized. when we rely on tests of blending and segmentation. This will be covered in much more detail in module 6. Other children, some of which have the moderate phonological core deficit, and most children with the severe phonological core deficit, will absolutely not develop phoneme awareness after being taught letter sounds.

It just doesn't naturally develop. So while typically developing children will develop phoneme awareness all on their own as a result of being taught letter sounds, Children with the phonological core deficit may or may not develop that, and if they do, it's going to be late, and in many cases, it doesn't develop at all. As a result, you don't have the phoneme awareness skills fueling the phonic decoding and the encoding. Rather, it's just really the child's raw letter sound knowledge that is prompting that, and that's often not enough.

If a child does develop the phonic skills, and typically... it's only as a result of direct teaching of phonic skills and not something that they're going to figure out on their own through either the whole word or the three cueing approach. Such a child may become good at phonic decoding. There are many cases and many of you know about these children who if they get a good phonic intervention they become better and better at sounding out unfamiliar words and better at better at spelling phonically regular words. But for many of them that's where their reading development stops.

They're not good at remembering words because they do not develop advanced phonemic awareness as a result of learning phonics. Now keep in mind, if you don't teach phonics explicitly, to such children, they're not even going to get that far. They're not even going to get to that second level on either side.

But if you do teach phonics, there's a good chance that they are going to get to the second level on both sides. However, most children with moderate to severe phonological awareness will never develop the advanced phonemic awareness unless it is directly taught. Some of the children with mild phonological issues might go on to develop the advanced phonemic awareness as a result of being taught phonics because they have milder problems.

But the more moderate to severe children with a phonological core deficit do not naturally develop that. That's why you have children who've been in phonic programs for years, and they do not become good readers because they are not good at adding to their sight vocabulary. In other words, the orthographic mapping process is not in place for them.

Orthographic mapping, which will be covered in detail in the next set of slides, is the mental process we use to store words. When I say mental process, it's actually automatic and behind the scenes. And what these children typically lack is automatic access to the letter-sound relationships.

And definitely, they lack automatic access to the phonemes and the spoken words. And as you see with the arrows, those are the two key skills that go into becoming very good at remembering words. Now, with that said, children with the phonological core deficit can do orthographic mapping, but very inefficiently.

One of the things we're going to learn in the next set of slides is that skilled readers after second grade only need to see a new word between one and four times, and it becomes part of their sight vocabulary from then on. But children who are struggling in reading, we don't know how many times they need to see it. I am not familiar with studies that show that. I do know a few studies that did training with children and may have exposed the kids 14, 16, 18 times. to certain words and very often they didn't get it even after that number of exposures.

But we do know that children, particularly by late elementary school and on into middle school and high school, they do remember words. How do we know that? Well, we have tests such as the test of word reading efficiency and it's timed and they start out with very simple words. And I have worked kindergarten through 12th grade and working with middle schoolers and high schoolers, some even pretty severe.

Dyslexic individuals, they will read those words very quickly and many of those words look just like another word but off by one letter. So what that tells me is a lot of those basic words that they have seen hundreds of times eventually get mapped orthographically. In other words, they truly do have a memory for those words.

But their orthographic lexicon is extremely limited and grows very slowly compared to their typically developing peers. So even though the orthographic mapping will work with these older children, it works highly inefficiently. And the reason for that inefficiency is because combination of their letter sound knowledge is inadequate and their phonemic skills are inadequate. Now it may not be obvious what in the world this auditory skill of phoneme awareness has to do with visual word reading, but that's what the next set of slides will explain.

To summarize, alphabetic writing systems require very efficient access to phonemes because the alphabet is based on the phonemic structure of spoken words. And individuals with the phonological core deficit don't naturally develop those phonological skills that they need to become efficient at reading. In most cases, these children need very direct and explicit teaching of the phonemic awareness skills and the letter sound skills in order for them to read proficiently.

It's also important to realize that different patterns or symptoms, you might say, of word reading difficulties can result depending on their level of phonological development. So remember back to a previous session where we talked about some students who had severe phonological core deficit issues and they couldn't even benefit from phonics. If you go back to our diagram, you realize that those children never made it out of that first level. They never developed the phoneme level blending and segmentation that allowed them to benefit from phonics.

But for those children who could develop phonics and had the opportunity to learn phonics, and their phonological core deficit was not nearly as severe, they show different presenting symptoms. Those children end up becoming very good at sounding out words, but they lack fluency. Why do they lack fluency?

Because they have a limited sight vocabulary, and there are too many words in a passage that they have to figure out phonically or through guessing. So those represent two different presentations of children that struggle. And then you look at older...

struggling students. You take a student in late elementary school who's built up a small but very firm sight vocabulary of easy words, and such children will look at those words and say them instantly, and they will kind of fool us into thinking that they're good at visually remembering words. No, they're not good at visually remembering words. They're actually inefficient at orthographic mapping, and after dozens or hundreds of exposure to those easier words, they now have them in their long-term memory. They are truly part of their orthographic lexicon.

So those children may be very poor at sounding out words, but they may be able to instantaneously recognize words. That creates the impression that there's some children that can remember words, but they can't sound them out. The reality is that's a developmental phenomenon.

We don't see that in younger children. We only see it in older children. I mean, we may see it in very early on in kindergarten and first grade. Some children will visually memorize some words. That's a visual memorization.

And the problem is there are too many words that look alike, so that type of strategy does not work well for the long haul. In sum, a number of the different types of patterns that we see in word-level reading among children can be very well understood by the developmental progression that is portrayed here in this set of slides. So how does the interpretation of word level reading difficulties support or not support your previous understanding of reading difficulties? And what do you think are some of the implications of all this for assessment and instruction? In the next set of slides we're going to cover orthographic mapping and learn how it is we remember the words we read.

Thank you. Hello, this is David Kilpatrick and I'm your presenter for these 13 on-demand webinars. These webinars are designed to introduce educators to the most useful information related to reading research that will help with assessment, prevention, and overcoming reading difficulties.

We are now in module four and module four contains seven different sessions. It's the module in terms of number of sessions and we're at the fourth session. After viewing this session, it is hoped that participants will be able to explain the process of orthographic mapping. But I'm going to mention right up front that most people don't really get it first time through.

You may want to watch this again and build upon your knowledge. I know I didn't get it the first time. I was exposed to it back in the late 90s.

I know many researchers are not familiar with how it works. So don't be discouraged if you don't get it the first time through. It's up to me to try to do my best to explain it.

But once you do understand it, it's amazing how everything related to reading falls into place so neatly. And then identify the two skills that are needed for efficient orthographic mapping. This is important because it's going to lead to understanding what might be the best way to instruct children and the best way to intervene with reading problems.

And finally, to look at how orthographic mapping is related to sight vocabulary. Let's recap a few things that have been learned in earlier sessions. First of all, word reading is not based upon visual memory.

That was covered in the second module. Secondly, skilled word readers don't guess at the words they read based on context. Most or all of the words they read, they are already familiar with it and they instantly jump out at them.

Phonological and phonemic skills are central to remembering words. How then are words remembered? Orthographic memory. Orthographic memory is the memory for specific familiar sequences of letters.

It means that you remember the correct letter order. Orthography means the correct way to write something in any given language system. Orthographic memory is a memory that is a familiarity with the specific letter order of any given word.

There are two broad levels of orthographic memory. There's orthographic recognition and that's what we need to instantly and effortlessly recognize familiar words. Orthographic recall is needed to produce the correct spellings of words, particularly words that can't be reliably spelled phonetically.

For example, irregular words or words that may be phonetically correct, but there are multiple ways of spelling it phonetically correct, like the examples you see there. Orthographic recognition is typically easier than orthographic recall. For example, more people can easily read words like rendezvous and kernel and licorice than can easily spell them.

There's extensive research on orthographic learning. There are three major areas of orthographic learning research. One pertains to David Scher's self-teaching hypothesis, the second to Linnea Airey's orthographic mapping theory, and third to various computer models that simulate how words are learned. Our focus is going to be on the first two, each of which has extensive direct and indirect scientific support.

