See it, Don't Say it. Why “sound it out” isn’t sound instruction.

A fourth grader brought his spelling list to my office at the end of the school day. He had not yet practiced any of the words, so I gave him a baseline test to see which words he might already know, thereby eliminating them from study. I asked him to spell the words to the best of his ability as I read down the list. I watched as he mouthed the sound of each word and spelled it based on what he heard. The result was 20% accuracy. As we reviewed his attempt, I gently pointed out the few that were correct and explained that most were incorrect because he was trying to sound them out. He looked at me with sad eyes and confusion. “But my teacher always tells me to sound it out”.

This seemingly innocuous instruction, is not harmless. It causes continued failure and frustration. The majority of words in English do not correspond with a one-to-one relationship between the letters and sounds —what is called the alphabetic principle. English spelling is not primarily phonetic or based largely on letters and sound correspondences. Rather, it is a combination of orthographically and phonetically regular and irregular patterns, and meaningful parts—what is referred to as morphology. English spelling, therefore, is morphophonemic--a combination of meaning and sound--rather than phonetic (Bowers and Bowers, 2018). English orthography relies more on meaning relationships between the origin of a word and its spelling, than the letter sound combinations that make it up.

But teachers have been trained to teach spelling using a phonics approach—matching letters or letter combinations to their sounds. Even at the first grade level many words defy this sounding out approach. Consider these common foundation words: the, was, said, of, have, are, as. Spelling them phonetically would result in thu, wuz, sed, uv, hav, r, az. Other words like walked have silent letters (the l) and a morpheme at the end (ed) which sounds like a /t/ and changes the meaning of the word to past tense. Trying to spell these words from a “sound it out” approach will result in misspelling and continued failure to spell correctly in English. They must be spelled based on meaning and a visual image of the word. And this is not just for words we call “sight words”. This is the best approach for spelling any word in English.

            So instead of teaching students to “sound it out”, we should be teaching them to “see it”, call up a visual image of the word, reminding them that they have seen it somewhere, whether in a book, on a street sign, bulletin board or on their very own spelling list, and think of what the word means. By teaching students to use their knowledge of morphemes and roots and base words to spell, students learn the connection between meaning and spelling. And by relying on a visual image of the word, they have a permanent model to go back to for comparison to check if what they wrote matches the image in their head, rather than guessing from the myriad of options for English consonant and vowel correspondences. Adding the instruction of morphology (prefixes, suffixes, roots and bases) and visual memory equips students with all the tools to be accurate spellers. Checking that every sound is represented by a letter or letter combinations should be the last thing students do when spelling.

            After giving this fourth grader the instruction to “see the word in your mind”, he had instantaneous and dramatically different results: 80% correct and a huge confidence boost in his ability to be a good speller instead of “the worst speller”.

Confidence and the Right Hemisphere

The right hemisphere of the brain is where non-verbal language is processed, such as facial expression, body language, gesture, volume, rate, tone of voice, and inflection. 

Because of this, children who have well developed right hemispheres-- visual learners, right brain, overview thinkers-- are especially susceptible to teachers' often unintended, but sometimes intentional messages that convey their beliefs and attitude about a particular student's ability. 

Take for example the classroom teacher in first through third grade, when children are learning to read. This teacher presents a right brain dominant child with a book. The child takes in the cover with the juvenile illustration, the larger print, the fewer words and the dominance of pictures and understands without a word spoken on the part of the teacher, that "my teacher thinks I can't read the harder books that my friends are reading." 

Or sometimes this presentation is accompanied by language that the teacher may think masks his/her true feelings about the child's capabilities, but the right brain child picks up on the subtle cues any way. Sometimes the messages are blatant. A frustrated science teacher may stand with arms crossed glaring over the shoulder of a struggling visual learner who does not understand how to apply the equation to the properties of electrical circuitry and in a sarcastic tone says "wow", indicating that the teacher is not impressed with the child's thinking. 

What all this non-verbal messaging does to children who are visual/right brain dominant, is destroy their confidence. These children have as their superpower the discernment and vigilance for reading visual cues. So this type of non-verbal messaging blows to smithereens the child's sense that I can get this, eventually. Because the right hemisphere is tied to our emotional/survival brain; the limbic system. So it puts right brain children into flight mode. Their brains are stressed the moment they pick up on the unspoken cues of dislike, disapproval, or disbelief.

So what we all need is more compassion. More understanding, more patience. More acceptance.

Expect Up. Assume that a child can rise to your expectations, rather than sinking down to something obviously achievable. Right brain dominant/visual learners aim to please. Because they are seated so strongly in their right hemisphere emotional center, they want to connect in relationship more than anything. They will often do whatever it takes to make their parents, their teachers and their friends happy. 

So make it easier for them. Provide the overview for the concept so the right brain/visual learner has the way in to the details. Let them use reading strategies that engage their overview, connection-making strengths. Be warm and friendly--even if you don't get them. You will see that they get you trying to get them. And it will embolden them to keep trying. All the while, you have preserved their self-confidence and from there, they can do anything. 

Being Bright Brained

I was in graduate school before I knew how to learn. Until then, I had been spending hours memorizing whole semesters worth of content and retaining it long enough to reproduce it on exams. I held most of the instruction in my auditory memory--short term storage. Consequently, much of what I had been taught was quickly forgotten. I was not empowered as a learner because I had never been taught how I learn. 

By the time I got to graduate school, the load, complexity and specialization of the information was so great, that I could no longer rely solely on these auditory skills. I began to intuit what I needed to do to learn the information quickly, easily and reliably. I color coded my notes, and grouped concepts, recognized patterns and connected ideas through meaning. As a visual thinker, representing the bulk of my thoughts in images, I relied more confidently on my visual memory. I needed to transform the information that was coming at me, into a useful format that I could receive, represent and make permanent. I needed to make it match my visual strengths.

After graduation, I went to work for a reading intervention company called Lindamood-Bell. I was hired as a Consultant and began testing and coaching the tutors to deliver the multi-sensory instruction to students. One of the programs they teach is called Visualizing and Verbalizing. Tutors delivered explicit instruction in making mental pictures.

This was revelatory to me for two reasons:

1. I took it for granted that I made mental pictures and thought everyone did!
2. I discovered that some individuals needed to be taught how to do something that came naturally to me.

But then, a greater shift occurred. In seeing that this skill of visualizing was important enough to teach, it was as if someone gave me permission to use it, to consciously pay attention to the pictures that my mind made so easily. Instead of feeling like I was the one who was different, out of sync, incapable, I realized I had the advantage. I could do it automatically. But the life changing part was this: The expectation to visualize validated me as a learner. This was the way I thought naturally, and here were teachers, telling other students that in order to comprehend (the very definition of learning), they needed to develop this skill--a skill that I had been born with and used all the time without trying and it was the one that everyone wanted!  Not only could I be myself, but suddenly, I felt like the one with the answer.

What I have learned in the 19 years since then is that individual instruction can be even more powerful when it is combined with information on hemisphere specialization and attentional styles and cognitive processing strengths.

It has been my experience that when we engage our metacognition--the brain's ability to be aware of its own thinking and learning process--we can regulate and control information that comes in--we learn faster, better and more permanently. This is supported by years of research (Dignath, C. & Büttner, G. Metacognition Learning (2008) 3: 231). And by years of experience in the clinic and classroom. By discussing attentional style and hemisphere skills, individual students can identify for themselves what their strengths are and how they attend, and then they are empowered to make better use of the information they receive.

By engaging students' metacognition or self awareness about their own brains and how they learn, teachers are creating a common language to discuss the different ways individuals receive information, how they organize and represent it. And how these ways of thinking and learning affect our perception and experience of the world (McGilchrist,2009). We are teaching students that it is necessary to question how information comes to us, and to monitor their own reception of information to make sure it is meaningful and useful to them.

This for me, is the crux of being Bright Brained. Knowing how to transform the information into the format that matches my strengths.  I am strongly visual, with a right hemisphere overview attentional style. When the information is coming at me in a stream of words, I have to quickly link them to pictures, or support that auditory input with the visual of written notes. But if I can't translate the verbal message quickly enough (it takes longer to translate words into pictures hence the slower processing speed of most if not all Visually dominant individuals), I may have to record the lecture or content until I can review it at my own rate and process it in my own time.

In fact, these are the top 5 strategies that I use most often in my work with students who are struggling in our heavily auditory and sequential, left hemisphere world:

1. Teach OVERVIEW first and repeatedly throughout a lecture to reorient the students to their big picture focus and the related overviews within that

2. Use CHUNKING, PATTERN recognition for memorizing; Engage metacognition/context/meaningful connections 

3. Encourage VISUALIZING and use of COLOR

• graphic organizers help visualize if information is highly sequential
• visualizing must be taught explicitly if individuals do not do it, but if the person is a visual thinker, then reminding and encouraging this strength in the midst of a heavily oral/auditory environment will help them connect emotionally and feel safe to learn from their strength.

4. Use MNEMONICS and SAME SOUND MEANING CUE for memorization

5. Engage EMOTIONAL CONNECTION to the teacher and content—relationship with the teacher is paramount

Once individuals are told about the hemispheres and their dominant skills, they can then begin to see which ones they use easily and which they are less conscious of and need to bring in more deliberately. This is where Cognitive Processing strengths enter the picture. 

In addition to teaching students about hemisphere specialization, I talk broadly about auditory and visual skills. I then link this to the notion of engaging our stronger skills at the moment of intake, when information is coming in, how can I represent it, so that I can easily and quickly process it and make sense of it.

So being Bright Brained is knowing your strengths as a learner and being empowered to transform and translate information into a format that is useable for you for maximum benefit. 

How do You make the best sense of information you receive? Do you have strategies that you use that are helpful when the presentation is primarily verbal? We'd love to hear your ideas. Share them here in the comments section.