Choosing Dyslexia Interventions, Part 2: Teaching Syllables—Letters-First vs Sounds-First

In part two of a five-part Days With Dyslexia series on choosing the right dyslexia intervention, the host explains why syllable instruction matters and contrasts letters-first versus sounds-first structured literacy approaches. A syllable is described as the “beat” in a word, and each syllable has its own vowel sound; research supports teaching syllable awareness but not memorizing multiple syllable types. 

Letters-first (e.g., Orton-Gillingham) divides syllables by letter patterns, teaches six syllable types, and requires students to mark vowels/consonants and apply rules, which strains working memory and becomes less accurate with three- and four-syllable words, affecting fluency. 

Sounds-first focuses mainly on open and closed syllables, divides words by natural speech beats, and uses listening and mouth/throat cues, making it easier to apply to longer words. A PDF covering all five episodes will be available by episode five, and the next episode will cover the job of letters.

00:00 Series Recap and Setup

01:54 What Syllables Are

02:34 Research on Syllable Awareness

03:16 Letters First Syllable Rules

05:25 Why Letters First Breaks Down

06:53 Sounds First Syllable Strategy

08:54 Open vs Closed by Sound

10:47 Why Sounds First Works Better

12:38 Wrap Up and Next Episode

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey there and welcome back to the Days with Dyslexia podcast. We are on part two of this five-part series for how to choose the right intervention for your child with dyslexia without wasting time or money. So on part one, we went through the introduction and then part one of what type of instruction you and questions you can ask when looking for a program or an interventionist to work with your child so that you get the best type of instruction. You're gonna get the best bang for your buck, and your child is going to be able to take advantage of early success. Last time we talked about the different types of approaches to teaching reading. We have a meaning approach or a meaning first approach, and those are ones you want to steer way clear of, right? Most schools have stopped using this, or I should say a lot of schools have moved away from this because of all the current research that we have saying that we should not be using balanced literacy and whole language approaches to teach reading and spelling. So a meaning first approach is out there, but we're not going to use that. The other two are both types of structured literacy. Okay, so we have a letters first approach and a sounds first approach. And so in part one, we talked about how a letters first approach and a sounds first approach are how their scope and sequences vary and why it makes more sense to use a sounds first scope and sequence because we're basing what we're teaching in the order of which we teach it on the child's natural oral language development. So today we're going to be talking about syllables. Okay, so what is a syllable? Well, these are the beats in a word, and these are the beats that you would probably clap along to if you were, you know, umbrella, right? They're the chunks that make up the flow to our speech. Okay, so what's important for kids to know about syllables, it has to do with the vowel sounds, all right, because each syllable is going to have its own vowel sound. Okay, and these two approaches differ in how they teach syllables pretty significantly. Before I talk about how they differ, let's talk about what we know in the research. Research consistently agrees that it's important for kids to understand syllableness in words. What we do not find anywhere in the research is that it's important for kids to learn a certain number of syllable types to help to break up a word. And so that's going to be important to remember in when we talk about the difference in these two letters first and sounds first approaches. So what we know is that the research says yes, kids have to understand syllableness and words. Now let's get in and talk about the difference. Let's start with a letters first approach to teaching syllables. People who use these letters first approaches, remember this is going to be like an Orton Gillingham type approach to teaching. They will divide syllables based on the letters that they see in a word. For example, if the word is tennis, right, they would divide the syllable between the ends. So they would have one N in the first syllable and the second N in the second syllable. And they do this because they're saying that the N when they divide it and there's two consonants, that's what is telling the reader that it should be a short vowel, the e sound. Same thing with hammer. When they look at the word hammer and they're trying to break up the word, they would divide it between the M's. Same thing with sniffle, it's got two Fs, they would divide it between the F's. And so they're dividing the syllables and determining the syllable type based on the letters in the word. So in those words, tennis, hammer, sniffle, they would consider that first syllable a closed syllable because it has the consonant letter following the vowel. They teach the letters first programs, teach six to seven syllable types, and the kids just have to memorize the rules to these, which makes it really hard if they struggle with their working memory, which a lot of kids with dyslexia do, because they have to memorize all these rules. Kids look at a word on the paper, they have to mark their vowel letters, then they have to draw a bridge, then they have to mark their conson letters, then they divide it up, then they figure out what syllable type it is. This is before they ever even try to read the word. And there's just a lot that goes into it. And so learning these different syllable types, you know, if they're learning seven types and they have to apply rules, it can be difficult. The other thing that's problematic about using the letters to divide a syllable and come up with which syllable type it is, is that these rules become highly inaccurate once the words have more than two syllables. Okay. They're pretty accurate with one and two syllable words. Okay. However, once we get into three and four