Reading expert Linda Farrell: Letter Names vs. Letter Sounds

Letter Names vs. Letter Sounds

Linda Farrell: Some children manage to read and they don’t know the difference between the letter name and a letter sound and they are strong readers and I don’t care. When a student struggles with reading, that’s often something that’s very difficult for them. They think in terms of letter names only. And when you’re a beginning reader, then they’re just trying to memorize letters.

And if I teach Tim is ‘t - i - m,’ three letters … but time is ‘t - i - m -e,’ four letters, and I ask a student who is not strong in knowing the difference between a letter name and a letter sound, “How many sounds in time? Show me how many sounds in time.” And they’ll put four. They’ll put four letters — four tiles down there, and I’ll say, “Well, tell me the sounds.” “/T/, /i/, /m/, /eh/.” That student understands how time is spelled. They know that word is time. And they have not a clue why that word is time and the other word is Tim.

So when I get a student who’s a sound-by-sound reader or who misreads vowel sounds — they read Tim as time or time as Tim; often they read hop as hope, hope as hop — it’s very important that before I ever start to try to teach them to read that they understand that there’s a letter and there’s a sound, because then I can anchor when I get to teach them that kit is ‘k i t.’ Then they know /k/, /i/, /t/. Now how many sounds in kite? /K/, /eye/, /t/ … three. Three sounds in kite. Great. Now let me show you how kite is spelled. This ‘i’ sound is spelled with two letters: this ‘i’ and this ‘e.’ And now suddenly they go, “Oh, I get how it works.” Some kids get … I happen to be a kid … I thought the short ‘a’ sound was /ah/ because that’s what the doctor has you say.

I could read, but, I tell you, I couldn’t teach reading knowing that, because I hadn’t — somehow the patterns, I intuited them, many people do — but when you don’t intuit them, you have to be taught explicitly. One of the things that’s very frustrating is that there are many programs that go real fast, and they don’t teach kids things to mastery. And then we don’t find out who’s struggling until they get to third grade, and now they’re way behind.

And we need to make sure that in first grade Calista masters what’s a letter, what’s a sound. Otherwise, it’s going to get in the way of her reading. It already is, because already she’s thinking in terms of letters — and she can do sounds. She can go, /h/, /u/, /g/, hug. But then I say, “What’s the first sound?” and she goes ‘h.’ Well, she’s not going to be able to understand that ‘th’ together spells /th/, two letters, one sound.

So it’s just a fundamental that we need to teach all children. It wouldn’t have hurt me to learn it. It wouldn’t have hurt anybody to learn that there is a sound and there is a letter. And we will keep children from struggling if we teach that to everyone.