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Click on Note: any word on this site to experience Interactive Orthography .

According to the U.S. Department of Education more than 60% of all K-12 students are reading below the level of proficiency required for the brain-work of reading to be transparent to the mind-work of learning at the grade level they are in.

Obviously, reading is the skill that matters most to success in school and children who fall behind in reading are in great academic danger. But it is not just the lack of reading skills that most endangers these children. It's the collateral damage to their faith in their ability to learn - it's the MIND-SHAME.

Kids Describe Public Shame of Reading Difficulties

Remember to click on Note: any word on this page to experience the next evolutionary step in technology supported reading.

More American children suffer long-term life-harm as a consequence of reading difficulties than from parental abuse, accidents, and all other childhood diseases and disorders combined. In purely economic terms, reading related difficulties cost more than the war on terrorism, crime, and drugs combined. We need to reframe our society's thinking about what's at stake and what's involved in learning to read.
Note: Click on any word on this page to experience the next evolutionary step in technology supported reading.

In the U.S. alone approximately one hundred million and physical children and adults have difficulty reading. The cognitive, linguistic, academic, emotional , social , health consequences of their reading difficulties significantly diminish their opportunities in school, work, and life. In the aggregate, reading difficulties skew ourdemocracy , drag our economy , perpetuate poverty, and cost U.S. taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars each year. R eading improficiency is our nation's most wide-spread and costly learning disability and nothing short of a complete REFRAME in how our society thinks about 'what's at stake' and 'what's involved' is going to improve the situation.

The first step in 'reframing' how our society thinks about reading is to update our understanding of what reading is.

See also:Learning Stewards on What Is Reading

"I t's not by chance that the word spell has this double meaning - to cast a spell, or to arrange the letters in the correct order to spell out a word ... it was experienced by oral peoples, who had not met the written word before, as magic, as a very powerful form of magic." -Dr. David Abram, Author: The Spell of the Sensuous

"When we read we take in a code and get a set of instructions and we perform cognitive processes." - Dr. Johanna Drucker, Author the Alphabetic Labyrinth

Why is learning to read so difficult? The root cause of reading difficulties (in most children) can be understood in terms of the complex interplay between:

Note: Click on any word on this page to experience the next evolutionary step in technology supported reading.

"Some people there are who, being grown; forget the horrible task of learning to read. It is perhaps the greatest single effort that the human undertakes, and he must do it as a child." - John Steinbeck, Nobel Prize Winning Author

"No one is to blame, we are all responsible"

"We're saying that it's a miracle that it ever happens. It's very unsurprising that many people struggle with it." - Dr. Michael Merzenich, Keck Center for Integrative Neurosciences, University of California at San Francisco

Many other factors contribute to and exacerbate these root issues: I nnate learning differences and disabilities, parental education and involvement, preschools and print exposure all contribute to a child's readiness or lack thereof. Limited English proficiency, the proliferation of media (TV, Video Games...), incompetent instruction, inadequate teacher training, the 3rd-to-4th grade switch to 'reading to learn", our education system's resistance to change, and our society's shallow thinking about reading all exacerbate the confusion. Making all of the above more difficult, educators, parents, and society as a whole, conspire (unintentionally but insidiously-pervasively) to cause children to feel like they are at fault for the difficulties they experience.

Children's early life learning trajectories determine their level of readiness for the challenges involved in learning to read. Understanding these trajectories involves understanding:

Note: Click on any word on this page to experience the next evolutionary step in technology supported reading.

"So the sobering message here is that if children don't have the right experiences during these sensitive periods for the development of a variety of skills, including many cognitive and language capacities, that's a burden that those kids are going to carry; the sensitive period is over, and it's going to be harder for them." - Dr. Jack Shonkoff, Chair, National Scientific Council on the Developing Child

"...children who have trouble with oral language generally will go on to have difficulty with written language..." - Dr. Paula Tallal, Co-Director, Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience, Rutgers

"...Children of professional parents -- I mean, talkative families and college educated -- heard forty-eight million words addressed to them by the time they're four. Children in welfare families who were taciturn heard thirteen million words addressed to them by the time they were four." - Dr. Todd Risley, co-author "Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young American Children"

"They feel like they're failures; they tell us that. Lousy reading produces a perception of stupidity and dumbness to peers and clearly to the youngster who is struggling. That is the shame." - Dr. G. Reid Lyon

Note: Click on any word on this page to experience the next evolutionary step in technology supported reading.

Building on 'CHILD'S FAULT' from 'Causes and Contributing Factors', this module's first segment provides the starting point for appreciating the "SHAME" that struggling readers experience. Next, "The Power of Shame" discusses shame's painful life-long and often life-distorting effects. The next three segments explore the "Public Shame" of the classroom; the "Fear of Shame" felt by children as they anticipate being asked to read out loud in classrooms, and how both drive the "Secret Shame" that causes children to hide their reading difficulties from parents, teachers, and peers. "Emotionally Learning Disabling" and "Avoidance" build on the previous segments and show how powerfully behavior-determining and learning-disabling shame avoidance can be. Finally, "Cognitively Learning Disabling" begins our discussion of the "Downward Spiral of Shame" (From our chapter the "Brain's Challenge") and describes how shame disrupts, distracts, and chokes the cognitive processing that is necessary for learning to read in the first place.

See also: "The Downward Spiral of Shame"

Dr. Maryanne Wolf: You know I haven't thought in these terms. But as you say them there is no question that's our enemy. Shame.
Dr. Donald Nathanson: "Like most scholars, until awakened by the "Children of the Code" project, I took reading as much for granted as eating and drinking. Very few of us have paid sufficient attention to the specific emotions triggered in children as they begin to read. Yet any impediment to mastery of the confusing code that connects spoken and written English must trigger shame, the emotion that stops all useful thought. So painful does shame become in the public arena of the schoolroom that our children swiftly divide into two streams and two futures purely on the basis of their response to the shame that accompanies the struggle to learn our written language.

Understanding the code and its history is essential to understanding the "CONFUSION' involved in learning to read it today. The "Power of Writing" begins our journey into the profound cognitive and institutional consequences of becoming code users (writers and readers). Next, "The Alphabet's Big Bang" and "Grecian Formulas" explore the origin of the Alphabet and it's unparalleled effects on the minds and institutions that gave rise to western civilization (future segments will address oral cultures and pre-alphabetic writing systems). In "Lend Me Your Ears" we introduce the initial relationships between letters and sounds (critical background for future segments on how the code became so complex). And, in the "Code of da Vinci" we present the code as both the 'DNA of science' and the 'media that enabled the Renaissance'. Finally, we review the "Spread, Rise, and Fall of Literacy" which sets the stage for "A Brief History of the Code - Part 2: Ye First Millennium Bug".

