My words!

Should we teach students to pull words down or build them up?

I like books, especially the old fashioned kind that have paper pages,¹ but I love what’s in them even more: words. Words just fascinate me. I like saying them, reading them, and writing them. I read poems with lots (or just a few) words. I play word games. In music, I’m all over “words and music.” I even get a little “meta” about words. I study them.²

Photo of books on on of the shelves of one of my bookcases. Photo © 202x by John Wills Lloyd, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

As depicted in the photograph, I have dedicated a shelf to books about words. The photo only shows some of them., and discerning viewers (aka, “Dear Readers”) will surmise that the shelf of books about words is even higher than the shelf of books about basketball.

The field of linguistics offers a vast array of knowledge regarding words. Although dictionaries sometimes provide etymological notes, they focus primarily on pronunciation and meanings. The histories of words provided in dictionaries often lack the depth of an entire book on etymology. Exploring the origin of words through dedicated works has helped me understand words historical development and evolution.

Of course, another aspects of words to which I attend is their meanings. Individual words have meanings. Indeed, a word often has multiple meanings. “Match” can be a verb or a noun. As a noun, it can refer to an object with one end made to be ignitable, but it also can refer to one of a pair, an individual (athletic?) contest, and more. As a verb, it has multiple meanings, too: to correspond, to align, to fit, etc.

We can also study “match” in a way other than its meaning or etymology. Like almost all written words, it’s composed of a string of sounds that are represented by letters. Hey, it starts with /m/! Wowser, it has five letters but only three sounds.³ Pretty interesting “stuff, no?”

But, what does that have to do with decoding?

A recollection

I remember a real-world example that revolves around a similar word. One of my kids asked me a question about “watch” one day. “Charlie” was a fifth-grader who, who had such serious behavior problems that the local education agency did not want him to attend the neighborhood elementary school (yes, it was before The Law); in addition, he could hardly read a lick. Bo, a teaching assistant, and I cobbled together a reading program heavily influenced by Orton-Gillingham and DISTAR and, voilà, Charlie was decoding like a 4th grader by March. One day, Charlie called me to his desk and, pointing at the word “watch,” asked, “Why does ‘watch’ have a ‘t’ in it?” Then, as if to prove the foolishness of the spelling, he said, “I don’t hear it when I sound it out…wwwaaatch. Oh, wait, I do! There is a ‘t’ in there! It’s just sort of quiet.” It was all I could do to keep from bursting with joy. I just smiled a full, rich smile, pointed at him, and said, “You’ve got it, man.” He was pretty pleased; he said, “I answered my own question.”

Now some folks would probably say, “That’s a good example of word study.” Sure. Probably right. Charlie studied—as in analyzed—the word and the realized that /ch/ puts one’s mouth-tongue in a position very similar to the position it’s in when one says /t/.⁴ Charlie’s realization about the “quiet t” came from “studying” the word. That use of “word study” is well and good.

Word study

“Word study” is a label that has multiple meanings, too. Some folks use it to refer to studying the components of words. Segmenting tasks are “word study.” Some folks seem to use it refer to “phonics lessons” in general.

The term “word study” also is used to refer to activities used to help younger children learn the alphabet principle. In one of its most widely known incarnations, my former colleagues Donald Baer, Marcia Invernizzi, Francis Johnston, and Shane Templeton (2009) promote word study for reading, spelling, and vocabulary. Makes sense. One can analyze spelling patterns to develop understanding of words’ pronunciation and meaning.

Some folks seem to use “word study” more narrowly to refer to activities that promote the analysis of words to gain insight into their spelling. Sorting pictures for words according to sounds is a popular activity: “Put all the pictures that start with /s/ in this pile and all the pictures that start with /r/ in this pile.” Sometimes teachers ask kids to sort printed words: “Look at all these words [this, path, with, thorn, thumb, bath, mouth…]. Put the ones that start with /th/ in this pile and the ones that end with /th/ in this pile.”⁵ Of course, there can be much more complex sorts, too (e.g., syllables, affixes, etc.).

Nearly all the word-study activities that I described in the previous paragraph fit into what I would call “analytic phonics.” Word study activities like these have learners start with the word itself and analyze the word to learn the alphabet principle. That is, they are predicated on analysis.

In contrast, “synthetic phonics” refers to teaching students to build up pronunciations. As a learner sounds out a word, she is synthesizing the parts to form the whole.⁶

If you reread Jeanne Chall’s Learning to Read: The Great Debate, you’ll see that some advocates of the “look-say” method (think the marvelously illustrated “Dick and Jane” readers) recommended analyzing words that learners could already read as “sight” words. They admitted that learners needed to master the alphabetic principle, but they wanted the kids to “understand” it in an intellectual way. Chall argued that those were not the more effective methods of the time. She argued that contemporary research (e.g., Gurren & Hughes, 1965) showed the superiority of synthetic phonics.

We know a lot more now than Chall knew in those days. So, analytic phonics or synthetic phonics…which is better? We should go back and examine the research on this topic more closely. And that’s a post for a later time.

References

Chall, J. (1967). Learning to read: The great debates. Harcourt-Brace.

Gurren, L., & Hughes, A. (1965). Intensive phonics vs. gradual phonics in beginning reading: A review. Journal of Educational Research, 58(8), 339-347.

References

Bear, D. R., Invernizzi, M., Johnston, F., & Templeton, S. (2008). Words their way: Word study for phonics, vocabulary, and spelling instruction. Pearson.

Footnote

1. I don’t mean to I dislike books in other media. I’ve read (and listened to) lots of books on my devices. They are fine.

2. Right! “Word study!” Keep reading after the origin for this footnote, ‘cause I’m getting to a discussion of that pair of words.

3. Quick, get out your Elkonin boxes, if you need them to represent segmentation of the sound stream!

4. Note that Charlie didn’t have to be able to verbalize the tongue-mouth positioning. He didn’t have to be able to use terms like “phoneme” or explain that “tch” and “ch” are essentially equivalent. All he really needed was the rudimentary skills of segmenting and blending that he’d mastered a few months earlier.

5. Sadly, some words sort when the words are printed can be solved without reading; for example, the illustration of words beginning and ending with “th” can be completed simply by looking at the letters, never having to connect them via letter-sound association.

6. I remember a colleague who promoted analytic phonics and was ardently opposed to teaching sounding out skills. With disdain, she said that a program promoting synthetic phonics was “Synthetic. You know, like fake…fake…it’s just unnatural.”