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The student can spell blends. Impressive growth!

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The student can spell blends. Impressive growth!

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This student has all of the correct SOUNDS in every word. Great phonemic awareness!

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Their awareness of different spelling patterns is really impressive.

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Their awareness of different spelling patterns is really impressive.

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Amazing endurance for free write from the beginning! The student could just focus on fine motor skills and content

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Fine motor skills have improved.

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Went from all uppercase letters to all lowercase letters

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Even fine motor skills have improved with instruction.

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Even fine motor skills have improved with instruction.

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Letter formation has improved dramatically. 

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Letter formation has improved dramatically. 

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This student has a good start with uppercase letters. It looks like he/she is writing names of family.

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My kids are still struggling with PH.

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This growth is impressive.

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2nd grade: Our kids are not this prepared.

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2nd grade: Our kids are not this prepared.

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Ox, House, Stick: The History of Our Alphabet

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Ox, House, Stick: The History of Our Alphabet

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Listen to this audio documentary on the Educate podcast. Subscribe now.

Molly Woodworth was a kid who seemed to do well at everything: good grades, in the gifted and talented program. But she couldn't read very well.

"There was no rhyme or reason to reading for me," she said. "When a teacher would dictate a word and say, 'Tell me how you think you can spell it,' I sat there with my mouth open while other kids gave spellings, and I thought, 'How do they even know where to begin?' I was totally lost."

Woodworth went to public school in Owosso, Michigan, in the 1990s. She says sounds and letters just didn't make sense to her, and she doesn't remember anyone teaching her how to read. So she came up with her own strategies to get through text.

Strategy 1: Memorize as many words as possible. "Words were like pictures to me," she said. "I had a really good memory."

Strategy 2: Guess the words based on context. If she came across a word she didn't have in her visual memory bank, she'd look at the first letter and come up with a word that seemed to make sense. Reading was kind of like a game of 20 Questions: What word could this be?

Strategy 3: If all else failed, she'd skip the words she didn't know.

Most of the time, she could get the gist of what she was reading. But getting through text took forever. "I hated reading because it was taxing," she said. "I'd get through a chapter and my brain hurt by the end of it. I wasn't excited to learn."

No one knew how much she struggled, not even her parents. Her reading strategies were her "dirty little secrets."

Woodworth, who now works in accounting, 1 says she's still not a very good reader and tears up when she talks about it. Reading "influences every aspect of your life," she said. She's determined to make sure her own kids get off to a better start than she did.

That's why she was so alarmed to see how her oldest child, Claire, was being taught to read in school.

As long as this disproven theory remains part of American education, many kids will likely struggle to learn how to read.

A couple of years ago, Woodworth was volunteering in Claire's kindergarten classroom. The class was reading a book together and the teacher was telling the children to practice the strategies that good readers use.

The teacher said, "If you don't know the word, just look at this picture up here," Woodworth recalled. "There was a fox and a bear in the picture. And the word was bear, and she said, 'Look at the first letter. It's a "b." Is it fox or bear?'"

Woodworth was stunned. "I thought, 'Oh my God, those are my strategies.' Those are the things I taught myself to look like a good reader, not the things that good readers do," she said. "These kids were being taught my dirty little secrets."

She went to the teacher and expressed her concerns. The teacher told her she was teaching reading the way the curriculum told her to.

Woodworth had stumbled on to American education's own little secret about reading: Elementary schools across the country are teaching children to be poor readers - and educators may not even know it.

For decades, reading instruction in American schools has been rooted in a flawed theory about how reading works, a theory that was debunked decades ago by cognitive scientists, yet remains deeply embedded in teaching practices and curriculum materials. As a result, the strategies that struggling readers use to get by - memorizing words, using context to guess words, skipping words they don't know - are the strategies that many beginning readers are taught in school. This makes it harder for many kids to learn how to read, and children who don't get off to a good start in reading find it difficult to ever master the process. 2

A shocking number of kids in the United States can't read very well. A third of all fourth-graders can't read at a basic level, and most students are still not proficient readers by the time they finish high school.
Percentage of U.S. fourth-graders below basic level in reading
When kids struggle to learn how to read, it can lead to a downward spiral in which behavior, vocabulary, knowledge and other cognitive skills are eventually affected by slow reading development. 3 A disproportionate number of poor readers become high school dropouts and end up in the criminal justice system. 4

The fact that a disproven theory about how reading works is still driving the way many children are taught to read is part of the problem. School districts spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on curriculum materials that include this theory. Teachers are taught the theory in their teacher preparation programs and on the job. As long as this disproven theory remains part of American education, many kids will likely struggle to learn how to read.
Percentage of U.S. 12th-graders proficient in reading
The origins

The theory is known as "three cueing." The name comes from the notion that readers use three different kinds of information - or "cues" - to identify words as they are reading.

The theory was first proposed in 1967, when an education professor named Ken Goodman presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in New York City.

In the paper, 5 Goodman rejected the idea that reading is a precise process that involves exact or detailed perception of letters or words. Instead, he argued that as people read, they make predictions about the words on the page using these three cues:

graphic cues (what do the letters tell you about what the word might be?)

syntactic cues (what kind of word could it be, for example, a noun or a verb?)

semantic cues (what word would make sense here, based on the context?)

Goodman concluded that:

Skill in reading involves not greater precision, but more accurate first guesses based on better sampling techniques, greater control over language structure, broadened experiences and increased conceptual development. As the child develops reading skill and speed, he uses increasingly fewer graphic cues.

Goodman's proposal became the theoretical basis for a new approach to teaching reading that would soon take hold in American schools.

Previously, the question of how to teach reading had focused on one of two basic ideas.

One idea is that reading is a visual memory process. The teaching method associated with this idea is known as "whole word." The whole word approach was perhaps best embodied in the "Dick and Jane" books that first appeared in the 1930s. The books rely on word repetition, and pictures to support the meaning of the text. The idea is that if you see words enough, you eventually store them in your memory as visual images.

The other idea is that reading requires knowledge of the relationships between sounds and letters. Children learn to read by sounding out words. This approach is known as phonics. It goes way back, popularized in the 1800s with the McGuffey readers.

These two ideas - whole word and phonics - had been taking turns as the favored way to teach reading until Goodman came along with what came to be known among educators as the "three-cueing system."

In the cueing theory of how reading works, when a child comes to a word she doesn't know, the teacher encourages her to think of a word that makes sense and asks: Does it look right? Does it sound right? If a word checks out on the basis of those questions, the child is getting it. She's on the path to skilled reading.

Teachers may not know the term "three cueing," but they're probably familiar with "MSV." M stands for using meaning to figure out what a word is, S for using sentence structure and V for using visual information (i.e., the letters in the words). MSV is a cueing idea that can be traced back to the late Marie Clay, a developmental psychologist from New Zealand who first laid out her theories about reading in a dissertation in the 1960s. 6

Clay developed her cueing theory independently of Goodman, but they met several times and had similar ideas about the reading process. Their theories were based on observational research. They would listen to children read, note the kinds of errors they made, and use that information to identify a child's reading difficulties. For example, a child who says "horse" when the word was "house" is probably relying too much on visual, or graphic, cues. A teacher in this case would encourage the child to pay more attention to what word would make sense in the sentence.

Goodman and Clay believed that letters were the least reliable of the three cues, and that as people became better readers, they no longer needed to pay attention to all the letters in words. "In efficient word perception the reader relies mostly on the sentence and its meaning and some selected features of the forms of words," Clay wrote. 7 For Goodman, accurate word recognition was not necessarily the goal of reading. The goal was to comprehend text. 8 If the sentences were making sense, the reader must be getting the words right, or right enough.

These ideas soon became the foundation for how reading was taught in many schools. Goodman's three-cueing idea formed the theoretical basis of an approach known as "whole language" that by the late 1980s had taken hold throughout America. 9 Clay built her cueing ideas into a reading intervention program for struggling first-graders called Reading Recovery. It was implemented across New Zealand in the 1980s and went on to become one of the world's most widely used reading intervention programs. 10

But while cueing was taking hold in schools, scientists were busy studying the cognitive processes involved in reading words. And they came to different conclusions about how people read. 11

Scientists take on three cueing

It was the early 1970s, and Keith Stanovich was working on his doctorate in psychology at the University of Michigan. He thought the reading field was ready for an infusion of knowledge from the "cognitive revolution" that was underway in psychology. Stanovich had a background in experimental science and an interest in learning and cognition due in part to the influence of his wife, Paula, who was a special education teacher.

Stanovich wanted to understand how people read words. 12 He knew about Goodman's work and thought he was probably right that as people become better readers, they relied more on their knowledge of vocabulary and language structure to read words and didn't need to pay as much attention to the letters.

So, in 1975, Stanovich and a fellow graduate student set out to test the idea in their lab. They recruited readers of various ages and abilities and gave them a series of word-reading tasks. Their hypothesis was that skilled readers rely more on contextual cues to recognize words than poor readers, who probably weren't as good at using context.

They couldn't have been more wrong.

"To our surprise, all of our research results pointed in the opposite direction," Stanovich wrote. "It was the poorer readers, not the more skilled readers, who were more reliant on context to facilitate word recognition." 13

The skilled readers could instantly recognize words without relying on context. Other researchers have confirmed these findings with similar experiments. It turns out that the ability to read words in isolation quickly and accurately is the hallmark of being a skilled reader. This is now one of the most consistent and well-replicated findings in all of reading research. 14

Other studies revealed further problems with the cueing theory: 15

Skilled readers don't scan words and sample from the graphic cues in an incidental way; instead, they very quickly recognize a word as a sequence of letters. That's how good readers instantly know the difference between "house" and "horse," for example.

Experiments that force people to use context to predict words show that even skilled readers can correctly guess only a fraction of the words; this is one reason people who rely on context to identify words are poor readers.

Weak word recognition skills are the most common and debilitating source of reading problems. 16

The results of these studies are not controversial or contested among scientists who study reading. The findings have been incorporated into every major scientific model of how reading works.

But cueing is still alive and well in schools.

Picture Power!

It's not hard to find examples of the cueing system. A quick search on Google, Pinterest or Teachers Pay Teachers turns up plenty of lesson plans, teaching guides and classroom posters. One popular poster has cute cartoon characters to remind children they have lots of strategies to use when they're stuck on a word, including looking at the picture (Eagle Eye), getting their lips ready to try the first sound (Lips the Fish), or just skipping the word altogether (Skippy Frog).

There are videos online where you can see cueing in action. In one video posted on The Teaching Channel, 17 a kindergarten teacher in Oakland, California, instructs her students to use "picture power" to identify the words on the page. The goal of the lesson, according to the teacher, is for the students to "use the picture and a first sound to determine an unknown word in their book."

The class reads a book together called "In the Garden." On each page, there's a picture of something you might find in a garden. It's what's known as a predictable book; the sentences are all the same except for the last word.

The children have been taught to memorize the words "look," "at," and "the." The challenge is getting the last word in the sentence. The lesson plan tells the teacher to cover up the word with a sticky note.

In the video, the wiggly kindergarteners sitting cross-legged on the floor come to a page with a picture of a butterfly. The teacher tells the kids that she's guessing the word is going to be butterfly. She uncovers the word to check on the accuracy of her guess.

"Look at that," she tells the children, pointing to the first letter of the word. "It starts with the /b/ /b/ /b/." The class reads the sentence together as the teacher points to the words. "Look at the butterfly!" they yell out excitedly.

This lesson comes from "Units of Study for Teaching Reading," more commonly known as "reader's workshop." 18 According to the lesson plan, this lesson teaches children to "know and apply grade-level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words." 19

But the children were not taught to decode words in this lesson. They were taught to guess words using pictures and patterns - hallmarks of the three-cueing system.

The author of Units of Study for Teaching Reading, Lucy Calkins, often refers to cueing in her published work. 20 She uses the term MSV - the meaning, structure and visual idea that originally came from Clay in New Zealand.

Then there is Fountas and Pinnell Literacy, started by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, teachers who learned the MSV concept from Clay in the 1980s. 21

Fountas and Pinnell have written several books about teaching reading, including a best-seller about a widely used instructional approach called "Guided Reading." They also created a reading assessment system that uses what are called "leveled books." 22 Children start with predictable books like "In the Garden" and move up levels as they're able to "read" the words. But many of the words in those books - butterfly, caterpillar - are words that beginning readers haven't been taught to decode yet. One purpose of the books is to teach children that when they get to a word they don't know, they can use context to figure it out.

When put into practice in the classroom, these approaches can cause problems for children when they are learning to read.

'That is not reading'

Margaret Goldberg, a teacher and literacy coach in the Oakland Unified School District, remembers a moment when she realized what a problem the three-cueing approach was. She was with a first-grader named Rodney when he came to a page with a picture of a girl licking an ice cream cone and a dog licking a bone.

The text said: "My little dog likes to eat with me."

But Rodney said: "My dog likes to lick his bone."

Rodney breezed right through it, unaware that he hadn't read the sentence on the page.

Goldberg realized lots of her students couldn't actually read the words in their books; instead, they were memorizing sentence patterns and using the pictures to guess. One little boy exclaimed, "I can read this book with my eyes shut!"

"Oh no," Goldberg thought. "That is not reading."

Goldberg had been hired by the Oakland schools in 2015 to help struggling readers by teaching a Fountas and Pinnell program called "Leveled Literacy Intervention" that uses leveled books and the cueing approach. 23

Around the same time, Goldberg was trained in a program that uses a different strategy for teaching children how to read words. The program is called "Systematic Instruction in Phonological Awareness, Phonics, and Sight Words," or SIPPS. 24 It's a phonics program that teaches children how to sound out words and uses what are known as "decodable books." Most words in the books have spelling patterns that kids have been taught in their phonics lessons.