"The big step between civilization and more primitive forms of human society is written language." Dr. John Searle, Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Language at U.C. Berkeley

"We have all become children of the code" - Dr. Malcolm Richardson, Chair, Department of English, LSU

"I think it was much easier to learn how to read in the 8 th century B.C. than it is today." - Dr. Frank Moore Cross, Professor Emeritus of Ancient Languages, Harvard University

"Once we start writing, we are able to then reflect back upon what we have written, and we enter into this kind of recursive relation to our own written signs. And, so, only then, a certain degree or experience of self-reflection that we now sort of take for granted, comes into being." - David Abram, Philosopher and Ecologist, Author: The Spell of the Sensuous.

"In learning to read... we were satisfied when we knew the letters of the alphabet" - Plato, The Republic

Though readiness and readiness differentiated instruction reduce the difficulty, working through the code's confusing letter-sound relationships is what most challenges the brains of most struggling readers. There is a direct and causal relationship between the confusion in the code and the 'stutters' heard in the voice of a struggling reader. Obviously, understanding this confusion is critical to understanding the challenges involved in learning to read. As importantly, understanding how the code became so confused is critical to reframing the experience of struggling readers. The more we understand the accidents and negligence that led to the confusion in the English code the more it becomes obvious that it is absurdly negligent to blame and shame children for their struggle with it.

- -- Latin Roots - The clergy begin to write English using the letters/sounds of Latin
- French Rules - French displaces English as the official language of England
- The King's English - Henry V resurrects English writing
- The Chancery Scribes - The King's scribes forge the roots of modern English
- The Roots of Confusion - How written English became such a mess.
The Great Vowel Shift - Major shifts in pronunciation add further confusion
Casting Spells - The printing press standardizes the unstable writing system

...In Greek, or Latin, for example, once you could view the letters, you could read... there was almost a perfect match... Dr. Guy Deutscher, Author: The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention

...[in English] "we have fifty some sounds and only twenty-six letters. So we have to adopt a whole variety of mechanisms to close the gap." - Dr. Richard Venezky, Author: The American Way of Spelling: The Structure and Origins of American English Orthography

"We are always compromised in certain areas by having to represent sounds with symbols that weren't designed to suit those sounds." - Dr. Johanna Drucker, Author: The Alphabetic Labyrinth

"it's easy to forget that the system we have learned is a system that is based on a series of accidents that result in layers of complexity"- Dr. Thomas Cable, Co-author: A History of the English Language

..."the accident of the printing press, which in England served to freeze spelling in the fifteenth century so you have these bizarre spellings" - Dr. Malcolm Richardson, Chair, Department of English, LSU
See also: Dr. Louisa Moats on the Confusion in English
See Also: The First Millennium Bug - The fall of phoneticism and rise of confusion

With the printing of the King James Bible literacy began to spread. As it did, reading teachers began to realize that the letter-sound relationships in the code made learning to read English difficult. Phonics was born in the 16th century as an attempt to train the reader to process the unruly code. Over a century later the whole word method (originally developed for the hearing-impaired) began being used as an alternate to the 'tedious' 'rote' work of phonics.

Paralleling the battle between these two teaching social, political, institutional, and even scientific around the code polarities, another movement began which focused on reforming the code itself. The story of our attempts to change the code is fascinating and understanding these attempts, and why they failed, sheds important light on the inertia that limits our understanding of the challenges involved in learning to read.

See also " Paradigm Inertia In Reading Science and Policy"

"The heart of our trouble is with our foolish alphabet. It doesn't know how to spell and can't be taught." - Mark Twain

"Delay in the plan here proposed may be fatal... the minds of men may again sink into indolence; a national acquiescence in error will follow, and posterity be doomed to struggle with difficulties which time and accident will perpetually multiply". - Noah Webster

"People are more likely to change their religion than change their writing system." - Charles Hockett, Anthropological Linguist

"...as every letter ought to be, confin'd to one; the same is to be oberv'd in all the Letters, Vowels and Consonants, that wherever they are met with, or in whatever Company, their Sound is always the same." - Benjamin Franklin"

The second great obstacle is our absurd spelling, which scholars agree is the worst on the planet. In trying to learn this, two or three years are worse than waster" - Melvile Dewey (Dewey decimal system - champion of simplified spelling).

See also Stanislas Dehaene on how the mess of English affects "How The Brain Learns to Read"

Learning to read can be difficult for any one of a number of reasons.

CRITICAL ELEMENTS: To construct the reading experience the brain must DIFFERENTIATE and process a number of elements including: Letters, Phonemes, Morphemes, and Vocabulary. CRITICAL PROCESSING: The brain mustAutomatize and Synchronize the sub processing of the critical elements. CRITICAL SPEED: The brain must process all the above fast enough to constructRecognizable Words at Speeds that approximate the rate at which the brain is accustomed to Recognizing Spoken Language. Processing speed is critical. Analysis of the Eye Movements of good readers reveals that, on average, the brain must process letters into sounds in less than a tenth of a second. THE BOTTLENECK: The 'stutters' in the voice of struggling readers reflect the time it takes the brain to work through the confusion in the code - the time it is taking toDISAMBIGUATE the code. Code disambiguation is the brain's greatest challenge during the process of learning to read. Exacerbating all the other challenges is the DOWNWARD SPIRAL that disrupts and dissipates the brain's processing when shame sets in.

"The majority of our kids who have a tough time, they are slow, they are labored in their reading" -Dr. Reid Lyon, former Branch Chief of NICHD "You wouldn't have to have much of a fault in this machine operating with high speed in this incredible processing efficiency that's required to begin to see somebody be a little slower at it or a lot slower at it." -Michael Merzenich, Neuroscientist, Member of National Academy of Sciences "The problem with automatization is that, at any step, if you've got a slow down step, if any piece of that enterprise has a block or you can't hold enough of the information, the whole house of cards falls apart" -Dr. Terrence Deacon, Neuroscientist, Anthropologist, Linguist "The more complicated the translation from the orthography to the phonology is, the more complicated this processing dance has to be within the brain." -Dr. Paula Tallal, Board of Governors Chair of Neuroscience, Rutgers

The Problem is essentially social-educational.

