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While this padlet only touched the surface on the "why" behind SOR instruction, it is important to understand the "why" in order to implement the "how."

Although this padlet is not focused on the how, here are a few suggestions that could easily be implemented until you learn more.

1.  Start teaching phonological awareness every day.  There are many easy to implement resources out there (such as Heggerty or Kilpatrick).

2.  Use a scope and sequence to teach sound/symbol correspondences explicitly each day.  The Orton Gillingham approach and lesson structure are perfect for this.  Spend an adequate amount of time on helping students map sounds (phonemes) to the corresponding spelling patterns (graphemes) in a multisensory way.  Replacing traditional word walls for sound walls are a great tool for sound/symbol instruction.Students who are above their peers can learn more advanced patterns and dive deeper into morphology and etymology.  Morphology is the study of forms of words (prefixes, roots, stems, suffixes, etc).  Etymology is the study of origins of words (why does knock have a silent k?  because it is from old english and the /k/ sound used to be included in the pronunciation but over time the pronunciation changed but the spelling remained the same).

3.  Use decodable texts in place of leveled books for beginning reading instruction.  Students should read decodable texts that are driven by the scope and sequence used in the classroom.  Have students work on reading these fluently and accurately.  There are many options out there for decodable texts.  If you don't have any in your classroom (I didn't before last year!), Reading A-Z is a good place to start.  Leveled books, especially at the earlier grades, tend to have too many patterns that students have not yet been exposed.  Leveled books are great for students who have mastered most decoding patterns or as read alouds.  Ideally, if structured approaches to instruction are implemented with a scope and sequence beginning in Kindergarten, most students will be able to read more complex text by 3rd grade, while still including structured approaches to phonemic awareness and advanced phonics.

4.  Continue grade level or slightly higher than grade level read alouds and discussions.  These build vocabulary and background knowledge which are essential for comprehension.  There are free curriculums online such as CKLA or Bookworms that can help you plan for read aloud instruction.

5.  Use assessments to identify specific instructional needs for struggling students such as the free PAST test (www.thepasttest.com) and the LETRS Phonics and Word Reading Survey (http://www.cityschoolsesp.net/userfiles/servers/server_152231/file/reading_diagnostic_tools.pdf).

I hope this overview helped increase your knowledge of the science of reading.

The following graphic is a great resource to keep handy about SOR.

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Brain scan research has shown that good readers activate the left hemisphere of their brain in the speech area, visual area, and the connecting pathway that good readers have built between these two areas.  At-risk readers have been shown to mostly activate the right hemisphere of their brain which does not correlate to skilled reading.  There have been multiple studies that show MRI brain scans of at-risk readers before intervention that have shown larger activation in the right hemisphere.  After daily systematic and explicit instruction the scans have shown higher activation of the left hemisphere, which is where skilled reading takes place.

Teachers are able to help students rewire their brain through explicit and systematic instructional approaches.  Teaching reading is rocket science!

Explicit:  direct teaching and scaffolding (I do, we do, you do)
Systematic:  uses a scope and sequence, multisensory

Click this link for a short video about rewiring the brain.

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"Phon" words such as phonological, phoneme, phonemic awareness, phonetics, etc. all deal with the SOUNDS of language.  Phonics is slightly different in that it pertains to the written symbols (letters) that correlate to sounds.  There are several levels of phonological awareness beginning with early skills such as syllables, alliteration, and rhyming before moving on to an awareness of sounds at the phonemic level such as segmenting, blending, and manipulating the smallest sounds in words.

Phonemic awareness is one of the most critical components needed for learning to read and spell but unfortunately it is one of the most neglected skills in many literacy curriculums today. There are 26 alphabetic symbols, but 44 speech sounds in English.  Since speech is a natural process for us, it is important to learn starting with speech sounds before moving to print.  Phonemic awareness is the conscious awareness of individual speech sounds in words and syllables and the ability to manipulate those sounds consciously without print.  Some people like to say that you can practice phonemic awareness in the dark because all you need is to hear the sounds.  However, being able to see mouth placement is often helpful for these tasks.  Problems with word recognition and decoding (at any age) are most often a result of weaknesses in phonemic awareness.  A free assessment tool is available online (thepasttest.com) called the PAST test that assesses phonological skills.

