EQUIPPED FOR

READING SUCCESS

A Comprehensive, Step-By-Step Program

for Developing Phonemic Awareness
and Fluent Word Recognition

David A. Kilpatrick, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Psychology
State University of New York, College at Cortland
School Psychologist
East Syracuse-Minoa Central Schools
EQUIPPED FOR READING SUCCESS:
A Comprehensive, Step by Step Program for
Developing Phonemic Awareness and Fluent Word Recognition

Copyright © 2016 by David A. Kilpatrick, Ph.D.

A previous edition was printed under the title:

WORD MAPPING AND PHONEMIC AWARENESS:
A Training Manual for Developing Fluent Word Identification (2002)
The present edition is expanded and fully revised

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, or by any information storage or retrieval system
without permission in writing from the author.
The exception to this notice is that the owners of this manual can
photocopy Appendices A and C for individual classroom use.

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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

 CHAPTER 2

UNDERSTANDING
PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS

The findings from countless research studies have been consistent and clear: Students with
good phonological awareness are in a great position to become good readers, while students
with poor phonological awareness almost always struggle in reading. Poor phonological
awareness is the most common cause of poor reading. Reading problems can be prevented if
all students are trained in letter-sound skills and phonological awareness, starting in
kindergarten. You may have heard there is a neurological/genetic basis for reading difficulties.
This is accurate. This is apparently because phonological awareness difficulties often have a
genetic basis. However, the good news is that despite their neuro-developmental origin, these
difficulties are preventable and correctable.

Auditory skills or phonological skills?

Some students with learning difficulties are described as having auditory problems.
Auditory refers to all of the sounds we hear, while phonological refers only to the sounds of
spoken language. Students with learning problems do not typically have auditory problems
unrelated to speech sounds. They can understand and produce spoken language because their
phonological issues relate to parts of words, not whole words. However, reading is a struggle
for them because our alphabet is designed to encode parts of words, and they struggle to
connect parts of spoken language to their alphabetic forms. In sum, such individuals have
phonological difficulties, not general auditory difficulties.1

Phonological Awareness or Phonemic Awareness?

Phonological awareness is an umbrella category. Phonemic awareness is a specific skill
under that umbrella. Phonological awareness includes all of the following:

•Word Awareness •Rhyme awareness •Phoneme Awareness

•Syllable Awareness •Alliteration & Initial Sound Awareness

The difference between the two can be defined as follows:

Phonological awareness: The ability to recognize and manipulate the sound properties of spoken words,
such as syllables, initial sounds, rhyming parts, and phonemes.
Phoneme awareness: The ability to recognize and manipulate individual phonemes in spoken words.

1
So, saying these students have “auditory difficulties” is somewhat imprecise.

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Chapter 2

From this we see that phonemic awareness is a specific type of phonological awareness. In
fact, it is the type of phonological awareness that is necessary for proficiency in reading. The
other types of phonological awareness provide the foundation for phonemic awareness. By
themselves, these easier phonological skills do not result in skilled reading. Many children
with reading difficulties lack phonemic awareness, but they can demonstrate the easier
phonological awareness skills.

What is a phoneme?
The word phoneme comes from the Greek word phonos, which means, “sound” or “voice.”
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in spoken words. In our alphabet, written letters are
designed to represent the phonemes used in spoken language. For example, the word sat has
three phonemes (/s/ /a/ /t/).2 It also has three letters. Each letter represents one phoneme.
However, letters and phonemes are not the same thing. Phonemes are oral and letters are
written. Phonemes are the smallest parts of oral words. Letters are the smallest parts of written
words.
Often, phonemes and letters do not match up. For example, there are four letters in bake,
but only three phonemes (/b/ /A/3 /k/). In the printed word shoe, there are four letters, but the
oral word has only two phonemes (i.e., two sounds). The sh represents one sound and the
vowels oe team up to make one sound. Thus, four letters represent two phonemes. So bake and
shoe do not have a one-to-one match between letters and phonemes. Teachers and parents
must understand the difference between phonemes and letters to successfully train phonemic
awareness. Remember: phonemes are oral and letters are written.
Many words have the same number of phonemes as letters (e.g., van, red, Tom, sit, told,
splash). However, in many words there is a different number of letters and phonemes (e.g.,
bike, then, boat, tree). Try this quiz. How many phonemes are in these words?

time ___ loose ___ new ___ guess ___ best ___ though ___ box ___

How did you do? See the footnote below for the answers.4 Notice how the words guess and
loose use five letters to represent only three phonemes. Also, guess and yes share the last two
sounds, but represent those sounds with a different number of letters. Two words of interest
are are though and box. The word though5 uses six letters to represent only two phonemes!
Box has three letters but four sounds/phonemes. This is because the letter x is the only letter
that has two sounds in it (/k/ /s/; consider that Boston’s baseball team is named the Red Sox,
not Red Socks, and fax rhymes with snacks). These examples illustrate the difference between
letters and phonemes. Normally they match up, but in English, they often do not.

2
Slash marks on each side of letters mean I am referring to the sound represented by that letter, not the letter itself.
3
A capitalized vowel between slash marks (e.g., /A/) represents the vowel’s “long” sound.
4
Time = 3; loose = 3; new = 2; guess = 3; best = 4; though = 2; box = 4.
5
Keep in mind that the digraphs sh, th, ch, wh, ph, and gh each represent a single phoneme.
— 14 —
 Understanding Phonological Awareness

What is the difference between phonics and phonemic awareness?

Often confused, phonics and phonemic are quite different. Phonemic awareness was
discovered in the 1950s-1960s in the fields of linguistics and speech pathology. It deals with
spoken language. By contrast, phonics was developed nearly 200 years ago in the field of
education. It deals with written language. Below is a description that helps distinguish the two:
• PHONICS has to do with the printed language. It deals with the letters and the various sounds
represented by those letters. It is a strategy for sounding-out words. It is an academic skill.
• PHONEMIC AWARENESS has to do with sounds in spoken words. It has nothing directly to do
with letters.6 It is an awareness of the sounds in spoken language. It is a mental/linguistic skill.

A good way to remember the difference between the two is that you can do phonemic
awareness with your eyes closed but you cannot do phonics with your eyes closed. Phonemic
awareness deals with oral input, phonics with visual input. Table 2.2 presents the differences.
There are many instances in which phonics and phonemic awareness are inconsistent with
one another. If you spell make backwards, you get ekam. But if you say the word make
backwards, you get the word came. Think about it. The first sound in make is /m/, followed by
the long a sound (/A/), and finally the /k/ sound. Reverse the order of those sounds and you get
/k/ /A/ /m/, that is, came. This doesn’t work when you do phonics backwards, but it works
when you say the sounds backwards. While they differ in various ways, phonics and phonemic
awareness are both needed for students to become successful readers. How this is the case will
be explained in Chapter 4.

Field of Origin Domain Skill Type Role in Reading7

PHONICS Education Written Academic Sounding out

Language new words

PHONEMIC Linguistics/ Spoken Mental/ Supports word

AWARENESS Speech Pathology Language Linguistic storage and
phonics
TABLE 2.2
KEY DIFFERENCES BETWEEN PHONICS AND PHONEMIC AWARENESS

What does “awareness” mean in the term phonemic awareness?

By age one, most children can tell the difference between two words that differ by only one
phoneme. For example, they can distinguish between us and up, or toy and boy, or came and
game. Each word in these word pairs differs by one phoneme. Speech pathologists call this

6
Phonemic awareness is certainly related to reading but the connection to letters is indirect. For example, the oral
sound /z/ can be represented by different letters, like s (has, is) or z. Phonological awareness is about
understanding and being aware of the sounds we make when we say words. The minute you introduce letters, you
have left the realm of phonological awareness and entered the realm of phonics.
7
This is a slight oversimplification. The letter-sound element of phonics is critical for permanent word storage, but
the phonic rules are not. Also, phonemic awareness appears to assist with sounding out new words.

– 15 –
Chapter 2

phoneme discrimination. However, it is not until age 6 or 7 that children can understand why
these words sound different from one other. Understanding why words sound different is
phonemic awareness. One of the earliest reports on phonemic awareness was from 1963 in
The Journal of Soviet Psychology and Psychiatry.8 The report describes a dialog between a
researcher and two school children. The first child was four-year-old Sasha:
Researcher: What’s your name?
Sasha: Sasha
Researcher: Nice to meet you Asha
Sasha: But my name is Sasha.
Researcher: That’s what I said, ‘Asha,’ right?
Sasha: No, you said ‘Asha’ but my name is ‘Sasha’
Researcher: But aren’t those the same, ‘Sasha’ and ‘Asha’?
Sasha: No!
Researcher: Then how are they different? They sound the same to me.
Sasha: (no response).
Sasha could not tell him why the names were different. She knew the two names sounded
different, but had no idea why. Next, we are told of a first grade boy by the name of Igor.
Researcher: What’s your name?
Igor: Igor.
Researcher: Nice to meet you Gor.
Igor: No, my name is ‘Igor,’ not ‘Gor,’ you forgot the I at the beginning.
Igor immediately knew why the names were different. This illustrates the awareness part of
phonemic awareness. Both children had good phonemic discrimination—they immediately
noticed the difference between their names and the names the researcher used. However, only
the first grader knew why the names were different. Sasha did not have phonemic awareness.
She was not aware of why the names sounded different. Being aware of the individual
phonemes is not necessary to understand the flow of spoken language. But when oral language
gets matched up with written letters, phoneme awareness becomes a necessity (see Chapter 4).
Important Note: If you suspect a student has difficulty with phonemic discrimination, refer
that student to the school nurse and a speech pathologist. Impaired phonemic discrimination
can affect both reading and general language development.

But don’t most children read well without phonemic awareness training?
Absolutely! About 60% to 70% of children develop phonemic awareness very naturally,
without being taught. Other children will never develop those skills unless they are directly
taught. Yet phonemic awareness is not “optional” if one wants to be a good reader. It’s just
that some students develop it naturally as they learn to read, while others do not.

8
Russian speech pathologists discovered phoneme awareness in the 1950s. The connection between phonemic
awareness and reading emerged in the late 1960s from the husband-wife team of Alvin Liberman, a linguistics
professor at Yale, and Isabel Liberman, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Connecticut.
— 16 —
 Understanding Phonological Awareness

Phonemic awareness and intelligence

There is only a small correlation between phonemic awareness and IQ scores. Some
children with low IQs develop good phoneme awareness and become good word readers. They
often don’t understand what they read, however. By contrast, there are many students with
average to above average IQs who have poor phonemic awareness. These students represent
the dyslexic or compensator type of poor readers mentioned in Chapter 1. Such students are
puzzling to teachers and parents because of our intuitive assumption that if a student is “smart
enough,” he or she should be able to easily learn to read.

Which children should receive phonological/phonemic awareness training?

Starting in kindergarten, all children should receive phonological awareness training. This
is due to the fact that not every child who is destined to have phonemic awareness problems
can be identified in kindergarten.9 If all children are trained starting in kindergarten, potential
reading difficulties can be prevented or minimized. This prevention effect has been
demonstrated in many studies. By training all children starting in kindergarten, fewer children
struggle later. This manual provides everything needed for such training.
Second, typical first and second graders can learn to read more quickly and efficiently
when they are trained in phonemic awareness. All schools are interested in boosting the
performance of their “average” students. Early phonological awareness training is a great way
to do it. This would allow students to focus more on comprehension earlier in their reading
careers because they can more quickly build a large sight vocabulary.
Finally, there are many bright students who never develop to their potential because
teachers are not aware these students have phonemic awareness difficulties. These are the
compensators mentioned in the previous chapter. With much effort and compensation, these
bright children perform average to low average in word-level reading. But because their
overall reading comprehension is average, they normally do not receive extra help. They
simply underachieve relative to their potential. Training all students in phonemic awareness
could prevent much of this type of problem (see Chapter 13).

Which ages or grades should receive training?

Training the most basic phonological awareness skills (e.g., rhyming, alliteration, first
sound awareness, and syllable segmentation) can start in pre-school. This would involve
reading stories that contain rhyming and alliteration and various word games. One British
study demonstrated that children with exposure to the classic nursery rhymes in preschool
were better readers by the end of second grade than children without such exposure. This was
true even though the two groups were matched for socioeconomic status. Thus, reading stories
with rhyming and alliteration may help develop phonological awareness. Other studies have

9
Most basic phonological awareness problems can be detected as early as the first half of kindergarten, before
reading problems have a chance to develop. However, not all children with this problem can be detected early.