For every child and adult who struggles and for all of us as a society, 'reading problems are always a consequence of 'learning problems'. Improving the learning trajectories of children (and adults) who struggle with reading requires an Orientation Shift in how Parents and Teachers think about learning and the challenges involved in learning to read.

"The problem is our society's lack of insight into what is involved in acquiring literacy." -Dr. Louisa Moats, Reading Scientist, Sopris West
"We need to reconceptualize what it means to learn to read and who's responsible for its success if we're going to deal with the problem." - Dr. Grover Whitehurst, Former Director of the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education

Reading is an unnaturally confusing challenge to our brains. It takes a lot of (early life learning) brain exercise for a brain to be ready for the challenges involved in learning to read. Depending on how well Instruction meets brain Readiness, children follow one of Two Paths: the upward spiraling of Matthew Effects or the downward spiral of Confusion and Shame.
Suggestions:
We need to Boost Brain Readiness, Reduce Extraneous Ambiguity, and Reframe the emotional experience to minimize learner's propensity to blame themselves and trigger shame. We need to engage learners in ever more frequent, complex and rapid turn-taking Dialogue. We need to learn to Isolate, Vivify and give Feedback on the real-time edge of learning. We need to be very careful to Minimize our contributions to the shame struggling learners feel.

"So painful does shame become in the public arena of the schoolroom that our children swiftly divide into two streams and two futures purely on the basis of their response to the shame that accompanies the struggle to learn our written language." - Donald L. Nathanson, M.D. Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Jefferson Medical College, Author: Shame and Pride and Knowing Feeling
"Children are developing a pre-conscious aversion to the feel of confusion and a pre-conscious aversion to the feel of confusion decapitates learning"- Children of the Code

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1000+ hours of deep-dive conversations with 100+ field leading experts, teachers, students and parents, about our collective understanding of what's at stake and what's involved in learning to read.

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Each Content Corner page offers a collection of resources specific to a particular shift from one of the Shifting the Balance books (+ Leadership Content Corner). Whether you’re ready to explore a new topic or want to expand existing knowledge, these resource hubs–which include podcasts, blog posts, downloads, and more–about each shift, will support you […]

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The ability to understand the meaning of printed text

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The ability to understand the meaning of spoken words

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Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate units of sound in spoken language, such as words, syllables, onset-rime, and phonemes. It is a critical starting point for reading instruction, since students need to be able to hear and distinguish the individual sounds within words in order to match them to the written symbols of our alphabet accurately ...

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A method for teaching children the relationship between spoken sounds and written letters so they can learn to decode and encode

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Why the ‘Science of Reading’ Needs the ‘Science of Teaching’ | Voyager Sopris Learning

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The “science of reading” refers to a vast body of multidisciplinary research providing a rationale for what must be taught to ensure almost all students can learn to read.

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Reading development typically follows a progression similar to the following outline. These stages are, however, generalizations, and individual development can vary. Effective reading instruction supports students at each of these stages to ensure a strong foundation and continuous growth.

1. Emergent Reading: In this initial stage, young children are exposed to print and begin to understand that written language carries meaning. They may show an interest in books, recognize some letters, and understand basic concepts about print.

2. Early Reading (Decoding): As children develop phonemic awareness and phonics skills, they move into the early reading stage. They learn to decode words, associate letters with sounds, and start reading simple, decodable texts. Fluency and accuracy improve during this phase.

3. Fluent Reading: At this stage, usually in late elementary school, students are becoming skilled readers with increased speed and accuracy when it comes to comprehension. They can comprehend text more effortlessly, making the reading process more automatic. Vocabulary and comprehension skills continue to expand.

4. Orthographic Lexicon Development: While becoming fluent readers, students build their orthographic lexicon-a mental store of word spellings and patterns. They recognize words at a glance, enhancing their reading efficiency and overall proficiency.

5. Reading to Learn: In middle and high school, students transition from learning to read to reading to learn. They tackle more complex texts across various subjects, extracting information, analyzing content, and applying critical-thinking skills.

6. Advanced Reading: As students progress through higher education and into adulthood, their reading skills become highly advanced. They can understand and analyze complex information, synthesize ideas, and engage with specialized texts in their chosen fields.

The six key concepts of the science of reading-phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and language development-are integral components of science-based reading instruction. When taught together, each concept works to ensure learners are developed into well-rounded and effective readers. Here's how they can be used in classroom instruction:

1. Phonemic Awareness: Phonemic awareness is developed through explicit and systematic activities that focus on recognizing and using individual phonemes (sounds). Teachers employ activities such as segmenting, blending, and manipulating sounds to help students grasp the fundamentals of spoken language, alphabetic principles, and phonics skills.

2. Phonics: Teachers guide students through systematic phonics instruction where they practice matching letters to sounds, blending sounds to form words, and decoding unfamiliar words. Additionally, phonics instruction often involves word games, phonics-based reading materials, and teacher-modeled examples to reinforce the connection between letters or letter combinations and their associated sounds.

3. Fluency: Fluency is cultivated through reading practice with an emphasis on accuracy, speed, and expression. To learn this, students engage in repeated reading, guided oral reading, and modeled reading to enhance their ability to read with ease, expression, and comprehension.

4. Vocabulary: Vocabulary instruction emphasizes the understanding of word meanings and the effective use of a variety of words. Teachers incorporate explicit vocabulary instruction, context clues, and exposure to thorough and diverse texts to enhance students' word knowledge and usage.

5. Comprehension: Comprehension instruction involves teaching students to actively understand and discover the meaning of any given text. Strategies such as questioning, summarizing, making connections, and visualization are employed to guide students in comprehending and critically engaging with written material.

6. Language Development: Language development is supported by activities that enhance oral language skills, including syntax, grammar, and overall linguistic proficiency. Teachers integrate language comprehension and development into reading instruction by promoting discussions, encouraging expression, and cultivating a language-rich environment that complements the written aspect of literacy.

Get Started on Your Science of Reading Journey

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Become a part of our EDVIEW360 community, where educators, researchers, and authors come together to share insight, best practices, and success stories. You will learn why the science behind learning to read is important for student success and how you can implement it in your school or district.

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What Is the Science of Reading? | Voyager Sopris Learning

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The science of reading is an evidence-based approach to teaching and learning that draws upon decades of research in cognitive science, linguistics, and psychology.

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Dyslexia is a language-based learning disability that affects reading. Children with dyslexia often have poor phonological skills, resulting in difficulties with decoding, reading fluency, and spelling. Dyslexia can also impact reading comprehension and writing. Learn about the early warning signs for dyslexia, common myths, and how to help children with dyslexia become successful readers.

