Currents in Literacy

Letter, Sound, and Word Learning

By Gay Su Pinnell and Irene Fountas

Today's classrooms are filled with books. Children are reading high quality literature and producing their own writing for many different purposes. Yet, a consistent, agreed-upon vision for literacy education eludes us as educators and policy makers argue over the role of phonics and spelling in the acquisition of literacy. In this article we address the concerns of teachers who want to be sure that children learn basic letter, sound, and word skills, develop higher level comprehension strategies, and also understand the purposes and the joy of reading and writing. We believe that through the appropriate balance of literacy experiences children acquire both letter and word knowledge as well as skill in using that knowledge in an efficient flexible reading and writing process.

We present three learning contexts below - Reading, Writing, and Focused Experiences - which involve children in meaningful reading and writing experiences and also offer opportunities for teachers to provide explicit teaching when appropriate. Although all three are essential in the reading-writing classroom, we call the third context focused experiences because here we are suggesting that teachers deliberately structure events to illustrate important phonics and spelling principles. (For a full account of our model, see Pinnell & Fountas, 1998.)

Reading

In a broad-based literacy program, children participate in a variety of reading experiences throughout the day and these activities vary in terms of teacher support. Through reading aloud to children, teachers demonstrate the act of reading and show them that it has meaning and purpose. Children gain implicit knowledge of the syntax or structure of written language, expand vocabulary, and also become more aware of the sounds of language as they enjoy rhyme and poetry (Booth, 1994). Reading aloud is an essential component of the literary/language curriculum.

Another reading context that is also highly supported by the teacher is shared reading. Here, the teacher and child read together from an enlarged text, which is repeated many times. Children have a chance to learn about the conventions of print, to focus on the details of some words, and to produce written language spoken aloud. In shared reading, the teacher provides support for processing the print, responds to the children's strengths and needs, and may make some of the following teaching moves to help children build their knowledge of how letters and words work:

• Build up a core of high frequency words.
• Find known and unknown words in the text.
• Give explicit attention to words, word parts, letter clusters, and letters to problem-solve new words.
• Give attention to sound and rhyme.
• Notice and use print conventions.

Guided reading is a context in which a teacher actually shows children how to read and supports them in processing novel texts. The goal is to help readers use effective strategies for processing increasingly difficult levels of text. Here, briefly, we describe the process (also see Fountas & Pinnell, 1996):

The teacher calls together a small group of children who are similar in their development of a reading process.

• She selects a text that is just about right for that group of students to learn how to learn to read better - that is, it is not too easy and not too difficult.
• Then, she introduces the text in a way that helps the children read the text for meaning, while solving problems as needed (Clay, 1991b).
• Each child reads the entire story softly or silently, not trying to stay in concert with others, while the teacher observes and occasionally intervenes briefly to support reading.
• Finally, the teacher and children revisit the text for selected teaching moves that will reinforce or support the reader's efficient actions.

Guided reading assures that children are, every day, reading a text that is within their control, given the strategies and knowledge they currently have, yet offers some challenge. Successful problem-solving builds a reading system for children because they must figure out new words by various means while holding understanding in their heads (Clay, 1991a).

During guided reading, the teacher may make a variety of teaching moves that support children's understanding of how to take words apart "on the run":

• When introducing stories, the teacher calls children's attention to particular words or aspects of individual words - beginnings, endings, middles, "chunks," or clusters.
• During or following the reading, the teacher draws attention to how to take words apart - using letter-sound relationships, letter clusters, parts of words.
• The teacher selects examples to teach for word-solving strategies involving visual information in combination with meaning and language structure.
• The teacher incorporates writing or teaching children how to use the sequence of sounds to analyze words, using an easel and chart paper, white board, pocket chart, sentence strips, or individual notepads.
• The teacher helps children practice putting together the process of using information in the text - searching, checking. and using phonological information while reading on the run.
• The teacher uses what she observes about the children's knowledge of letters and words to plan for teaching moves in shared reading or interactive writing as well as planning for focused experiences

Another important context for reading is independent reading. We want all children to engage in reading that is largely unsupported by an adult, beginning with very easy books and moving toward books that increase in complexity and difficulty as reading competence grows.