Goldberg decided to teach some of her students using the phonics program and some of her students using three cueing. And she began to notice differences between the two groups of kids. "Not just in their abilities to read," she said, "but in the way they approached their reading."

Goldberg and a colleague recorded first-graders talking about what makes them good readers.

One video shows Mia, on the left, who was in the phonics program. Mia says she's a good reader because she looks at the words and sounds them out. JaBrea, on the right, was taught the cueing system. JaBrea says: "I look at the pictures and I read it."

Courtesy of Margaret Goldberg, Oakland Unified School District

It was clear to Goldberg after just a few months of teaching both approaches that the students learning phonics were doing better. "One of the things that I still struggle with is a lot of guilt," she said.

She thinks the students who learned three cueing were actually harmed by the approach. "I did lasting damage to these kids. It was so hard to ever get them to stop looking at a picture to guess what a word would be. It was so hard to ever get them to slow down and sound a word out because they had had this experience of knowing that you predict what you read before you read it."

Goldberg soon discovered the decades of scientific evidence against cueing. 25 She was shocked. She had never come across any of this science in her teacher preparation or on the job.

And she started to wonder why not.

Balanced Literacy

People have been arguing for centuries about how children should be taught to read. The fight has mostly focused on whether to teach phonics.

The whole language movement of the late 20th century was perhaps the zenith of the anti-phonics argument. 26 Phonics instruction was seen as tedious, time-consuming and ultimately unnecessary. Why? Because - according to the three-cueing theory - readers can use other, more reliable cues to figure out what the words say. 27

Marilyn Adams came across this belief in the early 1990s. She's a cognitive and developmental psychologist who had just written a book summarizing the research on how children learn to read. 28 One big takeaway from the book is that becoming a skilled reader of English requires knowledge of sound-spelling correspondences. 29 Another big takeaway is that many kids were not being taught this in school.

Soon after the book was published, Adams was describing her findings to a group of teachers and state education officials in Sacramento, California. She was sensing discomfort and confusion in the room. "And I just stopped and said, 'What is it that I'm missing?'" she recalled. "'What is it that we need to talk about? Help me.'"

A woman raised her hand and asked: "What does this have to do with the three-cueing system?" Marilyn didn't know what the three-cueing system was. "I think I blew all of their fuses that I did not [know what it was] since this was so fundamental to being an elementary reading teacher," she said. "How could I present myself to them as an expert on reading and not know about this?"

The teachers drew her a Venn diagram of the three-cueing system. It looked something like this:

Adams thought this diagram made perfect sense. The research clearly shows that readers use all of these cues to understand what they're reading.

But Adams soon figured out the disconnect. Teachers understood these cues not just as the way readers construct meaning from text, but as the way readers actually identify the words on the page. And they thought that teaching kids to decode or sound out words was not necessary.

"The most important thing was for the children to understand and enjoy the text," Adams said. "And from that understanding and joy of reading, the words on the page would just pop out at them."

She would explain to teachers at every opportunity that explicitly teaching children about the relationships between sounds and letters is essential to ensure all kids get off to a good start in reading. But she got tons of pushback from teachers. "They didn't want to teach phonics!" she recalled in frustration.

In 1998, Adams wrote a book chapter about how the three-cueing system conflicts with what researchers have figured out about reading. She hoped it would help put three cueing to rest. 30

By this time, the scientific research on reading was gaining traction. In 2000, a national panel convened by Congress to review the evidence on how to teach reading came out with a report. 31 It identified several essential components of reading instruction, including vocabulary, comprehension and phonics. The evidence that phonics instruction enhances children's success in learning how to read was clear and compelling. National reports on reading a few years later in the United Kingdom and Australia came to the same conclusion. 32

"When I got into the classroom and someone told me to use this practice, I didn't question it."-Stacey Cherny

Eventually, many whole language supporters accepted the weight of the scientific evidence about the importance of phonics instruction. They started adding phonics to their books and materials and renamed their approach "balanced literacy."

But they didn't get rid of the three-cueing system.

Balanced literacy proponents will tell you their approach is a mix of phonics instruction with plenty of time for kids to read and enjoy books. But look carefully at the materials and you'll see that's not really what balanced literacy is mixing. Instead, it's mixing a bunch of different ideas about how kids learn to read. It's a little bit of whole word instruction with long lists of words for kids to memorize. It's a little bit of phonics. And fundamentally, it's the idea that children should be taught to read using the three-cueing system.

And it turns out cueing may actually prevent kids from focusing on words in the way they need to become skilled readers.

Mapping the words

To understand why cueing can get in the way of children's reading development, it's essential to understand how our brains process the words we see.

Reading scientists have known for decades that the hallmark of being a skilled reader is the ability to instantly and accurately recognize words. 33 If you're a skilled reader, your brain has gotten so good at reading words that you process the word "chair" faster than you process a picture of a chair. 34 You know tens of thousands of words instantly, on sight. How did you learn to do that?

It happens through a process called "orthographic mapping." 35 This occurs when you pay attention to the details of a written word and link the word's pronunciation and meaning with its sequence of letters. 36 A child knows the meaning and pronunciation of "pony." The word gets mapped to his memory when he links the sounds /p/ /o/ /n/ /y/ to the written word "pony."

That requires an awareness of the speech sounds in words and an understanding of how those sounds are represented by letters. 37 In other words, you need phonics skills.

Here's what happens when a reader who has good phonics skills comes to a word she doesn't recognize in print. She stops at the word and sounds it out. If it's a word she knows the meaning of, she has now linked the spelling of the word with its pronunciation. If she doesn't know the meaning of the word, she can use context to try to figure it out.

By about second grade, a typically developing reader needs just a few exposures to a word through understanding both the pronunciation and the spelling for that word to be stored in her memory. 38 She doesn't know that word because she memorized it as a visual image. She knows that word because at some point she successfully sounded it out.

The more words she stores in her memory this way, the more she can focus on the meaning of what she's reading; she'll eventually be using less brain power to identify words and will be able to devote more brain power to comprehending what she's reading. 39

But when children don't have good phonics skills, the process is different.

"They sample from the letters because they're not good at sounding them out," said David Kilpatrick, a psychology professor at SUNY Cortland and the author of a book about preventing reading difficulties. 40 "And they use context."

In other words, when people don't have good phonics skills, they use the cueing system.

"The three-cueing system is the way poor readers read," said Kilpatrick.

And if teachers use the cueing system to teach reading, Kilpatrick says they're not just teaching children the habits of poor readers, they are actually impeding the orthographic mapping process. 41

"The minute you ask them just to pay attention to the first letter or look at the picture, look at the context, you're drawing their attention away from the very thing that they need to interact with in order for them to read the word [and] remember the word," Kilpatrick said. In this way, he said, three cueing can actually prevent the critical learning that's necessary for a child to become a skilled reader.

In many balanced literacy classrooms, children are taught phonics and the cueing system. Some kids who are taught both approaches realize pretty quickly that sounding out a word is the most efficient and reliable way to know what it is. Those kids tend to have an easier time understanding the ways that sounds and letters relate. They'll drop the cueing strategies and begin building that big bank of instantly known words that is so necessary for skilled reading.

But some children will skip the sounding out if they're taught they have other options. Phonics is challenging for many kids. The cueing strategies seem quicker and easier at first. And by using context and memorizing a bunch of words, many children can look like good readers - until they get to about third grade, when their books begin to have more words, longer words, and fewer pictures. Then they're stuck. They haven't developed their sounding-out skills. Their bank of known words is limited. Reading is slow and laborious and they don't like it, so they don't do it if they don't have to. While their peers who mastered decoding early are reading and teaching themselves new words every day, the kids who clung to the cueing approach are falling further and further behind. 42

These poor reading habits, once ingrained at a young age, can follow kids into high school. Some kids who were taught the cueing approach never become good readers. Not because they're incapable of learning to read well but because they were taught the strategies of struggling readers.

'So what if they use the picture?'

Once Margaret Goldberg discovered the cognitive science evidence against cueing, she wanted her colleagues in the Oakland school district to know about it too.

Over the past two years, Goldberg and a fellow literacy coach named Lani Mednick have been leading a grant-funded pilot project to improve reading achievement in the Oakland schools. 43

They have their work cut out for them. Nearly half the district's third-graders are below grade level in reading. Goldberg and Mednick want to raise questions about how kids in Oakland are being taught to read.

They meet every couple weeks with literacy coaches from the 10 elementary schools in the pilot program. They read and discuss articles about the scientific research on reading. At a meeting in March, the coaches watched the video of the "picture power" lesson.

"This teacher meant well," Mednick said to the coaches after they watched the lesson. "It seemed like she believed this lesson would ensure her students would be on the road toward reading."

Mednick wanted the coaches to consider the beliefs about reading that would lead to the creation of a lesson like "picture power." The Oakland schools purchased the Units of Study for Teaching Reading series, which includes the "picture power" lesson, as part of a balanced literacy initiative the district began about 10 years ago. The district also bought the Fountas and Pinnell assessment system.

The coaches saw right away that "picture power" was designed to teach kids the cueing system. But they said many teachers don't see any problem with cueing. After all, one of the cues is to look at the letters in the word. What's wrong with teaching kids lots of different strategies to figure out unknown words? 44

"I remember before we started looking at the science and everything, I thought to myself, 'Reading is so hard for kids, so what if they use the picture?'" said Soraya Sajous-Brooks, the early literacy coach at Prescott Elementary School in West Oakland. "Like, use everything you've got."

But she's come to understand that cueing sends the message to kids that they don't need to sound out words. Her students would get phonics instruction in one part of the day. Then they'd go reader's workshop and be taught that when they come to a word they don't know, they have lots of strategies. They can sound it out. They can also check the first letter, look at the picture, think of a word that makes sense.

Teaching cueing and phonics doesn't work, Sajous-Brooks said. "One negates the other."

Goldberg and Mednick want to show the district there's a better way to teach reading. Schools in the pilot project used grant money to buy new materials that steer clear of the three-cueing idea. Two charter school networks in Oakland are working on similar projects to move their schools away from cueing.

To see what it looks like, I visited a first-grade classroom at a charter school in Oakland called Achieve Academy. 45

One part of the day was explicit phonics instruction. 46 The students were divided into small groups based on their skill level. They met with their teacher, Andrea Ruiz, at a kidney-shaped table in a corner of the classroom. The lowest-level group worked on identifying the speech sounds in words like "skin" and "skip." The highest-level group learned how verbs like "spy" and "cry" are spelled as "spied' and 'cried" in the past tense.

There were also vocabulary lessons. 47 The entire class gathered on a rug at the front of the classroom to talk about a book Ms. Ruiz read out loud to them. One of the words in the book was "prey."

"What animals are a chameleon's prey?" Ms. Ruiz asked the children. "Or we can also ask, what animals do chameleons hunt for food?"

The kids turned and talked to each other. "A chameleon's prey are bugs and insects and other chameleons and mice and birds," a little boy explained to his classmate. "That's it."

Other vocabulary words these first-graders had learned were posted on cards around the classroom. They included: wander, persevere, squint and scrumptious. The kids weren't expected to read those words yet. The idea is to build their oral vocabulary so that when they can read those words, they know what the words mean.

This comes straight from the scientific research, which shows that reading comprehension is the product of two things. 48 First, a child needs to be able to sound out a word. Second, the child needs to know the meaning of the word she just sounded out. So, in a first-grade classroom that's following the research, you will see explicit phonics instruction and also lessons that build oral vocabulary and background knowledge. And you will see kids practicing what they've been taught.

After their vocabulary lesson, the kids did "buddy reading." They retreated to various spots around the classroom to read books to each other. I found Belinda sitting on an adult chair at the back of the classroom, her little legs swinging. Across from her was her buddy Steven, decked out in a yellow and blue plaid shirt tucked neatly into his jeans. He held the book and pointed to the words while Belinda read.

"Ellen /m/," Belinda paused, sounding out the word "meets." She was reading a decodable book about some kids who visit a farm. Almost all of the words in the book contain spelling patterns she'd been taught in her phonics lessons.

"I am a farm here," Belinda read.

Steven did a double-take. "A farmer here," he said gently. Steven's job as Belinda's reading buddy was to help her if she missed a word or got stuck. But that didn't happen much because Belinda had been taught how to read the words. She didn't need any help from the pictures, either. She barely glanced at them as she read.

To be clear, there's nothing wrong with pictures. They're great to look at and talk about, and they can help a child comprehend the meaning of a story. Context - including a picture if there is one - helps us understand what we're reading all the time. But if a child is being taught to use context to identify words, she's being taught to read like a poor reader.

Many educators don't know this because the cognitive science research has not made its way into many schools and schools of education. 49

Ruiz didn't know about this research until the Oakland pilot project. "I didn't really know anything about how kids learn to read when I started teaching," she said. It was a relief when she came to Oakland and the curriculum spelled out that kids use meaning, structure and visual cues to figure out words. "Because I came from not having anything, I was like, 'Oh, there's a way we should teach this,'" she said.

I heard this from other educators. Cueing was appealing because they didn't know what else to do.

"When I got into the classroom and someone told me to use this practice, I didn't question it," said Stacey Cherny, a former teacher who's now principal of an elementary school in Pennsylvania. She says many teachers aren't taught what they need to know about the structure of the English language to be able to teach phonics well. She says phonics can be intimidating; three cueing isn't.