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The Science of Reading embodies over 40 years of research findings from multiple fields of study that shine a light on key fundamental principles of reading instruction. At The Reading League, we ground all of our professional development in three "anchors" that have emerged from this research. You may recognize the Simple View of Reading equation (Gough & Tunmer, 1986), but have you plugged in the numbers and talked about what it really means for different types of readers? You may have seen Scarborough's Reading Rope (2001), but are the details etched in your long-term memory so you can use it as a lens for viewing instructional decisions? You may have heard of the Four-Part Processing Model for Word Recognition (Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989), but can you explain how it functions in skilled readers? We recommend starting with this Knowledge Block if you have unfinished learning about these anchors and how they can sharpen your thinking about assessment and instruction. Our Foundations Knowledge Block also addresses transformative versus additive change, and what it takes to transform the culture of practice in a school system.

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The Science of Reading embodies over 40 years of research findings from multiple fields of study that shine a light on key fundamental principles of reading instruction. At The Reading League, we ground all of our professional development in three "anchors" that have emerged from this research.

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Click on Note: any word on this site to experience Interactive Orthography .

According to the U.S. Department of Education more than 60% of all K-12 students are reading below the level of proficiency required for the brain-work of reading to be transparent to the mind-work of learning at the grade level they are in.

Obviously, reading is the skill that matters most to success in school and children who fall behind in reading are in great academic danger. But it is not just the lack of reading skills that most endangers these children. It's the collateral damage to their faith in their ability to learn - it's the MIND-SHAME.

Kids Describe Public Shame of Reading Difficulties

Remember to click on Note: any word on this page to experience the next evolutionary step in technology supported reading.

More American children suffer long-term life-harm as a consequence of reading difficulties than from parental abuse, accidents, and all other childhood diseases and disorders combined. In purely economic terms, reading related difficulties cost more than the war on terrorism, crime, and drugs combined. We need to reframe our society's thinking about what's at stake and what's involved in learning to read.
Note: Click on any word on this page to experience the next evolutionary step in technology supported reading.

In the U.S. alone approximately one hundred million and physical children and adults have difficulty reading. The cognitive, linguistic, academic, emotional , social , health consequences of their reading difficulties significantly diminish their opportunities in school, work, and life. In the aggregate, reading difficulties skew ourdemocracy , drag our economy , perpetuate poverty, and cost U.S. taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars each year. R eading improficiency is our nation's most wide-spread and costly learning disability and nothing short of a complete REFRAME in how our society thinks about 'what's at stake' and 'what's involved' is going to improve the situation.

The first step in 'reframing' how our society thinks about reading is to update our understanding of what reading is.

See also:Learning Stewards on What Is Reading

"I t's not by chance that the word spell has this double meaning - to cast a spell, or to arrange the letters in the correct order to spell out a word ... it was experienced by oral peoples, who had not met the written word before, as magic, as a very powerful form of magic." -Dr. David Abram, Author: The Spell of the Sensuous

"When we read we take in a code and get a set of instructions and we perform cognitive processes." - Dr. Johanna Drucker, Author the Alphabetic Labyrinth

Why is learning to read so difficult? The root cause of reading difficulties (in most children) can be understood in terms of the complex interplay between:

Note: Click on any word on this page to experience the next evolutionary step in technology supported reading.

"Some people there are who, being grown; forget the horrible task of learning to read. It is perhaps the greatest single effort that the human undertakes, and he must do it as a child." - John Steinbeck, Nobel Prize Winning Author

"No one is to blame, we are all responsible"

"We're saying that it's a miracle that it ever happens. It's very unsurprising that many people struggle with it." - Dr. Michael Merzenich, Keck Center for Integrative Neurosciences, University of California at San Francisco

Many other factors contribute to and exacerbate these root issues: I nnate learning differences and disabilities, parental education and involvement, preschools and print exposure all contribute to a child's readiness or lack thereof. Limited English proficiency, the proliferation of media (TV, Video Games...), incompetent instruction, inadequate teacher training, the 3rd-to-4th grade switch to 'reading to learn", our education system's resistance to change, and our society's shallow thinking about reading all exacerbate the confusion. Making all of the above more difficult, educators, parents, and society as a whole, conspire (unintentionally but insidiously-pervasively) to cause children to feel like they are at fault for the difficulties they experience.

Children's early life learning trajectories determine their level of readiness for the challenges involved in learning to read. Understanding these trajectories involves understanding:

Note: Click on any word on this page to experience the next evolutionary step in technology supported reading.

"So the sobering message here is that if children don't have the right experiences during these sensitive periods for the development of a variety of skills, including many cognitive and language capacities, that's a burden that those kids are going to carry; the sensitive period is over, and it's going to be harder for them." - Dr. Jack Shonkoff, Chair, National Scientific Council on the Developing Child

"...children who have trouble with oral language generally will go on to have difficulty with written language..." - Dr. Paula Tallal, Co-Director, Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience, Rutgers

"...Children of professional parents -- I mean, talkative families and college educated -- heard forty-eight million words addressed to them by the time they're four. Children in welfare families who were taciturn heard thirteen million words addressed to them by the time they were four." - Dr. Todd Risley, co-author "Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young American Children"

"They feel like they're failures; they tell us that. Lousy reading produces a perception of stupidity and dumbness to peers and clearly to the youngster who is struggling. That is the shame." - Dr. G. Reid Lyon

Note: Click on any word on this page to experience the next evolutionary step in technology supported reading.

Building on 'CHILD'S FAULT' from 'Causes and Contributing Factors', this module's first segment provides the starting point for appreciating the "SHAME" that struggling readers experience. Next, "The Power of Shame" discusses shame's painful life-long and often life-distorting effects. The next three segments explore the "Public Shame" of the classroom; the "Fear of Shame" felt by children as they anticipate being asked to read out loud in classrooms, and how both drive the "Secret Shame" that causes children to hide their reading difficulties from parents, teachers, and peers. "Emotionally Learning Disabling" and "Avoidance" build on the previous segments and show how powerfully behavior-determining and learning-disabling shame avoidance can be. Finally, "Cognitively Learning Disabling" begins our discussion of the "Downward Spiral of Shame" (From our chapter the "Brain's Challenge") and describes how shame disrupts, distracts, and chokes the cognitive processing that is necessary for learning to read in the first place.

