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Instructions / Notes for “Themes that Stick”
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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.
References
Birsh, J. & Carreker, S. (2018). Multisensory teaching of basic language skills (4th ed.). Maryland: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.
Dahlgren, M. (2018). Understanding the how and why of sound walls [PowerPoint slides].
Retrieved from https://bit.ly/2Xo9fRa
Ehri, L. (2014). Orthographic mapping in the acquisition of sight word reading, spelling memory, and vocabulary learning. Scientific Studies of Reading, 18(1), 5–21.
Liberman, A. (1999). The reading researcher and the reading teacher need the right theory of speech. Scientific Studies of Reading 3(2), 95-111.
Moats, L. (2017). Can prevailing approaches to reading instruction accomplish the goals of RTI.
Moats, L. (2010). Speech to print: Language essentials for teachers (2nd ed.). Maryland: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.
Piaget, J. (1959). The language and thought of the child (3rd ed.). New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.
Yopp, H. (1992). Developing phonemic awareness in young children. The Reading Teacher,
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