October 6

So many muches! Grammar errors and what they tell us about language development

 

When kids first begin talking, typically at around 12 months of age, they of course stick to the basics— very short phrases that convey basic wants, needs, and social routines.  Mama.  More.  Up.  Hi!  All-done.  Milk.  Doggy.  Bye-bye.  Oops!  These are mostly one-word phrases and are not pronounced perfectly.  Then, typically when children are between 1 ½ and 2 years old, they take an important step in language learning: making word combinations.  More milk.  Mama car.  Up Daddy.  No doggy.  The intended meaning of early phrases might not be very clear out of context (Mama car could mean “look, there’s mommy’s car” or “here mommy, take my toy car”), but a child at this stage of language development shows us that he is beginning to understand that words are units of meaning that can be combined in novel ways to creating novel meanings, as in Mama car.  Big car.  Car up.  Once we know a good number of words and understand our language’s grammar, we can combine words to generate phrases that explain anything we want.  That is, language is generative.  The possibilities are literally endless.

Sometime around 2 years old, children usually begin using grammatical morphemes, or the little parts of words that make our phrases grammatically complete, and can express nuances like tense and number.  One of the earliest in English is the present progressive -ing, as in crying, eating, going.  Regular plurals (cups) and regular past tense (climbed) are also acquired pretty early on.  As children learn new grammatical forms, they are not just memorizing whole words.  Rather, they are learning the grammatical rules of whatever language (or languages) they are acquiring.  They learn how we can take these little word parts and apply them to other words we know, to create new shades of meaning.  For example, boat means something different than boatswalking means something different than walked.

The morphemes for plural and past tense are a little more complicated than they may appear at first glance.  There are actually three different pronunciations for each of these grammatical markers, depending on the sound at the end of the root word.

Root word ends in: Plural “-s” morpheme sounds like:
/p, t, k, f, th (voiceless)/ /s/ as in cups, hats, snacks, cliffs, baths
/b, d, g, m, n, ng, v, th (voiced), l, r/
and any vowel sound
/z/ as in tubs, beds, bags, drums, hens, songs, doves, lathes, balls, carscows, bees, pies
/s, z, sh, ch, j/ /ez/ as in buses, sizes, bushes, watches, badges
Root word ends in: Past tense “-ed” morpheme sounds like:
/p, k, f, th (voiceless), s, sh, ch/ /t/ as in hopped, walked, coughed, birthed, flossed, washed, watched
/b, g, m, n, ng, v, th (voiced), z, j/
and any vowel sound
/d/ as in rubbed, hugged, hummed, banned, arrived, bathed, buzzed, wagedbowed, peed, tied
/t, d/ /ed/ as in batted, glided

These context-dependent variations on morphemes are called allomorphs.  So using the above examples, /s, z, ez/ are allomorphs of the regular plural morpheme -s, and /t, d, ed/ are allomorphs of the regular past tense morpheme -ed.  Despite the different sounds, children are typically able to learn and apply grammar rules just by talking with adults around them, without even being aware that these variations exist.  Our knowledge of spoken grammar is mostly subconscious: you don’t even know that you know it.  In fact, I would wager that most adults who have not studied linguistics or early literacy instruction are not aware of allomorphs, and also probably can’t easily explain other grammar basics, such as when exactly we use he versus him and that the suffix -ly is used to change an adjective to an adverb.

So how do we know that little kids are actually applying their knowledge of grammatical rules, rather than just learning new grammatical words as whole units, parroting words they have heard mom or dad say?  After all, most 2-year-olds won’t say, “Today I learned that I have to put a ssszzz, or ez at the end of the word to indicate that there is more than one thing.”  How do we know that they know that?

For starters, children will begin to apply a rule more and more consistently, using it across multiple contexts, which suggests that the rule is acquired.  Furthermore, we hear evidence of grammar knowledge in the errors and inventions that are so common in the speech of young children.  When children make errors such as mouses instead of mice, they have not likely heard an adult say the word mouses, meaning they just came up with it on their own.  This is an example of overgeneralization of a grammatical morpheme- using it where it doesn’t actually belong.  While it’s technically not correct to say mouses, it’s a normal stage of language development and shows that the child can generate words using the plural marker.

I recently polled an online parenting forum for examples of such inventions of words.  The post generated a lot of interest, and responses were both adorable and brilliant.  Let’s take a look at some, and see what they tell us about those children’s understanding of spoken grammar.

