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Assessing letter-sound correspondence Language and literacy skills serve as key measures to a child’s ability to read, communicate, and succeed in almost all areas of learning (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1997; Clayton et al., 2020; Purpura, 2011), justifying the heavy emphasis from policymakers, education boards, and families on measuring these skills (Strickland & Ayers, 2006; Teale 2008). For assessments in language and literacy to be useful to educators and to students, it needs to go beyond standardized screenings and outcomes-based assessments. Teachers need tools for ongoing, direct, formative assessment to make instructional adjustments based on what students know (Teale, 2008, Piasta, 2014). Furthermore, the variability among preschool children in letter-knowledge, phonological awareness, and other preliteracy skills, language and literacy makes assessing in small groups or individually far more effective and informative (Chapman, 2003). Assessing language and literacy skills such as alphabet recognition or letter-sound correspondence allows for small group and individualized instruction, ensuring each young learner gets the support they need (Piasta, 2014).  The Cognitive ToyBox Letter-Sound Correspondence game assesses students’ recognition of the 26 letter sounds taught at the preschool level. Students can demonstrate their knowledge through game-based assessment, allowing teachers to review and adjust instruction accordingly. One of six game-based assessments offered on language and literacy, the Cognitive ToyBox Letter-Sound Correspondence game provides teachers with an easy way to gauge which of the 26 letter sounds students are able to recognize and which sounds they still have difficulty with. Assessments are always placed in the context of the whole child, taken in combination with what the teacher observes and in relation to other language and literacy skills. The Common Core Reading Foundational Standard for Kindergarteners states that students should be able to “demonstrate basic knowledge of one-to-one letter-sound correspondences by producing the primary sound or many of the most frequent sounds for each consonant” (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2021). Early childhood educators can use the Cognitive ToyBox formative assessment on letter-sound correspondence to move toward this goal. Once teachers know which letters each student is working to master, they can make instructional adjustments. In classrooms teaching phonemes systematically, teachers can focus on directly teaching the letter-sounds with which their students need more practice. In whole language approach classrooms, teachers can make note of letter-sounds to introduce through reading materials or class activities. No matter their approach to early reading and writing, teachers will have the information they need to ensure each child starts school ready to succeed. How do I use assessment data collected on letter-sound correspondence to inform instruction? Once a teacher has collected assessment data on their students’ letter-sound correspondence, they can review those data at the class and individual levels to determine next instructional steps. At the class level, the teacher can determine which letter-sounds most students (e.g., about 75-85%) can and cannot recognize. A subset of these sounds (3-5) can then be targeted for practice and instruction during whole group activities such as circle time and transitions. Once one subset has been mastered by most students, the teacher can introduce the next subset of letter-sounds. Teachers can then use the data to determine differentiated small groups based on skill level. Often, students can be broken into 3 homogeneous groups based on how many letter-sounds they can recognize. For example, students who know 50% or less of the sounds are in group 1, students who know 50-75% of the sounds are in group 2, and students who know more than 75% of the sounds are in group 3. Group 1 requires the most direct instruction support, group 2 is on track and can continue regular instruction, and group 3 is advanced and could benefit from more challenging instruction. The teacher may provide group 1 with more frequent direct instruction in smaller subsets of known and unknown sounds, while the other two groups experience larger instructional subsets and more whole language instruction (i.e. applied practice of literacy skills). The reason for including known letter-sounds in addition to unknown letter-sounds in an instructional subset is to give students a chance to succeed while learning new content; in other words, they are bound to get at least some letter-sounds correct as they learn unknown ones. Additionally, as a best practice, letter names and letter sounds should be taught in small groups rather than in isolation. For example, the concept of “The letter of this week is B” is less effective than “This week we’re learning the sounds /b/, /l/ and /r/” because by having other sounds in the instructional group, students learn to differentiate between the sounds. When taught a single sound in isolation without referencing other sounds, once the teacher moves on to a new sound the next week, students may forget the initial sound. For this reason, teachers should also always bring back previously learned sounds into the mix to ensure retention. In terms of direct instruction, teachers can create activities to target the following student behaviors in whole group, small group, and individual instruction.