The following short video explains phonemic awareness.

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What Is Phonemic Awareness? | Reading Lessons

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Many people (myself included before LETRS training) believe that structured literacy approaches are only for those students who struggle with reading and that the percentages of those students are low.  This is simply not true.  About 60% of students require a structured literacy approach for learning to read.  The other 40% also benefit from structured approaches to instruction. This is also in line with the NAEP results that shows about 60% of 4th grade students in the United States are reading below proficient levels.

The Ladder of Reading infographic (linked below) is a great resource for understanding that structured approaches are beneficial to ALL students.  Meaning based approaches, such as 3 cueing, mostly reach students who are already at the top of the ladder.

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[Editorial Note: This infographic has been updated. Please to access the current version on Nancy Young's website.}

By Georgette Dickman

Nancy Young, a member of IDA, holds a Master's of Education in Special Education with a focus on dyslexia. She has extensive experience and knowledge in teaching evidence-based approaches in reading, spelling, and writing to parents, teachers, and students. In schools across Canada, Young provides professional development that includes coaching, assessment, IEP planning, and reading/writing program development and evaluation. She is the author of Secret Code Actions, a book that offers the instructional basics most children need to learn the code using creative movement as an integral part of instruction.

The concept of The Ladder of Reading emerged during Young's lectures with teachers and parents who believed the myth that Structured Literacy was only beneficial and necessary for struggling readers. To counter that misunderstanding, she created an infographic featuring the categories and percentages that illustrated the ratio of individuals who require an explicit, sequential, systematic, phonics-based approach to learning to read, compared to the small proportion of individuals who learn to read effortlessly. With a few well-chosen words, the Ladder conveys the point, frequently unknown, that a Structured Literacy approach to beginning reading is advantageous for most students.

Infographics are visual presentations with minimal text to explain complex information. Under Young's direction, Dean Stanton's artwork features three smiling children in various stages of learning to read. To show that learning to read should be exciting and fun, the children are waving and happy. The Ladder of Reading is the mechanism that provides support as the students build their reading skills. At the top of the Ladder, the little bird symbolizes independence and indicates that skilled reading has been achieved. At this point, with basic skills mastered, the students fly away and comprehend on their own. Finally, The Ladder of Reading chart is color-coded from red (risk area) that demands a Structured Literacy approach to green (safety area) that is advantaged by a Structured Literacy approach.

It is clear that Nancy Young's infographic has hit its mark!
For more on the statistics underpinning Nancy Young's infographic, please click here: The Ladder of Reading Statistics. For a gallery of other IDA and third-party infographics, please visit our Infographics page. Do you have an infographic you would like to be considered for publication in IDA's Infographics gallery? Send inquiries with links/.jpgs to communications@dyslexia.org. Copyright © 2018 International Dyslexia Association (IDA). Opinions expressed in The Examiner and/or via links do not necessarily reflect those of IDA. We encourage sharing of Examiner articles. If portions are cited, please make appropriate reference. Articles may not be reprinted for the purpose of resale. Permission to republish this article is available from info@dyslexiaida.org.

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Ladder of Reading & Writing© Infographic - International Dyslexia Association

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Nancy Young, a member of IDA, holds a Master's of Education in Special Education with a focus on dyslexia. She has extensive experience and knowledge in

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The Simple View of Reading shows us the two most important components of reading and how deficits in either area lead to difficulties with reading.  These areas can be used to identify common reading difficulties and disabilities.  Research suggests that there are 3 types of reading difficulties.  Think about struggling readers you have had in your classroom.

1.  Phonological deficit - a problem with processing the sounds of language
2.  Fluency/Naming Speed - a problem with speed and accuracy of reading/decoding printed word recognition (word recognition component of the Simple View of Reading)
Important to note:  Problems with word recognition/decoding are most often a result of weaknesses in phonological processing.
3.  Language Comprehension deficit - a problem with the understanding of oral language, vocabulary weaknesses, making inferences, abstract reasoning, and logical thinking (language comprehension component of the Simple View of Reading)

Dyslexia is estimated to make up 5-15% of the school population.  Dyslexia is a disability that is neurobiological in origin with a core deficit in the phonological processing area of the brain.  These students have difficulty with accurate and fluent word recognition and poor decoding abilities.  It is estimated that every classroom has 1-2 students with dyslexia.

