Rethinking How We Teach Letters in Kindergarten and First Grade

“When was the last time that you engaged in a compelling discussion about teaching the letters of the alphabet?” asks Katherine Dougherty Stahl (New York University) in this article in The Reading Teacher. With the introduction of the Common Core, such basics seem to be taking a back seat to text complexity, comprehension, and written responses to texts. “However,” says Stahl, “some exciting new research is expanding what we know about how children learn letters and the best ways to teach the alphabet.” 

Researchers have found that several elements are essential for kindergarten and first grade, and mastering them correlates strongly with later reading proficiency:

• Knowing letter names;
• Knowing letter sounds;
• Being able to form letters;
• Grasping the alphabetical principle – that language is made up of discrete sounds and letters represent those sounds in a systematic way. 

“Young children who are at the earliest stages of learning how abstract letters and sounds come together to form meaningful words lack clarity on how the system operates,” says Stahl. 

How to teach all this? Many teachers still use the letter-of-the-week approach, having students recognize, form, and make the sound of each letter from Monday to Friday. The problem with this time-honored approach, says Stahl, is that “Not all letters need equal effort.” Many students come to school already knowing uppercase A, B, X, and O. The onomatopoeic sounds – s like a snake’s hiss, z as in buzz, m as in mmm – are also easy to pick up, as are letters that say their own name – b, d, j, k, p, t, v, and z. The most difficult consonants are y, w, and c and the trickiest vowels are i, o, and e. Children usually know the first letter of their own name, but there are differences: Jessica will have an easier time learning /j/, the beginning sound for j, than Joaquin. Finally, some students have more experience with rhyming games than others, making it easier for them to connect letter names to letter sounds.

All this suggests a more dynamic, differentiated approach to teaching letters, says Stahl. “Teaching one letter a week doesn’t allow time to provide the level of intense practice that children need to learn the most difficult letters. It also wastes time teaching letters that many children already know or need little instruction to master.” She suggests the Enhanced Alphabet Knowledge (EAK) program developed by Jones and Reutzel. The teacher teaches a new letter (or set of letters) each day, talking about what makes it easy or difficult to learn and going through multiple cycles of repeated practice. All letters are explicitly taught, with more-difficult letters getting more attention and practice. 

The first instructional cycle might focus on the first letter of each child’s name. Cycle 2 might be all the letters in alphabetical order. Cycle 3 might focus on the letters that say their name, followed by those whose sound can be clearly heard at the end of words – f, l, m. n, r, and s – then the more ambiguous letters like h, y, and w. “Ongoing assessment of students’ letter knowledge should be used to monitor and adjust the instruction and grouping of students,” says Stahl. As the year progresses, students solidify their knowledge of the easier letters and grapple with the tricky distinctions between p and q, d and b. Stahl recommends teaching letter names and sounds together and including in these lessons rhyming and playing around with letters and sounds. 

“Combining these elements does not mean that the lessons must be long and tedious,” she says. “Engagement is key, and the attention of young children is limited,” which suggests lessons of 10-15 minutes. And all this must be tied to real words in real texts, says Stahl – shared reading of big books, poetry posters, and alphabet books, shared writing, interactive writing, and the morning message. “If alphabet skill instruction is always isolated from connected text, children do not learn how to use these skills in service to writing and reading.” 

“New Insights About Letter Learning” by Katherine Dougherty Stahl in The Reading Teacher, December 2014/January 2015 (Vol. 68, #4, p. 261-265), http://bit.ly/1xbSnKj; Stahl can be reached at kay.stahl@nyu.edu.

From the Marshall Memo #566