"Just sound it out" is a strategy that's been long employed in the United States when coaching children in elementary education through reading sessions. The strategy helps them, and adult readers, to decode written words, and readers are to rely on phonetics and knowledge of letters and sound to read words aloud properly. The words are broken down in components so that it can be assembled verbally. However, this process does not translate to Spanish. Stanford University produced a new study which suggests that learning to read words in English isn't the same as how Spanish-speakers learn to read words in Spanish, particularly in Mexico.

Stanford University Professor Claude Goldenberg and colleagues published How important is teaching phonemic awareness to children learning to read in Spanish?, a study which examines the United States' use of phonemic awareness -- the way individual sounds make up words, and how Spanish-speaking students comprehend Spanish without such instructions. The document asks and answers the question: what approach is being used to teach a budding number of Spanish-speaking children Spanish in the United States? Also, what method is being used to teach children Spanish in Mexico, comparatively?

While the benefit of phonemic awareness in beginning instruction is evident, the United States' one-size-fits-all approach to reading is outdated, and needs to be revised. Time spent on phonemic awareness when teaching early literacy instruction in Spanish could be spent on teaching Spanish in a way that's more effective for young learners.

"Here's a specific instance of where reading policy and practice has been very markedly influenced based on a context -- English-speaking kids learning to read in English -- that is not all that general," said Goldenberg. "We need to be aware of the assumptions we're making when we take findings from one linguistic context and apply them to another."

Goldenberg, who taught junior high and first grade in predominately Latino neighborhoods throughout Southern California and Texas, has long-held concerns about challenges Spanish-speaking learners embark in the US education system. The study examined the Spanish oral language and reading skills of nearly 600 children in first and second grades and is sorted into three distinct groups: children who were assessed were learning Spanish in Mexico; Spanish in the United States; and English in the United States.

Reading instruction is very different in the two countries. The U.S. has placed an increased focus on phonemic awareness since the 1980s, and later adopted The Reading First framework, as part of No Child Left Behind in 2001, which pushed for further phonemic focus beginning at kindergarten.

Mexico's children have a low understanding of phonemic awareness because Mexico does not place an emphasis on spoken words being broken down into constituent sounds. The countries' approaches to phonics are very different, and each has different instructions on how to instruct children in developing relationships between letters and sounds.

When compared, the first grade children of Mexico scored much lower on reading and phonemic awareness assessments than Spanish-instructed and English-instructed peers in the U.S., who received considerable phonemic awareness instruction from kindergarten up to second grade. While Mexican students continued to score lower than U.S. students by the end of the second grade, they had caught up to or surpassed the U.S. students when it came to reading achievement.

When dealing with letters and there relative sounds, Spanish tends to more consistent -- whereas English represents a range of sounds that must be memorized. Researchers also found that early readers in Spanish tend to focus at the level of syllables. However, more definitive answers as to why phonemic awareness isn't quintessential to Spanish-speaking learners are subject to more research, which Goldenberg hopes that his work will incite.

Goldenberg added that his findings did not address whether kids who learn to read in Spanish and are taught phonemic awareness have an easier time learning to read in English.