Traditional literacy instruction often follows a print-to-speech path: students learn letters first, then the sounds those letters represent, and later encounter a long list of “exceptions” to the rules they initially learned. This can make English spelling and reading feel inconsistent and confusing.
SRI International and Reading Reimagined have trialed a promising approach that can minimize that confusion. Also referred to as speech-to-print, SLP begins with students’ oral language: students learn how their own speech sounds are represented in print through letters and letter combinations. From the start, SLP explicitly teaches that English sounds can be spelled in more than one way and sometimes with more than one letter, so that students aren’t taught a confusing labyrinth of rules and exceptions.
Eighteen teachers in two U.S. school districts were trained to use SLP instruction with promising preliminary results:
- Teachers who used SLP instruction in their classrooms reported an improved understanding of how phonemic awareness, phonics knowledge, and fluency help their students’ reading proficiency, confirming successful instructional change.
- Student focus groups also revealed improvements in pronunciation, decoding, spelling, vocabulary, and comprehension, with multilingual learners particularly benefiting from the approach.
