This blog post goes into my interpretation of Structured Literacy and how I have applied to to my classroom and tutoring. I do not consider myself an expert, just sharing what I’ve learned/what I’m still learning.
Update: I’ve had some requests for these slides so I am sharing the PDF and slides here.
What is Structured Literacy?
Structured Literacy is an instructional approach to teaching students to read that encompasses all of the elements of language and has key principles that guide how it is taught. Put more simply, it is explicit, systematic instruction in the structure of the English language. Research has shown that it is effective for all students and essential for students with dyslexia.
The International Dyslexia Association came up with this “umbrella term” to unify popular methods, such as Orton Gillingham, Explicit Phonics, and Multisensory Structured Language. I have been studying Structured Literacy, applying it to my reading instruction, and reflecting on its effectiveness for a few years now. I wanted to form my own opinion based on experience before writing this post. I have to say, I am a believer! (Scroll down to learn more about dyslexia.)
Elements of Structured Literacy: What to Teach
Structured Literacy puts more focus on teaching the structure of the English language. Below are the key components of Structured Literacy.
Each is equally important to building a strong foundation for our students. These elements work together and even overlap in some ways. I admit, I’m still learning myself! I have loved phonics instruction for a while now and started doing more syllable instruction a few years ago. Both yield great results. Now I am really digging deeper with morphology, syntax, and semantics! Morphology has been a big missing puzzle piece for me. More about each later in this post.
Here’s that same slide but with pictures of actual activities I use:
How to Teach the Elements of Structured Literacy
No one can become an expert over night. That is have learned from experience. There is still so much to learn and I have been so impatient- I want to know it all! 😉 BUT if you want to do something now, looking at how you are teaching reading skills should come first.
These guiding principals of Structured Literacy have helped me so much. This was my step one. I became very reflective about how I was teaching my students.
- I now have a clear sequence.
- I always review concepts before introducing new ones.
- I teach each new concept in a direct way and then allow for plenty of opportunities for my students to practice in a guided setting.
- I build on lessons previously taught, meaning I never ask students to read or spell words with things I have not taught them yet.
- For example, if I’m teaching digraphs I will not include words like “shark” or “beach” in their reading or spelling work because I have not taught bossy r or vowels at that point yet. At that point, I would have taught CVC words, so the reading and spelling consist of CVC words and words with digraphs and short vowels only.
Why Structured Literacy
Structured Literacy explicitly and systematically teaches decoding strategies that are necessary for students with dyslexia. BUT, it doesn’t just benefit them! It benefits all students. Although I was a fan of Guided Reading and Balanced literacy, I have come to learn it doesn’t focus enough on word analysis and decoding strategies for all of our students.
One more reason? During the last few decades, cognitive scientists and researchers have done thousands of studies about how skilled reading works, what children need to be able to do it, and why some children struggle with reading. This is what is referred to as the “science of reading”. The elements and guiding principles of Structured Literacy are based on this science.
This infographic below is super eye-opening! It was created by Nancy Young, who is a member of the International Dyslexia Association. I can literally picture every class of first graders that I’ve had and this fits pretty well. We have those few who seem to just teach themselves to read, right? Then you have those kids who seem to pick up easily and advance without a lot of extra effort. Then there are those kids that are always at benchmark, but do have to put in a lot of work. And finally, the 10-15% who struggle and who have us scratching our heads as to why. These are the kids that get stuck at lower guided reading levels and they can’t seem to move on. That’s because they need the components of Structured Literacy.
More about Each Element of Structured Literacy:
This section will go into each component of Structured Literacy. Structured Literacy teaches the structure of language including: phonology (speech to sound system), orthography (our writing system and its conventions), morphology (relationship among words), syntax (structure of sentences), and semantics (meaning and relationship among words).
Phonology
Phonology is the study of the patterns of sounds. The first step for our readers starts long before they pick up a book or a pencil. Classrooms should incorporate activities to develop phonological awareness into their daily lessons. This begins in pre-k/kindergarten. Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize that spoken words are made up of sound parts.
Phonological awareness skills include rhyming, alliteration, sentence segmenting, syllables, onset and rhyme, and phonemes. The most advanced phonological awareness skill is phoneme awareness.
