The Importance of Phonics Intervention in Early Education

Written By: Yvette Arañas and Lynn M. Edwards, PhD

For many years, literacy scholars have opposed each other during what is now referred to as the “reading wars.”

One camp argued that phonics (i.e., learning and sounding out the parts of a word) helped children become skilled readers.

The other side insisted that whole-language approaches were more effective, which emphasized text comprehension.

So, how do educators know when phonics intervention is needed and why is it important?

In this post, we’ll show you how to identify students in need of phonics intervention and how to crack the reading code with phonics instruction.

Cracking the Reading Code With Phonics Instruction
What Is (and Isn’t) Phonics?
How to Improve Students’ Decoding Skills
Assessing Phonics
Why Focus on Phonics?
Phonics Interventions Available in FastBridge
Phonemic Awareness Interventions for Tier 1 and Tier 2 Instruction
What Is Phonemic Awareness?
Identifying Students in Need of Phonemic Awareness Interventions
Phonemic Awareness Interventions Available in FastBridge
Summary

Cracking the Reading Code With Phonics Instruction

Learning how to read is not an automatic process. Although the human brain is wired to easily learn how to talk, it is not wired for the automatic ability to read and write (Daniels and Bright, 1996), which makes phonics instruction especially important.

Through decades of research studies, scientists have found that learning to read requires that students are explicitly taught early reading skills. And one of these key skills is phonics—also known as the alphabetic principle (Ehri, 2004; Foorman, Francis, Fletcher, Schatschneider, & Mehta, 1998).

The importance of phonics instruction was highlighted in a recent story broadcast on American Public Media titled Hard Words: Why Aren’t Kids Being Taught to Read?

The story noted that explicit phonics instruction can make the difference in whether a student learns to read. And, they explored how schools teach phonics and why explicitly teaching these skills is necessary for learning how to read.

What Is (and Isn’t) Phonics?

Phonics is the set of skills readers use to identify and manipulate letters (graphemes) of a written language with the corresponding individual sounds (phonemes) of the spoken language. Phonemes refer to the most basic unit of sound in spoken words.

After children master phonemic awareness, they can move on to applying phonemes to graphemes, or printed letters.

At the phonics stage, children learn how to sound out and read novel words by associating phonemes with print. The ability to apply letter-sound relationships to printed text and recognize word patterns is called decoding (Hiebert & Taylor, 2000).

Not all languages use phonics.

But it is essential for alphabetic languages where there are specific sounds matched to the letter. Making the connection between letters (or letter combinations) and sounds enables reading (decoding) and writing (encoding).

Phonics Instruction

Phonics instruction is focused on teaching beginning readers how sounds are linked to letters (or letter combinations) in the written language.

In the case of the English language, phonics instruction teaches students that there are predictable patterns between letters and sounds. Knowing these letter-sound relationships is how students recognize and decode words.

Phonics skills include a progression of skills that start with identifying letter-sound relationships leading to decoding multisyllabic words. Phonics instruction ideally begins in Kindergarten and can continue into later elementary grades to teach advanced phonic analysis skills.

Phonics vs. Phonemic Awareness

One important note: phonics is different from phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is knowing that words are made up of separate sounds.

Although phonics skills are built from phonemic awareness skills, these are different skills. We’ll talk more about Phonemic Awareness Intervention later in this post.

How to Improve Students’ Decoding Skills

When providing phonics instruction for children, it is important to start as early as possible (i.e., first grade and before). There are quite a few strategies that parents and teachers can do to help children master their decoding skills (Adams, 2001; National Reading Panel, 2000; Florida Center for Reading Research, 2008).

First, when children are very young, it is important to teach them how to identify and recognize letters before they associate them with sounds.

Having children practice naming and matching letters can help them strengthen this foundational skill. Children who need more practice can also practice writing the letters and identifying which letters are in a given word.

Eventually, children can move on to matching the first phoneme of a word to the word’s first letter. One activity they can do is match pictures to initial letters.

For instance, a child can focus on the letter g and identify which pictures show objects that begin with the /g/ sound. Later, the child can move on to matching pictures with final letters (e.g., which objects end with the letter t?) and later with medial letters.

Note that teaching middle vowel sounds are typically taught last because each vowel has multiple sounds, making them more challenging to master. It is also crucial to teach students rules that affect medial letters, such as adding a silent e to the end of a word.

