Word families or sound by sound?

Well this is not exactly your average teacher, so that you will get different results than if you did this on a regular education type forum. But word families are a lousy way to teach reading. Instead of teaching a child to read any word you set up a bunch of families that the child needs to learn, then basically you teach the child to read a set no. of words. If you teach phonemically, the child can read any word. The only exceptions are what Orton Gillingham programs call “units”, where the vowel has a different sound than it would ordinarily, in which you teach the unit not “all, ball, call, tall, etc.” (BTW, imo, OG sets out too many of these. I’ve seen “an”, “ink”, etc as units.)

—des

I’m sorry I don’t have the research right on hand to quote that word families are not a very effective way to teach but you can find it; basically word families are an excuse for phonics, not really phonics. And not really effective.
If you read the National Reading Panel report Teaching Children to Read, there is some discussion of these issues. The report recommends firmly with no waffling: *systematic *synthetic phonics in *every* classroom. *Synthetic* means yes, sound-by-sound, building up from single sounds to short words to longer words (obvious pedagogy, simple to complex and build up, if you have not been hornswoggled by the sales pitches of various programs.
*Systematic* means a planned, ordered progression, simple to complex, covering *all* the common sound/spelling patterns of the language; not just picking out a word here and there that the kids have trouble with, or a patern that makes cute rhymes. There ado exist some programs that teach word patterns that are moderately effective because they do work with a systematic plan, but in general the part-to-whole wins in every honest comparison.
Now, if you are more interested in a popularity contest than in being an effective teacher, excuses for phonics are more popular than systematic phonics, so you will find them in an awful lot of schools and classrooms. Excuses take less effort and less money and let you play games in the classroom. Systematic plans require investments of time and money and effort and put restrictions on what you can do. If you are a responsible teacher, you will be willing to put in that work.

Welp, I’m going to waffle :-) It’s how you deliver the word families (ya know, Caesarean or stork), not whether or not you do.

Word families are IMHO fine for students who **have already** learned the sounds - which folks like me would have practically intuited or wrestled from practicing the sounds.
Folks like me just don’t have any trouble to speak of with the blending act. So past and pact are obviously different and they roll off the tongue, or the mental ear, without having to take it apart and put it together… or perhaps having it happen so fast that it doesn’t seem like a “process.”
I teach them - but we call them “special categories.” When a word comes up in oral reading that hasn’t been learned in the “systematic” part of the program, I make a list of members of that family. (Generally I stick to those common irregular words, but if a student is proceeding slowly, I”ll include, say, a vowel digraph that I know we won’t get to for a while.)
So when teh student needs to learn “dead” I’ll make a list with dead, head, death, health, stealth, etc.
I will, however, still be teaching explicitly - often the whole “word families” deal means students are supposed to intuit the commonalities and their associated sounds. We’ll highlight that “ea” part and even practice those special cases on flashcards.
Of course, I deal with older students who have a lot of language information in their brains already that “just” needs to be organized (or reorganized). Teachign the first time through with a young student would be different.

Welp (as you say Sue :-)), I’m not sure if what you are describing really more falls under the “unit” category, as dead (or bread) is more in the exceptions department. That’s a WHOLE bunch different than teaching the “it” family, the “at” family, the “ot” family, etc etc. I *have* seen this and I am not making this up (as Dave Barry, who is not on this list might say). And as you say, it would be taught explicitly, not just showing the kids a page (or book).

—des

May as well chime in with my colleagues here…. teach the sounds and blending to teach reading.

Janis

I agree that teaching sounds and blending is definitely the way to start out and focus on, but I’m wondering if word families (or othographic patterns) have their place. For example fluency drills. I know with my son he can sound out and blend practically anything but sometimes still has trouble easily recognizing orthographic patterns in multi-syllable words. His reading is just too slow for grade level work. To help with recognition it seems like manipulating multisyllable patterns (including plenty of non-sense words) can be helpful. Of course, this isn’t just word families, but morphographs and orthographic patterns.

Laura: One of the arguments I have with “whole-language” is that they do many really good things, but in the wrong time and place. We see Grade 2 kids writing books and Grade 10 kids having to be taught what is a sentence — kind of backwards. The same thing goes with word families. For beginners, you need to work from simple to complex, letters and letter groups and sounds and then syllables. Yes, *after* you have the basics down, then it makes a lot of sense to look at the variant spelling patterns and word parts and all that. Since the word families stuff is being touted as a substitute for really teaching phonics in the early grades, no I disrecommend it highly. But your question is entirely different and at your stage, your ideas do sound good.

Laura, I heard the author of that well known fluency project (can’t recall the person or program…) at an IDA conference. She spoke about teaching blends as blends, word families, etc to increase fluency. I asked a question about this, I said “well I thought it was not a good practice to teach blends as blends, etc. that it slows up teaching reading, etc. She said it was a good question and basically said it mattered very much *when* something like that was taught. If it was taught while phonics skills were being developed it was inefficient, but after they developed it was useful to teach these— have the kids see these as units.

(Actually same answer as Victoria gave— just wish I could think of the darn program/author.)

—des

And my guess here is that not all kids would even need to be taught with word families. Many (non-ld kids) will have sufficient skills following a good phonics program that they will pick up the patterns naturally. (So in general education — which is where a lot of reading disabled kids are — using whole word, word families and orthographic patterns is probably unnecessary). I would think this type of teaching would probably be best used in a resource or special education setting where teachers are trained to recognize when teaching it is useful.

Actually, some teaching of root words, affixes, language sources and meanings of various roots and affixes, etc., is a very useful part of upper elementary language arts and is worth doing for all students. Learning these ideas helps with spelling, unlocking the meanings of new words, reading and writing vocabulary, and transfer to other languages. Again, this is quite different from the “word families” being touted as an excuse for phonics.