Alphabetics for Early Readers

Alphabetics for Early Readers refers to the foundational skills necessary for young children to become proficient readers. This involves recognizing and using the letters of the alphabet, which paves the way for the development of critical reading abilities like phonemic awareness, decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. Historically, various methods of reading instruction have emerged, with contemporary educators increasingly favoring approaches that integrate alphabetics with phonics, emphasizing the importance of sound-letter relationships.

Research shows that effective reading instruction is heavily influenced by developmental understanding, instructional methods, and parental involvement. Children typically learn the alphabet through familiarity with the letters in their names and exposure to uppercase letters before lowercase ones. Various teaching strategies, including engaging with simple texts and interactive activities, are employed to enhance reading readiness. Despite the evolution of educational practices, a consensus remains elusive regarding the optimal way to teach reading, highlighting the complexity of literacy development and its critical role in academic and future employment success.

Published in: 2021

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Subject Terms

Alphabetics for Early Readers

Abstract

Alphabetics, or learning to recognize and use the letters of the alphabet, is the foundation for reading readiness. Until an early reader masters alphabetics, he or she will be unable to develop essential reading skills such as phonemic awareness, decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. Because reading comprehension is the key to knowledge in all other fields, inadequate reading skills may hamper a child's ability to function in an academic setting and may remain with him/her into adulthood, ultimately affecting the ability to get and retain a job that provides a basic standard of living.

Overview

The history of reading in the United States has been marked by distinct stages, and each has been characterized by what experts in the field believe are the best methods for a given time period. Even in the twenty-first century, most experts agree that there is no single one way to teach an early reader to read. However, most educators are inclined to favor particular methods of instruction. State departments of education and individual school districts also play a major role in choosing the most effective method of teaching early readers. In general, contemporary educators opt for methods that use alphabetics to encourage the development of phonemic awareness while promoting fluency, vocabulary development, and reading comprehension.

In 1826, the practice of sight reading in which students simply memorized words became popular in most English-speaking nations of the world. In 1930, the popular Dick and Jane series for young readers was introduced in the United States. Between the mid-1930s and the mid-1960s, some schools alternately used the Alice and Jerry series. Both series contained simple and often repetitive words that were easy to recognize and understand and placed characters in relatable settings. In 1955, Rudolph Flesch published his landmark book, Why Johnny Can't Read, which advocated a switch to learning to read though the teaching of phonics. Other experts have refined and expanded on that original concept, and alphabetics has become the building block for developing reading skills. However, two camps emerged, with some educators rejecting alphabetics and phonics and insisting that sight reading had worked for decades and arguing that tried-and-true methods should not be shelved simply because newer methods had been introduced.

By the 1990s, most experts had joined the camp that preferred phonics learning over sight reading and had begun focusing on the teaching of phonemic awareness, which involves teaching early readers to recognize the individual sounds used in words. By the early twenty-first century, many educators had also begun stressing the necessity of developing reading fluency among early readers. Advocates of teaching reading through alphabetics suggest that early readers should be able to recognize that any language is composed of distinct sounds and combinations of sounds. In practice, this means early readers are taught to learn the letters of the alphabet by both sight and sound and learn to write letters and words that enable them to convey that understanding to others. Some contemporary reading experts are now maintaining that both alphabetics and sight reading skills need to be developed to produce the most skillful readers. These advocates believe that the two skills are complementary, working together to help students learn, and both skills are considered useful in helping students remember what they have learned.

Applications

Some researchers have used theories adopted from developmental psychology to suggest that alphabetics is the most important element in teaching young readers since mastery of the alphabet is the foundation for all other reading skills. For example, Margo Bowman and Rebecca Treiman (2004) have identified three stages in which the alphabet is mastered. In the first pre-alphabetic stage, non-readers may begin to pick up visual cues from both objects and texts. They may be able to recognize and sound "M" from the golden M of MacDonald's arches or the "R" from the distinctive "R" in the Toys R Us sign. In the second alphabetic stage, a child begins to associate graphemes with particular phonemes, initially starting with distinctive letters or letter sounds and progressing to other letters and their sounds. Once early readers have mastered these stages, he/she is ready to recognize recurring letter patterns.

