The second track of courses in Pictures Are For Babies introduces the student to single words. Starting with simple words, continuing through all one-syllable words, multi-syllable words, morphologically complex words, and ending by covering common words for many academic subjects, the word courses cover over 18,000 unique words. This level of coverage is unprecedented in a literacy program, where most other options cover up to a second or third grade reading level. Managing this level of complexity is only possible thanks to Trane, the deliberate practice engine that powers Pictures Are For Babies.
Another difference from other literacy programs is the emphasis on orthographic mapping, the process by which readers store words for immediate, effortless retrieval1. This set of words is called a sight vocabulary and spans tens of thousands of words in fluent readers.
To accurately follow the principles of orthographic mapping, the tutor is asked to only mark an example as correct if the student can read the word quickly and automatically, without hesitation. A good rule of thumb is that the student should start to read the word in less than one second. If the lessons were to give students more time, it would allow them to read the word by sounding it out, which is a part of the process of learning new words, but by itself does not support the goal of building a sight vocabulary.
The second feature that sets the word courses apart is the use of tiered interventions. These interventions directly address the fundamental mechanisms of orthographic mapping. Tier 1 is simply explicit instruction on the letter-sound mappings of the word. Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions are more complex exercises that target the most common and well-established causes of reading difficulties. By having a tiered intervention system, students receive the most appropriate level of instruction for individual lessons. It is recommended that tutors read the commentary sections, as they provide full explanations on the choices made in the design of these courses and the science behind them.
Note: In the instructions, the symbols inside slashes are part of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and unambiguously represent sounds. It is not necessary to learn the IPA, it is used here to make the difference between letter names and sounds clear. Their meaning can be inferred from the example words provided.
The general procedure for word courses is as follows:
Instructions on how to perform the different tiers of intervention are provided below. While the interface provides explicit warning on when to perform Tier 2, 3, and 4 interventions based on the past performance of the student, the tutor is free to perform any of the interventions at any time based on their judgement. For example, if the student has already been diagnosed with reading difficulties, the tutor can directly perform a Tier 2 or Tier 3 intervention from the beginning.
If the student correctly reads or writes all the examples in the lesson, no intervention is needed. The tutor can move to the next lesson immediately.
Tier 1 intervention is simply explicit instruction on how the words the student missed are read and spelled. The procedure below is done for each of those words. It is not necessary to do this for the words the student read or wrote correctly.
There are two stages for this process. First, the tutor demonstrates how the word is broken up into individual sounds and how those sounds blend together to form the word. This stage is done without any reference to writing. It is a purely auditory exercise that could be done with eyes closed. The second stage is to show how the word is written and how the letters map to the sounds.
The first stage develops basic phonemic skills called segmentation and blending and is done as follows:
The second stage delivers explicit instruction on the grapheme-phoneme mappings of the word, that is, how the letters in the word map to the sounds that were shown to the student in the first stage. This is done as follows:
Once the tutor has gone through the full procedure for all the words the student missed, the intervention is complete and the tutor can continue with the next lesson.
Here are some examples of how to do the full procedure with a few different words:
Using the word "cat":
Using the word "ship":
Using the word "take":
The procedure works for any word. It is not necessary that the word follows simple phonetic rules. In fact, the procedure does not require any knowledge of rules or technical terms like "long vowel", "silent e", or others. This is not only aligned with the principles of orthographic mapping, but also makes the tutoring role accessible to anyone without such knowledge. The tutor simply goes through the sounds and letters of the word as they are. The reasoning is fully explained in the commentary section. Here are more examples with words that do not match simple rules and more complex words.
Using the word "have":
Using the word "straight":
Using the word "discredit":
The procedure is even the same for words borrowed from other languages.
Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds in spoken language. It is a critical skill for reading and writing, as it allows students to understand how sounds map to letters and to efficiently store words in long-term memory for quick retrieval. Deficits in these abilities are the most common cause of reading difficulties, which is why Tier 2 intervention consists of exercises that explicitly target them.
After the student has answered a lesson multiple times, the following warning message will appear if their performance indicates a phonemic awareness deficit:
If the student performs poorly on this exercise, consider providing a Tier 2 intervention to detect and correct deficits in phonological awareness. See the manual for detailed instructions.
If after asking the student to read or write the examples in the lesson, the student still misses more than a couple of examples, the tutor should perform a Tier 2 intervention. The procedure is as follows:
The exercises should primarily focus on the words from the lesson. It is not necessary that the result of substitution, deletion, or reversal exercises is a word from the lesson or even a real word. The goal is to develop the student's phonemic awareness, not to teach them new words. As their phonemic awareness improves and their sight vocabulary grows, the tutor can expect that the need for Tier 2 interventions will decrease.
