Teacher to Teacher Shuling Yang, Natalia Aledsandrovna Ward, LaShay Jennings, Rachel Waldroff, and Edward J. Dwyer Developing Understanding of the Alphabetical Principle Among Beginning Literacy Learners Introduction We have worked with students in a variety of literacy learning environments and have found that fostering learning to apply knowledge of phonetic principles is very difficult for some students. A strategy we have found helpful is working with letter tiles and a blank grid. We have found that working with a physical product that involves manipulation of letter tiles is enjoyable for students and fosters learning based on the alphabetic principle as defined by McGee and Richgels (2012); the alphabetic principle is “a guiding rule for reading and writing whereby both processes depend on the systematic use of sound-letter correspondences” (p. 376). Review of Literature The International Literacy Association (ILA, 2019a) emphasized the importance of focused, explicit, systematic, and authentic instruction in learning letters and the sounds associated with those letters in a position statement titled Meeting the Challenges of Early Literacy Phonics Instruction. Authenticity, in this context, involves students applying their ability to identify letters, learning the sounds typically associated with letters, and recognizing how letters combine to make words in an alphabetic language like English. ILA researchers stressed how such learning must take place during engaging activities where the utilization of developing competencies is evident. In this light, Gill (2019) determined that “… to grow into fluent readers and writers, children need several years of systematic instruction to learn the intricacies of English orthography” (p. 39). In addition, ILA (2020) researchers proposed in a literacy brief titled Phonological Awareness in Early Childhood Literacy Development that phonological awareness, defined as “sensitivity to the sound (or phonological) structure of spoken words” (p. 2), provides the foundation for attaining competence in phonemic awareness, which is the ability to hear individual phonemes within words. ILA researchers further proposed that the ability to hear phonemes, the smallest units of sound in the English language, is critical for learning to read, and that students who enter first grade without the ability to hear and identify phonemes in words have great difficulty in learning to read. ILA (2019a) researchers in a position statement titled Meeting the Challenges of Early Literacy Phonics Instruction determined that sustained practice is essential for developing phonemic awareness competencies as opposed to short term study undertaken with the assumption that that the target material will be or has been learned sufficiently. We propose that working with what we call the Word Builder Grid provides opportunities for engaging, authentic, and academically sound learning strategies. We propose that the strategies suggested engage students in activities that provide opportunities for enjoying interacting with letters and building words while strengthening phonemic awareness and recognition of letters of the alphabet.
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