Revisions to Levels A and Level B

From phonemic awareness to phonemic proficiency

We have known for some time that the ability to identify and manipulate individual speech sounds is an important skill for the beginning reader. Those of you already familiar with ABeCeDarian know that the development of this skill, technically referred to as phonemic awareness, is a central focus of the program. Almost every activity in the program helps students think about words in terms of their individual speech sounds.

This focus on developing phonemic awareness, along with a simple and efficient way of teaching letter-sound correspondences has helped thousands of children around the country learn to read for the past 20 years.

Recently, however, I came across the work of David Kilpatrick, a psychology professor at SUNY Cortland, who has added enormously to our understanding of what skills are necessary for a beginning reader to succeed. At the heart of his work is a more refined and powerful understanding of the role of phonemic awareness in helping students develop automatic word recognition skills. Specifically, he underscores the importance of developing not just phonemic awareness, but what he calls phonemic proficiency. Kilpatrick offers this new term to emphasize that successful beginning reader have a much more highly developed skill at manipulating speech than was previously recognized.

Kilpatrick’s book, Equipped for Reading Success, provides exercises that both develop and assess phonemic proficiency. The core exercises involve oral phoneme deletions and substitution tasks of increasing difficulty. An example of a beginning task is: “Say mop. Now say mop but don’t say /m/.”

These are amazingly simple but powerful exercises. So one of the things that I have done in the revision is to incorporate similar exercises into Levels A and B.

What Kilpatrick has done, however, is much more than just offer some useful exercises. He has also provided a more complete explanation about the role of phonemic proficiency in developing automatic word recognition. Automatic word recognition, he argues, is the result of a process he refers to as orthographic mapping, a process in which the reader links the sounds in a word with their spellings. Without sufficiently developed phonemic proficiency, so this theory suggests, a reader doesn’t have a sophisticated enough representation of the words in her oral vocabulary to associate them stably and rapidly with their letters, and hence establish a readily retrievable connection between the spoken and printed words.

While phonemic proficiency is of fundamental importance in this process, Kilpatrick is, in addition, able to identify a variety of activities besides phoneme manipulation exercises that help students better connect letters to sounds, and hence, improve their orthographic mapping. I have incorporated many of these as well in this revision.

The result of incorporating these changes into ABeCeDarian is that by explicitly attending to the development of phonemic proficiency and adding activities that promote orthographic mapping, the newly revised curriculum will help even more students read fluently and help almost all students do so in less time and with less struggle than the previous version. I think both students and teachers will find the new activities interesting and engaging as well.

Here is a summary of the changes:

oral phoneme manipulation exercises have been added to every unit in Levels A and B
teachers ask phoneme manipulation questions during the Reading Chain activity
the teaching of rimes has been added (Rimes are the part of a syllable consisting of the vowel and everything after it. Examples include: at, op, ig, and, ast, udge, ean, ote.)
nonsense word reading has been added in Level B
practice reading “look-alike” words has been added
teachers now ask specific analysis questions about the spelling of sounds as part of the Breaking Words Apart activity.
word reading practice at all levels has been refined

The 2020 versions contain a few revisions that are not aimed at enhancing phonemic proficiency and orthographic mapping. These are:

The addition of gray boxes around all of the lines on which students are to write in the workbooks. The upper limit of the box now provides a visual cue about the height of so-called tall letters.
The content of Level B2 has been streamlined.

With all of these revisions, your students will still find the material engaging and you will find the materials easy to use. In fact, there are, (and will be) more demonstration videos available to help parents, tutors, and teachers see how to conduct the lessons, including how to conduct them remotely.