Many students are not identified with a learning disability such as dyslexia until later in their school career and some students have reading difficulties that are not due to a learning disability.  When approaches rooted in the 3 cueing system are used, students are given a strategy that works faster and easier than decoding.  They can look at the pictures, figure out what makes sense in the context or based on the first letter, follow the predictable pattern, etc.  At first, these students may seem to be making great progress due to the ease of using these strategies in early books.  However, many of these students often get to 3rd grade and beyond and plateau.  Texts become more complex, words become longer and more difficult to guess based on context, sentence complexity increases making it more difficult to guess, and the strategies they relied on to read that allowed them to bypass decoding in easier books start failing them.  They may not show up as having reading problems until 3rd grade or above, resulting in delayed reading interventions.

Building the foundation early on with code emphasis instruction is vital to their growth in reading.  According to Louisa Moats (2011), “A large body of research evidence shows that with appropriate, intensive instruction, all but the most severe reading disabilities can be ameliorated in the early grades and students can get on track toward academic success.”

The following short article describes the benefits of code emphasis instruction.

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By Louise Spear-Swerling, PhD

Recently the topic of Structured Literacy™ teaching has sparked considerable interest. Educators and parents often have questions about this approach:

What does it involve?

How is it different from the ways that children are usually taught to read?

Why is it effective for children with dyslexia and other learning difficulties?

Here is an explanation of what structured literacy means and why schools should use it.
What Is Structured Literacy?
Structured literacy (SL) approaches emphasize highly explicit and systematic teaching of all important components of literacy. These components include both foundational skills (e.g., decoding, spelling) and higher-level literacy skills (e.g., reading comprehension, written expression). SL also emphasizes oral language abilities essential to literacy development, including phonemic awareness, sensitivity to speech sounds in oral language, and the ability to manipulate those sounds.

Explicit teaching means that teachers clearly explain and model key skills; they do not expect children to infer these skills only from exposure. Systematic means that there is a well-organized sequence of instruction, with important prerequisite skills taught before more advanced skills. For instance, children master decoding and spelling simpler consonant-vowel-consonant words (e.g., tap) with short vowel sounds before learning more complex short-vowel words (e.g., stamp or tapped) with consonant blends or affixes.

Explicit, systematic teaching requires teacher-led instruction. Teacher-led instruction also enables educators to provide prompt, targeted feedback in response to children's mistakes, another characteristic of SL. For example, suppose that children are practicing reading words with short vowel sounds and consonant blends (e.g., stamp) aloud, and a child misreads stamp as stump. Rather than just telling the child the word, the teacher might point to the vowel to draw the child's attention to it. If that cue did not help, the teacher would provide additional feedback focused on the child's specific error (e.g., "short sound for a is pronounced /ă/ ").

...the emphasis is on patterns rather than specific words. This is because the teacher is trying to foster a decoding (and encoding) process or strategy-instead of teaching children to memorize individual words by overall visual appearance.

Structured literacy approaches use books and other instructional materials that lend themselves to this kind of teaching. Educators teach from a sequence of phonics materials proceeding from use of simpler to more complex patterns. Children read books containing the phonics word patterns they have been taught. Reading of texts and phonics instruction are coordinated so that as children's decoding skills develop, they are able to read increasingly complex texts. Similarly, spelling is coordinated with decoding, so that each reinforces the other.

Here is an example of coordination of decoding and spelling. Suppose that beginning decoders are learning to decode simple consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words such as tap, win, or fit. Their spelling instruction would employ similar CVC word patterns, such as nag, sip, and hat. Notice that the emphasis is on patterns rather than specific words. This is because the teacher is trying to foster a decoding (and encoding) process or strategy-instead of teaching children to memorize individual words by overall visual appearance.

