For more than a decade I have argued that a major, under-recognized cause of early reading failure is children being taught the wrong sounds of letters. When consonants are taught with an added “uh” (the schwa)—“buh,” “cuh,” “duh” instead of the pure /b/, /k/, /d/—blending becomes unnecessarily hard. Children try to say “cuh-ah-tuh” and struggle to hear the word cat. The confusion leads many of them to shut down. Once the pure sounds are taught and practiced, that particular source of confusion drops away and most children can begin to decode.
Many children arrive at school already influenced by alphabet videos, television, and even well-meaning kindergarten instruction that attaches the schwa. Screening at the start of Grade 1 for how children produce the letter sounds can identify this problem immediately and allow a short, targeted correction before formal decoding instruction begins in earnest.
What Zachary Barnes and Tiffany Peltier Contribute
In their 2022 article “Translating the Science of Reading Screening into Practice: Policies and Their Implications”, Zachary T. Barnes and Tiffany K. Peltier make a clear case for evidence-based screening—what they call Science of Reading Screening (SORS). They emphasize that reading comprehension is the product of decoding and language comprehension. A screener that only measures overall reading comprehension can flag students at risk, but it does not tell teachers whether the difficulty lies in decoding, language comprehension, or both. Further diagnostic assessments are required to place students in the correct instructional quadrant and match intervention to the actual need.
Barnes and Peltier also note the wide variation in state screening laws and Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) frameworks. When policy and practice are misaligned with the science, early intervention is weaker, identification procedures are less accurate, and student achievement suffers.
Where Pure Letter-Sound Screening Fits
The screening Barnes and Peltier describe, and that many states now require, is valuable. It can be made more precise and preventive by adding one simple, high-leverage check at the beginning of Grade 1: How does the child pronounce the individual consonant sounds?
Ask the child to say the sound for each letter (or show the letter and ask for the sound). Listen specifically for the presence or absence of the extra schwa. Children who consistently produce “buh,” “tuh,” or “muh” can receive immediate, brief instruction in the pure sounds. This is not a full diagnostic battery; it is a quick gate that addresses the first prerequisite for blending. As I have written before, if a child has not yet begun to walk, we do not start coaching them on how to run faster. Decoding and blending rest on accurate, pure phonemes. Vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension matter, but they come after the child can reliably map letters to sounds and blend those sounds.
This check also fits the logic of the Simple View. Accurate letter-sound knowledge is a foundational piece of the decoding component. Children who enter Grade 1 with contaminated letter sounds are already at a disadvantage on any measure of word recognition. Correcting the input early reduces the number of children who later appear “at risk” on broader screeners simply because they were taught (or picked up) an incorrect model.
At the start of Grade 1, screen every child on pure versus schwa-added consonant sounds. This takes only a few minutes per child.
Provide immediate, explicit practice for those who need it—modeling the pure sound, having the child repeat, and practicing blending short words without the extra vowels.
Proceed with the broader Science of Reading Screening measures that Barnes and Peltier and others recommend (phonemic awareness, letter-sound fluency, nonsense-word reading, oral reading fluency, and, where appropriate, language-comprehension measures).
Use the results to place children in the correct Simple View quadrant and deliver matched, evidence-based intervention.
Monitor progress and adjust.
When letter sounds are taught correctly from the outset, and when children who arrive with incorrect models are quickly realigned, far fewer students experience the early confusion that leads to disengagement. Universal screening then functions as true prevention rather than merely as a later flag for difficulty that has already taken hold.
Barnes and Peltier’s framework supplies the larger assessment and policy structure. The pure-sound check supplies the missing first step that addresses how many children actually begin school. Together they offer a clearer path to reducing the number of children who leave elementary school still struggling to read.
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