E71|Evaluating Advanced Phonemic Awareness with Dr. Michael Coyne

Advanced Phonemic Awareness, does it improve reading proficiency? It's coming up on the Teaching Literacy Podcast. Literacy Podcast. I'm your host, Jake Downs. This is the show where we work to bridge literacy research into practice. If you're new here, I'm an assistant professor at Utah State University, and it's great to have you here for episode 71.

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Phonemic Awareness Instruction is a cornerstone of early reading development. Most primary teachers are now familiar with teaching essential skills such as isolating or blending or segmenting. But one question that still remains is the effectiveness of so-called advanced phonemic awareness. Some have suggested that oral only practice with skills like addition, deletion, and substitution can build phonemic proficiency in students, which will then unlock automatic word reading.

But does this daily oral only practice with advanced physics awareness actually transfer to a student's skill in reading? Today our guest is here to help us answer that very question. His name is Dr. Michael Coyne and he is a professor of special education in the Department of Educational Psychology in the NIAG School of Education at the University of Connecticut.

Dr. Coyne is the lead author of a new study entitled The Effects of Advanced Phonemic Awareness Instruction in First Grade, which was recently published in the Elementary School Journal. This is a great episode with lots of takeaways for the classroom. After the show, make sure to stick around for Jake's take on the topic. Dr. Michael Coyne, welcome to the Teaching Literacy Podcast. Yeah, thank you so much. It's great to be here. Thanks so much for the invitation.

I'm very excited to have you on the show today and to talk a little bit about your recent study that you published in Elementary School Journal on Advanced Phonemic Awareness. But just to get us and the listeners all on the same page, can we start by defining two of the key terms in this area for our listeners? So phonological awareness and the more specific concept of phonemic awareness. What are those and why do they matter?

Yeah, sure. So um both phonological awareness and phonemic awareness refer to students' understanding of the sound structure in spoken language. Um that language can be broken down and broken into chunks so that You know, oral language can be broken into sentences and sentences uh consist of words. The sentence P lights Pizza has three words in it. Uh, we can think of breaking individual words into syllables. So something like this conson has three syllables, visconson.

Uh we can think about individual words breaking them up into onset rhyme like stop would be st up or individual sounds or phonemes in the in a word. So the the word stop would be st up. Um and this this is um you know this is an unnatural skill or insight for a lot of students because Oral language really m mostly consists of an uninterrupted flow of sound. And doesn't really

have separate words or sounds and and so we're kinda have to force this kind of structure onto language. And in so a sense like phonological awareness and phonemic awareness really required students to focus on a part of language that they're not used to. or mostly listening or s or focusing on meaning. So having to think about the sound structure of language is a a kind of

u uniquer or or different insight for students. Um and the difference between phonological awareness and phonemic awareness is really about the grain size. Phonological awareness is the broader, larger concept.

um that uh encompasses thinking about language is all those different units. So words and syllables and onsets and and those things. Um phonemic awareness is the um is the more sort of specialized version of phonological awareness that really is just focusing on the individual sounds and language. So if you're a Venn diagram person, phonological awareness is the big circle that encompasses everything. And phonemic awareness is the

you know, a smaller circle that's contained within the larger circle of phonological awareness. So it's a a more specialized specialized skill. Phonemic awareness and phonological awareness are not just about understanding that spoken words or language consists of sounds, but also working with those sounds, like pulling them apart.

um and putting them together. So um segmenting is one of the key phonemic awareness skills. So if we started with the word stop, you could segment that into the individual sounds of Ah p and then blending is putting sounds together, so if you started with the individual sounds of If you blended them together you would get the word stop.

I I really appreciate that notion of thinking of grain size that, you know, with language we have whole words and we can break that down to a smaller grain size, smaller grain size, smaller grain size, and uh eventually on the other side of the spectrum we get to individual sounds and because with the way we read English

sounds and are represented by specific letters, but there's not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence. Right. Last night I was doing a Phineemic awareness review with my undergraduates and we were looking at the word lap. So five letters, but represented by three sounds. And that's typically pretty mind-bending for my undergraduates when we first start talking phonemic west. They they're pretty good with it by this point of the semester.

but being able to go back to well, the sounds are represented by letters and being really fluid with the uh individual sounds but also in how they form together to make words that can be represented by letters is is a really productive practice for uh early developing readers on their way to reading.

So in thinking about that, there's a lot of research behind phonemic awareness and phonemic awareness instruction. Uh if I can, I'd just like us to elaborate a little bit on that research base. Are are we talking that there's

some evidence? Is there, you know, evidence suggesting it? Is there a pr preponderance of evidence? On the scale of like none to overwhelming amount, where would you rate the research that we have on phonemic awareness and its role for uh its role in in early reading development.

Yeah. I mean I would rate it as l as very strong and converging evidence that supports the importance of phonemic awareness to learning to read and also the importance of teaching phonemic awareness as part of a comprehensive approach to reading instruction. Um, and like you were saying, we have a lot of different kinds of evidence to talk about the importance of phonemic awareness. So so we know that sort of through correlational and predictive research that

Phonemic awareness is really highly related to and predictive of learning to read and future reading success. So You know, when we measure phonemic awareness in in kindergarten, um, it's really highly predictive of students' ability to learn how to read and their sort of reading outcomes in in later grades. Um we also know that Defining characteristics of student with dyslexia and reading disability is often a core phonological deficit.

