In a Spanish Immersion Kindergarten Program, I have been using the "old-fashioned" order of introducing letters when teaching reading and writing (m, p, l, s, t....) for a while, but at some point, something wasn't working. Following that thought, I started asking colleagues - who were also teaching Spanish in an immersion setting - about it; but they were all doing it almost exactly the same way. During this time I also started a Specialization in Teaching Reading, and Juan Jimenez, the author of "Programa Letra", presented the letters in a different order based on their pronunciation. This gave me some ideas so I decided to conduct a small and simple research experiment in my classroom in which I asked “How changing the order of teaching letters in Kindergarten in a Spanish Immersion program could affect students' reading progress ”.
The first reason I wanted to try a different approach to presenting the letters was that in the old-fashioned way, kids began to pause reading when moving from “m” to “p”, making the reading more robotic (chopped) rather than fluent. They will, for example, say /mmmmmaaaa/ /p/ /aaaaaaa/ when reading “mapa.” This was affecting their comprehension and of course, that was not what I wanted.
My goal with doing this study was for my students to be secure and excited about reading by making long sounds first so they get fluency, and also accuracy. So, I decided to move those letters (m, s, l, n, f, r) that allow it to the front of my list, just after the vowels. I didn’t consider the letters “j and z” in this group at that time as I also was thinking about the vocabulary and its complications with the “ge, gi, ce, and ci” syllables. After having those secured, we continued with p, t, c, b, g, d, v, j, ñ, ch, ll, h, k, qu, y, z, w, and x.
The control group, at the beginning, consisted of results from the previous year to the study (2017) on letter sound recognition and reading syllables (CV) and words (CVCV) as a control group. The order of letters presented throughout the year was different, even though everything else remained the same - vocabulary, strategies, activities, games, songs, etc.
The results were as I anticipated, my students could read more fluently and accurately compared to the previous year of the study. The study group showed a 24% improvement in reading syllables. Similarly, there was an increase of 20% when reading words with non-lengthening consonants (capa, todo, etc.).
After those results, I asked a couple of colleagues to allow me to test their kids which gave me the results shown in the graph below. My group is the one displayed in blue.
I acknowledge that more research and authors are recognizing the significance of this issue and proposing potential solutions. Ripoll (2014), as an example, states that teaching phonemes that can be pronounced independently from vowels, such as a, e, i, o, u, M, L, S, F, N, and R, is more effective than teaching phonemes like /k/, /p/, and /t/ where students may struggle to understand the relationship between their independent and combined pronunciations. He recommends starting with a, e, i, o, u, M L S F N R, and following with P T V B C D J G H Ch Ñ Ll Qu K Y Z X W.
Carmen Silva, is a well-known advocate in the learning to read area in her “Diverlexia” program presents the letters in a unique order such as “a, e, i, o, u, m, l, s, n, ñ, ch j, r, f, p, t, d, z, c, k, qu, g, x, b, v, ll, y”, and so on.
It seems like there is an increase in the amount of research, best practices, and rationale focused on modifying Spanish instruction at the early elementary levels; however, there is still much to be done. In my opinion, I see this being advantageous for our students’ learning-to-read process.
References:
*Ripolli S. Juan Cruz, 2014. Adquisicion y Desarrollo del lenguaje y su Didactica II. Universidad de Navarra.
*Follow Carmen Silva: https://www.diverlexia.com/
*Follow Juan Jimenez: https://letras.ull.es/
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