The “science of reading” movement has ended, at least for now, one great literacy debate: Policymakers, education leaders, and experts almost universally agree that explicit, systematic phonics is an essential component of early literacy instruction.
Now, as new reading policies in more than 40 states require teaching students about how written letters connect to spoken sounds, new questions are emerging in the field: Is one type of phonics instruction better than another? What’s the most efficient way to teach it?
A few years ago, in New York’s Patchogue-Medford schools, some students were still struggling with phonics, despite receiving instruction in it, said Kerin Moser, the district’s director of early learning, reading, and home schooling. So Moser and her team reviewed a handful of alternative phonics programs, and piloted three. They landed on one that took a different approach than many of the others they’d seen on the market.
The program was still explicit and systematic, but it used a different method for explaining the connection between letters and sounds. It also didn’t ask students to learn and apply as many language “rules,” like understanding syllable types. Instead, teachers taught common sound-spelling patterns, and then prioritized practicing reading and writing in context over isolated phonics drills.
Creators and supporters of this method call it “linguistic phonics” or “speech-to-print phonics.” Moser said it’s been a game changer for students who, until now, hadn’t been seeing growth. “It was more engaging for them,” she said. “They were more on task during reading intervention time.”
Literacy podcasters and bloggers are talking about the approach, which differs from the way that phonics is taught in many programs on state-approved lists of evidence-based reading materials. But despite growing educator enthusiasm, there’s not much research evidence giving linguistic phonics an edge over other methods.
In a sense, the conversation around the approach highlights the new challenges schools face: How should they decide between different curriculum programs that all claim alignment to research? And what kind of instruction has the best chance of reaching kids who struggle the most?
How linguistic phonics differs from other methods
Over the past decade, hundreds of thousands of teachers have been through training that covers letter-sound instruction in depth, and curriculum markets have shifted, with districts purchasing more programs that focus on helping students crack the code of written language.
All phonics instruction helps students link sounds to letters, so that they can decode words. The difference between linguistic phonics and some other approaches is a technical one springing from how they get kids to make those connections.
Many popular phonics programs are influenced by an approach called Orton-Gillingham. First developed a century ago by a neuropsychiatrist and an educator-psychologist, the method was designed to help children with dyslexia learn to read. It has since become one of the most common approaches used in intervention with struggling readers.
Generally, children start letter by letter, learning the sounds that individual letters make and how different combinations of letters work together to make different sounds. From there, teachers systematically explain the different rules that govern word structures: such as digraphs or different syllable patterns like open, closed, or vowel-consonant-e.
“The English language is very complex. It is an opaque language,” said Deanna Fogarty, the vice president of reading sciences at Wilson Language Training, a company that provides reading programs and interventions following the Orton-Gillingham approach, including the popular Fundations curriculum.
Students are taught these rules not for the sake of memorization, but to make it clear how the English language works, she said.
Linguistic phonics works differently. Instead of starting with letters, teachers start with sounds, demonstrating the multiple ways each sound can be represented by letters on the page. And because of the focus on translating spoken sounds into spellings, such programs tightly integrate spelling and writing with reading.
In practice, this might look like a kindergarten teacher showing students that the long “e” sound is often spelled one of four different ways: “ee,” “ea,” “e,” or “y.” They would teach students when they’re most likely to see these different spellings, using real words as examples.
Teachers don’t teach as many specific rules, like, “open syllables make long vowel sounds.” Instead, they focus on common patterns—when and where different spellings are most likely to occur.
The linguistic phonics approach was first popularized by Diane McGuinness, a cognitive psychologist, in the 1990s. She argued that memorizing rules related to word structures was an overwhelming and ineffective way for children to learn to read. Instead, linguistic phonics relies on the brain’s ability to pick up on patterns and generalize information. Lessons teach common representations for different sounds, and then give students lots of opportunities to practice decoding words in connected text to make that knowledge stick.
