SPED 2 Portfolio: Building Fluency with Orthographic Mapping NOT Memorization

 

The most fascinating thing I've learned in the past 6 months, outside of my program at Queen's, has been that I'm teaching reading all wrong! My teacher education program and district subscribe to a balanced literacy approach that teaches students strategies like "look for clues in the picture" or has students memorize entire words that are called sight words, but I've only recently learned about how the brain actually learns to read. I've written into so many report cards about building students "sight word banks" in order to support them in building fluency in their reading, but I see now that I misunderstood how we learn to read.

This video "Orthographic Mapping Explainer" by Lyn Stone draws on the work of David Kilpatrick and Linnea Ehri to explain that memorizing words, which is what we ask students to do with "sight words" doesn't work. It doesn't help students develop fluency. It doesn't help when the reader encounters a word with a sight word within it because the reader hasn't been taught to break it down. Another issue is that we don't have enough storage capacity in our brains to remember every whole word, according to Kilpatrick in Stone (2019). Instead, we use a process called "orthographic mapping." According to Lyn Stone, it works like this:

1. We look at a sequence.

2. Translate them into possible phonemes. 

3. Blend phonemes to form words.

4. Through exposure (the more we see the sequence), those sequences are recognized as a unit, and we recognize them by sight. 

5. This helps with recall when writing.

Stone shares some key findings from Linea Ehri, an academic who coined the term "orthographic mapping" who has a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology, as follows:

• the crucial part of memorization is the attention to the sequence of letters in a word -remembering phonemes in a certain sequence produce a certain sound for example
• instruction that interferes with noticing the sequence of phonemes as a unit (whole word or word-guessing strategies) interferes with the storing of that word!             (Ehri in Stone, 2019)

This year, I will be teaching reading and reading strategies a little differently. I still think "The Reading Strategies Book" is an amazing resource  -it really does have great material-but I will be spending more time on phonemic and phonological awareness and teaching sight words through orthographic mapping. 

Image retrieved from Sarah's Teaching Snippets

References:

Stone, Lyn. [Lyn Stone]. (2019, September 22). Orthographic Mapping Explainer [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIuwKnZqJEQ&t=205s