– 17 –
Chapter 2

also shown this link. Children who are read to in preschool (and beyond) tend to have stronger
letter knowledge and phonological awareness than children who were not.10
Formal approaches to training phonological awareness can start with kindergarteners,
including rhyming, alliteration and clapping out syllables. This should start in early in the
kindergarten year. Children should arrive at first grade with the phonological awareness they
need to efficiently acquire reading.11
Phonological awareness continues to develop along with early reading skills. All students
should get phonological awareness training through the end of second grade. After second
grade, students should be screened for phonemic awareness skills using phonological
manipulation activities (see Chapter 7). If a student seems to have mastered these skills and is
doing a fine job reading, then further training is unnecessary. However, students who have not
mastered these skills should get training. There is no age where a student is “too old” for
phonemic awareness training—if the skills have not been mastered, the student should get
training. Research has shown that older, struggling readers almost always have difficulties in
phonemic awareness that were never addressed. Such individuals will continue to struggle
with reading until this difficulty is corrected.
High school students and adults who are weak in phonemic awareness (and therefore weak
readers) should get training. In our public middle schools, high schools and colleges, students
who are weak readers are provided with strategies to “work around” their weak reading skills.
It is assumed that if they have not developed proficient reading by that point, they won’t ever
develop it. However, as mentioned, these students almost always have phonemic awareness
difficulties that were never detected or trained. This is a perfectly correctable cause of their
difficulties, and we are unknowingly letting them continue to struggle when they really do not
need to. There is no statute of limitations on training phonemic awareness skills when they are
weak If students at any age are poor readers, check their phonemic awareness skills, and
address them if they are inadequate.

Summary
Phonemic awareness is a linguistic skill that is essential for learning to read. It is different
from phonics, though the two are both important for reading. Phonemic awareness works
alongside phonics to allow children to master the skill of word recognition. Phonemic
awareness is arguably the most common source of reading difficulties. The good news is that
it is trainable. This manual provides everything needed for that training.

10
For most children, phonemic awareness difficulties have a genetic basis. There are many children whose parents
read to them in their early years yet they still struggle in reading. The good news is that even phonological
awareness difficulties of genetic origin generally respond to direct phonological awareness training.
11
This assumes the reading approach is developmentally appropriate, which most are not (see Chapter 5).
— 18 —
 CHAPTER 4

ORTHOGRAPHIC MAPPING AND

SIGHT WORD LEARNING:
WHY WE NEED PHONEMIC AWARENESS

Phonemic awareness is a critical cognitive/linguistic skill needed to store words for

immediate, effortless retrieval. The connection between phonemic awareness and permanent
word storage is not the least bit obvious. Our intuitions ask, “Isn’t phonemic awareness
auditory and our memory for words visual?” In this chapter, you will learn what scientists
have discovered about how words are stored. You will also see why phonological abilities are
so important in this process. The focus will be on phonemic awareness and not phonological
awareness. This is because storing words in permanent memory requires phoneme level skills.
In education, the term sight word has at least three meanings.1 We will be using only one.
A sight word is a familiar written word that we recognize instantly, automatically, and
effortlessly, without sounding it out or guessing. It doesn’t matter if the word is phonically
regular or irregular. The point is that a word is immediately recognized. A sight word
vocabulary (or simply sight vocabulary), refers to all of the words a student knows instantly
and automatically. Phonemic awareness plays a central role in building a student’s sight
vocabulary. This may seem puzzling because most people assume that we store words based
on visual memory. However, we will see how scientists have shown that this is not the case.

What scientists used to think about how we store words

Until recently, almost everyone thought that we store words by having some type of visual
image of every word we know. This assumption is based upon strong intuitive evidence. It
feels like we are rapidly accessing words from a visual storage bank of some sort. As soon as
we see words, they look familiar so we recognize them as quickly as we recognize other visual
input like objects or faces.2 The process would look something like this:

1
The term sight word is used by many to refer to irregular words that cannot be easily sounded-out. We will call
those words “irregular words” or “exception words.” Sight word has also been used to refer to a type of reading
approach, the sight word approach, which has also been called the whole word, look-say or basal approach.
2
Actually, good readers can recognize printed words faster than objects and colors! This speed difference was
discovered and reported in a scientific journal about 130 years ago (Cattell, 1886). It was an early, unrecognized
clue that word recognition does not use the same memory process as visually remembering objects.

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Chapter 4

We see a Visual Word

written vocabulary meaning is
word is activated retrieved

FIGURE 4.1
A TRADITIONAL VIEW OF SIGHT-WORD MEMORY AND RETREIVAL

It was assumed this visual memory system contained all the familiar visual images of the
words we know. Almost everyone believed some version of this theory, but it turns out that
everyone was wrong! Despite the strong intuitive appeal and widespread acceptance, scientific
research has demonstrated that this view is incorrect. There are several types of research
findings that disproved the “visual memory” theory of word storage. I will describe one.
Researchers had college students read words in mixed case (e.g., every other letter in each
word was uppercase; WoRdS lOoKeD lIkE this). The researchers reasoned that because mixed
case words do not match a previously stored visual image, students would have to slow down
to identify the words. Not surprisingly, the adult readers (i.e., college students) identified the
mixed case words more slowly than normally printed words. At first, researchers thought this
supported the “visual memory” view. Later studies, however, showed that the slower pace was
because the students were not accustomed to seeing words printed in this unusual manner.3 So
they trained the students using a set of mixed case words so they would get used to seeing
words printed that way. After the training, students read a fresh pool of words they had never
seen in mixed case. The students were able to recognize these new words in mixed case as fast
as they could recognize those same words in normal print! This convinced the researchers that
these readers were not matching those words to stored visual images because they had never
seen those specific test words printed that way before.4 Something else was going on.
Years ago, I had an experience that illustrates this finding. By late second grade, my second
son Kevin was a fluent reader. We had borrowed some Calvin & Hobbes comic strip books.
Kevin had no previous exposure to comic strips. Yet with his first try, he read them aloud as
quickly and fluently as he read anything else. This surprised me because comic strips are
written in all capitals! There was no way Kevin had seen all those words before in all capitals
so that he could have already stored visual images of them. Something else was going on.

3
We have all experienced this when we get a wedding invitation or graduation announcement and it uses a very
ornate font. It is difficult to read the first few words or sentences, but by the end we adjust and can read it just fine.
4
In a different study, researchers flashed mixed-case words on a screen very quickly (1/20th of a second), just fast
enough to be seen and processed. Students had no difficulty recognizing the words. Many students didn’t even
notice that the words were mixed case. A few students argued with the scientists, insisting the words were not
mixed case! Thus, it was the the specific order of the letters that allowed them to identify the words. That letter
order apparently registered in their brain faster than a conscious awareness of the physical way the letters were
printed. So the letter order was important for recognizing the word while how the word actually looked was not.

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 Orthographic Mapping and Sight Word Learning

One thing we know isn’t going on when we read that quickly is phonic decoding. There is
no way Kevin (or those college students) could “sound-out” and blend words that quickly. If
they were not sounding out these words, and they were not retrieving a visual image, then
something entirely different was involved. It had to be something that was not very obvious at
all. It was something that had escaped reading researchers for nearly a century. But one thing
was certain. We are not simply retrieving a visual image of every word we read.

Challenging the belief that word recognition is based on visual memory

Most people assume that words are stored in visual memory. Many teaching approaches
presume this. We assume that if students see the words enough, they will learn them. This is
not true. Children with reading problems often cannot remember new words, even after many
exposures. When they finally learn new words, they may forget them over school breaks or
even long weekends. We mistakenly blame their visual memories. Meanwhile, average readers
learn new words very quickly. Good readers only need one to five exposures to new words to
learn them. Then, once learned, they don’t forget them.
I believe this assumption that we store words based on visual memory is a major reason
why we have widespread reading difficulties in our country. Until we properly understand
how to promote permanent word storage, we will continue to have many weak readers. Listed
below are several factors that demonstrate how scientists know that we do not remember
words based on “visual memory.” The list is not exhaustive, but should establish the point:
1) As described above, mixed case experiments have demonstrated that we are not retrieving words
from a visual memory bank.
2) Closely related to the first is the everyday phenomenon of reading words fluently in various fonts
and typestyles, all capitals (like comics), and a wide variety of people’s personal handwriting,
whether their handwriting is cursive or manuscript. It is difficult to believe that that we have a visual
memory for all those versions of all the words we know.
3) A footnote above indicated that about 130 years ago it was discovered that word recognition is
faster than visual recognition of objects. Participants in the study said, “chair” faster when they saw
the word chair than when they saw a picture of a chair. This provided an early hint that visual object
recognition and word recognition may not involve the same mental process.
4) If word reading involves accessing visual memory, we would expect that children with reading
problems would have poor visual memory. This is not the case. Research since the 1970s has shown
that as a group, children with reading disabilities alone (i.e., they have no math or other learning
difficulties) generally perform as well on visual memory tasks as children who are good readers.
5) There is only a very small statistical correlation between visual memory skills and sight
vocabulary. By contrast, there is a huge statistical correlation between phonemic awareness and sight
vocabulary. If word reading is based upon visual memory, why would an auditory/phonological skill
like phonemic awareness correlate far more strongly with word recognition than with visual memory
skills? This finding suggests that visual memory is not a major component of word recognition.
While visual memory does not contribute much to word recognition, it does contribute to other
aspects of reading (see below).
6) Studies using high-tech brain scanning techniques indicate that the regions of the brain activated
when performing the visual memory task of naming objects (a chair, a house, a fork, etc.) differ from

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Chapter 4

the regions activated when naming familiar or unfamiliar written words. This finding is not consistent
with the view that reading involves the retrieval of visual images of words.
7) Research on the deaf population is inconsistent with the visual memory view of word reading.
Most students who are deaf graduate high school with about a third to fourth grade reading level. If
reading was based on visual memory, those who are deaf should not be so impaired in reading. Thus,
there are is no alternative “visual memory” approach the deaf population uses for efficient word
recognition.5
8) Consider the fact that we all temporarily forget the names of common objects or familiar people.
We “block” on them and it is frustrating. Consider how we occasionally block on the names of people
we’ve known for years. By contrast, we do not forget printed words. When a familiar word is sitting
in front of us, we do not block on it like we do in other visual memory situations. Reading is not like
visual memory – something different is going on.
9) Scientists who study visual memory (unrelated to reading) have shown that we do not have a
precise enough visual memory for efficient word storage. Our visual memory system is not capable of
storing 40,000 to 90,000 words for immediate retrieval. Consider the following examples:
Here’s a visual memory quiz: In what direction(s) are the presidents facing on a penny, nickel, dime,
and quarter? Researchers have tested adults’ visual memories for such things and find it is far weaker
than people realize. We have been exposed to those coins hundreds of times, and most people cannot
correctly guess the proper direction of all four of them! How can we expect to remember thousands of
words—many that look very similar to each other (e.g., black, block, blink, bleak, brick, brink, break,
broke, brisk, brush, blush, etc.)? Our visual memories are neither precise enough nor efficient enough for
that type of visual information (strings of letters). Many types of visual-spatial experiments have
demonstrated similar results. We overrate our visual memory, plain and simple.
When you look up a phone number, it is a visual task. The number is visual and your response is
visual-motor (touching the phone’s keypad). If our visual memories were so good that we could
remember 40,000 to 90,000 words for immediate retrieval, then remembering a visual image of a phone
number for 15 seconds should be very easy. But it is not. We translate that visual number out of the visual
realm and into the auditory realm (we repeat it out loud or in our heads). Then we translate it back into
the visual realm as we dial the number. Our visual memory is relatively weak and imprecise for
6
sequences of numbers and letters. So, we must translate out of the visual mode to remember the number.

Does visual memory play any role in reading?

