Thread by @tiffany_peltier

New study out🚨

“The most widely used [PA programs] have areas of inconsistency w/the #scienceofreading... Materials reviewed here did not take orthographic development into sufficient account.. did not use letters & did not limit focus to 1 or 2 skills.”
doi.org/10.1002/rrq.386

Thanks to Dr. Neena Saha for sharing on this week’s Reading Research Recap: readingresearchrecap.substack.com/p/april-16th-i…

Some highlights below from ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rr…

1/ "Why would commercial programs abstain from using letters in PA instruction? We wonder if developers of commercial materials inadvertently may have conflated assessment and instruction..."

2/ "There is no doubt that the former must focus on speech to avoid confounds in measurement, but we found no study that supports that limited focus for instruction—in fact, quite the opposite."

3/ "Of course, the core program uses letters in its other skill strands, but w/classroom time at a premium, the same goals may be achieved by combining phonological tasks with those strands."

4/ "Several training studies have offered productive exemplars in this regard, including listening 4 sounds in spelling, modeling phonemes’ articulatory gestures w/letter names & sounds toward achieving phoneme identity, & finger-tapping phonemes 2 decode & spell."

5/ "For those involved in commercial publishing, we caution that good assessment items used in research are not necessarily well suited 4 instruction. In particular, we point 2 complex, advanced tasks (e.g. phoneme deletion, substitution), that impose heavily on working memory."

6/ "Such tasks may be psychometrically sound, but we cannot discern a theoretical motivation 4 including them in early reading instruction, especially in kindergarten. Most importantly, letters should be part and parcel of phonemic awareness instruction."

7/ "Teachers can capitalize on the synergy between phonological & orthographic development 2 make headway toward blending & segmentation... in contrast 2 asking beginning readers in kindergarten 2 blend & segment from oral-only dictation."

8/ "We believe the most important question is this:

Once youngsters can spell phonemes in initial, final, & medial positions to write unfamiliar words & blend across unfamiliar written closed syllables to decode, is there objective merit to oral-only PA instruction?"

9/ "Also, more specifically, does practicing deletion and substitution tasks improve reading and spelling outcomes beyond what can be delivered with high- quality phonics instruction?"

10/ "The commercial materials examined in this study certainly imply affirmative answers 2 those questions. However, our review of research turned up no published studies that support those assumptions."

11/ "However, we identified studies suggesting that as readers develop word recognition precision, orthography garners a larger role, & phonological information diminishes in impact."

12/ "We also identified at least 1 study in which at-risk first graders receiving explicit phonics & text intervention did not profit from oral-only phonemic awareness work (Brown et al., 2000).

13/ "As educators often remind us, even 10 minutes of instructional time every day over an entire school year is a resource that needs to be used when, where, & how it counts most."