If you're passionate about staying at the forefront of literacy education, you're in for a treat.
Today, I've gathered some enlightening resources that update you on the latest phonemic awareness (PA) research – a cornerstone of effective literacy instruction – and give you a pedagogical boost as you start the new school year.
Previously I’ve shared how you can boost phonemic awareness and phonics knowledge and how knowledge around phonemic awareness hasn’t always been part of a teacher’s toolbox.
Over the past quarter-century, phonemic awareness has undergone a remarkable evolution.
Instead of being carefully cultivated and rooted in the soil of reading instruction, phonemic awareness has become more like a wildflower—untamed and disconnected from the broader landscape of our reading pedagogy.
To shed light on its contemporary landscape, we had the privilege of hosting Dr. Susan Brady, who cleared up some misconceptions surrounding PA instruction.
If you missed her talk, I highly recommend catching up here as it sets the stage for the latest insights I'm about to share.
Since Dr. Brady's presentation, the field has been buzzing with requests for researchers to delve deeper into the nuances of phonemic awareness instruction.
Mainly – to clear up misconceptions about phonemic awareness.
These misconceptions can affect,
- teaching methods,
- the length of instruction, and
- which students receive this instruction.
And often – result in wasted instructional time.
As you know,
It’s crucial that we continually update our knowledge and teaching practices.
So, let’s take a look at few excellent resources to stay up to date on the latest news in phonemic awareness.
Two Meta-Analysis on Phonemic Awareness by Erbeli and Rice
In an excellent episode of the Teaching Literacy Podcast, hosted by Dr. Jake Downs, we have the pleasure of hearing from reading experts Dr. Florina Erbeli (former researcher at Florida Center for Reading Research and currently serving at Texas A&M) and Dr. Marianne Rice (research student just completing her PhD at Texas A&M).
Erbeli and Rice share insights from two related meta-analyses about phonemic awareness.
They tackle crucial questions, including the optimal dosage of PA instruction and the efficacy of various approaches for teaching PA.
In the podcast, Dr. Downs first invites the researchers to explain what a meta-analysis is.
The discussion helps explain how meta-analyses can answer questions individual studies can’t.
By analyzing several studies altogether, a meta-analysis can sometimes help to settle controversies in the field.
If you’re new to meta-analyses check out this guide.
The researchers also speak about the knowledge students need for automatic word reading and getting to reading comprehension by developing “word-specific orthographic representations.”
They discuss Ehri's Phases of Development and Perfetti's Word Knowledge Theory concerning that idea.
Here’s our “simplified” take on word learning for reading and spelling.
Parker defines similar terms here.
Then, the host and researchers dive into the two meta-analyses:
Meta-Analysis #1: Practical Issues Around Phonemic Awareness Instruction
Rice et al. (2022) – “Phonemic Awareness: A Meta-Analysis for Planning Effective Instruction”
Dr. Marianne Rice shares how this first meta-analysis bloomed from a question her son’s teacher posed during the pandemic.
Marianne found that current research on phonemic awareness couldn’t answer the questions of:
- what is feasible for teachers in a classroom,
- the duration (number of weeks) of phonemic awareness instruction, or
- the dosage (number of minutes per instructional session).
Important notes: This meta-analysis only looked at improving phonemic awareness outcomes, not the outcome of reading acquisition.
The study was also focused on preschool to 1st grade.
One finding from the meta-analysis was that formats for delivering instruction were equally effective.
Teachers should feel confident implementing phonemic awareness instruction in whole groups, small groups, or one-on-one, depending on what works best for their classroom.
In addition, phonemic awareness instruction can be delivered effectively by teachers, parents, or computers to improve phonemic awareness outcomes.
Previous meta-analyses of phonemic awareness often pulled studies from small groups or one-on-one without examining whole class delivery.
Generally, these prior studies were researcher-delivered interventions, so this finding by Erbeli and Rice is new.
These results acknowledge that:
“Teachers sometimes get better results from whole class instruction than from small group.”
As far as content, this meta-analysis found that – at the level of the phoneme, and for the outcome of phonemic awareness – there wasn’t a statistically significant difference between teaching blending, segmenting, or skills such as adding, deleting, or substituting.