Figure 1 provides one example of a structured literacy activity for decoding and spelling, a phoneme-grapheme mapping task. The teacher dictates a chain of patterned words for children to spell in a grid, one word at a time, with one phoneme (speech sound) per box. (For decoding, the teacher can write the words and have children decode them.) The chain involves a variety of single-phoneme changes in words, not just changes in the first phoneme (spelling) or grapheme (decoding).

Words in the chain are carefully chosen. All are phonetically regular and involve only letter-sound (grapheme-phoneme) relationships children have been taught. For example, in the second row of the grid, tar would not be an appropriate choice to follow tap, because tar contains a vowel- r pattern ( ar) with a different vowel sound that children have not been taught at this early stage.

This SL activity and other similar activities promote careful attention to all the letters in a word-and all the phonemes they represent. They help children to grasp the alphabetic principle-the idea that reading involves a code in which sounds in spoken words map onto letters (graphemes) in printed words-as well as to develop strong phonemic awareness, decoding, and spelling skills.

They help children to grasp the alphabetic principle-the idea that reading involves a code in which sounds in spoken words map onto letters (graphemes) in printed words-as well as to develop strong phonemic awareness, decoding, and spelling skills.

A number of instructional programs and approaches have the features of SL. There is not one "best" SL approach for all children with dyslexia or other learning problems. Still, some instructional approaches and materials are simply incompatible with SL. Unfortunately, many of these are widely used in schools.
How Is Literacy Usually Taught?
Literacy instruction in many schools is not highly explicit or systematic. Important foundational skills (e.g., phonemic awareness and decoding) often receive limited emphasis, even for beginners or struggling decoders (Moats, 2017).

Literacy instruction in many schools is not highly explicit or systematic. Important foundational skills (e.g., phonemic awareness and decoding) often receive limited emphasis, even for beginners or struggling decoders (Moats, 2017).

Typical literacy instruction frequently uses loosely structured types of approaches, such as "reader's workshop" or "writer's workshop." Considerable classroom time is spent having children work independently on reading and writing tasks of their own choosing. Teachers do supervise this work and spend time "conferencing" with individual children. However, the way that instruction is organized means that time for teacher-led, explicit instruction is minimal.

Another key problem is that commonly used instructional materials do not lend themselves to explicit, systematic teaching of important foundational components of literacy. These problems may undermine the effectiveness even of a highly capable teacher.

For example, many schools do not provide teachers with a systematic phonics program and accompanying sets of words, texts, and materials. It is very difficult to teach phonics well, especially to large groups of children or those who struggle, without appropriate instructional materials.

Many schools do not provide teachers with a systematic phonics program and accompanying sets of words, texts, and materials. It is very difficult to teach phonics well, especially to large groups of children or those who struggle, without appropriate instructional materials.

Instead, teachers may be told to post "word walls" in the classroom; these "word walls" often contain common words that vary greatly in spelling patterns and pronunciation. (See Figure 2.) Some words (e.g., are, again) are irregular (i.e., exceptions to phonics generalizations). Other words are regular, but involve a wide range of patterns, including some difficult ones for beginners (e.g., two-syllable words like better). These kinds of materials do not help children understand the predictability of phonics patterns in words. Instead, they encourage memorization of whole words, a strategy that will not help children learn to read well in the long run.
More About Phonics in Typical Literacy Instruction
A frequent response from schools using typical literacy practices is, "But we do teach phonics!" This is generally true. However, in addition to limited emphasis and lack of explicitness, there are other problems with phonics instruction in many schools.

Research over the past couple of decades has suggested that, although any phonics is better than no phonics at all, certain types of phonics approaches are more effective than others. Specifically, an initial phoneme-grapheme level approach-that is characteristic of structured literacy-is more effective than a larger-unit phonics approach such as onset-rime, analytic phonics, or word families. (See Brady, 2011, for a review.) Typical literacy instruction often favors a larger unit approach to phonics.

Following are examples of how different phonics approaches might teach children to decode an unfamiliar word such as stack:

In a word families approach, children would learn to decode stack by comparing it to a known word such as back.

In an onset-rime approach, children would learn the sound for two parts of the word, the onset (st→/st/) and the rime (-ack→/ăk/). They would then blend the two parts to form the word (/st/) →/ăk/)→/stack/).

