Choosing the Right Dyslexia Intervention (Part 1): Structured Literacy and Sounds-First vs Letters-First

This Days With Dyslexia podcast launches a five-part series on choosing effective dyslexia intervention without wasting time or money, based on the host’s experience as a parent and as a speech language pathologist who specializes in literacy. The episode explains that research supports structured literacy: explicit, systematic, multimodal instruction that integrates sounds, letters/letter patterns, and meaning (triple word form theory). It warns against meaning-first approaches (whole language/balanced literacy) that emphasize guessing from context and are described as ineffective and potentially harmful, referencing the Sold a Story podcast. The host then contrasts two structured literacy types—letters-first (print-to-speech, e.g., Orton-Gillingham/Wilson/Barton) versus sounds-first (speech-to-print)—and begins Part 1: scope and sequence, arguing sounds-first aligns with natural oral language learning, teaches by spoken sounds, and separates consonant clusters into distinct sounds to reduce confusion and spelling errors.

00:00 Series Kickoff

00:22 Why This Matters

02:52 Avoid Wasting Time

05:01 Structured Literacy Basics

07:08 What Not To Use

09:58 Letters vs Sounds

12:08 Part One Scope Sequence

13:18 Letters First Pitfalls

18:19 Sounds First Logic

22:11 Wrap Up Next Steps

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, welcome to the Days with Dyslexia podcast. We are going to be starting a five-part series, and today is going to be the introduction and then part one. So make sure that you listen back so that you get all of the information, but it is a five-part series. You'll want to check out all five of those podcasts. We are going to be talking about how to choose the right intervention for your child with dyslexia without wasting time or money. Now, I have been through this process both as a parent and really as a parent first, and then as a professional. If you know my story, you know that I have a daughter with dyslexia. And even as a speech pathologist, when I started this process with her, I didn't know anything about dyslexia because I didn't learn anything about it in school. In the same way that teachers are not taught about dyslexia in school for the most part. I'm sure there are some unicorns out there that were, but for the most part, in school, teachers don't learn about dyslexia. They don't learn how to support kids with dyslexia. Speech pathologists don't learn about dyslexia or how to support kids with dyslexia. So I think that's a big part of why I feel drawn to put this information out for parents because it was so frustrating for me as a professional to know that I did not have the information to help my daughter. And the problem was is no one else did either. I thought that I could trust the school system to help me work through the process, but no, it was a struggle the whole way. It was a struggle to get a good evaluation, it was a struggle to get a strong IEP, it was a struggle to make sure that each year the new special ed teacher that had been assigned to my daughter's case got adequate training. You know, it wasn't all bad. There were some good parts along the way, but it's the hard parts that we often remember. I remember when we first got the dyslexia diagnosis, and I was so overwhelmed with what should we do? What do we need to use? What therapies, what strategies, what do we need to do to help her so that she can learn to read and spell? And at one point I counted and there were like 10 different types of therapies, interventions recommended to us. I now know that not all of those were good recommendations, not all of those things were helpful recommendations, but they all came from people who were well-intentioned and who believed what they were telling us was true. But knowing what I know now, I'm glad that we didn't spend time doing some of those things that would not have been helpful for her. So this series is about walking you through the type of intervention that is going to be most beneficial for a child with dyslexia. You can certainly use the services offered by Days with Dyslexia. We have multiple products available to help families and kids. But if you choose to go a different route, this is going to give you a lot of information to help know what you should be asking and what to look for so that you get to that right path and that right intervention faster without wasting a lot of time. Because unfortunately, what happens sometimes is parents spend a lot of time and a lot of money figuring out what doesn't work, and then they've missed the early intervention window that is so critical when kids start learning because their rate of acquisition slows pretty quickly, and kids can make really, really, really fast, strong gains in kindergarten, first grade, and then that slows down in second grade, slows down more in third grade. And unfortunately, the child that doesn't start getting high quality intervention until third grade doesn't make as good and as quick progress as the child who started getting intervention in kindergarten or first grade. So again, we're talking about how to choose the right intervention for your child with dyslexia without wasting your time or money. We're gonna be going through what works and what doesn't, and hopefully give you some information so that you can start seeing your child's reading and spelling skills improve and their confidence improve in as little as six weeks. There's also going to be a guide that goes along with this that includes all five parts of the series. I'm not sure when that's going to be available on the website. Hopefully, really soon. I just have to get the connections in place. So if you're listening to this and you try to find it and it's not there right away, come back and keep checking. But they will have the same title as this series. So here's the good thing. What we know, what research has told us, what is very clear among the people that do work with kids with dyslexia is that kids with dyslexia do best with structured literacy. Structured literacy is the explicit systematic teaching of sounds, letters, and meaning. We need the integration of sounds, letters, and meaning to develop those literacy skills that have been well established by what's called triple word form theory. What is triple word form theory? That is all of the research that tells us that children need to connect sounds to letters and letter patterns and then to meaning. If a child has sounds and letters connected but no meaning, well, it's essentially a nonsense word. That's why a lot of times in