Both the self-teaching hypothesis and orthographic mapping theory. While they overlap, they're not identical. Yet they both affirm that letter sound skills and phonemic skills are central to remembering words. And visual memory does not play any measurable role in remembering words beyond simple visual input.

And keep in mind, input and storage are not the same thing. So we're talking about how we store words, not how we input words. We know we input words visually. To begin discussing the self-teaching hypothesis, it's important to bring out the fact that adult competent readers have between 30,000 and 60,000 words in their sight vocabulary or their orthographic lexicon.

Meaning, you could take any one of the 30,000 to 60,000 words that you know, put them on the screen for just a 20th of a second, and you'll still be able to read it. How many of those words, by the way, did your teachers teach you? Or your parents?

Hundreds, probably. Maybe a thousand at most. So, how did you learn those other words? You taught yourself.

That's the idea behind the self-teaching hypothesis and where it gets its name. The vast majority of words we learned ourselves through reading. How did we remember them?

Well, orthographic learning occurs one word at a time. Both Airy and Scher's theory affirm that. In other words, you need to see a word in order to remember it. We can only remember things that we've seen before. And this learning only occurs as a result of an encounter with the letters and sounds in the words that have to be learned.

It's not based on some sort of visual memory. You have to actually see the word and make note of the letter order, because that's what orthographic memory is, remembering the letter order. Orthographic learning is implicit, meaning it is rarely a matter of conscious thought. Chances are you and I cannot remember consciously storing 30, 40, 50,000 words. Yes, there are times we come across a particularly difficult word and we might try to figure out a way to remember it.

But for the most part, the learning of words happened in the background. Numerous research studies have shown that from second grade on, for kids that are on target in terms of their reading development, we only need to see... printed words between one and four times and they become permanently stored for future instant recall. As students phonically decode words, says the self-teaching hypothesis, they are connecting phonemes with graphemes, meaning letters and digraphs, and forming orthographic connections.

So in other words, they're establishing in their memory the order of the letters. Self-teaching occurs efficiently in students who are skilled with letter and sound knowledge. but doesn't work well with students who struggle with letters and phonemes. So we have a situation in which children that struggle in reading may learn to sound out words, but they're not good at remembering the words they read.

We don't have the reverse. We don't have kids that are perfectly competent at remembering the words they read, but can't sound out nonsense words. So based upon the last two sessions, when we saw the development of word reading, we see that the phonic decoding comes before the efficient word memory.

Orthographic learning requires skilled phonic decoding. That is not optional. Very often it is assumed that phonics is an unnecessary part of learning to read because so many children learn to read even though they were not specifically taught phonics.

Even children who never received phonic instruction, those children still can build a sight vocabulary of 30 to 60 thousand words. But those children can also sound out nonsense words. So they learned how to read in spite of not being taught.

They figured out the code on their own. Orthographic mapping describes the mental process used to remember words. In the self-teaching hypothesis, really very little in terms of the actual cognitive connection forming process, where the orthographic mapping theory does more to help us understand that process. So the focus of the self-teaching hypothesis includes the real-world situation in which orthographic learning occurs. When does it occur?

It occurs during real reading situations. Through our lives, from our childhood up until today, as we're reading along and you encounter a new word, you put in a little bit of extra mental energy to sound it out, and that allows you to know what the word is and you continue going. Well, in that little time, one to four exposures to words that way, we remember that particular letter order.

But the self-teaching hypothesis doesn't explain how that happens. It does explain though that the central requirement for good orthographic learning is phonic decoding. By contrast, orthographic mapping describes the mental cognitive connection forming process that allows us to remember the words that we read.

However, it really describes it in a more abstract way. It doesn't put it within a context that Scher's theory does of real world reading. So together The orthographic mapping theory and the self-teaching hypothesis explain a lot about how we build our sight vocabulary. It seems like between the two of them, it's a very well understood process. Keep in mind that orthographic mapping is a mental process, not a teaching technique.

I've had people approach me that have learned about orthographic mapping and said, Oh yeah, we did orthographic mapping with the kids. Well, orthographic mapping isn't an activity you can do with kids or anybody else. Orthographic mapping is a...

mental process that occurs and can't be seen. It's the connection forming process that attaches pronunciations of oral words to the string of letters that we call the printed word used to represent those oral words. So what is the mental process that's described by orthographic mapping? Well, words are remembered by connecting pronunciations of oral words to their written counterparts.

The word spellings. When we learn new things, we're connecting what's new to something that's old. That's a process that starts from birth onward, is that as we learn new things, we're connecting new things to things we've already learned. Well, what do we already know?

We already know a word's pronunciation. So if a child knows a word like red, or sock, or house, that child already has something anchored in their long-term memory that they connect the spelling to. And that is the oral pronunciation of the word and typically the meaning of that word as well.

This can only happen at the phoneme level because of the phonemic nature of alphabetic writing. Proficient phoneme level abilities are necessary to efficiently remember words by connecting the phonemes in the pronunciations to the letter sequences that are used to spell that word. This may all seem like an abstraction at the moment, but as we go through this, I'm going to try to make it a little bit more clear and concrete.

Let's talk about the flow of information that's involved in orthographic mapping. Phonic decoding goes from text to brain, meaning you're looking at a text, it's got a word on it, you're going to try to figure that word out. You identify the sounds of the letters, you blend those sounds together, and hopefully activate the correct pronunciation. Orthographic mapping goes from brain to text.

Now the reality is orthographic mapping goes in both directions, but it's the brain to text part of that equation that people are unfamiliar with and don't necessarily understand. So I'm going to emphasize that part. You have the words pronunciation, and you have the phonemes in that pronunciation, and you attach the phonemes in that pronunciation to that letter sequence.

So you're going from what you know to what you're trying to learn. It's not just the pronunciation, but it's the phonemic nature of the pronunciation. It's breaking that pronunciation down into phonemes so that they can be attached to that letter sequence so that that letter sequence can become familiar. Why is it familiar?

Because you've attached it to something you already know, which is the word's pronunciation. The flow of information is in the opposite direction of phonic decoding. So a specific letter order, which we call a written word, it becomes familiar and very well established because the pronunciation already is established. So if you can connect what is known, the word's pronunciation, to what is unknown, the letter string, you can make that letter string That is a written word. Very familiar, very quickly.

Orthographic mapping certainly benefits from phonic decoding, as the self-teaching hypothesis indicates. So it's in that process of sounding out words and activating the relationship between the letters and sounds that allows the orthographic mapping process to occur. So orthographic learning is really a matter of phonic decoding plus orthographic mapping.

But the phonemic requirements of Phonic Decoding are less sophisticated than the phonemic requirements of Orthographic Mapping. That should become clear later. And in fact it should be clear from the developmental chart that you saw in the previous two sessions. You need the equivalent of an ending first grade level of phonemic awareness skills to do Phonic Decoding. But you need further more developed, what I refer to as advanced phonemic awareness, to become efficient at Orthographic Mapping.

Let's try to take a look at how this mapping process works. So let's begin with the oral part first. When you see in any reading-related research or writings about reading, when you see a slash mark on either side of a letter, it doesn't refer to that letter.

It refers to the common sound of that letter. So if you saw the slash mark on either side of a T, that is T, not the letter T. Well, I've taken that same convention and I've applied it to a whole word here.

The idea is that what you're looking at is not the printed word red, that is the oral word red. And you see over on the left, that's PLTM. That stands for your phonological long-term memory. In other words, red is a pronunciation that you're familiar with.

So if a child knows the word red, they know what it means, they know what it sounds like, they know they've heard it before. Let's see how their brain, their mind, their memory system... can be prepared to learn the printed word red.

If they have good phoneme analysis skills or phoneme awareness skills, analysis meaning you can pull the word apart. Look at this, now you've got the sounds within red available to you, r, e, d. Well, you already have that pronunciation in your long-term memory.

