Overcoming Orthographic Interference
- Supporting Word Mapping Mastery
Alfie's Mummy says the word 'the' as expected.
When she thinks about the phonemes her brain can't see past /e/ as in 'egg'
Even though Nicholas hasn't even started school yet, he is already facing barriers to learning because he has been taught at nursery to look at single letters and say a 'sound'.
He looks at the /o/ and wants to say IPA /ɒ/, as in the first sound in the word on, and when he looks at the /a/, he wants to say /æ/, as in ant. But the graphemes /o/ and /a/ in his name actually correspond with the schwa phoneme (/ə/). Look at his face. He knows there is a disconnect.
This is why children MUST follow the Monster Sounds to say the word when looking at words, as this addresses the challenges of English with its opaque orthography.
As shown here on the Silly Schwa page, we usually start with the Blue Cow. When running this pilot, we first mapped their names with the Silly Schwa—but they soon told us they didn't like that!
It only took a few weeks before they understood the difference and would use them interchangeably—but more often than not, correctly! Pretty amazing for 3- and 4-year-olds, really.
Orthographic interference refers to the impact that a learner's knowledge of spelling patterns (orthography) can have on their ability to process spoken language or accurately map phonemes (speech sounds) to graphemes (letters or letter combinations). This phenomenon occurs when pre-existing orthographic knowledge, or the way words are visually represented in written form, disrupts or biases phoneme-grapheme mapping, decoding, or encoding processes. It is particularly relevant in the context of learning to read and spell in opaque orthographies like English.
Key Features of Orthographic Interference:
-
Phoneme Identification Challenges:
-
Learners may struggle to isolate the phonemes in a word because they rely on the visual representation of the word, which can be inconsistent with its phonemic structure. For instance, in pitch, learners may perceive four sounds due to orthographic cues but overlook that the word contains only three phonemes (/p/, /ɪ/, /tʃ/).
-
-
Influence of Irregular Spellings:
-
English orthography contains numerous irregularities, such as graphemes representing multiple phonemes (e.g., a in cat, table, was) or phonemes represented by different graphemes (e.g., /f/ in fish vs. ph in phone). These irregularities can confuse learners when attempting to map speech to print or vice versa.
-
-
Effects on Teaching and Learning:
-
Teachers may unconsciously project their orthographic knowledge onto their teaching, which can distort their ability to provide accurate phoneme-grapheme mapping, especially for untaught correspondences.
-
For students, particularly those with dyslexia or phonological processing difficulties, orthographic interference may exacerbate challenges in developing phonemic awareness and decoding skills.
-
-
Impact of Accents and Dialects:
-
Regional accents and linguistic variations can further complicate mapping when the spoken form of a word does not align with its written representation. For example, the word bath might involve different vowel phonemes depending on the speaker’s accent, leading to potential mismatches between pronunciation and spelling.
-
-
Relevance to Literacy Instruction:
-
Orthographic interference highlights the importance of balancing phonics instruction with activities that encourage phonemic awareness in a way that is not solely reliant on print. It also underlines the need for teacher training to minimise biases arising from their own orthographic knowledge.
-
Implications for Education:
-
For Teachers:
-
Teachers must become aware of their own orthographic interference to better support children who are still developing phoneme-grapheme mapping skills.
-
Training on how to isolate and identify phonemes independently of spelling can reduce orthographic interference in teaching practice.
-
-
For Learners:
-
Learners benefit from explicit instruction that disentangles phonemic knowledge from orthographic biases, particularly in the early stages of literacy development.
-
Activities like using non-alphabetic systems (e.g., Phonemies) help children focus on phoneme awareness. They are useful for children of all ages - and offer a unique way for very young children to learn to read with very little explicit instruction - but especially for dyslexic learners and older children struggling with spelling.
-
Orthographic interference is a critical concept in understanding why some teachers struggle to teach children to read and spell, and at least 30% of children struggle to transition from phonemic awareness to fluent reading and spelling, especially in languages with opaque orthographies like English. Addressing this interference through effective teaching strategies and training is essential to improving literacy outcomes.
We use specific words to evoke orthographic interference in teachers of phonics, to show them that they so easily get 'blinded by the letters' When aware of this they can start to separate the speech sounds (and be aware that their accent may also affect this) and the 'pictures of the speech sounds' to give the correct mapping to children. The IPA is a great tool for checking the 'Universal Spelling Code' (Dehaene 2009)
Dehaene, S. (2009). Reading in the brain: The new science of how we read. Penguin Viking
Speech Sound Mapping: Discovery Learning in Mind
When you show the code, you don't need to 'explicitly teach' the concepts—the 'Code Mapping®' (black/grey to indicate the Sound Pics®/graphemes) plus the Phonemies to show the sound value just make sense to children's brains.