Quite a few kids demonstrated understanding of present progressing -ing.  As mentioned, it is one of the earlier emerging grammatical morphemes, and so there’s a lot of opportunity for kids to get creative.  There was a girl who said someone doing yoga in the park was namasteing.  A boy was wapping things with his wapping stick.  Another child used puzzling to mean playing with puzzles.  In the autumn, the leaves are fall-downing.  You go grossing at the grocery store.  A truck is back-upping.  And finally, I AM carefulling!!

There was a child who stuck two allomorphs at the end of words to mark plurals: carses, cookieses, toeses.  (Moses supposes his toeses are roses?)  Another child mistook the word much for a noun, and showed her ability to use the plural /ez/ allomorph: so many muches.

soooo many muches!!

One child said at bedtime Can you cush and coze me? meaning that she wanted her mom to make her cushy and cozy.  This represents an understanding of the suffix -y in adjectives.  She knows that -y often means having the quality of the root word (which could be either nouns as in sandy or verbs as in runny), and so invented root word verbs cush and coze.

This next one is particularly genius, in a couple of ways.  A child apparently said that when the family car got new tires, it was retired.  This shows an understanding of the prefix re-, meaning to do something again (to again put tires on a car).  Then, adding -ed in this case changes the word from a noun to an adjective, called a participial adjective (as in I am bored).  Also, we know that retired is a word that actually does exist, although it means something completely different.  Likely this child heard that word at one point, and used his smarts about morphology to infer a possible meaning.  Genius!

Here’s a neat one: a child used willn’t instead of won’t, apparently having analyzed all the other n’t contractions and determining that they should closely resemble the words from which they are derived (as in do-don’t, can-can’t, should-shouldn’t).  So of course the opposite of will is willn’t.  I’d like to see how many grown-ups have thought of that.  Not me, to be honest, and I think about a lot of stuff like this.  Thanks, kiddo, for pointing me towards this explanation.

Another little girl apparently used peace-ify in the place of pacify, I’m guessing in the context of talking about a baby’s pacifier bringing about a moment of peace.  That parent basically has a mini etymologist on her hands, because this kid probably already knows that both peace and pacify come from the Latin word pax, and the suffix -ify changes a word to a verb that means to become the root word.

Similar to the cush and coze example, this one involves the child removing a part of a word.  Hammers are what you use the ham things.  The -er suffix changes a word from an action to a thing that does the action.  Workers work.  Players play.  Hammers ham.  Of course!

I want so badly for this next one to be correct: the child who thought that the opposite of nocturnal was turnal.  It’s brilliant, because a) the kid already knows the word nocturnal b) it still shows awareness that words can break into parts, and c) noc sounds like not, so it’s a pretty reasonable guess!  Alas, in this case, noct comes from the Latin nox for night.  (The opposite of nocturnal is diurnal, which I’m not sure I’ve ever heard in my life.)

Threeth.  Not a word, but the kid who said it gets that the suffix -th is used to express the ordinal numbers such as fourth, twentieth, and billionth (but not first, second, third).

Some kids were able to show understanding of morphemes for negation: dis-, un-, and de-.   One wanted to be disbored (bored of being bored?), another who wanted his friend to be unsick so they could playand another who said he would never delove his mother (I’m not crying, you’re crying!!).

These next ones involve little phrases.  English has many two-word verbs, such as shut down, figure out, fit in, that are often idiomatic phrases (and notoriously difficult for English second-language speakers).  A few parents shared examples that demonstrate that the child knows that grammatically there is such thing as a two-word verb, but hasn’t quite gotten it right: pick me downbuckle me outand tuck me up (ok, that last one is my own son).

Next, some examples from bilingual or multilingual households, where kids sometimes mix vocabulary and grammar from more than one language in the same phrase. For example, a little girl who said lumes to mean that something lit up.  This is a sweet mash-up of French luminer and English -s third person singular. She also used unlâche to tell someone let go of something.  This shows that she likely knows the un- English morpheme for negation, but lâche in French already means let go.

Another bilingual child was mad because her brother retruired her castle.  The child combined re-, détruir (destroy)and the English past tense -ed.  Seems like someone wrecked that castle a few times over.