And if that pronunciation can be easily and naturally pulled apart, you now have anchoring points for this printed sequence. You attach each of those phonemes to its corresponding letter and suddenly you're using the power of what you already know, which is the pronunciation of the word red, and attaching it like super glue, like suction cups, to the printed word red. You get a word like has, you know the pronunciation of has. You can break that apart. Well, Now you see it's an H-A-S.

The child may have expected a Z. But as you know, in many words, the S makes a Z sound at the end of a word. And so the child can map those sounds onto that particular spelling pattern. And that way they're anchoring the pronunciation to the letter sequence. Notice this is the opposite information flow compared to phonic decoding.

Phonic decoding would go in the other direction. So let's take a look at how this... mapping process interacts with phonic decoding by way of integrating both the self-teaching hypothesis of David Scher and the orthographic mapping theory of Linnea Aery.

So based on the self-teaching hypothesis, we begin with good phonic decoding. That is how we begin to establish an orthographic memory. A child sees the word win. Now the child already knows the word win.

They've played games before. They know what the word win means. And they've heard the word win. But let's say the child has never seen the word in print before.

If the child has letter sound knowledge, the child can attach the common sound to each of those letters. So here's the child. turning those particular letters into their respective sounds. The child says, w-i-n.

Now many of you may have encountered children who may look at something like this and say, w-i-n, and turn and look at the teacher and say, what's the word? And you say, what's the word? You just sounded it out.

Well, that child has a problem with phonological blending. So what needs to happen is, not only does that child need to activate the sounds that go with the letters, the child needs to blend them together. And when they're blended together, that child will be able to do that.

activates the whole word when and the child says oh when so now you see with those slash marks we're talking about the phonological long-term memory we're talking about the oral form of the word so the child began with the written form used phonic decoding and phonic decoding is applying letter sound knowledge and phoneme blending to activate a spoken pronunciation but according to shares theory this is how a child learns to read and when we overlay Aries theory on top of it we see that this is now in the child's current working memory, but in the background, we'll see what I mean by in the background in upcoming slides, the child, if he or she has very proficient phoneme skills and phoneme analysis skills, now that he or she is aware of the pronunciation, they're able to work backward from that pronunciation to the spelling pattern. So there you go. Now we're taking that full pronunciation, we're able to break it up and turn around and apply that to that letter sequence. So this represents an integration of the self-teaching hypothesis and the orthographic mapping hypothesis, and together they give us a very clear understanding of the relationship between phonological skills and reading development.

In the previous slide, all the words were considered to be transparent, meaning there's a one-to-one correspondence between the number of letters and the number of sounds in the words. But there are also words that are referred to as opaque. in the sense that there is not a one-to-one correspondence.

So you get a word like this, m-a-k, and now you have a problem because now you see there are four letters but only three sounds. When in the context of mapping, it's really not a problem. And knowing the silent e rule can be helpful and useful to make sense as you create the map between pronunciation and print. So you see each of those line up with their corresponding sound. And once again, if you're familiar with the silent e rule, you don't get thrown off.

by the fact that there's an extra letter in that sequence. Now you have the word read. Same thing.

We have three sounds, but we've got four letters. In this case you have a vowel diagraph, rather than a silent e, and you're able to map those to their corresponding units that help represent the oral pronunciation. Now you have an irregular word, comb, and you got a little bit of a problem.

It's not a silent e word. But from a mapping standpoint, it's not a whole lot different. From a mapping standpoint, just like the word make, you're able to map to those letters that represent the sounds, but now you realize you have something extra.

Typically, B is not silent, but we do know there are a bunch of MB words that have a B that's silent. So let me distinguish between phonic decoding and orthographic mapping. Phonic decoding involves... identifying an unfamiliar word. The individual figures out the word through letter sound knowledge and phonological blending.

The flow of information is from orthography, that is the spelling pattern, to phonology, that is the pronunciation. So it goes from text to brain. Phonic decoding is about identifying a word and it's not about remembering a word.

Orthographic mapping only works if the word has been identified. So in other words, for orthographic mapping to work, you need to begin with the pronunciation. You need to know what the word in front of you actually says.

Whether you sounded it out on your own, whether you guessed at it, whether the teacher told you. The fact is you're looking at a word and you know what the pronunciation of that word is. We know from the self-teaching hypothesis that the most efficient way to go about that is by sounding out the word. The pronunciation of the spoken word is then mapped onto that letter sequence.

The flow of information is from phonology to orthography, from brain to text. Opposite direction from phonic to coding. Once again, orthographic mapping is truly interactive. The flow of information is in both directions. However, I'm emphasizing the direction of the flow of information that most people are not familiar with.

Orthographic mapping is about remembering a word, not about identifying a word. So it functions very differently than phonic decoding. And this mapping is only efficient at the phoneme level, at the letter level.

You have to be able to attach phonemes to sequences. It's not enough to have good phonological awareness in terms of syllable awareness or rhyming or all these others. Those are all earlier level phonological skills that lead eventually to phoneme level analysis. Eventually, orthographic patterns get mapped in the same way that words do. You look at a few examples there, I-G-H-T and T-I-O-N, etc., as well as rhyme units, prefixes, suffixes, etc.

And that helps speed the process of adding new words to your sight vocabulary as children track through. They don't have to reconnect ite, the I-G-H-T, to that pronunciation ite because it becomes familiar. Subword patterns, meaning patterns of letters that are less than a whole word, get mapped together. We know that from studies where children from about third grade on that are good readers, you give them a nonsense word like N-A-L-K and they will say knock. Why?

Because they've already mapped together the ALK from chalk and walk and talk. That's an orthographic memory of that particular pattern. But you try that with a first grader or weaker second grader, and they're going to say NELK.

They're going to try to go letter by letter. These mapping patterns presume a previous phoneme level mapping of those patterns. So when a person learned the ALK, now that's a little bit tricky in terms of its regularity. but it's no different than an ite or a shun as you see there.

We'll talk about the irregularities momentarily. What are the skills needed for orthographic mapping? Well, there are two foundational skills, I believe, that are necessary for orthographic mapping.

Skilled readers have both of these foundational skills. Weak readers usually lack both of them. They may have one of them, but typically lack both of them. So a compromise in these two skills is going to make it so that the ability to add words to the site vocabulary is also compromised. The two key skills needed for efficient orthographic mapping are letter sound proficiency and phoneme proficiency.

Let me explain each of those. If you have a first grader toward the end of the first grade year who's on target, look at a CVC, that's consonant-vowel-consonant, nonsense word, they will respond instantly. So if you show them M-I-P, they're going to say MIP.

And it's almost going to seem like it's as fast as if it were a real word like sit or hat. But the reality is that child was able to retrieve the sound for the M, the sound for the I, the sound for the P, and blend those three together all in a second or maybe even less. That's letter sound proficiency. Now, if you have a child at the end of first grade, who looks at MIP and says, M-I-P, MIP. Believe it or not, he's already behind.

He's not drastically behind, because there are plenty of children that struggle in reading that couldn't even do that. But the idea is this child's several months behind in terms of reading, because that's more of an early to mid-first grade level skill. So that second child had letter sound knowledge, but didn't have letter sound proficiency. It was not quick and instantaneous. Now let's go back to that first child who responded instantly to MIP.

Had you given him SPLANK, he probably would have said SPLANK. Because there was a blend at the beginning and the end, it's a bit more complex. However, by the end of second grade, that student will look at SPLANK and say SPLANK instantly.

That's because the letter sound proficiency improved between the end of first grade and the end of second grade. So that's letter sound proficiency. The basic point is that...

The child did not put conscious effort into retrieving the sound of the M or the sound of the I or the sound of the P. It was unconscious, automatic, behind the scenes. Now let's talk about phoneme proficiency. If you do a phonological awareness test with children, usually they're going to start out with easy items. Say baseball, but don't say base.

And work up to some somewhat more difficult items. Say hat without the at. And then you get to some of the more difficult items.

