Should I Teach Auditory Discrimination?

Do your students ever mix up certain sounds? Maybe they mispronounce words, like calling milk "melk" or they spell "met" as "net." 

Sometimes, students spell things wrong because they haven't learned a sound yet. 

Other times, they error because of their attention to detail. 

But sometimes, students genuinely cannot tell the difference between two sounds. 

When a student struggles with auditory discrimination, they cannot recognize the difference between certain sounds. 

Common errors include voiced and unvoiced pairs like "big/pig" or words with sound patterns that are very similar to one another like "thin/fin" or “met/net.”⁠⁠

Why is auditory discrimination important?

When reading and spelling, we need to process discrete differences in words. If we can't, we will mispronounce and misspell our words. It can lead to vocabulary struggles as well. 

Grab our auditory discrimination resource in our 5CCL Resource Library (linked below) or on Teachers Pay Teachers >>here.<<

For example, if a student can't hear the difference between a short ‘e’ sound and the short ‘i’ sound, they may refer to a “pen” as a “pin.” If this is not corrected, they may believe that the writing utensil they use is called a pin and not recognize the mistake.

How can I support auditory discrimination?

One of our favorite ways to support auditory discrimination is to have students sort words based on the sounds they hear (we use pictures so that they can’t use orthographic cues).

For example, in the picture above, students would sort the picture of the bear and the table into the /b/ sound column, and the pin, panda, and apple would all be sorted into the /p/ sound column.

You could do this with any pairs that students are struggling with as a fun way to keep them practicing and engaged! The images of the mouth formation also help students recognize how their mouth should look when making these sounds.

Check out the video to learn more about how we use this activity and grab a copy for yourself in our 5-Core Components of Literacy Resource Library here! 

Now, as we will mention again and again, this should be a quick activity or center-based activity in your lessons. This should not be a focus for an entire lesson as there are definitely additional valuable skills you need to make sure to fit in. If you're interested in learning more about how to fit it all in - you can check out our blog >>here<<.