Articulatory gestures in literacy instruction: Part 3- what now?

This is the last of a three-part series on the use of articulatory gestures in literacy instruction. If you missed the first two, see: Articulatory gestures in literacy instruction: Part 1- the theoretical rationale and Part 2- the research evidence.

These days, articulatory gestures and sound walls with mouth pictures are the subject of much discussion in the literacy world.  In part two of this series, we saw that the few studies that show promise for this approach had limited instructional implications.  And yet, current trends have not only embraced this concept, but have taken it to a level not investigated by any of the relevant studies.  Practices popularized over the past several years recommend teaching students about concepts such as liquid, fricative, affricate, nasal, voiced/voiceless consonant phonemes, and subtle gradations in vowel height and backness.  For example, teachers may be encouraged to have children remember to keep your voice on, because /u/ is voiced, like all vowels, or give detailed placement cues such as put your teeth together and round your lips like this, and pull your tongue toward the back of your mouth and make sure your voice is off (to make the /sh/ sound).   Or, dubious cues such as fit one finger in your mouth to say short i (as in “bit”) and two fingers to say short e (as in “bet”) and suggestions for metalinguistic activities that are rather removed from actual reading or spelling, such as asking students what is the nasal sound you make with your two lips?  I recently read a description of how to produce “j” that was very nearly 100 words long. Further, some instructional materials reference articulatory gestures over the first few years of literacy instruction.  All of these points represent a very significant overextension of the findings, in my view.

True, perhaps this depth of instruction is indeed more effective, even if yet to be demonstrated by experimental evidence.  So, if it might help, then why not?  A couple of responses here.  Firstly, spending class time on instructional routines that are not evidence-based results in an opportunity cost.  If we allot an average of even 3 minutes daily for a low-impact activity, that is 9 hours over the course of the school year that could be devoted to higher-impact activities.  Further, and probably more of a problem in my estimation, learning to teach the articulatory gestures requires a serious investment of time, energy, and resources on the part of very busy and underfunded teachers.  Is it possible that teachers will miss out on deepening their expertise in higher impact concepts, such as on the benefits of direct instruction, while they are devoting precious professional learning time to understanding the details of phonology and speech articulation?  I would argue that we need to be reasonably sure that the benefits of this approach are worth the costs associated with its implementation, and I’m not sold, based on the theoretical considerations and empirical findings to date.

Although I am skeptical of many current practices, I’m not ready to abandon the whole idea, given especially the findings of Boyer & Ehri, 2011.  For example, while doing phoneme segmenting for spelling, we may cue children to think about the sounds in their words, draw their attention our mouths as we model the spoken words, but without much explanation of the gesture.  And if a child writes “hug” as “hg,” I would definitely cue them to see how their mouth opens to make a vowel sound and might prompt them to look in the mirror to see it happen.  In my view, this approach is responsive to needs.  On the other hand, there are some contrasts where universally teaching the gestures likely makes sense, e.g. contrasts that are very similar acoustically, for example /f/ versus /th/, or /m/ versus /n/, which are much more distinct in terms of their articulatory gestures.  Finally, I have often referenced the gesture of a sound when teaching children new sound contrasts in their second language, for example teaching French Immersion students that French “u” (as in “tu”) is like “eee” but with rounded lips.  However, even for these second-language learners, I would personally stick to the basics and reference gestures only for sounds that pose some difficulty.

There are several sets of published materials for teaching children about articulatory gestures, some embedded into more comprehensive programs, some more-or-less stand-alone, and some low-budget printable versions available on Teachers Pay Teachers.  I have heard some people argue that by embedding more detail into instructional content, teachers learn along with their students, and develop knowledge that will improve their teaching.  For example, when teachers learn about continuant consonants, they can learn how to teach continuous blending, a research-based strategy that involves selecting words that start with “stretchy sounds” such as ssssat but not cat (Gonzalez-Frey & Ehri, 2021).  Indeed, this particular point is highly practical knowledge for teachers, but I do wonder if it gets lost in a sea of not-so-useful details.