And finally, because no story about preschoolers in complete without reference to poop and/or boogers: microttes.  This one is a portmanteau, or a word coined by blending two words, such as breakfast + lunch = brunch.   A child from a trilingual French-Spanish-English house apparently regularly invented her own words and one day came up with microttes as a combination of microbes (germs) and crottes (boogers/little poops).  Great! And gross, so let’s go wash our hands, shall we?

Are you curious about the age at which children typically acquire grammatical morphemes?  Although we have a pretty clear picture of the sequence of development of early grammar, the age of acquisition varies a lot from child to child.  This chart can give a general idea, though a word of caution: age estimates are based on observations of a rather small number of children.

Grammatical morpheme Examples Common age of acquisition
Present progressive ing

Prepositions on, in

Regular plural

Eating.

On the table.  In the car.

Dogs, cats

27-30 months
Irregular past tense

Possessive ‘s

Uncontractible copula

It fell.

Mommy’s coffee

Is it here? It is!

31-34 months
Articles a, the

Regular past tense

3rd person singular -s

A flower.  The car.

I licked my ice cream.

He likes pizza.

35-40 months
3rd person of have, do

Forms of the verb be

He has a dog.  She does yoga.

He is climbing. I’m not sliding, but she isAre you hungry?

41-46 months+
From: Bowen, C. (1998). Brown’s Stages of Syntactic and Morphological Development. Retrieved from http://www.speech-language-therapy.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=33 on September 24, 2020.

This post has been about children’s development of spoken grammar.  Some children need extra help with this, but, as previously mentioned, children learn spoken language mostly by simply talking with others.  Little kids don’t need to worry about understanding how grammar works in spoken language, because they unconsciously learn the rules.  However, we know that learning written language is not the same process.  In order to efficiently acquire literacy skills, school-aged children benefit from explicit teaching of many aspects grammar.  For example, many young children will write stopped as stopt and hugged as hugd.  When we teach kids that the letters ed at the end of a word represent the regular past tense, we are teaching morphological awareness. This helps developing readers decode, understand, and spell complex words such as impossible, cooperation, mismanagement, unfathomable. But morphological awareness is a huge topic for another day. Willn’t you stay tuned??

October 6

The cot-caught merger: a dialectal difference and early literacy instruction

Pronunciations can sometimes change so much that sounds that were once distinctly different are now pronounced exactly the same.  This is known as a merger. A well-known and wide-spread example of this is the low-back merger, a.k.a. the cot-caught merger, where the vowels in the words cot and caught have evolved so that they are no longer two distinct sounds.  Depending on where you live, you might be thinking one of two things right now: Of course “cot” and “caught” sound exactly the same! or There’s no way that “cot” and “caught” sound the same!  Pretty much all Canadians have the cot-caught merger, while the US population is split between merged and unmerged.  As a result, although the different spellings remain, the vowel sounds in the words cot/caught, nod/gnawed, stock/stalk are identical for some English speakers and not for others.  If you have the cot-caught merger and have a hard time understanding how other people can possibly produce and perceive these as two different sounds, you may like to check out this video.

This is all very interesting, but what’s the application to literacy instruction?  Well, this is an issue that comes up surprisingly often in online forums for literacy and language enthusiasts, including a few times recently in a wonderful community on Facebook called Science of Reading- What I Should Have Learned in College, a group dedicated to sharing knowledge about evidence-based practice in literacy.  People in this group know that a very efficient way to teach kids to read and spell involves having them pay attention to the sounds in their spoken words, and then linking these sounds to the letters of our alphabet.  This approach is aptly called speech to print.

There are many published materials that help teachers apply the speech to print approach.  A slight issue is that some of them may not discuss dialectal differences like the cot-caught merger.  So, what happens when one of the millions of people who has the cot-caught merger comes across these materials?  Occasionally, some confusion.  Huh, have I been pronouncing these words wrong my whole life?  Am I actually making a barely perceptible distinction between these two sounds?  Should I help my students make/hear a difference between these sounds?  Thankfully, the answer is no, no, and no.  If you don’t have the distinction in your dialect, you simply don’t have it, because they are the same sound.

If you are one of the millions of speakers with the low-back merger, you don’t need to toss out great instructional materials that differentiate between these sounds.  We just need to understand the phenomenon, so that we can treat the o in fox and the aw in saw as two different graphemic representations of the same sound, without trying to force a distinction that just isn’t there.  If you speak a dialect with the cot-caught merger, the o in fox and the aw in saw are as much the same sound as the ee and ea in tree and treat, which at one time were also distinct sounds that have completely merged for most dialects of English, as of around 300 years ago.