See also: "The Downward Spiral of Shame"

Dr. Maryanne Wolf: You know I haven't thought in these terms. But as you say them there is no question that's our enemy. Shame.
Dr. Donald Nathanson: "Like most scholars, until awakened by the "Children of the Code" project, I took reading as much for granted as eating and drinking. Very few of us have paid sufficient attention to the specific emotions triggered in children as they begin to read. Yet any impediment to mastery of the confusing code that connects spoken and written English must trigger shame, the emotion that stops all useful thought. So painful does shame become in the public arena of the schoolroom that our children swiftly divide into two streams and two futures purely on the basis of their response to the shame that accompanies the struggle to learn our written language.

Understanding the code and its history is essential to understanding the "CONFUSION' involved in learning to read it today. The "Power of Writing" begins our journey into the profound cognitive and institutional consequences of becoming code users (writers and readers). Next, "The Alphabet's Big Bang" and "Grecian Formulas" explore the origin of the Alphabet and it's unparalleled effects on the minds and institutions that gave rise to western civilization (future segments will address oral cultures and pre-alphabetic writing systems). In "Lend Me Your Ears" we introduce the initial relationships between letters and sounds (critical background for future segments on how the code became so complex). And, in the "Code of da Vinci" we present the code as both the 'DNA of science' and the 'media that enabled the Renaissance'. Finally, we review the "Spread, Rise, and Fall of Literacy" which sets the stage for "A Brief History of the Code - Part 2: Ye First Millennium Bug".

"The big step between civilization and more primitive forms of human society is written language." Dr. John Searle, Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Language at U.C. Berkeley

"We have all become children of the code" - Dr. Malcolm Richardson, Chair, Department of English, LSU

"I think it was much easier to learn how to read in the 8 th century B.C. than it is today." - Dr. Frank Moore Cross, Professor Emeritus of Ancient Languages, Harvard University

"Once we start writing, we are able to then reflect back upon what we have written, and we enter into this kind of recursive relation to our own written signs. And, so, only then, a certain degree or experience of self-reflection that we now sort of take for granted, comes into being." - David Abram, Philosopher and Ecologist, Author: The Spell of the Sensuous.

"In learning to read... we were satisfied when we knew the letters of the alphabet" - Plato, The Republic

Though readiness and readiness differentiated instruction reduce the difficulty, working through the code's confusing letter-sound relationships is what most challenges the brains of most struggling readers. There is a direct and causal relationship between the confusion in the code and the 'stutters' heard in the voice of a struggling reader. Obviously, understanding this confusion is critical to understanding the challenges involved in learning to read. As importantly, understanding how the code became so confused is critical to reframing the experience of struggling readers. The more we understand the accidents and negligence that led to the confusion in the English code the more it becomes obvious that it is absurdly negligent to blame and shame children for their struggle with it.

- -- Latin Roots - The clergy begin to write English using the letters/sounds of Latin
- French Rules - French displaces English as the official language of England
- The King's English - Henry V resurrects English writing
- The Chancery Scribes - The King's scribes forge the roots of modern English
- The Roots of Confusion - How written English became such a mess.
The Great Vowel Shift - Major shifts in pronunciation add further confusion
Casting Spells - The printing press standardizes the unstable writing system

...In Greek, or Latin, for example, once you could view the letters, you could read... there was almost a perfect match... Dr. Guy Deutscher, Author: The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention

...[in English] "we have fifty some sounds and only twenty-six letters. So we have to adopt a whole variety of mechanisms to close the gap." - Dr. Richard Venezky, Author: The American Way of Spelling: The Structure and Origins of American English Orthography

"We are always compromised in certain areas by having to represent sounds with symbols that weren't designed to suit those sounds." - Dr. Johanna Drucker, Author: The Alphabetic Labyrinth

"it's easy to forget that the system we have learned is a system that is based on a series of accidents that result in layers of complexity"- Dr. Thomas Cable, Co-author: A History of the English Language

..."the accident of the printing press, which in England served to freeze spelling in the fifteenth century so you have these bizarre spellings" - Dr. Malcolm Richardson, Chair, Department of English, LSU
See also: Dr. Louisa Moats on the Confusion in English
See Also: The First Millennium Bug - The fall of phoneticism and rise of confusion

With the printing of the King James Bible literacy began to spread. As it did, reading teachers began to realize that the letter-sound relationships in the code made learning to read English difficult. Phonics was born in the 16th century as an attempt to train the reader to process the unruly code. Over a century later the whole word method (originally developed for the hearing-impaired) began being used as an alternate to the 'tedious' 'rote' work of phonics.

Paralleling the battle between these two teaching social, political, institutional, and even scientific around the code polarities, another movement began which focused on reforming the code itself. The story of our attempts to change the code is fascinating and understanding these attempts, and why they failed, sheds important light on the inertia that limits our understanding of the challenges involved in learning to read.

See also " Paradigm Inertia In Reading Science and Policy"

"The heart of our trouble is with our foolish alphabet. It doesn't know how to spell and can't be taught." - Mark Twain

"Delay in the plan here proposed may be fatal... the minds of men may again sink into indolence; a national acquiescence in error will follow, and posterity be doomed to struggle with difficulties which time and accident will perpetually multiply". - Noah Webster

"People are more likely to change their religion than change their writing system." - Charles Hockett, Anthropological Linguist

"...as every letter ought to be, confin'd to one; the same is to be oberv'd in all the Letters, Vowels and Consonants, that wherever they are met with, or in whatever Company, their Sound is always the same." - Benjamin Franklin"

The second great obstacle is our absurd spelling, which scholars agree is the worst on the planet. In trying to learn this, two or three years are worse than waster" - Melvile Dewey (Dewey decimal system - champion of simplified spelling).

See also Stanislas Dehaene on how the mess of English affects "How The Brain Learns to Read"

Learning to read can be difficult for any one of a number of reasons.

CRITICAL ELEMENTS: To construct the reading experience the brain must DIFFERENTIATE and process a number of elements including: Letters, Phonemes, Morphemes, and Vocabulary. CRITICAL PROCESSING: The brain mustAutomatize and Synchronize the sub processing of the critical elements. CRITICAL SPEED: The brain must process all the above fast enough to constructRecognizable Words at Speeds that approximate the rate at which the brain is accustomed to Recognizing Spoken Language. Processing speed is critical. Analysis of the Eye Movements of good readers reveals that, on average, the brain must process letters into sounds in less than a tenth of a second. THE BOTTLENECK: The 'stutters' in the voice of struggling readers reflect the time it takes the brain to work through the confusion in the code - the time it is taking toDISAMBIGUATE the code. Code disambiguation is the brain's greatest challenge during the process of learning to read. Exacerbating all the other challenges is the DOWNWARD SPIRAL that disrupts and dissipates the brain's processing when shame sets in.