The best books for use with beginning readers are usually those with simple illustrations and minimum text, giving the child the opportunity to identify each letter and say its related sound(s) out loud. Research on early reading indicates that early readers learn best from readers that use words that sound out letter names (like team). Upper case letters of the alphabet are generally much easier than lower case letters for early readers because they see uppercase letters all around them on street signs and store names. The easiest letter for children between the ages of three and seven to grasp is the letter O. The most difficult letters are considered to be D, G, K, L, V, and Y. Despite the popularity of the alphabet song learned by most children, experts generally agree that children do not learn to recognize letters of the alphabet in that order. A number of studies have found that the first letter most children recognize is the first letter of their own name. This is assumed to be a result of the fact that parents are likely to say a child's name frequently and talk to the child about his/her name. The child may also see his/her name written frequently, and it may be the first word that a child learns to write.

Because parental involvement in education is a key factor in academic success, most teachers of kindergarteners and first graders consider their students' parents as essential partners in the process of learning to read. Parents are encouraged to help by working with their young children by engaging in such activities as reading with them, reading to them, working with flashcards, placing magnetized letters on refrigerators, practicing writing the child name and other words, sounding out words, and providing ample opportunities for reading and expanding knowledge. For older and more mature children, parents are encouraged to promote reading skills through activities such as drawing, solving puzzles, expanding vocabulary, and observing and discussing their environments. Both parents and teachers may also use activities such as playing with toys and age-appropriate computer games, singing, and watching television together to promote reading readiness skills.

In 1984, Brian MacWhinney and Catherine Snow established the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) to allow researchers to share information on language development. The system has proved a major resource of data for research on early readers. Knowledge such as the commonality of words used among specific age groups has proved to be a particularly useful tool. Researchers at the Chicago Language Division Project, for example, used CHILDES data to examine links between ethnicity and income in language development, engaging in a longitudinal study that captured on video tape conversational interactions with children from fourteen to sixty-four months at four-month intervals. Those observations provide major insight into the ways in which children learn to grasp alphabetics. Children were most familiar with the first three letters of the alphabet and with the first letters of their own names. Children who had learned to recognize the first letter of their names were generally able to identify those letters wherever they appeared, giving them an advantage even when researchers controlled for other variables. As expected, children from higher-income families demonstrated the most familiarity with letters of the alphabet.

Over time, researchers have learned that reading is a multi-stage process that begins with developing the ability to decode as children learn to combine graphemes into a blend of phonemes. Secondly, early readers learn to pronounce and blend these units into syllables and words. Words that cannot be learned in this way are learned by sight, and early readers are regularly required to master a list of sight words. In kindergarten, for instance, a child might be required to learn sight words such as "are," "have," "like," "look," and "play." In the first grade, a list might include "after," "talk," "won't," "what," "when," and "where." Early readers must also learn to draw analogies between new words and words they already know by sight. Examples of words that help early readers learn other words are "all," "am," "down," "more," and "thing." Finally, early readers learn to use context cues to help them recognize words with which they may be unfamiliar. Such a cue might be an illustration of an action described in a sentence.

Contemporary research suggests that school is a more productive environment for learning to read than the home. Researchers also find that skills develop more satisfactorily when students work in small groups rather than in the classroom as a whole. A 2014 study (Huang, Tortorelli, & Invernizzi) of 1,197 entry-level students revealed that Virginia kindergarten students were able to recognize the names of eighteen lowercase letters. They found that four-year-old students were most familiar with uppercase A, B, X, and O than any other letters of the alphabet and that the first sounds children were likely to learn were zz as in "buzz" and the m sound of "mommy." The most difficult sounds for young children were lowercase y, w, c, i, o, and e. Echoing the work of other researchers, they found that children were eleven times more likely to know the first letter of their name than any other letter of the alphabet.

