Orthographic Mapping
We’ve heard of it, but do we really get it?
The science of reading tells us that phonemic awareness is crucial for developing a sight word vocabulary. Sight words are words that we recognize instantly and effortlessly. It has been generally assumed that we recognize words based on visual memory, but we now know that we do not. Understanding how words are recognized and stored will help us better facilitate the development of sight word vocabularies in our students.
For this blog, I am summarizing a portion of chapter 4 of David Kilpatrick’s Equipped for Reading Success: A Comprehensive, Step-by-Step Program for Developing Phonemic Awareness and Word Recognition (2016). He starts the chapter by listing nine factors that demonstrate how scientists know that we do not remember words based on visual memory. I will not list those here, but realize that there is plenty of evidence to back this idea.
“Because written words are input visually, we must resist the strongly intuitive temptation to think they are stored visually” (p. 32).
Also know that visual memory is required to distinguish letters and learn their names and sounds. One big difference between learning letters and learning words is that for good readers it can take just one to five exposures to learn a word but it always takes hundreds of exposures to learn letter names and sounds.
Orthographic mapping is the mental process we use to permanently store words for immediate, effortless retrieval. The theory was developed by Dr. Linnea Ehri. This process occurs fairly naturally for most readers; simply expose them to words and they will map them to permanent memory.
We have a filing system that allows us to understand—quickly—the words that we hear. This filing system is the foundation for the filing system we use to read words. In this chapter, Kilpatrick uses acronyms to demonstrate that some letter strings are meaningful to us and some are not. For example, FBI and NFL are meaningful to most of us while GLV and LFW are not. Because FBI and NFL are meaningful, we remember them. It works the same with words. If a string of letters has meaning, our brains will remember that string of letters.
The question is—what makes letter strings meaningful? The answer is phoneme awareness. Phoneme awareness helps us understand the sounds we hear in spoken words. If the order of letters makes sense to a reader because it matches the sounds they hear in the spoken word, it is meaningful and can be anchored into permanent memory. We can now understand that if students are not used to segmenting words into individual sounds—which in turn are represented by individual graphemes—then letter order may seem random and trivial.
Young readers with basic phoneme awareness and good letter-sound skills will immediately connect letter strings with phonemes they hear in spoken words. (Remember, our filing system of spoken words is the foundation for the filing system we use for reading words.) In contrast, readers weak in phonemic awareness will not recognize the meaningfulness of letter strings. It is as if they are trying to remember random strings of letters.
Children not trained in phoneme awareness or those who struggle with it will not notice the logical relationship between a word’s pronunciation and the letters used to represent that pronunciation in print. This makes words extremely difficult to remember.
You have heard that phoneme awareness is important and now you know why. When we are cognizant of the sound structure of spoken words, the letters of written language piggyback onto these phonemes. This is the essence of orthographic mapping.
When a student’s orthographic mapping skills improve, their sight word vocabulary increases. And this leads to improvements in reading fluency and thus reading comprehension. Orthographic mapping is critical to becoming a successful reader and teachers’ understanding of the process is foundational to systemic reading achievement.
To hear David Kilpatrick himself talk about this, check out this video.