Phonemic awareness is the awareness of individual speech sounds (phonemes) in spoken words and the ability to manipulate those sounds. When a student has phonemic awareness, they can take a whole word like bat and orally break it up into its speech sounds (/b/ /a/ /t/) and they can the do the opposite (blend together individual speech sounds to say a word). They would also be aware that bat rhymes with the words cat, mat, pat, and fat.
More advanced phonemic awareness skills include phoneme deleting, adding, and substituting. Doing phoneme manipulation drills where students are asked to drop, add, or change a sound to make a new word are important for reading and spelling development.
Strong phoneme awareness in kindergarten can be an indicator of reading success later on. Explicit teaching of phonemic awareness can provide a strong foundation for reading and spelling. Students with dyslexia often need intervention with phoneme awareness early on in kindergarten and will continue to need more intervention with advanced phoneme manipulation in later years.
Sound-Symbol Correspondences
Sounds (phonemes) are represented with symbols (graphemes). Graphemes are letters and letter combinations (ea, igh, th, etc.) that represent a sound in print. There are 44 phonemes (sounds) in the English language and many more graphemes that represent those sounds. Graphemes can make more than one sound. A sound can have more than one grapheme.
- Students need to be taught these sound-symbol relationships explicitly (directly) and systematically (in a specific sequence).
- They then need to be taught how to match phonemes (sounds) to graphemes (printed letters). (Click here for a detailed post about orthographic mapping.)
- For reading, students need to be taught how to translate written symbols into sounds, then blend those sounds into words.
- For spelling, students need to be taught how to segment (break apart) a whole word into its individual sound parts, then convert those auditory sounds into print.
Phonics is the instruction of sound-symbol awareness.
Phonics goes much deeper that just learning the sound-symbol relationships. It goes on to include letter patterns, conventions of print, and syllabication.
There are certain patterns of letters and conventions that are also helpful to teach as part of “phonics instruction”. We can teach these to our students to help them become more effective readers and spellers.
- Example #1: The word “have” is not actually what many call a “rule breaker”. Actually, there is a rule that English words should not end in the letter v. Therefore, anytime a word ends in the sound /v/, the letter e is added. This e is silent and used only to make sure that a word doesn’t end in the letter v.
- Example #2: The letters ck only follow short vowels. When a word ends with the /k/ sound following a short vowel, use ck. Otherwise, use the letter k.
I also include fluency in this section because fluency begins with automaticity at the word level. Phonics instruction leads to better decoding skills, which leads to word recognition. As students progress, fluency becomes rate, accuracy, and prosody (phrasing and intonation). Teaching, modeling, and practicing fluency is incredibly important. (I also think fluency ties in with syntax because understanding syntax helps our readers with accurate phrasing and visa-versa. It is an essential part of reading.) Click here to read more about fluency with phonics.
Syllable Instruction
Another component of Structured Literacy is syllable instruction. Every written syllable has a vowel grapheme. There are six types of written syllables.
Recognizing written syllable patterns helps a reader divide longer words into readable chunks and helps with understanding spelling rules.
Morphology
Morphology is the study of the structure and form of words in a language. You can really do a deep dive into morphology and etymology (the history of words).
Morphemes include prefixes, suffixes, and base/root words.
The tricky part is that spelling is usually consistent with these units, but the pronunciation changes (like in the example above). That is why once you get to a certain point, you’ll want to lean less on phonology and more on morphology.
The suffix -s is the first piece of morphology that I teach. This picture shows the visuals but I actually begin with our ears! I learned from another teacher that using our hands helps. Use a fist to represent a base word and then a two fingers to represent the suffix. Say the base word, like “rat” as you hold out a fist. Then add the suffix sound as you put two fingers next to your fist. Repeat faster and then slower. This tip was GOLD! It helps my students to separate the base and suffix orally, which of course will help with spelling!
Stay tuned for a longer post on morphology!
Syntax
The IDA defines syntax as the system for ordering words in sentences so that meaning can be communicated.
Basically, syntax is grammar and sentence structure. This is an area that I really need to up my game.
One thing I do now for my early readers is a Sentence Scramble and Sentence Building. This is syntax at the most basic level but it’s a start, right?