Another reason cueing holds on is that it seems to work for some children. But researchers estimate there's a percentage of kids - perhaps about 40 percent - who will learn to read no matter how they're taught. 50 According to Kilpatrick, children who learn to read with cueing are succeeding in spite of the instruction, not because of it.

Goldberg hopes the pilot project in Oakland will convince the district to drop all instructional materials that include cueing.

When asked about this, the Oakland superintendent's office responded with a written statement that there isn't enough evidence from the pilot project to make curriculum changes for the entire district and that the Oakland schools remain committed to balanced literacy.

Oakland's situation is no different from many other districts across the country that have invested millions of dollars in materials that include cueing.

"It feels like everyone's trusting somebody else to have done their due diligence," Goldberg said. "Classroom teachers are trusting that the materials they're being handed will work. The people who purchase the materials are trusting if they were on the market, that they will work. We're all trusting, and it's a system that is broken."

'My science is different'

If cueing was debunked decades ago by cognitive scientists, why is the idea still in materials that are being sold to schools?

One answer to that question is that school districts still buy the materials. Heinemann, the company that publishes the Fountas and Pinnell and Lucy Calkins' products that the Oakland schools use, earned somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 million in 2018, according to earnings reports. 51

I wanted to know what the authors of those materials make of the cognitive science research. And I wanted to give them a chance to explain the ideas behind their work. I wrote to Calkins, Fountas and Pinnell and asked for interviews. They all declined. Heinemann sent a statement that said every product the company sells is informed by extensive research.

I also asked Ken Goodman for an interview. It's been more than 50 years since he first laid out the three-cueing theory in that 1967 paper. I wanted to know what he thinks of the cognitive science research. Of the major proponents of three cueing I reached out to, he was the only one who agreed to an interview.

I visited Goodman at his home in Tucson, Arizona. He's 91. He uses a scooter to get around, but he's still working. He just finished a new edition of one of his books.

When I asked him what he makes of the cognitive science research, he told me he thinks scientists focus too much on word recognition. He still doesn't believe accurate word recognition is necessary for reading comprehension.

"Word recognition is a preoccupation," he said. "I don't teach word recognition. I teach people to make sense of language. And learning the words is incidental to that."

He brought up the example of a child who comes to the word "horse" and says "pony" instead. His argument is that a child will still understand the meaning of the story because horse and pony are the same concept.

I pressed him on this. First of all, a pony isn't the same thing as a horse. Second, don't you want to make sure that when a child is learning to read, he understands that /p/ /o/ /n/ /y/ says "pony"? And different letters say "horse"?

He dismissed my question.

"The purpose is not to learn words," he said. "The purpose is to make sense."

Cognitive scientists don't dispute that the purpose of reading is to make sense of the text. But the question is: How can you understand what you are reading if you can't accurately read the words? And if quick and accurate word recognition is the hallmark of being a skilled reader, how does a little kid get there?

Goodman rejected the idea that you can make a distinction between skilled readers and unskilled readers; he doesn't like the value judgment that implies. He said dyslexia does not exist - despite lots of evidence that it does. 52 And he said the three-cueing theory is based on years of observational research. In his view, three cueing is perfectly valid, drawn from a different kind of evidence than what scientists collect in their labs.

"My science is different," Goodman said.

This idea that there are different kinds of evidence that lead to different conclusions about how reading works is one reason people continue to disagree about how children should be taught to read. It's important for educators to understand that three cueing is based on theory and observational research and that there's decades of scientific evidence from labs all over the world that converges on a very different idea about skilled reading.

The cognitive science does not provide all the answers about how to teach children to read, but on the question of how skilled readers read words, scientists have amassed a huge body of evidence.

Goldberg thinks it's time for educators across the country to take a close look at all the materials they use to teach reading.

"We should look through the materials and search for evidence of cueing," she said. "And if it's there, don't touch it. Don't let it get near our kids, don't let it get near our classrooms, our teachers."

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How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers

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For decades, schools have taught children the strategies of struggling readers, using a theory about reading that cognitive scientists have repeatedly debunked. And many teachers and parents don't know there's anything wrong with it.

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The Lazy Schwa Sound - Dynamite - BTS (Parody)

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"Wolf restores our awe of the human brain-its adaptability, its creativity, and its ability to connect with other minds through a procession of silly squiggles." - San Francisco Chronicle

How do people learn to read and write-and how has the development of these skills transformed the brain and the world itself ? Neuropsychologist and child development expert Maryann Wolf answers these questions in this ambitious and provocative book that chronicles the remarkable journey of written language not only throughout our evolution but also over the course of a single child's life, showing why a growing percentage have difficulty mastering these abilities.

With fascinating down-to-earth examples and lively personal anecdotes, Wolf asserts that the brain that examined the tiny clay tablets of the Sumerians is a very different brain from the one that is immersed in today's technology-driven literacy, in which visual images on the screen are paving the way for a reduced need for written language-with potentially profound consequences for our future.

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Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

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Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain [Wolf, Maryanne] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

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BUY THE BOOK

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ISBN: 9781250056122
336 Pages

THE FASCINATING AND SURPRISING HISTORY OF ENGLISH SPELLING FROM DAVID CRYSTAL, EVERYONE'S FAVORITE EXPERT LOGOPHILE

With The Story of English in 100 Words, David Crystal took us on a tour through the history of our language. Now, with Spell It Out, he takes on the task of answering all the questions about how we spell: "Why is English spelling so difficult?" Or "Why are good spellers so proud of their achievement that when they see a misspelling they condemn the writer as sloppy, lazy, or uneducated?" In thirty-seven short, engaging and informative chapters, Crystal takes readers on a history of English spelling, starting with the Roman missionaries' sixth century introduction of the Roman alphabet and ending with where the language might be going. He looks individually at each letter in the alphabet and its origins. He considers the question of vowels and how people developed a way to tell whether or not it was long or short. He looks at influences from other cultures, and explains how English speakers understood that the "o" in "hopping" was a short vowel, rather than the long vowel of "hoping". If you've ever asked yourself questions like "Why do the words "their", "there" and "they're" sound alike, but mean very different things?" or "How can we tell the difference between "charge" the verb and "charge" the noun?" David Crystal's Spell It Out will spell it all out for you.

YALSA-College Bound /Lifelong Learners, YALSA Outstanding Books for the College Bound and Lifelong Learners

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Praise for Spell It Out

"The best word book to come down the pike in many a moon...An ingenious idea, and only David Crystal could have pulled it off." - Patricia T. O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman, authors of Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language and bloggers at Grammarphobia.com, on The Story of English in 100 Words

"Brisk [and] exuberant...Crystal delights in exposing all the many wacky ways we English speakers make new words." - San Francisco Chronicle on The Story of English in 100 Words

-

Reviews from Goodreads

David Crystal

David Crystal is the author of The Story of English in 100 Words and Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor. In 1995, he was awarded the Order of the British Empire for services to the English language. He lives in the United Kingdom.

David Crystal

Crystal Business Partnership

LibraryThing

From the Publisher

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g

$19.00

Picador

Picador

ISBN: 9781250056122
336 Pages

Reviews

Praise for Spell It Out

"The best word book to come down the pike in many a moon...An ingenious idea, and only David Crystal could have pulled it off." - Patricia T. O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman, authors of Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language and bloggers at Grammarphobia.com, on The Story of English in 100 Words

"Brisk [and] exuberant...Crystal delights in exposing all the many wacky ways we English speakers make new words." - San Francisco Chronicle on The Story of English in 100 Words

-

Reviews from Goodreads

David Crystal

David Crystal is the author of The Story of English in 100 Words and Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor. In 1995, he was awarded the Order of the British Empire for services to the English language. He lives in the United Kingdom.

David Crystal

Crystal Business Partnership

LibraryThing

From the Publisher

Picador

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Spell It Out | David Crystal | Macmillan

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
g $19.00 Picador Picador ISBN: 9781250056122 336 Pages THE FASCINATING AND SURPRISING HISTORY OF ENGLISH SPELLING FROM DAVID CRYSTAL, EVERYONE'S FAVORITE EXPERT LOGOPHILE With The Story of English in 100 Words, David Crystal took us on a tour through the history of our language.

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This is a complete encyclopedia of phonics for teacher, student, and parent. No other book compiles so much information in such a usable form as this. The main section of the book is arranged alphabetically, so you can answer any question about phonics or spelling by looking up the letter or letter combination in its alphabetical order. Other sections include information about syllables, the history of English spelling, and more. The "Phonics Made Plain" cards and chart (available separately) reference this book for additional examples. The Appendix includes an excellent article concerning reading problems of the older student or adult.

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The ABC's and All Their Tricks (hardcover edition) | mottmedia

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This is a complete encyclopedia of phonics for teacher, student, and parent. No other book compiles so much information in such a usable form as this. The main section of the book is arranged alphabetically, so you can answer any question about phonics or spelling by looking up the letter or letter combination in its alphabetical order.

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© 2023 Equipped for Reading Success - WordPress Theme by Kadence WP

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For many, fall is synonymous with back-to-school activities and starting the new academic year on a strong note. It is also a time to raise awareness about dyslexia. Since the early 2000s, the International Dyslexia Association (IDA) has set aside the month of October to do just that. More recently in 2015, Congress voted to designate October as National Dyslexia Awareness Month.

According to the IDA, dyslexia is a "learning disability that is neurobiological in origin [and is] characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities." The Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity estimates that 15-20% of the world's population displays characteristics of dyslexia.

Although dyslexia is common among individuals of all ages, misinformation about the learning disability is equally common. To set the record straight and celebrate National Dyslexia Awareness Month, we're dispelling nine common myths.
MYTH #1: Only school-aged children develop dyslexia.
Because dyslexia is innate, characteristics can appear in children as young as two or three years old. Early signs for children under the age of five include delayed speech, difficulties remembering the alphabet, and mispronouncing common words.
MYTH #2: Dyslexia stems from vision problems.
You regularly hear that people with dyslexia see letters and words out of order, but this isn't caused by vision issues. Dyslexia is a brain-based learning disability. In fact, scans have revealed that the brain of an individual with dyslexia functions differently when it comes to reading text than the brain of someone without the learning disability.
MYTH #3: Dyslexia disappears once a child learns how to read.
While people with dyslexia can become fluent, skilled readers, there is no cure. Individuals with dyslexia can achieve success both in school and in life with early intervention and proper science-based instruction.
MYTH #4: Dyslexia is linked to a person's level of intelligence or motivation.
Dyslexia is often mistakenly attributed to a low level of intelligence or a lack of motivation. The truth is, students with dyslexia aren't lazy and in some cases try even harder than their classmates to master reading. Individuals with dyslexia require additional support and multisensory structured learning to create lasting literacy skills.
MYTH #5: Dyslexia is caused by a lack of reading at home.
Since dyslexia is a neurobiological learning disability, individuals can't develop it from limited reading in the home. However, a lack of reading practice at home can hinder the progress of adults learning to read. For children with dyslexia, parents can use creative ways to encourage reading outside of the classroom.
MYTH #6: Dyslexia is extremely rare.
It's easy to dismiss the prevalence of dyslexia if you think the learning disability hasn't impacted your life or the life of a loved one. More commonly, people can identify individuals in their lives that have struggled to learn to read and spell. It's estimated that 70-80% of people with reading difficulties have dyslexia, ranging from mild to severe.
MYTH #7: Dyslexia is only present in English-speaking students.
Whether a child is fluent in Spanish, Chinese, or German, dyslexia affects children who speak all languages. Researchers have found that the neuroscience behind dyslexia is the same, regardless of a child's native language.
MYTH #8: A lack of phonics instruction can cause dyslexia.
Although it is a critical component of reading, dyslexia is not caused by insufficient phonics instruction. Successful readers also require explicit instruction in phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. Offering children educational programs that promote these core components will create a foundation for higher-level reading skills.
MYTH #9: Boys are much more likely to have dyslexia than girls.
Although the exact percentage has fluctuated throughout the years, studies have shown that dyslexia affects both genders at a comparable rate. Despite these findings, teachers have been found to refer more boys for dyslexia evaluations.

While dyslexia affects every individual differently, students with dyslexia can successfully learn to read when provided with the proper tools and instruction. By dispelling common myths, we take another step toward developing the next generation of fluent, independent readers.

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Dyslexia Myths Debunked - Wilson Language Training Corporation

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For many, fall is synonymous with back-to-school activities and starting the new academic year on a strong note. It is also a time to raise awareness about dyslexia. Since the early 2000s, the International Dyslexia Association (IDA) has set aside the month of October to do just that.

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Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers

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ISBN-10:

1681253305

ISBN-13:

9781681253305

Pub. Date:

02/01/2020

Publisher:

Brookes Publishing

Overview

For two decades, Speech to Print has been a bestselling, widely adopted textbook on explicit, high-quality literacy instruction. Now the anticipated third edition is here, fully updated with ten years of new research, a complete package of supporting materials, and expanded guidance on the how of assessment and instruction in today's classrooms.

Filling a critical gap in teacher preparation courses, Speech to Print supplies K-12 educators with in-depth knowledge of the structure and function of language-fundamentals they need to deliver successful structured literacy instruction. Renowned literacy expert Louisa Cook Moats gives current and future teachers comprehensive, accurate, and accessible information on the underpinnings of language instruction, including:

the history of the English language and its effect on spelling

English phonology, including speech sounds and their distinctive features

how print represents speech in English

the morphological aspects of words

syntax and its instruction

how meaning is conveyed with language

Through case studies, activities, recommended teaching principles, and close analysis of real-world student work samples, teachers will also receive invaluable insight into how their students should be taught. Ideal for use in preservice courses and in-service professional development sessions, this essential textbook will give educators the strong foundation they need to teach language and reading skills to students with and without disabilities.