The researchers did see that blending and segmenting activities had effect sizes closer to 0.8 while deleting and substituting activities were in the range of 0.5 for improving PA outcomes.
This leads the researchers to suggest that blending and segmenting are the key skills to focus on in instructional design when improving outcomes for phonemic awareness.
When Do We Teach Phonemic Awareness and Who Benefits?
The researchers found teaching phonemic awareness in preschool and kindergarten is especially important.
Yet phonemic awareness instruction is also beneficial for 1st grade.
Instruction in phonemic awareness was also effective for at-risk students.
While at least one quality study exists to exhibit that phonemic awareness instruction is beneficial for English Language Learners, the researchers encourage more research in this area.
When it comes to decisions around duration throughout the grades and with at-risk or ELL learners, the researchers suggest data-based decision-making for the students in front of you.
Bottom Line:
Phonemic awareness instruction is practical, effective, simple, and easy to implement, so we should be teaching it.
Teachers should feel confident delivering phonemic awareness instruction in various settings and for all learners in the early grades.
They may want to place extra emphasis on blending and segmenting to enhance phonemic awareness outcomes.
In the Reading Simplified context, teachers all over the world have found that the manipulating of phonemes in the activity Switch unlocks sound-based decoding, especially early on in instruction.
Yet, Switch It is such a brief and efficient activity that most of a Simplifier’s lesson across the school year would prioritize blending especially.
The teacher will have students blend sounds to read words in the activities Read It and Sort It.
She would also give a lot of time for this practice during Guided Oral Reading and Re-Reading for Fluency.
And every Reading Simplified Word Work activity includes a bit of segmenting practice as well.
Thus, we do have an emphasis on blending and segmenting, with a smaller dose of manipulating phonemes, so this aligns with the researchers’ findings.
Meta-Analysis #2: How to Get the Most “Bang for your Buck” in Phonemic Awareness Instruction
How Many Minutes Should We Engage in Phonemic Awareness Instruction?
Dosage was the focus of the second meta-analysis discussed by Erbeli and Rice.
One key term in this study is “optimal dosage.”
The researchers describe it this way:
“The treatment group gets more instruction and the difference in gains for them should get large. When there is the largest difference between the treatment group and the non-treatment group, that’s the optimal dosage.
The optimal dosage found in this meta is an additional 10.2 hours above regular classroom instruction.”
Researcher Caution: This number isn’t prescriptive for all classrooms, or students, so when the authors suggest 10.2 hours of oral-only PA instruction as the optimal dosage, they aren’t saying that every time we deliver that amount of instruction we need to cut it off or that it is some magic number to get outcomes for all students.
That number may even shift as more research becomes available.
So just like in the first meta-analysis, instructional decisions for individuals should be made based on data.
“There is a diminishing return. PA instruction doesn’t need to go on forever.”
But what this finding around optimal dosage does mean is that oral-only PA instructional time doesn’t and shouldn’t go on forever.
And it may not be as powerful a use of our time as another option available to us.
Letters or Not in PA Instruction?
In contrast, while there were diminishing returns with phonemic instruction with oral-only PA, the authors also looked at dosage with phonemic awareness instruction that included letters.
This finding was different from the optimal dosage for PA-only instruction.
Students continued to make gains even after the 16-hour mark when incorporating letters with phonemic awareness instruction.
This finding suggests that at this point, we don’t have a ceiling or an optimal dosage suggestion for the hours to offer instruction for PA with letters like we do for PA-only instruction.
There isn’t an optimal dosage for PA instruction with letters because there weren’t studies in the meta-analysis that went beyond 24 weeks.
And typically with 24 weeks of PA instruction with letters, students were still making gains.
With the data available from this meta-analysis, the researchers conclude that you get more instructional gains for longer when the approach to PA instruction incorporates letters.
It’s great to see another confirmation of this finding!
We’ve been saying it for years.
Reciprocity
Erbeli and Rice encourage practitioners and researchers to continue to consider the reciprocal relationship between phonemic awareness and reading and spelling.
“They feed each other as students get more and more proficient.”
Bonus Conversation on this Meta-Analysis
In an enlightening episode, hosted by Faith Borkowski and Judy Boksner, Dr. Marianne Rice and Dr. Tiffany Peltier shed further light on the 2024 meta-analysis.
