Letter Names and Sounds Phonics Rules For Teachers: Episode 2

In episode 2 of Phonics Rules for Teachers (and How the Heck to Teach 'Em), learn what the difference is between letter names and letter sounds, why students need to understand the difference and the terms, and specific strategies for how to teach them in your classroom using a science of reading approach.

A classroom teacher with 10 years of experience, Martha Moore hosts the Phonics Rules for Teachers Podcast. Drawing from her personal journey, she shares insights on transitioning from traditional teaching methods to a phonics-centered approach and the impact it has on students' reading and writing.

Each week , Martha shares a simple phonics rule, strategy, or background information and how you can teach it in your classroom.

Transcript

What's the difference between letter names and letter sounds? Why does it matter that we use the correct terms, and how do we teach this to students? If you want to learn all of this and more, then you are in the right place. Welcome back to episode two of Phonic Rules for Teachers and How the Heck to Teach Them. I'm Martha Moore from Primary Paradise, and today we're going to be talking about letter names and letter sounds. What's the difference? Why does it actually matter? And how do we teach this concept to students?

Let's start off by defining letter name and letter sound. If we're talking about letter names, we are talking about what you're going to say if you look at this. I bet you just said A, B, C. These are the names of those specific symbols, and that's how we identify them. What you sing when you say the alphabet song? Those are letter names. Each of the 26 letters in the alphabet has a single letter name. For example, the word that begins with the letter B and B is the name of that symbol. We use letter names when we're referring to a specific letter.

What is a letter sound? When we refer to letter sounds, we are talking about the sounds that we make with our mouths when we are reading and we look at a specific letter. For example, if I write this word, you're going to say "cat," C, A, T, and we put it together to make the word "cat." Fluent readers blend or slide through words like this without actually specifically thinking about the letter sounds that their mouth is making. If you joined me for our last episode, you know that there are 26 letters in the alphabet and there are 44 sounds or phonemes in the English language. It doesn't take a math genius to see that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between the number of letters and the number of sounds in the English language. This is the case in some languages, but that's just not the case when it comes to English. In other words, letters can and often do represent more than one sound depending on the word, and some sounds require more than one letter to spell that sound.

The main difference between letter names and letter sounds is that letters are written and sounds are spoken, and it's really important that we use these terms consistently with our students so that they understand what information we are asking for from them. This will help them in reading and writing journey. There is some vocabulary that students don't really need to know in order to be successful readers and writers, for example, phonemes and graphemes. They maybe don't need to know those specific terms. However, it is important that students understand what you mean when you ask them for a letter and what you mean when you ask them for a sound.

Before we go any further, I have to address something that is a little bit of a pet peeve of mine and might seem a bit nitpicky, but stick with me because it actually is really important. That is this question: Do letters make sounds? Oftentimes, and I do this sometimes too even now, people say that letters make a sound. They will say what letter makes this sound? D or what letter makes this sound? The problem is this is a pretty inaccurate way to describe the relationship between letters and sounds. Let me explain. As I mentioned in the last video, reading and writing are not a natural process. Our brain is not automatically wired to do that. Spoken language came before reading and writing. When humans began writing, they had to develop symbols, i.e. letters, to represent the sounds in the words that they were hearing when people were speaking to each other. As I mentioned before, English has 26 letters, but only 44 sounds. Each letter doesn't make only a single sound.

Children are very literal, so if we tell them the that a letter makes a sound, they're likely to think that that letter will always make that sound or as in that letter can only represent that one sound. Instead, we can teach them that spoken language came before written language and when people began writing down symbols to represent the words that we were saying, people did their best to show the sounds we made in our words with letters and that some letters represent or stand for multiple sounds depending on how it is used in a word.

Let's look at an example together, shall we? What sound does this letter represent? Did you say "a" as in "cat"? That is correct. Maybe you said "a" as in "apron." That is also correct. But what about the sound that this letter represents in words like "water" or "was"? Again, depending on how we use a letter and in what word we find a letter, it can represent a different sound. It's really helpful to say that in a word that a specific letter represents sense a sound. You might also be wondering, okay, how do we spell sounds? As I've mentioned, we use letters to spell sounds. However, there are 44 sounds in the English language, only 26 letters, which means that we have some letters that represent more than one sound and we also have some sounds that are spelled with multiple letters. Here are some examples. These are all graphemes. As I've mentioned before, a grapheme is just a letter or letters that represents a single sound in a language. For example, we can spell the long "a" sound, "a," all of these different ways.

Now, before you get overwhelmed by all of this, with any sound, we will teach our students the most common spellings first and then work our way up to the less common spellings. So, it doesn't have to be overwhelming from the beginning.

