What Do You Do if Phonics Doesn’t Seem to Be Helping Your Learners?

‘Phonics does not work for dyslexic learners.’

I want to seriously challenge this statement.

There is a lot of renewed media attention currently around dyslexia, sparked by Jamie Oliver’s Dyslexia Revolution recently aired on Channel 4 and I have read a few blogs since then, stating that phonics doesn’t work for dyslexic learners. I completely disagree and want to explain why, in an effort to dissuade others who are following the current debate and are questioning their provision. Phonics can absolutely work for dyslexic learners! 

If school staff believe that phonics isn’t working, I would like to ask them to consider two things.

Is the learner ready for phonics?

How is the teaching of phonics being delivered?

Is the learner ready for phonics?

There is a pre-requisite to phonics which doesn’t receive anywhere near as much attention, and that is phonological awareness. Phonological awareness (PA) is the ability to hear, detect and consciously manipulate spoken sound at each level  - word, syllable, and phoneme. This is vital, particularly for the young learner, so singing songs, reciting nursery rhymes and having books read to them is a great way to introduce them to rhythm, rhyme and the sounds held within spoken language.

For many children, dyslexic or not, this happens before they attend school – fantastic! They will have heard lots of nursery rhymes and had some great exposure to many wonderful books containing playful rhymes and engaging illustrations. 

But for others, this will not have been the case. For some dyslexic children, despite this early introduction to PA and the support provided, this may not have been sufficient. So, for whatever reason, many of our young children will need lots of games and activities promoting phonological awareness before traditional phonics teaching can be effective. This is imperative for learners with dyslexia.

I also believe our young children need phonological training without using physical letter shapes, only introducing the letters when they are ready.

Not everyone agrees with me.

In the US, The National Reading Panel Feb 2000 stated:

‘Teachers should recognize that acquiring phonemic awareness is a means rather than an end. Phonemic awareness is not acquired for its own sake but rather for its value in helping learners understand and use the alphabetic system to read and write. This is why it is important to include letters when teaching children to manipulate phonemes and why it is important to teach children explicitly how to apply phonological skills in reading and writing tasks.’

They highlighted a single study to exemplify their point that phonemic awareness training should include letters (Cunningham 1990), yet that study used wooden chips and not letters.

What I have witnessed in my teaching experience and via observations is - if I pause my phonics teaching for learners struggling with phonics, and focus instead on phonological play with words, syllables and phonemes and then pick up phonics teaching after that, they instantly make rapid progress in phonics.

I was fortunate to listen to Dr D Kilpatrick a few years ago at a conference in Florida and he quoted research carried out by Dr S. Truch.

‘For the children who are making no progress in phonics, work on phonemic awareness first then the phonics skyrockets. To be effective for remedial purposes, a reading program needs to include phonemic awareness activities and other research-based activities including explicit teaching of letter and sound connections into the program.’

He too believes we should deliver phonemic awareness activities before explicitly teaching grapheme (letter) and sound correspondence. 

Of course, the sooner you can establish sound to grapheme correspondence the better, but good phonological awareness skills help children to make that crucial sound to grapheme connection.

One of the programmes mentioned in Truch’s paper was Phono-Graphix (McGuinness). McGuinness tells us that an important feature of this programme is that students are taught from sounds to grapheme(s), rather than grapheme(s) to sounds. In other words, children need to be able to hear the sounds, isolate those sounds, play around with those sounds before being introduced to the grapheme that would make that sound. This makes total sense to me.

There was a BBC programme called ‘B is for Book’, which unfortunately is no longer available online.

In this programme a little girl was trying to read CVC words, including some nonsense words; she was trying to make sense of letter shapes and letter sounds at the same time. She appeared to know the letter sounds although not yet proficient, struggling at times to recall the sound, but she did know them. Plastic letters were being used to build CVC words; she sounded out the letters correctly one by one but then guessed what the word might be.She sounded out: n-a-t and said ink, d-a-p and said bat and m-a-n and said mat.

This task was clearly not making sense to her at all. Why not? What was going wrong?

This little girl was being asked to do two very different tasks concurrently, finding both incredibly difficult. Firstly, a letter recognition task: look at the letter and say the sound. And secondly, a phonemic task, say the sounds and blend these sounds together.

She needed to have the skill in processing auditory sounds without simultaneously having to think about the letter shapes and their associated sound. In my opinion she was suffering from serious cognitive overload; the two tasks were simply too challenging.

For her and many others like her, she needed to have repeated practice, listening to words and playing around with spoken sounds before expecting her to make the link to letters.