At the root of some of their reading and spelling difficulties. And we also know that beginning reading interventions that include phonemic awareness.

There's a lot of evidence that they increase beginning reading skills and that's from you know National Reading Panel, the the what works clearinghouse practice guides, recent meta-analyses. Uh so I do think there's there's really compelling and converging evidence that supports the importance and the centrality of only phonemic awareness for um learning to read.

Thanks for bringing out the difference between correlational research and intervention research. So thinking about correlational research of like a single point in time having a group of students and giving them a battery of assessments and and I guess it could be longitudinal as well of two points in time, but then seeing which things correlate is

higher in X also correlated with higher in Y, or is there an inverse relationship? But Correlational research doesn't necessarily suggest what instructional practice might be as far as what would work and how much would work. I guess, you know, how often for how long per session and for which types of students it might be most productive. And that's where instructional research can come in to fill a gap.

Here's a correlation that's suggested within the research that we've seen across several studies. And then can we, you know, with specific instructional practices, if we teach it, does it improve that skill? And then usually especially with uh with, you know, early literacy stuff, we're also looking for

does it also support overall word reading down the road or or more immediately as well? And you're saying with phonemic awareness that we have actually quite a bit of both of those. We have a fair amount of correlational research. We also have intervention research. And, you know, this has been reported in the national reading panel clear back in 2000. We also have the

IES guide from it's probably about a decade old now, but uh from Dr. Barbara Foreman. And I think you were a co-author on the IES guide, right? Yeah, that's right. uh and recommending phonemic awareness instructions. So um this isn't new research per se. It's been around for a while, but th there is an aspect that's been talked about a lot over the last several years and there's been conversation and d and different

research is sort of putting forth different theories, but this is in the area of what's been termed advanced phonemic awareness. Can you talk to us a bit about what is advanced phonemic awareness and what kind of tasks are associated with advanced phonemic awareness? And then after we can get into some of the theoretical underpinnings behind it. Sure. So I think when folks are talking about advanced phonemic awareness, what they're what they're talking about is skills that go beyond

the kind of two skills that we talk about most often, which is like blending individual sounds together to make a word, or segmenting a word into its individual sounds. And it goes beyond to some to some more Um advanced kind of manipulation. So um the addition of a sound or deletion of a sound or the

substitution of a sound. So if we, you know, started with the word top and you say say the word top but put us at the beginning of it, that would be addition, so that would be stop. Or if you said say the sound stop without that That would be Sod.

Or if you said say the sound stop, but instead of an ah say a then you get to step. So it kind of Yeah, get students to kind of work with the sounds and language at a little bit more advanced and a little bit more kind of complex manipulations than just blending in segments. So in that sense, it's either adding a new sound to make a new word would be addition. Deletion would be so that'd be like stop add after s and the new word is stop.

Uh deletion being removing a sound from a word. So like stomp, remove the m and the new word is stop. and then substitution being swapping one sound for another's. And so these being collectively called advanced phonemic awareness because these tasks are generally more complex than something like isolating the first sound of a word or blending three sounds together to make a word or segmenting a whole word into its three individual sounds.

What are some of the for for folks that have been advocating advanced PA as being an important part for developing reading, what have been the theoretical underpinnings that they've leaned on or relied on to sort of promote this?

notion that advanced phonemic awareness is important. Yeah, sure. And I think, you know, one of the terms that is g it gets used is this idea of phonemic proficiency, which is You know, that there's more automatic, efficient and flexible facility with the sort of phonological structure of language.

Um, you know, actually in according to this to this theory, it sort of facilitates stronger orthographic or orthographic mapping, um, and ensures more efficient and automatic word recognition. So You know, kind of working at the language at the more complex level is really making stronger representative representations of words and memory. Um and so according to this perspective, beginning readers need to go beyond just blending and segmenting to develop these more advanced phonemic skills.

Um, and that by going beyond blending and segmenting, they're really uh helping to tune their phonological system. be more fine grained I guess or or more more representative and so that this helps them to establish and refine more fully specified orthographic representations of words and memory. And so because this sort of advanced level of phonemic awareness

theoretically supposed to be related to stronger word representations. The um the kind of implication of that is that instruction should focus more on those skills than it does right.

Um and that also that this kind of instruction in advanced philemic awareness skills is probably more important for those students with core phonological deficits or students that are at risk for dyslexia or experiencing reading difficulties that they That they need to build these m more complex skills to to really get word in memory in orthographic forms in their

Okay. So so it sounds like that if students are from from this position that if if young readers are hyper fluid with phonemes and able to be very flexible and fluid with them, that that's going to help the orthography part, the mapping part, the matching sounds to letters.

be a bit more sticky in that this might help students who have phonological processing deficits consistent with dyslexia and might actually benefit them the most. So so that's one camp around phonemic proficiency, advanced phonemic awareness instruction. What critiques have there been? Like what's what's the other side of the coin of folks saying, well, I'm not actually so sure that this is going to be the most productive approach?

uh for young developing readers. Yeah, I mean I think there's, you know, both theoretical and in more practical or experimental critiques. I think the theoretical critique is that This idea of advanced phonemic awareness really isn't explicitly included in some of the important theories of reading development or reading instruction like perfetti or airy.

