Great to see attention being drawn to this important second decoding strategy! Thank you! I like how you explain how important SfV is in English - probably because of our deep orthography. And it is so true that a better vocabulary bank will feedback into the decoding system.
I often test readers who actually have pretty good isolated phonics knowledge - yet they have poor decoding skills. This profile reminds us that knowing letter-sound correspondences is necessary but insufficient. One of the skills they are often missing is SfV. So I'm eager to see this concept make its way into teachers' consciousness.
That said, I’d like to offer a gentle caution about overemphasizing vocabulary as the key driver of SfV. While vocabulary knowledge is clearly correlated, it may not be the most influential factor. In the Steacy et al. paper you cited, their reported correlations with SfV were:
attention - .33
vocab - .50
PA - .66
word ID - .79
These data suggest that decoding-related skills (especially phonemic awareness and word identification) may play a larger role in supporting SfV performance than vocabulary alone.
The authors write:
"Steacy, Wade-Woolley, et al. (2019b) offered that there may be an orthographic component to SfV skill, and further speculated (Steacy, Compton, et al., 2019a) that learning to read may affect how children approach the SfV task through two related processes. The first might be that as children decode new letter strings, they store the incomplete phono- logical form that is associated with the lexical form, and this incomplete form is available during the SfV task (for a detailed discussion, see Elbro & de Jong, 2017). The other is that as children become better readers and spellers, they may actively use a phonology-to-orthography pathway to use spelling to disambiguate the mispronunciation. That is, when a child is presented with a mispronounced word in the SfV task, they may use phonology-to-orthography associations to “translate” the mispronounced spoken word into an orthographic form, a process we refer to as orthographic facilitation, from which they can access the correct phono- logical form associated with the orthographic form stored in memory. Consistent with this view, Edwards et al. (2022) reported that children with better decoding skills are likely using their knowledge of the varied connections between phonology and orthography to aid in SfV item performance, whereas children with poor decoding skills may be relying on phonology and semantic knowledge only. These results suggest that orthography is activated (whether consciously or unconsciously) during the task for those with better decoding skill, thus helping to disambiguate the decoded form of a word to the true phonological representation stored in the lexicon. Our conception of orthographic facilitation is based on the orthographic skeleton hypothesis (Wegener et al., 2018), which suggests that a pronunciation of an unknown irregular word generates a more regular spelling and, in our case, facilitates the target word in the SfV task."
- Steacy et al., 2022, RRQ.
All of this research is still in its early days so they are writing in a speculative way. I am trying to as well. This phonology --> orthography pathway appears vital in my clinical experience. I see kids improve in their phonemic manipulation and their SfV decoding strategies in a manner of weeks...and their decoding and word ID gets much better. Since it's such a short time frame, it seems unlikely that improved vocab is the explanation, but rather better decoding skill. My clinical experience resonates with what I read about the emergent SfV research.
So while vocabulary is clearly helpful, I believe it's important to continue exploring how decoding-related processes—especially phonemic awareness and orthographic knowledge—fuel SfV. Thank you again for bringing more attention to this essential yet under-discussed skill!
Thank you so much for such a considered and generous response. I really appreciate your engagement, and I completely agree that we need to do more to raise awareness of Set for Variability as a critical aspect of learning to read English. Your observations really resonate with the emerging research, and I share your hope that this concept becomes more widely understood and supported in classrooms.
You’re absolutely right to highlight that while vocabulary knowledge can certainly support SfV, it’s not the whole story. I was keen in the blog to draw attention to the often-overlooked role of oral vocabulary, particularly because we still sometimes hear ‘if they can sound it out, they can read it’, which overlooks how recognition depends on having that word stored in memory. But I could have more clearly acknowledged that phonemic awareness, decoding, and orthographic knowledge are often stronger predictors of SfV performance.
Thank you, too, for bringing the orthographic facilitation hypothesis and Steacy et al.‘s more recent work into the conversation. This interplay between phonology, orthography, and semantics is what makes English so fascinating (and challenging!) to learn. I’m really grateful for your perspective and for your engagement with the post.
Oh I’m grateful for this. Yes, the processes in learning to read are so complex and fascinating. I’m glad researchers didn’t give up after the PA discoveries which were so roundly documented. SfV is a nice new twist. ;) And of course vocab is 100% vital for the long view so it always merits more mentions in phonics convos. I look forward to your next post.