“Because you understand this concept of the same sound being spelled lots of different ways, the kids begin to apply that as they move into authentic text,” said Nora Chahbazi, the creator of EBLI, a linguistic phonics program.
This means that students are spelling words in the first few weeks of kindergarten, said Marnie Ginsberg, the founder of a linguistic phonics program called Reading Simplified, and a former reading teacher.
“If you open up any of the most popular phonics programs for kindergarten, you’re going to see several weeks of learning letter names and maybe letter sounds in isolation,” Ginsberg said. Reading Simplified does teach letter names and sounds, but quickly moves on to demonstrating how those sounds operate in words.
“We get right into manipulating and writing real words,” she said.
Does research support a linguistic phonics approach?
These differences in sequencing and pacing form a core distinction between linguistic phonics and Orton-Gillingham approaches.
Incremental learning is a tenet of the latter, said Fogarty. Students master component skills one by one, with each building upon the other. “It’s kind of like how we teach math,” she said. “We don’t start at algebra.”
In some linguistic phonics programs, students aren’t required to fully master individual phonics skills before moving on to new concepts. Instead, through reading and writing, students get opportunities to practice older skills alongside the new—an approach called “interleaved practice.” It’s been shown to help students remember more information over time.
The pace of linguistic phonics is a major draw for Kimberly Hart, an instructional coach in Bleckley County schools in Georgia, which uses Reading Simplified. She says it moves faster than the program the district was using before, helping kindergarteners in her district to read longer words and connected text faster than in previous years.
“If you don’t hurry up and do something, the rich are going to get richer and the poor are going to get poorer,” she said, referencing the “Matthew Effect” in reading, referring to how good readers increasingly outpace struggling ones.
But broadly, there’s scant evidence that would answer the questions of whether linguistic phonics is more efficient or effective than other methods of teaching students how to decode.
There are several case studies showing that programs following a linguistic phonics approach led to student reading growth, including in students with reading disabilities.
Still, these aren’t random-assignment experiments that directly compare similar groups of students getting linguistic phonics vs. other approaches. Indeed, little research compares the benefits of different phonics approaches and sequences in general.
That gap that can prove frustrating for district and school leaders weighing curriculum choices, and it’s an area where academics, practitioners, and now politicians have called for more research. A proposal in a recent congressional spending bill calls for convening another National Reading Panel—the group of experts brought together by Congress in 2000 to synthesize reading research in a landmark report.
It calls for the panel to explore “optimal amounts of time for different aspects of reading and writing instruction in the average classroom,” and “the essential components of effective reading curricula,” among other things.
Where does this leave schools and teachers?
The debate does highlight some general agreed-upon principles.
“Spelling helps,” said Devin Kearns, a professor of early literacy at North Carolina State University at Raleigh, and the chair of the International Dyslexia Association’s scientific advisory board.
Studies show that integrating practice with spelling and encoding—translating spoken sounds into written letters—improves reading and writing for students with disabilities. These activities are a core component of linguistic phonics.
“I think there are real benefits to be derived from activities like invented spelling, spelling instruction, word construction from sounds, and so on—in any phonics program. Speech-to-print activities appear to increase learning,” wrote Tim Shanahan, an emeritus professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and an author on McGraw Hill’s Wonders curriculum, in a blog post on linguistic phonics.
But without a definitive research answer, “claims of that superiority should be cautious and hedged,” he wrote in an email.
Students could also benefit from teachers layering in more encoding and spelling into the programs they’re already using, he wrote in the post.
Questions about how much instruction kids need on the structure of words—the rules that are central to an Orton-Gillingham approach—are murkier.
Focusing on common patterns, as linguistic phonics does, makes teaching “really efficient, and it makes it more focused on student practice,” said Kearns. Still, he said, students with dyslexia and other reading difficulties usually struggle with the generalizing of patterns, which could slow their reading progress in a linguistic phonics approach.
Even so, the system’s simplicity could “ultimately create results that are just as good as the rule version,” he said.
“Maybe, maybe not,” he added. “There’s not data on that.”
