Facts

Contact person:
Kim Ridell
Financer:
  • The Swedish Research Council
Responsible at MaU:
Kim Ridell
Project members at MaU:
External project members:
  • Robert Walldén - Linnaeus University (Project manager)
Time frame:
01 January 2026 - 31 December 2029
Faculty/department:
Research environment :
Research subject:

Project description

How do young children learn to connect speech sounds with written letters, and how do teachers actually teach this in real classrooms? Despite intense public debate and concerns about declining reading achievement, we still know little about how phonics instruction is enacted in everyday teaching situations.

This research project investigates how first-grade teachers design and deliver explicit phonics instruction. Using classroom video recordings, the study examines how teachers combine speech, images, gestures, writing, and instructional materials to make phoneme–grapheme relationships clear. It also explores how students respond during lessons—what engages them, what challenges arise, and how teachers support their learning moment by moment. Teachers are further invited to watch selected clips from their own lessons and reflect on their instructional decisions.

These stimulated recall interviews offer valuable insight into their reasoning: how they choose materials, address linguistic challenges, integrate meaning-making, and adapt instruction to diverse learners. By combining social-semiotic analysis of multimodal teaching with insights from the Science of Reading, the project provides a nuanced account of how phonics is practiced in the classroom. Its findings aim to inform teacher education, instructional materials, and policy discussions, contributing to a more balanced understanding of how early literacy instruction can be both systematic and engaging.