Unlocking Literacy: A Guide to Multi-Sensory Learning Strategies

One of the most important challenges that educators face is how to teach early or struggling students literacy skills. Multi-sensory instruction incorporates the use of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic-tactile modalities in the components of learning to read. Multi-sensory instruction techniques and strategies stimulate learning by engaging students on multiple levels.

Introduction: The Power of Engaging Multiple Senses

Learning to read is not a simple task. It requires the integration of information across the visual and auditory sensory modalities. To understand why multi-sensory learning is one of the most effective student engagement strategies, it’s important to understand how our minds work. The definition of multi-sensory learning, then, is using the neuroscience behind how we learn to teach lessons that engage two or more senses.

By incorporating multi-sensory instruction combined with direct, systematic, cumulative, sequential, instruction we can enhance learning pathways through seeing, hearing, and movement. By adding auditory or visual components to reading assignments, like illustrations or online activities, you can help students develop stronger literacy skills.

Foundations of Multi-Sensory Instruction

Understanding Modalities: VAK/T

We can gain a clearer picture of what multi-sensory instruction looks like if we think of it as multimodal instruction. During phonics instruction, educators can engage students in review drills of phonics concepts that have been taught. This strategy will aid students in gaining automaticity while incorporating the VAK/T modalities.

Phonological Awareness and Phonics

The structure of the English language starts with children learning phonological awareness skills followed by learning sound-symbol relationships. Most of us know this as phonics instruction. Alphabetical decoding in particular is a key skill for developing reading fluency in early elementary. This skill refers to the knowledge and application of letter-sound relationships, which helps students learn to recognize and sound out different words.

As children simultaneously learn to encode and decoding they progress from one-syllable words to multisyllabic words. When learning multisyllabic words the instruction of morphology, spelling patterns, and irregular words becomes essential.

Systematic and Cumulative Instruction

This instructional scaffold allows for consistency of systematic, cumulative, instruction. By incorporating multi-sensory instruction combined with direct, systematic, cumulative, sequential, instruction we can enhance learning pathways through seeing, hearing, and movement.

Multi-Sensory Strategies in Action

Visual Techniques

Utilizing sound boxes, or El’Konin (1971) boxes is a visual way for students to segment the individual phonemes they hear within a word or syllable. One of the activities suggested in the book Equipped for Reading Success by David Kilpatrick (2016), suggests using letters/spelling to illustrate phonological awareness concepts. Kilpatrick suggests that by utilizing a phonics concept by way of written example visually illustrates the same oral activity that we ask students to do during phonological awareness. Kilpatrick then suggests transitioning to a scaffold of using non-letter tokens to emulate the same activity of phoneme deletion and substitution.

Teachers can have words prepared for syllable division practice that align with phonics concepts. Morphemes can be color-coded to help students visually identify them and segment them for meaning and manipulation activities.

Auditory Techniques

As teachers show the student the grapheme the student says the phoneme/grapheme and will eventually progress to saying just the phoneme associated with the given grapheme. Students can say each phoneme in isolation and then blend them together to read.

For older grades, multisensory activities can also help teach more complex reading skills like critical thinking or advanced reading comprehension. You could, for example, take turns reading pages from a novel or textbook aloud as a class to engage their auditory and visual senses.

Kinesthetic-Tactile Techniques

As a second component to that review drill teachers can select a medium such as sand, dry erase boards, chalkboards, rice, hair gel in a ziplock bag, or any other medium of their choosing. For example, the teacher says /l/ and the student writes and says /l/. The student is hearing the sound and seeing the corresponding grapheme as they kinesthetically write. Often people might think the actual medium being utilized is the multi-sensory component e.g. sand, rice, shaving cream.

A multi-sensory strategy used with students when teaching encoding is the use of segmenting while simultaneously finger tapping, pushing chips or some other manipulative forward, to represent sounds. For example, if the teacher dictates the word “mop”, the student finger taps, or pushes a chip forward, for each sound in the word mop and then writes it in a phoneme box or on a phoneme line.

Kinesthetic manipulation of morphemes exhibits how morphemes can be manipulated in words. During syllable division, students can circle morphemes and attach meaning.

Multi sensory techniques that involve using the sense of touch are called tactile methods. Multi sensory methods using body movements are called kinesthetic methods.

Read also: Coordinated Intelligence Research

Syllable Division and Morphology

When teaching students to read multisyllabic phonetic words, syllable division, in and of itself, is considered multi-sensory. It layers a student’s knowledge of phoneme/grapheme relationships with their ability to be able to read syllables. Syllable division is a way to systematically, utilize visual and kinesthetic modalities to teach students to divide words into small manageable chunks for reading.

Morpheme instruction can be naturally transitioned to through syllable division instruction. With syllable division and morphology strategies, students can learn to decode and understand words prior to reading them within the context in content area texts.

Irregular Words

Another aspect of multi-sensory decoding strategies is the teaching of irregular words.

Benefits for Diverse Learners

Multi-sensory instruction techniques are frequently used for children with learning differences. Students with learning difficulties typically have difficulties in one or more areas of reading, spelling, writing, math, listening comprehension and expressive language. Multi-sensory techniques enable students to use their personal areas of strength to help them learn. Some researchers theorize that many students have an area of sensory learning strength, sometimes called a learning style. These researchers suggests that when students are taught using techniques consistent with their learning styles, they learn more easily, faster and can retain and apply concepts more readily to future learning.

The Neuroscience Behind Multi-Sensory Learning

The benefits of multi-sensory learning have been verified by contemporary research in cognitive science. One emergent literacy skill that multisensory learning can help teach is connecting print letters with the oral alphabet. Educational researchers have found that multisensory activities can teach students to associate letters or words with sounds faster.

Integrating Multiple Intelligences

The strategies behind multisensory learning are supported by decades of research, particularly Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. This theory, which was developed by Harvard professor Dr. Howard Gardner, states that the traditional notions of learning and intelligence are too limited. Children as young as four- or five-years-old have already developed strengths and weaknesses corresponding to Gardner’s intelligences.

When teaching reading strategies and other academic skills, schools rely heavily on linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences. But reading strategies for struggling readers or young students can be more effective if you incorporate some of their strengths. To use multiple intelligences in the classroom, try linking your lesson plans to at least two different types of intelligences and sensory strategies. You could, for example, teach your students a song about the alphabet. Not only would this pair musical and linguistic intelligences, but it would also engage your students’ auditory and visual senses while learning about letters.

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