Print-to-Speech or Speech-to-Print? That is the Question Redux

Tim Shanahan

“The Writing Lesson” and was created by Albert Anker

Blast from the Past: This piece first appeared on June 4, 2022, and was re-released on July 26, 2025. I continue to feel strongly that speech-to-print is the best way to go when it comes to beginning phonics instruction, yet as this entry admits, that is not yet proven. That hasn’t changed over the past few years, and yet data continues to accumulate on that side of the ledger. For example, Yan et al. (2024) demonstrate the importance of a neurological speech-to-print convergence in reading, something that suggests the potential value of such instructional approaches. Likewise, there is more evidence concerning the relationship between speech-to-print processing and word reading (Vandervelden, M., & Siegel, 2001). Other studies show the sensibility of the speech-to-print sequence in early literacy development (Rowe, Piestrzynski, Hadd, & Reiter, 2024). I’ve touched the piece up a bit, adding some history, but the point remains: we don’t know which approach is best, but until someone proves one to be better than the other, I’d bet on speech-to-print as the starting point.

Teacher question:

I know you typically don’t talk about specific programs, but I really would like to know your thoughts. I had always wanted more training in a structured literacy program/approach. I always thought Wilson, and specifically OG approaches, were the gold standards. More recently, I began reading about programs labeled as “speech to print.” Proponents of speech-to-print methods claim it is much faster to teach kids to read (and spell) than OG based approaches. Is there research to support this? Are these studies comparing programs based on OG (that mainly follow a more print-to-speech approach) and programs that are more specifically speech-to-print? Thank you!

 Shanahan response:

You’re right. I rarely comment on specific programs. But I’m happy to discuss program research or how consistent with the research a specific aspect of a program might be.

Let’s start with the claim that Orton-Gillingham (OG) style programs are the “gold standard.”
To me, a gold standard for an instructional program would be an approach that consistently resulted in positive learning outcomes and did better than competing methods. This outperformance would be demonstrated by direct research comparisons, or by meta-analyses summarizing a bunch of disparate but related comparisons. Basically, a gold standard approach would result in more learning.  

If OG was the gold standard, then it would reliably do better than other explicit decoding approaches in teaching kids to read.

Back in National Reading Panel (NRP, 2000) days, we analyzed evaluations of phonics instruction across 38 experimental and quasi-experimental studies – considering 18 different phonics curriculum sequences. Our conclusion? Phonics was a valuable ingredient in literacy teaching, and programs with explicit systematic phonics tended to outperform those that did not.

What about different types of phonics teaching? We made some of those comparisons, too. For instance, synthetic phonics (reading words from individual letters and sounds) resulted in higher average effects over analytic phonics (focused on syllables, morphemes, and use of known words as analogies), but this difference wasn’t statistically significant. Basically, there was no real difference in the effectiveness of synthetic and analytic phonics.

We didn’t compare individual phonics programs with each other because there were usually only one or two studies of most programs.

One exception to this was OG. There were enough studies of OG programs to allow the computation of a meaningful estimate of effectiveness. Nevertheless, we didn’t do that. I still think that was a good choice. I suspect those results would be a bit misleading. When OG failed, it was usually being delivered to severely disabled populations, including with kids so disabled that they were hospitalized. It is fair to say that OG didn’t do especially well with such kids. But none of the comparable programs were ever evaluated under those circumstances. There is no reason to think they would have done any better.

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