Teacher Awareness Series II: Article One – Alphabet Knowledge and Letter Names

by Jean Schedler, Ph.D. Educational Consultant

Alphabet Knowledge and Letter Names

Welcome to the first of six articles in Teacher Awareness Series II. If you are just now joining us in reading the Teacher Awareness Series, I would encourage you to visit the five articles that comprised Teacher Awareness Series I via the Eduvac website.

Teacher Awareness Series I facilitated us in becoming more aware or sensitive to the unique abilities of our student to attend or pay attention during class.

Teacher Awareness Series II builds upon this knowledge and sensitivity to individual students in ones classroom; and our ability as teachers to change what we do to begin to address these needs.

It is critical to “begin at the beginning”, when exploring underlying skills that may be giving struggling students difficulty. Better to “begin at the beginning” and confirm the existence of skills – than to make assumptions and begin too high and have the student continue to experience failure.

The beginning is the letters (graphemes) that are used to represent the sounds of our language. These letters are known as The Alphabet. It has been proven (Chall, 1996) that the ease or difficulty with which a student acquires letter knowledge reliably predicts how easily and successfully the student will learn to read.

It is often assumed that students six years and older, already know the alphabet – this is a dangerous assumption for teachers to make.

Students may often be able to sing-the-alphabet; but are unable to say-the-alphabet. Students often run letter names together (l-m-n-o) and think that is a single letter name; or omit a letter (l-m-p); or insert a letter (x-y-n-z).

There are many fun classroom activities to do to practice the alphabet. The important piece when practising is to always have an alphabet strip clearly visible (on the wall, poster or student desk) for students to refer to should they need it. This is called “structuring for success”.

Some alphabet activities are: to recite in unison the alphabet; put plastic magnet letters into alphabetic sequence, have students match upper and lower case manuscript letters in alphabetic order.

When the students line-up, or they are sitting in a circle or at their desks – go around and have each student say a word starting with “a”. Again – be sure to have an easily visible alphabet strip available for students to refer to before their turn. We want to structure for success and have the students experience success as we practise the skill.

Once students are accurate reciting the alphabet, then take the letters out of sequence and have the student(s) name each letter (say just the letter name, not the letter sound just yet). Older students often are able to say the alphabet, but may struggle with labelling individual letters such as “q”, “x”, “w”, or “j”. Again – the focus right now is the ability to say/provide just the letter name when shown an individual letter.

A suggested activity is to post the letters in random order on a poster and have the students take turns naming the letters left to right. Or use the plastic letters and have the students shake and dump the letters, line them up in random order and then name the letters. Students could do this independently or as a team.

This week’s task is to have your entire class recite the alphabet in unison, to listen to several of your successful students recite the alphabet and name letters in random order and then to have several of your struggling students do the same.

The purpose is to begin to recognise the wide range of basic skills that exists in your classroom, and empower you to begin to fill some of the gaps.