Some might categorize—zoo animals and farm animals. Some might identify initial consonants—b, c, g, h, and l. Some might use word length—four, five, and six letters. Some might use syllables—one, two, and three. All will try to arrange the words into groups, find similarities and differences, identify patterns of meaning, sounds, or spellings. Essentially, they will perform the various investigative tasks of word study, a proven method for recognizing and understanding the elements of words (Bear, Templeton, Invernizzi, & Johnston, 1999).

The scope and sequence of word study skills are based on research in developmental spelling (Henderson, 1990; Templeton & Bear, 1992), which shows that children acquire word knowledge in a hierarchical order. Students first learn basic letter/sound correspondences and then the patterns associated with long and short vowels; third, they learn structures of syllables and affixes; and finally, classical roots and stems in derivational families.

Word study targets the particular stages of the child’s development. For example, you would not give students still mastering letter formations the type of sort in the first paragraph. They would find a more appropriate challenge in matching lowercase letters to their capital formations. Through the developmentally appropriate and investigative nature of word study, children begin to understand how words truly “work”—from phonology and orthography to semantics and pragmatics.

As a method of word study, word sorting addresses a wide developmental range and a variety of needs. Picture sorts are helpful tools for developing phonological awareness in children who are just learning or have not yet learned to read. They often ask students to perform tasks that build awareness of phonemes, the very smallest part of oral language, by categorizing or matching initial, middle, or final sounds. Sorts can help build understanding of graphemes as well, the smallest part of written language, by asking students to match particular sounds to their written representations. Research continues to show that this ability to recognize that written words are made up of letters that represent sounds—the alphabetic principle—is one of the strongest predictors of successful reading (Stanovich, Cunningham, & Cramer, 1984; Bradley & Bryant, 1985; Chall, 1996; Langenberg, 2000). Research also suggests that word study and word sorting are effective ways of teaching these essential elements (Joseph, 2000; Cunningham, 1997; Fountas, Pinnell, & Giacobbe, 1998; Bear et al. 1999).