Putting on Your Underwear First: Why Instructional Sequence Doesn’t Always Matter

Putting on Your Underwear First: Why Instructional Sequence Doesn’t Always Matter

Teacher’s Question:  

Is there a particular order in which teachers should teach the letter sounds? 

Shanahan’s response:

It makes sense to put your underwear on before you put on a skirt, shirt, blouse, or pants.

Unless you’re Madonna.

Then the usual ordering of things doesn’t necessarily get the job done. Madonna changed the sequence from bra/blouse to blouse/bra and became a star. (That she is wildly talented may have also had something to do with that).

Many teachers, principals, parents, and policymakers expect the proper ordering of letters and letter sounds in a curriculum to be more than a matter of convention or style, however. This question comes up often.

I find it hard to explain to them that there is no research-proven best sequence for teaching the ABCs or phonics. But that is the case.

Back when the National Reading Panel (2000) report came out, there was a similar hubbub in Congress. The Panel reported that phonics programs with a clear sequence of instruction – that’s what we meant by “systematic phonics” – were most successful. Consequently, Congress wanted to require that everyone teach phonics using that sequence.

The problem was that the Panel wasn’t touting a specific curricular sequence. No, it was just emphasizing the benefits of a planful and planned curriculum. About 18 different phonics curricula were examined in that collection of studies, and each had its own sequence for introducing letters and sounds.

And they all worked.

But programs that had planned sequences of instruction – any planned sequence – than those that promoted the idea of responsive phonics (the idea that teachers would teach the skills as the children seemed to need them). I wasn’t surprised by this finding, since as a classroom teacher, I tried to teach phonics in a more individual, diagnostic matter, keeping track of what I had covered with each child. It was an unholy nightmare, requiring too much managing on my part and too little learning for the kids.

That doesn’t mean the letter/sound orderings should be completely arbitrary.

For example, it makes good sense to offer earlier teaching of the most useful or frequent letters and sounds. Children learn such letters — including the ones in their own name — more quickly than the letters they don’t see as often (Dunn-Rankin, 1978). It is wise to teach letters like t, h, s, n, and the vowels, before taking on the much less frequent z, x, or k. Kids can successfully learn these letters in any sequence, but teaching the most frequent ones early, enables kids to read words sooner.

When I was a becoming a teacher there was a controversy over whether to teach consonants or vowels first. Lots of argument, but not much data. Our professors demonstrated that if you took all the vowels out of a message you could still read the text, so they claimed consonants were most useful and more worthy of early attention. Other authorities would argue back that are no words without vowels and vowels have higher frequencies. They thought vowels merited earlier instruction.

Common sense eventually won out.

Instead of making it an all or none proposition, teaching a combination of consonants and vowels allows kids to read and write words earlier.

Still another general guideline has to do with ambiguity. We should try to minimize confusion to make early reading easier. Separate very similar letters.

At one time, psychologists flirted with the idea of teaching highly similar letters together since that would allow teachers to highlight the distinguishing features. But empirical studies found that it was better to separate those similar elements (Gibson & Levin, 1975). Don’t teach b and d together, or m and n, for instance. Letters that are visually or phonemically similar need to be kept apart.

Teach one of the confusables thoroughly, before introducing its partners. A student who already has strong purchase on either the /p/ or /b/ sounds, will have less trouble mastering the other. (Ws are confusing, not because of their great similarities with other letters, but because of the pronunciation of their names: I wish I had a nickel for every time I told a young writer to sound out a w, only to get the response, “Doooubbbblle-uuu…/d/”).

A related question has to do with capitals and lower-case letters. Which of those do we teach first? Basically, lower case letters have greater value in reading. You simply see more of them, so the knowledge of such letters is more predictive of eventual reading achievement (Busch, 1980).

But kids are more likely to come to school knowing their capitals (they are somewhat easier to teach because they are more distinctive, and because so many preschool alphabet toys include capitals rather than lower case letters). Teaching lower case and capitals together is fine, too -- especially for the many lower-case letters that are just miniature versions of the capital versions: c, k, m, o, p, s, v, w, x, y, z.

Beyond these very general guidelines, the “appropriate” sequences of instruction for letters and sounds are arbitrary and you have a wide range of choices in how to do it or in evaluating the sequences adopted in commercial programs.

However, I would not send my daughters to school with their underclothes on the outside, but then they aren’t Madonna.

References

Busch, R. F. (1980). Predicting first-grade reading achievement. Learning Disability Quarterly, 3, 38-48. 

Gibson, E. J., & Levin, H. (1975). Psychology of reading. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.