The section above demonstrates that we do not store words based primarily upon visual
memory. However, visual-perceptual skills, including visual memory, play important roles in
other aspects of the reading process. The following are some of these aspects:
Alphabet recognition. Learning the alphabet letter names and letter sounds is based on visual-
phonological memory. Children need to learn that the letter m makes the /m/ sound, and s makes the /s/
sound, etc. There is nothing about those little squiggly figures we call letters that would suggest any

5
It is encouraging that some researchers have had recent success with developing phonological awareness in people
with profound deafness. Interestingly, their innovative techniques are linguistically based, and use multisensory
techniques to develop those linguistic abilities (e.g., finger spelling, attention to verbal articulation and segmenting
of speech sounds). Also, students with cochlear implants who are able to perceive the phonemes in language often
develp normal reading skills.

6
The example of the phone number deals with our temporary working memory buffer, while remembering words
involves our long-term memory. However, similar results have been found with both types of memory.

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 Orthographic Mapping and Sight Word Learning

given sound—it is all a matter of visual-phonological memorization. Also, visual memory is required to
distinguish the letters b, d, q, and p. So, visual memory is absolutely essential for letter learning. But
notice the difference between letter learning and word learning. For good readers, it only takes one to
five exposures to new words and they are remembered. However, with letters, it takes children hundreds
of exposures for a letter to become fully automatic in memory. Another interesting point is that this
visual memory aspect of learning letters is typically not the culprit when children stuggle remembering
their letter names or sounds. Recent studies have shown that it is the phonological aspect of this visual-
phonological learning that is the problem.
Reading comprehension. There is a correlation between visual memory and reading comprehension.
Presumably, if you can create a good mental visual-spatial representation of what is going on in the
reading, you are better able to understand it. Also, such a representation may assist in later recall.7

So, visual-spatial-perceptual memory is likely to be a contributor to at least two aspects of

the reading process (letter learning and reading comprehension). However, it must be made
clear that there is no evidence that visual memory directly contributes to word recognition or
reading fluency. As outlined above, we have enough evidence to dismiss the ingrained notion
that we store words based upon visual memory. We need to stop teaching our children to read
using methods based upon a faulty understanding of the reading process. However, this
discredited view is still held by almost everyone in elementary and special education and it
drives our teaching practices. Adherence to this traditional view will guarantee that we will
continue to have widespread reading failure. We will not improve the performance of poor
readers until we adopt a proper understanding of how we store words.
How then do we store words? We will now turn to this question.

What scientists now think—the discovery of Orthographic Mapping

Orthographic mapping is the mental process we use to permanently store words for
immediate, effortless retrieval. Orthographic mapping is the process minds use to take an
unfamiliar printed word and turn it into an immediately recognizable sight word. Orthographic
mapping occurs fairly naturally and “behind the scenes” for most students. Simply expose
children to literacy activities and over time they will learn to “map” words to permanent
memory. In the research, orthographic mapping has gone by various terms like direct
mapping, the bonding hypothesis, unitization, the amalgamization hypothesis, or the
representation hypothesis. However, the developer of the theory now calls it “orthographic
mapping.”
Having a good understanding of how words are stored will determine what we teach, and
how we teach it. When a student’s orthographic mapping skills improve, his or her sight
vocabulary grows. This leads to improvements in reading fluency and reading comprehension.
So orthographic mapping is critical to reading fluency and comprehension.

7
Several studies in the research suggest that visual-spatial-perceptual skills influence reading comprehension.
However, most researchers agree that more study of this needs to occur before they reach any conclusions.
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Chapter 4

An overview of Orthographic Mapping

When people talk, the words they say are represented by sequences of sounds. We
immediately recognize those sound sequences as familiar words. It works lightning fast and
looks something like this:

Sound
We hear a sequences Oral
recognized vocabulary Meaning is
sequence
and matched is activated retrieved
of sounds
to stored
sounds

FIGURE 4.2
ACCESSING WORD MEANINGS IN LISTENING

We have a highly organized and efficient oral/mental filing system that allows us to
instantly access the words that we hear. Our oral dictionaries are very fast. If they weren’t, we
would struggle to understand spoken language. The stream of sounds that we hear activates
our oral/mental dictionaries. If someone speaks in an unfamiliar language, that stream of
syllables is meaningless to us. Those sounds find no matches in our oral filing system.
The big discovery regarding orthographic mapping is that this oral “filing system” is the
foundation of the “filing system” we use for reading words. We have no “visual dictionary”
for reading that runs alongside our oral dictionary. I suspect that the reason this idea was not
obvious to researchers for the last 100 years is simple: speech is auditory and reading is visual.
Because reading involves visual input, everyone presumed that it also involved visual storage.
However, input and storage are not the same thing. Like in the example from earlier in the
chapter, we may input a phone number visually, but we store it auditorily.
To understand orthographic mapping you must understand the concepts of meaningful
letter strings and familiar letter strings. A meaningful letter string is a sequence of letters in a
meaningful order. For example, USA is a meaningful letter string because it stands for the
United States of America. Those same letters in a different order are not meaningful letter
strings (i.e., UAS or SUA). They are not meaningful because they are not in the order of the
words they represent. There are two types of meaningful letter strings, 1) familiar and 2)
unfamiliar. A familiar letter string is a string of letters that you immediately recognize, based
on past experience. Consider the following “letter strings”:

Meaningful letter strings Random strings of letters

Familiar strings Unfamiliar strings (not meaningful or familiar)
___________________________________________________________
FBI NFL NASP IEEE QNZ STE
SPCA IRS SSSR SBE BASM RWR
TABLE 4.1
EXAMPLES OF TYPES OF LETTER STRINGS
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 Orthographic Mapping and Sight Word Learning

For those who live in the United States, the first group of letter strings in Table 4.1 should
be familiar.8 They are acronyms for four organizations in the United States. These strings of
letters are meaningful because each letter in the string stands for a word (e.g., FBI stands for
Federal Bureau of Investigation). As acronyms, these letter strings gain their meaningfulness
because the letters represent the first letters of each word in the organization’s name.
The letter strings in the second column also represent organizations. These letter strings are
probably not familiar to the reader because the reader is probably not familiar with these
organizations (e.g., SSSR stands for the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading).9 Because
they are acronyms, these letter strings are meaningful. However, the letter sequences in the
second column are not familiar letter strings to most readers. They are not familiar because the
reader does not have past experience with them. The letter strings in the first and second
columns are equally meaningful (they are all acronyms), but they are not equally familiar.
Once familiar, these letter strings become unitized. That is, we treat that sequence of letters
like a unit. For example, when we see FBI, we do not say “Hmm, F – B – I . . . Oh, FBI!” No,
we see the letter string FBI and instantly know what it is. It is familiar to us, while FBU, or
MBI are not familiar. we no longer have to consciously focus on the “parts” of the FBI letter
string. Rather, we recognize that sequence of letters as a unit. However, any change in that
sequence throws us off, as the examples FBU or MBI illustrate. So, it is the sequence of letters
in that specific order that becomes familiar to us, and that sequence is made up of a precise set
of individual letters, in a precise order, regardless of the “look” of the sequence (i.e., in what
font it is printed or in whose handwriting it is written).
The last column contains random letter strings. As far as I know, they don’t mean anything.
They are non-meaningful, so there is almost no chance they are familiar. Familiar letter strings
are familiar because we have remembered them. We have remembered them because they are
meaningful. Sequences that are not meaningful are very difficult to remember. Because they
are meaningless, there is little or nothing we can use to anchor them in permanent memory. By
contrast, acronyms are easy to remember because when we first learn them, we recognize that
they match up with the first letter of words, which help make them familiar more quickly.
Because acronyms are not words, they only provide an analogy to word reading. Yet they
provide a helpful way to illustrate the concepts of meaningful letter strings and familiar letter
strings. We must now apply these concepts to words. We will seek to answer two questions:
1) What is meaningful about the letter strings that make up printed words?
2) How do the letter strings become so familiar that we can instantaneously and
effortlessly recognize them?

8
For those outside the United States: FBI = Federal Bureau of Investigation; NFL = National Football League;
SPCA = Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; IRS = Internal Revenue Service.
9
NASP is the National Association of School Psychologists, SBE is the Society of Broadcast Engineers, and IEEE
is Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
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Chapter 4

Why written words are meaningful letter strings

The letter sequences in words are meaningful because the order of the letters is designed to
match the order of the sounds in spoken words. For example, each letter in the word stamp is
in the same order as its corresponding phoneme in the spoken word. If the letter order used to
represent the oral word stamp was different, say smapt, then that order does not meaningfully
represent the oral sounds in the word. This is the whole idea behind alphabetic writing
systems. The letters are designed to represent the sounds in the oral words. While it is true that
English has many “irregular” words (this will be addressed later), the basic idea of alphabetic
writing is that the order of the written letters matches the order of the sounds in the spoken
word. Hence, the letter strings represent the oral strings of phonemes in a meaningful way.
Therefore, by their very nature, written words are meaningful letter strings!
Meaningful strings of letters (i.e., written words) can be anchored into permanent memory
if the reader is able to recognize why those letter stings are meaningful. As mentioned, the
letter sequence is meaningful because it matches the stored oral sequences of phonemes in
spoken words. If a student has phoneme awareness, he can recognize this connection. If he
does not have phoneme awareness, these letter strings are not meaningful to him, so it will be
very difficult to remember those letter strings—it will be difficult for these letter strings to
become “familiar.” If they don’t become familiar, reading is seriously compromised.
Consider this analogy. You have a room full of adults participating in a memory study.
Half of the people are American sports fans. Half are Australians with no knowledge of
American sports. Both groups have equal command of the English language. You give both
groups the task of remembering random letter strings. They are told that the following strings
of letters are random and should be committed to memory:
NFL NBA LPGA MLB
WNBA PGA NHL NCAA

Later, those in our imaginary study are asked to recall as many of the letter strings as they
can. You can bet that the American sports fans would do far better than the Australians who
had no exposure to American sports. All of the above letter strings are acronyms for American
sports leagues. These are meaningful strings to American sports fans, and not meaningful to
the Australian non-sports fans. The Australians were not aware that these letter strings are
meaningful, so they would have a very hard time remembering them. To them, they were
memorizing random strings of letters, which is very difficult.
It is roughly similar with orthographic mapping. First graders with basic phonemic
awareness and good letter-sound skills are like the American sports fans. They immediately
recognize that letter sequences in printed words have a meaningful relationship with the
phonemes they hear in a spoken word. This is how they anchor words into permanent memory.
They associate the string of phonemes in the word’s pronunciation with the letter order in the
written word. By contrast, children who are weak in phoneme awareness or letter-sound skills
are like the Australians from our example. Because they lack one or both of these skills, they
do not recognize the meaningfulness of the letter strings that make up printed words. For these

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 Orthographic Mapping and Sight Word Learning

students, remembering letter strings is very difficult because they do not have a reliable way to
do it. It is as if they were trying to remember random letter sequences. Thus, they have an
uphill battle trying to make those letter strings “familiar” and instantly recognizable. They
therefore cannot remember words efficiently, so they struggle in reading.
This is the basic difficulty in reading acquisition. Children who struggle with phonemic
awareness and/or letter-sound skills struggle in reading. Why? Because the letter strings they
see are not meaningful to them, which makes them very difficult to remember. These children
rely on ineffective cues and hints to remember words, such as guessing based on the first letter
of the word, the length of the word, and context. Until these foundational skills are developed,
a student will not have an efficient way to make letter strings familiar. Students with good
phonemic awareness naturally associate printed letter strings with the sounds in spoken words
and therefore remember the words they read. Phonemic awareness allows the student to make
effective use of the lightening-fast oral dictionary we use for spoken language.
While phonemic awareness and letter-sound skills are equally important for mapping,
phonemic awareness difficulties are more commonly the problem. The vast majority of
students with word recognition difficulties lack sufficient phonemic awareness. Students with
problems in both struggle the most.
In recent years, a greater emphasis has been placed on phonics or letter-sound skills due to
the research supporting its importance. But research has also supported the importance of
phonemic awareness in learning to read. Yet while many teachers have heard phonemic
awareness is important, there is not much clarity as to why it is important. As teachers learn
more about the mapping process, it should become clear why both phonemic awareness and
basic phonics (i.e., letter-sound skills) are critical for remembering words as sight words.
To illustrate, consider two students in late first grade. For the first time, they see the word
sent. They both have the letter-sound skills needed to sound it out. The first student has
phonemic awareness while the second does not. The first student immediately notices that the
spelling of sent aligns perfectly with the phonemes in the spoken word sent (/s/ /e/ /n/ /t/). For
this student, it will be easy to remember that sequence and distinguish it from other, similar
looking sequences (e.g., set, send, scent, or cent). However, the student with weak phonemic
awareness skills will not be aware of the sounds in sent. He will not notice the meaningful
relationship between the spelling s-e-n-t and the phoneme sequence in the spoken word. To
him, s-e-n-t is no more meaningful of a way to represent sent than s-n-e-t, s-t-e-n, or s-e-t-n.
Why would s-e-n-t be a more suitable way to represent the spoken word sent than those other
ways if the student has no way of noticing the sounds within the spoken word sent? There is
really no reason that s-e-n-t is more meaningful than those other letter orders (e.g., s-n-e-t)
unless you have an awareness of the individual sounds within the spoken word sent. But that is
precisely what students with poor phonemic awareness do not have. They are not aware of the
oral sequences within spoken words, so there is little or nothing meaningful about the letter
order in the printed words they see.10 If there is nothing meaningful about the letter order, then

10
The exception to this is with the first letter and first sound in a word. Even most reading disabled students can
notice the first sound in spoken words and they can match first sound to the first letter. But with so many words
– 35 –
Chapter 4

only inefficient, raw memorization is possible, and sight vocabulary growth is dramatically
hindered.
This is the essence of what researchers call the alphabetic principle. The alphabetic
principle is the idea that at some point, it dawns on children that the written letters match up to
the phonemes in spoken words. This may seem obvious to us, but to a beginning reader, it is
not. They gain this insight through early literacy activities and/or phonics instruction. Without
the combination of good phonemic awareness and good letter-sound skills it is very difficult
for students to develop the insight we call the alphabetic principle.