WHAT'S NEW:

New and expanded practical content on the how of language and reading instruction

New and updated chapter exercises

New faculty support materials

More on key topics like program and curricula selection, frameworks for instructional planning, and problem solving when students are slow to respond to intervention

More accessible, undergraduate-friendly tone and structure

Additional graphics to illustrate key concepts

NEW FACULTY SUPPORT MATERIALS! Support your instruction with a complete package of online companion materials, including chapter quizzes, a sample syllabus/course outline, PowerPoints to accompany each chapter, PDF handouts for selected concepts, and a video demonstrating production of all the sounds in the English language.

Learn more about the new edition!

Product Details

ISBN-13:

9781681253305

Publisher:

Brookes Publishing

Publication date:

02/01/2020

Edition description:

3rd ed.

Pages:

344

Sales rank:

56,577

Product dimensions:

6.90(w) x 9.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Louisa Cook Moats, Ed.D., has published many book chapters, journal articles, and policy papers on reading instruction. Formerly Project Director at the District of Columbia Public Schools site of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Early Interventions Project, Dr. Moats is now an independent consultant and writer who specializes in the professional development of teachers of reading and writing. Dr. Moats spent the 1996-1997 school year as a visiting scholar at the Sacramento County Office of Education, where she authored and presented leadership training materials on early reading for the California State Board of Education. These materials are now required content in all of the professional development programs conducted under Assembly Bill 1086 in California. Dr. Moats received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Wellesley College, her Master of Arts degree from Peabody College of Vanderbilt University, and her doctorate of education in reading and human development from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She worked as a teacher, neuropsychology technician, and specialist in learning disorders prior to her doctoral training. She was a licensed psychologist in private practice for 15 years in Vermont and a graduate instructor both at Harvard and at St. Michael's College in Winooski, Vermont, where she developed innovative courses for teachers linking the disciplines of linguistics and reading education. Specializing in reading development, reading disorders, spelling, and written language, she has written and lectured widely throughout the United States and abroad. She has taught courses in teacher education at the Greenwood Institute in Putney, Vermont, and at Simmons College in Boston. Her publications include this text's companion workbook, Speech to Print Workbook: Language Exercises for Teachers (Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co., 2003); journal articles; book chapters; a classroom basal spelling program; a book titled Spelling: Development, Disability, and Instruction (York Press, 1995); and a book for parents, co-authored with Susan L. Hall, Straight Talk About Reading: How Parents Can Make a Difference in the Early Years (Contemporary Books, 1999).

Read an Excerpt

https://brookespublishing.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/TEXTBOOK-excerpt-w.toc-1.pdf

Table of Contents

About the Author
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction

Chapter 1 Why Study Language?

Chapter 2 Phonetics: The Sounds in Speech

Chapter 3 Phonology: Speech Sounds in Use

Chapter 4 The Structure of English Orthography

Chapter 5 Morphology for Reading, Spelling, and Vocabulary

Chapter 6 Syntax: How Sentences Work

Chapter 7 Semantics: Word and Sentence Meaning

Chapter 8 Structured Language and Literacy Instruction

Index

Editorial Reviews

Includes all a teacher needs to know about the English language in order to teach reading and writing . . . a must-read for all teachers.

Marcia K Henry

"This text has been instrumental in deepening teachers' linguistic knowledge and improving their understanding of reading instruction. The second edition incorporates up-to-date research while providing a range of rich examples of how to put this knowledge into practice."

David Coker

" Speech to Print is the treasure map that Louisa has provided teachers to point the way from research to results. This second edition adds shading and nuance that gives teachers unparalleled understanding and insight. My only regret is that the thumbed, earmarked, and highlighted copy that has become such a friend will be put aside while I begin to thumb, earmark, and highlight the second edition."

G. Emerson Dickman

"Provides a winning survey for elementary educators."

The Midwest Book Review-California Bookwatch

" Speech to Print has long been a mainstay in my courses on reading - the second edition expands and strengthens this valuable resource. The content truly is essential for educators and specialists responsible for helping students succeed at learning to read."

University of Rhode Island and Haskins Laboratories - Susan Brady

"[Speech to Print] is always front and center on my reference list. I look forward to recommending this revised edition. If every educator mastered the content of this volume, I am sure that our instruction and intervention efforts would be much improved."

Vanderbilt University - C. Melanie Schuele

"Just when you think Louisa Moats can't improve on her cache of professional development writings for teachers, she drops another literacy gift in our laps. This new book . . . weaves the latest research on language, reading, writing and spelling seamlessly with practical classroom application."

Senior Research Associate, The National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality, Vanderbilt University - Peabody Colleg - Susan M. Smartt

"Includes all a teacher needs to know about the English language in order to teach reading and writing . . . a must-read for all teachers."

author, Unlocking Literacy: Effective Decoding and Spelling Instruction; former president, The International Dyslexi - Marcia K. Henry

"Simply the most brilliant and informative example of how effective instructional practices are informed by converging scientific evidence."

Southern Methodist University - G. Reid Lyon

"An essential book . . . Dr. Moats has done an outstanding job of integrating research and application from the field of literacy. Required reading for teachers as well as for those who prepare them in the colleges of education."

Associate Dean for Graduate Program Development; Professor of Literacy Education, ESL, and Educational Psychology, Texas - R. Malatesha Joshi

"Teachers will deepen their knowledge and application of reading basics and literacy through Speech to Print's accessible, self-guided lessons. A must have for inservice and preservice teachers."

LETRS National Trainer, author, LETRS Foundations: An Introduction to Language and Literacy; Next STEPS in Literacy - Deborah R. Glaser

Read More

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Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers / Edition 3|Paperback

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ISBN-10: 1681253305 ISBN-13: 9781681253305 Pub. Date: 02/01/2020 Publisher: Brookes Publishing For two decades, Speech to Print has been a bestselling, widely adopted textbook on explicit, high-quality literacy instruction.

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Welcome to the University of Florida Literacy Institute (UFLI, pronounced "you fly"). UFLI is an ongoing effort by UF faculty, students, and staff to improve literacy outcomes for children learning to read.

The work of UFLI focuses on two main areas: teacher development and reader development. The place where those two overlap ... that is where the work of UFLI lives. Our programs and resources are designed to help teachers become more confident and more successful in their capacity to help kids learn to read. We do this through:

Academic programs for both pre-service and practicing educators to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to be effective reading teachers

Professional learning opportunities to help classroom reading teachers, instructional coaches, and school leaders expand their knowledge, enhance their teaching practices, and build capacity in their schools

Resources for teachers, parents, and teacher educators to use in their reading instruction

Much, much more!

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UF Literacy Institute | Where teacher development and reader development overlap

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Welcome to the University of Florida Literacy Institute (UFLI, pronounced "you fly"). UFLI is an ongoing effort by UF faculty, students, and staff to improve literacy outcomes for children learning to read. The work of UFLI focuses on two main areas: teacher development and reader development. The place where those two overlap ...

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Prompting Students while reading, McCandliss

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Prompting Students while reading, McCandliss

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What does problem-based math learning unlock for students?: Part 1

This three-part series explores how problem-based learning instruction engages all students in grade-level math, and how instructors can go about implementing problem-based learning in the classroom.

By Amplify Staff | July 28, 2022 Read post

Want the latest free resources, webinars, and more?

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Featured blog post This three-part series explores how problem-based learning instruction engages all students in grade-level math, and how instructors can go about implementing problem-based learning in the classroom. By Amplify Staff | July 28, 2022 Read post Want the latest free resources, webinars, and more?

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Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read by Stanislas Dehaene 

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Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read by Stanislas Dehaene 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How the Brain Learns to Read - Prof. Stanislas Dehaene

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Welcome to the University of Florida Literacy Institute (UFLI, pronounced "you fly"). UFLI is an ongoing effort by UF faculty, students, and staff to improve literacy outcomes for children learning to read.

The work of UFLI focuses on two main areas: teacher development and reader development. The place where those two overlap ... that is where the work of UFLI lives. Our programs and resources are designed to help teachers become more confident and more successful in their capacity to help kids learn to read. We do this through:

Academic programs for both pre-service and practicing educators to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to be effective reading teachers

Professional learning opportunities to help classroom reading teachers, instructional coaches, and school leaders expand their knowledge, enhance their teaching practices, and build capacity in their schools

Resources for teachers, parents, and teacher educators to use in their reading instruction

Much, much more!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
UF Literacy Institute | Where teacher development and reader development overlap

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Welcome to the University of Florida Literacy Institute (UFLI, pronounced "you fly"). UFLI is an ongoing effort by UF faculty, students, and staff to improve literacy outcomes for children learning to read. The work of UFLI focuses on two main areas: teacher development and reader development. The place where those two overlap ...

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UF Literacy Institute | Where teacher development and reader development overlap

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What is dyslexia?

Dyslexia is a language-based learning disability. Dyslexia refers to a cluster of symptoms, which result in people having difficulties with specific language skills, particularly reading. Students with dyslexia usually experience difficulties with other language skills such as spelling, writing, and pronouncing words. Dyslexia affects individuals throughout their lives; however, its impact can change at different stages in a person's life. It is referred to as a learning disability because dyslexia can make it very difficult for a student to succeed academically in the typical instructional environment, and in its more severe forms, will qualify a student for special education, special accommodations, or extra support services.

What causes dyslexia?

The exact causes of dyslexia are still not completely clear, but anatomical and brain imagery studies show differences in the way the brain of a person with dyslexia develops and functions. Moreover, most people with dyslexia have been found to have problems with identifying the separate speech sounds within a word and/or learning how letters represent those sounds, a key factor in their reading difficulties. Dyslexia is not due to either lack of intelligence or desire to learn; with appropriate teaching methods, students with dyslexia can learn successfully.

How widespread is dyslexia?

About 13-14% of the school population nationwide has a handicapping condition that qualifies them for special education. Current studies indicate that one half of all the students who qualify for special education are classified as having a learning disability (LD) (6-7%). About 85% of those students have a primary learning disability in reading and language processing. Nevertheless, many more people-perhaps as many as 15-20% of the population as a whole-have some of the symptoms of dyslexia, including slow or inaccurate reading, poor spelling, poor writing, or mixing up similar words. Not all of these will qualify for special education, but they are likely to struggle with many aspects of academic learning and are likely to benefit from systematic, explicit, instruction in reading, writing, and language.

Dyslexia occurs in people of all backgrounds and intellectual levels. People with dyslexia can be very bright. They are often capable or even gifted in areas such as art, computer science, design, drama, electronics, math, mechanics, music, physics, sales, and sports.

In addition, dyslexia runs in families; parents with dyslexia are very likely to have children with dyslexia. For some people, their dyslexia is identified early in their lives, but for others, their dyslexia goes unidentified until they get older.

What are the effects of dyslexia?

The impact that dyslexia has is different for each person and depends on the severity of the condition and the effectiveness of instruction or remediation. The core difficulty is with word recognition and reading fluency, spelling, and writing. Some individuals with dyslexia manage to learn early reading and spelling tasks, especially with excellent instruction, but later experience their most debilitating problems when more complex language skills are required, such as grammar, understanding textbook material, and writing essays.

People with dyslexia can also have problems with spoken language, even after they have been exposed to good language models in their homes and good language instruction in school. They may find it difficult to express themselves clearly, or to fully comprehend what others mean when they speak. Such language problems are often difficult to recognize, but they can lead to major problems in school, in the workplace, and in relating to other people. The effects of dyslexia reach well beyond the classroom.

Dyslexia can also affect a person's self-image. Students with dyslexia often end up feeling "dumb" and less capable than they actually are. After experiencing a great deal of stress due to academic problems, a student may become discouraged about continuing in school.

How is dyslexia diagnosed?

Before referring a student for a comprehensive evaluation, a school or district may choose to track a student's progress with a brief screening test and identify whether the student is progressing at a "benchmark" level that predicts success in reading. If a student is below that benchmark (which is equivalent to about the 40 th percentile nationally), the school may immediately deliver intensive and individualized supplemental reading instruction before determining whether the student needs a comprehensive evaluation that would lead to a designation of special education eligibility. Some students simply need more structured and systematic instruction to get back on track; they do not have learning disabilities. For those students and even for those with dyslexia, putting the emphasis on preventive or early intervention makes sense. There is no benefit to the child if special instruction is delayed for months while waiting for an involved testing process to occur. These practices of teaching first, and then determining who needs diagnostic testing based on response to instruction, are encouraged by federal policies known as Response to Intervention (RTI). Parents should know, however, that at any point they have the right to request a comprehensive evaluation under the IDEA law, whether or not the student is receiving instruction under an RTI model.

A comprehensive evaluation typically includes intellectual and academic achievement testing, as well as an assessment of the critical underlying language skills that are closely linked to dyslexia. These include receptive (listening) and expressive language skills, phonological skills including phonemic awareness, and also a student's ability to rapidly name letters and numbers. A student's ability to read lists of words in isolation, as well as words in context, should also be assessed. If a profile emerges that is characteristic of readers with dyslexia, an individualized intervention plan should be developed, which should include appropriate accommodations, such as extended time. The testing can be conducted by trained school or outside specialists. (See the Dyslexia Assessment Fact Sheet for more information.)

What are the signs of dyslexia?