As a result of such findings, many researchers suggest that teachers should teach the alphabet in the way that students naturally learn the letters. In practice, most teachers of early readers either introduce letters in alphabetical order using programs such as Open Court Reading Pre-K or Waterford Early Reading programs, or they teach the most common sounds first as with the Frontline Phonics and Jolly Phonics programs. In many classes, teachers highlight a single letter over the course of a week. Other methods, such as comparing and contrasting sounds or teaching according to difficulty levels are also used.

Discourse

In 1981, the National Commission on Excellence in Education was established to examine the state of education in the United States. The result of that study was A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, in which it was reported that some 13 percent of seventeen year olds were considered to be functionally illiterate. Among minorities, the number of functional illiterates was an overwhelming 40 percent. In 1994, Congress passed the Improving America's Schools Act, which reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary School Act, which had originally been passed in 1965 as a civil rights measure. In addition to seeking to improve educational opportunities for minorities, the bill had prohibited schools that refused to integrate after the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, from receiving federal educational funds. In the 1994 bill, Congress endorsed the concept of using improved methods of assessment to ensure that educational progress would continue to be measured.

In 1997, Congress established the National Reading Panel (NRP) to serve as a clearing house for information on reading instruction methods. In cooperation with the Child Development and Behavior Branch of the National Institute for Child Health and Development (NICHD), fourteen experts composed of school administrators, classroom teachers, and scientists examined 10,000 studies on reading methods conducted before 1966 and more than 100,000 studies conducted after 1966 in order to identify the most effective reading instruction methods. NRP also held public hearings so that the input of classroom teachers, parents, and communities could be considered. As a means of improving the quality of reading skills in American schools, NRP was also asked to make suggestions for educational improvements and recommend needed reforms. NRP issued their final report on April 13, 2000, suggesting that the focus of reading instruction in the United States should be on phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, guided oral reading, vocabulary development, and reading comprehension.

In 2002, the work of NRP and the efforts of Dr. G. Reid Lyon of the NICHD were used to form the basis of George W. Bush's educational policy, No Child Left Behind. Despite such educational reforms, standardized testing in 2007 revealed that one-third of all fourth-grade students were still reading below grade level. In 2015, Barack Obama asked Congress to pass the Every Student Succeeds Act, which replaced the No Child Left Behind policy of the Bush administration.

Since the late 1980s, educators and researchers have been debating the single "best" way to teach basics to early readers, but there is still no one accepted method. Experts generally agree that the ability to read begins with identifying letters of the alphabet, being able to write those letters, being able to recognize letters of the alphabet when they appear in print, and recognizing sounds associated with particular letters and groups of letters (phonics). The concept of reading readiness suggests that early readers should already have mastered such basic skills.

The ongoing discrepancy between non-minority and minority reading skills is explained to a large extent by the link between minority status and poverty, and both variables are associated with poor academic performance. Programs such as the federally-funded Head Start, which was established in 1965 as part of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, were established to promote reading readiness skills among the economically less advantaged. Early readers without that preparation may have problems identifying the more difficult aspects of reading, such as letters that make different sounds in different words, homophones (such as "to," "too," and "two"), and letter combinations that produce different sounds in different words (as in "though" and "bough"). Most experts have identified the most essential reading skills as decoding, reading text, fluency, and reading comprehension. Early readers who fail to develop these skills may have problems that stay with them for their entire lives, setting the stage for future academic failure.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, states began adopting the English Language Arts Common Core Standards of education that were applicable to literacy in fields such as history, social science, science, and technical fields. By the sixth grade, students were expected to be literate enough to read and comprehend texts used in each of those fields. As a result, some school districts advocated a shift away from alphabetics as the foundation of reading for early readers. Newer research has, however, resulted in a reiterated emphasis on the importance of alphabetics in preparing early readers for future academic success.

