Integrating Structured Linguistic Literacy and The Science of Learning: How We Teach Reading Matters
Recently, I attended professional development on the Science of Learning, and throughout the training, I kept making connections between its principles and Structured Linguistic Literacy (SLL, also known as speech to print), which is the approach I use in reading instruction.
Most parents have heard about the Science of Reading—the large body of research that helps us understand what contributes to skilled reading.
The Science of Learning is also a body of research—drawing from cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychology—that investigates how learning happens. It answers questions such as:
How is new learning acquired?
How does new information connect to what students already know?
What helps students remember new learning?
How can students use what they’ve learned in a different situation without someone telling them what to do?
In The Canon of Literacy, Dr. Paige Pullen argues that we must broaden literacy instruction to include proficient language use, reading, writing, and spelling because they are not separate skills; they draw on shared knowledge and reinforce one another.
Knowing what to teach, therefore, is only part of the equation. We also have to consider whether our instruction helps learning stick and whether students can transfer what they’ve learned beyond the lesson.
This is where I see an important intersection between the Science of Learning and Structured Linguistic Literacy.
Start With What the Student Already Knows
Peps Mccrea, in A Model of Learning, points out that “prior knowledge constrains learning.” In other words, students understand new information through what they already know.
Before students learn to read, they already possess an extraordinary amount of knowledge about language. They know thousands of spoken words and what those words mean.
Traditional print-to-speech phonics generally begins with print: Here is a letter or spelling. What sound does it make?
SLL begins with speech and connects the sounds students already know to the spellings that represent them.
Speech is the starting point. Print is the code we connect to it.
Take the word play.
Students already know the spoken word. They can say play, listen to its sounds, and connect those sounds to the written word:
\<p> represents /p/
\<l> represents /l/
\<ay> represents /ā/
Rather than beginning with the <ay> spelling and asking students to memorize what those letters “say,” SLL connects new information—the spelling—to the spoken words already stored in the student’s language system.
What Students Pay Attention to Matters
Mccrea also writes that “attention is the basis of developing knowledge.”
Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning describes how repeated practice of the same thing can create an illusion of mastery. Performance during practice may improve, but that doesn’t guarantee the student will retrieve and apply the information in another context.
Imagine a student practicing a list of words with the <ay> spelling: day, may, say, pay, lay, play, stay.
After the first few words, the student knows how every word will end. They may begin paying attention mainly to the first letter or two because <ay> is already expected.
The entire list might be read quickly and accurately.
It looks like mastery.
But what was the student actually paying attention to?
What happens when they encounter words like play, playing, or replay in a story?
Real reading doesn’t organize itself into neat groups of words containing today’s spelling. A book doesn’t announce, “The next word contains the spelling you just practiced.”
The student has to attend to the whole word and use what they know.
This illustrates an important distinction in learning research:
successful performance during practice isn’t necessarily the same as lasting learning.
How Structured Linguistic Literacy Builds Learning Over Time
If smooth performance during one practice session isn’t necessarily evidence of learning, what should practice look like?
Research on learning points to the importance of spacing, retrieval, and interleaving—returning to information over time, recalling it rather than simply being shown it again, and mixing related learning rather than always practicing one thing in isolation.
One of the essential concepts students learn in SLL is that the same sound can be represented by different spellings.
For instance, /ā/ can be represented in different ways: day, rain, eight, table, great.
By sorting words according to the spelling that represents /ā/ and discussing where those spellings tend to appear in words, students become increasingly familiar with the different ways they may encounter that sound in print.
They don’t need to completely master the <ay> phonics pattern, then completely master the <ai> phonics pattern, and continue through the spellings one at a time.
Instead, in SLL, different spellings for the same sound are introduced and then revisited together.
At first, this can seem counterintuitive. Parents and teachers may wonder whether showing a struggling reader several possibilities at once will create confusion.
Learning research gives us good reason to present multiple spellings together. Studies of interleaving have found that comparing similar information can help learners notice the differences that distinguish one possibility from another.
When students encounter different spellings of a sound, they have opportunities to compare them, notice similarities and differences, and build increasingly flexible knowledge about how that sound can be represented in print.
A student might encounter <ay> while reading and then retrieve <ai> when writing. Another spelling may appear in a new word several days later. Previously encountered spellings mix with newer ones.
Now the student has to do more than repeat something that’s still fresh in memory. They have to retrieve what they know and determine which knowledge applies.
Mastery of a concept is not expected before moving on to a new one. We move forward knowing that students will encounter, retrieve, and apply previously learned concepts again and again in different situations.
Learning continually circles back.
Keep the Mental Work Focused on Reading
Another important concept in the Science of Learning is cognitive load—the amount of information the human brain can hold and process in working memory.