And if you do that with a child at about the end of second grade or beginning of third grade, who's on target for reading, this is what you're going to get. You're going to say to them, say fly, fly. Now say it again, but instead of little sayer, and they're going to say fry in one second. Now think about what that child had to do to properly respond to that item. The child had to do four classic phonological awareness tasks all in one second or less.

First of all, the child had to segment fly into its individual parts. Then the child, that's phoneme segmentation, then the child had to do what's called phoneme isolation, which is to try to figure out where the target sound is in the word. Is it the beginning, middle, and end? Oh, there it is in the middle. Then the child did phoneme manipulation, pulled out the l and put in a r.

Then the child did phoneme blending, blended the sounds that were left over and said fry. So that child went from fly to fry in under a second. The question becomes, do you think that child put any conscious effort into segmenting the word fly?

I would contend that the answer is no. That all happened automatically in the background. and effortlessly.

So that's phoneme proficiency. Phoneme proficiency means a child has access to the individual phonemes in a word automatically in the background without even thinking about it. So this is how we put these two together to understand orthographic mapping. Let's go back for a minute to a slide we saw earlier about mapping transparent words. So here a student sees a word, they sound it out, they activate it.

During this process, when that child sees the word wind for the first time, it's probably in a sentence or a paragraph, and that child is thinking about the meaning. The child is not spending time doing conscientious word study. However, if that child's phoneme awareness or analysis automatic and behind the scenes and they give no thought to it it just happens because they've developed that level of phoneme skills that phoneme proficiency as I'm calling it guess what happens once win is activated they're able to apply the segmentation to win behind the scenes as you just saw there and they're also able to then take that segmented form of the word win and connect it up with the printed form of the word win without much conscious effort at all.

And in many cases, no conscious effort. Once again, do you remember storing 30, 40, 50,000 words? I know I don't remember that. Certainly we all remember some tough words, but for the most part, this all happened in the background.

So if there's any doubt in your mind that it has to happen in the background like that, I think some simple logic that you would get from a Philosophy 101 class. We know from our own experience as well as from research studies that learning new words is largely implicit. In other words, it happens in the background, it's unconscious, we're not putting conscious effort into remembering the word. We're not saying, oh here's a new word I've come across that how am I gonna remember this? It happens quite naturally as we read after just a few exposures.

So if the process of remembering words is automatic and effortless and in the background, then that means the skills that underlie it by their very nature have to be automatic and unconscious and in the background. So even if we never did a study on this, you would have to infer that the letter sound skills and the phoneme skills would have to be automatic and unconscious. And indeed, there's evidence that that's the case.

As a result, I would like to make a distinction between knowledge and proficiency. We need to move away from these two terms, letter sound knowledge and phonological awareness. I have tested many struggling students who you give them an item like I just mentioned earlier.

You say, say fly, fly. Now say it again instead of a little say-er. Fry.

So they're going to come back three, four, five seconds later. I've done this with fourth graders, fifth graders, tenth graders, adults. And technically speaking, you would say they have phonological awareness. But you may have a second or third grader who's a skilled reader and you do that and they respond instantly.

In one case, phoneme awareness is displayed. In another case, phoneme proficiency is displayed. Same thing with letter sound knowledge. That second child in the illustration I gave with MIP, that child that went M-I-P, MIP, that child has letter sound knowledge, but doesn't have letter sound proficiency. That child's reading is already behind.

So instead, we need to replace these terms with letter sound proficiency and phonemic proficiency, because that's what seems to drive the mapping process. It's not enough to just have knowledge about the letters and be able to come up with it with some conscious effort. It has to be instant and automatic, because...

Learning 40,000 words requires you to pay attention to what you're reading, and as you come across new words in print, you are not directing undue attention to it. It's happening in the background. And when you consider the sight word explosion that occurs in late second into third grade, children go from knowing hundreds and hundreds of words to suddenly knowing thousands of words, they are not putting lots of conscious effort into storing those words.

Rather, the background skills... of letter sound proficiency and phonemic proficiency are now in place, the mechanics are ready to go, and they are adding words to the sight vocabulary in a sponge-like fashion as researchers refer to it. We have to realize that knowledge does not presume automaticity or proficiency, whether it's letter sound knowledge or phonological knowledge.

And awareness doesn't presume automaticity and proficiency, like the examples I gave earlier. And I think this is a very important point, because I have I've personally done evaluations of many children who might be characterized as having decent phonological awareness, but their reaction to those items is very slow. They do not display phonemic proficiency and they struggle in reading. And the sad part is the recommendation we make, and certainly the recommendation I made the first few years before I figured this out, was to say, hey, this child has perfectly fine phonemic awareness. He got all the items correct, even though there were very slow responses.

And yet in such cases, the child does not have sufficient phonemic skills to be good at orthographic mapping. There are many phonological awareness tests that are not sensitive to the phonemic underpinnings of the reading process. They may be sensitive to the phonemic underpinnings up to that ending first grade level, a blending test and a segmenting test.

But phoneme segmentation tests, by their very nature, are incapable of telling you if the person has segmentation proficiency. When you stop and think about it, when we saw how orthographic mapping works, the only phoneme skill you needed was segmentation. Yet I gave you a manipulation example going from fly to fry.

When we read and spell, we don't manipulate letters or sounds. And the reality is Aries theory says that you need to be able to segment. But you need to be able to segment instantly, automatically, and in the background. A segmentation task.

is incapable by its very nature of telling you if you have that level of proficiency. Why? Well, you give a child a segmentation task and you say to them, let's take a word like blend.

Blend is a good example because it has a blend at the beginning and the end. It's a little bit complex. And you say to a child, tell me all the sounds in blend.

And they say, b-l-e-n-d. You say, great. Now, if that child did it very slowly, you can feel confident that they don't have phoneme proficiency. But if the child does it quickly, You don't know if the child just computed that at the moment or if that child truly has unconscious access to those phonemes. Why?

Because it's a conscious task. You just ask them to segment the word blend. In other words, if you're having the child do a conscious task, you don't know if the response is based on conscious effort, that's very quick maybe, or whether it's unconscious. effort that the child just was able to get access this. But stop and think about that manipulation task.

Think about how that child in one second did four classic phonological awareness tasks. So that child able to segment in on average one quarter of a second. That gives me a lot of confidence that that's automatic and it's not something the child put any conscious effort into.

So that's the irony of this. Really what kids need to be able to do is segment to attach the sounds within the pronunciation to the letter strings. But yet a segmentation task cannot tell you if the child has segmentation proficiency, or what I'm calling...

Phonemic proficiency. Rather a manipulation task. Not just a manipulation task but an instant response to a manipulation task. Say clap without the little cap.

Child comes back instantly. The child just performed four classic phonological awareness tasks in order to do that. So the best assessments that we have for the key skills that underlie orthographic mapping are, first and foremost, timed nonsense word reading subtests.

Why is that? Well, because that's going to let us know how proficient the letters sound. skills are. The second thing is we need a phonological awareness task with a timing element such as the phonological awareness screening test. The great thing about the phonological awareness screening test is it is free and the And there are multiple versions of it so you can give it to children and do some progress monitoring.

Now, it's called the PAST. There's another test that floats around there that's also free called the Phonological Awareness Skills Test. It does not have this timing element.

As of this particular time that I'm developing this series of webinars, the only test I know of that gives you information about the instant response to individual items is the Phonological Awareness Screening Test. What about irregular words? This whole mapping process. process?

Well, both irregular words and opaque words might take longer to learn. I say it may take longer, it might take longer because we don't really have any research that I know of that addresses that question. Maybe it takes one to two extra exposures. Instead of one to four exposures, maybe you're talking two to six exposures.

