Children learn to read by connecting letters and sounds to meaning

By Shane Templeton

Childhood is filled with memorable "firsts." Like your toddler’s first unsteady step or your kindergartner’s first ride on a "big" bicycle, the first time you hear your child sound out a word correctly (d-o-g, dog!) is a magical moment. But before that happens, your child needs to know a lot of information about connecting letters and sounds to meaning—information that adults often take for granted.

Parents who want to help their children learn to read, or develop as readers, must understand exactly what it is that children need to know. With that information, parents can participate in the learning process in a powerful way.

Many children think that they can "read" when they’ve memorized a favorite storybook and can recite it word for word. This is an excellent confidence-building activity that demonstrates the understanding of a connection between the words on a page and the words we say out loud. Taken a step further, a child can point to each word as they "read," following from left to right, also showing an awareness of the basic concepts of print. This is the first sign that your child has begun to understand the visual conventions of written English.

But to truly grasp what it means to read, your child must first understand that letters (and letter combinations such as "sh" and "th") connect to sounds. This orderly relationship between graphemes (units of print) and phonemes (units of sound) is known as the alphabetic principle. Teaching your child the alphabetic principle begins exactly where you expect—with the alphabet.

Singing the "ABCs" helps children learn the names of each letter in the alphabet. Looking at the letters as they sing this song is an important next step for your child. Recognizing the letters on the page and connecting them to the letters in the song builds a skill that the experts call orthographic familiarity. Once your child has built this connection, she will be ready for more formal reading instruction at school.

You can help your child connect sounds and letters first and foremost by reading aloud. No other activity supports the early development of reading skills as effectively as reading aloud together and talking about what is read. Like anything else, reading requires practice. It gets easier as words become more familiar. The more you read to your child, the easier it will be for her to learn to read, because she will understand that the words and pictures on the page have meaning.

When your child starts "sounding out" words, she reaches into her memory to check for things like pronunciation and meaning. Reading aloud helps improve that memory by building vocabulary. Parents can help children learn to sound out by explicitly identifying the sound represented by an individual letter—for example, "The letter m makes the sound mmm." As this skill gets stronger, ask, "What letter makes the mmm sound?"

Once a child can connect a few letters and sounds like these, she can begin sounding out simple words like "Mom" or "Dad." Keep in mind that it can be difficult to demonstrate how sounds are blended, since many consonant sounds must be distorted (by adding a vowel sound) in order to pronounce them separately. Help your child through these words by sounding them out together.

Each time you help your child sound out words, try to model the process for her. First clearly pronounce each independent letter, pointing to each one in sequence. Then blend these sounds together slowly, allowing individual sounds to remain somewhat distinct. Glide your finger below the individual letters on the page as you pronounce them. Finally, pronounce the word as if it were in a sentence, sweeping your finger across the word once more.

When you practice this exercise with your child, you are teaching her a powerful strategy for identifying words, known as sequential decoding. Decoding is a foundational reading skill, meaning it must be in place for other skills to develop. Sounding words out letter by letter (sequential decoding) leads to the automatic recognition of letter combinations (parts of words) and, eventually, to instant sight recognition of whole words.

Recognizing common patterns of spelling and sounds can help your child develop a sight vocabulary. When you are reading aloud, point out common letter patterns, such as "–at" and "-ike," and letter combinations such as "th" and "sh." Once these letter patterns and combinations become familiar, children can begin to "chunk" the letters as a single unit when they read. Choose books with predictable, repeated word patterns or rhymes that encourage children to identify these "chunks."

As adults, we often think of fluency as something to achieve in a second or even third language. In fact, fluency, the ability to decode accurately, rapidly and efficiently, is based on a child’s ability to connect sounds and letters to meaning and put them together to form words and sentences. Understanding this connection lays the foundation for learning to read and understand what we read in any language.

Reading aloud and sounding out are every parent’s "first" steps toward laying a healthy foundation for your beginning reader. When you help your child connect letters and sounds to meaning, you empower her to discover the purpose (and pleasure!) of reading.

Shane Templeton is Foundation Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Nevada, Reno. Templeton’s research has focused on developmental word knowledge in elementary, middle and high school students.Templeton is Senior Author of "Houghton Mifflin Spelling and Vocabulary" and author of "Houghton Mifflin English" and "Houghton Mifflin Reading: The Nation’s Choice."

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