In all of the contexts for reading that we have mentioned, teachers strike a balance. Sometimes they are doing the reading for children and making it easy for them to acquire new ideas and language structures. Sometimes they are explicitly demonstrating a process. Sometimes they are confirming children's attempts and illuminating examples in a way that helps them apply knowledge in other contexts. Teachers prompt, reinforce, demonstrate, and explicitly teach principles about how letters and words work as part of the reading process; they have children practice behaviors for themselves.

Writing

Writing and reading are parallel and complementary processes. When children read, they learn to take words apart, letter by letter, part by part, and they learn words as wholes. When they are writing, children are putting together or constructing words using their knowledge of letters, sounds, and word parts to build a written message. Learning in one area assists the child to learn in the other.

A highly supported writing context involves the teacher in writing for children. In the traditional "language experience approach," the teacher acts as the scribe when children dictate their descriptions of experiences. This context offers an opportunity for the teacher to demonstrate the construction of words and the use of conventions and composition. Through a related but more powerful process called shared writing, the teacher also serves as a scribe but much more attention is given to the collective composition of a text and to writing something that children can read again and again. These texts, created by the group are ideal material for shared reading, which, again, is a productive context for learning about letters, words, and the conventions of print.

Interactive writing is another small or large group situation that increases children's participation in the act of writing and helps them attend to the details of letters, sounds, and words while working together in constructing a meaningful text (for a fuller description see Button, 1996). In interactive writing the teacher and children compose a text together. The text can be anything - a list of things to do, a retelling of a familiar story, a letter, a story. They share the pen with the teacher as they write the message, one word at a time, with emphasis on writing some words quickly and saying other words slowly and thinking how to write them. Children are encouraged to use their knowledge of sounds, letters, letter clusters, word parts and words, and their growing network of knowledge about how words are alike.

Sometimes, children go up to the chart and write letters, groups of letters, or words that they know. For children who are just beginning to learn about letters, sounds, and words, linking the action to the names of children in the class is a powerful support.

During interactive writing, children's attention is directed to aspects of words, perhaps even to how to construct words letter by letter or in parts. This process of writing provides the teacher with many opportunities to help children learn how to:

• Say words slowly ("sounding out" in a smoothly blended way), to analyze the sequence of sounds in words.
• Write words letter by letter.
• Give explicit attention to words, word parts, letter clusters, and letters.
• Relate words to other words they know (names and high frequency words).
• Write whole, known words fluently.
• Use what they know about a word to help write a new word.

We find that when children write on their own, they use the skills and strategies they have learned about letters and words in interactive writing. In addition, writing workshop provides more opportunities for brief powerful, focused lessons (sometimes called "mini-lessons") on every aspect of writing, including short lessons on how to write words. The teacher is always thinking about what children know how to do as writers and what they need to learn how to do. She is thinking about what will move them forward in their development of the writing process. All of these experiences lead to independent writing, which is the goal of writing instruction.

During their own writing, children construct words in a variety of ways. They hear and record sounds, use known words to get to words they don't know, and use parts of words flexibly to solve spelling challenges.

The following teaching moves also support writers in independent writing. The teacher:

• Develops a word wall for children's use throughout the day.
• Helps children build personal word banks and use word lists in writing folders.
• Explicitly teaches and prompts children to use on their own the word construction techniques they learned in interactive writing.
• In conferences and mini-lessons, helps them to learn how to proofread their work, including a check on spelling.
• Teaches them to use their known words to construct new words or link to other words.

Young children will not be able to write every word correctly in their own writing. They will approximate many spellings as they develop and grow more competent. However, as their letter, sound, and word knowledge grows, closer approximates and much standard spelling will be evident.