Uh and that of course there's this, you know, strong connection between strong phonological and orthographic representations, but but this idea that this advanced phonemic proficiency is is critical in developing those those representations. I also think there's just a lot of converging evidence um over time that phonemic awareness instruction more effective when it's linked with letters and also when it focuses on one or two of the most important skills like like blending and segmenting.

Uh and I I also should mention that I'm not sure this is explicitly part of the theory of phonema proficiency, but that there's many in the field that have been providing guidance to practitioners that to really be able to focus on advanced phonemic awareness instruction. It might be best to provide that in the absence of print.

So that students can focus solely on phonology or the sounds without this sort of competing interference of orthography or letters. Um so Again, I'm not sure that's part of the original theory, but the way it's been interpreted is that um advanced philemic awareness instruction um should or can often happen without integrating letters or phonics into that instruction.

Yeah. Um so it it sound as part of the dissemination and any and even the implementation that the advanced PA being more oral only, not as uh uh integrated with letters which Which makes sense in, you know, if we're doing substitution, right? Take lark and replace ol with sh and the new word is shark, you know, w once once once you start changing words.

then all of a sudden the orthography can change as well. So that that can get sticky for students or teaching. So it it seems that in practice it's been a lot of Let's just do it a lot oral only so then we're not having to get into advanced smelling patterns or having to to switch

So we can talk opposing camps and theories and get into that stuff all day, but let's let's talk about the evidence base for advanced phonemic awareness. Where would you put it on a scale, you know, from minimal to preponderance or overwhelming and then And then perhaps even let's let's go the other categorization of two, of correlational research and then intervention research. How where's the research base in in those areas?

Yeah, and my my understanding is is it Is m the evidence is mostly theoretical, um with Really thinking about some major theories of of reading and and trying to understand and think more about the strong connections between phonology and and orthography and strong representations of words and memory.

And I think there's been some reinterpretation of existing studies where Potentially some of these studies that had more of a focus on advanced phonemic awareness um had some different outcomes or maybe stronger overall less so much effects. overall levels of proficiency of of students that that engage in those kind. I don't really know of many empirical studies that have evaluated um the effects of teaching advanced phonemic awareness on on student outcomes.

Um there m may be some more quasi experimental or or case study approaches, but but I don't know of of published studies that have been rigorous or carefully controlled studies that have evaluated uh the the efficacy of this kind of instruction on outcomes. So what I hear you saying is that the evidence base looks different between Phonemic awareness. Things like isolation, blending, segmenting, and the advanced phonemic awareness where there's Perhaps correlational stuff.

Perhaps there's some, you know, like a dissertation or master's theses. There might be s some studies out there with advanced PA, but we haven't seen large scale quasi or experimentally designed with studies with with controls and such. that have gone through the peer review process. That's something that, well, with with with this study that we're talking about today that uh we're just on the the forefront of to to start to test this advanced phonemic awareness theory and and see how it holds.

Exactly, yeah. And I would say that in some ways, and this isn't particularly unusual, but but in in some ways it feels like practice has got a little ahead of the research in in this area. in that I think this is this idea of advanced phonemic awareness and teaching advanced phonemic awareness, particularly through oral language activities, has really caught on, I think, with schools and teachers and and districts. And so we see a lot of this happening in practice.

But as you mentioned, I don't think there's as much experimental re intervention research that really looks at the effects of this kind of instruction on on important early reading outcomes.

So with that in mind, let's actually start to talk about the study that you conducted with several colleagues. Just to give us some framing of the study. And in the study you were measuring an approach, it was a specific curriculum that incorporated a lot of advanced PA and a lot of and that the instruction was completely oral only, from what I understand, at least what you were measuring. Can you talk to us a little bit about the curriculum you use?

And a bit of the background of of why this crithine was selected in the context for the study. Sure. This was a a while ago when this this study happened. It was actually before the pandemic. But we were in touch with a professional development organization that was situated in a state and they were getting a lot of interest from school districts about coming in and doing professional development, professional learning around advanced phonemic awareness.

And in combination with the professional development organization and with one of the school districts decided that it would be good to set up an evaluation to sort of s just to see, you know, what the effects are of of of really implementing an advanced phonemic awareness curriculum.

Um and so The way that the study was set up for is that this was a a a school district that was adding in a ten to fifteen minute supplement of advanced phonemic awareness instruction, kind of on top of their business as usual reading practices. And they couldn't provide professional development to all the schools at once, so

we were able to kind of work with them to do a randomization process where half the schools were randomized to get the training one year and the other half the training the next year. And this was really focused on all first grade teachers in in the district. So The first grade teachers in the district that were randomly assigned by their schools to the the treatment. um received this training and implemented this ten to fifteen minutes phonemic awareness curriculum.

um over the course of the year with a whole class instruction. And this uh included six to eight activities that really focused on all phonemic awareness, but particularly advanced phonemic awareness. So It did a lot of the the kind of standard kind of things like rhyming and onset identification and blending and segmenting, but they also spent um a significant amount of time with segmenting and adding phonemes, deleting phonemes, substituting phonemes.

And all of these different activities were oral only, so they didn't include letters. There was one sort of activity later Um that was more of a review of letter knowledge, letter names and sounds, but that wasn't incorporated into the phonemic awareness activities. It was more of a standalone activity. So it was a a pretty good test of Oral only phonemic awareness instruction. This was again added on to

districts business as usual reading instruction. So we tried to get a a a sense of a little bit of what that business as usual reading instruction looked like. And what we found is that across the school district that it was a fairly eclectic approach. Some schools, some teachers were using components of an older published core reading program. And they were also supplementing that with some district provided materials to teach comprehension and also foundational reading skills.