The tutor should conduct around five or six exercises in total, mixing substitution, deletion, and reversal exercises. Once those are done, the intervention is complete and the tutor can continue with the next lesson.
Below are additional examples of how to run the exercises with a few different words.
Using the word "robbery" and a substitution task:
Using the word "antique" and a deletion task:
Using the word "nap" and a reversal task:
Most students will respond well to the Tier 2 intervention, as it targets the most common causes of reading difficulties. However, Tier 3 adds additional phonemic work with multisensory support to help students who struggle even after Tier 2 interventions. In addition, Tier 3 intervention should be done on a 1-on-1 basis. This is not an issue for most students, since Pictures Are For Babies is designed to be used in a 1-on-1 tutoring setting. However, if the tutor is working with a group of students, they should make sure students receive some level of individual attention during Tier 3 interventions.
If the student continues to struggle with a lesson, the following warning message will appear:
If the student performs poorly on this exercise, consider providing a Tier 3 intervention to detect and correct deficits in phonemic awareness and include additional multisensory support. See the manual for detailed instructions."
If after asking the student to read or write the examples in the lesson, the student still misses more than a couple of examples, the tutor should perform a Tier 3 intervention. The procedure is as follows:
Below are some examples of how the tokens are used in the exercises. Circle emojis are used to represent the tokens.
Using the word "cat" and a substitution task:
Using the word "tramp" and a deletion task:
Using the word "map" and a reversal task:
Most students will respond to the Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions, as they target the most common cause of reading difficulties. Based on the most successful interventions for reading difficulties, only 5-10% of students will need a more intensive intervention. These students have reading difficulties caused by deficits in phonemic awareness and additional cognitive or neurological issues. The most common types of additional issues are:
If the student continues to struggle with a lesson, the following warning message will appear:
If the student performs poorly on this exercise, consider providing a Tier 4 intervention. This tier is for students with complex reading disabilities that are caused by phonemic awareness deficits and additional cognitive or neurological issues. This tier should be handled by a reading specialist. They can use this application as a structured curriculum and automated scheduler while running their own interventions. See the manual for detailed instructions.
As the warning indicates, this tier should be handled by a reading specialist. Unlike the previous tiers, which asked tutors to perform phonemic tasks that are easy for fluent readers, the other causes of reading difficulties cannot be fixed via simple exercises delivered by minimally trained tutors. This does not mean that Pictures Are For Babies is not useful for these students. On the contrary, reading specialists can use Pictures Are For Babies as a structured curriculum and automated scheduler while running their own interventions.
It is important to note that the figure of 5-10% of students falling in this category is a conservative estimate. Some studies have been able to reduce the number to as low as two or three percent. Unless the student has been diagnosed with additional issues by a professional, it is recommended that tutors exhaust the Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions before seeking the help of a reading specialist, as phonemic awareness deficits are the most common cause of reading difficulties and almost always present in more complex cases.
Another point of note is that the students falling in this category may struggle to fluently read and write past an elementary school level. However, with the right interventions and the support of Pictures Are For Babies and a reading specialist, they can often reach a level of reading and writing that allows them to function independently in daily life.
While not yet proven in a controlled study, some strategies used by Pictures Are For Babies may be helpful for these students. For example, spaced repetition, interleaving, and retrieval practice might help students with working memory and rapid automated naming issues. Every lesson in the program is a form of retrieval practice and spaced repetition and interleaving are built into the scheduling algorithm.
If you are familiar with other programs that teach reading, or you remember your own experience learning to read, you may have noticed that the word courses in Pictures Are For Babies are very different from traditional approaches. In particular:
Rest assured, however, that these differences are not arbitrary. Rather, the courses are designed to follow the principles of orthographic mapping, the most important finding in the field of reading research, at least when it comes to reading at the word level. Most other programs, commercial or otherwise, ignore these principles because there is a vast and widespread gap between empirically validated research and the practice of teaching reading.
As was mentioned earlier, orthographic mapping is the process by which readers store words for immediate, effortless retrieval. The set of these words forms a sight vocabulary, which in fluent readers contains tens of thousands of words. The ability to read these words quickly and automatically is what allows fluent readers to dedicate their cognitive resources to understanding, interpreting, and enjoying the texts they read. Readers with a limited sight vocabulary, on the other hand, must devote a significant portion of their cognitive resources to reading individual words. This can happen even if they are taught decoding with a traditional phonics program.
