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The table below shows the comparison of data from pre-assessment to post-assessment.
Table Five
In order to ensure that instructional time is wisely used to meet the learning requirements of students, upper elementary instruction needs two components: effective teachers and a clearly articulated daily literacy block along with literacy embedded within the content areas.
Resourceful Research
Four Things I Wish I Had Known as a Reading Teacher
by
Amy Earls Thompson
The writing workshop is a block of instructional time in which students practice the writing process (Dorfman & Shubitz, 2019). Writing workshops can be used with young children and with adolescent students. This article provides a brief overview of instructional methods involved in the implementation of a writing workshop.
Conducting a Writing Workshop
Increased time to write with a focus on the strategies of pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing are linked to increased writing quality (Graham & Harris, 2016). Unfortunately, students tend to demonstrate a decrease in enthusiasm for writing from early childhood to middle school and high school, due to less time to write and less engaging writing opportunities (Graham & Perin, 2007) so it is imperative to engage students in workshops that are personally and culturally meaningful. We recommend that it should be evident that multicultural literature is being read, enjoyed and analyzed across the curriculum. Writing workshops provide opportunities for lively inquiry and discussion about texts with diverse characters, settings, and cultures (Alexander, 2018).
Conversations
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knowledge in order to build upon this foundation to further develop a child’s language as a prevention to the development of reading difficulties.
(2) There is an order to teaching sounds. Continuous sounds are generally the first sounds taught in reading instruction, and they are the easiest to teach. These phonemes are one continuous sound that keeps going. Because they are stretched out sounds, continuous sounds are easier for students to blend. These sounds are made by the letters m, s, f, l, r, n, v and z (Moats, 2010). Stop sounds are often taught next. These sounds have a definite beginning and ending where the sound stops. A little puff of air should be felt when the sound stops. These sounds are made by the letters b, c, d, g, p, t, k, and j. Stop sounds are categorized by being either voiceless or voiced (Birsh and Carreker, 2018; Moats, 2010). Students can be taught how to recognize this by putting their hand on their neck or vocal cords. If a vibration is felt when the stop sound is made, it is a voiced sound. If no vibration is felt, it is a voiceless sound. These sounds are then further categorized by if the sound is made by the lips, tongue behind the teeth, or in the back of the mouth (Moats, 2010).
In order to be able to blend words, students need to be taught vowels. No longer is it enough to only teach that there are five vowels: a, e, i, o and u, and those vowels have either short or long sounds. Now, recognizing the placement of the mouth when vowel sounds are made is important. The tongue, jaw, and lips work together to create the shape of the vocal tract. Moats created the vowel circle or vowel valley to depict the order of the vowels from the smallest opening of the mouth to the largest opening of the mouth (Birsh and Carreker, 2018; Moats, 2010).
The main idea is to teach sounds that are easiest to articulate to most difficult to articulate - moving from front to back in the mouth. There is an order to use based on placement in the mouth, not based on the most frequently used letters. This makes it acoustically able to be managed while reducing the cognitive resources required to complete the task ensuring the task is not too complex too early to help eliminate phonological problems. It is important to remember that phonemes are the smallest units of sounds. These sounds should be taught before print is involved (Moats, 2010). Therefore, letters need not be taught before sounds (Birsh and Carreker, 2018). Once several sounds are learned, CV sequences can be introduced because they are easy to articulate with minimal tongue movement followed by CVC words. Speech-language pathologists have been learning and utilizing this information in working with students. Imagine how much greater of an impact a classroom teacher or reading specialist could make if they, too, utilized this information in working with students.
(3) Mirrors and Sounds walls are powerful instructional tools. With the increased focus on phonemic awareness and utilizing the information learned about tongue, lip, and jaw placements when it comes to making sounds, mirrors are important in the classroom and have become powerful instructional tools. When teaching students how to form a sound, or a phoneme, in their mouth, it only makes sense that the students are able to look at their mouths to see what it is doing. Having students focus on the shape of their teacher’s mouth and placement of tongue and teeth when learning new sounds, gives students a model of how their mouths should look. Utilizing mirrors enables students to see the shapes of their mouths.
Many times, misconceptions are cleared up simply by using the mirror. For example, if a student is trying to differentiate between the sounds that the letters m and n make, that is sometimes difficult since the sounds are similar. If the teacher models that the sound the letter m makes is formed by the lips being together and the sound the letter n makes is formed by the tongue being on the roof of the mouth, the student can utilize their mirror to see the difference. Many times, simply utilizing the mirror clears up difficulties distinguishing between the sounds.
The importance of the formation of the mouth when making sounds has also transformed word walls into sound walls – another powerful instructional tool. A sound wall is set up according to the articulation of speech sounds – moving from front to back in the mouth. Sound walls are beneficial because they allow students to attend to articulation to help make phonemes more concrete as well as attaching phonemes to orthographic patterns. Having the visual reminder of the shape of the mouth and then words underneath those mouth shapes or sounds helps solidify the phoneme grapheme connections (Dahlgren, 2018).
Mirrors and sound walls are valuable in the classroom. They both focus on articulatory gesture or mouth movements which are how phonemes are represented in the brain (Liberman, 1999). In addition, mouth positions are tangible. They can be felt and viewed in a mirror for learners to analyze when learning new sounds (Ehri, 2014).
(4) Phonemes are altered by co-articulation. “The blending of speech sounds into units is termed co-articulation” (Birsh and Carreker, 2018, p. 350). Phonemes are at times difficult to isolate because they are altered or influenced by co-articulation. One phoneme can sound multiple ways such as the words “post, spark, stop, lisp, sipped” (Birsh and Carreker, 2018, p. 37). Even though the place and manner of the articulation of the sound the letter p makes is the same, there are “subtle variations” (Birsh and Carreker, 2018, p. 37). It is difficult to simply teach sounds because the “a” in apple sounds quite different than the “a” in ant because phonemes are greatly influenced by co-articulation or the type of vowel or consonant they are next to which influences the position of the mouth. As children progress, multisyllabic words can become problematic due to these articulatory difficulties and can be resolved by teaching these welded or glued sounds. Young readers can learn that when groups of letters such as all, am, an, ong, ink, unk are together, the sounds made are not the letters typical sounds but rather a slightly different sound is created. For example, the a in fan does not sound like the a in apple but is slightly different because of the nasal n.
Conclusion
A strong foundational knowledge in the language makes you powerful – armed with tools to be the teacher and the interventionist. Today, teachers need to be both. The knowledge of language for teachers goes hand-in-hand with that of a speech-language pathologist. It is important as teachers we use our resources, our specialists, and our shared knowledge. We all have struggling readers in our classrooms. The accommodations and modifications currently in use help some children but are only Band-Aids for other children. Kids still cannot read. Let us all work together to change that for our kids.
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