Within the context of sound walls there is debate over whether or not we should use sound walls based on pictures to help students remember sounds (think “van” for “v”), just letters, or mouth articulation pictures. Tangentially, there is also a looming disagreement between word walls and sound walls, within the greater context of the Reading Wars debate. I have to admit, I was initially biased towards letters only sound walls. Personally, I started off my career as a high school teacher and truthfully, I think this has left me biased against anything that seems “cute”. Admittedly, my own classroom is often quite Spartan and I have never used either a word wall or a sound wall myself (I know blasphemy!)  

That being said I have found the articulation pictures especially hard to believe in, because they seem so removed from reading instruction. Biases disclosed, these mouth articulation pictures have recently become very popular to use with sound walls. However, I believe they likely originated from speech and language pathologists teaching students with speech difficulties and slowly made their way into the circulation for dyslexic students. Indeed, some of the older tutoring programs for dyslexic students, heavily feature mouth articulation videos. As I researched this issue, I reflected with many friends and colleagues in the industry and many of them assured me that my bias was incorrect. 

As I dove into the research. I started off by checking what Dr. Shanahan had to say on the issue, because truthfully, while I don’t always agree with everything he says, I do believe he is the leading authority in the world on the Science of Reading. He wrote an article on the topic of sound walls vs word walls in April of 2022 and he appeared to come to the conclusion that there had been no meaningful research conducted on the topic, writing “Research is mute on this issue.” He also seemed to believe that neither sound walls or word walls were particularly helpful. While his commentary was interesting, it did not necessarily directly answer my own questions.
 

I went to the Education Source and Scholars Portal databases and searched for experimental research on “sound walls”, “word walls”, and “mouth articulation and reading instruction”. I also put a call out on social media looking for experimental papers on the topic. I found no experimental papers on the topic of specifically sound walls or word walls. On the topic of articulation instruction, there were about 2 dozen papers, most were theoretical but three were experimental. To my pleasant surprise, two of the experimental papers were conducted by Dr. Linnea Ehri, et al, for whose work I have immense respect.

The most recent study was an RCT conducted in 2011. It was conducted on pre-k students in a wealthy American private school. The students were divided into three equated groups. In one group, the students received phonemic awareness instruction with letters and sound articulation pictures. In the second group the students received phonemic awareness instruction with letters. And in the third group the students received their business as usual instruction. (This is a phenomenal experimental design by the way!)  

The experiment conducted standarized tests, immediately after the intervention and again, 7 days afterwards. The original authors found a mean effect size of 1.25 for the letter picture articulation group and a mean effect size of .38 for phonemic awareness instruction, with just letters. However, I wanted to compare the effect of PA instruction combined with articulation training and just PA instruction to see if the letter articulation training added any benefits. I recalculated the effect sizes using a Hedge’s g calculation, with the combined group as the treatment group and the PA only group as the control group. To ensure accuracy, I had a second author review and independently recalculate all effect sizes, in the case of a disagreement, bother authors re-did their calculations and discussed to find consensus. I have summarized the results, in the below chart. Please note, I did not include the delayed results.