Teaching phonics, at this stage in her phonological development was clearly not working; I would say it was damaging. My fear for her was that she would quickly become frustrated and give up. For her, the phonemic awareness part of the reading equation was missing.

Phonemic instruction should be great fun; it should be seen as a game.

In ‘Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties’ it says:

‘The degree of outcome in the reading progress appears to be directly related to the presence and nature of phonemic awareness training. Studies with no phonological awareness element tend to have minimal outcomes. Studies that train phonemic awareness to the basic level have moderate outcome. Studies that train phonemic awareness to the advanced level have very strong outcomes.’ D Kilpatrick, p303

So, what is meant by basic and advanced level?

Basic phonemic awareness involves:

• Segmenting - breaking words into their syllables and words into their individual sounds.
• Blending - combining individual sounds to say a whole word.

Advanced phonemic awareness involves:

• Deleting phonemes - Say ‘cat’. Say it again without the ‘k’ - ‘at’. 
• Substituting phonemes - Change the ‘c’ in cat to ‘h’. What is the new word? Hat.
• Reversing phonemes within words - Say ‘cat’. Now say it backwards. Tac.

The little girl in that documentary needed both!

‘Phonemic awareness seems best taught at first without letters but, at some point, phonemic awareness needs to be applied to letters and words’. D Kilpatrick, p303

I agree; phonological awareness first, quickly followed by phonics teaching.

How is the teaching of phonics being delivered?

For phonics teaching to be successful for the learner with dyslexia or indeed any learner, it needs to be delivered using pure letter sounds. Pure sound is the pronunciation of each letter. The sound should be clear and distinct without adding additional sounds. For example, the /m/ sound is pronounced ‘mmm’ and not ‘muh,’ /t/ is pronounced as ‘ttt’ not ‘tuh’. When sounding out using pure letter sounds it is easy to hear the word mat from m-a-t but almost impossible to hear it from muh–a-tuh or using the word fish as another example using pure sounds f-i-s is easy to hear the word but using un-pure sounds... what is a fuh-i-shuh?

We also need to set high expectations for all.

Many learners need little and often, very intensive sessions that incorporate speed.

When explaining to teaching staff what Lexonik is all about I tell them that our programmes are fast, focussed and fun. Everyone seems happy with the focussed and fun but can challenge me on the fast aspect, telling me that their learners have slow processing speed and therefore cannot cope with speed.

Well... on day one, lesson one, I always accept and praise the recall speed of letter sounds or syllable sounds or indeed speed of reading words regardless. But with the right support, using age-appropriate resources and positive encouragement that speed can and will improve. After all the curriculum doesn’t wait; learners who have fallen behind need to catch up, therefore speed is of the essence. For a reader to achieve reading fluency, automaticity is required. Speed is essential. At Lexonik we time our activities, so learners see for themselves concrete evidence that they are improving. We don’t just blandly tell them they are getting better - they see it for themselves and that is so motivational. Telling students, they are getting better when they cannot see any progress being made does the opposite; it can come across as patronising.

Incidentally ‘WE’ is a very positive and motivational word to use with students. ‘We’ need to get quicker; ‘we’ need to get faster, is friendly. This inclusive language is encouraging and develops team spirit. ‘YOU’ can be threatening. ‘You ‘need to get quicker’, ‘you need to get faster’ instantly puts the pressure onto the individual student which is very much counterproductive.

I remember visiting a secondary school down in the south of England back in 2013. I met with senior leaders to explain what Lexonik was all about prior to me teaching a group of their year 9 students. When I mentioned the pace of the sessions, the Head of Special Educational Needs interrupted and said she would need to remove ‘James’ from the group as he was dyslexic and would not be able to deal with the pace. I asked her to leave James in the group and with support he would be able to cope.

The four students duly arrived and as soon I said, ‘Let’s set the timer and see how fast we can complete this task’, James put up his hand and said ‘I can’t do that because I am dyslexic’ I assured him I would support him, and I did. The same thing happened when I asked the group to spell syllables, again at speed; gave him the same assurance. At the end of the one-hour session James stood up, shook my hand said That was brilliant, best lesson ever. I have learned so much, thank you’ How many times had James been told he couldn’t do it because he was dyslexic rather than be told together, ‘WE can do this, we can do this together, just work with me’.

So, there you have it. I firmly believe phonics absolutely does work for learners with dyslexia of all ages and abilities; in fact, it is a must. We just need to make sure that we work on phonological skills first, that pure sounds are used, we encourage speed of recall and that we set high expectations for all.

Do you agree? I would love to hear your thoughts.