The problems displayed by individuals with dyslexia involve difficulties in acquiring and using written language. It is a myth that individuals with dyslexia "read backwards," although spelling can look quite jumbled at times because students have trouble remembering letter symbols for sounds and forming memories for words. Other problems experienced by people with dyslexia include the following:

Learning to speak

Learning letters and their sounds

Organizing written and spoken language

Memorizing number facts

Reading quickly enough to comprehend

Persisting with and comprehending longer reading assignments

Spelling

Learning a foreign language

Correctly doing math operations

Not all students who have difficulties with these skills have dyslexia. Formal testing of reading, language, and writing skills is the only way to confirm a diagnosis of suspected dyslexia.

How is dyslexia treated?

Dyslexia is a lifelong condition. With proper help, many people with dyslexia can learn to read and write well. Early identification and treatment is the key to helping individuals with dyslexia achieve in school and in life. Most people with dyslexia need help from a teacher, tutor, or therapist specially trained in using a multisensory, structured language approach. It is important for these individuals to be taught by a systematic and explicit method that involves several senses (hearing, seeing, touching) at the same time. Many individuals with dyslexia need one-on-one help so that they can move forward at their own pace. In addition, students with dyslexia often need a great deal of structured practice and immediate, corrective feedback to develop automatic word recognition skills. For students with dyslexia, it is helpful if their outside academic therapists work closely with classroom teachers.

Schools can implement academic accommodations and modifications to help students with dyslexia succeed. For example, a student with dyslexia can be given extra time to complete tasks, help with taking notes, and work assignments that are modified appropriately. Teachers can give recorded tests or allow students with dyslexia to use alternative means of assessment. Students can benefit from listening to audiobooks and using text reading and word processing computer programs.

Students may also need help with emotional issues that sometimes arise as a consequence of difficulties in school. Mental health specialists can help students cope with their struggles.

What are the rights of a person with dyslexia?

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act 2004 (IDEA), Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) define the rights of students with dyslexia and other specific learning disabilities. These individuals are legally entitled to special services to help them overcome and accommodate their learning problems. Such services include education programs designed to meet the needs of these students. The Acts also protect people with dyslexia against unfair and illegal discrimination.

Suggested Readings

Moats, L. C., & Dakin, K. E. (2008). Basic facts about dyslexia and other reading problems. Baltimore: The International Dyslexia Association.

Shaywitz, S. (2003). Overcoming dyslexia: A new and complete science-based program for reading problems at any level. New York: Knopf.
The International Dyslexia Association (IDA) thanks Louisa C. Moats, Ed.D., and Karen E. Dakin, M.Ed., for their assistance in the preparation of this fact sheet.
The International Dyslexia Association (IDA). IDA encourages the reproduction and distribution of this fact sheet.
If portions of the text are cited, appropriate reference must be made. Fact sheets may not be reprinted for the purpose of resale. © Copyright 2020. The International Dyslexia Association (IDA). For copyright information, pleaseclick here.

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DYSLEXIA BASICS - International Dyslexia Association

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Written English is a code in which letters and groups of letters are used to stand for sounds, and to be able to read, children must learn to break it-literally, to de-code it. Although skilled reading involves many factors, decoding ability is the foundation on which it rests; after all, it is impossible to pay attention to meaning unless one knows what the words say!

The following list is intended to indicate some key warnings signs that may indicate a decoding problem. It is not, however, intended to be used a source for any particular diagnosis. Keep in mind that children learn to read at varying rates, and that some difficulties early on are normal and by no means indicative of a serious problem.

That said, if your child or a child you know displays many of these behaviors while reading, especially beyond second grade, we urge you to seek out quality, phonics-based intervention. Reading problems that are relatively straightforward to correct when a child is in elementary school can seriously hinder them from fulfilling their academic potential later on. The longer they remain unaddressed, the more challenging they become to remedy.

To check for the following, click here for a selection of grade-appropriate passages, and have your child read the relevant one aloud. (Note that the passage for grades 7-8 is challenging and can be used for older students as well.)
1) Skipping Words
Whether this is a serious cause for concern is really a matter of degree. If a child skips an occasional word because they are distracted or reading too quickly, that is unlikely to be a sign of a problem. On the other hand, frequent skipping should be checked further.
2) Misreading Words
Again, this is a case of degree. Children who occasionally misread "little" words, e.g., saying a instead of the, but who are otherwise accurate are probably not in any danger. Likewise, if a child can automatically self-correct, or can easily self-correct when prompted, the issue may well be speed or focus rather than actual decoding.

Note that it is not uncommon for children to confuse letters, particularly similar looking ones like b, d, and p through second grade; contrary to popular belief, a child who reads big instead of dig is not necessarily dyslexic.

That said, frequently confusing similar words-particularly ones with similar beginnings and endings-is typically a sign that children have not learned to use all the letters/sounds in a word to determine its identity. Focusing on letters at the "extremes" of words has been identified as a common stage in the reading development of young children and is probably not a major cause for concern in a beginning reader.

In older students, however, this type of reading may be a result of three-cueing/MSV methods, which teach children to focus primarily on first/last letters and use context clues (often pictures) to figure out the rest. Even when children are well past the age of picture books, the habit of focusing only on beginning/ending letters may remain.
In addition, pay particular attention to the way a child approaches names: if they identify words primarily through memorization and guessing, then they are likely to have difficulty reading names, which generally cannot be memorized or figured out from context. A child who struggles with this skill may even have trouble figuring out when an unfamiliar word is a name. 3) Guessing at Unfamiliar Words
Guessing at unknown words is one of the biggest signs of a decoding problem because it indicates that children are not even attempting to sound out words-either because doing so requires an uncomfortable amount of effort or because they have not learned letter-sound-syllable relationships well enough to identify words this way. It is also a habit that, once established, can be extraordinarily difficult to break.

Note that it does not matter whether children guess correctly; some children are outstanding guessers! While guessing (often accompanied by memorizing) may work in the early grades, this strategy quickly becomes ineffective as books get more challenging. Many children who get by this way begin to experience trouble around fourth grade, when the switch from "learning to read" to "reading to learn" begins to occur, and find themselves unable to cope with a flood of new vocabulary.
4) Inability to Sound Out Words When Asked
Children who avoid sounding out words, even when specifically prompted, often do so because they are unable to decode phonetically rather than because they are unwilling to make the effort. In such cases, just telling them to "try harder" is likely to result in frustration.

Even if children can identify the individual sounds made by letters, they may not be able to combine them into a word without support. Most children require explicit instruction in how to blend sounds, along with lots of supervised practice. If these are not provided at school, children will not necessarily figure this skill out on their own.
5) Difficulty Following Text with a Finger
If your child uses a finger to follow along with the text, do they move it smoothly so that it is consistently under the word being read, or do they move it inconsistently so that it lags a few words behind and then suddenly jerks ahead or trails off entirely?

Jerky and/or inconsistent movements are often a sign that a child is expending so much effort trying to process each new word that they cannot coordinate an additional action. In addition, these types of movements indicate difficulty reading at a consistent speed, with some words being absorbed much more quickly than others.
6) Skipping Lines
Skipping entire lines of text without noticing is often a sign that children are so focused on trying to identify each individual word that they cannot focus on other basic other aspects of the text, or pay enough attention to meaning to notice when what they are reading does not make sense.

In other cases, however, skipping lines may be more of a speed/attention issue. Having a child slow down and periodically summarize what they are reading may be sufficient to keep them focused on reading all the lines in sequence.
7) Reading Very Slowly
In the early grades, children should be reading at around 100-150 words per minute (adults typically read around double that rate, effectively processing words at the speed of sight). When reading is significantly slower than that, comprehension is affected because words read at the beginning of a sentence have already been forgotten by the end.

In terms of becoming a skilled reader, the ability to sound out words is only half the story. A child who must laboriously re-sound the same word each time they encounter it may be able to connect letters and sounds in the most literal way but cannot move to the next level of reading for meaning. In order for that to occur, letter-sound sequences must be learned to the point of being automatic. Some children who struggle to move past sounding-out may simply not have been given enough practice blending-stringing letters together smoothly to make words.

Otherwise, speed issues can be attributable to an extremely wide range of factors, including difficulty hearing the individual sounds in words; insufficient practice in blending syllables; vocabulary deficits; memory and attention issues; and a curriculum that does not address speed and fluency, or that encourages memorizing and guessing.
8) Robotic Reading
Children frequently read in a monotone when they must devote so much attention to decoding the text that they have no mental space left over to think about meaning.

Note, however, that some children may feel silly or overly exposed when reading with emotion, and so this is not necessarily a sign of trouble. If a child is otherwise reading at a normal speed, saying words correctly, and can demonstrate comprehension, then there is probably no cause for concern.
9) Ignoring Punctuation
This often goes hand-in-hand with #8 but is not exactly the same thing. Paying attention to punctuation is an important aspect of comprehension because it helps readers understand how a text would be spoken: where the pauses would occur, where thoughts begin and end, etc.

Some children who are solid decoders may not intuitively understand the connection between words written on a page and spoken language and pay little attention to punctuation as a result. In such cases, children typically benefit from listening to adults model expressive reading. Having a child take turns reading with an adult (alternating sentences or paragraphs), using a familiar text, can be very helpful; the child will usually begin to absorb the adult's intonation naturally.

That said, children are just as likely to ignore punctuation because they have difficulty figuring out what the words literally say and do not have the mental room to process other features of the text.
10) Eyes Racing Around the Page
When children have serious difficulty decoding, their eyes may race around the page, ignoring the normal left-right sequence of the text, or dart erratically from section to section looking for clues to the words. While less common that the other signs discussed here, this issue may develop naturally in some struggling readers, but it also seems to be a particular side-effect of cueing-based instruction. When children are trained to repeatedly look away from words and at pictures and/or other textual cues, the habit can become automatic and continue to be so long after children have begun to read more challenging, picture-less books.

Particularly when combined with the use of screen-based texts, this type of reading can result in serious misreadings and difficulties understanding things like sequences of events and causes/effects.

Unlearning this behavior is very challenging and typically requires more time and effort than other types of reading issues not associated with a learning disability.

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Written English is a code in which letters and groups of letters are used to stand for sounds, and to be able to read, children must learn to break it-literally, to de-code it. Although skilled reading involves many factors, decoding ability is the foundation on which it rests; after all, it is impossible to pay attention to meaning unless one knows what the words say!

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Still on the topic of 'multi-cueing reading strategies' - known commonly as The Three Cueing System, or the Searchlights in England, you will find below a very important/historic/famous article written by Marilyn Jager Adams on looking for the origins of the multi-cueing graphic and notion.

You may not want (nor have the time) to wade through the whole article - but I very much wanted it on my blog to provide further evidence that we really need to address this prevailing confusion about the difference between 'multi-cueing' when this relates to using multiple cues to guess unknown printed words compared to multi-cueing when used to support meaning-making. These differences are very, very important, not arbitrary, and teachers need to understand how and why they are not one and the same thing. Teachers, and others, have commonly misinterpreted the idea of 'multi-cueing' as a list of unreliable and inappropriate word-guessing activities shown by research to be damaging to reading. Multi-cueing reading strategies amounting to such activities as: guessing printed words from the picture, context, initial letter, word shape and reading-on (then going back) - are all potentially damaging. They dilute and detract from any all-through-the-word phonics teaching and learning and give children the wrong messages about how reading/decoding (lifting the words off the page) works. It leads to children with poor reading habits that will fail them sooner or later - often unbeknown to teachers and parents.

Tragically, the perpetuation of the multi-cueing notion, where this amounts to the list of word-guessing strategies, damages professional understanding and dilutes and detracts from teachers teaching phonics comprehensively or at all. Further, it promotes the use of early books that are not easily decodable for the learner (such as repetitive or predictable texts), rather than teachers ensuring the provision of ample reading material matching any phonics taught systematically to date so that children can 'apply and extend' their phonics knowledge beyond word-level work to cumulative text level material which builds up their decoding fluency and confidence.

Before providing the full paper, I'm highlighting some snippets (in colour) from Marilyn's summary so you can immediately see the importance of her conclusion regarding the devastating effects of misunderstandings based on the three-cueing, or multi-cueing, notion for reading instruction.

Marilyn wrote:

If the intended message of the three-cueing system was originally that teachers should take care not to overemphasize phonics to the neglect of comprehension, its received message has broadly become that teachers should minimize attention to phonics lest it compete with comprehension. If the original premise of the three-cueing system was that the reason for reading the words is to understand the text, it has since been oddly converted such that, in effect, the reason for understanding the text is in order to figure out the words. How did this happen?

Further, she wrote:

Consistent with Reyes's (1992) lament, the sobering revelation of this story is the profound breach in information and communication that separates the teaching and research communities. In the world of practice, the widespread subscription to the belief system that the three-cueing diagram has come to represent has wreaked disaster on students and hardship on teachers.

Her final words which are still relevant to this day:

We must work together to rebuild the bridge, socially and intellectually, between those involved in research and practice. Toward regaining respect for as well as the productivity, morale, and forward momentum of our educational system, there may be no more important effort we can undertake.

Below is the full text - please note the dates! Here we are in 2017, however, and yet still we have such a long way to go to address ' the profound breach in information and communication that separates the teaching and research communities'. [Note that even in England, where Systematic Synthetic Phonics as the main route to lift the words off the page has been embedded in the National Curriculum, confusion remains in the teaching profession.]:
The Three Cueing System
By Marilyn Jager Adams
Visiting Scholar, Harvard University Graduate School of Education

From Adams, M. J. (1998). "The Three-Cueing System." In F. Lehr and J. Osborn (Eds.), Literacy For All Issues In Teaching And Learning, pp. 73-99. New York Guilford Press.