We did, you know, ask specifically whether they were teaching ephemic awareness in phonics, and and they they were teaching ephemic awareness in phonics. Um, but it wasn't we wouldn't characterize it as a systematic district-wide approach. It differed and varied some between teachers in first grade and between schools also. Um so this

15 minute Phonemic advanced Phonemic Awareness supplement was was coming on top of that business as usual instruction. So the schools that did that, they added that on, and the schools that were in control were continued to do their their reading instruction the way they had been doing.

I love studies like this because it's a snapshot of how things are often working in the real world. I I mean there's a lot to say for like a really tightly controlled R C T where every single variable is controlled for. Those are fantastic as well. But also studies like this where a district is onboarding a new

They don't have the capacity to roll it out to everyone at once. So some of the schools sort of get to be the tip of the spear and we're gonna try this on top of what we're already doing and comparing, you know, the schools that are trying the new thing with the schools that are just continuing to do what they were doing. I think there's a lot of value in that'cause it it it it mimics or sort of represents

what often happens, you know, the way that curriculum gets rolled out in schools. Yeah. Exactly. I also feel like that provides an opportunity for conducting more applied school based research than we are. A lot of times when a district or a state is rolling out a new curriculum, they don't have the resources to provide it to everyone at the same time. And y you know, usually it's a first come, first serve or some kind of uh application process.

Um, but being able to work with a state or a district to you know, actually do randomization of teachers or of schools that are gonna be starting off. Like provides a like a real opportunity that I don't think we take advantage of enough. to provide some, you know, pretty rigorous evidence about the effectiveness of of these new curriculum. And I know it's

schools and districts and and states aren't always thinking that way. But I think as researchers, one of the things that we can do is work more closely with practitioners to think about the the benefits of trying to You know, it's a little bit harder to pull off, but if we can do some kind of rigorous, more controlled study in practice, it provides a lot, you know.

There's a lot of evidence to help them make decisions moving forward about the the benefits of these kind of new programs or supplemental materials that they're using. Yeah, absolutely. I I wholeheartedly agree with all of that. And in in this case, it was a pretty large study you had. There's talking we're talking twenty six teachers.

that implemented the curriculum that had a lot of advanced PA that was delivered oral only. And then it was over the course of thirty five weeks. And then you had twenty teachers that were just continuing with business as

usual. Uh you talked about how the There the the phonics approach and f the the basic reading instruction that was happening was a bit of an eclectic approach that there was noise across classrooms in the sense that not every classroom was doing the exact same thing with the exact same pacing with the exact same dosage per

you know, whichever things that they were doing, which you know, also I think mimics what happens a lot in practice, that there is noise across classrooms. Let's talk a little bit about the measures that you used. And I want to group them as proximal outcomes

near transfer outcomes and far transfer outcomes. And maybe before we get into the individual measures, let's talk about why that grouping matters, especially when we're thinking about something like Phonemic awareness, advanced phonemic awareness. Yeah, sure. Sometimes I think it's it's really helpful to think about how closely aligned the measures are with the intervention itself. Um so one of the when we talk about a closely aligned measure. Yeah, we try to think of it.

What specifically is this intervention teaching? And then so are we seeing outcomes on exactly what the focus of the teaching is? And so in this case, the intervention really focused on teaching phonemic awareness and teaching ad advanced phonemic awareness. And so we wanted to make sure that we had measures that that were really attuned to that and and measuring those very specific skills that were being taught in the intervention.

And you know you can also think kind of a little bit of a little bit of a little theory of change or the mechanisms of, you know, if you see these changes on more closely lined measures, like what are some sort of transfer transfer concepts or or outcomes that you might expect? So we know that there's a lot of Theoretical support for that.

um increases in student phonological awareness or phonemic awareness are related to other beginning reading outcomes, particularly I think word reading outcomes like um word decoding or um word identification. And so, you know, that m we might expect to see or to look for outcomes in that area for uh with the focus on phonemic awareness. And then more distal measures are you know, more broad measures of reading that that

you know, it might be less might be harder to find effects. They might not be as sensitive to those effects. Um, but it's important to measure those big. So a lot of times in meeting it might be reading comprehension. In in this study, you know, we were able to access

oral reading fluency data, which we sort of see as reading connected text um fluently and efficiently. And we saw that as something where if we saw effects on that, that would be considered, you know, sort of far transfer from the focus of the intervention itself. So uh ultimately what what we're saying is well, we care about phonemic awareness because it it leads to greater reading proficiency. So thinking about almost

you know, a domino effect. Okay, if I if I teach phonemic awareness, are my kids gonna get better at phonemic awareness? And then you know another layer being, okay, if I if I teach phonemic awareness, is that going to help students rapidly and accurately decode a string of letters that they haven't seen before that are, you know, randomly arranged in a nonsense.

