Education Week - February 12, 2020 - 23

Phonics
Is Just One
Part Of a
Whole
We must teach the
foundational reading
skills completely
Collage: SireAnko/Getty and
Vanessa Solis/Education Week

By Heidi Anne E. Mesmer
MESMER is a professor in literacy in the school of education
at Virginia Tech. Her latest book is Letter Lessons and First
Words: Phonics Foundations That Work (Heinemann, 2019).

ere's the good news: Most educators
have gotten the message that K-5
students need to learn the foundational reading skills outlined in the
common core and other college
and career-ready standards: print
concepts, phonological awareness,
phonics and word recognition, and fluency. The bad news?
The foundational skills instruction that students receive is too
often incomplete and ineffective. Districts are "checking" the
foundational skills box but are using practices of questionable
quality and not addressing all of the foundational skills. It's
not enough to just do foundational skills. They must be taught
completely-yet efficiently-with quality materials to build
capacity for comprehending lengthy, advanced literary, and
informational texts.
Literacy is livelihood. If you can't read words, many aspects of
your life will be impacted. Take this question on a cosmetology
licensing exam: "Which of the following refers to the deepest
layer of epidermis-stratum spinosum, stratum granulosum,
stratum germinativum, stratum lucidum?" It requires
understanding complex Latin vocabulary as well as decoding
multisyllabic words.
That's why foundational reading skills must work together-
it is the integration of the skills that provide an entry point
to complex literacy. As students increase in their abilities
to automatically recognize words, they also increase in the
amounts of mental energy they can devote to understanding
complex ideas and vocabulary. No one can concentrate on
Newton's laws, plot development, or electrical circuits if they
are struggling to decode every fifth word.
A common misconception is that "foundational skills"
only means "phonics." The truth is that the four areas are
an integrated gestalt, greater than the sum of their parts.
Often emphasized in K-2, phonics is teaching students the
correspondence between visual symbols (graphemes made of
letters) and speech sounds (phonemes). But to access phonics,
children must have certain insights, or the system will make no
sense.
Students often learn letters but don't know, for example,
that print runs left-to-right or that words are groups of letters

separated by space-insights called print concepts. Similarly,
students learn letter names but do not understand the
alphabetic principle-that symbols represent speech sounds
("cat" equals three symbols, three sounds). Kindergarteners
learn the alphabetic principle and print concepts when their
teachers model reading and writing. We are putting the cart
before the horse if we drill letter/sounds without also teaching
print concepts and the alphabetic principle.
Some educators think phonological awareness is synonymous
with phonics, but this is another misconception. In fact, when
I recently observed foundational skills lessons in more than
10 K-2 classrooms, I only saw one phonological awareness
lesson. Phonological awareness is the ability to orally identify
and manipulate the sound units of language such as words,
syllables, and speech. Research tells us that if students do not
consciously attend to and distinguish these units, they are
unlikely to benefit from phonics. Similarly, instruction in print
concepts primes students to learn phonics. Can you imagine
going to a job where you learn all about the different types of
buttons, threads, fabrics, and zippers but no one tells you that
you are manufacturing jeans? Yet that's often how reading
instruction can feel for children.
Phonics and word recognition skills include analyzing
multisyllabic words into morphemes, the smallest meaning
units (e.g., pre-treat-ing). Many schools stop instruction after
students can decode single syllable words, but multisyllabic
words outnumber single syllable words 4-to-1 in advanced
texts. To complete foundational skills instruction, we need
systematic instruction in morphology through the 5th grade and
beyond.
The last foundational skill, fluency, closes the deal. It is
the ability to read connected text automatically (with little
conscious effort), accurately, and with proper expression
using volume, phrasing, smoothness, and pace to convey
the meaning. Addressed in 1st through 5th grade, fluency
enhances-and is affected by-meaning making. Without
requisite fluency, students will have little cognitive energy to
devote to complex ideas.
It can be exhausting to hear about research-based this
and research-based that-but there are well-established
findings regarding foundational skills instruction. Simply
put: Foundational skills cannot be separated. Print concepts
and phonological awareness support phonics instruction,
morphological instruction extends students' word recognition,
and fluency automatizes word reading. Here are truths
educators should focus on:
1. Systematic instruction is effective. It is driven by a

scope and sequence, a guide specifying the content to be taught
and its order. Let one scope and sequence drive instruction. I
often see districts using two to three foundational skills plans,
an overkill approach that is bound to confuse students.
2. Students need to learn all the foundational skills. I
see approaches that heavily emphasize just one or two skills,
such as phonics, but completely miss others. These skills are
complementary and need to be consistently taught, in response
to development, through grade 5.
3. Instructional language should be explicit. Teachers
should clearly and directly tell students the grapheme/
phoneme relationships, word roots, or syllable patterns being
taught. I recently tested more than 150 kindergarteners who
knew about 90 percent of their letter/sounds but could not
decode simple words. Most young children must be taught
explicitly how to decode words.
4. Solid foundational skills instruction is assessmentguided and responsive. All students do not need the same
thing. In a 2014 study, one researcher found that entering
kindergarteners ranged from knowing zero letter names to
knowing all of them. Teachers must use simple diagnostic
assessments that inform cumulative review and instruction and
often must use small group instruction.
5. Instructional materials must be aligned to the
standards. A recent analysis from the RAND Corporation
found that only 7 percent of elementary school teachers used
at least one high-quality English/language arts material.
Thoroughly vet materials to ensure full coverage of all
foundational skills. EdReports.org provides a rigorously
developed tool that give leaders a road map. (I recently sat on
an advisory panel for the organization's inaugural review of
Foundational Skills curriculum.) With focused planning even
small or underresourced districts can find research-based,
standards-aligned materials.
Moreover, all four foundational skills deserve our full
attention as they provide an entry point to complex literacy.
Decisionmakers must fully understand what the foundational
skills are and apply the robust research that informs best
practices. These foundational reading skills are truly
foundational-an essential ingredient but not the full recipe.
Comprehension and writing instruction, which requires a
wide range of instructional targets such as vocabulary and
world knowledge, the focus of the other standards, round out
the complete recipe. Millions of students are looking to their
schools to provide them with the essential knowledge they need
to succeed in college and career-it is imperative that we get
these skills right. n

EDUCATION WEEK | February 12, 2020 | www.edweek.org/go/opinion | 23

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Education Week - February 12, 2020

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