Post by Nicola Lott

Just because a student hears a sound easily doesn’t mean they can read or say it. A recent study by Heiszenberger et al. (2024) out of Austria looked at German-speaking learners trying to master two English sounds: 🔸 /w/ as in witch 🔸 /θ/ as in thing Now, you’d think /w/ would be easier, right? Turns out—nope. Even though it’s easier to hear, students struggled to produce it accurately and fluently when spelling cues didn’t match what they expected from their first language. The researchers found that orthography (spelling) can trip kids up even more than sound perception does. So if a word looks weird, it’s harder to read and say—even if they’ve heard it a thousand times. 📚 Study: Heiszenberger et al. (2024). Perceptually easy second-language phones are not always easy: The role of orthography and cross-linguistic influences on L2 word reading and speech production. https://lnkd.in/g_sYJk99 💡 Takeaway? When working with multilingual readers, don’t just teach the sounds—teach the sound-symbol mismatch too. Their home language is part of the puzzle. Anyone else see this come up when supporting ELL students with decoding or pronunciation?