In a phoneme-grapheme level approach, children would learn sounds for the graphemes that represent each phoneme (s→/s/ t→/t/ a→/ă/and ck→/k/), then how to blend all four parts into a whole word (/s/ /t//ă/ /k/ →/stack/.

Research over the past couple of decades has suggested that, although any phonics is better than no phonics at all, certain types of phonics approaches are more effective than others. Specifically, an initial phoneme-grapheme level approach-that is characteristic of structured literacy-is more effective than a larger-unit phonics approach such as onset-rime, analytic phonics, or word families. (See Brady, 2011, for a review.) Typical literacy instruction often favors a larger unit approach to phonics.

Why is an initial phoneme-grapheme level phonics approach generally preferable to other phonics approaches? One reason may be that the phoneme-grapheme approach promotes closer attention to spelling (grapheme) and speech sound (phoneme) sequences in words than do other phonics approaches. Careful attention to letter sequences in words is fundamental for developing good decoding skills. Also, this approach generally includes explicit teaching of phoneme segmentation and blending, important phonemic awareness skills-foundational skills for both spelling and decoding.

In a phoneme-grapheme level approach, children would eventually learn to attend to larger patterns in words, including common orthographic patterns, such as graphemes (e.g., ar, ee, au, igh) and morphemes (e.g., common roots/base elements, prefixes, and suffixes). Some very common morphemes (e.g., ​-ing, ​-ed​ [​​indicating tense​]​) often would be taught relatively early. However, an emphasis on larger units mostly comes later, as children advance to more complex words, rather than at the very beginning of phonics teaching. Furthermore, all of these elements-phonemes, graphemes, and morphemes-would be taught in an explicit, systematic way.

In addition to basic phonics instruction, children need to practice applying their phonics skills while reading texts (Foorman et al., 2016). While their decoding is still developing-and particularly for children who struggle with decoding-oral reading of texts with teacher guidance and feedback is essential. Texts should include many words that children can decode. Otherwise, children may just guess at words.

In addition to basic phonics instruction, children need to practice applying their phonics skills while reading texts (Foorman et al., 2016). While their decoding is still developing-and particularly for children who struggle with decoding-oral reading of texts with teacher guidance and feedback is essential.

Unfortunately, in typical literacy instruction, children often read leveled or predictable texts. These texts use many words that poor decoders cannot read, with pictures that usually encourage guessing.

For instance, a predictable text about a child getting ready to go to school in the morning might have sentences such as William found his lunch, William found his crayons, and William found his backpack, with accompanying pictures of William getting his lunch, crayons, and backpack. With words spelled with varied and relatively complex phonics patterns, and pictures that enable guessing, this type of text does not encourage children to look carefully at the letters in words to decode them-and the letters and their sequence are what make one word different from another.

Teacher feedback to children's decoding errors also matters. This feedback should emphasize attention to the print and application of decoding skills, as would occur as part of a structured literacy approach. However, many teachers are trained to believe that small errors such as reading a for the or this for that can be ignored, because they do not greatly alter meaning (Spear-Swerling, 2018). Nevertheless, beyond the earliest grades, good readers decode with a very high degree of accuracy and do not make frequent errors of this type (e.g., Daane, Campbell, Grigg, Goodman & Oranje, 2005).

Are there children who learn to read well with typical literacy practices? Certainly. However, the typical literacy practices outlined in this section are not nearly as effective for children with dyslexia and other literacy difficulties as are structured literacy practices (Fletcher, Lyon, Fuchs, & Barnes, 2018; Foorman et al., 2016; International Dyslexia Association, 2017).
Why Is Structured Literacy Effective?
First, SL explicitly and effectively addresses foundational literacy skills, a core need of children with dyslexia as well as many other struggling students. Also, in all components of literacy, SL emphasizes teaching that is clear, systematic, and unambiguous to the learner-all important qualities for students experiencing difficulty.

Finally, SL instruction can be very engaging to struggling students. Explicit teaching has been criticized as "drill and kill" that dulls interest and creativity, with typical literacy practices presented as inherently more engaging to children. Little research supports this view (Archer & Hughes, 2011).