But we do know that it takes many more exposures for kids with reading disabilities represented there as a minority. Most irregular words are more common than words are only off by one letter sound element so take for example the word said you say well that's off by two letters no it's really off by one letter sound connection the a instead you would expect it to be an e short e so it would be sed but instead the AI is doing something it doesn't ordinarily do and then you have the same situation going on with put it's not you know we would say putt and there is a word putt but there's a T there and it has to do with golf so most irregular words are only off by one element and we make adjustments but notice the word comb there like the word make you're still using an adjustment so the word make is regular the word comb is irregular but in both cases you have to make an adjustment and indicate that there's one letter that's silent and it's very rare that words have multiple violations some of the most common ones you see right there and if you want to look at others you have to go beyond the earliest level of reading things that first and second grade are not likely to be exposed to. Interestingly, irregular words are not a challenge for orthographic mapping. They are a challenge for phonic decoding.

Why? Because with phonic decoding, you don't know what the word is and you're given inaccurate information and trying to figure it out. But with mapping, it's a completely different phenomenon.

With mapping, you know the pronunciation. You're looking at the word, and you're looking at the word island and immediately recognizing, hey, there's an S there, and it's silent. And so you map that pronunciation island.

onto that particular letter sequence. So the difference between mapping and phonic decoding in this case, in terms of irregular words, is in one case, you already know the answer to the question, which is, you're looking at the word in front of you. I know what the word is, and I'm gonna make a map between that pronunciation and that letter string. So you take a word like put, and you say, hmm, I would have guessed it'd be P-O-O-T based on the pronunciation, but that's how we spell put.

Okay, I see how the, at the beginning and a t at the end, so we're gonna represent. the in this case with a u so mapping is far more flexible when it comes to irregular words than phonic decoding linea airy who was the developer of the orthographic mapping theory says exception words are only exceptional when someone tries to read them by applying a phonic decoding strategy when they are learned to cite words they are secured in memory by the same connections as regularly spelled words Let's probe a little bit more why this is not an issue for mapping. There are many regular words that require adjustments for mapping like silent e-words, vowel digraphs, they gave those illustrations earlier, also consonant digraphs. They're all opaque so you see word like she and you have two sounds sh and e and you have a diagraph at the beginning and you have to map the sh onto two different letters.

Many regular words that are multi syllabic have a vowel reduction in the non-stressed syllable and that's considered a regular word and yet we are able to map to that without a great deal of difficulty. Irregular words are not the cause of reading problems in English contrary to popular belief. Poor word-level reading is as common in what we call regular orthographies, that is, those with consistent letter-sound relationships like in Italian and Spanish. And that's due to poor orthographic manner.

So in those languages they get up to speed on phonetic decoding much more quickly and easily. And most of their struggling readers eventually become good at phonetic decoding. But they don't remember the words they read for the same reason as kids struggle in English. And so if the irregularities prevented people from learning to read the way people often assume, we would have far more incidences of reading difficulties in English than we do in other languages. And you may think that that's the case, but you're going to have a hard time finding any research to support it.

And in fact, we have a lot of research to the contrary. Even regular words are poorly represented in the orthographic lexicons of poor readers. One final topic before we move on, and that is the...

issue of orthographic skills. Just in the last few years I've noticed in the school psychology field, and I'm a school psychologist, I've noticed in the educational field that people are talking about orthographic skills and orthographic processing. However, the ideas that are floating around currently are like about 10 years outdated in terms of the research. There was a great review done in 2006 that I think really had an impact on the field and allowed us to understand where these orthographic skills actually fit in.

The foremost... common orthographic tasks used to establish what people think of as orthographic skills are the word likeness tasks. So you'll see a bunch of pairs of words like LMK and a slash mark and PIM and you'll see a whole long list and then children are supposed to circle the one that's most like a word. So in the first case PIM is more like a word and in the second case BAPP is more like a word and these are often under time conditions and it turns out children that are better at that type of task are better readers than children.

children who aren't as good at it. Another is what's called the homophone or pseudohomophone task where you say to a child you may have a picture of a sailboat or whatever and the child has to circle the first one or you may have what's called pseudohomophone so b-r-e-n-e is not actually a word but you have to circle which one is the word. And then reading irregular words is a common task used to assess orthographic skills and spelling irregular words.

So you put these all together and you see that they all correlate with word reading skills. So The problem is that correlation isn't the same thing as causation. In fact, I think we have a pretty good idea now of how this all unfolds. It seems that orthographic knowledge, or orthographic processing as people may want to call it, is a byproduct of learning to read. It's not causal like letter sound skills or phoneme skills are causal for reading.

Orthographic skills result from reading experience, including statistical learning. Statistical learning is something that goes on in the background. for us.

We start to see patterns. We start noticing patterns, even if not consciously. And also orthographic mapping. As I said in an earlier slide, orthographic mapping allows us to anchor parts of words just like we anchor words into long-term memory.

So that's how we establish subword patterns like the ones you see here and many others. So current ideas that are floating around about orthographic processing, they seem to imply that word learning is based on based on some kind of visual memory, as if T-I-O-N or I-G-H-T is a visual memory. Well, guess what?

Go back to module two and consider the fact that I-G-H-T could be presented in many different fonts. It could be presented uppercase, lowercase, and they all look very different, but it's still gonna activate the same orthographic memory. So it's not the look of those four letters, it is the actual sequence of those four letters that gets anchored in our orthographic memory. And intervention recommendations based on this notion are ineffective so some people say well let's directly train the orthographic skills or let's have kids remember these words based on visual memory and we have no evidence to suggest that that works and I think we have a lot of experiential evidence to show that kids don't catch up with those types of interventions now I realize this is a pretty heavy-duty lesson and I realize the concept of orthographic mapping is rather difficult to grasp first time through and don't panic if you didn't get it the first time through I've been doing my best for about the last 18-20 years of trying to get people to understand this and I know as I said I didn't get it the first time through. But let's try to summarize.

Orthographic learning results from an interaction between the sounds and the letters and written words. It's not based on any kind of visual memory process. Orthographic mapping is the mental or cognitive process used to store words for instant retrieval.

This is how we build our sight vocabulary through orthographic mapping. Orthographic mapping connects what is already known which is the words pronunciation to what we're trying to remember which is the word spelling pattern And the process is implicit, so the reader is not consciously trying to remember words, it just happens after one to four exposures. And so many of the research studies that show this, the child is reading a brand new word in the context of a paragraph, it's not some isolated flashcard type of approach. And the critical skills needed to be good at orthographic mapping are letter-sound proficiency and phonemic proficiency.

Children that are good readers have this. I have given phonemic proficiency and letter sound proficiency tasks to hundreds of children typically developing children in research studies i've given it to hundreds of children that are disabled readers in real real world school evaluations and it's quite clear that good readers have letter sound proficiency and phonemic proficiency and poor readers do not. Students that have lighter sound proficiency and phonemic proficiency, they develop reading skills very easily. Students without those skills struggle. So what are the critical aspects of orthographic mapping and how do you think this information might inform your instruction?

In the next session, which is module 4.5, we're going to look at fluency and get a better understanding of how we can help children build their fluency. Module 4 Word Level Reading Session 5 Word Reading Fluency Hello, this is David Kilpatrick and I'm the presenter for these 13 on-demand webinars. These webinars are designed to introduce participants to the reading research, particularly as it pertains to assessment, prevention, and overcoming reading difficulties.

Here are the 13 modules and right now we're in module 4. Module 4 has the most number of sessions and we are now in the fifth session of module 4 and we're going to talk about word reading fluency. As a result of this session, participants will be able to describe the nature and importance of word reading fluency, describe the basis for reading fluency, and understand why many fluency related efforts don't have the kind of benefits that we hope they would have. Fluency is typically defined as word-level reading that is fast and accurate, but also expressive.

Reading with expression involves prosody. Prosody comes from two Greek words, pros, which means to or toward, and ode, which means we have the word ode, which is a song. So in other words, prosody has to do with more song-like expression. That's that change in voice pitch that we have as a normal part of our verbal language. Reading fluency is highly correlated with reading comprehension.

When word-level reading is fluent, the reader's working memory and attention is freed up so that they can focus strictly on comprehension. It's important to realize that word reading is not paired associate learning. So it's not just simply by practicing looking at these words that we automatically get better at them.

Paired associate learning is when you pair two different things that by nature are probably unrelated. And paired associate learning is what underlies letter names and letter sounds. But it's important to realize that written words are not paired associate learning.