One precision.  The graphemes for the and aw/au sounds do not present exactly the same scenario as ee vs ea.  The graphemes ee and ea are both vowel teams: two vowel letters representing one vowel sound, as in meet and meat.  In contrast, is a short vowel, while aw/au function like vowel teams.  Diving a little deeper, a careful look at English orthography reveals that a number of spelling rules depend on whether a syllable contains a short vowel or vowel team.  For example, we use -ck at the end of a short word following a short vowel, as in rock, while the word hawk requires only -k after the vowel team aw. So, even if they sound the same for you, it probably makes sense to clearly differentiate short from vowel teams au/aw because it helps us make sense of spelling patterns. As a Canadian, if I were making a sound wall to help children understand the sounds of English, I would put and aw/au stuck right together, side-by-side, and I would of course pronounce them exactly the same.

From Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers by Louisa Moats. The cot and caught vowels are differentiated in this chart (fox and saw), though the book discusses dialectal differences. Other spellings for o/aw/au are also shown.

Just to complicate things a little further, not all speakers who have distinct vowels for cot and caught divide these two sounds the same way.  The Atlas of North American English (Labov et al, 2006) explains that in certain contexts, mainly before the voiceless continuant sounds /f, s, th/ (as in off, loss, cloth) and before the /g/ sound (as in dog, frog), words with the short o are actually spoken with a vowel closer to the sound heard in saw/caught.  Hence, hot-dog actually has two different vowel sounds for some speakers, because of the influence of the consonant sounds at the end of each syllable.  Isn’t phonology interesting??

So, what do you do if a curious young mind notices that the o and aw/au are represented by different pictures or gestures, or appear as different on the vowel sound chart, and yet have the same sounds?  Rather than give the all-too-common response “English is complicated!  That’s just how it is!”, you could see it as a neat opportunity to introduce dialect differences and language change: “Some people pronounce these differently, but for us they are the same.”

Does this seem a little complicated? Like very many aspects of literacy and language, the underlying ideas are pretty complex, but that doesn’t mean that it needs to be for children. Doctors have oodles of deep knowledge that informs their sometimes simple advice to patients. Similarly, when educators understand the complexities of our language- both the oral and the written systems- they are in a much better position to teach it to young learners, using simple explanations adapted to the children’s needs and capabilities.

I love this topic, because it is a great example of how there is so much knowledge to be shared when people from a variety of backgrounds- speech pathology, education, linguistics, psychology- come together to look at practices in literacy. Does this sort of knowledge float your boat, bake your cake, rock your socks?  You will no doubt love Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers by Louisa Moats, a comprehensive resource about the oral language underpinnings of literacy development.

References:

Labov, William & Ash, Sharon & Boberg, Charles. (2006). The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change. 10.1515/9783110206838.

Moats, L. C. (2020). Speech to print: Language essentials for teachers, 3rd ed. Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes Pub.

Language is always evolving, with new words (bingeable, superspreader), new expressions (I can’t even), and even shifting syntax (Have you any? vs Do you have any?) and grammar (the fading subjunctive: If I were…).  But the main topic of interest today is shifts in pronunciation.  The way we pronounce words changes slowly over time, often specific to a geographical area or demographic, resulting in a patchwork of different accents among speakers of the same language.

Pronunciations can sometimes change so much that sounds that were once distinctly different are now pronounced exactly the same.  This is known as a merger. A well-known and wide-spread example of this is the low-back merger, a.k.a. the cot-caught merger, where the vowels in the words cot and caught have evolved so that they are no longer two distinct sounds.  Depending on where you live, you might be thinking one of two things right now: Of course “cot” and “caught” sound exactly the same! or There’s no way that “cot” and “caught” sound the same!  Pretty much all Canadians have the cot-caught merger, while the US population is split between merged and unmerged.  As a result, although the different spellings remain, the vowel sounds in the words cot/caught, nod/gnawed, stock/stalk are identical for some English speakers and not for others.  If you have the cot-caught merger and have a hard time understanding how other people can possibly produce and perceive these as two different sounds, you may like to check out this video.