Reading children's literature with beautiful pictures or extended opportunities to write for pleasure can indeed be motivating-but not for students who cannot decode or write well enough to enjoy them. Helping children to succeed at literacy is a key way to motivate and engage them, as well as to prepare them for ongoing, higher-level literacy learning.

Reading children's literature with beautiful pictures or extended opportunities to write for pleasure can indeed be motivating-but not for students who cannot decode or write well enough to enjoy them. Helping children to succeed at literacy is a key way to motivate and engage them, as well as to prepare them for ongoing, higher-level literacy learning.
Moving Forward
Structured literacy approaches are much more successful than many typical literacy practices for meeting the needs of children with dyslexia and other literacy problems. SL prioritizes teacher-led, explicit instruction in all important components of literacy. Initial phonics instruction uses a phoneme-grapheme (encoding) and grapheme-phoneme (decoding) level approach. Texts and other materials are well coordinated with the phonics program.

If educators are prepared to implement this kind of instruction, and are given appropriate instructional materials, they can reach a much wider range of children than with typical literacy practices. Virtually all teachers want to be effective with their students. Let's give them the knowledge and tools to do so.
References
Archer, A., & Hughes, C. (2011). Explicit instruction: Effective and efficient teaching. New York, NY: Guilford.

Brady, S. (2011). Efficacy of phonics teaching for reading outcomes: Indications from post-NRP research. In S. Brady, D. Braze, & C. Fowler (Eds.), Explaining individual differences in reading: Theory and evidence (pp. 69-96). New York, NY: Psychology Press.

Daane, M. C., Campbell, J. R., Grigg, W. S., Goodman, M. J., & Oranje, A. (2005). F ourth-grade students reading aloud: NAEP 2002 Special Study of Oral Reading (NCES 2006-469). U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

Fletcher, J. M., Lyon, G. R., Fuchs, L. S., & Barnes, M. A. (2018). Learning disabilities: From identification to intervention (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Guilford.

Foorman, B., Beyler, N., Borradaile, K., Coyne, M., Denton, C. A., Dimino, J.,...Wagner, R. (2016). Foundational skills to support reading for understanding in kindergarten through 3rd grade (NCEE 2016-4008). U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

International Dyslexia Association. (2017). Effective reading instruction for students with dyslexia (fact sheet). Retrieved fromhttps://dyslexiaida.org/effective-reading-instruction/

Moats, L. C. (2017). Can prevailing approaches to reading instruction accomplish the goals of RTI? Perspectives on Language and Literacy, 43, 15-22.

Spear-Swerling, L. (2018). Structured literacy and typical literacy practices: Understanding differences to create instructional opportunities. Teaching Exceptional Children, 51, 201-211.

Louise Spear-Swerling, Ph.D., is Professor Emerita in the Department of Special Education at Southern Connecticut State University. She has prepared both general and special educators to teach literacy for many years. Dr. Spear-Swerling helped to write IDA's Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teachers of Reading. Her most recent book, published by Brookes, is The Power of RTI and Reading Profiles: A Blueprint for Solving Reading Problems.
Copyright © 2019 International Dyslexia Association (IDA). Opinions expressed in The Examiner and/or via links do not necessarily reflect those of IDA. We encourage sharing of Examiner articles. If portions are cited, please make appropriate reference. Articles may not be reprinted for the purpose of resale. Permission to republish this article is available from info@dyslexia.org.

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Here's Why Schools Should Use Structured Literacy - International Dyslexia Association

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Share This: By Louise Spear-Swerling, PhD Recently the topic of Structured Literacy™ teaching has sparked considerable interest. Educators and parents often have questions about this approach: What does it involve? How is it different from the ways that children are usually taught to read? Why is it effective for children with dyslexia and other learning difficulties?

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According to the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which assesses a random sample of students every two years across the nation, only 38% of Virginia's 4th grade students are reading at or above proficient levels in reading.  Nationwide, only 34% of 4th grade students scored at or above proficient in reading.  While Virginia is scoring above the national average and has shown growth over the last decade, the last 4 years for Virginia scores have been stagnant.