We use paired associate learning for faces and objects, letters, etc. There's some sort of visual input, verbal output in our long-term memory system. But word reading involves orthographic memory.

It's a different type of memory entirely. So if we treat learning words the same way we treat learning letter names or learning the names of objects, we are not directing adequate attention to the kind of orthographic memory that is used to become a competent reader. Research has shown different activation patterns. Research has shown different activation patterns in our brain when we look at faces versus looking at words versus looking at objects.

We often assume that speed of identifying words has to do with speed of retrieval. It's almost as if we assume that the children have the words in their mind and they're just not coming out fast enough so they need more practice getting those out but rapid automatized naming is a task that was mentioned earlier and that has to do with how quickly we can get phonological information out of our brain but there are many struggling readers who actually have good rapid automatized naming granted kids with poor rapid automatized naming are more likely to struggle in reading but there are plenty who don't struggle in rapid naming who are struggling readers. So their ability to access information that they know is pretty good. The issue is do they know the information?

Is the word in their sight vocabulary that they can activate it when they see it? Correctly identifying a word is going to be based on phonic decoding or guessing from context or recall from a familiar word. We talked about this in a previous session.

The first two of these are rather slow and they're strategic. The third is fast and effortless. There's no strategy involved in identifying a familiar word.

It just jumps out at us effortlessly. So we need to examine our assumptions about the nature of fluency. What is fluency? Is fluency about sounding out words really quickly?

Is fluency about being coming better and better at guessing? Is fluency about more quickly accessing words that are already stored in our long-term memory? Or is fluency about being able to hear and understand what we're saying?

matter of having a larger number of words in our sight vocabulary that jump out at us instantly. Only the fourth one of those has strong research support. So the problem is that the National Reading Panel worked from assumptions about fluency that we might want to reconsider today.

It's almost as if they treated fluency as a paired associate learning task. And To their credit, they did a great job with what they had available to them, but they had a limited amount of research that they could formulate their opinions. And subsequent research has shown that some of these oral reading practices that they seem to give a nod to don't have the same kind of benefit that we would hope that they would have. And it's important to realize that we just do not have studies to show that weak readers become skilled readers as a result of some of these reading practice approaches. Interestingly, studies of repeated reading and other similar practice effects show very limited standard score point gains, and often those standard score point gains are lost upon follow-up six months or a year later.

There's also very limited generalization to unpracticed passages. So with repeated readings, you keep reading the same passage over and over, and you see increased accuracy and increased speed. But then the generalization to new passages tends to be very limited.

It's unfortunate that a few recent reviews of research on repeated readings suggest that it's effective, but they don't talk about standard score point gains. They simply talk about raw score point gains. This is an issue that's going to be taken up again in Module 11, and you can have raw score improvements and still be getting farther and farther behind.

Just like if you have 10 runners in a long-distance race, the person in 10th place may be getting farther and farther behind the other 9 as the race goes on, but they're still moving forward. and that's comparable to the idea of raw score improvements. One of the problems with the research in this area is when we do cross-reference the kind of gains that they're making to standard score point gains, we find that they're very limited.

So it almost seems sacrilegious to second-guess the National Reading Panel on this. However, we have had a lot more research to go on since that time to help us better understand the nature of reading fluency. As mentioned, I think they did an excellent job with the research base that they had available to them.

But I think it's time to take a fresh look at the nature of fluency. We've been talking about fluency now since the reading panel, and we're going on about 20 years, and we still don't see any major improvements in reading according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress during that time period. We now have a pretty well-established base for assuming that fluency is a byproduct of the size of your sight vocabulary. In other words, students with large sight vocabulary, they read fluently.

As they're reading along the words are just jumping out at them instantly. They're not putting effort into the word reading. By contrast, children who are weak readers have very limited sight vocabularies.

So their fluency is much weaker because they have to spend time figuring out words. There are at least three lines of research to support this idea that reading fluency is largely based upon the size of one's sight vocabulary. So there are studies that compare timed list reading with timed paragraph reading.

And the children who more quickly are able to accurately identify words from a list are also the same children who more quickly and accurately read paragraphs. And the children who struggle in reading words from a list are also the children who struggle in reading words from a list. struggle in paragraph reading. So the idea seems to be that when you have kids read from a list under time conditions you're getting a good sense if they have a large sight vocabulary or not because they certainly can't rely on context and because it's timed if they try to rely on phonic decoding it's going to slow them down, the clock is ticking, they're gonna get a lower score.

So as a result we have some degree of confidence that reading from a list under time conditions is a way of distinguishing kids with large sight vocabularies from kids with lower sight. vocabularies. And if that's in fact the case, then it's quite telling that children that do better with list reading are the children that do better with real paragraph reading. Also, there have been some studies that alter text difficulty. So let's just say, as a point of illustration, you have some fourth graders reading on a fourth grade level in terms of their fluency.

And then you give them seventh or eighth grade level text. Well guess what happens to their fluency? It goes down.

But this This next one is very interesting. You take fourth graders who are reading at, say, a late second grade level, and you give them early to mid second grade text. Guess what happens? Their fluency skyrockets.

Their fluency's great. Now stop and think about that for a minute. If fluency was its own separate cognitive or linguistic concept, those children should be going through second grade material in a non-fluency.

fluent fashion as well. However, what's the difference? The difference is that these children know the words in that second grade passage. It's within their sight vocabulary realm, and so they're able to move quickly through the passage.

Once again, if fluency was its own separate independent contributor to reading, then you would expect that those kids would not be fluent even with the second grade material. Also what is rather interesting is that there are studies to show that phonic decoding correlates pretty strongly with reading fluency. And when we take that and integrate that back into what we looked at in the previous session, we realized that phonic decoding is the gateway into building the sight vocabulary and we're arguing here that the sight vocabulary is the foundation for fluency at least to a very large degree more broadly speaking This idea of fluency is quite consistent with our ideas of orthographic learning. The traditional ideas of fluency, that it just has something to do with speed of access, are not necessarily all that consistent with our developing understanding of orthographic memory and orthographic learning. They tend to be more consistent with some old classic ideas of paired associate learning, which reading words is not about paired associate learning.

It's about orthographic memory. We really don't have much... evidence other than in some cases with children with rapid automatized naming issues we don't have much evidence to suggest that we can account for fluency primarily based on the idea that the kids already have the words in their long-term memory but they're just not coming out quickly enough but yet when we approach fluency we treat it that way in other words when we give kids stuff to practice we want them to try to get words out faster but the question is do they have those words in the long-term memory in the first place and I would suggest the answer to that is is no. Practice, we know, is very important for anything that we do.

But who's helped by reading practice? The problem is that we've treated reading practice like we treat maybe if you're a golfer and you want to work on your putting or if you're into basketball and you want to work on your free throw shooting. But orthographic learning is not the same as motor learning or other types of learning. So who benefits from reading practice? I would suggest that children who are not good at remembering the words they read, don't benefit a whole lot from reading practice.

I don't mean to be... crude putting it this way, but what's happening is as they're going through, words are going in one ear and out the other. They're not sticking.

They're not remembering the words. And that seems to be consistent with the research that we have that children who are very weak readers do not become good readers. They do not close the gap with their typically developing peers as a result of any reading practice intervention.

Once again, we're going to cover this in more detail in module 11, but I have not seen... any research on reading practice and I've looked at dozens and dozens and dozens of them including several reviews of research on reading practice interventions and none of them have any evidence to show that children make large standard score point gains in any reading measure whatsoever. So the emphasis is on raw score improvements as mentioned earlier. But you can improve in your raw scores while still getting farther and farther behind your peers. However, children who are good at remembering the words they read, that is children who are good orthographic mappers, children who are typically developing readers, reading practice is the only way to improve.

You recall from the previous session that every word is added to the sight vocabulary one at a time. Well, how do you encounter more words to build that sight vocabulary? through reading and through reading practice. If it requires one to four exposures, how are you going to get those two, three, four exposures of words that are not that common, but by reading? So reading practice is the only way to improve one's reading ability if you're a child who remembers the words that you read.