Since sharing my take on this trend, a few people have suggested that incorporating this kind of teaching into the classroom may reduce the number of children who will require individual speech therapy, and so it might be justified as a preventative approach. It’s possible. We do know that a child with speech difficulties who is learning to read will benefit from an approach that targets both of these in a coherent fashion (Rvachew & Brosseau-Lapré, 2015).  However, I am still unconvinced that the heavy emphasis on the gestures is sensical. In fact, most speech disorders in children, about 85-90%, are primarily phonological in nature (Dodd, 1995), meaning that they have a delayed or disordered concept of the system of sounds in their target language. Consequently, speech therapy involves much less discussion of the articulatory gestures than most people would probably imagine. For these children, it’s less about how to move your mouth and more about creating opportunities and providing feedback to help establish the meaningful sound contrasts of the language, i.e., building their phonological system. I would argue that using a sound wall with the lengthy descriptions of the articulatory gestures to help a child with a phonological disorder would be conflating articulation and phonology, which SLPs know are different things, requiring different approaches to interventions (Rvachew & Brosseau-Lapré, 2018). True, speech articulation difficulties, such as a dental lisp of /s/ and /z/, are a different matter, and typically would require placement cues, but these errors are commonly present on only a subset of speech sounds. Furthermore, when teaching articulation, we teach only whatever features are required to differentiate the error from the target sound, without getting into every feature.

I admit, when I first heard about mouth pictures and articulatory gestures and sound walls in literacy several years ago, I was excited that my expert knowledge about speech might be put to use in this way.  Like a lot of SLPs with a passion for literacy, I was ready to dive in, having been assured that there was ample evidence for this approach.  I have since changed my mind, after spending considerable time investigating this issue.  Of course, SLPs are still critical to the discussion on literacy, but we need to do our homework and try to check our bias at the door, just like everyone else.  

In a field as vast as literacy, it’s easy to get caught up in trends, because there is so much going on at all times, amplified by the din of social media. If we find ourselves questioning the utility of a certain trend, we might take a lesson from the recent discussion regarding the teaching of phonemic awareness. For ages, many people (I was one of them) advocated for teaching phonemic awareness isolated from printed words, to be sure that children were really focusing on the phonemes. Well, this seems to be rather a misinterpretation of the literature that became entrenched in practice, as some researchers have pointed out (e.g., Seidenberg, 2021; Brady, 2020), leading many people to reconsider aspects of their instruction and intervention. There likely are some circumstances in which we would want to zero-in on phonemic awareness specifically, to achieve a higher volume of practice in a short time, though research has yet to identify what exactly those circumstances are, just that extensive oral-only phonemic awareness instruction is probably not an efficient use of classroom time.  In fact, an extremely popular program (reportedly an estimated annual revenue $8.2 million USD) that teaches precisely this concept has been the subject of some criticism, and recent research findings suggest that there may not be an advantage to incorporating this program over teaching a quality phonics program alone (Little et al., 2023).  I’m no social psychologist, but it seems to me that trends and bandwagons are simply a fact of life for us fallible humans. As long we are aware of this fact, if we commit to doing the homework, and are willing to adapt in the face of new information, then everything should be fine.

Back to the articulatory gestures. Let’s put this trend in the current context.  Over the past several years, lots of people have realized that the predominant approach to early literacy needs serious work.  Very important here: the present critique, specifically of the use of articulatory gestures, should not be taken as criticism of the broader shifts towards explicit, systematic foundational literacy instruction. There is finally generally agreement that we need to move toward a more systematic approach to foundational literacy, so that the greatest number of children learn to read during the first few years of school, and major changes are underway, in some places at least.  This is an important moment that we really can’t afford to mess up.  We should aim to be sure that our implementation of best practices is not inadvertently derailed by promoting elements that are needlessly burdensome and distract from higher-impact instruction and interventions.  As with everything, the devil is in the details, and keeping up with this field is time-consuming and, frankly, exhausting, given the volume of information out there.  So, what’s a teacher, interventionist, SLP, or other literacy leader to do?  As Anita Archer famously said: Teach the stuff and cut the fluff, reminding us to keep it as simple as we can and as complicated as we must, based on the best available evidence.  So I will continue to teach the linking of speech sounds to their corresponding graphemes, but for now I’ll hold off on vowel valleys and complex displays and descriptions of articulatory gestures, until there is evidence that these result in better outcomes in literacy.

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