In addition to teaching sounds of individual letters, it is also important to teach the sounds of pairs of letters called digraphs (e.g., ea, th, sh), which are single sounds that have two letters.

The same strategies mentioned above for teaching individual letters can be applied to digraphs.

Later, children can move into more complex phonics-related skills. Using magnetic letters, blocks, and other manipulatives, they can learn how to switch out initial, final, and medial letters to make new words.

For example, a child can create many words that contain –an such as can, fan, tan, pan. Eventually, they can learn how to write words on their own from a selection of letters.

Assessing Phonics

The most basic phonics-related assessments often measure students’ ability to identify letter sounds. FastBridge’s earlyReading includes Letter Names, which is a one-minute measure of this skill.

After mastering individual letter-sound relationships, students can move on to more advanced decoding assessments.

A common way to measure decoding is to have students read words that follow regular grapheme-phoneme relationships (i.e., regularly spelled words). earlyReading provides two options for measuring decoding.

One is the Decodable Words subtest, which is a timed test that assesses the ability to read phonetically regular words. The other subtest is called Nonsense Words, which is similar to Decodable Words, except that the words are made up and do not exist in the English language.

The advantage of using Nonsense Words over Decodable Words is that Decodable Words may contain a word that a student can identify automatically without any decoding skills.

While learning how to analyze printed words and their sounds is necessary to one’s reading development, we cannot forget the importance of applying meaning to the text. Topics that we will cover in the near future will include vocabulary and comprehension.

Why Is Phonics so Important?

Learning the relationship between sound and printed letters enables children to read novel words, particularly ones that follow regular spelling rules. For words that are irregularly spelled, children can still use their alphabetic and phonemic knowledge to remember these words each time they see them in print.

After readers establish letter-sound relationships, they eventually learn how to read words automatically and comprehend text. Though children can learn these relationships on their own, explicit instruction can be beneficial to them, especially for struggling readers.

Phonics instruction also has been shown to help prevent reading difficulties in at-risk readers and improve reading achievement in children with reading disabilities (National Reading Panel, 2000).

Why Focus on Phonics?

Phonics instruction is a primary focus in early elementary grades because it is a foundational skill necessary to establish before reading can be automatic and fluent. Children need to be able to “crack the code” of written language.

Cracking the code happens most effectively and efficiently through systematically and explicitly teaching phonics and other basic reading skills.

Reading English words requires matching the letters to their correct sounds. As children build their decoding skills through phonics instruction, they use these decoding abilities to recognize word patterns and develop word accuracy such that word recognition becomes automatic and fluent (Hiebert & Taylor, 2000).

And, when children become fluent at the decoding of words, they then have the capacity to focus their attention on comprehending what is read (Adams, 1990; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998).

The National Reading Panel (2000) affirmed that systematic phonics instruction is the most effective method for ensuring that all students master the English alphabetic code. Teaching phonics skills increases the likelihood that students will master the necessary foundational reading skills and continue to meet expected reading proficiency goals.

Identifying Students in Need of Phonics Interventions

Teachers can identify students in need of phonics intervention by using FastBridge earlyReading™ assessment results.

Subtests within the earlyReading™ suite that target phonics include letter names, letter sounds, decodable word reading, and nonsense word reading. These assessments may also be used to monitor phonics intervention progress.

One of these subtests, Nonsense Words, is included in the earlyReading™ screening Composite score in the winter and spring of kindergarten and the fall, winter, and spring of first grade.

The earlyReading™ Composite includes four subtests and that score can be used to identify students who are not on track (i.e., at-risk) for reading problems.

For those students whose Composite scores indicate risk, teachers can look at specific earlyReading™ subtest scores to identify student difficulties.

For example, if a student’s score on the earlyReading™ Letter Sound subtest is low, it might indicate a need for phonics instruction focused on letter sounds.

If a student’s score on the earlyReading™ Decodable Words is low, it might indicate a need for phonics instruction focused on consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) word instruction.

Phonics Interventions Available in FastBridge

Given that phonics is a foundational skill in learning to read, how can we support students in developing such skills?

Fastbridge offers reading interventions that target phonics skills. The phonics interventions are based on prior research about effective phonics instruction and are aligned with the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts for grades K-5.

The phonics interventions are available within the Fastbridge Training & Resources section of the online system.