The meaningfulness of a text depends no more on the knowledge and thought with which it has been written than it does on the knowledge and thought with which it is read. Indeed, readers can interpret and evaluate an author's message from the print on the page only to the extent that they possess and call forth the vocabulary, syntactic, rhetorical, topical, analytic, and social knowledge and sensitivities on which the meaning of the text depends.

Over the last several decades, cognitive scientists have energetically investigated the extent to which such dimensions of background knowledge and responsiveness might explain individual differences in reading proficiency. As expected, children do contrast along such dimensions, both with each other and with the demands of their texts. Also as expected, instructional support of such knowledge and strategies generally does result in increases in the productivity of their reading. Yet, research has also shown that as children's reading experience grows, these sorts of capabilities tend to grow alongside. That is, to the extent that children do read, they generally do learn new words, new meanings, new linguistic structures, and new modes of thought in course (Stanovich, 1993).

The wisdom of the popular dictum, that reading is best learned through reading, follows directly. So, too, however, does the seriousness of its most nettlesome caveat: Where children find reading too difficult, they very often will not do it-or at least not with the sort of engagement that best fosters learning. Fortunately, with respect to the language and meaning of text, finding selections that are within a child's comfort level is rarely a problem. However, the same is not true with respect to the wording of text.
M. J. Adams Three-Cueing System
Until well into the middle grades, children's ability to understand text that is read aloud to them significantly exceeds their ability to understand the same text when reading on their own (Curtis, 1980). The bulk of this difference is traced to their difficulties in reading the words. Moreover, poorly developed word recognition skills are the most pervasive and debilitating source of reading difficulty (Adams, 1990; Perfetti, 1985; Share and Stanovich, 1995).

Words, as it turns out, are the raw data of text. It is the words of a text that evoke the starter set of concepts and relationships from which its meaning must be built. Research has shown that for skillful readers, and regardless of the difficulty of the text, the basic dynamic of reading is line by line, left to-right, and word by word. It is because skillful readers are able to recognize words so quickly that they can take in text at rates of approximately five words per second or nearly a full type-written page per minute. It is because their capacity for word recognition is so over learned and effortless that it proceeds almost sub-attentionally, feeding rather than competing with comprehension processes. Most surprising of all, research has taught us that what enables this remarkably swift and efficient capacity to recognize words is the skillful reader's deep and ready knowledge of their spellings and spelling-speech correspondences. During that fraction of a second while the eyes are paused on any given word of the text, its spelling is registered with complete, letter wise precision even as it is instantly and automatically mapped to the speech patterns it represents.

Although scientists are only beginning to understand the various roles of these spelling-to-speech translations, they are clearly of critical importance to the reading process. To the extent that knowledge of spelling-to-speech correspondences is underdeveloped (as evidenced, for example, by subnormal speed or accuracy in reading nonsense words), it is strongly and reliably associated with specific reading disability (Rack, Snowling & Olson, 1992). Moreover, research affirms that except as children have internalized the spelling-to-speech correspondences of the language, learning to recognize an adequate number of words with the speed and accuracy on which fluent reading depends is essentially impossible.

Useful knowledge of the spelling-to-speech correspondences of English does not come naturally. For all children, it requires a great deal of practice, and for many children, it is not easy. The acquisition of this knowledge depends on developing a reflective appreciation of the phonemic structure of the spoken language; on learning about letter-sound correspondences and spelling conventions of the orthography; and on consolidating and extending this knowledge by using it in the course of one's own reading and writing. Each of these accomplishments depends, in turn, on certain insights and observations that for many if not most children are simply not forthcoming without special instructional guidance and support (for review, see Adams, 1990). As researchers have gained appreciation of the critical importance of able word recognition within the reading complex, they have also uncovered reasons for its difficulty (e.g., Juel, 1994; Liberman & Liberman, 1990; Stanovich, 1986) and a variety of instructional strategies for easing, speeding, and assessing its acquisition (e.g., Ball & Blachman, 1991; Byrne & Fielding-Barnesley, 1989, 1991; Henry, 1989; Lundberg, Frost, & Petersen, 1988; Uhry & Shepard, 1993). Moreover, it is because there is far, far more to literacy development than recognizing the words that these lessons are of such crucial importance to everyone in the business of reading education.
What is the Three-Cueing System
Over the last few years, I have spent much time in schools around the country, working with teachers and administrators. My challenge has been to tell them about these lessons from research and their implications with respect to instruction. At some point during such sessions, I am almost inevitably asked how what I have said relates to the three-cueing system.

The first time I was hit with this question, I naively asked what, specifically, my audience meant by "the three-cueing system." Whose three-cueing system? Although nobody could provide a reference, someone in my audience graciously drew a schematic of the three-cueing system for me (see Figure 1).

I was greatly relieved. I understood this schematic. It looked to be nothing more or less than a Venn diagram. As such, its interpretation was straightforward. The intersection or overlap of the circles of a Venn diagram correspond to a logical AND between the sets its circles respectively represent. In logic, when an outcome depends on any number of elements linked by AND, it means that if any of those elements is missing, the outcome will not follow. Thus by depicting the meaning of a text in the intersection of its semantic, syntactic, and graphophonic cues, the Venn diagram succinctly asserts that the meaning of a text depends on all three; all three of these types of information are necessary, all three must be properly processed, and not one of them can be safely ignored or finessed except at the risk of forfeiting or distorting the meaning of the text. Sometimes, as shown in Figure 1, a fourth cueing system, pragmatics, is included to indicate that, in addition, getting to the author's point from what she or he has literally written depends on the application of practical knowledge and good sense.

Not only was the logic of this schematic clear to me, its evident message was thoroughly familiar as well. That the meaning of text is constructed by the reader as jointly determined by its lexical, semantic, and syntactic constraints had been a central theme of the reading literature in the late 1970s and early 1980s (examples include Anderson & Pearson, 1984; Bransford, Barclay & Franks, 1972; Brown, Bransford, Ferrara, and Campione, 1983; Perfetti & Roth, 1977; Rumelhart, 1980; Rumelhart & Ortony, 1977; Sanford & Garrod, 198 1; Smith, 197 1; Stanovich, 1980). It was, as a matter of fact, a literature to which I, too, had contributed (Adams, 1980, 1982; Adams, M. J. Adams Three-Cueing System Anderson, & Durkin, 1978; Adams & Bruce, 1982; Adams & Collins; 1979; Huggins & Adams, 1980). I was delighted to find that the essence of the researchers' collective effort had so enduringly impressed the practitioners before me.

Feeling thus endorsed, I turned attention to how each of the three "cueing systems" could mislead a reader except as used in coordination with the others. To concretize the point, I presented a number of examples and linguistic surprises; I showed how the system explained a variety of confusions due to developmental difficulties and crosslinguistic differences; and I led my audience to share examples from their own classrooms and discuss their instructional implications. This was happy, familiar territory, and I carried on for nearly an hour. My audience was clearly interested. Yet, they also seemed a bit uncomfortable. It was evident from their faces and posture that what I was saying differed from what they were expecting in some fundamental way. Whatever they saw as the main point of this schematic, I knew I was somehow missing it.

In fact, I understate the dissonance in the room that day. When I asked these people what they meant by the three-cueing system, they looked at me as though I were from Mars. They were at least as embarrassed as I. For indeed, how could I not know? How could I present myself to them as an expert on early literacy and not know. What was at issue here was clearly not any general notion of the interplay of syntax, semantics, and graphophonemics but, rather, some particular, specific version of this notion-one with which I was frankly unfamiliar.
The Source of the Three-Cueing System
From that day on, it seemed that I encountered the three-cueing system at every turn. Not only was I asked about it again and again, but I also found pictures of or allusions to it in in-service materials across the country and at the center of a surprising number of state and district reading/language arts documents. Though the schematic differed slightly from one source to the next, the common ancestry was apparent. Casually, at first, I began to collect examples (see Appendix 1).

Idle curiosity it might have remained, except that I soon found the three-cueing system getting in the way of my efforts to communicate with practitioners more often than it helped. The problem, to my mind, was not the schematic but some of the interpretations that had become attached to it. Given the widespread familiarity of the schematic in the community of practice, I wanted to correct and clarify its intent. To do so, I needed to find the original. I was confident of the original author's logical leanings and scholarship from the very fact that she or he had chosen a Venn diagram as means of expression.

I began to search in earnest. In addition to tackling the literature, I took to asking audiences everywhere if they had encountered this schematic and if they could give me a source. People gave me copies of the schematic instead, and my collection grew. Still, in not one single instance, did the graphic include a citation of its source.

Turning to the internet, I posted a query to the TAWL (Teachers Applying Whole Language) list serve. A number of people responded, indicating their familiarity with the schematic ("I'm looking at it right now," wrote one). Some had hypotheses as to its original author. Most prominently, these suggestions included Ken and Yetta Goodman, Marie Clay, Don Holdaway, and Brian Cambourne. However, nobody was sure. Notably, Ken Goodman, who is himself a frequent participant on the TAWL list serve, seemed most perplexed of all.

In addition to asking practitioners, I probed my colleagues in educational research, beginning with those whom I have long revered as having near-encyclopedic knowledge of the literature. As it turns out, the schematic was unfamiliar to most of them, as it had been to me. Their best guesses as to its origin were by and large the same as those offered by the TAWL subscribers. A few were certain they had seen it before; they reached back into their minds with that pained look of arduous recall. I became hopeful. But again, to no avail. In every one of these cases, interestingly, what I ultimately got back was a pointer to work by Lois Bloom. Indeed, Bloom did publish such a Venn triplet, twice. In the first case (Bloom, 1970, p. 232), the circles are labeled "Cognitive Perceptual Development ... .. Linguistic Experience," and "Nonlinguistic Experience," and their overlap is labeled "Linguistic Competence." In the second (Bloom & Lahey, 1978, p. 22), the three circles are labeled "Form," "Content," and "Use," and their overlap as "Language." In other words, Bloom's graphic was similar, but her topic was not. Bloom was not the source I was seeking, but her repeated citation did affirm my faith in these people's mental inventory of the literature they had read. Whatever the true source of the three-cueing schematic, I was increasingly convinced that it was not part of the mainstream academic repertoire.

As I continued my search, several people suggested that the schematic's original printing had been in a publication of the New Zealand Ministry of Education. Brian Cutting, now Educational Director of the Wright Group/Sunshine Reading Programme and who has long been centrally involved in reading practice, policy, and research in New Zealand, valiantly volunteered to help me out on this front, but again to no avail.

Among sources of consternation in this quest was the frequency with which the schematic was used and the similarity with which it was described in state and district reading documents. Pushing this angle, I was told by several people that the schematic came from the Frameworks group. This group operates through the Wayne-Finger Lakes Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) in New York with funding from Rigby Education and the Children's Literacy Foundation, a video-disc literacy in-service enterprise started by Ben Brady, founder of Rigby of America. Featuring Jan Turbill, Andrea Butler, and Brian Cambourrie, Frameworks is an outgrowth of Australia's "Early Literacy In-service Course" (ELIC) and offers in-services throughout the country on staff development and, in particular, on how to write a reading framework document.

Working from an advertisement in the International Reading Association's newspaper, Reading Today, I called the Frameworks office and requested information. They were very cordial, but the information never came.

Turning again to the internet, I submitted a query to the "Reading Specialists Online" at the Wright Group's website. In response, one of their specialists, Katy Kane, posted a very nice explanation of the origin and interpretive intent of the schematic on the Wright Group's online Question and Answer page: The term "cueing systems" comes from Ken and Yetta Goodman, Carolyn Burke, Marie Clay, Brian Cambourne, and New Zealand's Reading in Junior Classes. Cueing systems are assessed with running records (Clay) and reading miscue analysis (Goodman, Watson, Burke, et al) to illustrate the strategies that readers have at their disposal when confronting [unfamiliar words], how these strategies are integrated, what readers do when they come to something they don't know, what patterns emerge, how well readers self correct, and always and ever, what does what they have read mean to them. The Venn diagram is used and explained in Invitations (1994) by Regie Routman.

The version of the three-cueing schematic that appears in Routman's (1988, 1994) books is included in Appendix 1. Of note, it is one of only two that I have been able to find in archival journals or books as opposed to, for example, in-service handouts, framework documents, and advertising copy. The other, which is also the oldest in my collection, is from an article by David Pearson that first appeared in Language Arts in 1976 and was later reprinted in an International Reading Association volume on What Research Says Lo the Teacher (Samuels, 1983). 1 did not find this article on my own. Instead, it was sent to me by Pearson, himself, in response to one of my end-of-talk queries. He assures me that he created it on his own in 1976. Nevertheless, he, too, had been unaware of the schematic's present-day ubiquity-and seemed wholly bemused by the thought that it might have been he who started it. In any case, if this article by Pearson (1976) is the original source for the three-cueing schematic, then, insofar as I can tell, it lay dormant for over a decade.
The Significance of the Three-Cueing System
Again, my concerns with the three-cueing system relate not to the schematic, which I find wholly sensible insofar as it goes. My concerns relate instead, and in two major ways, to the interpretations so broadly attached to the schematic.

First, the three-cueing schematic is sometimes presented as rationale for subordinating the value of the graphophonemic information to syntax and semantics and, by extension, for minimizing and even eschewing attention to the teaching, learning, and use of the graphophonemic system. This interpretation directly contradicts the logical import of the Venn diagram which, by virtue of its structure, asserts that productive reading depends on the inter-working of all three systems. More importantly in the context of instructional guidance for teachers and school districts, such marginaliziation of the role of spelling to speech correspondences is alarmingly discrepant with what research has taught us about the knowledge and processes involved in learning to read.