Great to see attention being drawn to this important second decoding strategy! Thank you! I like how you explain how important SfV is in English - probably because of our deep orthography. And it is so true that a better vocabulary bank will feedback into the decoding system.
I often test readers who actually have pretty good isolated phonics knowledge - yet they have poor decoding skills. This profile reminds us that knowing letter-sound correspondences is necessary but insufficient. One of the skills they are often missing is SfV. So I'm eager to see this concept make its way into teachers' consciousness.
That said, I’d like to offer a gentle caution about overemphasizing vocabulary as the key driver of SfV. While vocabulary knowledge is clearly correlated, it may not be the most influential factor. In the Steacy et al. paper you cited, their reported correlations with SfV were:
attention - .33
vocab - .50
PA - .66
word ID - .79
These data suggest that decoding-related skills (especially phonemic awareness and word identification) may play a larger role in supporting SfV performance than vocabulary alone.
The authors write:
"Steacy, Wade-Woolley, et al. (2019b) offered that there may be an orthographic component to SfV skill, and further speculated (Steacy, Compton, et al., 2019a) that learning to read may affect how children approach the SfV task through two related processes. The first might be that as children decode new letter strings, they store the incomplete phono- logical form that is associated with the lexical form, and this incomplete form is available during the SfV task (for a detailed discussion, see Elbro & de Jong, 2017). The other is that as children become better readers and spellers, they may actively use a phonology-to-orthography pathway to use spelling to disambiguate the mispronunciation. That is, when a child is presented with a mispronounced word in the SfV task, they may use phonology-to-orthography associations to “translate” the mispronounced spoken word into an orthographic form, a process we refer to as orthographic facilitation, from which they can access the correct phono- logical form associated with the orthographic form stored in memory. Consistent with this view, Edwards et al. (2022) reported that children with better decoding skills are likely using their knowledge of the varied connections between phonology and orthography to aid in SfV item performance, whereas children with poor decoding skills may be relying on phonology and semantic knowledge only. These results suggest that orthography is activated (whether consciously or unconsciously) during the task for those with better decoding skill, thus helping to disambiguate the decoded form of a word to the true phonological representation stored in the lexicon. Our conception of orthographic facilitation is based on the orthographic skeleton hypothesis (Wegener et al., 2018), which suggests that a pronunciation of an unknown irregular word generates a more regular spelling and, in our case, facilitates the target word in the SfV task."
- Steacy et al., 2022, RRQ.
All of this research is still in its early days so they are writing in a speculative way. I am trying to as well. This phonology --> orthography pathway appears vital in my clinical experience. I see kids improve in their phonemic manipulation and their SfV decoding strategies in a manner of weeks...and their decoding and word ID gets much better. Since it's such a short time frame, it seems unlikely that improved vocab is the explanation, but rather better decoding skill. My clinical experience resonates with what I read about the emergent SfV research.
So while vocabulary is clearly helpful, I believe it's important to continue exploring how decoding-related processes—especially phonemic awareness and orthographic knowledge—fuel SfV. Thank you again for bringing more attention to this essential yet under-discussed skill!
Thank you so much for such a considered and generous response. I really appreciate your engagement, and I completely agree that we need to do more to raise awareness of Set for Variability as a critical aspect of learning to read English. Your observations really resonate with the emerging research, and I share your hope that this concept becomes more widely understood and supported in classrooms.
You’re absolutely right to highlight that while vocabulary knowledge can certainly support SfV, it’s not the whole story. I was keen in the blog to draw attention to the often-overlooked role of oral vocabulary, particularly because we still sometimes hear ‘if they can sound it out, they can read it’, which overlooks how recognition depends on having that word stored in memory. But I could have more clearly acknowledged that phonemic awareness, decoding, and orthographic knowledge are often stronger predictors of SfV performance.
Thank you, too, for bringing the orthographic facilitation hypothesis and Steacy et al.‘s more recent work into the conversation. This interplay between phonology, orthography, and semantics is what makes English so fascinating (and challenging!) to learn. I’m really grateful for your perspective and for your engagement with the post.
Oh I’m grateful for this. Yes, the processes in learning to read are so complex and fascinating. I’m glad researchers didn’t give up after the PA discoveries which were so roundly documented. SfV is a nice new twist. ;) And of course vocab is 100% vital for the long view so it always merits more mentions in phonics convos. I look forward to your next post.
Another very helpful instalment, Jen! Thank you 🙏🏻.
💯