For each phonics intervention, there is an online course with a series of eight lessons that include the following components.

Lesson 1: An introduction to the phonics intervention
Lesson 2: Standardized administration information with a short video
Lesson 3: Whole group step-by-step administration guide with student and teacher materials to use.
Lesson 4: Small group step-by-step administration guide with student and teacher materials to use.
Lesson 5: Formative assessment with progress monitoring recommendations
Lesson 6: Practice options, including a checklist to monitor intervention fidelity
Lesson 7: Certification in implementing the intervention (coming soon)
Lesson 8: Resources such as references to prior research about the intervention methods.

Currently, there are four phonics interventions available for educators to use. The interventions begin with easier phonics skills and move toward challenging skills. As supported by research, these interventions are explicit and systematic.

Explicit

The interventions directly teach students phonics through modeling and practice activities.

Systematic

The interventions follow a planned and progressive sequence of phonics skill development using clearly defined lessons with many practice opportunities for students to build accuracy and automaticity of these skills (Carnine, Silbert, Kame’enui, & Tarver, 2010).

The four phonics interventions include Picture Card Sort, Letter Sound Bingo, Word Boxes, and Word Mix Up.

Picture Card Sort

Picture Card Sort should be used when students need to improve their letter-sound accuracy. The goal for this phonics intervention is for students to demonstrate 95% or higher accuracy with letter sounds.

Letter Sound Bingo

This phonics intervention should be used when students demonstrate limited automaticity with letter-sound knowledge.

Letter Sound Bingo is focused on increasing automaticity and retention of letter sounds such that students can identify each letter sound in 3 seconds or less. Letter Sound Bingo can be used alongside Picture Card Sort.

For example, a teacher could use Picture Card Sort 3 or 4 days a week and then at the end of the week use Letter Sound Bingo, focusing on the letters that were taught throughout that week.

Letter Sound Bingo can also be used on its own 3 or 4 times per week if students already demonstrate 95% or better accuracy with letter sounds but are not yet automatic with them (i.e., still need to learn how to say each sound in less than 3 seconds).

Word Boxes

This phonics intervention is more specialized and should be used when students have an accuracy need specifically related to segmenting, blending, and decoding consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words with short vowels (such as cat, cut, cot, set, sit).

The intervention materials include a set of 15 CVC word lists that can be used by teachers across 15 sessions. The goal of this intervention is to increase student decoding accuracy with CVC words to 95% or more.

Word Mix Up

This phonics intervention is designed for students who need to improve both accuracy and automaticity with blending and decoding various word types.

The intervention is designed to support students in learning how to decode simpler word types such as CVC (e.g., cat, sat) and consonant digraphs (e.g., shop, that, chill) as well as more complex word types that include vowel teams (e.g., week, piece, load) and variant vowels (e.g., right, spy, pool, cook, house).

Teachers can use the Word Mix Up materials to teach the sequence of word types. The Word Lists, Sentences, and Stories include 108 lessons from easier to more difficult that use specified word lists matched with sentences and a story with the words used in them.

This allows students to generalize the words they learn in a list format to connected text that has a high percentage of decodable words in the text.

Phonemic Awareness Interventions for Tier 1 and Tier 2 Instruction

The term “phonemic awareness” has been a buzzword in reading research and education for quite some time now. But what exactly is phonemic awareness? And why should we pay any attention to it?

A common cause of student reading difficulties is inadequate mastery of foundational reading skills such as phonemic awareness (Kilpatrick, 2016).

Phonemic awareness is an essential building block for helping students to understand the alphabetic principle which in turn sets the stage for learning to read (Keesey, Konrad, & Joseph, 2015).

What Is Phonemic Awareness?

I’ve written before about the importance of phonemic awareness, which refers to the ability to identify and manipulate sounds (phonemes) in spoken words (Ehri, 2004; National Reading Panel, 2000).

A child who has developed phonemic awareness can easily recognize that spoken words can be broken down into smaller parts of sound called phonemes. For example, when asked to identify the sounds in the word, cat, a child should be able to identify that there are 3 phonemes in the word cat, including /c/, /a/, /t/.

In this example, the child can hear, recognize and isolate each of these phonemes and recognizes that these individual sounds make up the word cat.

Why Is Phonemic Awareness so Important?

Although phonemic awareness does not involve decoding or reading any words, phonemic awareness has been found to be a strong predictor of reading achievement during a child’s first years in school.