Now, let's get to the most important part. Why do students need to know and understand the difference between letter names and letter sounds? Let me start by saying that it's imperative that students understand and know letter sounds because if they don't know letter sounds, they cannot read. People often wonder, why do they need to also know letter names? So, let's talk about it. When students are just beginning to read, if we take our word here again, "cat," and we ask students how do you spell this? If they only know the sound and they said "a," we could figure out what symbols to write down or they could figure out what symbols to write down. However, as they grow as readers and writers, spelling with the sounds will no longer work and it can get really, really confusing. Let's take a look at how spelling with just the sounds will no longer work once we see more complex words. Let's try this word here. That's not even that complex. This is the word "shop." If we ask our students how to spell this word and they simply make the sounds "sh," "a," "p," we have no way of knowing that they actually know what two letters they need to write down to represent the "sh" sound or maybe they could say "s," "a," but that's counterintuitive because "s" and "h" in this word don't represent "s" they represent "sh." And as you can imagine, this way of trying to spell words would get trickier and trickier as students learn more and more complex words. 

So, the bottom line is yes, students do need to know the letter names and the sounds in order to be successful readers and writers. Now you might be wondering, should students learn letter names or sounds first? Let's talk a little bit about what students need to do before they even learn letter names and specific letter sounds.

First, I want to say if you are teaching preschool students or kindergarten students, particularly earlier in the year, you can start preparing students for this work by having them listen to words orally, hearing the sounds in words, breaking them apart, and putting them back together. This doesn't require them to do anything more than hear the sounds and reproduce the sounds, either breaking them apart or putting them together. In fact, this is even a great warm-up for older students as well. You can do this with sounds that they don't even know yet. For example, say words like "hug" and have students break the sounds apart. "What sounds do you hear in the word 'hug'? H-U-G. 'Hug'."

You can also do the opposite. You could say, "I have a word that I've broken apart. I want you to slide the word together, listen for the sounds, smush them together, slide them together, blend them together. What word do we have? H-A-G." And then your students can say "hug." You can do this with even more complex words and even more complex sounds as they get really good at it. And it will help tune their ears into hearing and breaking apart the sounds in words, which is a great prerequisite to working with actual letters and building and writing words themselves.

Something that's really important when you are doing this work, though, is to make sure your students have really good pronunciation. You yourself need to make sure you are modeling correct pronunciation. And if you hear a student incorrectly producing sounds, you should correct that and model it and have them practice it until they are saying the sounds correctly. For example, if you said the word "cat" and your students say they hear the sound "C-A-T," this is not the correct way to produce those sounds. I always joke with my students that "short u" is the only letter that has an "uh" in it. What I recommend doing when students are making these sounds is I tell them to "clip" the sound. "T" becomes "C," and "T" becomes "T." Modeling correct pronunciation can also do a whole lot of good here because if they're hearing the sound correctly and you were constantly reinforcing it, it will help them remember to cut off that "uh" that they might have developed previously.

Let's talk about, should we teach letter names or letter sounds first? To be perfectly honest, there are a few different schools of thought here. The majority of people think two things: one, that they should learn the sounds and then the names, or that they should learn them together. My personal opinion and what I have seen work the best is learning them both together at the same time. The most important thing is that they do learn both. But if you are already teaching letter sounds or letter names, it's really not that much more of a cognitive load on our students if we ask them to learn them together. Of course, some letters represent more than one sound, but what we want to do is teach them the most common sounds first. For example, for letters that represent a vowel sound, we teach them the short vowel sound first.

The bottom line is this: if you're already spending time discussing the letter sound, it's not going to take much more brain power for your students to learn the name as well. It also makes it so much easier when you are talking about a specific letter and the sound that it can represent. So, I highly recommend teaching letter names and sounds at the same time.

Now let's get down to the nitty-gritty: how can we help our students understand the difference between letter names and letter sounds? As a first-grade teacher, some of my students come to me already knowing some of their names and sounds, but no, most of them do not totally know all of their letter names and their letter sounds in a totally secure way. I always begin each year with a letter name, sound, and formation review that takes about 2 or 3 weeks, depending on how quickly we can go through the letters. Oftentimes my students come in with incorrect or incomplete knowledge, so it is my job as a teacher to make sure that we fix that so that they have a good foundation going forward.

The best thing we can do is ensure that our students have a good foundation from the beginning. The second best thing we can do is give them a solid foundation as soon as we can. So if your students come to you and they should know their letter names and sounds and they don't, that's okay. You can build that foundation with them so that way they can be successful as they continue forward.

Let's talk about six strategies that I like to use to teach letter names and sounds in my classroom.