So if all of this research on the science of reading is true, why have teacher preparation programs and curriculum/textbooks not aligned with SOR?

Many of the reading methods used today can be traced back to the "Reading Wars" from the 90s.  In an effort to understand the reading problems faced in American schools, a panel of experts, called the National Reading Panel, including education professionals and scientists were convened by Congress in 2000 to study and determine the most effective approaches to quality reading instruction.  At the time, schools mostly fell into two categories in regards to the type of reading instruction provided to students.  One method was a whole language approach, which is grounded in the theory that reading is a natural process and is acquired through exposure to a variety of text.  Others were using approaches centered around explicit phonics only instruction, which is the process of teaching students to link alphabetic letters to their sounds.  The findings from the National Reading Panel showed that explicit, systematic phonics instruction was deemed most effective, but also that the areas of phonemic awareness, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension were also vital to quality reading instruction.  This opened the door for the rise of the  balanced literacy theory, which can be defined as a combination of whole language and phonics practices.  This type of instruction has since been most prevalent in our preservice teacher education systems, schools, and curriculum.

However, the typical balanced literacy curriculum has not been very "balanced" at all.  Phonemic awareness typically plays a very small part in today's curriculum and should be one of the most vital components.  Phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension  instruction have simply been integrated into daily reading activities where the phonics skills and vocabulary are driven by whatever texts are being read that day.  While the idea of balanced literacy is not "wrong" as it does embrace the five critical components of reading, the definition of balanced literacy should be redefined and restructured to include more explicit and systematic approaches to each of the 5 critical components for reading.

The following article offers some great ideas for shifting our thinking about balanced literacy.

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Although reading is a very complex process, the simple view of reading offers a simplistic formula as a means to understand the two most important components of reading and how they lead to reading comprehension.  The Simple View of Reading (SVR) by Gough and Tunmer is a multiplication problem that emphasizes that reading comprehension is the product of printed word recognition and language comprehension.  The SVR model is:

Word Recognition X Language Comprehension =
Reading Comprehension

If you assign a 0, 0.5, or a 1 designating a student's strength in both areas, the result points to the students ability to comprehend text.  For instance,
0 (WR) x 0 (LC) = 0 (RC) (not good!)
0 (WR) x 1 (LC) = 0 (RC) (not good!)
.5 (WR) x .5 (LC) = .25 (RC) (not good!)
1 (WR) x .5 (LC) = .5 (RC) (again, not good!)
1 (WR) x 1 (LC) = 1 (RC)  ❤

Reading comprehension is only going to be as good as the student's weakest area.  The only way to achieve a 1 for reading comprehension which indicates adequate comprehension, is for BOTH word recognition skills and language comprehension skills to be well developed.

What do I mean by word recognition skills?  Phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition.  Sight words are defined as ALL words that a student knows without having to sound them out.

What do I mean by language comprehension?  Listening comprehension, oral language comprehension structures such as our background knowledge, oral vocabulary, understanding of syntax and semantics, and concepts about print. Simply put, it is our understanding of oral language.

Watch the following 11 minute video about the Simple View of Reading.

*There are several other important models that identify and explain the components of skilled reading that are not included in this padlet (Scarborough's Rope, Ehri's Phases, 4 Part Processing Model).*

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I feel it is important to share my background in teaching reading in case there are others who have had similar experiences.

During my undergrad years, I was not taught much about how to teach reading in my education coursework.  Courses centered around theories, pedagogy, and the stages of reading, but not much in the way of actual methods in practice.  I didn't really learn the practice of teaching until student teaching and then in my own classroom.  I'm sure most of you can relate to the feeling of not really learning how to teach until you actually became a teacher!  My first year in my own 3rd grade classroom, we rotated blocks and for one block, I was given the weakest readers in the entire grade level.  I worked so hard to find ways to help them, but struggled greatly.