Making letter strings familiar: How we map

Letter strings are considered familiar if we can immediately recognize them. In fact, the
concept of “familiar letter strings” is another way of saying “words in our sight vocabulary.”
You will recall that a sight word vocabulary refers to the pool of words we can instantly
recognize, without guessing or sounding them out. How do we make letter strings familiar? It
is a multi-step process that begins with the letters. Without automatic letter-sound skills,
orthographic mapping is inefficient or impossible. This cannot be emphasized enough. Letter-
sound skills are not optional for the efficient permanent storage of words—they are essential.11
When a student learns a letter/sound combination to the automatic level, the sight of that
letter immediately and effortlessly activates the sound associated with it.12 When the student
sees the letter t, the /t/ sound is instantly activated in the temporal lobes (the area of the brain
that stores auditory/phonological information). Letter-sound associations are learned during
preschool, kindergarten, and first grade for most students. Children often require hundreds or
even thousands of exposures to letters before they are mastered to the point of automaticity.13
Once automatic, the sight of the letter will activate the sound in memory just as quickly and
efficiently as if the student heard someone produce the sound orally. In other words, whether
they see the letter t or hear the /t/ sound, the memory for that sound is activated in the temporal
lobes of the brain. This is probably why the areas of our brains that interpret speech are active
even during silent reading. Whether sound information involves visual input (written letters)
or auditory input (oral phonemes), similar memory centers in the brain are activated.
As skills develop, a string of two or more letters can activate the sounds associated with
that letter combination. For example, when we see ip in a word, we do not have to determine
the pronunciation of ip by sounding out both of the letters, i and p. We treat that letter
combination and its pronunciation together, simply as ip. This means that ip is a “familiar
letter string” which activates the corresponding pronunciation /ip/. There are many common
words parts, such as rime units (–et, –ig, –ap, –ot, –ut, etc.), blends (tr, bl, sn, cr, str, etc.),
suffixes (–ing, –ed, –tion) and prefixes (re–, con–, un–, dis–). When we see these common

beginning with the same letter, this focus on the first sound is not very efficient.
11
See Chapter 12 for more on letter-sound learning.
12
Technically, it can activate more than one sound, if the letter has more than one sound associated with it. The
context of that letter allows us to determine the correct sound and the others get “discarded.” This happens so
quickly that cognitive scientists call it “pre-cognitive,” meaning it happens before we have time to think about it.
13
As mentioned earlier, letter recognition is based on visual memory, even though word recognition is not.

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 Orthographic Mapping and Sight Word Learning

letter strings in the context of words, their respective pronunciations are activated. When we
see a rime unit, we don’t have to access each letter sound separately. Rather, we treat the
letters as a unit. If you identify ip by sounding it out one letter at time, that’s phonic decoding.
But if you instantly recognize ip because of past experience with it, that means it has become a
familiar letter string to you. You no longer need to break it apart letter-by-letter.
But how do words or parts of words become familiar if not visually? Here is where
phoneme awareness comes into play. Word parts, such as /ip/, are not words, yet they are still
part of our existing oral language system. While /ip/ never appears by itself in our language,
the sound /ip/ is familiar to a student with phonemic awareness. That student has /ip/ filed
away in his oral dictionary as a familiar part of words such as dip, hip, lip, rip, sip, zip, chip,
clip, drip, flip, grip, snip, trip, whip, etc.14 If a student does not have phonological awareness,
the simple two-letter string ip will not anchor to anything in particular in his memory. For that
student, ip represents two random letters that must be memorized—he doesn’t notice (i.e.,
doesn’t have the awareness) that /ip/ is a common part of a whole bunch of words he knows.
By contrast, if a student has phonemic awareness, he can notice (i.e., have awareness of) parts
of oral words. Such awareness allows him to participate in a connection forming process
between the letter combination and its pronunciation. This is the essence of phonemic
awareness—being aware of the sound structure of spoken words. The letters of our printed
language are supposed to represent the sounds of our spoken language. Therefore, we need to
be aware of those sounds in spoken words in order to anchor their printed forms in permanent
memory. The oral form of the word is already stored in memory. When we map, the letters of
the printed form of the word piggyback onto the phonemes in our existing rapid oral filing
system, which we use to understand spoken language. If a student is not attuned to the sounds
within oral words, there is no efficient way for printed words to become familiar letter strings.
There is nothing to which they can efficiently connect the strings of letters for later retrieval.
Some readers may think I’m suggesting that when we read we are doing “phonics” very
quickly. This is not the case. I had the same first impression when I began to read the research
on mapping back in 1997. What I am describing here is immediate sight word recognition, not
sounding out words. Sounding out words takes longer than instant recognition. Phonic
decoding focuses on one or two letters at a time. Immediate word recognition involves
processing all of the letters at once. All of the letters in the word can be seen with a glance of
the eye, and the entire letter string is recognized as a familiar. How is this?

Clues from Eye Movement Research

When we read, we attend to virtually every letter of every word we read. Various types of
clever experiments have demonstrated this. If we did not attend to every letter of the words we
read, we could not instantly recognize words that differ from one another by only one letter.15

14
Not to mention the multisyllabic words that contain ip (e.g., tulip, zipper, eclipse)
15
There has been a notion promoted by some in educational circles that we don’t attend to every letter of every word
we read. This may be true for weak readers, or good readers who are skimming. It is not true for typical reading.
There is a popular e-mail “forward” circulating that purports to prove this. But that e-mail demonstrates a
phenomenon called contextual facilitation and does not represent our normal word recognition processes.
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Chapter 4

Second, when we read, we experience the illusion that our eyes sweep evenly across the page.
However, extensive eye movement research has demonstrated that our eyes move across a line
of text in little jumps. We stop and fixate on a spot briefly, and then jump to the next spot.16
Our eyes jump so quickly that during the jump, we take in no useful information—just an
extremely quick blur. But during each fixation, we take a very brief “picture” of what we see.
The perceptual system within our brain then “stitches together” these little visual
“photographs” so that we feel like our eyes are moving smoothly across the page.
When our eyes fixate on a spot, we take in about 7-8 letters to the right of the fixation, and
about 4-5 to the left.17 This perceptual span of 11-13 letters allows us to take in all the letters
of a big word, or all of the letters of a few small words. Those letters are taken in
simultaneously, not in a sequence like when we phonically sound out words. When a reader
encounters a string of letters, he or she immediately recognizes it as a familiar letter string,
which in turn activates the oral word and its meaning. This does not occur one letter at a time
from left to right, as is the case with phonic decoding. Rather, the visual span takes in all the
letters at once; so all the letters simultaneously activate the oral word (just like we instantly
perceive all the letters in acronyms like USA, NFL, and FBI). This simultaneous perception of
all of the letters is why it feels like we read words as whole units. In one sense, we are reading
them as whole visual units, given that all of the letters are activated at the same time. Yet it is
not visual memory that activates the word, as was pointed about before. The activation occurs
at the letter-phoneme level. We recognize a letter string as familiar, which in turn activates the
word it represents. If activation did not occur at the letter level, we would constantly confuse
look-alike words. The word’s pronunciation and meaning are all activated together because
they are all connected in memory, once the word is permanently mapped.
Earlier in the chapter, Figure
4.2 illustrated the processing of oral
PHONOLOGY SEMANTICS language. Figure 4.3 shows the interaction
(pronunciation) (meaning) between the visual input of familiar letter
strings (or orthography) and the instant
activation of both the word’s
pronunciation and its meaning. Whether
we actually hear a word spoken or see a
O RTHOGRAPHY
(spelling)
familiar, mapped letter string, the word
gets activated in our brains. Oral words
are made up of sequences of oral sounds.
Written words are strings of letters
FIGURE 4.3
designed to represent those sounds. A
ACCESSING WORD MEANING IN READING
word’s pronunciation (phonology) and

16
You don’t need experimental equipment to see this for yourself. Have someone read the top lines of a book.
Watch his or her eyes closely because it happens very quickly. You may see this jump-fixate-jump-fixate pattern.
17
Readers of modern Hebrew and Arabic show the opposite pattern, with a perception of 7-8 letters to the left and 4-
5 to the right. This is because Hebrew and Arabic are read from right to left rather than left to right.

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 Orthographic Mapping and Sight Word Learning

meaning (semantics) is connected in memory with the word’s spelling (orthography), so when
the printed word is seen, the pronunciation and meaning are instantly accessed. There is no
guessing or sounding out the word. The word just pops into your mind effortlessly.
Notice this recognition process is not simply a matter of visual memory. Researchers prefer
to use the term “orthographic memory” because it is a memory for a specific sequence of
letters, not a visual-spatial memory for the “look” of the word based on its visual properties. It
does not matter if the letters are all uppercase, lowercase, handwritten, or in differing fonts.
The visual look of the word is not important as long as the letters are legible. Once the word’s
letters enter the visual system, orthographic memory takes over. Rather than visual memory, it
is a memory for a specific letter string. That particular a letter string has become familiar and
unitized in the memory system.
Consider when you type a web address into a web browser (e.g., Internet Explorer, Safari,
Firefox). It tries to “guess” the address you are typing based upon what is in the browser’s
memory. So when I type in www.a, I get www.apple.com, because I have an Apple computer.
The Apple address is in my browser’s memory. Regardless of what site I try to visit that starts
with the letter a, I still get that Apple address after typing the letter a. That is because the
computer is limited to one letter at a time for its “guess.” If I follow the letter a with the letter
d, then www.adobe.com comes up automatically. That is a software company in my browser’s
memory. Again, the browser is simply making the best guess given the limited information it
has available so far. It appears that our brains work in a similar way, except much more
efficiently. When we read, our brain has access to all of the letters in the word at the same
time. While the web browser has only one letter at a time available to make its best guess, and
narrows the choices as it goes along, our brains get all the letters at once to activate the word!
This is a far more efficient system. It is not like phonics, sounding out one letter at a time.
Rather, it is a whole letter string rapidly accessing a stored word based upon the previous
association between that letter string and the phonemes in the word’s pronunciation. The letter
string becomes familiar because the person had the phonemic awareness to connect the oral
phonemes in the word to the letters used to represent that word in print. This process informs
us about what a sight vocabulary actually represents. Words mapped in memory have bonded
the oral sounds (which are already stored in our oral/mental dictionary) with the written letter
strings that are designed to represent those oral words. When words have been completely
mapped, those familiar letter strings activate the oral words instantly.
So, once a letter string becomes familiar, it becomes unitized. We treat the letter sequence
as a unit. For example, when we see spend, we don’t say, “Hmm, s – p – e – n – d, Oh,
spend!” Rather, we see that letter string spend and instantly recognize it as familiar. Spend is
familiar to us, while stend or slend are not. And, we don’t confuse the letter order in spend
with words like send, or spent, because those are different strings of letters that have been
unitized in their own right. Thus, we no longer have to consciously focus on the “parts” of the
letter string, but recognize the whole letter sequence as a unit. However, any change in that
sequence throws us off, as the examples of stend or slend illustrate. So, it is the sequence of
letters that becomes familiar to us, and that sequence is made up of a precise set of individual
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Chapter 4

letters, in a precise order, that is, the word’s orthography. It is familiar regardless of font or
case. The unitization phenomenon is why it feels so holistic as we read words.
Going back to our analogy of acronyms from earlier in the chapter, we feel like we
“holistically” process acronyms like NFL, NHL, and NBA18. However, this instant recognition
only occurs by correctly perceiving the actual sequence of letters that distinguish them from
any other sequence. NLF or FNL do not make us think of pro football, but NFL does.