Number one, as I already mentioned, teach letter names and sounds together. Hopefully, if you're already teaching that "a" represents "a," calling it an "a" just makes sense. Many phonics programs have helpful hand motions, chants, and keywords to help students remember the name and the sound together. These are a great bridge, but just remember that the ultimate goal is for students to be able to not need those as extra support when they are reading. You don't need to rush this. If they need the cue, use the cue. If they need the hand motion, use the hand motion. But we don't want 10-year-olds to still be relying on these cues. We want, over time, for this knowledge to be automatic.

Number two, focus on what their mouths are doing. When initially teaching letter sounds, focus on the placement of their mouth and their tongue. Showing students what their lips and tongue and mouth should be doing when producing a specific letter sound is incredibly helpful and also helps ensure correct pronunciation. If it's possible, give them a small mirror so they can see their mouth when they're making a specific sound. You can also have a sound wall with picture prompts, and I highly recommend using real faces if possible, real mouths if possible, so they can refer back to that to make sure their mouth is making the right shape when they make a letter sound.

Number three, use the new letter sounds and letter names in action as soon as possible. A great way to help students wean away from needing hand motions and cues and chants to remember letter names and sounds is to get them using those letters and the sounds. Get them to use them in action as soon as possible. Even if your students only know three, four, or five letters, as long as they know one or two vowel letters, you are able to build words together with them. As soon as they know a handful of letters, start working together to build and spell two- and three-letter words. This will allow them to practice spelling, saying the names, and reading, making the sounds in context. Quickly, and what you use, you don't lose. So if they're using it, it will make it stick even better into their brain.

Number four: Think about pacing. This one can be a bit tricky because it might be based on the curriculum you're using, and if so, obviously you need to follow the curriculum that you are expected to follow. However, gone are the days of spending an entire week on one letter. Research shows that students actually learn letter sounds and letter names better if they are learning a few sounds at a time and working with a few sounds at a time. In an episode coming up, we will talk about the order to teach different sounds, but what's important to remember is this: You don't need to spend a whole week on just one sound. You can learn a sound in one or two days and then continue to build upon those sounds using them in context, reviewing every day. If you take the time every day as a warm-up to review the sounds you have already learned and then continue using them in context, your students will grasp the letter names and the letter sounds and be able to use them in their reading and their writing. If you want to see what this would look like, comment below, and I will be sure to make a video demonstrating how you can do this in your classroom.

Number five: Use clear language and be consistent. As I have already mentioned, if you are talking about the letter name, make sure you say "letter" or "letter name". If you are talking about the sound, make sure you say "sound". I like to tell my students that every letter has only one name, but letters can represent multiple sounds and they can even work together to represent a sound. I like to use a kid as an example. I bring a kid to the front of the group and I ask them to say their name. We're going to say our kid's name is Alex. I always say, "This is Alex. Alex is their name. However, Alex can do many things. Alex, what are some things that you can do?" Maybe Alex is going to say that Alex can jump, run, sleep, and lots of different things that they can do. Then I like to connect it to a letter. This is the letter A. A is its name, but A can do lots of things. In a word, A can represent different sounds. In a word, we're going to start by learning the most common sound, and as we learn more about A, we will learn more about what A can do, what A can represent in a word.

Number six: Use warm-ups to tune into sounds. As I've already mentioned, you can use a lot of oral practice in the beginning of your phonics lesson for older kids and for younger kids to help students tune into the skills that they are going to be practicing. You can even have them practice this with sounds that you have not explicitly taught them yet because even if they don't know how to write the sound, they can still hear the sound in the word. Have them practice segmenting, which is breaking apart whole words that you say, and have them practice blending or putting together sounds of a word that you say orally. And as they progress, you can have them actually write down and spell the words as well. Consistency is key when it comes to talking about letter names and letter sounds. Don't beat yourself up if you make a mistake. I'm sure if you go back and watch this video, I probably said that a letter makes a sound at some point in there because we're human. However, consistency is key, so do the best you can to be as consistent with your language.

Here are our key takeaways from today: 1. Use consistent language when referring to letter names and letter sounds. 2. Teach your students letter names and letter sounds together. 3. Segment and blend orally as a warmup, making sure to model and reinforce correct pronunciation. 4. Teaching a few sounds each week is a much better practice than teaching one sound in isolation for a long time. 5. Review all the sounds you've learned so far consistently. 6. Use new letters and sounds in context consistently, early and often. Understanding the difference between letter names and letter sounds is fundamental to phonics. Helping our students learn the difference and how to use them properly is one of the first steps to building a solid reading foundation. Thank you so much for joining me, and don't forget to like and subscribe. Come back next week for another episode of Phonics Rules for Teachers and How the Heck to Teach Them.