Hi Taylor!
This is a great distinction to pick up on! It’s important to understand that receptive (listening and pointing) tasks are easier than expressive (naming) tasks. Think of it like this: unless you’ve spent some considerable time in or around Delaware, if I asked you to name its capital city, this might be a tricky question (I say this as someone living on the West Coast- your experience may vary!). But if I gave you choices, you’d be more likely to pick out the correct response of Dover from the foils than trying to come up with the capital's name on your own. Continued practice and meaningful learning experiences around the Dover-Delaware association would make it more likely that you would be able to respond with this capital city name independently the next time that I asked you. Based on what you have shared, I'd say that your student is emerging in his letter naming knowledge, but needs continued practice in order to solidify this learning.
To add some nuance to this idea, let’s consider some other explanations that may be contributing to this discrepancy. If your student is performing the receptive (letter pointing) task with all of the letters arranged alphabetically in front of him, he may be using cues from silently singing the alphabet song while tracking the letters in front of him in order to cycle to the correct association. In order to ensure he truly does understand sound-letter associations receptively, try your task with several (let’s say 6) letters in front of him in a random order. Is he still able to consistently find the correct letter?
Alternatively, I would like to make sure that there isn't a speech or oral motor planning difficulty (e.g. apraxia of speech) that could be compounding his efforts. Is he able to pronounce most words correctly? It’s to be expected that kindergarteners mispronounce words (such as ‘free’ for ‘three’), but usually these mispronunciations are relatively consistent (rather than mispronouncing the same word in different ways) and centered around tricky consonant sounds. Do you find this to be the case? I also wonder, when you say he isn’t able to tell you the letter name, is it because he is telling you the wrong letter name? Or does he not respond at all? Some students (especially without a lot of school experience) feel put on-the-spot and uncomfortable with these sort of labeling requests, and there might be a component of being nervous to answer incorrectly at play.
Without having the answers to the above questions, I'd suggest a bridging activity, such as asking him to hand over the letter <s> and then immediately after he does so, asking “What letter is this?” This will help introduce him to the task in a way he should find success in, which can help in both his confidence and retrieval practices. You could also scaffold this activity by showing the letter and then providing choices (Is this an <s>, an <m>, or a <b>?) and then expecting an oral response. After he’s able to find success at this level, begin to remove the scaffold by adding space between the assistance and the expectation that he labels the letter independently. For example, instead of asking him to label the <s> immediately after retrieving it, have him retrieve the <s> then two other letters before jumping back to holding up the <s> and asking him what letter it is.
I know we were only able to scratch the surface on a lot of different ideas, but hopefully this gives you a good starting point and gets you set in the right direction. Keep me updated with how it goes!
