Breaking down the pieces

A big part of planning the app, was/is thinking about what the actual educational content will be. What do I want people to learn? What order? How to break it down, etc?

I had done a lot of research into this area back when I made an app for pre-k to grade 2 students focused around the same topic. And I went back to a lot of that research again.

I had already heard about sight words from when my oldest niece and nephew had gone through Kindergarten. And I knew about the Fry word lists from a previous app I had worked on. But the more I dug into it, and the more research I read, I realized how much “we” had been swinging from phonics first to whole words as a reading strategies. And that if we really wanted to focus on getting people reading fast, we needed to take a multi-prong approach.

And, in the years since, I believe this even more than I did then (if possible).

So, as I started on this project, I knew I was going to tackle high frequency words as well as phonics and decodable words.

I went back and found the paper by Jonathan Solity and Janet Vousden. I love this paper because they give you two great starting points. First, because they include a list of the top 64 most frequent GPCs that are most crucial to learn to start decoding quickly. And second, because it also includes a list of the top 100 high frequency words. These two pieces form the foundation of my thinking.

GPCs

GPCs, or grapheme–phoneme correspondences, is the connection between a letter (or grouping of letters) to a single phoneme sound. The word “rug” is made up of three, as each letter in it is tied to a different phoneme sound. The word shrug is made up of 4, as “sh” is tied to a single sound.

What makes learning GPCs hard, is that the same letter(s) can map to more than one phoneme. It’s why we the word “read” can be read two different ways. The “ea” can be mapped to the “eh” sound or the “ee” sound.

In fact:

Gontijo, Gontijo, and Shillcock (2003) analysed 160,595 different word types (the number of unique words, i.e. the number of different words) and found that they can be represented by just 195 graphemes and 461 grapheme–phoneme associations.

Yikes! That’s a lot of possible combinations. However, as I mentioned above, the paper highlights the 64 GPCs that are the most frequent. If you know these ones, you can start to approach and decode a lot of words. Most words, really. Because the thing is, not all GPCs are created equal. Some are found very infrequently in words (like “dge” in fridge or judge). For these ones, it makes less sense to spend time teaching these up front, as compared to the basic sounds behind most constants and the long and short versions of the vowels.

High Frequency Words

High Frequency Words (HFWs) and Sight Words often get confused and tangled, but they do actually mean two different things. Sight words, are words that use tricky/rare GPC mappings, and so aren’t easy to sound out early on (think words like “was” or “the”). High Frequency words, on the other hand, get their name specifically because of how frequently they arise in text. The top 100 I mentioned above, account for about 50% of the words in most texts. 🤯

While it’s important that people learn how to sound out words and decode them (and need phonics to do so), mastering these top 100 words so that you just know them without thinking, is a crucial step to being able to read fluently and quickly. If you can already read half the text, you’ve unlocked a huge portion. And those top 100 give a lot of help to the context of what you’re reading.

My Approach

I knew from the start that I wanted to tackle this project by starting with a focus on the basic GPCs and HFWs. But, I also wanted to take it farther. Knowing that b makes the sound of “buh” is good, but you need to also put it together to start decoding words like bug or bat. So, that meant added in a third category for me, decodable words. And then, I decided that I’d actually like to take it even one step farther, and bring in sentences. I didn’t want to go past sentences because a) I already do reading comprehension at that level at my job (no compete) and b) it’s a much much bigger than the other four groups I mentioned combined and well, this is being done just by me as a hobby. So I wanted to try and keep it more manageable.

My first plan looks something like the chart below. Where players would start with both basic GPCs and HFWs available to work on. And then as they learn enough GPCs, it would unlock beginner decodable words. And when they have enough of those and enough HFWs, it would unlock sentences.

I’m not 100% sold on the plan, mainly because I think I’m going to divide it into more granular levels. There’s a sense of accomplishment to getting things done, and if the task is too big, it can feel too overwhelming and demotivating. So I don’t want someone to go in and feel they need to learn all 100 HFWs before they’ll be able to unlock sentences, and so on. So this will be modified, but gives some basic idea of the structure — “learn enough of the parts needed to master the next part, and it unlocks.”

Anyway, will have to see how it goes. For now, I’m just getting the basic app setup. I’ve got it to the point that it has the base GPCs and HFWs and you can do some “listen and read” and “read and listen” matching. But, more on that in the next post.