According to the National Reading Panel (2000), instruction in phonemic awareness helps children read words and pseudowords (e.g., bax, mib). Thus, phonemic awareness helps children to learn how to recognize familiar words and decode words they have never seen before.

Phonemic awareness instruction teaches students to pay attention to and manipulate sounds in spoken words. The National Reading Panel (2000) concluded that it helps develop students’ skills in spelling.

In addition, phonemic awareness instruction has helped to improve normally developing readers, students who have been identified for being at risk for reading problems, and students with reading disabilities.

Why Focus on Phonemic Awareness?

We know that effective reading instruction in early elementary grades (e.g, Kindergarten through grade 2) includes explicitly and systematically teaching phonemic awareness and letter-sound correspondence (National Reading Panel, 2000; Wagner, Torgesen, Laughon, Simmons, & Rashotte, 1993).

Phonemic awareness instruction helps students acquire phonemic awareness along with word reading and even comprehension skills (Ehri et al., 2003).

Common aspects of phonemic awareness instruction include identifying different phonemes, finding common phonemes in word pairs, blending phonemes to make words, segmenting phonemes of a word, deletion of phonemes, and substituting phonemes.

Overall, teaching phonemic awareness skills increases the likelihood that students will master the necessary foundational literacy skills and continue to meet expected reading proficiency goals.

Identifying Students in Need of Phonemic Awareness Interventions

Teachers can identify students in need of phonemic awareness intervention by using FAST earlyReading™ assessment results. Subtests within the earlyReading™ suite that target phonemic awareness include Word Rhyming, Onset Sounds, Word Segmenting, and Word Blending.

These assessments may also be used to monitor intervention progress. One of these subtests, Word Segmenting, is included in the earlyReading™ screening Composite score in the winter and spring of kindergarten and the fall, winter, and spring of first grade.

The earlyReading™ Composite includes four subtests and that score can be used to identify students who are not on track (at-risk) for performance at grade level. Then, it is recommended teachers look at specific earlyReading™ subtests to determine specific student difficulties with phonemic awareness.

If a student’s score on Word Segmenting is very low, it might indicate a need for phonemic awareness instruction.

Teachers can also consider a few common indicators that may assist them in identifying students in need of phonemic awareness instruction or intervention, including students who have difficulty with:

Rhyming
Hearing, isolating, and discriminating sounds that makeup words
Adding, moving, and deleting sounds in words
Breaking a word into individual sounds

If a student only knows a few letter names or sounds, it is also possible he or she may not have mastered phonemic awareness skills and we recommend checking to determine the level of mastery with phonemic awareness.

If a student’s Word Segmenting score is a very low number or zero, it can be helpful to conduct an additional assessment with one or more other earlyReading™.

Phonemic Awareness Interventions Available in FastBridge

Given phonemic awareness is a foundational skill in learning to read, how can we support students who need to develop it?

To meet the needs of your students, Fastbridge offers class-wide and small group reading interventions that target phonemic awareness.

The interventions are research-based and are aligned with our assessments and the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts for grades K-5. For each intervention, there is a series of eight lessons to build an understanding of each activity and when to use it for which students.

The lessons include:

Lesson 1: An introduction to the intervention
Lesson 2: Standardized administration information with a short video
Lesson 3: Whole group step-by-step administration guide with student and teacher materials to use
Lesson 4: Small group step-by-step administration guide with student and teacher materials to use
Lesson 5: Formative assessment with progress monitoring recommendations
Lesson 6: Practice options, including a checklist to monitor intervention fidelity
Lesson 7: Certification for implementing the intervention (this section is coming soon)
Lesson 8: Resources such as references

Currently, Blending & Segmenting Sounds is available for teachers to use. The objective of this phonemic awareness intervention is for students to increase their accuracy and automaticity with blending and segmenting phonemes in spoken words.

This intervention is designed to be used at the whole group (tier 1) or small group (tier 2) levels. For this intervention, the teacher will use the provided word list and pictures to help students blend and segment words with 2, 3, and 4 phonemes.

Each student will have a sound mat with bingo markers or pennies to follow along as sounds and words are pronounced.

The daily lesson plan involves introducing students to 2 to 3 new words from the word list as well as reviewing some of the same words from previous lessons by following the step-by-step instructional procedures provided.

