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But when children learn letter sounds as though that wild card is a part of the letter sound then critical skills like blending, segmenting, and later, decoding and encoding become extremely difficult.

Another reason I hear folks use to support using pictures is that kids need to learn how to hear the beginning sounds in words, and they believe pictures will support that. And I agree, learning how to identify a sound in a spoken word is important.

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I teach kindergarten. We are trying to follow the science of reading. We believe that is the best way to go. However, my colleague and I are disagreeing over one aspect of our program. Should we teach the letters first, the sounds first, or should we teach them together?

One cool natural experiment compared children in the U.S. with those in England, where letter names are introduced later than letter sounds. There, the kids use their knowledge of sounds to help in the mastery of the letter names (Ellefson, Treiman, & Kessler, 2009). Essentially, the researchers figured that learning that first list of letters or sounds is just arbitrary memorization. Then, when the kids try to learn the second list, they use what they already know to make the task go easier. If I know my letter names, and they give me a clue that will help me learn the sounds, then I do that. On the other hand, if I already have mastered the sounds, then they may be used to facilitate my learning of the letter names.

Ellefson, M. R., Treiman, R., & Kessler, B. (2009). Learning to label letters by sounds or names: A comparison of england and the united states. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 102(3), 323-341. doi:

This is a wonderfully comprehensive look at the issue. Thank you! I have been heavily influenced by Diane McGuinness, so I always prioritize sounds for reading and writing and leave names for 'labeling' (like a student's Raz Kid level). I find this particularly useful when working with struggling first graders in my intervention groups who attempt to blend using letter names and thereby obstruct orthographic mapping by not connecting the phonological processor with the orthographic processor as explained in Seidenberg's 4-part processing model. And frankly, I find it's just plain simpler for all of us. Stanislas Dehaene says in Reading in the Brain:

"The names of letters . . . far from being helpful, may even delay the acquisition of reading . . . Letters names cannot be assembled during reading--the hookup only concerns phonemes. But phonemes are rather abstract and covert speech units. A true mental revolution will have to take place before the child finds out that speech can be broken into phonemes."

Harriet, I appreciate your comment. We emphasize sounds for reading early on in Kindergarten while ensuring that students form the sound through writing as a part of that learning. Once all sounds are introduced, we begin associating the letter names with the sounds through spelling activities.m and letter names are reinforced again through formation as well. Although this is contrary to the recommendation that Shanahan makes our data would support that this approach had been highly effective so far in helping our students become good readers and spellers, similar to the study he referenced. Through this approach, I predict many of kindergarteners will be spelling at a first grade level by the end of kindergarten and many are already reading well. Additionally, we are seeing that this approach is decreasing disproportionality in achievement between our racially diverse students and Caucasian students.

There is no one way to teach children. It would be like doling out the same prescription to everyone with a pain of some kind. The article seems to agree, in suggesting building upon "most" and I will add EACH kids' strongest knowledge base. Teachers must individualize; some children need more letter instruction, some need to learn to listen to sounds first, and some need a mix. Others need to make letters before they can learn to identify them or associate them with sounds. A good teacher is informed about many approaches and learns what is next for each student. Period.

It makes more sense to teach letters and sounds together for kindergarten ...a apple /a/, b bat /b/, etc. I have seen kindergarten teachers teach a letter a week when students already know the letter(s) and instruct sounds separately. So boring and slow moving. Kids could be decoding words much earlier.

Teaching letter names in k-1 is important for truespel. Truespel phonetics uses only letters of the alphabet to spell the sounds of US English. This links phonics with phonetics. In fact teaching phonetics obviates the need to teach phonics because a phonetically spelled word \can be associated with a traditionally spelled word. No need to remember the 10 or so of ways of spelling a sound. See a listing of truespel studies at Many phoneme frequency facts are here because truespel is spreadsheet amenable.. Truespel is free with tutorials and converter at truespel.com .