syllable words, there are so many words where this just doesn't work. Which is a a lot of which is one of the reasons why kids who start to learn to read using Orton Gillingham, they can start reading one and two syllable words, but they really struggle moving beyond these one and two syllable words, and it affects their reading fluency. I mean, remember the process that I told you that the kids have to go to to divide the word. Mark your vowel, draw your bridge, mark your consonant, figure out the syllable type, and that's gonna tell you how to try to read this word. That's a lot of work. And imagine doing that for every word in a sentence or for the majority of words in a sentence that aren't considered sight words, right? And we're gonna talk about those later. But that makes learning to read and reading fluency really difficult. It makes moving into three and four syllable words pretty cumbersome. So now let's talk about a sounds first approach. When we're talking about syllables in a sounds first approach, we are going to mostly talk about, we just talk about open and closed syllables. That's all. And the reason we talk about those open and closed syllables is because what we hear in the word helps us spell the word. Again, we're starting with sounds. What we hear in the word helps us to spell the word. We also would using a sounds first approach, we'll divide the syllables up the way that we naturally say them. When we say the word tennis, right, we the first syllable sounds like te. The second syllable sounds likeness. Tennis. Tennis. In my clinic, we use drums, right, to represent the syllables or the beats in the word. And then we used our tiny sound cards to represent each tiny sound in the word, that first syllable only has two sounds. Okay. The second syllable has three tiny sounds. Tennis. And so if the child has to figure out how many syllables are in the word, because that's going to help them spell the word, because every syllable needs a vowel, uh, has a vowel sound, which means every syllable that sound has to be represented by a letter in the word. That's why we talk about syllableness, okay? But it's way less cumbersome for a child to talk about syllables like this, right? How many beats do you hear? Tennis, and they try to clap it out, or they can hum it. Right? That would be tennis, hmm-mm. Hammer sounds the same because it's got the same number of beats and the same stress. Okay, same thing with that third word, sniffle, but that's looking at the beats. We would also determine using a sounds first approach if a syllable is considered closed because it ends in a consonant sound. It is considered open if it ends in a vowel letter. That is because, as I mentioned in part one, when we say vowel sounds, your mouth and throat are open. So they can figure out if it's an open or closed syllable by paying attention to what their mouth and throat are doing. So for the word hammer, we say ham, my mouth and throat are open to say that short vowel ah sound. That's an open syllable. In sniffle, right? Sni, my mouth is open to say that short vowel eh sound. It doesn't have to close to make that sound. That's very different than how a letters first approach. A letters first approach would consider those words to have close syllables because they broke up the consonant group. It it's also difficult for kids to figure out the job of the letters in there because those conson letters, the NN, the M M and the FF, and the words I've given as an example, they're working together. Their job is to work together to spell one sound, but they're breaking it up. Almost as if there's two. You know, we don't say ten niss or ham mr or sniff full that n m and f or one sound in that word. So how we break up syllables and how we determine if a syllable is open or closed is very, very different when you're using a letters first versus a sounds first approach. So in that sounds first approach, children learn to recognize open and closed syllables by listening to sounds, not by memorizing these letters-based rules. And so you can see how by just having to pay attention to what they're doing naturally is going to make it much easier to determine is this an open or closed syllable? Instead of having to mark vowels, mark consonants, draw a bridge, figure out which of the seven syllable types it is. That's a lot. Okay, there it's significantly easier on a child's working memory to use a sounds first approach when talking about syllables. Sound using the sounds first approach makes more sense when talking about syllables because it's a natural division based on oral language, it's less mentally taxing and it's easier to apply when reading really long words. Because you can apply it beyond words with just one and two syllables, right? This is gonna work regardless of how many syllables a word has. What sound are you using at the end of the syllable? Easy. So kids can move into multisyllabic reading with much less frustration than with a letters first approach because what they've taught and been and been using for these one and two syllable words doesn't work for them. Three and four and more syllable words. So they get frustrated again because they're doing what they've been taught to do, but it's not helping because the accuracy of those rules drops significantly once those words have more than two syllables. That is not the case with a sounds first approach. Okay, so that is what I've got for part two of going through this series on how to choose the right intervention for your child with dyslexia without wasting your time or money. Remember that there is going to be a PDF download that includes the information from all five sessions. I'm not sure if I'm gonna have that available as soon as the first podcast episode drops, but certainly by the time that the fifth one drops, it will be available. So you can just go and download it, and then you'll have all this information organized for you. So make sure you listen to all five episodes and come back for the next one. What you are going to be talking about the job of letters. I alluded to that a little bit today, but we're going to be talking about the job of letters and how that is different for a letters first versus a sounds first approach to reading and spelling.