As in reading, teachers strike an instructional balance in writing, including demonstrating, interacting, prompting, reinforcing, and explicitly teaching letter and word principles. Children learn and discover much about letters and words as they work on written language; that is, the learning is embedded in the acts of reading and writing. Teachers also provide intentional teaching by calling children's attention to any aspect of written language as needed.

Focused Experiences

In addition to the multiple opportunities to teach children how to use letters and word knowledge in the process of reading and writing, it is also very valuable to provide opportunities for children to actively attend to characteristics of letters and words in focused, planned experiences. Children need hands-on practice and time to extend this knowledge, become flexible with it, and make it theirs. We have learned from our observations of children in classrooms that:

• Some children discover on their own the necessary principles of how words work, but many do not.
• The study of our language can be valuable and interesting in its own right, especially when moving into the more complex kinds of word study.
• Planned, focused experiences contribute to both writing (spelling) and reading (taking words apart) and provide a way for teachers to be systematic and organized about children's learning.

A wide range of focused experiences are appropriate for helping young children acquire literacy skills. The selection and application of focused experiences depends on what children already know and what they need to know. There are some principles that may be helpful in planning for focused experiences:

• Focused experiences should be characterized by the words active, social, and constructive. If the lesson is to make words using a particular spelling principle, then every child should have a chance to actively move letters around to make words or to write words and to engage in talk with others while learning.
• When children have low knowledge in a particular area - for example, the names of letters - it is necessary to have wide exposure to learning across several contexts. Working only in focused experiences will not build the strong understandings that will be required by children who must depend on school for meaningful literacy learning.
• It is helpful for children to have a personal entry to an area of knowledge that is largely new. We advocate starting with children's names in learning to look at print and developing phoneme awareness, but we do not stay there. There will be a time to "tidy up" knowledge by systematizing instruction and giving children a feeling for possessing a body of knowledge - for example, the sounds related to consonants, including how to recognize them at the beginning, end, and middle of words, or, a word bank of known words.
• Good assessment will help the teacher make the best use of instruction. It is not effective teaching to spend time on areas in which children are already knowledgeable. If a few children are more limited than the rest of the group some small group instruction will be helpful to them. Chances are, they will profit more from small group or one on one instruction than from whole group work that is obviously behind the other children's learning anyway.
• Above all, there should be connections between the focused experiences that teachers provide, and the demands made by the embedded experiences in reading and writing. Providing a phonics and spelling program is not a matter of following a sequence or doing a group of activities. Planning requires not only that the experiences be appropriate and planned in response to children's needs but that the learning is reflected and used across many different contexts throughout the day.

Word Study Center

As one example of a way teachers can provide focused experiences, we will describe what might happen in a word study center. For young children, you may want to call it an "ABC center." This is an organized place in the room that provides for independent practice following a mini-lesson on spelling or phonics principles. The center has a wide range of materials, including but not limited to those listed below.

Materials

• letters of all kinds - magnetic, plastic, felt, both large and small
• letter or word puzzles (name puzzles for children who are just beginning to acquire letter and word knowledge)
• letter or word games
• words to sort and put together
• word books
• alphabet books
• dictionaries and other references and resources
• word banks and word walls that catalog and organize what children know
• charts and other wall materials

Guidelines for Using the Word Study Center

Materials are not the only feature of the word study center. To assure meaningful learning at centers, a carefully structured plan is required:

1. Place materials in the ABC or Word Study center for a purpose. Don't just have a lot of materials there for children to "mess around" with.

2. Conduct a mini-lesson on the principle that children will be exploring in the assigned ABC center task and post the directions at the center. We suggest that teachers provide short, focused mini-lessons using magnetic letters, a white board, or chart paper prior to children's work at centers.

3. Use information from your observations of children's reading and writing to plan for the mini-lessons and center experiences that most of the children need.

4. As much as you can, observe how students are performing the tasks. These observations will help you plan for further lessons and experiences.

5. Reteach the mini-lesson if needed.

6. To bring closure and reinforce the learning, invite children to share examples in a group sharing time.

7. Consider putting an exemplar on the word wall for further language expansion, word exploration, and reference by the children.