This is all very interesting, but what’s the application to literacy instruction?  Well, this is an issue that comes up surprisingly often in online forums for literacy and language enthusiasts, including a few times recently in a wonderful community on Facebook called Science of Reading- What I Should Have Learned in College, a group dedicated to sharing knowledge about evidence-based practice in literacy.  People in this group know that a very efficient way to teach kids to read and spell involves having them pay attention to the sounds in their spoken words, and then linking these sounds to the letters of our alphabet.  This approach is aptly called speech to print.

There are many published materials that help teachers apply the speech to print approach.  A slight issue is that some of them may not discuss dialectal differences like the cot-caught merger.  So, what happens when one of the millions of people who has the cot-caught merger comes across these materials?  Occasionally, some confusion.  Huh, have I been pronouncing these words wrong my whole life?  Am I actually making a barely perceptible distinction between these two sounds?  Should I help my students make/hear a difference between these sounds?  Thankfully, the answer is no, no, and no.  If you don’t have the distinction in your dialect, you simply don’t have it, because they are the same sound.

If you are one of the millions of speakers with the low-back merger, you don’t need to toss out great instructional materials that differentiate between these sounds.  We just need to understand the phenomenon, so that we can treat the o in fox and the aw in saw as two different graphemic representations of the same sound, without trying to force a distinction that just isn’t there.  If you speak a dialect with the cot-caught merger, the o in fox and the aw in saw are as much the same sound as the ee and ea in tree and treat, which at one time were also distinct sounds that have completely merged for most dialects of English, as of around 300 years ago.

One precision.  The graphemes for the and aw/au sounds do not present exactly the same scenario as ee vs ea.  The graphemes ee and ea are both vowel teams: two vowel letters representing one vowel sound, as in meet and meat.  In contrast, is a short vowel, while aw/au function like vowel teams.  Diving a little deeper, a careful look at English orthography reveals that a number of spelling rules depend on whether a syllable contains a short vowel or vowel team.  For example, we use -ck at the end of a short word following a short vowel, as in rock, while the word hawk requires only -k after the vowel team aw. So, even if they sound the same for you, it probably makes sense to clearly differentiate short from vowel teams au/aw because it helps us make sense of spelling patterns. As a Canadian, if I were making a sound wall to help children understand the sounds of English, I would put and aw/au stuck right together, side-by-side, and I would of course pronounce them exactly the same.

From Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers by Louisa Moats. The cot and caught vowels are differentiated in this chart (fox and saw), though the book discusses dialectal differences. Other spellings for o/aw/au are also shown.

Just to complicate things a little further, not all speakers who have distinct vowels for cot and caught divide these two sounds the same way.  The Atlas of North American English (Labov et al, 2006) explains that in certain contexts, mainly before the voiceless continuant sounds /f, s, th/ (as in off, loss, cloth) and before the /g/ sound (as in dog, frog), words with the short o are actually spoken with a vowel closer to the sound heard in saw/caught.  Hence, hot-dog actually has two different vowel sounds for some speakers, because of the influence of the consonant sounds at the end of each syllable.  Isn’t phonology interesting??

So, what do you do if a curious young mind notices that the o and aw/au are represented by different pictures or gestures, or appear as different on the vowel sound chart, and yet have the same sounds?  Rather than give the all-too-common response “English is complicated!  That’s just how it is!”, you could see it as a neat opportunity to introduce dialect differences and language change: “Some people pronounce these differently, but for us they are the same.”

Does this seem a little complicated? Like very many aspects of literacy and language, the underlying ideas are pretty complex, but that doesn’t mean that it needs to be for children. Doctors have oodles of deep knowledge that informs their sometimes simple advice to patients. Similarly, when educators understand the complexities of our language- both the oral and the written systems- they are in a much better position to teach it to young learners, using simple explanations adapted to the children’s needs and capabilities.

I love this topic, because it is a great example of how there is so much knowledge to be shared when people from a variety of backgrounds- speech pathology, education, linguistics, psychology- come together to look at practices in literacy. Does this sort of knowledge float your boat, bake your cake, rock your socks?  You will no doubt love Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers by Louisa Moats, a comprehensive resource about the oral language underpinnings of literacy development.

References:

Labov, William & Ash, Sharon & Boberg, Charles. (2006). The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change. 10.1515/9783110206838.

Moats, L. C. (2020). Speech to print: Language essentials for teachers, 3rd ed. Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes Pub.