In terms of targeting the benefits of whole language instruction, the teacher can incorporate letter sounds into various modalities and materials in order to (1) promote a love of reading, and (2) demonstrate the value of letter sounds in the context of reading. For example, during activities when printed text is involved (e.g., calendar, story time), the teacher can call on a student to be the “Sound Inspector.” The teacher points to a specific letter in a word, and the student says the corresponding sound. The teacher may then explain that that specific word begins with or ends with that sound; they may say out loud the other sounds in the word while pointing to the corresponding letters; and they may model decoding the word by saying the sounds slowly in sequence and then faster. As another example, after the teacher writes down students’ responses to the Question of the Day on chart paper, they might have students come up and underline wherever they see the letter that makes the sound /n/. Then, the class reads the poem together again while emphasizing or drawing out the sound whenever they get to the letter “n” (i.e., “nnn”). Ideally, teachers utilize assessment data to inform instruction and assess students regularly to determine whether their instructional efforts are effective. If students are not making sufficient progress between checkpoints, the teacher may need to change or enhance their instructional strategies. The most effective literacy instruction would include both explicit instruction of phonemes in isolation, as well as indirect instruction of phonemes along with other preliteracy skills in the context of spoken language, printed words, and read-alouds. References Cited
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What is letter-sound correspondence? Letter-sound correspondence is the ability to match letters with their corresponding sounds. Seems straightforward, right? In practice, letter-sound correspondences, especially in English, can be quite complex due to irregular spellings and pronunciations of letters in different words (Hutzler, 2004). For example, the “c” in “cent” and “count” sound different. Vowels have many variations as well, such as the “a” in “bacon” and “mat.” These differences seem normal once we get used to them, but how do we teach young learners how to read and write out these inconsistencies?  A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound. These sounds can be represented by a single letter, such as “a” in apple, or may be represented by multiple letters, such as “ck” in lock. Furthermore, the phoneme is not necessarily the same as the spelling of a word, i.e. “s” in circle. Those distinct sounds, even for the same letter, have their own name. Phonemes, or the smallest units comprising spoken language, combine to form syllables and words (Ehri et al., 2001). Each letter of the alphabet counts as a phoneme. Added together with combinations of letters, such as “ch” and “oo”, English consists of 44 different phonemes all blending together to create words (Watson, 2019). For instance, the word “check” has three phonemes, “/ch/” “/e/” and “/ck/”. The number of phonemes for “check” (3) are different from the number of letters (5) or syllables (1). Awareness of these phonemes and the ability to manipulate them plays a crucial role in helping students master the alphabetic principle, or the understanding that letters correspond to sounds that make up spoken words (Moats, 2010; Keesey et al., 2015). Phonemic awareness falls under the broader phonological awareness, or the recognition that words are made up of sounds, such as syllables, onsets and rimes, or phonemes (Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, 2017). Letter-sound correspondence is a prerequisite phonemic awareness skill for students to eventually blend sounds together to read words. Letter-sound correspondence vs. alphabet recognition - what’s the difference? Both letter-sound correspondence and alphabet recognition are crucial preliteracy skills, which greatly improve a child’s reading ability when they begin grade school (Lonigan, 2006). Furthermore, both require students to match a written letter of the alphabet with a sound or name. So how are they different exactly? Alphabet recognition, sometimes referred to as letter recognition, is the ability to name a letter shown or pick out a letter among a group of letters by differentiating their shapes (Lynch, 2020). Letter-sound correspondence, on the other hand, is the skill of identifying a letter based on what sound it makes in a word, which is not necessarily its name. In order for students to match letters with their sounds, or phonemes, they must be able to first differentiate letter formations and shapes first. Once they can name the letters of the alphabet, they can more easily associate letters with the sounds they make. In the end, however, knowing the sound a letter makes is what will allow them to read, not just the letter’s name. Why does letter-sound correspondence matter? Letter-sound correspondence is one specific skill among a number of other preliteracy skills that preschool children develop before entering kindergarten. Building preliteracy skills before formal schooling is a critical factor that ensures a child can become a successful beginner reader in kindergarten and in the years that follow (Strickland & Riley-Ayers, 2006). Letter-sound correspondence contributes to one of two main parts in the alphabetic principle, which are 1) alphabetic understanding - words are composed of letters that make sounds and 2) phonological awareness - letters make sounds that can be identified and put together to retrieve the pronunciation of an unknown word (University of Oregon, 2009). Letter-sound correspondence falls primarily within the second of the two parts, contributing to a child’s ability to understand basic units of sound in language and connect them to the letters of the alphabet. This ability to match letters with their sounds is a key early literacy skill that preschool age children begin to develop (Diamond, et al. 2008). Children’s literacy skills by the time they reach kindergarten correlate to their reading achievement in early elementary school (Denton et al., 2003) and in high school (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1997). Phonological awareness and the ability to associate sounds with print is an integral part of developing early writing and reading competence (National Reading Panel, 2000). Notably, however, the process of learning to read and write does not follow a linear sequence of learning letter shapes, sounds, pronunciations, then the meanings of words. Study findings have pointed out the reciprocal relationship between phonological awareness and learning to read and write (Weaver, 1998; Diamond et al., 2008), emphasizing that letter-sound correspondences must be taught within the whole of phonological awareness and other preliteracy skills to prepare young children for high literacy and language development down the line (Chapman, 2003).  ©Lina Kivaka via Canva.com Different approaches to teaching phonemic awareness In recent years, two main approaches to teaching phonemic awareness skills have been discussed in early childhood research: systemic phonemic instruction and whole language instruction. Systematic phonemic instruction explicitly teaches students letter-sound correspondences, often in isolation first and then teaching students how to blend phonemes together (Keesey et al., 2015; Gibbs et al., 2018; Ehri et al., 2001). The more long-standing approach, whole language instruction, focuses on speaking, listening, and reading with a literature-rich curriculum to expose students to new words and phoneme-combinations and teach them on an as-needed basis (Strauss, 2019; Chapman, 2003; Klesius et al. 2010). So is one better than the other? Not necessarily. Both systematic phonemic and whole language instruction teach integral concepts and skills for children learning to read, but in different ways. Teaching phonemes first, as in systematic phonemic instruction, is a systematic and comprehensive approach that gives students the tools to sound out new words. This direct teaching approach ensures students are exposed to all existing phonemes in a logical progression, which is advantageous in setting a strong foundation for decoding words in text since whole language instruction captures learning opportunities as they arise. However, there are many words that cannot be decoded by identifying phonemes in the word, in which context whole language instruction has an advantage. These words are either regularly occurring “sight” words that students must learn to recognize as a whole (e.g., “the”); or they are words that can only be identified by understanding the context in which they are found in text (e.g., “It was crowded, there were a lot of [people] at the mall,” where “people” cannot be sounded out but guessed in context). The tricky part is that between phonological awareness and early literacy, there is a mutual effect on learning letters and their sounds with growth in literature and writing skills. A recent literature review of both approaches determined that they should be used in tandem for emergent readers (Holton 2021) to provide a holistic approach to reading instruction. In both approaches, letter-sound correspondences must be taught at some point - whether on its own initially or in the context of specific words. For both systematic phonemic and whole language instruction, teachers need to know what letter-sounds their students know and the ones they don’t. In the home setting, parents and caregivers can use the whole language approach; the key is that children should be surrounded by literature and read often. References
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