They discussed:
- Distinctions between oral-only PA instruction and instruction with letters.
- The ability to meet two goals within 1 activity.
- Optimal instructional time for accelerated improvement.
- The reciprocal relationship between reading and PA.
Explore more about the 2024 meta-analysis and implications of the resarch in:
- “Article of the Month” by the Iowa Center for Reading Research,
- EdWeek, and
- ResearchFeatures.
Paper by Dr. Melissa Stalega and Colleagues on Phonemic Awareness and Reading Outcomes
The previous meta-analyses from Erbeli and Rice focused on the effects of phonemic awareness (PA) instruction on PA outcomes.
They highlighted the need for future research to understand the impact of PA instruction on reading outcomes due to the reciprocal relationship between PA, reading, and spelling.
That future is now here, thanks to a new study.
Dr. Melissa Stalega and colleagues investigated the effects of PA with and without print on reading outcomes.
Their results are illuminating:
Results of Study
- PA-only instruction had a moderate overall effect on reading-related outcomes.
- PA-only instruction was less effective compared to print-based instruction and less effective for word reading outcomes than for PA outcomes (g = 0.64, 95% CI [0.44, 0.84], p < .001).
Conclusion of Study
PA-only instruction can be beneficial for reading-related outcomes, but the effect varies depending on two important contextual factors:
1) the reading outcome type and
2) the comparison condition.
Specifically, PA-only instruction might be less effective in improving word reading outcomes than PA outcomes.
In addition, PA-only instruction has less of an effect on reading-related outcomes when compared to print-based instruction like phonics.
Implications for Practitioners
As educators, we should incorporate letters into PA instruction to improve reading outcomes.
Teaching phonics and PA simultaneously is more effective, just as researcher Devin Kearns tweets below:
We can teach phonics and phonemic awareness at once.
What Other Leaders Are Saying About Phonemic Awareness Instruction – Reciprocity Wins!
Dr. Mark Seidenberg synthesized early 2024 research, foreshadowing Stalega et al.'s findings.
He emphasized that PA instruction should be seen as an interactive contributor to reading outcomes rather than an isolated skill.
This perspective is captured in his presentation slides in this talk.
In the Handbook on the Science of Early Literacy, Doctors Nell K. Duke, Julia B. Lindsey, and Crystal N. Wise discuss this concept as “instructional simultaneity.”
They highlight the importance of integrating PA and print instruction.
“Despite decades of research suggesting that children who know some letters are best served by practicing phonemic awareness with letters…in practice, many educators and programs continue to separate these skills, with large swaths of instructional time devoted to oral-only practice.
...instructional simultaneity in reading foundational skills is not just a way to save instructional time, it is likely to be far more impactful than isolated activities aiming to target just one of these skills at a time.”
Dr. Timothy Shanahan supports this view, stating:
Lindsay Kemeny, educator, and author of 7 Mighty Moves, summed up the research on phonemic awareness this way in her presentation at the Accelerate Literacy Summit.
Reading Simplified is Well Poised with Phonemic Awareness
At Reading Simplified we advocate for “integration” over isolating subskills.
Our approach focuses on the alphabetic principle, cohesively integrating decoding and phonemic awareness.
And as Marnie says,
“Scientists Pick Apart; Educators Put Back Together”
This method aligns with the findings of Erbeli and Rice, allowing for instruction in various settings and facilitating differentiated learning.
Our core activities and instructional routines, such as Switch It, combine segmentation and phoneme manipulation with letter usage, honoring the reciprocal relationship between PA, reading, and spelling.
McCandliss et al. highlighted the effectiveness of word-building activities more than 20 years ago, showing that PA skills improve through decoding-focused interventions, which integrate PA instruction within the context of reading.