"The majority of our kids who have a tough time, they are slow, they are labored in their reading" -Dr. Reid Lyon, former Branch Chief of NICHD "You wouldn't have to have much of a fault in this machine operating with high speed in this incredible processing efficiency that's required to begin to see somebody be a little slower at it or a lot slower at it." -Michael Merzenich, Neuroscientist, Member of National Academy of Sciences "The problem with automatization is that, at any step, if you've got a slow down step, if any piece of that enterprise has a block or you can't hold enough of the information, the whole house of cards falls apart" -Dr. Terrence Deacon, Neuroscientist, Anthropologist, Linguist "The more complicated the translation from the orthography to the phonology is, the more complicated this processing dance has to be within the brain." -Dr. Paula Tallal, Board of Governors Chair of Neuroscience, Rutgers

The Problem is essentially social-educational.

For every child and adult who struggles and for all of us as a society, 'reading problems are always a consequence of 'learning problems'. Improving the learning trajectories of children (and adults) who struggle with reading requires an Orientation Shift in how Parents and Teachers think about learning and the challenges involved in learning to read.

"The problem is our society's lack of insight into what is involved in acquiring literacy." -Dr. Louisa Moats, Reading Scientist, Sopris West
"We need to reconceptualize what it means to learn to read and who's responsible for its success if we're going to deal with the problem." - Dr. Grover Whitehurst, Former Director of the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education

Reading is an unnaturally confusing challenge to our brains. It takes a lot of (early life learning) brain exercise for a brain to be ready for the challenges involved in learning to read. Depending on how well Instruction meets brain Readiness, children follow one of Two Paths: the upward spiraling of Matthew Effects or the downward spiral of Confusion and Shame.
Suggestions:
We need to Boost Brain Readiness, Reduce Extraneous Ambiguity, and Reframe the emotional experience to minimize learner's propensity to blame themselves and trigger shame. We need to engage learners in ever more frequent, complex and rapid turn-taking Dialogue. We need to learn to Isolate, Vivify and give Feedback on the real-time edge of learning. We need to be very careful to Minimize our contributions to the shame struggling learners feel.

"So painful does shame become in the public arena of the schoolroom that our children swiftly divide into two streams and two futures purely on the basis of their response to the shame that accompanies the struggle to learn our written language." - Donald L. Nathanson, M.D. Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Jefferson Medical College, Author: Shame and Pride and Knowing Feeling
"Children are developing a pre-conscious aversion to the feel of confusion and a pre-conscious aversion to the feel of confusion decapitates learning"- Children of the Code

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1000+ hours of deep-dive conversations with 100+ field leading experts, teachers, students and parents, about our collective understanding of what's at stake and what's involved in learning to read.

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Many common words present challenges to children because they are irregular in some way. An irregular word is a word that presents a challenge for decoding. These words contain elements that do not follow the most common letter-sound correspondences. Some words are permanently irregular. In these words, the sounds of the letters are unique to that word or to a very small number of words. Other words are temporarily irregular. This means that the student has not yet learned the letter-sound correspondences in the word.

Although irregular words can be challenging, there are effective methods for teaching them. The good news is that, in most common irregular words, only one or two letters don't adhere to expected phoneme-grapheme correspondences. This means children can learn to decode most of the word, and they only have to learn one or two letters "by heart." The Heart Words materials below can be used to teach irregular words this way. This approach can promote children's orthographic mapping.

Once an irregular word has been introduced and taught, which includes sounding out the decodable parts and recognizing the part(s) that need to be learned by heart, flash cards can be an effective tool for practice. For many readers, irregular words are committed to memory after only a few (1-4) exposures. A struggling reader may need 20 or more exposures to the same word before it can be recognized on sight.

Here's a helpful article about teaching irregular words.
https://www.readingrockets.org/article/new-model-teaching-high-frequency-words
Irregular "Heart" Words

This collection of "heart word"slides contains some words that are permanently irregular and others that are temporarily irregular. Each slide includes teacher guidance in the notes section to explain the irregularities in the word. You can also download and print these Heart Word Cards on card stock.
Heart Word Slides (PowerPoint) Heart Word Slides (Google Slides) Heart Word Tutorial
Irregular Word Cards

We also have traditional irregular or "hot" word flash cards and word slides for reviewing with children.
Irregular Word Flash Cards (PowerPoint) Irregular Word Flash Cards (Google Slides) Irregular Word Slides (Powerpoint) Irregular Word Slides (Google Slides)
Tutorials and Sample Lessons
Sample Lesson - Irregular Words

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Irregular and High Frequency Words | UF Literacy Institute

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Many common words present challenges to children because they are irregular in some way. An irregular word is a word that presents a challenge for decoding. These words contain elements that do not follow the most common letter-sound correspondences. Some words are permanently irregular.

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Dr. Katie Pace Miles

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Michael Hunter and Linda Farrell Webinar on When, Why, How to use Decodable vs. Leveled Text

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Michael Hunter and Linda Farrell Webinar on When, Why, How to use Decodable vs. Leveled Text

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https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zUjAn9GJwtCT7LvoQ6Db__kkuKfe_79V/view?usp=sharing

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Decodable Text Linda Farrell  Michael Hunter Oct 2021

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Deep Dive into Literacy | Center for Development and Learning

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This professional development offering is a series of online mini-course sessions. The course options range from 45-60 minute sessions that will take a deep dive into a variety of literacy topics and real-world classroom concerns.

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Laura Stewart, Chief Academic Officer, hosts school leaders who share their experiences in transforming school literacy systems and curricula. During the 60-minute webinar, thought leaders from the field participate in a question and answer session about the journey to bringing change.

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Laura Stewart, Chief Academic Officer, hosts school leaders who share their experiences in transforming school literacy systems and curricula. During the 60-minute webinar, thought leaders from the field participate in a question and answer session about the journey to bringing change.

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of assessment and instruction in today's classrooms. 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: 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. 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! 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 Speech to Print

Filling a critical gap in teacher preparation courses,

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

how
Through case studies, activities, recommended teaching principles, and close analysis of real-world student work samples, teachers will also receive invaluable insight into 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!