Okay, even more distal. Is it going to help my students read a word accurately in connected text? And then even more distal is it going to help my students

read connected text, you know, with more a with greater accuracy and greater automaticity. So, you know, thinking of how the domino and especially for early reading, I think that's important of, you know, how far where where is it actually helping besides just with the phonemic awareness component, does it actually push other dominoes down to to help the students move towards more proficient reading and

Yeah. And the more the kind of broader range of measures that you have at different kind of points, like you said, different level you know, number of dominoes from the the very start of the intervention. um you can kind of see where you're seeing impacts and and how teaching what you're teaching is not only not only are kids learning what you're teaching, but maybe also transferring to other skills that we think that those

phonemic awareness skills are going to be important for also helping word reading too. So let's let's get into the results. So just to recap, twenty-six teachers were implementing this curriculum for 10 to 15 minutes per day for 35 weeks.

So that's a a fairly significant dose. I mean, that's the greater portion of a school year and ten minutes across thirty five weeks is a significant amount of time overall. As far as proximal outcomes, did this practice improve phonemic awareness outcomes specifically? So we had a measure of phonemic awareness that we administered that had various subtests that got at the the skills that were being introduced in in this curriculum. And so we found

consistent effects across most of those subscales, the sort of overall composite of all those phonemic awareness skills. We saw a statistically significant effect with a a pretty good effect size of 0.65. Um we also found the facts on you know phonemic awareness skills like blending and uh And segmenting and also strong effects on more advanced phonemic awareness skills like um

uh uh deleting deleting phonemes or substituting phonemes, um or adding phonemes. Uh so we were able to see you know, see that the curr the the the primary skills that the curriculum was teaching in phonemic awareness really did lead to more growth to those students that received that instruction than students in the in the control room. And so and these were measured and fairly similar to how

the practice was administered, right? So it was it was or only it take the word top adds you know, the new word is stop. That would be like a sample of what like the like the addition subtest would have been. Is that am I correct in that understanding?

Yeah, they they were really pretty closely aligned with the activities that were being taught in the in the curriculum and so Um no letters, oral only, and a pretty close alignment between the activities that were taught in the curriculum and the and the way that the assessment um assessed the

Okay. Excellent. Let's move to near transfer outcomes. So did this intervention group w did student scores improve uh compared to the control on the nonsense word reading fluency task and the word reading accuracy assessment.

So we didn't see any differences, um, statistically significant differences between students in the treatment group and in the the business as usual group on our word reading measures. So nonsense word.

reading or real word reading accuracy in connected text. And the effect sizes for those were were were very small. So, you know, point oh two, point oh three. So we didn't we didn't find that um this instruction, this whole class instruction and in phonemic awareness resulted in better word reading for the kids in the treatment group.

Okay. Uh so that that first layer of not exactly phonemic awareness, but a transfer skill, there there didn't seem to be outcomes there in favor of the intervention. Okay, let's go to the FAR transfer measures, which was the oral reading fluency outcome. So a a you know the one-minute timed reading curriculum-based measure for students. How did outcomes look on the FAR transfer measure?

Yeah, we also did not find any any differences between the treatment and control groups on their oral semency scores. Again, just to kind of summarize, right, we we found pretty strong effects on the measures of phonemic awareness. But no effects um word reading or reading fluency. Okay.

So I mean in other words, if you teach the students the phonemic awareness oral only, they get better at oral only tasks, but in this case there wasn't dominoes that fell to say this is going to transfer to improve basic automatic word decoding accuracy in connected text or the automaticity in connected text would be a broad finding right.

Uh, you also looked at several different things, like there's been speculation that this approach might be best for students who have phonological processing issues. And so the students that are lower on phonemic awareness initially on the on their phonemic awareness scores initially might perform better. Did you see any differences based on

the achievement of where students started or across schools of different socioeconomic status. When you when you picked in those some of those other variables, were there any differences or any any findings of note that you can comment on? Right. We we were specifically interested in whether this instruction might be differentially beneficial for some students compared to other students. And again, uh Theoretically we know that there's been some speculation.

This might be more beneficial for students that are at risk for reading difficulties or at risk for dyslexia. So we looked at students' entry-level phonemic awareness skills and other reading skills. the beginning of first grade. And we were wondering if that would have would interact with the with the treatment uh to to show that it was differentially beneficial. So that maybe compared to the control group, maybe students that were started off low.

more beneficial for those students. Or on the other hand, it could be that students who started off higher with benefited more from uh being part of this instruction. And based on our analyses, we didn't find that there was that it was that there wasn't any differential effect or impact.

uh of this instruction based on entry-level skills. So it was equally it was equally effective compared to the control group for students that started with with lower reading skills as well as higher reading skills. So we didn't find that it was better or that students with lower skills responded more strongly than students that came in with average or or or higher. Okay. So it it wasn't that, you know, results really lopsided on a smaller portion of students, but that

you know, it was it was too noisy to detect it overall. It was that higher achieving students, me you know, medium achieving students, lower achieving students on the intake data. There wasn't systematic differences in how different groups of students responded to this instruction that was predominantly ad advanced phonemic awareness, you know, done oral only from what it sounded.

Yeah, that's right. And and again we we were wondering if maybe um students who came in with lower phonemic awareness skills might, you know, have have really kind of benefited more or that this was something that they we saw more growth with them and we wanted to make sure that because this was a whole class tier one kind of approach, that we weren't missing out on some effects that might be specific to certain groups of students.

Excellent. Uh so let's let's kind of pick through these findings a little bit, but think about it with a lens of recommendations for practice.