8. Consider working briefly with a small group of children who had difficulty with the task.

Picture sorting. Picture sorting prompts children to say the names of objects and search for ways that those words sound alike or different. This activity is different from a worksheet in which children must have the precise name of the object in the picture and get it "right" or "wrong." Here, the activity is more open in nature. Children can find pictures that start with or end with, or in some way represent a certain sound. Pictures can also be used in a more exploratory way as children discover several different ways to put them into groups. Teachers usually find pictures from advertisements or magazines or phonics books, paste them on cards for durability, and use them in many different ways. Some examples of ways to sort pictures are by:

• beginning sound
• ending sounds
• medial sounds
• number of syllables
• rhyming words

Letter sorting and matching. Children sort or match letters according to various characteristics. As they sort or match, they say the name of the letter. Children can sort letters in the following ways:

• upper and lower case letters
• color - red, blue, green, yellow
• letters with tails (y, p)
• letters with circles (a, b, g)
• letters with tunnels (n, h)
• tall letters and short letters
• letters in abc order
• vowels
• consonants

Making words. Children can build words in a variety of categories such as:

• names (first and last)
• names that begin with the same letter
• color words animal words
• number words
• theme words
• words that rhyme
• words with 2, 3, 4 letters
• words with 1, 2, 3 syllables
• words that start with a consonant or vowel
• words that begin with a letter cluster

Word sorting. As children become more knowledgeable about letters, sounds, and words, a good activity for the word study center is word sorting. Word sorting will enable students to form hypotheses, concepts, and generalizations about the properties of written words, and help them to link new words to the familiar ones they can already spell. There are two basic types of word sort activities:

• closed sorts, in which students find a specified feature in a group of words. For example, students can find words that have a silent /e/ (make, pile, cute, etc.) or any other sound.
• open sorts, in which students classify words according to shared features that they themselves discover.

There are many categories for sorting words. As children sort, they read words many times. Consider sorting words in many of the same ways listed for word building. Add the variety of useful word principles such as sorting words by:

• words that name and action words
• words with particular endings (ing, ed)
• words with a particular letter or letter sound (for example, sound of /a/ in cake, play, eight and make)
• words with the same root (look, looks, looking)
• words that rhyme (black, track, snack)

The categories are endless. Remember that in a closed sort, the teacher identifies the category and shows the student how to sort words into them. In open sorts, students make piles of words and then label categories, discovering principles in the process. Categories for sorting should be guided by the teacher's observation of what children know and where they need to go next in their development of word knowledge.

Resources and References

The Word Study or ABC center and other areas of the room include many references and resources, We discuss some examples here.

Alphabet linking chart. An alphabet linking chart is an alphabet chart with pictures, letters, and words that children use as a reference. (See Fountas & Pinnell, 1996, for a chart you may want to reproduce for your classroom.) The chart can be enlarged to make wall charts; students can have a copy in their writing folders.

They can use the chart to do any of the following.

• Read only the letters.
• Read only the words.
• Read only the vowels.
• Read only the consonants.
• Read the pictures.
• One group reads the vowels and another group reads the consonants.
• The class or group sings the chart
• The teacher covers some letters with Post-its and asks the children to make predictions; then removes the stickers.

Alphabet books. ABC books are a useful reference and learning tool for kindergarten or first grade children. We recommend providing a variety of ABC books in the book coiner, the ABC center, the writing center, and many other places in the classroom. The books provide numerous opportunities to engage children in the following:

• Reading letter names.
• Matching letter forms in the book with plastic letters.
• Developing new letter-sound associations.
• Using magnetic letters to match the words that are associated with each letter, and then checking constructions against the words in the book.
• Making a class alphabet book or individual alphabet books using a pertinent theme.
• Making individual letter books (see Fountas & Pinnell, 1996).