Watch the webinar recording

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Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers

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Speech to Print: Language... by Moats Ed.D., Louisa Cook

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Partner spotlight: Putting the science of reading into practice

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Partner spotlight: Putting the science of reading into practice

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Guest author Heidi Turchan is an early literacy consultant for Calhoun Intermediate School District in Michigan, where she provides coaching and professional learning for teachers and support staff. As a member of the REL Midwest Strategies to Improve Reading (STIR) partnership, Turchan is helping educators in Battle Creek Public Schools bridge research to practice to improve literacy instruction in grades K-1. In this post, Turchan provides tips and guidance related to the use of instructional routines based on her on-the-ground experience as an early literacy consultant.
I was a science-of-reading nerd before it was cool! My journey started 25 years ago when I became a dyslexia practitioner to support students with intensive reading needs. The science of reading was borne from the work of researchers studying how children learn to read. This body of knowledge is based on decades of research conducted by experts from multiple disciplines, including psychology, education, and neurology. Researchers have studied what happens in the brain during reading and what needs to take place instructionally to enable skillful reading. Educators who use systematic, explicit instruction to teach important components of literacy use a structured literacy approach.

All students benefit from explicit, systematic instruction rooted in the science of reading. Because my background was in speech pathology, using the structured literacy approach to support any struggling reader made perfect sense to me. Now, as the science of reading is becoming more mainstream, educators can apply the empirically based research to classroom practice by integrating structured literacy into reading instruction.

Structured literacy instruction builds on the key components that the National Reading Panel identified in 2005. Since that time, the panel has emphasized the importance of focusing phonics instruction on grapheme-phoneme-level relationships rather than larger-unit phonics approaches, which can lead to better reading outcomes. This evidence has continued to be foremost in ensuring reading success.

To explore strategies for integrating the science of reading and structured literacy into classroom instruction, Battle Creek Public Schools, along with Lansing School District, is working with REL Midwest as a part of the Strategies to Improve Reading (STIR) partnership. This partnership aims to increase reading skills in kindergarten and grade 1 by developing, testing, and refining an approach for integrating evidence-based strategies to improve literacy outcomes for students. Read on to dig into structured literacy and the key components that educators can implement to set up young readers for success.

Defining structured literacy

Structured literacy instruction is systematic, meaning that it is based on a scope and sequence. Teachers provide skills instruction sequenced in a way that makes sense to students and is comprehensive. Systematic instruction is carefully thought out, builds upon prior learning, progresses from simple to complex, and is designed before activities and lessons are planned. As instruction continues, concepts move from simple to more complex, connecting to and building upon previously taught content. Structured literacy instruction is also explicit. Teachers provide clear, direct explanations ("I do"), guided practice ("we do"), and frequent opportunities for students to practice ("you do") with timely and specific corrective feedback. As I work with teachers and literacy tutors new to structured literacy, I often hear, "I wish my teachers would have taught me to read this way when I was in school!" or, "I love that the guesswork has been taken out of instruction when I follow this sequence chart and the instructional routines!"

For students in prekindergarten through grade 2, phonological awareness activities, which include identifying and manipulating individual sounds, should be a part of every lesson. The lessons should follow a scope and sequence that intentionally orders prerequisite skills and groups related concepts with direct phonics instruction, or matching letters to sounds, as well as the structure of the English language (for example, syllable patterns, prefixes, suffixes, roots, spelling rules). This scope and sequence ensures that students will deliberately be taught reading and spelling strategies that they will be encouraged to use throughout their life.

The key components of structured literacy

Structured literacy teaches students how language components work together. Each piece of a structured literacy lesson builds on prior knowledge introduced in a previous lesson. This continuous review of concepts helps students solidify the skills being taught so they can apply them in other areas of learning. Because sequential and cumulative review is important, it is essential not to skip it. I see this too often in classrooms when teachers are feeling pressed for time.

I describe the key steps of a sample structured literacy lesson below as well as strategies for using the key components of structured literacy to put the science of reading into practice. Because of the structured manner of the instructional routines I suggest below, the instruction is carried out at a brisk pace moving seamlessly between each drill so it is possible to get through the content in a 30- to 40-minute phonics block.

Step 1: Warm up

I recommend starting a structured literacy lesson with phonological awareness practice. In grades K-2, this effort includes a 5- to 7-minute warm up for Tier 1 ("Let's get your ears warmed up for our phonics lesson by practicing our sounds!"). Written language is built from speech sounds, so educators need to begin each lesson with auditory activities that manipulate syllables and sounds. Helping children hear and manipulate phonemes, or the smallest units of sound, lays an important foundation for later associating letters with sounds.

Step 2: Teach and review previously taught concepts

A key characteristic of structured literacy instructional routines is to teach and review previously taught concepts. This practice supports student mastery of the content.

Visual drill (decoding) to see a letter and say the correct sound(s):The purpose of this drill is for students to develop automatic recall when they see a letter, or grapheme (the smallest unit of written language), of its corresponding sound. The teacher shows students a letter card, points to it, and says the letter's name. Students then repeat the letter name and vocalize the corresponding sound. The visual drill always changes: Add new cards as you teach a new concept. Remove cards after students achieve automaticity, meaning they give you the correct sound(s) without hesitation. A good rule of thumb is to have five to eight consonants or consonant clusters. After you introduce vowels, they will remain in the visual/reading review because there are numerous vowel sounds.

Auditory drill (encoding) to hear a sound and write the corresponding letter: The purpose is for students to hear a sound and automatically retrieve the multiple ways they know how to write out the sound. In this drill, the teacher says a sound. Students echo the sound to feel it on their speech organs and then write the corresponding letter. As students learn more advanced spellings based on sounds, the teacher's nonverbal cue is to hold up fingers for the number of ways they know how to spell the letter based on the sound they hear (for example, if you have taught the students four ways to write out the /o/ sound, you would hold up four fingers).

Often, teachers delete this portion of the review, but it's important to include visual and auditory drills in every lesson. Both help connect the orthographic and phonological processors in the brain and work on reciprocal processes.

Reading and spelling review: A daily review of previously taught concepts is also important for students to reach automaticity, meaning the rapid, effortless ability to recognize words. The words provided to students should include letters and sounds taught in previous lessons. Encoding practices, or spelling reviews, include teaching proper letter formation and spelling and should be done every lesson with six to nine words for previously taught concepts to ensure mastery.

Step 3: Introduce new concepts

Because reading instruction blocks vary in length, new concepts in the instructional routine can be taught over the course of 1 week. To introduce a new concept, the teacher explicitly explains it to students (for example, "Today, we are going to learn when and why to use -tch"). Next, the teacher displays the letter/sound card and reminds students that they already know one way to spell /ch/ using . "Now, when we hear /ch/ at the end of a one-syllable, short-vowel word, it is spelled with -tch."
When bringing new content into instruction, it is important to give students many opportunities to respond and to practice words to read, phrases to read, and spelling exercises. Explore the following strategies to introduce new concepts.

