Ready4Reading Evidence Portfolio
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means of developing students ’ awareness of the sounds in language (Ehri, 2022; Foorman et al., 2016; Eccles et al., 2020).
• Alphabet Knowledge. The alphabetic principle refers to the insight that printed letters represent spoken sounds in words. This principle provides the foundation, and impetus, for learning grapheme – phoneme correspondences. During explicit alphabet instruction, the teacher shows a letter to students and provides the corresponding name and sound simultaneously. This approach has been shown to be highly impactful for letter-sound learning (Piasta et al., 2010; Roberts et al., 2018), particularly when teachers utilize fast pacing with introducing letters (e.g., three letters per week; see Vadasy & Sanders, 2021). Certain letter sounds are more difficult than others (e.g., h, y ) and may require additional instructional intensity (Piasta, 2016). One promising strategy is using embedded mnemonics (Ehri et al., 1984; Ehri, 2022; Roberts & Sadler, 2019; Shmidman & Ehri, 2010). In this approach, the teacher embeds the letter shapes into a picture that also reflects the letter sound (e.g., an f embedded into a flower ). Activities emphasizing hard-to-learn letters, such as those from the middle of the alphabet ( l, m, n, o, p ) and visually or phonologically similar letters (e.g., b, d , and c, k ), as well as those with mismatched sounds and names also appear to be particularly beneficial (Jones et al., 2012). • Sound-Spelling Knowledge. Research shows that after letter-sound pairs have been introduced, effective phonics instruction should use explicit routines to teach students how to read words systematically from left to right by blending, chunking, and sounding out letter sounds (Foor man et al., 2016; Lindsey, 2022). Instruction should “teach the highest utility sound-spelling correspondences, from the alphabet to the most common single-syllable CVC words, to more sophisticated common patterns, covering all 44 phonemes. That will allow children to access more complex patterns and give them a base to learn new words as they encounter them in reading” (Lindsey, 2022, p.103). • Spelling. Research suggests explicitly teaching spelling reinforces orthographic mapping (Ehri, 2021; Ouelette et al., 2017). More specifically, Weiser Mathes’s synthesis of research on this topic suggests that (2011) effective sound-spelling instruction focuses on encoding or “explicitly teaching beginning readers and spellers to write words according to their phoneme - grapheme correspondences, to build words using manipulatives … and to learn to m anipulate phoneme- grapheme relationships to make new words” (p. 171). • Decoding. Decoding involves “transforming graphemes into phonemes and blending them to form pronunciation of words” (Ehri, 2022, p. 1). Experts agree that students must learn explicit strategies to decode words (Mesmer & Kambach, 2022). Research suggests a learning advantage for teaching students to pronounce phonemes corresponding to letters with no pauses (e.g., decoding the word sand as ssssaaaannnd ) rather than pausing between phonemes (e.g., /s/- pause- /ӑ/ - pause- /n/- pause- /d/) — before blending (Gonzalez-Frey & Ehri, 2022). The vowel flexing strategy is another evidence-based decoding technique that teaches students to try pronunciations and match them to the sentence's meaning (Steacy et al., 2016; Mesmer & Kambach, 2022).
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