Never Say, “Sound it Out,” and Other Advice, From the Teacher Next Door
Are you an early-years teacher who teaches young children to read through guided reading and leveled books?
When a student struggles to read a word, is your first response to ask, “What would make sense?” or, “What would sound right?”
Do you use running records to help identify goals for your students? Have you taught students strategies like, “Skip the word and go on” or “Look at the pictures for clues” when they come to unknown words?
If so, you likely follow the whole language or balanced literacy approach, and at some point in your career you likely were told never to say these three little words: “Sound it out”.
I was alarmed and embarrassed the first time someone said this to me. Teaching reading by focusing on letters and their sounds had been my custom, ever since my first year of teaching, when I was hired to teach a Grade 1 class. I remember being unsure of where to start, and going to the veteran teacher next door, to ask for help. She introduced me to phonics, and when the first child in my class read a full sentence aloud to me, I experienced a thrill that made me a teacher of reading for life! It had occurred to me, back then, that I had not been taught how to teach reading in my bachelor degree, and I wondered what I would have done without the teacher next door.
It turns out that many teachers use the strategies they do because of the teachers who work close by, who they have turned to for help. Just recently I learned that I am not the only person to have graduated with a bachelor degree in Elementary Education, having not been taught how to teach reading. For many others, the approach shared with them, through professional development, or the teacher next door, was the three cueing system, or MSV.
After my first few years as a classroom teacher, my career quickly turned to supporting students with disabilities. Having spent most of my career working in the field of inclusive education, I somehow had sidestepped being taught MSV, or the three-cueing system, so when I was told not to use the words, “Sound it out,” I was baffled and worried that something else very important had been missed in my education.
MSV stands for Meaning, Structure and Visual, and is often presented in a three circle Venn diagram. If a student uses meaning to help them solve an unknown word, they are drawing on their background knowledge, the pictures in the book, and their understanding of the context of the story. Structure refers to sentence structure, and a student is using this cueing system when they draw on what they know about grammar and syntax to solve a word. Visual cues are when students use their understanding of letters or letter patterns, and sounds, to solve the word. Prompts to use visual information include having the student look at the first letter in the word and telling them to, “Get your mouth ready” (Burkins & Yates, 2021).
In the three-cueing system, phonics and phonological awareness are underemphasized. Teaching students to use context or sentence structure to solve words, is believed to be more reliable (Beverine-Curry, 2019). Reading specialists like Marie Clay and Kenneth Goodman, who were proponents of the whole language approach that was common in the 70s and 80s, minimized the importance of teaching the alphabetic code. In fact, the belief was that focusing too much on print could trip a student up, and instead they should be guided to use meaning and syntax, as these behaviors were common to skilled readers (Smith, 1971, as cited in National Institute for Direct Instruction, 2022). This has since been disproven. It turns out that using pictures and context to solve words are behaviors common to poor readers, whereas strong readers apply sound-symbol relationships (Kilpatrick, 2016).
It is true that one of the strategies in MSV is related to letters and sounds. The visual cue in the three-cueing system represents grapho-phonemic connections, or print to sound connections. However, even though the three circles in the MSV Venn diagram are the same size, and the prompts were initially used in balance, over time, prompting students to use visual information to solve words was minimized (Burkins & Yates, 2021). Having students look at the letters is relegated to the last resort, as a reading strategy. Additionally, in guided reading, when students come upon an unknown word, they may be asked to make the sound of the first letter in the word, but then are prompted to use other cues, like the pictures on the page, to predict the word.
According to reading researcher David Kilpatrick (2016), “The whole language/balanced literacy instruction approach stresses meaning, context and good literature, but puts too little emphasis on phonological awareness and word study, virtually guaranteeing poor reading among about one third of our students” (p. 42).
Unfortunately, it turns out that “minimizing the use of visual information actually makes learning to read harder” (Burkins & Yates, 2021, p. 115), according to recent neurological research. When we use a “meaning – first approach”, students do not gain practice mapping sounds to letters, and this cuts down on the development of orthographic knowledge (Burkins & Yates, 2021, p. 116). Orthographic knowledge is a person’s memory of how language is represented in written form. In fact, using the three-cueing system “can actually prevent the critical learning that is necessary for the child to become a skilled reader” (Beverine-Curry, 2019).
Would you be surprised to learn that decoding, or sounding out words, is accurate 95% of the time, while using context to guess is only accurate 25 to 35% of the time (Kilpatrick, 2016)? Additionally, as texts become more complex, it is less possible to use context to solve words. Therefore, this strategy eventually will not serve readers well, since “with each passing year, the reading vocabulary load increases, so compensation becomes more challenging” (Kilpatrick, 2016, p. 3).
New research into how the brain learns to read has come out in support of teaching phonics and phonemic awareness as the most effective strategies for all readers (Dehaene, 2013). Teaching students to learn letter sound correspondences, and to associate sounds with letters turns out to be the way that our brains store words permanently, in a process called orthographic mapping (Kilpatrick, 2016). When students acquire the habit of looking closely at words, connecting sounds to letters, they are engaging in a powerful behavior that leads to “permanent word storage” and fluent word reading (Kilpatrick, 2016, p. 41). The end result is the development of a large bank of words that a student knows on sight. When students can decode words with ease, they are able to understand what they read. We all agree that reading is about making meaning from text, and it turns out that teaching students to “sound it out” is the route to get there!
It is unfortunate that for many teachers, just like me, the strategies we employ have come to us through the teacher next door, or the book at the bookstore, as opposed to through scientific research. It is important to remember, however, that many of the methods in use in schools today were developed before scientific discovery of how reading happens in the brain, and so the teacher next door “cannot be faulted for not anticipating that discovery” (Kilpatrick, 2016, p. 42). Teachers have done what they found worked best, not knowing the science behind it. In some cases, traditional teaching strategies have been disproven, while others have been confirmed by recent scientific studies.
It is now known that training students in “phonemic awareness, letter-sound skills, and word study skills…will result in substantial reductions in the percentage of struggling readers” (Kilpatrick, 2016, p. 42). And so, in the wize words of Maya Angelou, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better”.
One of my goals is to learn more about what the research has to say about teaching reading, and to share that with teachers like you, through this blog. Please let me know if this has been helpful to you! Looking into various teaching strategies more closely to see what the research tells us, is beneficial to teachers and students alike. Thanks, and Happy Teaching!
References Beverine-Curry, H. [The Reading League]. (2019, October 24). The Reading League Live Event September 2019: Three-Cueing Systems & Related Myths. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG7sEYIsbVo Burkins J., & Yates, K. (2021). Shifting the balance: 6 ways to bring the science of reading into the balanced literacy classroom. Stenhouse Publishers. Dehaene, S. (October 25, 2013). How the brain learns to read.
. You Tube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25GI3-kiLdo Kilpatrick, D. (2016). Equipped for reading success: A comprehensive, step-by-step program for developing phonemic awareness and fluent word recognition. Casey & Kirsch Publishers. National Institute for Direct Instruction. (n.d.). Part 2: What whole language writers have to say about literacy. Retrieved August 3 2022, from https://www.nifdi.org/news/hempenstall-blog/442-part-2-what-whole-language-writers-have-had-to-say-about-literacy Smith, F. (1971). Understanding reading: A psycholinguistic analysis of reading and learning to read. Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
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