The relationship between orthographic mapping and phonic decoding

Mapping must not be confused with phonics. Mapping and phonics differ in some very
important ways. The biggest reason they seem similar is that both require proficiency with
letter-sound relationships. However, mapping and phonic decoding use these letter-sound
relationships differently. Phonic decoding starts with an unfamiliar printed word. The letters
are translated into sounds, which are then blended together to identify the spoken word. By
contrast, mapping is a two-way process that requires an awareness of the phonemes in the
spoken word (i.e., phonemic awareness). When a student encounters an unfamiliar word and
sounds it out via phonic decoding (text to brain), behind the scenes, unconsciously, our brains
naturally attach the phonemes in the pronunciation to the letters in the printed word (brain to
text). This cannot happen efficiently unless a student has very proficient phonemic skills to the
point that they can segment words without even thinking about it (explained in more detail in
Chapter 7). Being proficient with the sounds in the spoken language and the letter-sound
relationships in the printed language assists the student in anchoring the sequence of phonemes
in the word’s pronunciation to the letter string used to represent that particular oral word. The
word’s pronunciation is already in long-term memory, and mapping helps the printed letter
string anchor to that pronunciation in long-term memory, making it familiar. The key is to go
from pronunciation to letters (mapping) rather than letters to pronunciation (phonic decoding).
After a few exposures, the process of mapping is complete. The word is “mapped,” so it is
now a familiar letter string, and seeing that familiar letter string instantly activates that word’s
pronunciation. No more phonic decoding or guessing are needed for that particular word.
Another way to see the difference between phonic decoding and mapping is that phonic
decoding uses the letter-to-sound relations to activate oral words from an unfamiliar letter
string. By contrast, orthographic mapping uses sound-to-letter relationships to anchor
phonemes in a word’s pronunciation to the printed letter strings into long-term memory for
future retrieval. Phonic decoding uses letter-sound skills to identify words while orthographic
mapping uses letter-sound skills to establish a memory of printed words. Mapping does not
involve identifying unfamiliar words; it involves a connection-forming process that turns
unfamiliar printed words into familiar printed words. These are different processes; both
essential to reading. Yet both rely heavily on the letter-sound relationships, even if they do so
in different ways.

18
NFL – National Football League; NHL – National Hockey League; NBA – National Basketball League.

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 Orthographic Mapping and Sight Word Learning

The three components of orthographic mapping

In essence, orthographic mapping has three components (see Figure 4.4). To be good
orthographic mappers, children need to develop three skills: 1) Automatic letter-sound
associations, 2) highly proficient phonemic awareness, and 3) word study. Word study
represents a conscious or unconscious process of connecting the phonemes in spoken words to
the written form of the word, which does not happen efficiently if the first to components
(letter-sound proficiency and phonemic proficiency) are not in place. Basically, word study is
the process of matching the oral phonemes to the letters as a memory aid for future retrieval.
When beginning to read, while the first two components are still developing, the word study
process may be somewhat conscious. But as letter-sound and phonemic skills become
automatic, the word study aspect of the orthographic mapping process generally occurs
without conscious effort, as we encounter unfamiliar words. Thus, word study (conscious or
unconscious) is the connection making process used to remember words. The word study
aspect of mapping is the superglue that anchors words in permanent memory. But for this to
happen, students must have good letter-sound skills and good phonemic awareness skills.

WO R D STUDY:
Consciously or unconsciousl making
connections between the phonemes in
oral words and letters in written words

OR THO GRA PHIC

MAPP ING

PHONEM IC
AWAREN ESS: LETTER –SO UND
Attention to the sounds in SKILLS:
the oral word Proficiency with
letters and sounds

FIGURE 4.4
THREE CRITICAL SKILLS NEEDED FOR ORTHOGRAPHIC MAPPING

The traditional whole word and whole language approaches do not adequately address the
three components of permanent word storage. However, most good readers develop these
three skills naturally, without being directly taught. Through exposure to letters and words,
children destined to be good readers naturally make connections between sounds and letters.
But those with phonological awareness difficulties don’t make these connections, so reading is
a major struggle for them. Then, we blame the student and give him names like “dyslexic,” or

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Chapter 4

“learning disabled,” or “reading disabled.” The lack of adequate attention to letter-sound skills
and phonemic awareness in two of the three major traditional reading approaches helps us
understand why we have 30-34% of our fourth graders in the U.S. reading substantially below
grade level, based on government statistics. Instead of “learning disabled,” Philip McInnis
called these students “curriculum disabled” because the curriculum did not provide them with
what they needed to be successful readers. Our curricula are largely designed to facilitate the
reading progress of students who are bound to learn to read regardless of the approach we use.
Phonics fares better because it explicitly teaches the letter-sound component. However,
phonics programs typically do an insufficient job with the other two components. The fact is
that all three components should be explicitly taught and reinforced, starting in kindergarten.
All of the classical methods (phonics, whole word, whole language) were developed before the
discovery of orthographic mapping, so they cannot be faulted for missing some or all of the
components of permanent word storage. Given the research findings about permanent word
storage, we can now make the training and support of these components a central part of early
reading instruction and reading remediation. If we do this, we can make substantial reductions
in the percentage of struggling readers (see Chapter 5).
Let’s return to some comments made in Chapter 1. It said there that a huge study conducted
by the State University of New York at Albany was able to reduce the number of students with
reading problems to a tiny fraction of the usual number of poor readers. How? They addressed
the issue of permanent word storage by teaching skills consistent with the mapping process.
Students were trained in phoneme awareness, letter-sound skills, and word study skills. This
allowed them to map words efficiently to permanent memory. As a result, they became good
readers and no longer required extra reading help. Others studies have shown similar results.
In addition, similar results have been found for many years among schools using McInnis’
ARL program. ARL was using these techniques long before researchers began to understand
the mapping process. Rather, McInnis used these techniques because they worked. Only in
recent years have we figured out why they worked. But the kind of training used in the Albany
study and by ARL have not been commonly used in our schools. This is likely because of the
prominent role the whole language philosophy (also presented as literacy based instruction and
balanced instruction) has played in our educational systems. The whole language/balanced
instruction approach stresses meaning, context, and good literature, but puts insufficient
emphasis on phonological awareness and word study.

Getting orthographic mapping into the knowledge base of teachers

Since 1999, I have presented this information about mapping to hundreds of teachers,
school psychologists, school administrators, parents, and to my undergraduate college students
in my course on learning disabilities. I realize that it is usually not well understood the first
time through. Don’t get discouraged if it is difficult to understand the orthographic mapping
concept. It took a while for me to grasp it as well. Rereading this chapter may help.
What you really need to know is the bottom line: we use our oral filing system as the basis

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 Orthographic Mapping and Sight Word Learning

for sight word storage and retrieval. The point of entry into our permanent filing system for
written words is at the level of letters and phonemes, not “whole words” as our intuitions
mislead us to believe. If students notice that the phonemes in spoken words are represented by
letters in printed words, they can make those sequences in written words familiar. If students
do not easily notice the phoneme structure of spoken words (i.e., they lack sufficient phonemic
awareness), then for them, there is nothing special or meaningful about the letter order in
printed words. As a result, it is very difficult to remember those letter sequences and make
them familiar. This means that words are added to a student’s sight vocabulary very slowly,
and a limited sight vocabulary is a threat to reading fluency. If a student is poor at word
recognition and fluency, reading comprehension typically suffers. When reading
comprehension suffers, all of a student’s school experience is negatively affected. This whole
chain of events is preventable in most cases if we make sure that all students have adequate
phonemic awareness and letter-sound skills. This book contains a comprehensive and carefully
sequenced curricula of phonological awareness skills starting in kindergarten that you can use
to help prevent most reading difficulties. It is designed to supplement the many phonic
programs already available.

____________________________________

My goal in giving a detailed account in this chapter of orthographic mapping is for the
reader to understand that:
• We do not store words based on visual memory.
• We use our oral-linguistic filing system as the basis for word recognition.
• Phonemic awareness and letter-sound skills are not optional—they are central to the
process of permanent word storage and sight vocabulary development. Either we are
going to leave children on their own to figure it out themselves, or we will directly train
them. They cannot read efficiently without these skills.
The next step is to look at how we should approach teaching reading now that we have a
good working understanding of how words are learned. What should schools do to make sure
children become efficient orthographic mappers? The following two chapters address this
question.

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Chapter 11

Assessment of
Phonological Awareness:
The Phonological Awareness
Screening Test (PAST)

Assessing phonological awareness can be a simple matter. The Equipped for Reading
Success program provides three ways to evaluate these skills, two informal and one formal.
1) The simplest way to evaluate phonological awareness is to take note of the level at
which the student is working. Is he or she able to do Level E3? Level H? Level K? This
informal assessment tells you how far along in the program a student has progressed. It is
important to notice a student’s speed when doing One-Minute Activities to see if he or she is
at the knowledge stage or the automatic stage.
2) If you want a quick assessment of a student’s skill, you can simply give half of a One-
Minute Activity (i.e., five items) from any given level. How well the student does helps you
know how well he or she is progressing. Also make note of speed.
3) Use the formalized Phonological Awareness Screening Test (PAST)1 in Appendix C.
Detailed instructions for administering the PAST are included in this chapter. The PAST is
best used with students as part of a formal reading assessment to determine a student’s level of
phonological awareness. A comprehensive reading assessment should include tests of working
memory, rapid automatized naming, as well as phonological awareness and oral blending.2 All
of these lower level linguistic skills are assessed on the Comprehensive Test of Phonological
Processing-Second Edition (CTOPP-2),3 which I strongly recommend. The CTOPP-2 should
be used alongside the PAST. I have found the PAST and the Elision subtest (the CTOPP-2’s
phonological awareness test) tend to yield similar results. However, in the cases where they
differ, the PAST is usually (but not always) more consistent with a student’s reading skill.

1
An Internet search will turn up another test that uses the acronym PAST called the Phonological Awareness Skills
Test. This test samples from the various classical tasks like rhyming, segmentation, etc. Like nearly all other
phonological awareness tests, it does not provide a timing element nor does it have items that are difficult enough
to assess advanced phonemic awareness.
2
These tests would be, of course, in addition to tests of context-free word identification, nonsense word reading,
reading comprehension, and listening comprehension.
3
As mentioned in an earlier chapter, blending may be average in weak readers with poor phonological
awareness/analysis skills the CTOPP-2’s Blending Words subtest must be interpreted with caution. If it is average,
it does not rule out phonological awareness difficulties. The Blending Words, Elision (manipulation/deletion) and
Phoneme Isolation subtests all get combined on the CTOPP-2 for an overall Phonological Awareness Composite.
Do not use that composite if Blending Words is average and the Elision and/or Phoneme Isolation are weak.
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Chapter 11

INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE

PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS SCREENING TEST (PAST)

The Phonological Awareness Screening Test (PAST) can be found in Appendix C. There
are four forms; A, B, C, and D. This allows teachers to do formalized assessment a few times a
year to track a student’s progress.
There is a “history” behind the title “PAST.” First, PAST stands for Phonological
Awareness Screening Test. Second, the acronym acknowledges the work of others in the past.
The PAST originated as the Auditory Analysis Test (AAT) of Rosner & Simon (Journal of
Learning Disabilities, 1971). Dr. Philip J. McInnis revised the AAT by adding segmentation
items (the AAT only used deletion items) and adding levels to make it more developmentally
appropriate. His version was first called the Language Processing Assessment (LPA) and then
the Phonological Processing Test (PPT). Since 2003, I have used a modified, updated version
of this time-tested assessment.4 So, while this is my “version” of the test, it is based upon the
work of my predecessors (hence, the “PAST”).