assessments, nonsense words are used because we want to see what they understand about sounds and letters. Okay, and so they take meaning out of the equation. But sounds are what they hear in the word and what they say when they speak a word. The letters and letter patterns are how they spell a word or the letters they write to spell the sounds, and then meaning has to do with what the word means. And then also sometimes words can have different meaning parts. So, for example, if you add an S on the end of a word, it can make it mean more than one. It can also make it mean an action in progress. Think he kicks the ball, right? That's the action that the child is doing. He got three kicks to get it in the goal. That is a plural version of the word kick. So a word can have a different number of meaning parts. When a child can integrate all three of those things, sounds, letters, and meaning, and they are taught to integrate those three things in a way that is explicit, systematic, and multimodal. That's what we mean by structured literacy. All right, so let's talk about different approaches that are currently being used to teach literacy skills. First, I'm going to talk about an approach that is not structured literacy. This is an approach that was popular for many, many years. It is no longer supported by research. Unfortunately, it does still continue to be used because it's very well marketed. But in in recent years, most people have come to know that this first approach I'm going to talk about is not a good way to teach kids. And there is another really good podcast that goes through why this particular way of teaching is not good. So I'm not going to delve into that, but that is called the Sold a Story Podcast. It's also a short series, but Tiffany Hogan does a really, really, really good job of going through all that information and talking about why we transition from this first type of approach to the structured literacy approach that is currently supported. So that is a meaning-first approach. So remember we talked about the importance of sounds, letters, and meaning. So an approach that focuses pretty heavily on meaning is also called whole language or balanced literacy. So these methods emphasize context and essentially guessing words from pictures or sentence structure. There is very little attention given to the sounds or letters beyond maybe what's in the first letter and the first sound in the word, but research has shown that this type of instruction is not only ineffective, but it can actually cause children to be further behind. So they looked at kids in very early elementary school that got this type of meaning first approach. And then they looked at those kids when they were in third grade, and the kids that got intervention using this meaning first approach, so the whole language, the balanced literacy approach, were actually further behind other peers that had been struggling that got no intervention at all. So those are not structured literacy approaches and run far, far, far away if somebody wants to use that to help your child with dyslexia. If you have a school that is using a whole language or a balanced literacy approach that focuses on the meaning first, I would start talking at board meetings and sending a lot of emails because you want to avoid that at all costs. So then we're going to talk about a letters first approach. This is also called a print to speech structured literacy approach because it's based on the printed system. But it is a letters first approach. Orton Gillingham is a letters first approach. Orton Gillingham programs, things like Wilson and Barton, they all base the concepts that they teach. They start with letters and spelling rules and then they connect it back to sound. So it's a letters first approach. I think that there is something much better to use than the letters first approach. And that's what we're going to talk about on here. We're going to spend our time talking about a letters first approach versus a sounds first approach. So a sounds first approach is my preference. It's also called a speech to print type of instruction. Sometimes you'll hear it called linguistic phonetics. Because saying speech to print and print to speech is a tongue twister for me and I think difficult to listen to because there's so many similarities. That's why I'm going to talk about a letters first versus a sounds first approach. Both of those are structured literacy. So what we're going to spend our time going through in this five-part series are the five big differences between a letters first approach and a sounds first approach. Because sometimes what you'll hear people say is, oh, well, we work on spelling, so that's a speech to print. Not really. That might be a speech to print activity, but it's not a speech to print intervention method. And that's what we're talking about, the difference in a sounds first versus a letters first intervention method. So in going through this, my goal is to help you understand why a sounds first approach is faster and less frustrating for kids with dyslexia. Help identify where your child is on their journey so that then you can choose the right type of support to see steady progress with growing confidence at home. So now we're going to move into part one of these big one of five for these big differences between a letters first and a sounds first type of instruction, because not all structured literacy is the same. A sounds first approach to instruction builds on how your child's brain naturally learns. Kids are biologically wired for oral language, right? If you sit a kid in a room and there's lots of other people talking, that child, with rare exception, is going to learn to talk and to speak and to communicate. If you put a child in a room full of books, they are not going to learn to read simply because they're surrounded with books. Reading and spelling must be taught. So the first big difference we're going to talk about is the scope and sequence. Okay. The scope and sequence of a letters first approach introduces concepts organized by their written letters. So it will sound something like, well, we start with C and then we introduce O and then we introduce A, D, and then Q U. And so you can see how their ordering, their scope and sequence is ordered by letters, not sounds. I want to pause here by saying that I have been through training for both types of instruction, right? So this information is coming straight from manuals that I have for both the letters first training that I received and the sounds first training that I have received. Now, I no longer use the letters first or in Gillingham training that I