Jennie Sjursen 0:00
Is it print to speech or speech to print? Wait, are they the same thing are two different things. I'm Jennie Sjursen, ex-special educator turned dyslexia interventionist. It wasn't so long ago that I too, was overwhelmed by balanced literacy versus structured literacy, education speak, and everything in between. Fast forward after many, many hours of self driven education. And you'll see I've built a thriving dyslexia practice helping students from ages six to 18. My specialties, working with a quote unquote difficult almost always to the student, and breaking down the complexities of dyslexic to everyday language strategies and action steps. Before we dive in, have you heard, we have a good book section on our website. Think of it as your one stop shop for books about learning and dyslexia for adults and kids. It'll help you support your child through their dyslexia slash neurodiverse journey, we'll dive into it, we've put a link to our good books page in the show notes below. Go ahead, hit pause and bookmark the page for later, we'll wait for you.
Jennie Sjursen 1:16
Speech to print is based on the fact that oral language is hardwired in humans, the majority of us naturally and unconsciously learn how to talk at a very young age. Speech to print focuses on what the child already knows, speech, and layers new knowledge on top print. This approach focuses on the speech sounds and matching them to all the different letter or letter combinations that represent the sound. For example, take this sound, the student will be taught that this sound is represented by the letters S and C, they will also have to work on spelling patterns for the sound so that C makes the sound when followed by an E, I or y. These are the skills required for encoding or spelling. So that's how they differ. How are they similar. Both approaches rely on phonics, knowing how speech sounds correspond to certain letters and letter patterns and vice versa. And as the research has shown, and both approaches agree, systematic and explicit phonics instruction is crucial when learning to read. Both approaches rely on phonemic awareness activities to help students match letters to sounds. And they both use decoding and encoding activities. So this brings me back to where I started. When I first began diving into the differences. Most people would consider OG a print to speech approach. And I was seeing comments on social media where parents were saying, Oh gee didn't work for my child speech to print made all the difference. I wanted to know if there was an even better approach for teaching my students.
Jennie Sjursen 3:59
Most of us here are aware of the reading wars between whole language or balanced literacy and structured literacy or the OG approach and have solidly come down in favor of the latter. Now, a lesser known debate has been going on inside the structured literacy group. There are two camps, the printed speech camp and the speech to print camp. They differ on how structured literacy instruction should be presented. So I wanted to know what's the real difference between the two, and is one better than the other. Printed speech can be considered traditional phonics, taking the letters or letter combinations and matching or translating them to speech sounds. This is how good readers read and these are the skills required for decoding or reading. In general, the printed speech approach starts at the letters and teach us the corresponding sound for the letter. This approach starts at a simple level, single letters and over time moves to more complex levels, letter combinations.
Jennie Sjursen 4:16
But the more I dove in, the more I realized the Orton Gillingham approached as taught by my Orton Gillingham Academy fellows, utilizes both approaches, print to speech and the decoding section of the session, and speech to print in the encoding section. I looked at YouTube videos and speech to print trainings that were presented for the different associations, and often found myself saying, Yeah, I do that already. That's not new. But then I listened a little closer. The speech to print trainers kept referring to quote, traditional commercial OG programs or traditional commercial OG curriculums. Bingo. Similar to what I said in our last podcast. What is the OG approach and guiding principles? Some of the programs are curriculum derived from the OG principles. Only focus on decoding and neglect are only lightly touched on the encoding piece that I can agree on. When learning that's Speech to print provides all the different letter letter combinations for a single sound at once, I can only think how overwhelming that would be for the majority of my students. I already make their brains hurt when introducing new letters and sounds, this would make it explode.
Jennie Sjursen 5:16
Further research also shows that one of the main promoters of speech to print Louisa Moats does not recommend providing all the different letters for sound at once. She recommends just like print to speech, a simple to complex sequence. So again, how I was trained in the OG approach, it still on the same page of speech to print. Finally, and a recent blog post by Tim Shanahan print to speech or speech to print that is the question. Shanahan states at the end quote, at some point, any decoding program must focus on print to speech, since that is what we do in reading further stating, quote, my advice, get a phonics program that includes such activities, or layer them into a traditional print to speech program. Again, I agree. At the end of all of this, what do we know? And what's the difference between the two approaches? In a nutshell, good readers need to be able to manipulate their phonological knowledge in both directions, print to speech and speech to print. This bi directional ability to manipulate letters and sounds is interwoven, one supports the other.
Jennie Sjursen 6:33
The debate between the two approaches, in reality is really all about what is the best way to arrange or present these letter sound relationships to beginning readers. In my opinion, the need to manipulate sounds and letters and bi directional manner means both approaches need to be woven into a session, which was exactly how I was trained. So the debate is really a hair splitting argument. If you have any further questions about speech to print or print to speech, please feel free to sneak into my inbox. And if you love what you've learned so far, please give our little podcast a five star rating we've heard so appreciate it. Thank you. Until next time I hope you enjoyed this episode of literacy untangled. If you love this episode as much as I did, head on over and rate and subscribe so you never miss an episode. If you want to continue the conversation or share your takeaways, head on over to our Instagram at literacy untangled and comment on your favorite part. I can't wait to hang out with you again soon. Bye