Tim- I agree with you on this- teach letter names and sounds at the same time. I was surprised that you included many exemplars of the letter B to prove your point. You demonstrated the need for letter invariance so that children can begin to construct semantic categories of letter exemplars. I still stand firm in my proclamation that many children need to be explicitly taught the concept of letter invariance. In 2009 book Reading in the Brain, Deheane concluded: " I therefore think it very likely that dyslexia arises from a joint deficit of vision and language. The weakness itself probably rests somewhere at the crossroads between invariant visual recognition and phonemic processing." Letter naming fluency and letter-sound fluency are reviewed daily in the Heggerty Kindergarten PA book. Instead of using the Heggerty letter sound cards that display one capital and one lower case letter, I made cards that show five different upper and lowercase variants. This concept should be taught to all emergent readers as part of comprehensive Tier One instruction, but the children that need it most include children with autism, dyslexia and ESL.

"It's interesting that people who are saying that we should follow brain science ignore data when it comes to practical issues. I'd rather follow the empirical data any day than untested theories and indirect inferences." This statement is exactly what I've been thinking about this letter name versus sound argument for some time. Thank you for posting this information. One doesn't get to pick the science they agree with and disregard what doesn't fit with their own misguided notions, even if those notions are well-intended.

Hi Tim,

Firstly, I'd like to say that I'm a big fan of your work and that I really like the honesty of your blog in that you obviously try hard to be as even-handed as you can in your presentation of the evidence.

You are correct is stating that, in the UK, many practitioners see no need to teach letter names, at least in the first year of teaching reading and writing. Why, we ask, would teachers teach that the spelling < m > is both 'em' and /m/? If children are reading the word 'mat', why would we teach 'em' 'ay' 'tee', rather than /m/ /a/ /t/, especially when children can actually hear the word 'mat' if they say the sounds precisely.

For many children, especially those who come from low SES backgrounds, teaching both letter names and sounds imposes too great a cognitive load in the beginning stages of learning to read and write. As the code become more complex, letter names are a useful short cut. For example, "How do we spell the sound in /ee/ in 'stream', Miss?" "It's the 'ee' 'ay' spelling." Even so, writing the required spelling on a whiteboard/in the student's book is equally helpful.

Many of us in the UK think that the orientation of much teaching in the US is far too derivative of O-G programs, rather than the approach you mention in the blog advocated by Professor Diane McGuinness.

Neither does it matter what an English speaker's accent is. If teachers teach their students from sound to print, then the approach is able to accommodate any and all accents of English. Thus, whether, you say the spelling < a > in 'bath' as /a/ or as /ar/, doesn't matter: one should teach to the accents of the students. A McGuinnessian sound-to-print approach works for all accents of English.

One point on which we would most decidedly agree with you: the advice you give on the power of writing. When children build a word, they say the sounds and they write it, saying each individual sound. This, as you say, assists the process of getting the information into long-term memory.

I subscribe to the blog and learn much from it. Thank you.

John

So what is to be said about kindergarten students who have learned the sounds of most letters but cannot recognize the letter by name. Our curriculum teaches both at the same time but we have some students who cannot retain the name of the letter. While I understand that the sound is what will eventually lead to reading it baffles me as to why they can't learn the names.

Once again, an informative and timely post. I want to add some thoughts. Although I am a big proponent of teaching the letter names and sound together for K and 1, I have often experienced students attempting to decode a word such as 'cat' this way:

'C' (letter name), 'cat' (key word to anchor sound), /k/ (letter sound)--->'A' (letter name), 'apple' (key word to anchor sound), /a/ (letter sound)---> 'T' (letter name) 'top' (key word to anchor sound), /t/ (letter sound)

And never come up with the word 'cat'....and therefore never come close to associating this word to anything meaningful...

So a word of caution is needed here. It is imperative that teachers emphasize the need to convey to their students that these visual letter forms (and yes, writing sure does help) represent the sounds of our language...another way to say it would be: the sounds of our language are represented using letter forms. Simply reciting letter names, key anchor words, sounds does not necessarily convey this totally necessary piece of information. That is why teaching phonological awareness in conjunction with the use of letters is so important. I would take it a step further to say that it is best to use lower case letters while doing these exercises to improve decoding and spelling.

Stanislaus Dehaene believes the letter/sound conundrum to be a "chicken and egg" issue since "the two types of learning are so tightly linked that it is impossible to tell which come first, the grapheme (letter name) or the phoneme (sound)--both arise together and enhance each other."