General principles of administration

Do not administer the PAST unless 1) you have carefully read and understood the
directions, and 2) you have had the chance to practice it with feedback before testing a student.
If you are experienced using the One Minute Activities, the PAST will be easy to learn.
Use of sample. Follow the sample line at the beginning of each level. Administer each item
at a given level the same way. Note that you are always deleting or substituting the sound
represented by the letter(s) in the parentheses (e.g., cow(boy) means “boy” gets deleted).
Proper pronunciation of sounds. When giving directions for Levels F through M, use
letter sounds, not letter names. When you say “change /a/ to /i/,” you say the sound made by
the letter, not the name of the letter. The exception is with the “long” vowel sounds (Level J
II). Long vowel sounds are represented by uppercase letters in brackets (i.e., /A/). These long
vowel sounds match the letter name (e.g., the a in words like cake, tame, or made).
Also, don’t add an “uh” sound when you pronounce consonants in isolation (e.g., /m/ is
pronounced mmm, not muh). Proper pronunciation of sounds in isolation will be essential for
children to understand what phoneme you are asking them to manipulate. For help with
pronunciation when administering the PAST, see Chapter 12 and Appendix E.
The assessment of automaticity. All items are timed. When you administer an item, as
soon as you finish speaking, immediately count in your head “one thousand one, one thousand
two.” Use a stop watch or sweep second hand at first to be sure your counting very closely
approximates two seconds. If the student responds correctly before you get to the word two in

4
My version 1) adds a timing element to assess automaticity; 2) adds or modifies levels to make smoother
transitions (see Appendix B for program comparisons); 3) provides corrective feedback for every incorrect item,
and 4) for Forms A, B, C, and D in Appendix C, most items are “orthographically inconsistent” to limit the
possibility of correctly responding to test items via a mental spelling strategy rather than by phonological
awareness (e.g., going from gave to game by exchanging an /m/ for a /v/ can easily occur via mental spelling while
going from both to boat by exchanging a /t/ for a /th/ does not as easily yield to a mental spelling strategy).

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 Assessment of Phonological Awareness

the phrase “one thousand two,” he or she receives credit for an automatic response. Put an “X”
in the blank next to the word to indicate the response was automatic. If the student answers
correctly, but after the two second count, mark a “1” next to that item. Incorrect items are
marked with a zero (0). See Figure 11.2 below.
When doing the mental count, continue counting until the student responds. If you reach
“one thousand-five” and the student has not yet responded, repeat the item to give the student
a second chance. After repeating the item, resume the mental counting. If the student responds
correctly within five seconds of this second chance, score the item as correct (i.e., a “1”).
However, an automatic score can only occur within the first two seconds of the first try. The
second chance is given because students sometimes forget what you asked. Also, if the student
asks you to repeat the item, do so. However, repeated items cannot be scored as automatic,
only as correct or incorrect. If the student does not respond after the second five-second count,
score the item as incorrect and provide the correct feedback on the item (see below on
providing feedback).
If you mis-speak a word, excuse yourself, skip the item, and go on to the next one, so long
as it was not the last item at that level. Go back to the item you spoiled before going on to the
next level and score normally (i.e., they can receive an automatic score if they answer in less
than two seconds). If this occurs on the last item of a level, repeat that item immediately and
use your best judgment about scoring.
Occasionally, a student will respond to the previous item. For example, you have the
student go from sit to sat (Level J). On the next item, you ask the student to go from hid to
had, but instead of had, the student says sad, accidentally carrying over sounds from the
previous item. This may not be the result of a phonological awareness problem, but may result
from confusion or a working memory issue. If you judge that a student has carried something
over from the previous example, re-administer the item. However, the student cannot receive
an automatic score on a re-administered item, only correct (1) or incorrect (0).
Correct Automatic

l l X
X X 5 3

0 l

l l X 4 1

FIGURE 11.1
SAMPLE SCORING

Automatic responding typically takes about a second or less, so a count of two is generous.
Therefore, only give automatic credit if students have begun a correct response by the time
you have mentally said two in the silently phrase “one thousand two.”
Repeating an item. If a student seems confused, or seems to lapse in attention, it is okay to
repeat an item. However, when you repeat an item, that item cannot be scored as automatic.
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Chapter 11

Students can only receive a 1 if the response was correct or a 0 if it was incorrect.
Pacing. One important reason to be thoroughly familiar with the administration procedures
and to have practiced the test beforehand is pacing. It is important to administer the PAST at a
good pace to keep things moving. A moderately quick pacing prevents lapses of attention,
boredom, or prevents you from unnecessarily taxing a student’s working memory.
Providing feedback. A unique feature of the PAST is that the examiner provides corrective
feedback for every incorrect item. Feedback on the PAST is based on the assumption that a
student is not going to develop phonological awareness skills in the 4 to 8 minutes it takes to
administer this test. Give feedback for every incorrect response. The standard correction is:
“The answer is tall. When you say ball, and change the /b/ to /t/ you get tall. Ball–tall. See
how that works?”5 No further demonstration or explanation is permitted (especially, no visual
cues). Also, you must never refer to the location of the sound within the word. Correct every
incorrect item, even if it is the last item at a level. It is also okay to acknowledge that the
student got an item correct (“that’s right!”), especially if he or she responds tentatively.
HOWEVER:
1) Do NOT teach any item or level. This is a test, not a teaching session. While oral
feedback is provided, no teaching, manipulatives, or explanations are allowed.
2) NEVER say anything about the POSITION of the sound within the word because this is
a big part of what you are testing. For example, never say anything like “see how I switched
the /b/ to a /t/ at the beginning of the word?” A key part of phonological awareness is being
able to isolate a sound, so saying anything about position is like giving away the answer.
Routing procedure to speed administration. Students are not administered all 50 PAST
items. For younger students, many of the later items are too difficult and there is a discontinue
rule (described below). For more skilled students, it would be unnecessarily tedious to
administer all of the easy items. To keep the test a reasonable length, there is a routing
procedure, which works differently at each of the syllable, onset-rime, and phoneme levels.
Syllable Levels (D1 to E3)
•Everyone taking the PAST, including high school students and adults, start at Level D1.
Explain to students that this “word game” starts out very easy. The easy ones help
students understand the nature of the task without ever having to explain the nature of the
task. There are no explanations or practice items when administering the PAST.
•If the first item of D1 is responded to automatically (i.e., 2 seconds or less), skip down to
the first item of D2. If that is automatic, skip to first item of E2, then E3. When you score
later, if the first D1 through E3 items are automatic, score any un-administered items at
those levels as automatic (thus a 5/5 at that level).
•However, if any item is either 1) incorrect, or 2) correct but not automatic (i.e., correct
response after 2 seconds), administer all items at that level and score normally. For
example, if the first D2 item is correct but not automatic, administer the other D2 items.

5
Typically you say that last part (“See how that works?”) only with the first incorrect item.

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 Assessment of Phonological Awareness

However, the routing procedure resumes with E2. If the first item in E2 is automatic, do
not administer the other E2 items and score those unadministered items as automatic.6
Onset-Rime Levels (F & G)
For kindergarten to second grade:
•If the first three F or G items are automatic, skip the final two items at that level and score
them as automatic.
•If any of the first three F or G items are incorrect, or correct but not automatic, administer
all five items at that specific level (i.e., F or G) and score normally.
For third grade through adults:
•Use the same general procedure as with the the kindergarten through second graders
except only the first two items need to be automatic before skipping on to the next level.
Phoneme Levels (H to M)
•For Levels H through M, give all items at each level. Continue administering until the
discontinue rule is reached or you come to the end of the test.
Discontinue Rule. If the combined “correct” score on two levels in a row is 0, 1 or 2 out of
10, discontinue the test. Consider all items in the levels beyond the discontinue level as
incorrect. For example, a student got only two items at Level I and none at level J (thus 2/10
across the two levels). Discontinue the test. Do not administer K, L, or M. All items on the un-
administered levels are scored 0.

SCORING THE PAST

Passing a level. A level is considered passed if either all items or all item except one are
correct (e.g., 4 out of 5). A level is considered automatic if all or all but one of the items at that
level were responded to automatically. Levels with 3 out of 5 or fewer are not considered
passed and represent a level that should receive instructional attention. Keep in mind, each
level yields two scores: 1) a correct score and 2) an automatic score. Students commonly pass
a level with their correct score but not with their automatic score. These differences are
preserved for the total scoring (see Figure 11.2 and The Total Scores section below). Only
levels passed at the automatic level do not require instructional attention.
Item scoring. It should be clear by now that items are scored in one of three ways:
1) Incorrect (Score = 0)
2) Correct but not automatic (Score = 1)
3) Automatic i.e., the student responds in two seconds or less (Score = X)
At each level, count every score of 1 and X and put the total in the “correct” column on the

6
The reasoning is that if students can do a higher syllable level (E2 or E3), they likely can do the easier ones, but
were incorrect or not automatic due to the novelty of the task rather than a lack of phonological awareness. It is
not unusual for a student to get one of these earlier items incorrect or non automatically as a result of the unusual
nature of the task then go on and display automatic responding at higher levels. In such cases, administering all
subsequent syllable level items after an early error or slow response is unnecessarily tedious. If they have an
automatic response to the first item at any given syllable level, do not administer any more at that level and score
unadministered items as automatic, even if they had an incorrect or slow response on an easier syllable level.
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Chapter 11

right. Scores of 1 or X are both scored as “correct” items. In the “automatic” column, only
include the items with Xs for that level (see Figure 11.1 above for an illustration).
The Total Scores. As mentioned, students receive two scores at each level, a correct score
and an automatic score. Transfer the totals from the right hand columns to the top of the first
page of the test. There are two sides to this. First, the student receives a score that indicates
how many were correct and how many were automatic at the syllable, onset-rime, and
phoneme levels. Second, the other side gives the highest level passed. Remember a level is
passed as correct if at least 4 out of 5 at that level are correct on most levels.7 A level is
considered automatic if at least 4 out of 5 items were automatic. Thus, for most children, the
highest correct level will be higher than his or her highest automatic level (see Figure 11.2 for
an illustration). It is also important to note any levels not passed that were below the highest
level passed.

J
10 8 —
10 10
8 4
6 2 I
34 24 E, H

FIGURE 11.2
SAMPLE OF SCORING RESULTS

INTEPRETING THE PAST

Even though the PAST correlates powerfully with reading, it does not have traditional
norms. However, based on 1) McInnis’ 35 years using these levels; 2) my 12 years working
with the PAST; 3) several studies that show when children developmentally can do specific
phonological manipulations; as well as 4) several studies I have done on the PAST, the
following is a guide to interpreting the results:

Typically Low
Grade Level Achieving Readers Achieving Readers
1) Mid Kindergarten D1-E2 sometimes higher none correct or D1-D2
1) Late Kindergarten D1-E2, F, G, sometimes higher D1-D2; E2 or lower
2) Mid First Grade E3, F, G, I or higher E2, F, G or lower
3) Late First Grade F, G, H, I, J F, G, I, or lower
4) Mid Second Grade H, I, J or higher F, G, H, I, or lower
5) Late Second/Early Third Grade H to M mostly automatic H, I, maybe J or lower
6) Mid Third Grade All levels, mostly automatic Many levels ‘correct,’ I to M mostly not ‘automatic’
7) Fourth Grade to Adulthood All levels automatic Most levels ‘correct,’ but J to M not all ‘automatic’

7
Except for the levels that do not have five items. At D1 is 4/6 is used to dermine if the level is passed and/or
automatic and 3/4 is required for D2.

