Language Patterns

Structured Literacy and Science of Reading (SoR) are not programs.  Rather, they are ways of describing an approach to reading instruction - an approach that individual programs reflect to a greater or a lesser degree.  All Structured Literacy/SoR programs teach the letters, sounds and spelling patterns. However, they do not all introduce them in the same order.  They all include phonemic awareness, but they do not all approach phonemic awareness in exactly the same way. They all include decodable words, but they differ in the amount of decodable connected text they offer students.  They all include direct, explicit instruction, but they differ in the way they balance the explicit teaching of vocabulary and comprehension strategies versus the implicit learning of these strategies through independent reading.  Structured Literacy programs also vary in how they introduce grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPC).  Speech-to-print programs begin with the sound, and teach the students how to spell it.  Print-to-speech programs begin with the grapheme, and teach student what sound or sounds it represents.  Some programs do both, at least until students have mastered one basic sound for every letter and every digraph.  There is not enough research at this micro level to say with certainty which exact order of operations is most effective. What we do know, however, is that it is essential to have an order, and to stick to it, so that students are assured of success if they apply what they have learned. 

 

We also can say with certainty that the organising principles of Structured Literacy need to be  linguistic rather than thematic.  This means that learning activities are planned around particular phonemes, graphemes, morphemes, syntactic patterns, or comprehension strategies, rather than being designed around content – apples, for example, or legends, or forms of transportation.  This does not mean that lessons do not include this thematic material.  Structured, science-based programs may include not only apples, but alligators, arrows, antennae, and perhaps an Allosaurus, in the very first lesson. Any or all of these themes can be explored, according to the needs and interests of the students.  However, at the beginning levels, the thematic content is introduced incidentally and orally, while the vocabulary, the texts, and the writing and spelling activities are introduced explicitly and in a cumulative way, with each new sound, symbol or concept building on what has come before.