You know, we we haven't talked too much about I mean, we've talked about the design of the curriculum, but we didn't want this to be like a takedown of a specific curriculum because we we feel this is Wha the the the practices we're talking about here is sort of a lot of rapid fire advanced phonemic awareness tasks that are being done predominantly oral only. That's representative of not just this one particular curriculum that was being used in this study that that

Characteristic of what something that's become more popular in classrooms, you know, over the last six, seven years. And so thinking about it as specific practices that were measured rather than like a curricular evaluation in the traditional sense. So with that in mind, let's talk through approaching phonemic awareness. Like I'm a I'm I'm a kindergarten teacher, I'm a first grade teacher, I'm doing phonemic awareness instruction in my classroom.

What's my goal? What do I want to see as a result of the phonemic awareness instruction that I'm doing with my students? I think you know, first is that We we want this to be happening in schools, but we uh we want phonemic awareness instruction to be rehappening in in schools with in with in the younger grade. So we really do want to see kids getting better at being able

blend individual sounds together to make a word or to segment individual sounds in a word um then pull those sounds apart. Um but I think what we what we also want to see is them pretty quickly eventually Um doing those same tasks with with letters as well. Uh so it makes a lot of sense when we think about, you know, reading a word or spelling a word. You know, when we think about blending sounds together, say the sounds, hmm

Make the word mud. We can do that orally just thinking about language. But then when we're looking at letters, you know, we have to do the same thing. We know that the letter M says mm. We teach and learn that the letter U says ah and that the letter D says d but you still have to then to get to the word, you have to blend those letters and those sounds together.

So when you're decoding words that you don't know, you're actively also practicing that kind of blending, that phonemic awareness blending piece. So we we you know, we might do some oral only warmups with some words and especially maybe even words that we're gonna practice reading coming up. But then we also do that same those same tasks with with letters also. And the same thing with segmenting. We might start with a you know a word that's like stop.

Then we say, okay, now we've kind of taken that word and broken it apart into sounds. What are the letters that correspond with each of those sounds? So sometimes you see them see students doing this with letter tiles, with Alkinin boxes, right? Like you might take the S and move it down into the first box and the T into the next box and the O into the next box and the P into the next box. Right. So you're still segmenting orally into those individual sounds.

But then you're directly connecting it with the letters so so that you're y you know, you're really trying to integrate kids letter sound decoding knowledge with their phonemic awareness skills and knowledge in in the in similar activities that are integrated together. So I think, you know, we have a lot of findings from research syntheses, but also guidance documents that re reinforce this idea that phonemic awareness is important, that we think about doing it orally, but we also

really purposefully and intentionally integrate it and incorporate letters and decoding and phonics with phonemic awareness instruction. So that we're we're seeing those things happening together. Yeah. I I think that's a really powerful notion of if we you know phonemic blending

really closely is mimicking the decoding process that students will be participating in. And then phonemic segmenting is really closely mimicking the encoding, the spelling process that students will develop proficiency. in and so if if we're structuring our phonemic awareness instruction productively, we can sort of like bandit towards those future tasks in the sense that, well, you know, if I have Alcone boxes and I'm sliding tokens to represent each sound.

then that's sort of later once I have some orthography under my belt, then it's it's a natural uh it's a natural transfer to start to oh instead of tokens I'm gonna start sliding letters to represent individual sounds and and vice versa with you know, with spelling instead of blending. When I've talked with teachers, one of the things they've really liked about the sort of rapid fire oral only approach is the teacher might say, Wow, I can get through like eighty words like nothing. We can just

whip through a really high volume of words and the and feeling a little bit of hesitation of like, if I'm doing, you know, like say it say it slide it style, you know, with phenic awareness tokens or something like that, I can't get through eighty words in the same amount of time. I might only get through

four or five. Can can you speak to that trade off of perhaps using manipulatives and letters might use you know, you might be able to cover less words than you can if you're doing oral only, but

Is that a trade off that you think is is worth it or how how would you help frame the thinking of that? Yeah, that's a great question. And I and I think and I know you've talked about this uh previous podcasts before, but really thinking kind of stepping back and thinking about the overall allocation of time that you have towards reading instruction and a comprehensive approach that incorporates

you know, multiple components from mimic awareness, uh letter sounds, letter combinations to coding and encoding strategies. And kind of thinking about, you know, that we have limited time and we have to make decisions about how we allocate that time. And I think also I don't wanna lose this too, but that phonemic awareness activities are

Are fun and engaging and interactive. And that, you know, one of the things that we did learn from the study is that like the teachers really like doing this, the kids really like doing this. Teachers w did it with high levels of fidelity. Uh, so I think there's really something there that we we don't wanna. you know, to kind of take away from From teachers and students really kinda thinking about language and having fun with language and like the sounds and language.

But I do think this idea that it doesn't have to happen for really long periods of time. Um, that it's a sort of smaller but meaningful component of a comprehensive plan.

And that you may do some oral only activities and you can go through those, like you said, you can go through those really quickly and it's kind of fun for kids. But then move into the compon the part where you're practicing those same kinds of phonemic awareness skills like blending and segmenting, but doing it with manipulatives or with letters or with with writing.

So I think it's a difficult trade-off and and both can happen. But I think where we may be, you know, we want to be careful of allocating too much time, like two things I guess, allocating too much time to something that's really a component skill and not You know, phonemic awareness by itself isn't really important. You know, phonemic awareness is important if it facilitates kids becoming better readers and becoming more fluent readers. Um, so we wanna

you know, make sure that we're keeping in mind that the goal of this is to help kids be better readers. And the second piece is to not think about these components as the sort of isolated features. that kind of happen separately, um, that we wanna think about them as integrated and aligned in a systematic comprehensive approach to foundational skills where these things are supporting each other.

