What’s Wrong with “Sounding it Out?”
I recently had a conversation with several primary grade teachers about decoding words. We were were talking about how to prompt kids to decode words from beginning to end. These excellent teachers truly couldn’t come up with a phrase for what they were trying to say. They just didn’t know how to explain what they meant. They were visibly squirming in their seats. Finally, one of them glanced at the door to be sure no one was standing there, and looked around the table at each teacher before speaking. Then she took a deep breath and said, ”I don’t know what to say to kids. I know we’re not supposed to prompt them to to try sounding it out. But I just don’t have any idea what else I should tell them.”
All I could do was blink in response. I was flabbergasted.
So I asked questions.
What was wrong with sounding it out?
As it turned out, they’d heard from other reading professionals who had adamantly told them we should never ask kids to “sound it out.” They said that it would lead to very choppy, letter-by-letter decoding. They didn’t want kids to sound out this way.
Instead, they wanted them to think about what would make sense so that words come out more like, well, words. For these teachers, an example of why this would be problematic might be in a sentence like this:
The (brown) (horse) is running (quickly).
They say prompting kids to sound out these words would end up sounding like:
The /buh/r/ah/wuh/n/ /h/ah/r/s/eh/ is r/uh/nn/i/n/g/ /kw/i/k/k/l/ee/.
They said sounding out words like this was a big no-no.
And I agree.
Sounding it out like this would be a very inefficient and unhelpful way to decode these words. It would, in fact, very likely hinder maintaining meaning.
If a child doesn’t yet have the tools to give them the ability to read the words in a sentence like this, then maybe a better fit book is needed.
I would have to argue that it’s the teacher’s role to choose books that are supportive of a students’ growing capacity as a reader. It’s also their role to teach them the decoding skills needed to grow that capacity.
“Don’t sound it out” is another instance where solid instructional practice has been misinterpreted.
If a student will be confronted with a sentence such as The brown horse is running quickly, then presumably they’d have had the phonics instruction to equip them to read it.
What the Research Says
Nell Duke, early-literacy researcher extraordinaire, explains that “good readers pay attention not just to the individual letters, but to where they are positioned in the word and which letters are around them.” Meaning they will have learned how to tackle beginning and ending blends (as in brown), vowel teams (found in brown), r-controlled vowels (as in horse), digraphs (as in quick), and inflectional endings -(ing and- ly).
And because they will have had the teaching needed to help them know how to approach those spelling patterns, they should be able to successfully read a sentence like The brown horse is running quickly. If they had the phonics tools they needed, it might sound like this*:
The /br/ow/n/ /h/or/s/ is /run/ing/ /qu/ick/ly/.
Not at all letter by letter, but pattern by pattern, or word part by word part. In doing this, the words will sound like actual words, and meaning will be left very much intact.
In a blog post for Heinemann, Heidi Anne Mesmer, author of Letter Lessons and First Words, says that “the reader should be able to apply letter/sound knowledge to independently recognize words in text.”
Which means that if a child needed to decode each word letter by letter, and wasn’t able to decode part by part (or phonics feature by phonics feature) or even worse–was forced to rely on guessing from the picture using meaning to figure out the word, then this book would be too challenging for this reader at this moment.
There will always be exceptions to certain words, which are in themselves teachable moments. By and large, most words are quite decodable. But if–and only if–the child has been taught how to approach the spelling patterns in the words they will encounter.
Making “sound it out” an absolutely perfect prompt.
And let’s think about this. Flip to writing, reading’s right-hand man. When children are encoding words to write, the most common, easily understood, and helpful prompt we give kids is “sound it out.” If we’re saying it there, why on Earth would we not also say it in reading? Reading and writing are reciprocal, meaning that one completely supports the other. So it really makes no sense to ask, and in fact expect, kids to “sound it out” in writing but not in reading.
“Sound it out” is a very effective prompt for our readers. As long as we’ve given them the tools to do it efficiently.
*For the sake of this example, I’ve broken apart almost every word in the sentence. If the child had to labor through this many words, this book would likely be too difficult for them.
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