Structured Linguistic Literacy

The core principle of Structured Linguistic Literacy is that spoken language is the foundation of written language as opposed to the other way around.
Vowel Valley recognizes that school-aged children come with a well-developed ability to use spoken language. Their brain naturally recognize patterns, and so we need to leverage these strengths to teach reading and writing skills.

Even before students are fluent in handwriting, they can start using the code to build words. Speech-to-Print approaches provide explicit instruction in the concepts that are the foundational basis of the English alphabetic code. Focusing on the foundational concepts circumvents the need to teach students an excessive amount of the code slowly over many years. 
Once students have a firm understanding of how the code functions, they can transition more quickly to implicit learning or self-teaching. This important distinction of speech to print practice accelerates the acquisition of accurate, automatic reading and writing. 

Key Principles of Speech-to-Print/Structured Linguistic Literacy:

1. Sound-First Approach: Instruction begins with identifying and manipulating the sounds (phonemes) in spoken words before introducing their written representations.
2. Integrated Skills: Reading, writing, and spelling are taught simultaneously, reinforcing each other.
3. Pattern Recognition: Instead of teaching rigid rules, students learn flexible spelling patterns that can be applied to many words.
4. Contextual Learning: Sounds are taught in the context of words, not in isolation.
5. Orthographic Mapping: From the very beginning, students learn to connect the sounds in words (phonemes) to their spellings (graphemes). This facilitates automatic word recognition.

The Science Behind this Approach 

The effectiveness of Speech-to-Print is rooted in cognitive science and research on how the brain processes language. Dr. Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive scientist and expert in the Science of Reading, has contributed significantly to our understanding of the reading process.

Dr. Seindenberg’s research emphasizes the importance of phonological discernment and the ability to map sounds to letters in learning to read. He describes a phenomenon he calls “escape velocity,” where students transition from explicit instruction to self-teaching. Speech to Print methodology aims to achieve this transition efficiently.

The process works as follows:

1. Students are explicitly taught how the English alphabetic code works.
2. They learn to apply these concepts to all words.
3. As their skills develop, they require less support and can increasingly teach themselves new words.

This approach aligns with what cognitive scientists call the “Simple View of Reading,” which posits that reading comprehension is the product of decoding ability and language comprehension.