Hi Leslie,
It sounds like you are trying to target the phonemic awareness skill of blending with students who have difficulty with their phonological working memory- the ability to temporarily hold sequences of sounds in mind so that they can be processed in some way, such as repeating them, following directions, or blending them into words. Phonological working memory has an important role in language and literacy development, as it supports students’ ability to decode, learn new vocabulary, and comprehend text or speech, among other important skills and tasks.
Although researchers have studied ways to improve phonological working memory directly, the evidence for broad functional improvement is limited. In practice, this means it is usually more effective to support the targeted skill itself (in this case, blending). So, you are right to frame this as a question of how to support blending despite this weakness in working memory, rather than how to support the working memory in isolation.
While blending can be introduced to and practiced by students before they have acquired enough letter-sound correspondences to decode printed words, practicing blending with letters (rather than sounds presented orally by a teacher) more directly supports reading development. So, if your students have learned several phonics patterns, I would encourage them to practice blending by decoding words written by those patterns. If they are still unsuccessful (perhaps they are attempting /p/…/ă/…/t/…bat), I would both continue to practice the phonics patterns to the point of automaticity so less time and cognitive energy are dedicated towards recalling the sounds, as well as practice decoding words with initial continuous, fricative sounds (/m, n, s, z, f, th, th, sh) so that the students can practice continuous blending. For more explanation of continuous blending, as well as additional examples of how to differentiate decoding simple words for diverse learners, our Blending Drill Lesson Toolkit will be a valuable resource.
You may, however, be attempting to practice this phonemic awareness skill before your students have mastered enough letters to blend with print. To be clear, you needn’t wait until your students can demonstrate the skill of oral blending before beginning their learning of phonics and blending from print. Phonics can and should be taught at the same time that children are still learning to blend. An additional consideration is that children younger than six may not be ready to blend sounds together to make words. With younger children such as this, it may be more appropriate to briefly work on skills that target broader phonological skills such as Syllable Awareness, or an easier introduction to practicing their sensitivity to speech sounds with Phoneme Isolation tasks.
In many ways, this concern resolves itself developmentally and instructionally for most students. Younger children may simply not yet have the phonemic awareness skills necessary for successful oral blending, while older students are typically able to blend through print as they acquire letter-sound correspondences. Once students can use letters to anchor the sounds visually, they no longer need to rely as heavily on holding an entire sequence of sounds in phonological working memory while blending.
The students most likely to need additional support, then, are those in the middle of this transition: students who know some letter-sound correspondences, but not yet enough to practice blending primarily through print. For these students, the goal is usually not to strengthen working memory in isolation, but to reduce the memory demands of the blending task itself. You can do this by shortening pauses between sounds, limiting practice initially to two- and three-phoneme words, and providing supports such as picture choices so that students can focus their cognitive effort on combining the sounds rather than retrieving the word from an unlimited set of possibilities. It is also important to ensure that the difficulty truly reflects a challenge with retaining the sounds long enough to blend them, rather than difficulty understanding what blending is or how the task works conceptually.
If you are unsure which aspect of the task your students are primarily struggling with, make sure to first explicitly model the blending process and begin with continuous sounds.