My second major concern is that discussion of the remaining two or three systems syntax, semantics, and pragmatics - tends to be unproductively superficial in the discourse surrounding the three-cueing schematic. Given the extreme, if inappropriate, share of the reading load that is ascribed to these sophisticated systems, this lack of guidance with respect to the instructional support that each warrants is all the more troubling.
The Demise of the Graphophonemic System
Pearson's 1976/1978 article might well have been the original source not just of the three-cueing schematic but also of the de-emphasis of spelling-sound instruction that so often attends it. With respect to graphophonemic instruction, Pearson proposes that teachers should "value most highly those phonics skill activities which allow children to utilize the most semantic and syntactic information while they are 'cracking the code,"' and, conversely, "value least highly those phonics skill activities which are most isolated from context" (Pearson, 1978, p. 90). To anchor this argument, he writes, . Efficient readers maximize their reliance on syntactic and semantic information in order to minimize the amount of print to speech processing (call this decoding, phonic, or grapho-phonemic analysis) they have to do.... For example, it doesn't take much visual or grapho-phonemic information to confirm the hypothesis that telescope fits into the sentence, "The astronomer looked through the _." (p. 86).

Presented in excerpt, however, the force of such quotes may be misleading; in journal articles as in children's literature, context matters. A full read of the paper assures that Pearson's goal is one of promoting classroom support of semantic and syntactic factors not instead of but relative to phonics. Thus, he clarifies, although initial phonics instruction may need be conducted "in isolated contexts, we will always require the intermediate phonics-in-context step before the attempt to have children transfer the skill to a real reading situation" (Pearson, 1978, p. 90). To illustrate this intermediate, phonics-in-context step, he provides examples that look very much like traditional skills worksheets and very little like the whole language activities of today; the suggested activities are primarily designed to teach phonics, albeit with semantic and/or syntactic support (e.g., given a picture of a can, choose the label: can. cane). In overview, Pearson's intention seems not in the least to dismiss or even diminish the teaching or learning of the graphophonemic system. It is instead to criticize texts and activities that are made abstruse or incomprehensible through emphasis of phonics elements to the exclusion or at the expense of the other, potentially supportive dimensions of language and learning. At the same time, he strives to emphasize the pedagogical importance of providing enlightened instructional support for the other two systems.

Pearson (1976, 1978) attributes the inspiration for his three-cueing system graphic at least the ideas that the graphic was intended to capture-to a book by Frank Smith (1975). Smith, I would agree, deserves singular credit for the philosophy that spellings and spelling/sound correspondences are essentially irrelevant to reading or leaning to read (see Adams, 1991). On the other hand, insofar as I can determine, in neither that book nor any of his others, has Smith discussed reading in terms of semantic, syntactic, and graphophonemic cueing systems.

Rather, the description of reading in terms of semantic, syntactic, and graphophonemic cueing systems seems best attributed to early work by Ken Goodman (e.g., 1970a, reprinted in Smith, 1973; Goodman, 1970b, reprinted in Singer & Ruddell, 1976). Each of the systems, Goodman explains, is necessary and used simultaneously in the reading process.

The graphophonic system, Goodman continues, is particularly useful for beginning readers as they are developing control over written language. Drawing on their oral language competence, children "recode graphic input as speech" such that "the alphabetic character of the writing system makes it possible to match sound sequences already known with less familiar graphic sequences" (Goodman, 1976, p. 48 1). The print-to speech route, he suggests, falls to secondary or back-up status only as the reader becomes proficient and, even then, he points out, "there is some echo of speech involved as the reader proceeds even in silent reading., At times, the reader may find it helpful to recode print as speech and then [construct its meaning]" (p. 482).

Meanwhile in his model, which he emphasizes "represents the proficient reader" (Goodman, 1976, p. 483), the process of rapidly sampling, predicting, and comprehending the text is continually monitored and adjusted through instant, easy access to words from their spellings and, as needed, spelling-sound correspondences. Given that the model "also represents the competence which is the goal of reading instruction" (p. 483), he quite reasonably cautions that restricting children's early instruction to isolated words and meaningless phonic elements is, at best, shortsighted. Goodman's thesis, in short, is that instruction should be designed with sensitive awareness that as readers gain in skill, their active attention is devoted less and less to sounding out words and more and more to the higher-order nuances and import of the text. In this spirit, he also provides more insightful and sophisticated discussion of the kinds of support warranted than I have seen in any recent text. Within the present discussion, however, the point is that neither can contemporary dismissal of spelling-sound instruction be traced to Goodman's early work.

If Routman (1978, 1994) borrowed the three-cueing system schematic from Pearson (1976), she does not mention him. Nor does she credit Goodman. Instead she attributes her inspiration to Holdaway (1979) and, indeed, Holdaway's express view of the utility of graphophonemic information is extreme.

Holdaway begins his discussion of graphophonemic cues with an example:' "An illuminating exercise to place oneself in a similar position to the beginning reader ... by using our own alphabetic code with deprived cues" (1979, p. 91). Through an exercise suitable to the London Times, he therewith purports to demonstrate the superfluousness of letters and spelling-sound correspondences. He then walks us, insight by insight, through an explanation of how it is that the full and complete wording of the following sentence leaps to mind, almost instantly and with incontestable clarity:

The exercise is intended to demonstrate not merely our scant dependence on letters while reading - only 12 of the 39 letters of this sentence are available - but, further, that what letter information we do use, need entail "no necessary phonic involvement" (Holdaway, 1979, p. 93). Instead, he assures us, our ready success in understanding the sentence is the product of nothing more than our deep and ready knowledge of the semantic and syntactic constraints of text. Plus our faith that the author would not write so as to foil or confuse our initial expectations. And solid sense of the informational value of word length and configuration cues. Along with an ability to parse words into roots and affixes given the scantiest visual cues. Complemented by a prodigious sense of the distributional properties and redundancies of English spelling.

Holdaway's exercise is fun. It sparkles with energy and intelligence as does his text throughout. His encrypted sentence (which, by the way, is intended to read, "Letters are not the only clues to unknown words") is a clever springboard for discussing the layers upon layers of redundancy that characterize written language. As a developmental analogy, however, it is unconvincing at best: The knowledge and processes he leads us to use in its decryption are not remotely available to the beginning reader. Nevertheless, this exercise is the departure point from which Holdaway builds his theory of how the reading process works and the instructional recommendations on which Routman, in turn, builds hers.

Routman's books, Transitions (1988) and Invitations (1994), in which she shares the attitudes and process of becoming a whole language teacher, are extremely popular among practitioners. Her treatment of phonics in her first book, Transitions (1988), is full of angst and ambivalence. On one hand, she acknowledges the pressure, from both within the educational community and without, that phonics be taught first and well; on the other, she is concerned that this pressure is misguided. On one hand, she reports that the teaching of phonics had been the main emphasis of her pre-service and graduate training; on the other, she has just read, and been strongly impressed with, Holdaway's (1979) book. On one hand, she cites the validation of phonics instruction by the then recent report of the National Commission on Reading (Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, & Wilkinson, 1985), Becoming A Nation of Readers; on the other, she does not see how such phonics emphasis can be reconciled with the report's tandem recommendation for the use of more meaningful, memorable stories with beginners. Although she has heard "enthusiastic talk by salesmen of 'predictable text,' 'meaningful story,' and 'real literature,"' the basal textbooks she has seen are still "driven by skills and phonics" (1988, p. 23). She disdains the detailed teacher manuals that accompany the basals as "demeaning to teachers and to children. They discourage independent thought and imply that teachers and students are not to be trusted" (p. 24). Yet she also reports with satisfaction her past pleasure and success in using Recipe for Reading (Traub & Bloom, 1975), a phonics supplement in which skills are taught explicitly, systematically, and in isolation.

Routman observes that good readers both know and use phonics well. In contrast, nearly all poor readers struggle with phonics and, when reading meaningful text, this struggle directly detracts from their capacity for comprehension. The epiphany came, she claims, in the course of her experience as a Reading Recovery trainee. There she has witnessed beginners who "became competent readers by relying primarily on meaning especially picture cues and memory for text" and "without ever having mastered short vowels and other phonics generalizations" (19-88, p. 45). The paradox, to her mind, was resolved. "Effective readers," she concludes, "use all three cueing systems interdependently. Ineffective readers tend to rely too heavily upon graphophonic cues" (p. 41). Moreover, she explains, "It has become crystal clear to me - and it has taken about ten years to come to this understanding - that children learn phonics best after they can already read. I am convinced that the reason our good readers are good at phonics is that in their being able to read they can intuitively make sense of phonics" (p. 44).

Thus, in her second book, Invitations (1994, p. 147), Routman presents the three-cueing schematic with the following introduction: Proficient readers function with an interdependence between the three cueing systems: semantics, syntax, and grapho-phonics. Semantic cues (context: what makes sense) and syntactic cues (structure and grammar: what sounds right grammatically) are strategies the reader needs to be using already in order for phonics (letter-sound relationships: what looks right visually and sounds right phonetically) to make sense .... While phonics is integral to the reading process, it is subordinate to semantics and syntax. (This is apparently why the graphophonic system is depicted beneath the other two in her version of the diagram. Note, however, that the position of the circles is formally of no significance to the logic of a Venn diagram. What matters is only whether they overlap partly, totally, or not at all with each other and the outcome of interest.)

The major reason for poor readers' over-reliance on graphophonic cues, Routman surmises, is its instructional overemphasis by their parents and teachers. To help teachers discourage parents from asking their children to sound words out, she provides a reproducible letter (see Appendix 2), entitled, "Ways to Help your Child with Reading at Home" (1994, p. 200b). I ask that you read through the recommendations in this letter to parents: Phonics truly seems the last resort.

To help teachers deal with unknown words without directing attention to graphophonemic cues, Routman provides a similar reproducible set of guidelines for the classroom (1994, p. 226b). In addition, she describes a few ways of introducing various phonic elements in what she deems proper subordination to other literacy goals. Although some of these activities are similar to those proposed by Holdaway (1979), the differences are also noteworthy. First, Holdaway's recommendations were intended principally for kindergarten children and motivated by his experience with Maori children who approached the challenge of learning to read with much trepidation and little notion of what it was all about. Routman's recommendations are directed to teachers across the kindergarten and primary grades. Second, although Holdaway uses context for motivation and support, he gradually does expose and exercise the full logic of the alphabetic system, if somewhat haphazardly. Routman's (1994) activities, in contrast, are focused on initial and final consonants: The vowels, she submits, are generally unnecessary for printed word recognition, and their evident difficulty should convince us that beginning readers are not developmentally ready for them anyhow. In refusing the vowels and focusing instead on bits and pieces of occasional words, Routman's approach not only denies the utility of the alphabetic principle but fails to reveal its basic logic and structure. Routman frequently acknowledges the difficulty of pursuing her avowed instructional course:

It has taken me well over ten years to feel completely comfortable with this approach. One thing that eased my further transition was holding onto the spelling workbooks for a while after I had long given up phonics worksheets. Knowing that the skills were still being covered relieved my conscience and helped my comfort level. Like many teachers, I did not believe children would really learn to read without a heavy dose of phonics first. (1994,p.149)

Encountering such remarks again and again, I kept wondering if the reason she was able to make the switch complete was because she had become a resource teacher. Visiting classrooms only "by invitation" to give demonstration lessons, she was no longer responsible for monitoring the children's larger developmental progress. In any case, here is a note Routman received from a regular first-grade teacher:

I did more phonics in context this year, noting beginning and ending sounds and digraphs in chart poems and Big Books. The kids really like the big charts we made where they could add their own words, but I am still struggling to find a balance in teaching phonics. I find myself feeling pressure from some of the second grade teachers who expect kids to arrive with solid word attack skills. Also, I feel guilty for not giving spelling tests. When I'm teaching all the phonics sounds, I feel as through I'm teaching spelling too. I still teach phonics separately even though I don't see kids transferring the skills. I notice that every time I pull a sound out of context, two or three kids give me an example of a word that doesn't fit the rule at all. I'm still not comfortable with the way I handle phonics. (1994, p. 157)

Having reprinted this letter so as to encourage others to take heart, Routman consoles,

"Most of us seem to find the transition from prescribed phonics in isolation to teaching meaningful phonics in the context of literature very difficult and slow going. It may be reassuring to know that most teachers are struggling with making phonics teaching more relevant and applicable to reading and writing" (1994, p. 157).

Whether Routman's text is its source or echo, this attitude about the disruptiveness of phonics and its instruction is one that is very broadly held in the field. Appendix 3 shows a tabular summary of the three-cueing system, used in inservice sessions provided by the California Early Literacy Learning (CELL) Project which is affiliated with the Reading Recovery center at the San Bernardino campus of the California State University. Note, in particular, the admonition at top: "Let's all work together to avoid the phrase, 'sound it out'!" According to David Pesetsky, a professor in the Linguistics Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it was an in-school poster very like Routman's letter to parents, along with his first-grade son's steadfast insistence that he was not to sound words out, that initially triggered his own concern about how reading was being taught. Seeking an audience for that concern, first in his son's classroom, then in his son's school, then at the district level, he was ultimately given a copy of the proposed Reading Curriculum Framework for the State of Massachusetts - only to find the phonics-last philosophy promoted in that document as well.