But if you're a child who doesn't remember the words that you read, it is not an efficient way to improve your reading. So if we want to improve Fluency, we need to improve the size of a child's sight vocabulary. And we improve the size of the child's sight vocabulary by making them competent at remembering the words they read.

So in other words, make them better at this orthographic mapping process. And how do we do that? We improve their orthographic mapping and their ability to remember words by developing their letter-sound proficiency and their phonemic proficiency. But in many cases, we don't address those if we are using a three cueing systems approach, or we're using just the whole word, sight word, Dick and Jane, C spot, run approach, which was so popular for so many years based on visual memory.

We are not addressing either of those. Those are the foundational underlying skills for word memory. And maybe we're dabbling in letter sound knowledge.

Maybe we're doing a lot with letter sound knowledge. Maybe we're doing a heavy duty phonics approach with these kids. But chances are we have not been addressing the letter sound skills to the point of proficiency and the underlying phonemic skills that are needed for remembering words.

So for children who are skilled at orthographic mapping, those are the kids that have that sponge-like acquisition of sight vocabulary. They're good at remembering the words they read. So as the sight vocabulary grows, so the fluency improves.

This particular perspective helps us rethink our traditional conception of reading fluency. And we have, this is not some stray unusual idea. I told you there's at least three lines of research that show this. It's also consistent with our understanding of orthographic learning.

And it's also consistent with the intervention research that shows that children make very modest, if any, standard score point gains on reading measures by the various reading practice approaches. Now, that doesn't mean we never have struggling readers. Practice reading.

I think when you're doing a small group and you have some kids working over here and some kids working over here, there's nothing wrong with giving them text that they can read and have them practice it. That's not my point. We can still use that as just sort of a tool to kind of keep the kids into the reading situation or atmosphere instruction that we're doing.

But we have to recognize that by itself that type of approach of simply having them do reading practice If they are not good at remembering the words they read, it's not going to be particularly effective. But as mentioned, and I can't emphasize enough, children who are good at orthographic mapping, the only way for them to become better readers and more fluent is through reading practice. Don't get the idea that what I'm saying here is reading practice is not effective.

The issue is it's effective with whom. And with those who are good at remembering the words they read, it's the only way to improve reading. For those that are not very good at remembering the words they read, it's not going to be nearly as effective.

You see, once you have the good orthographic mapping skills that are pretty well in place by typically developing readers by late second into early third grade, all the mechanics are in place. It's just a matter of now adding more words to the sight vocabulary that only comes through extensive reading. So, summarizing, fluency involves fast, accurate, and expressive reading. Conventional views about fluency are not necessarily all that consistent with what we've been learning about reading development. And reading practice by itself has limited benefits for children who do not remember the words they read.

And it's best for us to understand fluency as a byproduct of the size of the sight vocabulary. You have a large sight vocabulary, you're going to be much more fluent than a student with a limited sight vocabulary. And many of our efforts to boost fluency have been directed toward more of a paired associate learning approach, but we need to shift and try to get kids to become better at remembering their words, better at the orthographic mapping process so they can build the sight vocabulary. And once children are good orthographic mappers, the only way for them to improve their reading is through reading practice. How has your perspective been changed, if at all, based upon these ideas about fluency?

How might your teaching differ? Next up, we're going to talk about the issues of English learners and learning to read words. Module 4, Word Level Reading. Session 6, English Learners and Word Reading Development.

Hello, this is David Kilpatrick, and I am the presenter for the 13 On Demand webinars. And these webinars will help participants understand some of the most valuable information coming out of the reading research as it pertains to assessment, prevention, and overcoming. reading difficulties. Here's an overview of the 13 modules. We're currently in module 4 and module 4 has the largest number of sessions.

Almost all the others have one to three sessions and we're in our sixth In the sixth session, we're going to talk about English learners and word reading development. As a result of this session, participants should be able to identify the challenge faced by English learners and describe the promise of teaching English learners to read, and there's some good news here, as well as develop confidence regarding teaching English learners word-level reading skills. English learners are making up an increasing proportion of our school-age population. And think about it. These kids are tasked with learning math and science and P.E.

and music and everything else. And yet, English is their second language. And all of this is being taught in English.

So it is quite a challenge for them. Luckily there's a large and growing body of research on English learners. Here are the basic findings. First of all, English learners make much faster progress in word level reading and even in spelling than they're going to make in reading comprehension or general written expression. Secondly, the ability to learn to read in a new language, and it is abbreviated in the research as L2, even if it's not their second language, could be their third or fourth language, is highly correlated with success.

in L1. In other words, if a child, say, in middle school comes over from another country, they've already learned to read in another language, their skill base that they use to acquire that is going to transfer quite nicely over into English. The implication is that if a child struggled in one of those other languages, they're going to probably struggle with English as well.

Phonemic skills that were developed in their native language have a very strong correspondence with the phonemic skill development in their second language. Now a little footnote to that is that some languages do not have some of the sounds that we have in English and vice versa. But in terms of any overlap among the sounds there's going to be a very good degree of transfer. Also there's a general metalinguistic concept of being able to manipulate language as we do in phonological awareness exercises that will also transfer. And this is irrespective of specific sounds.

As a group, English learners, just like native speakers of English, they have the same general word reading pattern. In other words, about two-thirds of the students are going to learn to read regardless of the teaching method that you use. But then there's going to be about a third of children who will not make progress using our traditional approaches of the whole word approach or the whole language approach balanced literacy they are going to require very systematic teaching of phonics and phonemic skills in order to have normalized reading But the good news is that when it comes to word level reading, the potential for growth is fairly similar compared to native speakers of English.

In other words, these children can develop the word reading skills quite competently. Reading comprehension is much more of a challenge for English learners than word level reading is. Vocabulary is extensive.

When you think about word level reading, you just need to know the 26 letters, the 40 some sounds that correspond to those letters. That's a very limited... set even with grammar there's a very limited set of tenses there's a very limited set of parts of speech but when it comes to vocabulary it's extensive so as grammar becomes learned and as the letters and sounds become learned.

Background knowledge like vocabulary is also extensive. So because of the background knowledge in the vocabulary, reading comprehension takes a lot longer to develop in English learners. And for English learners without any general language impairments, there is a long positive growth trajectory that takes several years.

They may pick up on everyday type of language because they master the grammar and they master everyday language, the 2,000 or 3,000 words that you need in a language to function on a day-to-day basis. But it's going to take a lot longer for those tens of thousands of words to fall into place so that they can be competent speakers and comprehenders of English. But in the short run it's important to realize that semantic knowledge of words, that is the word meanings are not necessary for orthographic mapping. Think of the concept of hyperlexia.

With hyperlexics, they don't even understand many of the words that they're reading. But if they have a phonological memory of that word, they're going to remember it. An example I like to give is with the word ostensible. I didn't know what the word meant, but I heard people use it and I saw it in print and because I heard people use it it was part of my phonological memory not part of my semantic memory because I didn't know the meaning and When I saw it in print I was able to map that so anytime time I saw the word ostensible it jumped out at me just like any other familiar word and it wasn't until later that I learned what it meant so we don't actually need to know the meaning of a word in order to map it orthographically and have a strong orthographic memory English learners face many challenges in school but word level reading is less challenging than reading comprehension or written expression which requires greater and more expansive higher level language functioning the skills that are acquired in one language can be applied to a new language.

This is obviously in cases where children had already had some prior schooling. Phonological skills are roughly transferable from one language to another and I say roughly because various languages don't all share the exact same sounds. Early on English learners are going to function like hyperlexics, meaning they're going to be able to develop the word reading skills.

They're going to build upon their phonological memory. They're going to hear a lot of words that they don't know the meanings of but the fact that those are familiar sounding words, they'll be able to use that to anchor letter sequences via orthographic mapping. And as higher level language skills grow, reading comprehension will increase.

