I often get the feeling that there may be some confusion between Phonics teaching in school and articulation therapy. For example, when I have told parents that their child shows speech errors that wouldn’t be expected given their age, they have replied, “I don’t think they’ve learned that sound yet in school.” As if, at some level, there exists a belief that children’s speech improves automatically as they learn Phonics in school.
So, I’d like to try and clarify how Phonics and articulation therapy are different.
Phonics is a way of teaching that leads children along the path to literacy. In other words, it’s often one of the first deliberate steps in teaching a child to read. Children learn that, in English as well as many other languages, words are made up of sounds, letters represent sounds, and we use letters to spell words.
In the earliest years of formal schooling, Phonics teaching may include activities such as the following (while not limited to only these):
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singing songs with repetitive sounds
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playing games where you guess a sound or a word
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thinking of words that rhyme
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thinking of words that all start with a given letter sound.
A Phonics lesson with its related activities aims to help children make connections between the letters they may be starting to notice in books and the sounds of spoken language. In other words, Phonics connects something you see (a letter symbol) with something you say and hear (a phoneme).
Phonics = connection between letters and sounds
The UK Department of Education has a phonics learning program called Letters and Sounds, which sets the order in which phonics skills are taught across six distinct phases. Back when I taught Nursery, we introduced the following letter sounds first: s, a (as in “apple”), t, p, i (as in “igloo”), n.
There doesn’t seem to be such a set scope and sequence in the U.S. However, there are expert suggestions when considering the order of sounds taught:
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Teach sounds so that words can be formed as soon as possible. So the first letter sounds taught are those that appear commonly in lots of words in the English language.
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More common sound-spellings are taught before less common sound-spellings.
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Easily confused letters and sounds are separated in the order (so think of g and j, or s and the soft c, among so many others in the English language)
One more thing, any and every person who wants to learn to read will need to pass through a period of learning phonics. In other words, without the understanding that the letters written on the page are directly related to the sounds we say (and hear), it will be next to impossible for someone to read fluently.
Articulation Therapy
Articulation therapy works to remediate errors in a child’s speech that are not appropriate for their age.
What exactly does that mean, “not appropriate for their age”?
Across the world´s languages, there are particular sounds that develop earlier in a child’s speech… mainly because they are easier to produce. For example, the consonant phonemes preferred by babies as they babble tend to be the sounds included in their first words. These early developing sounds across the world’s languages tend to be
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stop consonants like, /b, p, d, t/
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nasals, such as /m, n/
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different vowels
And looking at a list of typical first spoken words among English-speaking toddlers, we can recognize this pattern: “mama”, “dada”, “papa”, “hi”, “bye-bye”, “ball”, “no”, “uh oh”, and “baba” (bottle).
As children continue to develop their speech system over time, and as their motor skills become more and more refined, they are continually adding in more and more phonemes. They can do more complex movements with their mouths, therefore, they can make a greater variety of sounds, including those that require refined control of the airflow from the lungs and coordinated movements of multiple articulators, as for /f/, “ch” and “r”.
Moving into preschool then school-age years, children also learn how to use their mouth for complex speech movements, such as production of consonant clusters, closed syllables and multisyllabic words, at a faster rate and with automaticity. This is not only important in pronouncing words correctly (by age 4, children are understood 100% of the time!), but also because the ability to produce a wide variety of sounds is crucial to language development. In English, an important example is the /s/ sound, which is also used as the plural and possessive morphemes.
Developmental norms largely guide the way a speech therapist assesses a child’s speech development, how they set goals and how they plan intervention. Speech therapists are concerned about how a child’s actual development matches what is typically expected given their age and languages they have been exposed to. In other words, the reference is the acquisition of phonemes, involving the journey through vocal and auditory development, babbling, sound production and language development. It’s very complex, yet humans around the world go through this process of acquiring speech and language regardless of whether they can read or not.
Speech acquisition = physical + cognitive development
Articulation Practice in Therapy
When a child’s speech does not appear to be developing in a way expected for their age, speech therapists may recommend therapy. How is therapy practice different from what they are already learning and doing in Phonics?
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Articulation therapy is based on remediating error patterns that would not be considered developmentally appropriate based on the child’s age. In other words, sessions focus mainly on the sounds produced in error.
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Activities are designed so that the child will produce a high number of correct repetitions of the sound– in isolation, words, or sentences. What is a high number of repetitions? For severe speech disorders, experts recommend over 70 correct repetitions during a 30 minute therapy session. That’s a lot!
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Articulation therapy may or may not involve the letter symbols. Although letters are often used as visual cues to remind the child of what sound to say and facilitate correct production, especially for children who have already learned to recognize letter symbols, the goal of the session is not usually related to letter recognition.
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Finally, articulation therapy may incorporate phonemic and phonological tasks that are frequently used in Phonics teaching, but again, typically focusing on the sound in error. For example, for a child who says the /w/ for /r/ (e.g. “I went for a walk and found a wock”), sorting /w/ and /r/ words by their initial sound would be an important part of intervention. This helps the child begin to tell the difference between the sounds, and is important since he has been producing /w/ and /r/ words indiscriminately.
In conclusion, though they differ in many ways, Phonics instruction and articulation therapy complement each other well for children who have speech disorders. Teachers or parents with questions regarding how these inputs might overlap or how speech therapists and educators can better coordinate their work are encouraged to reach out.
