Digraphs & Blends
About this Thread:
This research-based phonics thread will help you introduce digraphs and blends to your students over a 9-week period. If you have English learners or bidialectal students in your classroom, this thread includes tips for supporting their fluency with these phonics elements.
Materials:
sound cards
white boards/markers/erasers or dictation paper for students
Length of Instruction: 20 minutes a day
Duration of Instruction: 9-weeks
Frequency of Instruction: 4 - 5 days a week
Group size recommendation: Whole class, small-group, individual instruction
This research-based instructional thread focuses on digraphs and consonant blends. Below are some key research findings to help teachers deliver this instruction to all students in the classroom including struggling readers, bi-dialectal students, and English learners:
Explicit Instruction of Digraphs and Consonant Blends
A large body of research suggests that direct and explicit instruction in blending and segmenting phonemes impacts student word-level reading fluency and accuracy. Stephanie Al Otaiba and others explain in their article entitled Teaching Phonemic Awareness and Word Reading Skills: Focusing on Explicit and Systematic Approaches explains, "Although there are many different skills within phonemic awareness that require explicit teaching, blending and segmenting at the phoneme level are the most important skills as they lead directly to decoding (e.g., sounding out simple words) and encoding (e.g., spelling simple words)" (2019).
Culturally & Linguistically Relevant Instruction Research
For English learners and bidialectal students blending can be tricky. hese students may be unused to the linguistic features of digraphs and blends that are in GAE, but not present in their native language or home dialect.
In fact, Dr. Julie Washington and Dr. Mark Seidenberg point out in their article in "American Educator" entitled, Teaching Reading to African American Children: When Home and School Language Differ that"the subtle transformations between the cultural and the general varieties of a single language may be even more difficult for young children to detect and resolve than the more obvious differences between two languages" (2021).
When supporting your English learners and bidialectal students, keep in mind that dialects are syntactically complex language varieties. Drs. Washington and Seidenberg write, "the social stigma surrounding varieties spoken by linguistic minorities can be compounded by race and class, but they are as linguistically valid as other dialects and highly valued by the people who speak them" (Washington & Seidenberg, 2021).
Research shows that in order to fully support English learners and bidialectal students, educators should point out linguistic differences in speech and help students make connections to print. For example, in one dialectal variety, African American English (AAE), the final "t" is commonly left off of the final blend, "st". In fact, in Dr. Washington's research, she and colleagues found that "half the words [in AAE] had different pronunciations than in the GAE condition because of final consonant deletions". Research showed that explicit instruction in the phonemic mismatches between a spoken dialect significantly improves students ability to identify blends accurately and fluently when reading suggesting that this strategy should be included in reading and writing instruction for English learners and bidialectal students.
References:
Al Otaiba, S., Allor, J. H., Baker, K., Conner, C., Stewart, J., & Mellado de la Cruz, V. M. (2019). Teaching phonemic awareness and word reading skills: Focusing on explicit and systematic approaches. Perspectives on Language and Literacy, 45, 11-16.
Archer, A., & Hughes, C. A., (2020) Explicit instruction [video clip]. Retrieved from https:// explicitinstruction.org/video-elementary/elementary-video-11/
Cárdenas-Hagan, E. (2020). Literacy Foundations for English Learners: A Comprehensive Guide to Evidence-Based Instruction. Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes Publishing, Co.
Cárdenas-Hagan, E. (2018). Cross language connections for English learners’ literacy development. Intervention in School and Clinic, 54(1) 14–21.
Chiappe, P., Siegel, L., & Wade-Woolley, L. (2002). Linguistic diversity and the development of reading skills: A longitudinal study. Scientific Studies of Reading, 6(4) 369–400.
Brown, M. et al., “Impact of Dialect Use on a Basic Component of Learning to Read,” Frontiers in Psychology 6, no. 196 (2015)
Carnine, D. W., Silbert, J., Kameenui, E. J., & Tarver, S. (1997). Direct Instruction Reading (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill/Prentice-Hall.
Siegel, J. Second Dialect Acquisition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Shollenbarger, S. et al., “How African American English-Speaking First Graders Segment and Rhyme Words and Nonwords with Final Consonant Clusters,” Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 48, no. 4 (2017): 273–85.
Tatum, A. Teaching Reading to Black Adolescent Males: Closing the Achievement Gap (Portland, ME: Stenhouse, 2005); and A. Tatum, “Breaking Down Barriers That Disenfranchise African American Adolescent Readers in Low-Level Tracks,” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 44, no. 1 (2000): 52–64.
Pasquarella, A., Chen, X., Gottardo, A., & Geva, E. (2014). Cross language transfer of word reading accuracy and word reading fluency in Spanish-English and Chinese-English bilinguals: Script universal and script specific processes. Journal of Educational Psychology, 107, 96–110.
Ramirez, G. (2017). Morphological awareness and second language learners. Perspectives on Language and Literacy, 43, 35–41.
Washington, J. A., & Seidenberg, M. S. (2021). Teaching Reading to African American Children When Home and School Language Differ. American Educator, (Summer).
