Why? Because our students have heard these two phrases their whole school lives and have no idea what they mean. They are the very antithesis of explicit literacy instruction. We want our words to help our students without guessing or wondering what they should do next.

The analogy I give is learning to build my first website. I started with the WordPress platform because I'd read about their 'famous 5-minute install'. Brilliant! There were no YouTube demo videos back then so I found the simplest instructions for the inexperienced website builder and here's Step 1:

If you will be uploading WordPress to a remote web server, download the WordPress package to your computer with a web browser and unzip the package.

That's what 'sound it out' sounds like to struggling readers. It's ok if you already know what you're doing but terrible if you don't. What I really needed was someone to use words I could understand and show me how to download something with a web browser.

What does that mean for reading?

Instead of saying 'sound it out' we ask students in a variety of differentiated ways to say the sounds and listen for a word they know.

That's what we mean by 'explicit instruction'. It's not directly telling them a lot of things about reading or spelling a word. It's giving a simple and clear instruction for exactly what we want them to do when we're not there to prompt.

It's similar with 'break it down'. Students either have no idea what this means or their memories have been burdened by lessons on syllable types or rules in various interventions. Instead of saying 'break it down' we ask our students to say, listen, look at and physically break down and build up words without ever using that phrase or mentioning a syllable type or rule.

We want the student to connect what they see and write (reading all through a word and spelling syllable by syllable) with what they say out loud.

We talk about a student's natural speech but might nudge a preferred spoken syllable boundary for spelling if it hides a helpful morpheme. For instance, they might naturally say:

in/ten/ded  but a surprising number of students don't know that <ed> is a meaningful suffix so we start with in/tend and add ed.

Or they might say:

hi/er/ar/chy which obscures the meaningful <arch> syllable. To create a wider discussion about all the 'archies' we nudge syllables to hi/er/arch/y.

This is the right time and place to add morphology to lessons.

Syllables, sounds and graphemes are the most straightforward starting place for struggling readers and spellers and make sense of the complex (but not chaotic) English language.

• Add morphology when it supports memory and expands vocabulary.
• Keep directions simple and meaningful and
• Avoid burdening memory with unnecessary information.
• In other words - no more 'sound it out' or 'break it down' (or rules).

Finally, a quote from a TRT student about his first lesson, the authentic learner voice that inspires me to keep on explaining why keeping it simple is best.