Three of the questions I most often receive are: 

• What do I think of the EBLI reading program?

• What do I think of a speech to print approach to phonics?

• Do I think a speech to print approach is better than a traditional phonics approach?
   

Truthfully, I think these are all very difficult questions to answer. However, I do think it is important to try and present answers as these are such widely asked questions. But to better answer these questions, let's start by discussing what is EBLI and what is a speech to print approach to phonics. 

 

EBLI stands for Evidence-Based Literacy Instruction. It is a speech to print phonics program created by Nora Chahbazi and inspired by Diane McGuinness. The EBLI program includes explicit instruction in vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, handwriting, writing, and spelling. The EBLI program is widely popular and has especially seen a growth in enthusiasm with the recent SOR movement. 

 

Speech to Print, sometimes referred to as linguistic phonics, is an approach to phonics in which instructors teach the possible graphemes (letter or letters representing a sound) a phoneme (a single unit of sound) can make. Comparatively, in most other phonics programs, an instructor presents a grapheme and teaches the sound it can make. Over the years, to better understand this issue, I have interviewed Dr. Steve Truch, Nora Chahbazi, and Nicole Ott. 

 

As I see it, a speech to print approach is really trying to address the same key problem that Dr. Pete Bowers presents with his criticisms of a traditional phonics approach: The English language does not consistently represent phonemes the same way. Therefore an overly simplified phonics code might create more confusion. For example, the phoneme /sh/ can be spelled by 20 different ways as identified to me by Nora Chahbazi. This means that proficient reading requires a great deal of cognitive flexibility. Speech to Print approaches try to build this concept right from the beginning. 

 

In a traditional phonics lesson, an instructor might start with the letter <A> and ask the students what sound the letter <A> makes then have the students list <A> words. In a speech to print program like EBLI, “the instructor says ‘We are going to look at different spellings that represent the /ai/ sound.’ Then a sort is done where students discover a variety of ways to spell this sound, with teacher support and by segmenting the sounds as they match the spellings for the various words.” (Chahbazi, 2023). 

 

As Nora pointed out to me, there is a lot of confusion around the speech to print terminology. To quote Nicole Ott: 

“Speech to print and print to speech have two definitions in common use. One is a process, and the other is an instructional method. Unfortunately, this twofold definition leads to some interesting discussions because people talking about speech to print can be talking about completely different things.

 

Print to speech and speech to print are both a process and an instructional method.

All decent reading programs use both processes: print to speech (blending) and speech to print (segmenting).

 

Process:

Print to speech:

The process of print to speech is blending sounds into a word.

 

Speech to print:

The process of speech to print is segmenting a word into sounds and putting those sounds on paper in the form of a written word.

 

Instructional method:

Print to Speech

Traditional reading programs using the Orton Gillingham method and other OG-like programs are known as a print to speech instructional method. These methods focus on print first. They concentrate on teaching letter names and letter sounds in isolation first before a student begins to read or spell. They teach spelling rules, exceptions, syllable types, and syllable rules to move from the written word to speech. Although OG and OG-like programs are called print to speech, they use both processes of speech to print (segmenting) and print to speech (blending).

Speech to Print

 

Programs like EBLI, Reading Simplified, Sounds-Write and a few others are referred to as speech to print instructional methods. These programs are also known as linguistic phonics or structured linguistic literacy. These programs focus on speech first. There are no rules and no syllable types. A child does not need to know letter names or sounds to begin building (segmenting and writing) his first word. Segment sounds first, write sounds next, and blend sounds back into a word is a common process in speech to print programs. Although programs like EBLI are called speech to print, they use both processes of speech to print (segmenting) and print to speech (blending).

 

The first part of Louisa Moat's book, Speech to Print, centers around the process of speech to print, but she describes the print to speech instructional method in the last part of her book. While EBLI instructors use the information in Moat's book about the process of speech to print, we would never use her instructional method, print to speech, with all its rules, syllable types, and high cognitive load for our students.

 

EBLI uses both print to speech and speech to print processes in its instruction, but it is a true speech to print instructional method.”

 

Due to the confusion around the Speech to Print terminology, some have begun to refer to this approach as Structured Linguistics Literacy. In order for a program to be classified as Structured Linguistics Literacy, it must meet Diane McGuinness’s 10 principles of instruction which according to John Walker are: 

 

“1. “No sight words (except high frequency words with rare spellings).”[These might be words like ‘of’, in which the spelling < f > represents the sound /v/. ‘Of’ is the only word in the English language in which /v/ is spelt using the spelling < f >.]

 

2. “No letter names.” [Letter names can be useful as a shortcut once pupils understand that the sounds in the English language are represented by spellings. This would usually be by the end of the first year of school, when they have learned the Initial/Basic Code.]

 

3. “Sound-to-print orientation. Phonemes, not letters, are the basis of the code.” [Start by teaching that sounds in simple, CVC words can be represented by single-letter spellings. Humans have been speaking for, at the very least, 100,000 years; writing, on the other hand, was only invented about 5,000 years ago. See also a previous post on this.]

 

4. “Teach phonemes only and no other sound units.” [The English alphabet system is based on the individual sounds of the language, not on larger units, such as onsets and rhymes. If a child has been taught that /b/ and /l/ are written < b > and < l >, why on earth would they be taught ‘bl’ as well?]

 

5. “Begin with an artificial transparent alphabet or basic code: a one-to-one correspondence between 40 phonemes and their most common spelling.”[This is one of the most crucial points made by McGuinness. Young children can easily be taught that the sounds in our language are represented by single-letter spellings. They are easy to introduce, easy to remember when spelling, and lack the complexity of digraphs, trigraphs and multigraphs.]

 

6. “Teach children to identify and sequence sounds in real words by segmenting and blending, using letters.” [By ‘using letters’, what McGuinness means is segmenting and blending in the context of written words, rather than doing this orally.]

 

7. “Teach children how to write each letter. Integrate writing into every lesson.” [Children should be taught carefully how to form each letter, though not in their phonics lessons (cognitive overload). When teachers neglect to teach letter formation from the start, like anything, correcting a fault can be very, very hard, especially when it has been practised to semi-permanency.]

 

8. “Link writing, spelling, and reading to ensure that children learn that the alphabet is a code, and that the code works in both directions: encoding/decoding.” [Reading and writing are two sides of the same coin. Of course, from a psychological point of view, writing is more difficult than reading because it draws on recall memory, rather than recognition memory.]

 

9. “Spelling should be accurate or, at a minimum, phonetically accurate (all things within reason).” [Once it dawns on (even quite young) children that they can represent the sounds in words in writing, they start to try and write anything and everything. Error correction should always be based on what the children have already learnt. For example, ‘frog’ spelt as ‘fog’ would need to be corrected but ‘Queen’ spelt as ‘Quen’ would not unless and until the spellings of the sound /ee/ had been taught.]

 

10. “Lessons should move on to include the advanced spelling code (the 136 remaining common spellings and 80 sight words).” [This probably takes the average child about two more years to learn. However, once learnt, it provides a strong base for learning less frequently encountered spellings, which, if taught in context, are easy to add to the repertoire. ]”

 

As I see it, there are 5 advantages to this type of approach:: 

1. The approach is more linguistically accurate

2. The approach is faster

3. The approach builds cognitive flexibility into the instructional model

4. It connects phonemic awareness and letter sound knowledge, within the same lesson

5. It connects decoding with reading, within the same lesson.

 

That said, I do see one possible theoretical disadvantage. By using the speech to print model, you are inherently teaching a far more complex, albeit accurate version of the phonetic code. While traditional phonics typically teaches a much simpler version of the code. Of course, the idea behind traditional phonics might not be to teach the entire phonics code but rather to teach a sort of “cheat sheet” to decoding, so as to quickly allow faster access to reading new words. I therefore wonder if the speech to print method is inherently more cognitively demanding. However, many scholars in the Speech to Print area seem to thoroughly object to this specific criticism. 

 

Nora Chahbazi, reached out to me to discuss this issue of the potential impact on cognitive load and said, “Cognitive load with EBLI and other Structured Linguistic Literacy/S2P/Linguistic Phonic programs actually LIGHTEN the cognitive load (a lot). The lack of phonics rules, syllable division rules, letter names, and more are what lighten the load.” She also referred me to an article by John Walker, creator of the Sounds-Write speech to print phonics program, which I will link in the references section. 

 

When I interviewed Nicole Ott, she presented me with a speech to print lesson which was admittedly, a humbling experience, as my knowledge of linguistics was far lower than hers, and I truly struggled. That said, I think she intentionally gave me a difficult lesson to model what the process would feel like as a student. After this lesson was done, Nora Chabazi told me, “With EBLI we always ensure struggle then provide guidance to correct errors or struggles. If the work is too easy or already known, we increase the difficulty of words used in instruction. Rather than being about knowledge, the lessons in SLL are about teaching and helping all learners apply the skills of PA and the processes to match speech sounds to letters/graphemes to, as quickly as possible, accurately and automatically read and spell-reading and spelling are taught at the same time as they are reversible.”  I must say, I like the speech to print approach. It addresses a difficult problem with the linguistics of the English language. The approach is also much more flexible and easy to adapt for older students unlike traditional phonics instruction. Of course, long time followers of this blog will know that I don’t place a great deal of value on qualitative arguments. But rather, I want to know what the experimental evidence shows.

 

Previously, when I have been asked about the speech to print approach, I have pointed people towards the studies on the program “Targeted Reading Intervention” (TRI), which is the experimental basis for the linguistics phonics program, Reading Simplified. Upon request, Marnie Ginsberg, the creator of Reading Simplified, sent me 5 high quality, TRI RCTs and 2 high quality quasi-experimental studies, all of which used standardized assessments, and collectively showed a mean effect size of .45. These studies were all on grades K-1 and had an average sample size of 418. I conducted an additional search for studies on TRI, using the Education Source database and found no additional studies. This effect size is ever so slightly, higher than the NRP mean for phonics, and my meta-analysis for structured literacy programs. However, typically higher quality studies show lower effect sizes and the TRI studies are some of the highest quality phonics studies I have read. Which is why it's one of the programs I would be most willing to endorse.