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 Assessment of Phonological Awareness

If a student’s performance matches the shaded Low Achieving Readers column, it suggests
that phonological awareness may be a concern. If a student’s level is lower than is listed in
that column, then a phonological awareness problem is almost certain. In either case, those
students will require training beyond what they may be receiving in whole-class instruction.
Notice above how subtle the differences can be, especially early on (i.e., K-1). Except for
obvious cases of very low performance, the differences may be very small. This is why all
kids should get whole class or small group phonological awareness training in kindergarten
and first grade. Next, note that over time, typical students start to pull away from those with
reading difficulties. Automaticity becomes a bigger factor with time, especially after second
grade. After third grade, lack of automaticity at any level may indicate that a phonological
awareness difficulty may be present.
Do not be surprised by inconsistent performance across some levels. A student may
struggle with an easier level, and pass a higher level. This is because different levels involve
different types of manipulations. For example, H and K involve splitting initial blends. If a
student struggles with awareness of sounds in blends, he may not pass H, but may pass J,
which does not involve blends. Students who struggle with awareness of ending sounds may
do poorly with Level I and L but do well with H, J, and K. Some students may have a difficult
time with E2 and E3 but do well with onset-rime or even phoneme-level tasks. Most likely,
such students took a while to “warm-up,” to the task. Their phonological awareness may be
fine, but you may want to check their working memory and ability to focus.

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 Appendix C
PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS
SCREENING TEST (PAST)

The following eight pages contain four versions (Form A through D) of the Phonological
Awareness Screening Test (PAST). The multiple versions are designed for periodic updates throughout
the school year. For instructions on administering the PAST and for more information about
phonological awareness assessment, see Chapter 11.

Copyright notice Appendix C: The owner of this ma nual is free to photocopy the PAST
(Forms A-D) for individual classroom use or use in a resource room, special class, or private
tutoring. There is no limit to the number of copies that can be made for individual classroom
use. However, owner’s of this manual are not authorized to provide other teachers with this
assessment.

Also note: No one should administer this assessment unless he or she has thoroughly read the
instructions in Chapter 10 and practiced it at least three times on students for whom the results are not
needed.

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 PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS
SCREENING TEST (PAST) FORM A
David A. Kilpatrick, Ph.D. © 2010
Adapted from the levels used in Mclnnis (1999) & Rosner (1973)

Name: ______________________________ Date: _______________ Grade ______ Age ______

Teacher: __________________________ D.O.B.: ___________ Evaluator: __________________

INSTRUCTIONS: See Equipped for Reading Success Chapter 11: “Assessment of Phonological Awareness” for detailed instructions on the PAST.
RESULTS:
Correct Automatic Highest Correct Level: ______
Basic Syllable ____/10 ____/10 (Levels not passed below the highest correct level) ______
Onset-Rime ____/10 ____/10
Basic Phoneme ____/10 ____/10
Advanced Phoneme ____/20 ____/20 Highest Automatic Level: ______
Test Total ____/50 ____/50 (Non-automatic levels below highest automatic level) ______
Approximate Grade Level (Circle): PreK/K K late K/early 1st 1st late 1st/early 2nd 2nd late 2nd to adult
Note: The grade levels listed throughout the PAST are estimates based on various research studies and clinical experience. They are not formalized norms.

I. SYLLABLE LEVELS
Basic Syllable Levels (D, E2 - preschool to mid kindergarten; E3 - mid to late kindergarten)
LEVEL D “Say bookcase. Now say bookcase but don’t say book.” Correct Automatic
FEEDBACK: “If you say bookcase without saying book, you get case. Okay? Let’s try another one.”
D1 (book)case ____ (sun)set ____ space(ship) ____
D2 (sil)ver ____ (mar)ket ____ gen(tle) ____ ___/6 A: ___/6
LEVEL E “Say October. Now say October but don’t say Oc.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say October without saying Oc, you get tober. See how that works?”
E2 (Oc)tober ___ (um)brella___
(fan)tastic ___ (um)brella___
___/4 A: ___/4
Basic Syllable Total: ___/10 A:___/10

II. ONSET-RIME LEVELS

Onset-Rime Levels (kindergarten to mid first grade)
LEVEL F “Say feet. Now say feet but don’t say /f/.” Correct Automatic
FEEDBACK: “If you say feet without the /f/, you get eat; feet-eat, see how that works?”
/f/eet → eat ___ /b/irth → earth ___
/t/ame → aim ___ /t/ime → I’m ___ /c/one → own ___ ___/5 A: ___/5

LEVEL G “Say done. Now say done but instead of /d/ say /r/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say done, and change the /d/ to /r/, you get run; done-run.”
/d/one /r/ → run ___ /m/ore /d/ → door ___ ___/5 A: ___/5
/g/um /th/ → thumb ___ /l/ed /s/ → said ___ /f/ull /w/ → wool ___
Onset-Rime Total: ___/10 A:___/10

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 PAST Form A
III. PHONEME LEVELS
Basic Phoneme Levels (early to late first grade)
LEVEL H
H1 (Deletion) “Say sleep. Now say sleep but don’t say /s/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say sleep without the /s/, you get leap; sleep-leap, see how that works?”
Correct Automatic
/s/leep /s/ → leap ___ /c/rane /k/ → rain ___
H2 “Say true. Now say true but instead of /t/ say /g/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say true, and change the /t/ to /g/, you get grew; true-grew.”
/t/rue /g/ → grew ___ /p/lowed /k/ → cloud ___ /f/lows /k/ → clothes ___ ___/5 A: ___/5

LEVEL I “Say went. Now say went but don’t say /t/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say went without the /t/, you get when; went-when.”
I1 wen/t/ /t/ → when ___ ran/g/e /j/ → rain ___
I2 whea/t/ /t/ → we ___ nie/c/e /s/ → knee ___ dri/v/e /v/ → dry ___ ___/5 A: ___/5
Basic Phoneme Total: ___/10 A:___/10
Advanced Phoneme Levels (early to late second grade; Level M is early third grade to adult)
LEVEL J “Say ran. Now say ran but instead of /a/ say /u/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say ran, and change the /a/ to /u/, you get run; ran-run.”
I. (use sound of vowel) r/a/n /u/ → run ___ k/i/t /u/ → cut ___ h/u/ff /a/ → half ___
II. (use name of vowel) b/ea/k /A/ → bake ___f/i/ne /O/ → phone ___ ___/5 A: ___/5

LEVEL K
K1 (Deletion) “Say bread. Now say bread but don’t say /r/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say bread without the /r/, you get bed; bread-bed.”
b/r/ead → bed ___ s/n/eak → seek ___ Correct Automatic
K2 (Substitution) “Say crew. Now say crew but instead of /r/ say /l/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say crew, and change the /r/ to /l/, you get clue; crew-clue.”
c/r/ew → c/l/ue ___ p/r/oud → p/l/owed ___ s/n/eeze → s/k/is ___ ___/5 A: ___/5

LEVEL L “Say some. Say some but instead of /m/ say /n/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say some, and change the /m/ to /n/, you get sun; some-sun.”
so/m/e /n/ → sun ___ rhy/m/e /d/ → ride ___
nigh/t/ /s/ → nice ___ see/m/ /t/ → sea/t/ ___ kee/p/ /z/ → keys ___ ___/5 A: ___/5

LEVEL M
M1 (Deletion) “Say ghost. Now say ghost but don’t say /s/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say ghost without the /s/, you get goat; ghost-goat.”
gho/s/t → goat ___ co/s/t → caught ___
M2 (Substitution) “Say west. Now say west but instead of /s/ say /n/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say west, and change the /s/ to /n/, you get went; west-went.”
we/s/t → we/n/t ___ cra/f/t → cra/ck/ed ___ dea/l/t → de/n/t ___ ___/5 A: ___/5

Advanced Phoneme Total: ___/20 A:___/20

– 239 –
 PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS
SCREENING TEST (PAST) FORM B
David A. Kilpatrick, Ph.D. © 2010
Adapted from the levels used in Mclnnis (1999) & Rosner (1973)

Name: ______________________________ Date: _______________ Grade ______ Age ______

Teacher: __________________________ D.O.B.: ___________ Evaluator: __________________

INSTRUCTIONS: See Equipped for Reading Success Chapter 11: “Assessment of Phonological Awareness” for detailed instructions on the PAST.
RESULTS:
Correct Automatic Highest Correct Level: ______
Basic Syllable ____/10 ____/10 (Levels not passed below the highest correct level) ______
Onset-Rime ____/10 ____/10
Basic Phoneme ____/10 ____/10
Advanced Phoneme ____/20 ____/20 Highest Automatic Level: ______
Test Total ____/50 ____/50 (Non-automatic levels below highest automatic level) ______
Approximate Grade Level (Circle): PreK/K K late K/early 1st 1st late 1st/early 2nd 2nd late 2nd to adult
Note: The grade levels listed throughout the PAST are estimates based on various research studies and clinical experience. They are not formalized norms.

I. SYLLABLE LEVELS
Basic Syllable Levels (D, E2 - preschool to mid kindergarten; E3 - mid to late kindergarten)
LEVEL D “Say flashlight. Now say flashlight but don’t say flash.” Correct Automatic
FEEDBACK: “If you say flashlight without saying flash, you get light. Okay? Let’s try another one.”
D1 (flash)light ____ (door)bell ____ rail(road) ____
D2 (cor)ner ____ (mem)ber ____ mar(ble) ____ ___/6 A: ___/6
LEVEL E “Say gymnastics. Now say gymnastics but don’t say gym.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say gymnastics without saying gym, you get nastics. See how that works?”
E2 (gym)nastics ___ (i)dea ___ ___/4 A: ___/4
(Sep)tember ___ (car)nation ___
Basic Syllable Total: ___/10 A:___/10

II. ONSET-RIME LEVELS

Onset-Rime Levels (kindergarten to mid first grade)
LEVEL F “Say far. Now say far but don’t say /f/.” Correct Automatic
FEEDBACK: “If you say far without the /f/, you get are; far-are, see how that works?”
/f/ar → are ___ /n/ame → aim ___
/w/ait → ate ___ /b/eg → egg ___ /l/oan → own ___ ___/5 A: ___/5

LEVEL G “Say kite. Now say kite but instead of /k/ say /r/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say kite, and change the /k/ to /r/, you get right; kite-right.”
/k/ite /r/ → right ___ /c/ane /r/ → rain ___ ___/5 A: ___/5
/d/ime /r/ → rhyme ___ /g/uess /y/ → yes ___ /c/aught /b/ → bought ___
Onset-Rime Total: ___/10 A:___/10

– 240 –
 PAST Form B
III. PHONEME LEVELS
Basic Phoneme Levels (early to late first grade)
LEVEL H
H1 (Deletion) “Say sleeve. Now say sleeve but don’t say /s/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say sleeve without the /s/, you get leave; sleeve-leave, see how that works?” Correct Automatic
/s/leeve /s/ → leave ___ /g/reat /g/ → rate ___
H2 (Substitution) “Say breeze. Now say breeze but instead of /b/ say of /t/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say breeze, and change the /b/ to /t/, you get trees; breeze-trees.”
/b/reeze /t/ → trees ___ /c/rew /t/ → true ___ /p/roud /c/ → crowd ___ ___/5 A: ___/5

LEVEL I “Say sword. Now say sword but don’t say /d/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say sword without the /d/, you get sword; sword-sore.”
I1 swor/d/ /d/ → sore ___ bol/t/ /t/ → bowl ___
I2 sea/t/ /t/ → see ___ grou/p/ /p/ → grew ___ hou/se/ /s/ → how ___ ___/5 A: ___/5
Basic Phoneme Total: ___/10 A:___/10

Advanced Phoneme Levels (early to late second grade; Level M is early third grade to adult)
LEVEL J “Say man. Now say man but instead of /a/ say /e/.”
Correct Automatic
FEEDBACK: “If you say man, and change the /a/ to /e/, you get man; man-men.”
I. (use sound of vowel) m/a/n /e/ → men ___ r/o/ck /e/ → wreck ___ wh/e/n /u/ → won ___
II. (use name of vowel) l/oa/n /I/ → line ___ s/i/de /E/ → seed ___ ___/5 A: ___/5

LEVEL K
K1 (Deletion) “Say truth. Now say truth but don’t say /r/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say truth without the /r/, you get tooth; truth-tooth,”
t/r/uth → tooth ___ b/r/eeze → bees ___
K2 (Substitution) “Say crime. Now say crime but instead of /r/ say /l/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say crime, and change the /r/ to /l/, you get crime; crime-climb.”
c/r/ime → c/l/imb ___ b/r/aid → b/l/ade ___ s/p/eed → s/k/ied ___ ___/5 A: ___/5