I then decided to get my masters degree in reading to become a certified reading specialist.  I just knew that would solve all my struggles with teaching reading!  And it definitely helped a great deal for many of my students.  In my masters program, we learned the developmental stages of reading and methods for teaching reading.  We were taught to find reading levels, place students in text at their instructional level, and gradually move them up levels.  We were taught strategies to teach struggling readers that included things such as using the picture clues, meaning clues, and knowledge of the structure of language to decipher the text.  In my classroom, I happily used the beanie baby strategies and felt like most kids were benefiting from this type of instruction.  However, while some kids seemed to learn to read so easily on their own and others were able to grasp the strategies with instruction,  there were always some students who just didn't seem to make much progress no matter what, especially struggling students who were in 3rd grade or above.  This was often chalked up to factors such as lack of motivation, not receiving support at home, or simply just labeled a poor reader/slow learner.  *Side note:  the same masters program in reading that I completed in 2009 has now revamped their entire reading specialist curriculum to reflect SOR practices.*

After OG training, I still continued to stick mostly to the methods learned in my masters program with some OG sprinkled in and didn't quite grasp the "why" behind instruction such as OG.  I really struggled with accepting it.  I even have a picture from a text thread with a friend showing myself defending a 3 cueing strategy!  Then, I was asked if I would be willing to complete LETRS training through a VDOE sponsored cohort.  I had no idea what the training was about, but said yes.  While researching LETRS before I started the course and still skeptical, I came across the article linked below.  This article is a great starting point for learning about SOR.  I had my first "aha" moment after reading this article.  After reading this article, I decided to be more open-minded to learn about the science that I had never been taught in undergrad or graduate school.  There were many, many, many more "aha" moments (and even some feelings of grief) subsequently during the LETRS course.  LETRS, rooted in SOR, explains the WHY behind instruction such as OG and code emphasis instruction vs. traditional meaning emphasis instruction.  LETRS helped me to see the big picture and how OG instruction fits in.  Research shows that code emphasis instruction helps naturally great readers to become even stronger and weak readers to be able to access the code to become better readers.  In other words, it helps reach those weaker students without hindering the strong readers from growing.

I share my experience with you so that this space can be a NO SHAME ZONE.  If you are skeptical, I understand!  I was teaching reading the way I was taught to teach reading and there is no shame or fault in that.  I had to admit to myself that I had unfinished learning about how to teach reading.  Many of the practices we currently use can continue to be implemented and/or refined.  If you want to dip your toes in to see what SOR is about, read the following article, then come back for step #3.

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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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Hello!  I'm a reading specialist in Virginia. I have completed Volume 1 of LETRS along with facilitator training to become a certified local LETRS facilitator.  I will be taking part in LETRS volume 2 next school year. I'm so glad you've "stopped by" my Padlet.  I have been asked by several teachers recently about the science of reading (SOR) and how they can learn more.  So, I decided to create a space for teachers to visit that highlights some of the most important concepts surrounding SOR.  The beautiful thing about educators is that we are always seeking ways to better help our students.  This space is set up in sequential order with 10 steps.  As you have time, read and visit the links for each step.  I suggest using a computer to view the material.  You can leave anytime and come back to where you left off or if you're feeling extra caffeinated, you can go through the whole padlet in one sitting.  😜

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Researchers have discovered that learning to read is NOT natural.  Our brains are not hardwired to read print.  They are hardwired for language because speech is natural.  This is evident by the fact that most children learn to speak effortlessly.  Written language (print) has not been in existence long enough for our brains to have built up the pathways required for reading.  Because of this, reading should be mastered starting with speech (or sound) and then moving to print.  Four key areas of the brain used for reading are the language comprehension area (understanding of language), the phonological area (sound/language), the orthographic area (visual area/recognizing faces and objects), and the assembly or bridge area (phoneme-grapheme association).  These four areas are not connected or "wired" at birth. Skilled reading requires this new "bridge" pathway to be built between the speech (or sound) area of the brain to the visual (or print) area of the brain.  Through the process of consistently connecting sounds to spellings,  words are then stored for fast and automatic retrieval, known as orthographic mapping.  Many programs start with the visual/print and move to speech/sound, which is not conducive to building networks in the brain for skilled reading.  Dr. Stanislas Dehaene is a leading cognitive neuro-scientist on how the brain learns to read.  Watch the following 7 minute video to learn more.

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The Brain Prize Presents: Stanislas Dehaene