These instruction procedures outline how to prepare materials, explain the activity to students, model the activity, and provide guided practice, group practice, and applied practice. Additional accommodations and instructional extensions are provided as well.

Phonemic Awareness Interventions

FastBridge offers 19 phonemic awareness interventions at Tier 1 and Tier 2 levels. Each intervention closely targets individual phonemic awareness skills from easier to more difficult aligning with FastBridge’s earlyReading™ assessment.

Examples of our phonemic awareness interventions will include:

Rhyming Words
Understanding Syllables
- Deletion using Two-Syllable Words
- Deletion using Three-Syllable Words

Understanding Onset-Rimes
- Onset Sound Deletion
- Rime Deletion
- Onset Sound Substitution
- Rime Substitution
Manipulating Phonemes in Words
- Manipulating Sounds with Deletion
- Manipulating Sounds with Substitution

Further information will be provided about these interventions when they are available.

Summary

As every teacher knows, students enter school with diverse prior experiences. As a result, they are at different readiness levels for learning phonics skills.

Teachers will need to determine how to differentiate core instruction and provide additional supplemental interventions for students who are behind or at-risk for not meeting grade-level reading goals.

Fastbridge has phonics interventions that can be used to assist struggling students master letter-sound correspondence. These interventions range from basic to more advanced and help students through direct and systematic instruction.

References

Juel, C. (2006). The impact of early school experiences on initial reading. Handbook of early literacy research, 2, 410-426.

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel. Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction (NIH Publication No. 00-4769). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Adams, M. J. (2001). Alphabetic anxiety and explicit, systematic phonics instruction: A cognitive science perspective. Handbook of early literacy research, 1, 66-80.

Hiebert, E. H., & Taylor, B. M. (2000). Beginning reading instruction: Research on early interventions. Handbook of reading research, 3, 455-482.

Florida Center for Research (2008). Student Center Activities: Grades K-1. Retrieved from http://www.fcrr.org/for-educators/sca_k-1_rev.asp

Adams, M. J. (1990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Carnine, D., Silbert, J., Kame’enui, E. J., & Tarver, S. G. (2010). Direct instruction reading (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.

Daniels, P. T., & Bright, W. (Eds.). (1996). The world’s writing systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ehri, L. C. (2004). Teaching phonemic awareness and phonics: An explanation of the National Reading Panel meta-analysis. In P. McCardle & V. Chhabra (Eds.), The voice of evidence in reading research (pp. 153–186). Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes Publishing.

Foorman, B. R., Francis, D. J., Fletcher, J. M., Schatschneider, C., & Mehta, P. (1998). The role of instruction in learning to read: Preventing reading failure in at-risk children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 90, 37–55.

Hiebert, E. H. & Taylor, B.M. (2000). Beginning reading instruction: Research on early interventions. In M. J. Kamil, P. B. Mosenthal, P. D. Pearson, & R. Barr (Eds.). Handbook of reading research, Volume III (pp. 455-482) Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum.

National Reading Panel. (2000). Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction (NIH Publication No. 00-4769). Washington, DC: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Shaywitz, S. (2003). Overcoming dyslexia: A new and complete science-based program for reading problems at any level. New York: Knopf.

Simos, P. G., Fletcher, J.M., Sarkari, S., Billingsley, R. L., Denton, C., & Papanicolaou, A. C. (2007). Altering the brain circuits for reading through intervention: A magnetic source imaging study. Neuropsychology, 21, 485–496. https://doi.org/10.1037/0894-4105.21.4.485.

Snow, C. E., Burns, M. S., & Griffin, P. (Eds.). (1998). Preventing reading difficulties in young children. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Ehri, L., Nunes, S., Willows, D., Schuster, B., Yaghoub-Zadeh, Z., & Shanahan, T. (2001). Phonemic awareness instruction helps children learn to read: Evidence from the National Reading Panel’s meta-analysis. Reading Research Quarterly, 36, 250–287

Kilpatrick, D. A. (2016). Equipped for reading success: A comprehensive, step-by-step program for developing phonemic awareness and fluent word recognition. Syracuse, NY: Casey & Kirsch.

Wagner, R. K., Torgesen, J. K., Laughon, P., Simmons, K., & Rashotte, C. A. (1993). Development of young readers’ phonological processing abilities. Journal of Educational Psychology, 85, 83–103.

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