Orthographic mapping also explains how fluent readers are able to efficiently build such a large sight vocabulary. The main driver of orthographic mapping in fluent readers is their phonological awareness, that is, their ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the sounds of spoken language. In particular, fluent readers have strong phonemic awareness, the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds in spoken language. By being able to quickly and accurately segment words into their individual sounds and map those sounds to letters, words are stored efficiently in long-term memory.
For example, when a fluent reader encounters a word that other reading programs would classify as "irregular" or a "sight word" (not in the sense of being in a sight vocabulary, but in the sense of having to be memorized as a whole), they are able to break it down into its individual sounds and notice that most of the sounds map to letters in a way that is consistent with their previous knowledge. Take the word "have" as an example. A traditional phonics program would teach that this word is irregular because the letter "a" does not make the "long a" sound as in "cake", but rather the "short a" sound as in "cat". A program based on lists of sight words would simply have the student memorize the word as a whole. The orthographic mapping of a fluent reader, on the other hand, stores only the second letter of the word as the sound-letter mapping that is inconsistent with their previous knowledge. Every other letter is effectively stored for free.
Given that the core processes that create fluent readers are phonological, and not visual, there is no empirical support for the use of pictures in core instruction. Pictures can be used to explain the meaning of words, but they do not help with the reading process itself. This is the insight that is captured in the title of this program: Pictures Are For Babies.
All phonics programs teach the letter-sound mappings of words in some way. This requires that students know how to segment words (break them down into their individual sounds) and blend sounds (put the individual sounds back together to form a word). If that is the case, why does Pictures Are For Babies claim that it is not enough?
The reason is that struggling readers often have deficits in phonemic awareness that prevent them from doing more advanced skills, such as substituting, deleting, or reversing sounds in words. These are the skills that are explicitly targeted in the Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions. Fluent readers, on the other hand, have strong phonemic awareness and can perform these advanced skills with ease. Reading interventions that do not address these deficits have modest effects at best. Interventions that teach phonics, allow for opportunities to practice reading, and explicitly train phonemic awareness to the advanced level have the strongest effects. These interventions have proven that 90 to 95% of students can learn to read at grade level with correct instruction.
These interventions use a tiered system to provide the most appropriate level of instruction. Tier 1 often consists of group instruction. Tier 2 consists of additional instruction that is provided for at-risk students, while Tier 3 consists of 1-on-1 instruction for students who continue to struggle. Because Pictures Are For Babies is primarily designed for 1-on-1 tutoring, the tiers are defined slightly differently. Tier 1 consists of explicit instruction on letter-sound mappings. Tier 2 consists of exercises that develop phonemic awareness to the advanced level. Tier 3 consists of more of those exercises with additional multisensory support. Tier 4 is for students with complex reading disabilities that are caused by phonemic awareness deficits and additional cognitive or neurological issues. This tier should be handled by a reading specialist.
The interventions that delivered the best results also taught phonics. However, there are many ways to teach phonics, and not all of them have the same effectiveness. Some programs teach phonics by introducing a complex set of rules, with exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions. Most have tutors or trainers use technical terms like "long vowel", "silent e", or others. Fluent readers, however, do not use these rules when reading and often do not even know them. The rules are also not real, but rather a way to categorize statistical patterns of a language. When the pattern is so consistent that it can be considered a rule, repeated exposure to the words that follow that pattern is sufficient. When the pattern is not consistent, the rule is not helpful. In fact, it can be detrimental, especially to struggling readers, who are already using a lot of cognitive resources to learn how to read.
For that reason, Pictures Are For Babies does not use any phonics rules or technical terms. The tutor simply goes through the letters in the words and maps them to their sounds. The structure and rules of a more traditional phonics program are instead encoded in the curriculum without explicit planning required from the tutor. Trane, the deliberate practice engine that powers Pictures Are For Babies, makes sure lessons are repeated at optimal intervals and that students automatically make progress when they display mastery of existing material. Not only is this approach more aligned with the principles of orthographic mapping, but it also makes the tutoring role accessible to anyone without any knowledge of phonics rules or metalinguistic terms like "long vowel", "silent e", or others. As long as the tutor is a fluent reader, they can perform segmentation, blending, substitution, deletion, and reversal to guide the student through the same procedures.
Orthographic mapping also explains why spelling should be integrated with reading in any literacy program. Spelling requires that the exact letter-sound mappings are used, so it helps track if the word has been deeply stored in long-term memory. Spelling practice reinforces reading skills, which in turn reinforce spelling skills. This is why Pictures Are For Babies has dictation lessons, and why progress to the next course is blocked until the student sufficiently masters the dictation lessons of the current course.
This direct quote and most of the pedagogy around word and sentence level reading comes from David Kilpatrick's book Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties.