The best way we can promote orthographic mapping to our students is through exposure and practice. Orthographic mapping occurs when students can link the sounds of a word with the letters that make up the spelling and the meaning of the word (Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, 2020).3
Orthographic memory helps move words into a child’s long-term memory and will result in these words being recalled automatically when reading. It is essential to understand that our students will need phonics and decoding skills for orthographic mapping to occur. Phonemic awareness is a foundational skill for decoding. Therefore, it is our responsibility to support our students in the needed skills to help promote orthographic memory for students to become fluent and skillful readers.
Teaching reading is not an easy task, but the science of reading is now offering us clear, indisputable evidence of how the brain learns to read. As educators, it is up to us to become familiar with what the scientific evidence says about how the brain learns to read and begin implementing it in our classrooms.
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Retrieved From:
1 Loewus, L., & Hanford , E. (2019, March 11). What Teachers Should Know About the Science of Reading. Education Week. Another version of this news article first appeared in the Teaching Now blog. Retrieved May 30, 2022.
2 Gough, P. B., & Tunmer, W. E. (1986). Decoding, Reading, and Reading Disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7(1), 6–10.
3 Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. (2020, December 18). Automatic word recognition. Skills for Early Reading: Automatic Word Recognition - Evidence Based Early Literacy. Retrieved May 31, 2022.