It's intentionally showing students how these different component skills come together to support word reading and sentence reading and and text reading. So I think I think it's a a difficult balance, but we really want to keep the end in mind, which is Integrated, comprehensive program that focuses on philonemic awareness, but in the context of

letters into coding. Um, but still making sure that there's opportunities to really engage with the structure of language and sort of fun and engaging in interactive ways. So it it sounds like almost that I mean we we talk about phonemic awareness as

you know, that there's maybe a a threshold or a ceiling, right? But maybe it's more of like how the phonemic awareness instruction evolves over time, that as your students become more proficient decoders, then, you know, we're moving from well, maybe it you know, we're moving from doing more, even like say it slide at task with tokens to now let

let's actually spell the word or let's actually blend the word or, you know, something like a word chain. You know, like we're now we're we're still doing phonemic type stuff, but we're doing it in the through more of a lens of orthography supporting the phonology. you know, rather than the other side. Right. I think the f the more advanced you get, the more the phonemic awareness components of these kinds of reading tasks.

really are become subsumed or they're still happening, but they're happening within the context of these reading tasks. And I do think, you know, for students who might be experiencing reading difficulties who might be a little bit older and are still having difficulty with

apprehending and manipulating the sounds and language that y you know, it might make sense to kind of step back and spend a little bit of time like a warm up activity with with really focusing on oral only phonemic awareness. But again, it it has to be a very careful and thoughtful lead in or c for warm up activity that's that supports the the broader purpose of of helping students become accurate and slight readers.

So let's let's maybe talk about then what if I'm a teacher and I have a curriculum that has a lot of advanced Phonemic Awareness tasks. Or it has a lot of oral only tasks, or maybe I have a a school or a district expectation or their state standards that are pushing me towards more advanced phonemic awareness tasks.

How what would you recommend for that teacher and how to approach those tasks or how to think about the the place of advanced phonemic awareness in the curriculum tasks or in their classroom? Yeah. Uh and again, I'm I don't have you know, I don't have the all the answers about this. And a lot of this is my own experience in in classrooms and and a lot of master teachers that I've gotten an opportunity, you know, to work with over the years. It's always difficult when you're kind of having

think about a curriculum or a program and and modifying ways that to make it a little bit different. But I think You know, teachers are pretty good at doing things like taking it taking phonemic awareness activities that might be oral only and

And then incorporating letters or letter tiles or for orthography into that. You know, where if you're doing an activity where you're segmenting um orally, you know, moving into then like you were talking about, doing it with with tiles over with letter tiles. So I think trying to build in doing similar kinds of activities but doing those with with letters and with

decoding and encoding activities and and is something that teachers can do. I also think that these oral only phonemic awareness activities is something that's pretty short and something that is a lead in to more More systematic, comprehensive foundational skills instruction. I mean I do think one thing that that I get worried a little bit about is if schools are adopting a oral only phonemic awareness approach.

as a patch for not having a systematic or a comprehensive foundational skills program as something that's gonna, you know, kind of fix the program. Um, I think probably in advance. Phonemic Awareness supplement works best if you already have a really strong systematic phonics program in place already. But I worry a little bit about that's maybe not the way that schools are using it all the time, that they're maybe continuing on with business as usual and adding this on as as a sort of fix.

rather than as a supplement to a really already strong foundational skills program. Absolutely. I think it's a really critical point you just touched on that I think in about any area a a ten to fifteen minute supplemental thing it can only supplement that there's not a really robust systematic uh and intentional intentionally uh taught core curriculum undergirding that it's gonna be hard to get results with something that's more supplemental in style and design. Yeah, exactly.

Uh Doctor Coyne, this has been a great conversation. Just as we conclude, what are you most apt optimistic about regarding the current direction of literacy research and instruction? Yeah, sure. I th I always think I think that's a great last question. I'm a pretty optimistic person and I do feel like the field is is converging more on

really thinking about the importance of research and evidence in informing what we do in schools. Um, I know there's there's uh there's disag disagreements, uh, but it does feel like more and more that folks are looking to the science and looking to the research to help us better understand how to support students learn to read. Um I'm also optimistic in that, you know, we're knowing you know more and more about these specific practices that support students and and teachers.

curriculum and intervention and assessments and coaching. Um, but I also think that the move towards really thinking about a systems approach or a tiered approach like in multi-tiered systems, some support. can be one of those ways that we really help schools

pull together all these different evidence based practices in a way that provides a kind of comprehensive, aligned, um, integrated approach uh that supports all students school wide. And I think also Aaron Complementation signs can really help to improve that research to practice gap to get these practices in schools and sustained over time. So I think You know, we're still learning a lot about how to best teach reading, how to best support teachers. And I think we're

We're also really making a lot of gains on how to help schools build the systems and the supports and the infrastructure to sustain these kind of practices over time. Fantastic. Dr. Michael Coyne, thank you for joining us on the Teaching Literacy Podcast. It was great to be here. Thank you so much for having me. A great big thanks, Dr. Michael Coyne, for joining us on the show. Such a good conversation, such interesting concepts to think about.

