How The Electric Company Teaches Decoding Skills
PBS Kids TV Program Helps Children Learn Basic Literacy Skills
Aug 24, 2009
The educational tv program The Electric Company on PBS helps struggling readers ages 6 to 9 learn basic literacy skills that are necessary to improve reading comprehension. One of the key educational goals of this PBS KIDS Go show is to teach children decoding skills like phonics rules so that they understand how letters and sounds form words and how to break apart unfamiliar words to read them. The main narrative scenes and the short "curriculum commercial break" segments work together to support this goal by teaching and modeling a variety of phonics skills and decoding strategies.
Learning Phonics Skills to Improve Reading Comprehension
The Electric Company teaches phonics skills as part of a curriculum designed to align with national educational standards. Each episode of this educational kids tv program has been assigned a few specific decoding goals that are introduced in sequence and build upon each other even as some repeat across several different shows. These curricular phonics goals improve reading comprehension by covering everything from introducing short and long vowel sounds to teaching sight words, consonant digraphs, and common word family endings.
As part of the main plot of each show, the four members of The Electric Company perform various phonics activities while communicating and solving word puzzles, thus modeling phonics skills and word attack skills that relate to the target decoding goals. Then the interstitial segments teach and reteach this material. By presenting phonics content in several different forms (such as music videos, cartoons, and live-action sketches), The Electric Company appeals to different learning styles and levels of reading ability.
How The Electric Company is Teaching Phonics Rules
Many of the interstitial segments are designed to teach one specific phonics rule and programmed to follow a previous segment where this concept was introduced initially. For example, a segment in which characters play with two sounds of the letter g (hard g and soft g) might be followed by a song with lyrics that explicitly state the phonics rule for using soft g ("before e, y, or i, make a sound like a j"). Then the dialogue of the next segment will contain the same example words used in these segments to give children additional practice with how words with g are spelled and pronounced.
Prankster Cam segments starring the four members of the Pranksters also teach phonics rules. In each of these scenes, one of the Pranksters tackles a phonics rule head-on, for example, complaining about how the same letter has different sounds in different words. Over the course of the monologue, the Prankster will state the phonics rule that covers this situation, clarifying for viewers exactly what it is that they should be learning.
Making Phonics Instruction Fun for Struggling Readers
One interesting method by which the new Electric Company 2009 teaches phonics skills is to personify some of the letters that, when added to a word, change the sound and meaning of the word. The old classic Electric Company used the same teaching strategy at times, as in the Tom Lehrer song Silent e, which starred a magic wand-wielding silent e who went around turning objects into other objects.
The new Electric Company is populated with personified letters such as:
- Silent E, now presented as a silent ninja figure and named "the baddest ninja in town," who sneaks up behind words full of quivering vowels to change the whole word.
- Transformer H, so full of strength that pocketfuls of the letter h are treated as powerful objects that celebrity guest Jimmy Fallon is "not afraid to use."
- Bossy R, who teaches the concept of r-controlled vowels by changing personified vowels in a catchy rap video.
By giving letters personalities and having them star in songs and skits, The Electric Company appeals to auditory and kinesthetic learners and makes it more likely that all children will become engaged with this content and remember how and why certain letters change words.
Decoding Skills for Struggling Readers
Children that have mastered decoding can successfully identify and manipulate different spoken sounds and then correlate these sounds with written text. The segments of The Electric Company present a range of decoding strategies and word attack skills for struggling readers, teaching kids ways to break words down into their component parts and to blend the parts of words together to read the words.
Better yet, when reading words, the cast members often model think-aloud strategies so that young viewers can follow the processes the characters are using to make sense of text. For example, one segment features an extreme close-up of a mouth while the speaker describes how to try out and discard various sounds to figure out how to read a word correctly.
From watching the new Electric Company, struggling readers can first master phonemic awareness and phonological awareness and then learn the phonics rules and decoding strategies essential for good reading comprehension. Once these basics are mastered, children can focus on other reading comprehension skills, such as understanding connected text and learning new vocabulary.
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