You can ask questions that encourage studnets to look at the parts of a sentence.
- Who is this sentence about?
- What did they do?
- How was it done?
- Which word or phase told you that?
- Where or when?
For the activity shown below, students are reading the sentence, then choosing the correct inflectional ending to add to the words.
Semantics
When we talk about semantics, we are referring to finding meaning in language. In teaching, we usually refer to it as comprehension.
I love both of those comics because they illustrate how context and background knowledge affects our understanding of words and concepts.
It is important to note that you do not need to wait when it comes to comprehension instruction. In other words, a child does not need to be able to read in order to develop comprehension skills. Reading comprehension is a result of word recognition and language comprehension (this is the Simple View of Reading).
- Language comprehension literally begins before kids enter school. We can continue to improve language comprehension through read-aloud. A child can benefit so much from read-alouds that are intentional. In the younger grades, we can need to focus on vocabulary development and building background knowledge.
- Word Recognition comes from all of those other elements above (phonemic awareness, phonics, sound-symbol association, and morphology).
Here is my understanding of what semantics entails:
The IDA says: Comprehension of both oral and written language is developed by teaching word meanings (vocabulary), interpretation of phrases and sentences, and understanding of text organization.
I found this in my studies and thought it was super interesting. I ordered the book so I’ll hopefully have a better understanding soon! Notice how the symbol cannot directly go to the referent. We must have conceptual understanding first (for a cat, that might be fury, pet, mammal, tail, cuddly, whiskers).
Click here if you would like the slides to this post.
What About Balanced Literacy?
Okay, so this is a hot button issue. Many of us were trained on the Balanced Literacy approach and built our classrooms around this model. I was so put off when I first heard that basically I had to throw all of that out the window and try something new. The shift took a while for me, but I’ve seen results! I think first, educate yourself if you haven’t already, on the science of reading. The more I learned about what is happening in the brain while reading, the more it all made sense to me. I slowly started changing things.
The first thing I did was look at my phonics instruction. I realized it was an afterthought. I wasn’t direct with my teaching and I surely didn’t have a clear path. So my advice to you is to look into a systematic, explicit program that teaches the structure of English. As you (hopefully) learned in this post, it’s not all about phonics, but that was a big part for me that was missing.
Now onto “guided reading”. I am referring to the practice of using leveled texts for instruction. Our newer readers need a more systematic approach with skills taught sequentially, cumulatively, and explicitly. They need decodable readers in the beginning where they can apply what they are learning. The very nature of leveled readers and the strategies that are taught along with them promote guessing over decoding. This is not what skilled readers do and it is not what we want to promote for our new and struggling readers. The science has shown that this approach is not beneficial to students learning to read. Our beginning readers need the time and guidance to learn and practice specific skills.
That doesn’t mean that they will never be able to transfer over to more traditional texts. Obviously, at some point, they need/want to be reading “real” books in a guided setting. It just can’t come before/at the expense of those foundational skills.
I hope this post was helpful. The more we learn and grow, the more our students benefit. I began this journey slowly. I encourage you to study Structured Literacy and/or specific principles and elements of it and think about how you can start to incorporate that into your daily instruction.
Lesson Plan Templates for Structured Literacy
Click here for editable lesson plan templates.
Here are the components of a lesson. When I’m teaching small groups, I don’t get to every section every day or I spend a different amount of time on each. For example, on the first day of teaching a particular skill, I may spend more time Teaching the concept, doing guided practice, and spelling words. Then, the next day, I’ll spend more time on guided practice, applying to a connected text, and spelling/dictation. Every day, I do the warm-up activities (visual/auditory drill, phonemic awareness, and review) because they only take a few minutes.
Here are examples of activities I would do in each section.
Where to Learn More
Update: Here are some places to learn more.
- Science of Reading Info.com and this Facebook group
- The podcast Amplify and the Teaching, Reading and Learning are amazing! You will learn so much about the classroom application of the science of reading here.
- UFLI is another great resource!
- Reading Teachers Toolbox
- If you’re not sold on the why, check out Emily Hanford’s report
- I highly recommend looking into LETRS training.
Other Related Blog Posts
To learn about Reading and the Brain, click here
To read posts about dyslexia, click here.
