The timing and teaching of word families
Johnston, F.R. 1999, in The Reading Teacher, vol. 53, no. 1, pp.64 — 75.

Bear and Templeton (1998) have made a strong case for the integration of the teaching of phonics, vocabulary, and spelling. But how this instruction can be most effectively managed will depend upon each student’s developmental level. Developmental readiness can be determined most effectively by examining students’ samples of writing.

The timing of instruction is an important consideration for Johnston, a colleague of Bear and Templeton in advocating that the onset/rime linguistic unit be the primary focus for instruction in assisting students to become more knowledgeable decoders through learning about the relationships among words (word families). Her argument is based on considerable research including that of Treiman (1983). She suggest that it is easier for students to segment words into onset and rime at the early stages of learning to read and write rather attempting to discriminate the individual phonemes. The pace of instruction needs to be tuned, however to meet individual differences.

For example, students at the Early Letter Name phase who are using consonants predominantly in their writing should only be exposed to one family (e.g., -at as in cat) at a time. However, once students establish regular use of vowels, the pace of instruction could be accelerated with families being presented across vowels. The choice of families could be effectively linked to texts where a number of words with the same phonogram occur (e.g., Hop on Pop).

One way of maximizing this approach is to teach the families that have high frequency use. It seems, for example that the list of 37 phonograms generated by Wiley and Durrell (1970) is the basis of 500 primary words. Similarly, Frye (1998) produced a list of 38 phonograms that is the basis for 654 one-syllable words. As well many of these words are the building blocks for multisyllabic words (e.g., hippopotamus).

Johnston’s article provides a service in making a link between the timing of instruction based on developmental readiness and the teaching of word families building on student’ phonological awareness of rhyme. Readiness for instruction is a concept sometimes overlooked. Her advice is that students’ invented spelling can indicate what instruction is appropriate and when this should happen.