Books about Words. Baskets of books about language and word play are included in the classroom library. Some examples are The King Who Reigned (Gwynne), Too Hot to Hoot (Adler), and A Cachie of Jewels (Heller). Class made big books featuring the alphabet or other forms of words (for example, More Than One), are popular texts for new learning. Baskets or pots of different types of dictionaries and thesauruses are useful tools.

Word walls. A word wall is an alphabetically organized collection of words that are arranged in order across a large wall space in the classroom (see Cunningham, 1995). The word wall represents words that children are in the process of learning and using in many ways The word wall is ever changing; as children come to know some words very well, they may be taken off the wall. Teachers add exemplars of word principles that have been newly explored by thorough instruction and practice. Teachers use word walls throughout the day to help children attend to and refer to words. One teacher begins the year by placing the names of all the children in the class on the word wall. She adds high frequency words that children are learning and theme words that they are using in science (for example, chick, and egg).

Reading wall. Another version of a word wall is the collection of food wrappers collected by the children and placed on the wall for reading. The wrappers can be sorted and read in a variety of ways.

Charts, lists, and webs. It is useful to create charts, lists, and webs of words showing their relationships to each other. Many teachers of young children begin the year by creating a clear name chart for use in helping children make connections between the sounds and letters of their names and new words they are writing. Webs of theme words or lists of words that follow particular principles are useful reference tools. Teachers place paper around pencil cans with lists of high frequency words in the center of tables. They create theme word walls and charts related to science or social studies so that children can access words as needed.

Personal word wall. A more personal list of words related to the alphabet letters can be placed inside children's writing folders for reference. As children are working on new words the teacher or child adds the word to the chart for reference.

Using Word Competence in Reading and Writing

As children learn new words or principles of how words work, they need to demonstrate their knowledge in early reading and writing. Teachers help children by prompting them to make links and check on themselves. For example. Sarah rereads her story and uses her personal word wall to check many of the words that may not look right. When the teacher helps children develop spelling consciousness, they review their work, refer to resources, and demonstrate their understanding of the importance of using what you know about words and making attempts with unknown words.

We have noticed in some classrooms that children frequently misspell words that they actually know how to spell in a standard way. When consciousness is applied, that will not happen. It is useful to encourage children to explore new words, try them, and then check them; but once knowledge is established it is appropriate to hold children accountable for using what they know.

The teacher who shows an interest in language and words often inspires children to an appreciation of the same nature. The school day is filled with opportunities for creating interest and competence in written language. The more the teacher provides opportunities for children to read, write, play with or talk about words in meaningful ways, the more likely it is that children will develop into interested and competent word users.

Phonics and spelling are for reading and writing. Our ultimate measure of effective teaching of letter and word knowledge within reading and writing and focused experiences will be the evidence of fluent processing of phonological, syntactic, and semantic information by children who are confident and competent in their literacy.

References

Booth, D. (1994). Classroom Voices: Language-based Learning in the Elementary School. Ontario, Canada: Harcourt Brace & Co.

Button, K., Johnson, M., & Furgerson, P. (1996). Interactive Writing in a Primary Classroom. The Reading Teacher, 49(6):446- 454.

Cunningham. P. M. (1995). Phonics They Use. New York: Harper Collins.

Clay. M. M. (1991 a). Becoming Literate: The Connection of Inner Control. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Clay. M. M. (1991b). "Introducing a New Story Book to Young Readers." The Reading Teacher, 45: 264-273.

Fountas, I. C. & Pinnell G. S. (1996). Guided Reading: Good First Learning for All Children. Portsmouth NH: Heinemann.

Gay Su Pinnell is a professor in the School of Teaching and Learning at The Ohio State University and Irene Fountas is a professor at Lesley University and Director of the Center for Reading Recovery. They have extensive experience in classroom teaching and field-based research, and in developing comprehensive approaches to literacy education. They have co-authored Guided Reading: Good First Teaching for All Children (1996), Help America Read: A Handbook for Volunteers (1997), Word Matters: Teaching Phonics and Spelling in the Reading/Writing Classroom (1998), and Interactive Writing: How Language and Literacy Come Together, K-2 (1999).