The result was the famous letter from 40 linguists and psycholinguists to the Massachusetts Secretary of Education (see Appendix 4). The focus of the linguists' protest is the document's promotion of the view that "the decoding of written words plays a relatively minor role in reading compared to strategies such as contextual guessing. This treats the alphabetic nature of our writing system as little more than an accident, when in fact it is the most important property of written English." They conclude: We are concerned that the Commonwealth, through its powers to set standards for schools, should presume to legislate an erroneous view of how human language works, a view that runs counter to most of the major scientific results of more than 100 years of linguistics and psycholinguistics. We are even more concerned that uninformed thinking about language should lie at the heart of a "standards" document for Massachusetts schools. (See Appendix 4) Broadly circulated via the internet and in part, no doubt, because of the world renown of many of its individual signers, this letter quickly found its way into policy forums on reading across the country. In Massachusetts, it was singularly responsible for the retraction and rewriting of the state's language arts framework to include due acknowledgement of the importance of teaching children to how to understand and use phonics.

Routman's observation that good readers, as a group, are quite facile with phonics is correct. Yet her conjecture that this is because they are good readers is just backwards. Again, scientific research argues incontrovertibly that becoming a good reader depends on understanding and using spellings and spelling-sound correspondences and, conversely, that poorly developed knowledge or facility with spellings and spelling-sound correspondences is the most pervasive cause of reading delay or disability (Rack, Snowling, & Olson, 1992; Stanovich, 1986). Research further demonstrates that, with the exception of no more than 1-3% of children, reading disability can be prevented through well-designed early instruction (Vellutino et al., 1996). However, such instruction must include attention to phonics, and is most effective when it includes explicit, systematic instruction on the alphabetic principle, including phonemic awareness and on the spelling-sound patterns and conventions of English, as well as an active emphasis on practicing and using that knowledge both in isolation and in the context of meaningful reading and writing (Bond & Dykstra, 1966; Brown & Felton, 1990, Chall, 1967; Foorman et al, 1997).
The Diminution of the Other Cueing Systems.
Given that the principal argument for the de-emphasis of phonics instruction has been that children are in greater need of developing their sensitivity to the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic cues of text, one might expect an attendant surge in the amount and rigor of instruction on the latter. Yet, quite the opposite has happened. I had struggled with resulting problems a number of times from a number of angles and in a number of different situations before I realized them as part of the same elephant. One such encounter occurred as I was reviewing a draft language arts framework for one of the state departments of education. The topic was that of supporting vocabulary knowledge. The text did a laudable job of explaining the importance of ensuring that children possessed the background knowledge on which productive understanding of a word's meaning depended. However, the text neglected to mention anything about helping the children add the words per se to their vocabularies. I wrote a comment to this effect. But it went unheeded. On the next draft, I provided a carefully worded insert to the same effect. Still it was not accepted. I ran into this same oversight again as a worked on the reading advisory for another state. This time I was a legitimate co-author of the document, so I exercised the prerogative of adding the point:

Written language places far greater demands on people's vocabulary knowledge than does casual spoken language. Indeed, more advanced texts depend so heavily on precise wording to build meaning and message that, from the middle grades on, students' reading comprehension can be closely estimated by measures of their vocabulary. Students will be able to learn from these texts only if they approach them with most of the vocabulary they require. (California Department of Education, 1996, p. 9). The text goes on to discuss both the prospects of expanding one's vocabulary through reading, as explored by Nagy, Anderson, & Herman, (1987), as well as the potency of Matthew effects (the rich get richer) in understanding and retaining new vocabulary items (e.g., Robbins & Ehri, 1994), and suggests, quite sensibly I thought, that "Beginning in kindergarten, vocabulary growth should be actively supported in the classroom" (p. 10). Not long thereafter, I received an unauthorized copy of an email that had been circulating through the state internet referring to "Marilyn Adams's pernicious use of Nagy's vocabulary data." I didn't get it. I wrote to Bill Nagy. He didn't get it either.

I had a similar experience in critiquing the explanation of semantic cues in one of these draft frameworks. The text explained that semantic cues "are meaning cues used as readers bring their knowledge of the world, feelings, attitudes, and beliefs to the printed page." Correcting what again seemed to me to be nothing more than an oversight, I suggested the most minor edit: Semantic cues "are meaning cues used as readers bring their knowledge of the meanings of words and of the world, feelings, attitudes, and beliefs to the printed page." Again, the insert was rejected. How strange. After all, in cognitive psychology, the distributed semantics of words are held to be the starting points from which the meaning of text is constructed.

One of the fundamental tenets of the three-cueing rhetoric is that readers must learn to monitor their comprehension as they read. Thus, in the typical exposition of the three cueing system, a question is provided with each system. For the semantic cues, readers are to ask, "Does it make sense?" For the syntactic system, they are to ask, "Does it sound like language?" And for the pragmatic system, they are to ask, "Is this the language that should be used in this situation?" Encountering these questions in the draft framework on which I was working, it seemed to me that each could be augmented so as to give teachers better guidance as to comprehension difficulties associated with its system. With this thought in mind, I added to the semantic question, "Do I understand to what the author is referring?" To the syntactic question, I added, "Do I understand how the author wants me to interrelate the concepts s/he has named?"

But I balked at the question provided for the pragmatic system. Pragmatic sensitivity is about the larger meaning and message of the text. It is about understanding why the author chooses to say what she or he says and how she or he chooses to say it. It is about the author's point and point of view. In Goodman's words, it is about "the subtle differences between the straightforward and the sarcastic, the profane and the profound, the humorous and the serious" ( 1976, p. 832). Pragmatic processing, in short, is just another term for metacognitive processing. As such, and more so than for any of the other systems, sensitivity to pragmatics depends on readers' willingness and ability to examine the language, the cohesion, and the nuances of the text and to bring their own background knowledge actively and critically to bear. Of all the questions one might provide to clarify the role and importance of pragmatic processing, why in the world would the first choice be: "Is this the language that should be used in this situation?"

And then it hit me. In discussions of pragmatics within the three-cueing rhetoric, the standard explanation is that proficient readers, having experienced language in many contexts, are familiar with the kinds of words and language that are used in informal versus formal situations, in literature versus science, and so on. In other words, the question, "Is this the language that should be used in this situation?", is not intended to guide readers' pragmatic understanding of the text at all. It is instead intended exactly and only to remind them to use any such understanding they might have as means of assessing whether they have misidentified a word.

I was stunned. Yet, when I looked again, the questions attached to the other systems had the same character. None of these questions was directed toward supporting or strengthening the children's comprehension skills. The semantic question had nothing to do with prodding readers to monitor or extend their understanding of the text. The question is not "Does the text make sense given the words I've read?" but, instead, "Does this word make sense given my understanding of the text?" In view of this, the strong emphasis on choosing literature that matches students' prior knowledge and interests is understandable. However, the converse message - that comprehension instruction integrally involves building students' background knowledge and vocabulary so as to meet the demands of new texts tends to get lost. The latter message was among the focal points of both Pearson's (1976) and Goodman's (1970b) works. It was, moreover, among the central and critical lessons of schema theory.

Similarly, the syntax of written text is important and tricky. Syntax is language's formal means of communicating the intended relations between concepts and events, as in the difference between "Students who like school get good grades" versus "Students who get good grades like school." In reading essays and informational texts, where the motive is to create new understandings and knowledge by building new relationships between familiar concepts, syntax is vital. In understanding algebra. problems, syntax is almost all that matters; whether the problem is about a plane in the wind or a riverboat in a current is only incidental with respect to the mathematics at issue. Learning to use the syntactic cues of text well is not easy. Yet, the syntactic issue in focus with the question "Does it sound right?" is only that some strings of words are permissible in English, and some are not. The purpose of the question is only to alert the reader to syntactically anomalous word recognition errors.

I finally understood why my audience looked so puzzled on that first run-in with the three-cueing system. They had been operating on the belief that the semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic cues were straightforward and familiar to children, and, because of this, were wholly available for use in finessing the graphophonemic system, which was complicated and unfamiliar. It had never occurred to them that there was much to teach or learn about the semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic cues involved in skillful reading. What I was saying must have been totally disorienting to these people.
Summary
If the intended message of the three-cueing system was originally that teachers should take care not to overemphasize phonics to the neglect of comprehension, its received message has broadly become that teachers should minimize attention to phonics lest it compete with comprehension. If the original premise of the three-cueing system was that the reason for reading the words is to understand the text, it has since been oddly converted such that, in effect, the reason for understanding the text is in order to figure out the words. How did this happen?

My reason for quoting so extensively from Routman's (1988, 1994) text was to convey a sense of how the three-cueing belief system is realized in the field - in terms of both its classroom practice and the arduous commitment of its practitioners. Although Regie Routman is extremely influential among practitioners, I do not believe her books to be the source of this widespread belief system. First, if they were, more people would have cited Routman as a source of the schematic. Yet, of the many, many people I asked, only one did so. Second, the very fact that there are so many slightly different versions of the schematic around suggests that people's knowledge of it is not coming from a book. Given the option, after all, it is much easier to cut and paste than to draw a graphic anew. Third, marginal interpretations of the three-cueing schematic are also too scattered for me to believe they are a product of book-learning. For example, in the core curriculum of one district with which I worked, cursive writing and spelling conventions are given as instances of the syntactic cueing system; inasmuch as the syntactic cueing system was explained as knowledge about the order and structure of language, these errors were understandable-except for the fact that syntax has nothing to do with the order or structural properties of letters.

Again, the simplifications and distortions that the three-cueing system has suffered are uncharacteristic of the fate of written information. My hypothesis is, instead, that the three-cueing system has principally proliferated through inservices, workshops, and conferences, and that it is through that process that its interpretation has been changed and its heritage forgotten. Such forums have become a common mode of inservice education in recent years:

With some exceptions, university- and college-level literacy courses have not kept pace with the widespread implementation of process instruction. Instead, process instruction has been largely a grassroots movement spreading from coast to coast. Organized teacher groups, known as Teachers Applying Whole Language (TAWL), have sprung up everywhere ... and have served as support groups for those implementing whole language. The majority of teachers not involved in these groups, however, has relied primarily on information learned from institutes, workshops, and conferences conducted by whole language and writing process advocates. In many cases, teachers attending these meetings have taught other teachers in their school districts.

While the enthusiasm of teachers teaching teachers is commendable, the short-term nature of such training presents a unique problem; it virtually assures that only the rudimentary elements of these theories can be presented. (Reyes, 1992, p 429)

Consistent with Reyes's (1992) lament, the sobering revelation of this story is the profound breach in information and communication that separates the teaching and research communities. In the world of practice, the widespread subscription to the belief system that the three-cueing diagram has come to represent has wreaked disaster on students and hardship on teachers. At the same time, it is the underlying cause of not insignificant distrust and ill-will between teachers, teacher educators, and researchers. Yet, while teachers widely believe that the lore of the three-cueing system is based on the best of current research, researchers are barely aware of its existence, nature, or influence. The lesson of the story is thus clear and urgent. We must work together to rebuild the bridge, socially and intellectually, between those involved in research and practice. Toward regaining respect for as well as the productivity, morale, and forward momentum of our educational system, there may be no more important effort we can undertake.
References
Adams, M. J. (1980). Failures to comprehend and levels of processing in reading. In R. J. Spiro, B. C. Bruce, & W. F. Brewer (Eds.), Theoretical issues in readinR comprehension (pp. 87-112). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaurn Associates.

Adams, M. J. (1982). Models of reading. In J. F. LeNy and W. Kintsch (Eds.), Language and comprehension, (pp. 193-206). Amsterdam: North Holland.

Adams, M. J. (1990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about pELnt. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Adams, M. J. (1991). Why not phonics and whole language? In W. Ellis (Ed.), All language and the creation of literacy, (pp. 40-53). Baltimore, MD: Orton Dyslexia Society.

Adams, M. J., Anderson, R. C., & Durkin, D. (1978). Beginning reading: Theory and practice. Language Arts, 55, 19-25.

Adams, M. J., & Bruce, B. C. (1982). Background knowledge and reading comprehension. In J. A. Langer & M. T. Smith-Burke (Eds.), Reader meets author Bridging the 2ap (pp. 2-25). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Adams, M. J., & Bruck, M. (1993). Word recognition: The interface of educational policies and scientific research. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplina[Y Journal, 5, 113-139.

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Marilyn Jäger Adams: The Three Cueing System (the origins - and the tragedy described in the summary)

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Still on the topic of 'multi-cueing reading strategies' - known commonly as The Three Cueing System, or the Searchlights in England, you will find below a very important/historic/famous [...]

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Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Cant, and What Can Be Done About It 1st Edition

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Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Cant, and What Can Be Done About It 1st Edition

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I'm Mark Seidenberg, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I was originally a psycholinguist but you could call me a cognitive scientist or cognitive neuroscientist and I'd be good with it.

I grew up in Chicago, and went to a few colleges but only Columbia gave me any degrees, including a Ph.D. I was a professor at McGill University and then at the University of Southern California before returning to the Midwest in 2001. I've conducted a lot of research on language and reading. Our lab website is http://lcnl.wisc.edu.

My reading research addresses the nature of skilled reading, how children learn to read, and the brain bases of reading and dyslexia, using the tools of modern cognitive neuroscience: behavioral experiments, computational models, and neuroimaging. Recently I've been investigating the causes of chronically low reading among lower income and minority children-so-called "achievement gaps."

My language research focuses on determining what we know when we know a language, how we acquire this knowledge, and how it's used in comprehending language. Also how language compares to other human capacities, and to the communicative systems of other species

Language at the Speed of Sight (Basic Books, 2017) is a general audience book about the science of reading and its relevance to reading education.

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Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can't, and What Can Be Done About It

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Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can't, and What Can Be Done About It

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The Science of Reading: What Is It?, Why Is It Important?, and How Can We Implement?