LEVEL L “Say hen. Now say hen but instead of /n/ say /d/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say hen, and change the /n/ to /d/, you get head; hen-head.”
he/n/ /d/ → head ___ whe/n/ /t/ → wet ___
sou/p/ /n/ → soon ___ to/n/e /d/ → toad ___ kni/f/e /t/ → night ___ ___/5 A: ___/5

LEVEL M
M1 (Deletion) “Say desk. Now say desk but don’t say /s/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say desk without the /s/, you get deck; desk-deck.”
de/s/k → deck ___ she/l/f → chef ___
M2 (Substitution) “Say rift. Now say rift but instead of /f/ say /s/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say rift, and change the /f/ to /s/, you get wrist; rift-wrist.”
ri/f/t → wri/s/t ___ te/s/t → te/n/t ___ ro/p/ed → roa/s/t ___ ___/5 A: ___/5

Advanced Phoneme Total: ___/20 A:___/20

– 241 –
 PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS
SCREENING TEST (PAST) FORM C
David A. Kilpatrick, Ph.D. © 2010
Adapted from the levels used in Mclnnis (1999) & Rosner (1973)

Name: ______________________________ Date: _______________ Grade ______ Age ______

Teacher: __________________________ D.O.B.: ___________ Evaluator: __________________

INSTRUCTIONS: See Equipped for Reading Success Chapter 11: “Assessment of Phonological Awareness” for detailed instructions on the PAST.
RESULTS:
Correct Automatic Highest Correct Level: ______
Basic Syllable ____/10 ____/10 (Levels not passed below the highest correct level) ______
Onset-Rime ____/10 ____/10
Basic Phoneme ____/10 ____/10
Advanced Phoneme ____/20 ____/20 Highest Automatic Level: ______
Test Total ____/50 ____/50 (Non-automatic levels below highest automatic level) ______
Approximate Grade Level (Circle): PreK/K K late K/early 1st 1st late 1st/early 2nd 2nd late 2nd to adult
Note: The grade levels listed throughout the PAST are estimates based on various research studies and clinical experience. They are not formalized norms.

I. SYLLABLE LEVELS
Basic Syllable Levels (D, E2 - preschool to mid kindergarten; E3 - mid to late kindergarten)
LEVEL D “Say footprint. Now say footprint but don’t say foot.” Correct Automatic
FEEDBACK: “If you say footprint without saying foot, you get print. Okay? Let’s try another one.”
D1 (foot)print ____ (row)boat ____ mid(night) ____
D2 (ta)ble ____ (o)ver ____ pan(da) ____ ___/6 A: ___/6
LEVEL E “Say Invention. Now say Invention but don’t say In.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say invention without saying in, you get vention. See how that works?”
E2 (in)vention ___ (ma)gician___ ___/4 A: ___/4
(me)chanic ___ (re)member___
Basic Syllable Total: ___/10 A:___/10

II. ONSET-RIME LEVELS

Onset-Rime Levels (kindergarten to mid first grade)
LEVEL F “Say bat. Now say bat but don’t say /b/.” Correct Automatic
FEEDBACK: “If you say bat without the /b/, you get at; bat-at, see how that works?”
/b/at → at ___ /ph/one → own ___
/n/ame → aim ___ /c/ore → oar ___ /c/ough → off ___ ___/5 A: ___/5

LEVEL G “Say loop. Now say loop but instead of /l/ say /s/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say loop, and change the /l/ to /s/, you get soup; loop-soup.”
/l/oop /s/ → soup ___ /p/ut /f/ → foot ___ ___/5 A: ___/5
/p/ool /r/ → rule ___ /w/ait /g/ → gate ___ /s/auce /l/ → loss ___
Onset-Rime Total: ___/10 A:___/10

– 242 –
 PAST Form C

III. PHONEME LEVELS

Basic Phoneme Levels (early to late first grade)
LEVEL H
H1 (Deletion) “Say sled. Now say sled but don’t say /s/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say sled without the /s/, you get led; sled-led, see how that works?” Correct Automatic
/s/led /s/ → led ___ /s/weet /s/ → wheat ___
H2 (Substitution) “Say true. Now say true but instead of /t/ say /g/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say true, and change the /t/ to /g/, you get grew; true-grew.”
/t/rue /g/ → grew ___ /f/roze /g/ → grows ___ /t/roop /g/ → group ___ ___/5 A: ___/5

LEVEL I “Say word. Now say word but don’t say /d/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say word without the /d/, you get were; word-were, see how that works?”
I1 wor/d/ /d/ → were ___ lam/p/ /p/ → lamb ___
I2 boa/t/ /t/ → bow ___ toa/d/ /d/ → toe ___ wi/d/e /d/ → why ___ ___/5 A: ___/5
Basic Phoneme Total: ___/10 A:___/10
Advanced Phoneme Levels (early to late second grade; Level M is early third grade to adult)
LEVEL J “Say bat. Now say bat but instead of /a/ say /i/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say bat, and change the /a/ to /i/, you get bit; bat-bit.”
I. (use sound of vowel) b/a/t /i/ → bit ___ g/e/m /a/ → jam ___ m/a/tch /u/ → much ___
II. (use name of vowel) sh/ee/p /A/ → shape ___ ch/o/se /E/ → cheese ___ ___/5 A: ___/5

LEVEL K
K1 (Deletion) “Say breeze. Now say breeze but don’t say /r/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say breeze without the /r/, you get bees; breeze-bees,”
Correct Automatic
b/r/eeze → bees ___ c/l/aim → came ___
K2 (Substitution) “Say crows. Now say crows but instead of /r/ say /l/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say crows, and change the /r/ to /l/, you get close; crows-close.”
c/r/ows → c/l/ose ___ s/w/arm → s/t/orm ___ c/r/uise → c/l/ues ___ ___/5 A: ___/5

LEVEL L “Say set. Now say set but instead of /t/ say /d/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say set, and change the /t/ to /d/, you get said; set-said.”
se/t/ /d/ → said ___ ri/s/e /m/ → rhyme ___
migh/t/ /s/ → mice ___ tu/b/e /th/ → tooth ___ cou/gh/ /t/ → caught ___ ___/5 A: ___/5

LEVEL M
M1 (Deletion) “Say swept. Now say swept but don’t say /p/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say swept without the /p/, you get sweat; swept-sweat.”
swe/p/t → sweat ___ bo/l/t → boat ___
M2 (Substitution) “Say rent. Now say rent but instead of /n/ say /s/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say rent, and change the /n/ to /s/, you get rest; rent-rest.”
re/n/t → re/s/t ___ dri/f/t → dri/pp/ed ___ wor/k/ed → wor/s/t ___ ___/5 A: ___/5

Advanced Phoneme Total: ___/20 A:___/20

– 243 –
 PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS
SCREENING TEST (PAST) FORM D
David A. Kilpatrick, Ph.D. © 2010
Adapted from the levels used in Mclnnis (1999) & Rosner (1973)

Name: ______________________________ Date: _______________ Grade ______ Age ______

Teacher: __________________________ D.O.B.: ___________ Evaluator: __________________

INSTRUCTIONS: See Equipped for Reading Success Chapter 11: “Assessment of Phonological Awareness” for detailed instructions on the PAST.
RESULTS:
Correct Automatic Highest Correct Level: ______
Basic Syllable ____/10 ____/10 (Levels not passed below the highest correct level) ______
Onset-Rime ____/10 ____/10
Basic Phoneme ____/10 ____/10
Advanced Phoneme ____/20 ____/20 Highest Automatic Level: ______
Test Total ____/50 ____/50 (Non-automatic levels below highest automatic level) ______
Approximate Grade Level (Circle): PreK/K K late K/early 1st 1st late 1st/early 2nd 2nd late 2nd to adult
Note: The grade levels listed throughout the PAST are estimates based on various research studies and clinical experience. They are not formalized norms.

I. SYLLABLE LEVELS
Basic Syllable Levels (D, E2 - preschool to mid kindergarten; E3 - mid to late kindergarten)
LEVEL D “Say sidewalk. Now say sidewalk but don’t say side.” Correct Automatic
FEEDBACK: “If you say sidewalk without saying side, you get walk. Okay? Let’s try another one.”
D1 (side)walk ____ (door)way ____ week(end) ____
D2 (dol)phin ____ (car)pet ____ mor(ning) ____ ___/6 A: ___/6
LEVEL E “Say tornado. Now say tornado but don’t say tor.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say tornado without saying tor, you get nado. See how that works?”
E2 (tor)nado ___ (per)mission___ ___/4 A: ___/4
(com)puter ___ (de)partment___
Basic Syllable Total: ___/10 A:___/10

II. ONSET-RIME LEVELS

Onset-Rime Levels (kindergarten to mid first grade)
LEVEL F “Say band. Now say band but don’t say /b/.” Correct Automatic
FEEDBACK: “If you say band without the /b/, you get and; band-and, see how that works?”
/b/and → and ___ /w/ise → eyes ___
/j/ar → are ___ /f/ake → ache ___ /sh/ove → of ___ ___/5 A: ___/5

LEVEL G “Say read. Now say read but instead of /r/ say /n/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say read, and change the /r/ to /n/, you get need; read-need.”
/r/ead /n/ → need ___ /h/er /f/ → fur ___ ___/5 A: ___/5
/c/ode /t/ → toad ___ /l/ed /s/ → said ___ /th/ese /ch/ → cheese ___
Onset-Rime Total: ___/10 A:___/10

– 244 –
 PAST Form D

III. PHONEME LEVELS

Basic Phoneme Levels (early to late first grade)
LEVEL H
H1 (Deletion) “Say tried. Now say tried but don’t say /t/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say tried without the /t/, you get ride; tried-ride, see how that works?” Correct Automatic
/t/ried /t/ → ride ___ /s/lam /s/ → lamb ___
H2 (Substitution) “Say froze. Now say froze but instead of /f/ say of /g/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say froze, and change the /f/ to /g/, you get grows; froze-grows.”
/f/roze /g/ → grows ___ /t/rees /f/ → freeze ___ /f/ries /p/ → prize ___ ___/5 A: ___/5

LEVEL I “Say port. Now say port without the /t/.”

FEEDBACK: “If you say port without the /t/, you get poor; port-poor, see how that works?”
I1 por/t/ /t/ → poor ___ col/d/ /d/ → coal ___
I2 sa/m/e /m/ → say ___ pla/c/e /s/ → play ___ nee/d/ /d/ → knee ___ ___/5 A: ___/5
Basic Phoneme Total: ___/10 A:___/10
Advanced Phoneme Levels (early to late second grade; Level M is early third grade to adult)
LEVEL J “Say hit. Now say hit but instead of /i/ say /a/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say hit, and change the /i/ to /a/, you get hat; hit-hat.”
I. (use sound of vowel) h/i/t /a/ → hat ___ wh/e/n /i/ → win ___ t/oo/l /e/ → tell ___
II. (use name of vowel) g/a/te /O/ → goat ___ c/a/pe /E/ → keep __ ___/5 A: ___/5

LEVEL K
K1 (Deletion) “Say try. Now say try but don’t say /r/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say try without the /r/, you get tie; try-tie.”
t/r/y → tie ___ s/l/ope → soap ___ Correct Automatic
K2 (Substitution) “Say snail. Now say snail but instead of /n/ say /t/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say snail, and change the /n/ to /t/, you get stale; snail-stale.”
s/n/ail → s/t/ale ___ f/l/ows → f/r/oze ___ s/m/ile → s/t/yle ___ ___/5 A: ___/5

LEVEL L “Say foam. Now say foam but instead of /m/ say /n/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say foam, and change the /m/ to /n/, you get phone; foam-phone.”
foa/m/ /n/ → phone ___ je/t/ /m/ → gem ___
bo/th/ /t/ → boat ___ wro/t/e /p/ → rope ___ tee/th/ /ch/ → teach ___ ___/5 A: ___/5

LEVEL M
M1 (Deletion) “Say wisp. Now say wisp but don’t say /s/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say wisp without the /s/, you get whip; wisp-whip.”
wi/s/p → whip ___ de/n/t → debt ___
M2 (Substitution) “Say bent. Now say bent but instead of /n/ say /s/.”
FEEDBACK: “If you say bent, and change the /n/ to /s/, you get best; bent-best.”
be/n/t → be/s/t ___ so/f/t → sa/l/t ___ ri/pp/ed → wri/s/t ___ ___/5 A: ___/5
Advanced Phoneme Total: ___/20 A:___/20

– 245 –