received because I think that there's something better out there. But all that to say is that this information is coming straight from those manuals, and I am sharing it with you so that we can do a direct comparison. But again, the letters first approach introduces those concepts by written letters, okay? They also treat consonant clusters as a single blend unit rather than separate sounds. What does that mean? Well, consonant sounds are anything that's not a vowel. Most people are more familiar with what the vowel sounds are, right? We have long vowel sounds, a e-i-o. We have short vowel sounds, a, e, i, uh, uh. There are some other vowel sounds, um, but a consonant sound is anything that's not a vowel. That's the easiest way to explain it. The official difference between consonant and vowel sounds is when we produce a vowel sound, our mouth and throat stay open. When we produce a consonant sound, you have to close your articulatory system somewhere to make the sound. So that means somewhere between your vocal folds and your lips, you have to close the parts of your mouth and throat that we use to produce the sound somewhere to make the sound. So if you want to try this, it's just say the long vowel A sound. A, okay, your mouth and your throat are very open. But in order to make, for example, the mmm sound, your lips have to close. If you make the d sound, your tongue closes to the top of your mouth right behind your top teeth to make the g sound, the back of your tongue closes to the top of your mouth to make that sound. Do you see the difference? So our mouth has to close somewhere to make the sound. It doesn't have to stay closed, but it has to close in order to make the sound. And for vowels, your mouth and thread are going to stay open. So that's the difference between vowels and consonants. But the treating consonant clusters as a single blend. So what's a consonant cluster? A consonant cluster is when a word has two or more consonant sounds next to each other. So for example, the word frog has a f then a rr sound. Those are both consonant sounds right next to each other. Okay. And in Orton Gillingham programs, teaches this as a unit. Now, in their little system marking, they will do one big underline and then they do two tiny underlines, but kids learn this as a unit. They're not really separated by sounds. This makes it more difficult for kids with dyslexia because they have diff difficulty perceiving sounds, right? That is a hallmarker of dyslexia, is they have difficulty processing sound awareness. And so if their brain doesn't recognize that there are two distinct sounds in the word frog, they are not going to write two different letters to spell the sounds. And so this is why a lot of times kids with dyslexia, when they have words with constant clusters at the beginning, they're only writing probably a letter for that very first sound. So frog might look like F-O-G. If their brain doesn't recognize that that r in there is a unique sound, then they're not going to write a letter for it. They think that they've already written the letter for fr because they wrote an F. A sounds first approach introduces concepts by their spoken sounds. So the whole their scope and sequence is organized by spoken sounds, not by the written letters. They start with different consonant sounds and then short vowel sounds, long vowel sounds, etc. But the scope and sequence is organized by sounds. Okay. And the particular scope and sequence that I use starts with consonant sounds where you hear the sound most commonly associated with that letter when you say the letter name. And what do I mean by that? Well, when I say the letter B, I have to use a b sound at the beginning of that letter name. Okay. When I say the letter D, I use a d sound to say the letter name. Okay. The letter sound connections where the child has to produce the most commonly associated sound to say the letter name are the easiest connections for kids to learn. And this is also why it is important for kids to learn letter names, because learning letter names starts giving them this early sound awareness. And so those letter sound connections rarely have to be taught. Think about some other letter names. So when we say the letter name R, we start with a vowel sound ah. When we say the letter name L, we start with a vowel sound L. Those sound letter connections can be more difficult because they're less transparent when we're teaching letter names. This is an example of why it's important to teach kids the difference between letters and sounds. So a lot of times when a child is writing the word car, they'll start sounding it out, right? Hopefully, hopefully they didn't just memorize letter strings, but they'll start sounding out and they'll go k, and hopefully they know that's a C. So they were going k, they write a C, and then they go, R, oh, R, I know that letter, and they just write the letter R. Because they heard the name of the letter. If we're teaching them the difference between sounds and letters, what they need to recognize there is that there is a vowel sound in that word, aw, short vowel ah. There's three sounds in that word k, aw, err. So making sure that each sound that they can identify and perceive each sound is gonna help make sure that they write at least one letter for every sound. You'll often see that happen too when a word has, for example, the word men. So when I say men, the last two sounds sound like the letter name N. Mm. N. And so if that child hasn't learned that they need to identify that there are distinct sounds in there and that there has to be a vowel sound in each syllable, they're gonna sound it out and go mmm and write an M. And then they're gonna go N. Mmm N. And they're just gonna write a letter N. They might leave out a vowel. But if we teach them that, oh, you know what, every syllable has a vowel sound, what's the vowel sound in there? We have to pull apart each tiny sound so that they can now write a letter for the short vowel. Eh sound in the word m and so that is the difference between the scope and sequence for sounds first and letters first approach. So a sounds first approach and for the scope and sequence makes more sense because children are already processing sounds naturally in their oral language. Organizing their instruction around these sounds just feels more logical to them. It reduces confusion. It allows a lot of kids to skip those very early lessons because they already understand that when they hear a b sound, they need to write a B because they hear b when they say the letter name B. That is it for the first part. Make sure you come back and listen to part two in this series.