April 19

Pile of Words: Drive Deeper Engagement with Vocabulary at the Beginning of a Unit, Text, or Project

Each new unit, text, or project presents learners with vocabulary words that may be new and unfamiliar. So, how do we get students to think more deeply about vocabulary? How can we make learning new vocabulary more engaging and meaningful? Matthew Perini, Harvey Silver, and Jay McTighe propose a simple yet powerful strategy called “pile of words.”

I love the pile of words strategy because it positions the students at the center of learning. Instead of the teacher simply pre-teaching vocabulary or presenting a word bank or word wall of key terms, the pile of words strategy challenges students to engage in conversation, work collaboratively, and think critically about vocabulary.

Here is how it works!

Step 1: Think about the unit, text, or project you are about to start and create a list of vocabulary words and key terms.

Select a list of vocabulary words and terms central to the unit, text, or project you are about to begin with your students. When I piloted this strategy with my students, who are teacher candidates, I shared the following pile of words from a text we were about to begin.

The size of your pile of words should be large enough to allow for sorting and grouping without overwhelming learners. If you are working with younger learners, you may want to keep your pile of words smaller. A third-grade teacher might present students with six words, whereas a tenth-grade teacher might present 15-20 words. You are the best judge of how many words you think your students can handle for an exercise like this.

Step 2: Group students and give them time to discuss and define.

Give students time to discuss and define the words. Which words do they know? Which do they need to define using online resources? Encourage them to capture their definitions in their notes so they are easy to reference throughout the unit, text, or project.

If you are working with younger learners, you may want to provide resources they can use to look up unfamiliar words or even provide them with definitions after they have had the opportunity to discuss and define the words they do know.

Step 3: Group the words into categories by shared characteristics and label each category.

Once students have defined the words, they should work collaboratively with their group to create categories. Which words share common characteristics? What would you label this category of words to reflect their commonality? Put the words with shared characteristics together in a category and give that category a name or label.

My students worked in breakout rooms using a Jamboard to organize and label their words. I invited them to make as many categories as they needed to sort and group the words.

The categories students create and the labels they assign to each category provide insight into their thinking. This step provides informal data about what they know and what gaps or misconceptions exist.

Step 4: Ask students to make predictions about what they expect to learn based on the pile of words.

After sorting the words into categories and generating a label for each, ask them to take a few minutes to review the words, categories, and labels and make a prediction about what they expect to learn based on this pile of words. What big ideas would they expect to explore studying this unit, reading this text, or working through this project?

Step 5: As students progress through the unit, text, or project, ask them to revisit their predictions.

Prompt students to revisit these predictions as they make progress through this unit, text, or project. Were their predictions accurate? Do they need to be refined based on what students are learning? Are there additional vocabulary words or terms they want to add to their pile of words?

I modeled this strategy with my teacher candidates hoping that they will use it to drive deeper learning. I created the template below to support them in using this strategy online or in a blended learning environment. Although I included six possible groupings in the “group and label” section, it’s important to tell students that they can create as many groups or categories as they need and to feel free to customize the template.

Pile of Words Template

The beauty of this simple strategy is that it can be used at any grade level or in any subject area to drive deeper thinking about vocabulary.

Looking for simple yet powerful strategies designed to drive deeper learning? Check out Jay McTighe and Harvey Silver’s book Teaching for Deeper Learning!

April 15

What’s the Alphabetic Principle?

what is the alphabetic principle
What is the alphabetic principle?
To start, let’s come to a common understanding of what we mean by the alphabetic principle. This is not just singing or saying the ABC’s. It is a term used to describe a very important part of the reading process. We are really talking about 2 interconnected skills.

Alphabet knowledge – the ability to identify letters in different fonts, name the letters, and an awareness of the overall alphabet order and structure. This also includes letter-sound correspondence.
The overarching concept that letters and letter patterns represent the sounds of spoken language and that there is a predictable relationship between those letters and letter sounds.

You may see definitions that separate alphabet knowledge as a prerequisite skill and include decoding as part of the alphabetic principle. In reality, the process is more fluid than can really be described by discrete stages. At any rate, the alphabetic principle is a crucial bridge between phonemic awareness and orthographic mapping.

To better understand how the alphabetic principle fits into reading development, Ehri’s phases of reading development is a useful framework. It illustrates the development of both the understanding of letter-sound relationships and their use for decoding and encoding.

