How can we help students who struggle with consonant blends?

Hide Video Transcript Show Video Transcript

Dr. Louisa Moats: The deletion of consonants inside of blends is very common in students who are at beginning stages. And that's because those consonants are much more elusive in speech. When we say a word like melt, the /l/ kind of slips away into the vowel. When we say a word like stick, the second /t/ sound is buried in the word. So what the student needs is phonemic awareness practice with words that have blends in them, and they need practice with what we call complex phoneme awareness tasks that involve adding and deleting sounds. So, for example, if we want students to learn the /st/ in stick, we'd say, say tick. What are the sounds? /t/ - /ĭk/. Now, add /s/ to the beginning of the word. What does it make? And if those students has sick and you backtrack and you say, tick has a /t/ in it. If you add /s/ and you don't take anything away, what does that make? And then conversely, you can practice by saying, say, stick. Now take away /s/ ... what do you have left? And then more difficult is say stick ... now take away /t/. What do you have left? That's more demanding because that's a more elusive phoneme to detect in the speech-sound stream.