So how are English learners similar to native speakers in regards to the way that they acquire word level reading in English? Next up, we're going to answer the questions posed at the very beginning of Module 4. Module 4 Word Level Reading Session 7 Understanding Word Reading Difficulties Hello this is David Kilpatrick and I'm the presenter for this series of 13 webinars. This series is designed to help teachers learn more about the reading research particularly as it pertains to practical issues of assignment and prevention, and overcoming reading difficulties.

Here's an overview of the 13 modules. We're currently finishing up in Module 4. Module 4 has the largest number of sessions. All the others have maybe one to three sessions. And we're going to talk about understanding word reading difficulties.

In session seven, participants will be able to describe why some children struggle in reading, explain why some students have limited sight vocabularies, and also understand why some approaches to reading work better than others. We're going to go back to the beginning of Module 4 and look at the questions that were posed at the outset. Why do some students have difficulties with word-level reading while others do not? Why do some students struggle in learning phonics?

Why do struggling readers have such limited sight vocabularies? Why do some students struggle with reading fluency? And how does all this affect students learning English? Finally, why do some word reading interventions have such limited results while others have large results? We'll take these questions one at a time based upon what has been learned earlier in this module.

Why students struggle in reading. Assuming adequate amount of effort and opportunity and they don't have problems with their seeing or their hearing, word level reading difficulties are largely based on the phonological core deficit. Alphabetic writing systems are based on the phonology of spoken language. And they are based on the phonology at the level of the phoneme. So letters of the alphabet are designed to represent phonemes.

Written letters don't convey words. We only have... I can come up with maybe three words in English that are a single phoneme you have the article a or a you have oh in some regions of the country I in Where I'm from I is actually a diphthong ie you have two different vowel sounds back-to-back but in others people say ha and that's hi so in that case it's a single phony but other than that all other words are multi-phonemic in english and therefore phonemes are an abstraction that are not part of our spoken language the written letters are designed to convey phonemes within words and capture the speech stream and if you struggle with phonemes you are going to struggle in reading so alphabetic writing systems are designed to and encode the phonemes of spoken language. But if you have phonological issues such that you don't have easy and proficient access to the phonemes in spoken words, you're going to struggle in reading.

Difficulty with phonemes equals difficulty with reading, quite simply. So children with the phonological core deficit are not competent at having easy, proficient access to the phonemes in the spoken language, and therefore they struggle in reading. Why would some children struggle in phonics? Well, phonics also requires phonological information.

You need well-established connections between letters and sounds. And as mentioned, letter sounds are abstractions. L, M, T, R, S, J. Those are not things that appear by themselves in spoken language.

They're always co-articulated with other phonemes to produce spoken words. Learning those letter sounds and applying those letter sounds represent abstractions that individuals with the phonological core deficit are not very good at. And then phonological blending, which is taking individual phonemes and blending them together to activate a word, also is something that many children struggle with. The key is that both of these require phonological and particularly phonemic level skills, and the kids with the phonological core deficit do not have those skills or have a limited amount of those skills. So phonics is difficult for...

students who don't have sufficient access to the phonological properties of spoken language and when we simply plow ahead and teach them phonics and they don't have the underlying phonological skills that we talked about in an earlier session they're not going to benefit from phonics in nearly the same way that they would if they had those underlying skills Why do some students have limited sight vocabularies? Well, memory for words, so they jump out at us when we read, are not based on visual memory. They're based on orthographic memory. And orthographic memory has as its foundation letter sound skills and very proficient phonemic skills now I'm not talking about recalling from orthographic memory I'm talking about encoding into orthographic memory so in order to efficiently add words to your orthographic memory you need to have letter sound proficiency and phonemic proficiency. Those proficient skills allow individuals as they're reading, as they're encountering new words in the background, according to Scher's theory and Ari's theory, the self-teaching hypothesis and orthographic mapping, in the background what's happening is the person who has instant access to the sounds in the spoken language, when they encounter a new word and sound it out, they are able to apply the sound structure, the phonemic structure of that pronunciation.

onto that letter string in the background while they're focusing on comprehension. So students who lack letter sound proficiency or phonemic proficiency or who lack both, which most struggling readers lack both, they can't efficiently add words to their sight vocabulary. They don't have the foundational skills.

Actually, they can add words to their sight vocabulary, but very inefficiently. So rather than adding words to their orthographic lexicon after one to four exposures, it may take dozens of exposures. The older assumption that fluency is based on just simply speed of retrieval of known words or based on some sort of visual memory is not consistent with current understandings. There is going to be a possible exception of kids with poor rapid automatized naming. How much and in what way poor rapid naming influences reading fluency is still something that is being studied by researchers.

A more well established assumption is that reading fluency is a byproduct of the of the size of the student's sight vocabulary or their orthographic lexicon. In other words, how many words are already familiar to them as they embark upon a passage? So students with limited sight vocabularies are gonna have to move through text very slowly and not very fluently, while those with large sight vocabularies, words jump out at them and they are very fluent.

How does this impact English learners? English learners certainly have many important obstacles to be successful in school, there's no doubt. Yet the skills needed for reading in one alphabet language typically transfer to English among those students who have already had some level of reading instruction in their native language and word reading can actually progress pretty well with proper instruction among English learners the bigger obstacle for the English learners is going to be the vast and extensive vocabulary that they have to learn as a result the language comprehension is going to be affected and therefore the reading comprehension so for word level reading the type of instruction we would use successfully with native speakers of English works quite well with English learners. Now of course we have to adjust to accommodate for specific individuals coming from certain language systems where some of the sounds are a little different but aside from that the general process is similar. Reading practice tends to have very limited benefit for children who don't remember the words they read.

But it is essential for those who do remember the words they read. In fact, it is the only way to develop reading skills if you remember the words you read. Reading practice is essential.

But for children who don't remember the words they read, reading practice is not a way to help bridge the gap between they and their peers. It has not been shown to allow children who are struggling readers to improve their reading skills such that they have more normalized abilities. In module 11, we're going to cover this issue of intervention quite extensively, and it will become clear that many of the approaches that we're currently using with struggling readers do not work very well, and they're not based on our understanding of orthographic learning that was covered in this module.

As a result, we haven't seen the kind of growth since the reading panel, before the reading panel, more recently with RTI, MTSS. with balanced instruction, we haven't seen it with our fluency ideas, etc. We just haven't seen the dial move. And it's largely because we've been working from assumptions about how reading works that we now know are not accurate.

The exciting news, and I'm foreshadowing chapter 11, is within the reading research, the approaches that most closely approximated the concepts and ideas that are consistent with The orthographic mapping approach and the self-teaching approach had the largest standard score point gains by far compared to the traditional methods that we use for intervention. We can conclude that instruction intervention that's consistent with how we learn words is going to do better than instruction and intervention that is not consistent with how we learn words. So it's important for us to pay attention to the kinds of things in this module to better understand the nature of reading.

And that's not something that's been well understood. It certainly wasn't well understood when the four classic approaches to teaching reading were developed and implemented. The phonics approach, the linguistic approach, the whole word approach, and the whole language balance literacy approach. None of those approaches are informed by how we actually learn to read.

They were informed by more intuitive and traditional practices. So word level reading skills are based on phonological and phonemic skills. That's the nature of alphabetic writing. This means that poor access to phonemes and spoken words will have a very negative impact on your reading development. And poor access to phonemes is going to have a negative impact on learning phonics, developing sight words, and reading fluency.

One bit of good news is that English learners respond very well to high quality word level reading instruction. An intervention and instruction that's consistent with our scientific understanding of the nature of reading have much better outcomes than many of our traditional approaches that do not reflect an understanding of reading that has been pretty well established scientifically. Once again, that will be covered in depth in Module 11. How has your understanding of the various aspects of word reading development changed as a result of this module? This was a very large module with seven sessions, and there's a lot to absorb. Some of it you may want to go back and take a look at.

So how might your thoughts on reading instruction change as a result of this module? We begin a new module with the next session and we're going to look at how the simple view of reading helps us understand reading comprehension.