“With an increasing emphasis on the importance of phonemic awareness in learning to read (National Reading Panel, 2000; Snow et al., 1998), we also sought to document the effects of Word Building on phonological awareness. Although Word Building does not directly incorporate many of the activities found in phonological awareness instructional programs, the progressive minimal contrast activity might have an important impact on developing phonological awareness skills by focusing children’s attention on units within each position of the written and spoken word. Given the growing consensus of research demonstrating the reciprocal relation between decoding and phonological awareness skills (Perfetti, Beck, Bell, & Hughes, 1987; Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 1999), it is important to investigate how decoding activities might serve to strengthen phonological awareness skills in the process of improving decoding abilities.” -McCandliss, Beck, Sandak, & Perfetti, 2003 (p. 79)
“Our finding that phonemic awareness skills improve via an intervention that diverts no time away from reading instruction to engage children in special speech analysis activities may hold practical implications. Although previous studies have demonstrated support for the use of phonemic awareness as a speech-related activity practiced in isolation (Bentin & Leshem, 1993; Hurford et al., 1994), a recently emerging consensus demonstrates that, beyond preschool, phonemic awareness instruction is most effective when it is imparted in the context of printed letters (for two recent meta-analyses, see Bus & Ijzendoorn, 1999; National Reading Panel, 2000). It is possible that Word Building successfully integrates decoding and phonological awareness remediation within a program that focuses all the instruction time on reading skills. However, direct evaluation of such a possibility will require direct comparisons between word building and more traditional combinations of phonemic awareness and print activities.” -McCandliss, Beck, Sandak, & Perfetti, 2003 (p. 101)
The Potential When We Pivot Our Pedagogy
Incorporating letters into PA instruction leads to greater success in reading outcomes.
Our practices at Reading Simplified have always embraced this integrated approach, ensuring efficient and effective reading and spelling instruction.
So let’s end with McCandliss and colleagues' final thoughts,
“We propose that applying these techniques early in reading instruction may encourage full alphabetic decoding from the start and potentially prevent some of the difficulties demonstrated by the children in this study.” (p. 102)
Reading Simplified Always Aligned to Contemporary Research
Using data members of the Reading Simplified Academy learn to adjust the duration and dosage of initial instruction and intervention.
Members are also supported through advanced coursework and The Teachers’ Lounge (our embedded coaching platform) to intensify instruction for their students and setting.
Those aspects of Reading Simplified align with research and always have.
The science has been around, and is incorporated into the instructional design of Reading Simplified since its first inception as The Targeted Reading Intervention.
Interestingly, most of this conversation on reciprocity and incorporating letters with phonemic awareness was present in Dr. Diane McGuinness’ prototype:
- Teach phonemes (individual sounds) only – no other unit
- Teach children to identify and sequence sounds in real words by segmenting and blending, using letters.
- Teach children how to write each letter. Integrate writing into every lesson.
- Link writing (spelling) and reading to ensure children learn that the alphabet is a code and that codes are reversible: encoding/decoding
McGuinness’s work inspired many Structured Linguistic Literacy programs such as Reading Simplified.
If you are a Reading Simplified trained teacher or familiar with our activities from a free workshop like 3 Simple Steps of Science of Reading Success you may still be trying to reconcile the researchers’ suggestion from the first meta showing that segmenting and blending had a larger effect size than deleting, adding, or substituting phonemes.
And perhaps, you’re wondering about its relationship to our key activity Switch It where we ask students to manipulate phonemes.
I’d like to address that.
Segmenting is part of Switch It.
Within Switch It procedures with letter tiles, students are directed to isolate sounds and segment sounds first.
So that emphasis occurs every time we teach using Switch It.
We then add the manipulation into the word building/chaining activity.
Once the change is represented, students blend through the word and sometimes segment again.
Integration at its best!
Those effect sizes reported for deleting, adding, or substituting phonemes in the 0.5 range are still meaningful, so I don’t understand why any researcher would say not to put some instructional attention toward these tasks.
Yet I’m hearing comments to that effect in the field.
Perhaps it’s just in response to oral-only phonemic awareness tasks.
Well, that’s not how we start student learning at Reading Simplified.
Many programs that incorporate word building/chaining extend into advanced code.
We find our other activity, Sort It, in which students begin by blending sounds to read a new word, much more efficient for releasing the advanced code.
And let’s not forget that word chaining has been shown to be effective as a component of intervention in multiple high-yield reading interventions such as LiPS, The Targeted Reading Intervention, and more without the component of oral-only phonemic awareness.
Your Turn!
Dive into these resources, explore the insights, and continue the conversation!
What findings surprised you, and how will they impact your instruction?
Resources