And especially with relation to current classroom practice and what it means for instruction and assessment and of course students overall reading proficiency.

I'll give you my take on where I stand with the conversation on advanced phonemic awareness. This is the only large scale instructional study that we know that involves this style of instruction. So advanced phonemic awareness paired with lots of rapid oral-only style delivery. And so In that sense, with this study where, okay, yeah, kids that were taught in this manner, they got better at doing those specific tasks.

But that it didn't necessarily the transfer effects didn't show up. So students weren't able to perform a decoding task any better. Students weren't able to have their overall in-text accuracy didn't increase any higher.

they weren't more automatic in connected text of these first grade students. So I'm willing to hold off on that style of instruction. So lots of oral only advanced phonemic awareness tasks, because in this single study we didn't see effects there and especially and I I I lean into this a bit because Especially this mimics how things are happening in schools of like here's a ten to fifteen minute supplement.

There you go, teacher, rock and roll. And and it's it's great that the teachers were really engaged with it, that the students really enjoyed the tasks. Like those are all positive things, but if it's not tipping over any dominoes to things outside of that specific task, then That it might not be the most productive practice to think about.

So let me I'll just talk to you about like if I was coming and substituting in a classroom for the next couple of months, how I would be approaching phonemic awareness. I would be doing lots of blending and isolating and segmenting and I would do it with Elkonan boxes and if it's words that student had the capacity to do it with print, we would do it with with print. So Uh we might slide Alcon boxes first and then it might be uh

you know, like a token on one side, but you flip it over and it's a letter tile. Or we might slide the token out and then write the letter. And I would do that for words that students could do given our current scope and sequence of where we've been with our Reading and stuff. And I would spend probably 10 minutes a day, seven to ten minutes a day doing stuff that's really, really clearly phonemically phonemic awareness style instruction, but I would make sure to be using tokens.

Uh or manipulatives, I would make sure to be using letters where applicable. And then I would also make sure that when I'm doing my decoding instruction that my decoding instruction is also very phonemically involved. So I love doing word chains and I I mentioned that in the episode. So something like a word chain works really great because I can get a lot of rapid decoding practice in.

But it's also tapping some of that phonological aspect of reading as well. So then I'm able to feed two birds with one hand. So I would be doing a whole lot of that. And my I would evolve my phonemic awareness instruction over time. So if I'm Teaching earlier in the year in kindergarten, I might have a little bit higher ratio of some oral only tasks just to get students used to the skill.

But then I would try and get to tokens as quick as I could to do some say it slided stuff. And it would over time, you know, evolve to include some letters. So maybe initially it's just a first letter, but the other two are tokens. And then maybe by the end of the year, right, we're doing C V C words with the letter tiles, you know, using, you know, like a an L Conan bog.

And then in first grade I would continue to evolve that, right? So some, probably not a whole lot of anything oral only I would be doing if I was coming to do a first grade classroom for a whole year. And I would do some tokens, uh, but then over time that would evolve. using tokens to having more and more letters and trying to, you know, I'd be plucking I'd be pluck plucking words from my decoding curriculum.

to use for my Phonemic Awareness instruction in increasingly more so, rather than having like a separate Phonemic Awareness pot of words and a separate decoding set of words. Over time, I just would increasingly pluck more and more words from the decoding curriculum to use as my specific phonemic awareness, right, quote unquote warm-up at the beginning. And then let's say though, let's say I had a curriculum like that where it has a lot of rapid fire, advanced phonemic awareness tasks.

uh that are delivered oral only. If I have a curriculum like that, th that's a great place for me to curate words. But I would find in the scope and sequence, okay, where are their blending and isolating and segmenting tasks? And I would double down on those. And rather than trying to get through everything in that curriculum, I would do a lot of isolating, blending, and segmenting tasks, but

back to what I mentioned, I'd be doing it rather than just rapid fire oral only or doing, you know, specific hand motions or something like that. I would be using uh Alconin boxes with tokens and of and increasingly progressing towards letters where students are capable of doing the individual phonemes with with letters that they've learned.

So certainly that's that's not the only way, that's maybe not the most correct way. I hope that research evolves and that, you know, what I just explained, that might be an approach that gets evolved over time. But I feel pretty comfortable in saying that, well

if we have a whole lot of evidence on the scale for isolating, blending and segmenting, and we have basically this one study and then some correlational and theoretical stuff on the advanced PA scale, it's like, well, I feel very comfortable saying I'm gonna lean into isolating, blending, and segmenting as much as I possibly can.

And do some, may perhaps some, but in the sense of like a word chain, right? That might be where I'm doing my phonemic manipulation stuff on the decoding side, but I'm willing to wait on advanced phonemic awareness for more research. because we have such good evidence for phoneme isolating, blending, and segmenting. But certainly I hope there's more studies in this area. And I never want to be too dogmatic about something that if more studies

come and evolve and this position evolves, that's great. I want to try and follow the data as best I can. That's what doing good science is about, is it's not about always being right. It's about following the data towards being right in a better way over time. That's all I've got for you. Thank you for your support of this show, for listening to this episode. If there's a colleague that you think might benefit from this episode, I invite you to share this episode with them.

I also highly encourage you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify so that the podcast can be more widely visible to folks who may benefit. This is Jake with a Teaching Literacy Podcast, and until next time, let's work together to make reading and writing instruction even better.