Phoneme walls are more effective than word walls in developing students' reading & writing abilities

Phoneme Wall by Words in the Wild teaching fellow

At Words in the Wild, specialists and teaching fellows engage in cycles of inquiry to identify practices that build strong, independent readers and writers. The process of bridging research and practice takes time and patience. As a community of learners, our teachers test out research based approaches with students, and present the challenges and triumphs of implementation in our weekly meetings where we engage in group reflection. Over the past couple school years, we’ve taken a deep dive into phoneme walls, word walls, and other ways to make students’ thinking about important features of words visible in our classrooms.

During her time as a Words in the Wild teaching fellow, Paige Harrington-Clark, researched the common practice of using word walls in the classroom and learned about how building “phoneme walls” can benefit students as they learn to decode and encode. We’re excited to share her insights with you!

Download the full report here

PHONEME WALL OR WORD WALL?

Phoneme walls are more effective than word walls in developing students' decoding (reading) and encoding (writing) abilities. Phoneme walls teach students how language works, exploring the complexities of the English language in a systematic way. Letters can have multiple jobs, and our students have the ability, when given the right tools, to learn those jobs and apply this knowledge in both reading and writing.

Word Walls

Word walls are organized A-Z, using all 26 letters of the alphabet. Words are placed under each letter based on the first letter of the word. Words that begin with the same letter, even if that letter is not producing the same sound, are all categorized together. For example, "the," "true," and "Tuesday" are all placed under the letter "t." However, "t" makes a different sound in each word: "the" begins with the digraph /th/, "true" begins with a sound that is close to the digraph /ch/, and "Tuesday" begins with /t/.

Phoneme Walls

Phoneme walls, also known as sound walls, are organized by the phonemes or sounds. The English language has 44 phonemes (sounds). Phoneme walls can be further organized by vowels and consonants. Phoneme walls also make use of visuals, showing how the mouth looks when making that phoneme. Within each phoneme category, words can be organized further by grapheme, or the letter(s) that produces that sound. For example, the sound /k/ can be produced by the graphemes "c," "k," "ck," and "ke." In each phoneme category, words can be included even if the phoneme is not at the beginning of the word; moreover, phoneme walls help students attune to all the sounds in the word - not just the initial one.

Why is a phoneme wall more effective?

Imagine a student working on a writing project. They are writing about their sibling turning "one," so they are attempting to encode the high frequency word "one." Because the word has been previously taught, it must be on the word wall. Perhaps this student is able to segment the word "one" and isolate the initial phoneme /w/, but now they may be confused - what letter makes that sound? They might look for the letter "w," but traditional word walls would place "one" under the letter "o." Moreover, this does not match with the student's thought processes regarding the sounds they are hearing. CREATING A PHONEME WALL WITH STUDENTS Research shows that phoneme walls support students literacy development by more clearly connecting speech to print (Bottari, 2020). In the example above, the student is struggling with a high frequency word. Often, words that do not follow a typical pattern, like sight words, are taught as "tricky," and a student's only way of knowing these words is to memorize them. This practice undermines students' agency and underestimates students' abilities to learn the patterns of the English language and apply them independently when reading and writing new and unfamiliar words (Miles, 2018). Phoneme walls are created alongside explicit phonics instruction, which foregrounds that letters can have multiple jobs. Students, by using the phoneme wall, can also see patterns within these grapheme-phoneme relationships such as when to use "c," "k," "ck," or "ke." Now, imagine that same scenario. A student is attempting to write "one," and they hear the sound /w/. Using the phoneme wall, the student can match the sound they are hearing with the visual of the mouth making the same sound and see the different graphemes that produce that sound. The sight word, which will have been previously taught by matching the phonemes with the graphemes, will be easier for the student to recognize because the relationship between the sounds they are hearing and the letters they see on the wall is clear (Miles, 2016).

Creating Phoneme Walls with Students

Phoneme walls should be developed alongside both phonemic awareness and phonics instruction. Most researchers agree that a strong literacy foundation begins with developing students' phonemic awareness skills (segmenting and isolating phonemes), but other research shows that this instruction is only effective when connected with phonics instruction - teaching students which graphemes produce those phonemes (Mesmer, 2015). A phoneme wall is not something that is created at the beginning of the school year before students arrive in the classroom. For a phoneme wall to be truly effective, it must be created as students learn particular phonemes and graphemes.

Supporting Linguistically Diverse Students

A phoneme wall can be leveraged to support English Language Learners, but it can also become confusing if a sound in English is different from the sound produced in a different language by the same letter. The phoneme wall, however, can be explicitly taught and organized in a way that makes sense for English language learners. For instance, the vowel sounds in the English language differ from the vowel sounds in other languages. The vowel valley is extremely useful in explicitly teaching these sounds and the multiple graphemes that produce different vowel sounds. Further, it can also be effective to include the sounds produced in other languages in the phoneme wall. Scholar Lori A. Helman argues that "after. a foundation has been built on the commonalities of the two languages, it will be necessary to systematically outline how the two languages differ" (457). The phoneme wall gives space in the classroom for this comparison. For example, in the vowel valley, the. phoneme /ē/ could include a place for the grapheme "i," specially highlighted in a way that makes clear that in Spanish the "i" grapheme can make the same sound.

Click here to download Paige’s report, along with activities to get you started on your phoneme wall journey!

FREE Download with Activities Ideas & Additional Resources

Have you tried using a phoneme wall with your students? Whether you’ve done this form many years, or if you’re curious about trying this for the first time, we’d love to hear about your experience! Please reach out to our team on Facebook or Instagram! ❤

References:

Bottari, Marjorie. “Why Make the Switch? Transitioning from Word Walls to Sound Walls.” Heggerty. 20 Nov. 2020, https://heggerty.org/resources/blog-post/sound-walls/.

Helman, Lori A. “Building on the Sound System of Spanish: Insights from the Alphabetic Spellings of English-Language Learners.” The Reading Teacher, vol. 57, no. 5, 2004, pp. 452–60. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20205383.

Miles, Katharine Pace, et al. “Rethinking Sight Words.” The Reading Teacher, vol. 71, no. 6, 2018, pp. 715–26. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26632620. "Sound Wall Start Kit." Learning A-Z, https://www.learningaz.com/user_area/content_media/raw/science-of-reading-sound-wall-starter-kit.pdf.

This resource was created by Paige Harrington Clark.