Pre-Alphabetic: The pre-alphabetic phase is where the reader has minimal letter knowledge but recognizes the meaning of other symbols. This is the phase where a child sees the golden arches and reads it as “Cheeseburgers dis way.”

Partial Alphabetic: The partial alphabetic phase is when a student uses some awareness of letter and sound connections, often focusing on first letters. Instruction here focuses on letter sound knowledge and phonemic awareness.

Full Alphabetic: The full alphabetic phase is where the magic happens. Readers learn to attend to each letter in sequence matching sounds to the print. In reading, this happens with sounding out a word. In writing, this is the process of segmenting a word for encoding into graphemes.

Consolidated Alphabetic: The consolidated alphabetic phase, also called the Grapho-morphemic phase is when students use chunks and sequences of letters and morphemes rather than individual letters to decode.

The two middle stages are where the alphabetic principle is being taught and learned. As the teacher moves into alphabetic principle work, phonemic awareness drills remain critical in laying a strong foundation for literacy. However, alphabetic principle learning will help to prepare the student for phonics instruction, reading, and writing.

Now that we understand what we are talking about and why it is important, the natural follow up question is How? What are some activities to help strengthen the alphabetic principle for young children? How can we teach this crucial skill?

Card drills. Identifying the letter, key word, and sound is excellent practice for letter-sound correspondence as is the blending drill from the OG lesson. Another useful type of card drill is using missing letter cards. If you show the student A, B, ___, can they tell what is missing? You can increase the level of difficulty by omitting the middle or initial letter.
Alphabet arc activities. These activities prove surprisingly difficult for many students. It can be very enlightening to have a 2nd or 3rd grade struggling student write the alphabet in order from memory and observe their process. Do they write all the letters in order or do they omit letters or get some out of order? Are they able to write the alphabet straight through or do they need to periodically go back to the beginning to determine what comes next? If they do need to go back, how often? Some students will sing to themselves and misunderstandings that have persisted such as the single “ellemeno” letter can reveal themselves. Through these activities student develop an understanding and awareness of the alphabet as the letters relate to each other, to the alphabet as a whole, and that alphabetical order is a constant. A student that is adept is able to locate letters within the alphabet quickly, pick up from nearly any point and not need to repeat the entire alphabet song to move forward.
Magnetic Letters. The sky is really the limit with magnetic letters. Matching upper case and lower case, sorting letters by shape, features, locating particular letters, building words or using magnetic letters to draw visual attention to a particular part of a word.
Alphabet Puzzles. Alphabet puzzles are a fun way to work on alphabet knowledge and sequencing without feeling so much like work. Chatting while working on the puzzle can reinforce concepts of letter sounds and phonemic awareness.
Multisensory Materials for Tracing and Sky Writing. Letter formation is a key part of learning the alphabetic principle and requires fairly extensive practice, particularly for students that struggle. Using multisensory materials, tracing and combining this with the child saying the letter and sound they are writing or tracing is an important tool for developing proficiency with these letters and sounds. These same supplies are useful for error correction.
Alphabet Charts. The key to using alphabet charts is making sure that the pictures used for the letters represent the most common sounds. X is for xylophone or xray is not an appropriate key word.
Sound Walls. Sound walls are another valuable tool. Having pictures that show mouth shapes for the formation of the letter makes these an even more valuable tool. Using little mirrors allows students to see how their mouth looks while they are making particular sounds.
Letter Name Drills. These do not necessarily need to be timed to be effective, particularly if a student is nervous about timed trials. A sheet with 5 or 6 letters randomly repeated is excellent practice for identifying letters quickly.
Reading or Singing Letters with Prosody. Singing the alphabet song to a different tune or reading letters A!B?C. to encourage appropriate expression is a great way to build flexibility and automaticity with letters. It also lays important groundwork for future work on fluency.
Plenty of Time for Meaningful Review, Practice & Mastery. All too often, struggling readers lack the opportunity to reach true mastery with the alphabetic principle. If we keep in mind a goal of overlearning, we will be well on our well to ensuring a high degree of competency.
When helping a student that struggles with literacy, it is important to make sure that this bridge between phonemic awareness and orthographic mapping is in good working order. Struggling students may have surprising misunderstandings and gaps in their knowledge. They may not be able to use alphabetic knowledge with ease and efficiency. Make sure the bridge has no loose boards or gaps that might trip up the reader. True proficiency and mastery can be surprisingly elusive and evade detection.