Mccrea describes working memory—the mental workspace we use while thinking—as limited. Our attentional bandwidth allows us to attend to only a small amount of new information at one time. In fact, research by Nelson Cowan suggests that working memory capacity is typically limited to about three to five meaningful chunks of information at once.
For a struggling reader, that workspace can become crowded quickly.
The student may be trying to look at a word, blend its sounds, remember previous sentences, understand vocabulary, and follow the author’s meaning all at once.
Instead of asking students to remember a growing collection of categories, rules, and exceptions while they’re trying to read, SLL provides a consistent process for connecting speech to print based on how the English writing system works:
Words are made of sounds.
Sounds are represented by one or more letters.
A sound can have different spellings.
The same spelling can represent different sounds.
As that process becomes more efficient, more attention becomes available for vocabulary, ideas, and comprehension—the reasons we’re reading in the first place.
Reading, Spelling, and Writing Strengthen the Same Knowledge
Mccrea notes that when students talk and write about what they are learning, their thinking becomes more visible and their understanding can deepen.
Reading and writing access shared language knowledge from different directions.
In a typical tutoring session with me, a student might read the word play by connecting the spellings on the page with the sounds in the spoken word they already know.
Next, they practice spelling the word by starting with the spoken word play and retrieving the spellings that represent its sounds.
Then they use it in a sentence: The boy will play with his red boat.
Errors in spelling or handwriting formation are immediately corrected, and the student rewrites the sentence correctly.
In just one activity, the student has reinforced several aspects of literacy rather than practicing reading, spelling, handwriting, and writing as unrelated skills.
An Unexpected Spelling Doesn’t Require a Different System
Students need more than memorized patterns. They need increasingly flexible knowledge that helps them respond when a word doesn’t behave exactly like other words they’ve encountered.
Consider the word said.
We can listen to its sounds:
/s/ /ĕ/ /d/
Then look at how those sounds are represented:
\<s> represents /s/.
\<ai> represents /ĕ/.
\<d> represents /d/.
Rather than treating said as a completely different kind of word that must be memorized as a visual whole, students continue using the same speech-to-print process.
In this word, <ai> represents /ĕ/. That spelling may be unexpected, but the process of reading and spelling the word hasn’t changed.
For struggling readers, a consistent process can reduce cognitive load, confusion, and anxiety.
Productive Struggle Doesn’t Mean Guessing
The Science of Learning also helps explain why waiting briefly before providing an answer when a student hesitates can help the learning process.
If I know the student has encountered something before, I give them an opportunity to retrieve it.
Research on learning consistently finds that retrieving information from memory strengthens future access to that information. According to Make It Stick, retrieval is one of the most powerful ways to make learning more durable.
But there’s an important distinction.
If students don’t know a sound because it’s new or they haven’t encountered it enough times to retrieve it from memory, I provide it.
If students say an incorrect sound, I correct it.
Then they repeat the correct sound, return to the beginning of the word, say each sound from left to right, and blend the sounds together. A similar process is used when spelling.
I don’t want students staring at words hoping an answer will appear, and I don’t want them guessing.
This productive struggle means giving students responsibility for the thinking they’re capable of doing—not withholding information they need in order to learn.
The Goal of Reading Instruction Is Independence
My goal is for students to independently retrieve and apply what they’ve learned beyond our tutoring sessions.
The Science of Learning calls this transfer—using knowledge or skills in a situation different from the one in which they were learned.
That’s one reason authentic reading is so important in my instruction.
A real book mixes everything together.
A familiar sound may appear with a different spelling. A known spelling may represent a different sound. A multisyllabic word appears without warning. Vocabulary and meaning have to be considered at the same time.
Students have to bring previous learning to the situation and determine what applies.
By integrating principles from the Science of Learning with Structured Linguistic Literacy instruction, students are prepared to use what they’ve learned beyond the situation in which it was originally taught.
The Science of Reading helps us understand what students need to learn to become successful readers and writers.
The Science of Learning helps us understand how effective teaching helps knowledge become connected, remembered, retrievable, and flexible.
Structured Linguistic Literacy brings those ideas together in practical ways:
Begin with the spoken language students already know and connect it to print.
Direct attention to the information that matters.
Revisit learning rather than assuming that successful performance today equals mastery.
Mix old and new learning so students must retrieve and apply what they know.
Integrate reading, spelling, and writing so they reinforce one another.
Provide students with the information they need while gradually giving them responsibility for more of the thinking.
Give students opportunities to apply what they know in authentic reading, where the activity itself doesn’t give away the answer.
Together, the principles of SLL and the Science of Learning provide students with the knowledge and processes they need to retrieve, adapt, and apply what they’ve learned when they encounter something new.
That is how students become successful, confident, and independent readers.
Schedule a free consultation call and find out how Success Tutoring's speech to print approach can improve your child's reading.
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