Terms & Concepts

Decoding: The process by which letters, words, and symbols are translated into a reader's spoken language. Teachers and parents take on the responsibility for ensuring that early readers decode a word rather than memorize it.

Every Student Succeeds Act: An Obama-era act in which states are held accountable for measuring academic progress in areas such as state testing proficiency, English-language proficiency, academic progress in a selected area such as state testing, and a selected indicator of continued progress or improvement in the school environment.

Fluency: The ability to decode words so that they can be immediately grasped without having to stumble over them or stop to sound out each word as it is read.

Graphemes: Letters or combinations of letters that make specific sounds or phonemes. Examples include the /aw/ sound spelled as aw in "saw," au in "pause," a in call, and ough in "bought." The commonality of graphemes is one of the factors that make English a difficult language for early readers and non-native readers.

Head Start: Federal program created to prepare pre-school children from low-income families for school to mitigate some of the negative impacts of poverty. The program has since been expanded to cover low-income families with children from birth to five years, providing assistance in health and family well-being as well as education.

No Child Left Behind: Education policy enacted during the administration of George W. Bush that shifted the lion's share of educational responsibility back to the states and sought to mitigate the well-documented educational disparities between whites and Asians and those of other races.

Phonemes: Units of language associated with particular sounds. Examples include /b/ as used in banana and bubbles or /c/ as used in car or duck.

War on Poverty: A series of initiatives instituted by Lyndon Johnson in 1964 designed to immediately alleviate and eventually eradicate poverty through programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Job Corps, and the original Elementary and Secondary School Act.

Bibliography

Bowman, M., & Treiman, R. (2004). Stepping stones to reading. Theory into Practice, 43(4), 295-303. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=15316427&site=ehost-live

Dougherty-Stahl, K. A., & McKenna, M. (2006). Reading research at work: Foundations of effective practice. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Ehri, L. C., Nunes, S. R., Willows, D. M., Schuster, B. V., Yaghoub-Zadeh, Z., & Shanahan, T. (2001). Phonemic awareness instruction helps children learn to read: Evidence from the National Reading Panel's meta-analysis. Reading Research Quarterly, 36(3), 250–287. Retrieved September 13, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=507782125&site=ehost-live

Huang, F. L, Tortorelli, L. S., & Invernizzi, M. A. (2014). Investigation of factors associated with letter-sound knowledge of kindergarten entry. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 29(2), 182–192. Retrieved September 13, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=95019487&site=ehost-live

Hurford, D. D., Lasater, K. A., McMahon, A. B., Kiesling, N. E., Carter, M. L., & Hurford, T. E. (2013). The results of a scripted linguistic phonics reading curriculum implemented by kindergarten teachers. Journal of Educational Research and Policy Studies, 13(3), 33–50. Retrieved September 13, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=93451842&site=ehost-live

Joshi, R. M., & Aaron, P. G. (2016). Handbook of orthography and literacy. New York, NY: Routledge.

Murray, B. (2012). Making sight words: Teaching word recognition from phoneme awareness to fluency: How to help children read words effortlessly without memorization. Ronkonkoma, NY: Linus Publications.

Nowak, S., & Evans, M. (2013). Parents' goals for and perceptions of alphabet books. Reading and Writing, 26(8), 1265–1287. Retrieved September 13, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=89657297&site=ehost-live

Solari, E., Denton, C. A., & Haring, C. (2017). How to reach first-grade struggling readers: An integrated instructional approach. Teaching Exceptional Children, 49(3), 149–159. Retrieved September 13, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=122323010&site=ehost-live

Treiman, R., Schmidt, J., Decker, K., Robins, S., Levine, S. C., Demir, Ö. E., & Demir, Ö. E. (2015). Parents talk about letters with their young children. Child Development, 86(5), 1406–1418. Retrieved September 13, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=109364543&site=ehost-live

Alphabetics for Early Readers

On this Page

Subject Terms

Alphabetics for Early Readers

Abstract

Overview

Applications

Discourse

Terms & Concepts

Bibliography

Suggested Reading