Structured Literacy - Auditory Review

The Auditory Review component of structured literacy is a quick, daily routine that helps students connect sounds to letters by writing the spelling for the sounds. It’s a key step for reinforcing encoding skills. You’ll also find resources and support here to help you implement this component effectively in your classroom.

Say the phoneme clearly, then have students repeat it.
Have students write the matching grapheme while saying the sound aloud.
Focus on previously taught sounds to reinforce mastery.
Keep the pace brisk—1–2 minutes max.
Provide immediate feedback on correct or incorrect grapheme formation.
Use a whiteboard or paper for quick, repeated practice.
Model as needed to ensure correct pronunciation and letter formation.

Here are some recommendations for what to do and what not to do in Auditory Review.

Don’t say the letter name instead of the sound—focus on phonemes, not letter names.
Don’t introduce new sounds during this review—stick to what’s already been taught.
Don’t skip student repetition—hearing and saying the sound helps solidify it.
Don’t move too slowly—this review should be fast and focused.
Don’t overload students with too many sounds—keep it limited to 3–5 per session.
Don’t ignore errors—correct mispronunciations or letter formations in the moment.

Student White Boards

Students can use whiteboards to record their responses.

Auditory Review Paper

Here is a paper that students can use to record their responses.

Video to Come

Castles, A., Coltheart, M., Wilson, K., Valpied, J., Wedgwood, J., The genesis of reading ability: What helps children learn letter-sound correspondences?, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Vol. 104, Issue 1.

Knowledge of letter-sound correspondences underpins successful reading acquisition. How do young children acquire this knowledge and what prior information do they bring to the learning process? This experiment gave preschoolers training in letter awareness or phonemic awareness. The phonemically trained children appeared to show some advantage on recognition tasks. However data suggest there is little value in training preschoolers in letter forms or sounds in isolation without providing instruction on the links between the two.

Ehri, L.C., (2013) Orthographic Mapping in the Acquisition of Sight Word Reading, Spelling Memory, and Vocabulary Learning, Scientific Studies of Reading, 18(1), 5-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2013.819356

Orthographic mapping (OM) involves the formation of letter-sound connections to cond the spellings, pronunciations, and meanings of specific words in memory. It explains how children learn to read words by sigh, to spell words from memory and to axquire vocabulary words from print.

Share, D.L. (2004) Knowing letter names and earning letter sounds: A causal connection. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Vol. 88, Issue 3, pp.213-233.

Two experiments tested the common assumption that knowing the letter names helps children learn basic letter-sound (grapheme-phoneme) relation because most letter names contain the relevant sounds. Letters with names containing the relevant sound facilitated letter-sound learning. The benefit of letter-name knowledge was found to depend, in part, on skill at isolating phonemes in spoken syllables.