Guided practice: I Do, We Do, You Do:

I do: The teacher displays the word match, underlines the vowel, and says, "The vowel is pronounced / ă/ because it is closed in by the -tch. We see one vowel, so we will use -tch at the end of a one-syllable word with a short-vowel sound." The teacher then demonstrates two or three additional words with the same explicit wording.

We do: The teacher involves students in the analysis of -tch words displayed for all students by underlining the single vowel and reading the word.

You do: Students analyze the words by underlining the single vowel and then reading the words.

Words to read in isolation. The teacher provides a list of -tch words. Students can read the list of words on their own in whisper voices or with a peer. The teacher may choose to circulate around the room and monitor which students are grasping the skill and which may need more targeted small group support.

Spelling (encoding): Say it, Sound it, Write it. This procedure allows students to feel the whole word on their speech organs. For each word, students pronounce, or segment, each sound. As they do so, they "map" or write each sound on their phoneme-grapheme mapping page. Students then put the word back together as a whole.

Sentence dictation. The teacher dictates a sentence containing -tch word(s). To ensure the students heard the sentence correctly and are aware of the number of words, the students repeat the sentence and then write it independently. The teacher calls the class back together and proofreads their work using the CUPS strategy: Capitalization, Understanding (Does your sentence make sense? Did you leave any words out?), Punctuation, and Spelling.

Connected text. A structured literacy curriculum should include a decodable story. Typically, these stories will not contain pictures because the intention is for students to use the strategies they have been taught and avoid relying on pictures to figure out the words. It is important to end with connected text to give students an opportunity to practice what they learned in the lesson and to revisit what they learned previously. Even with a decodable passage, teachers can teach vocabulary and comprehension! Pre-read the passage and select one to three words that may be new to your students and teach their meaning before students read the passage (for example, the -tch passage includes words like switch, etch, and blotch). After students have read the passage, ask open-ended questions about the setting and characters to support comprehension of the text.

The knowledge provided by the science of reading combined with structured literacy implementation can be a game changer for teachers, enabling them to reach a wider range of students than with their previous literacy practices. Teachers want to teach reading efficiently and effectively so that all students learn to read.

Additional resources

To learn more about REL Midwest's work in Michigan, see this blog post and handout for an introduction to the STIR partnership. For more information on how to integrate the science of reading into practice to support literacy success, check out the following resources:

Watch REL Midwest's documentary exploring strategies used by two Michigan districts to accelerate reading growth for young learners. The program features an example of research-based professional training aligned with structured literacy along with one district's experiences with integrating data-based individualization to intensify the use of research-based instruction for students with individualized needs.

Watch a REL Midwest video that explains the need for systematic, direct, and explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics.

Watch a REL Midwest video that discusses the most effective evidence-based practices for identifying and assisting struggling readers.

Read a REL Midwest blog post highlighting strategies for using data to deliver differentiated reading instruction to students in the early grades.

Explore a What Works Clearinghouse practice guide that provides five recommendations to help educators identify struggling readers and implement evidence-based strategies to support their reading achievement.

References

Foorman, B. R., Francis, D. J., Fletcher, J. M., Schatschneider, C., & Mehta, P. (1998). The role of instruction in learning to read: Preventing reading failure in at-risk children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 90(1), 37-55. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.90.1.37

Foorman, B., Beyler, N., Borradaile, K., Coyne, M., Denton, C. A., Dimino, J., Furgeson, J., Hayes, L., Henke, J., Justice, L., Keating, B., Lewis, W., Sattar, S., Streke, A., Wagner, R., & Wissel, S. (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. https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/practiceguide/21

Gersten, R., Compton, D., Connor, C. M., Dimino, J., Santoro, L., Linan-Thompson, S., & Tilly, W. D. (2008). Assisting students struggling with reading: Response to Intervention (RtI) and multi-tier intervention in the primary grades. A practice guide (NCEE 2009-4045). U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED504264

Author(s)

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educational improvement; excellence in education; educational research; statistics; statistical data; statistical surveys; regional educational laboratory program; rel; rigorous studies; fast response projects; no child left behind

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REL Blog | Partner spotlight: Putting the science of reading into practice

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Guest author Heidi Turchan is an early literacy consultant for Calhoun Intermediate School District in Michigan, where she provides coaching and professional learning for teachers and support staff. As a member of the REL Midwest Strategies to Improve Reading (STIR) partnership, Turchan is helping educators in Battle Creek Public Schools bridge research to practice to improve literacy instruction in grades K-1.

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Hollis Scarborough-creator of the famous Reading Rope and senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories-is a leading researcher of early language development and its connection to later literacy.

Dr. Scarborough's association with the International Dyslexia Association (IDA) goes back to 1994 when she served as associate editor of the Annals of Dyslexia until 2002. In 2009, she received IDA's highest honor, the Samuel Torrey Orton Award. Dr. Scarborough continues her IDA affiliation as a member of both IDA's Council of Advisors and IDA's Scientific Advisory Board. Her contributions on a national level (e.g., the Research Council, Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, and the Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children) have positively influenced the reading instruction in the United States.

The genesis of the Reading Rope dates back to Scarborough's lectures for parents on the complexities involved in learning to read. Originally, she spoke of skilled reading as resembling the "strands" of a rope, using pipe cleaners to illustrate the interconnectedness and interdependence of all the components.

The Reading Rope consists of lower and upper strands. The word-recognition strands (phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition of familiar words) work together as the reader becomes accurate, fluent, and increasingly automatic with repetition and practice. Concurrently, the language-comprehension strands (background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge) reinforce one another and then weave together with the word-recognition strands to produce a skilled reader. This does not happen overnight; it requires instruction and practice over time.

For many children, learning to read is a challenging undertaking. The Reading Rope, created by Dr. Hollis Scarborough, captures the essence of this task.
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 printed for the purpose of resale. Permissionto republish this artilce is available from info@dyslexiaida.org.

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Scarborough's Reading Rope: A Groundbreaking Infographic - International Dyslexia Association

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Hollis Scarborough-creator of the famous Reading Rope and senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories-is a leading researcher of early language development and

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References

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Blachman , B. A. (1994). What we have learned from longitudinal studies of phonological processing and reading, and some... Journal of Learning Disabilities, 27(5), p287.

Blachman , B. A., Fletcher, J. M., Schatschneider, C., Francis, D. J., Clonan, S. M., Shaywitz, B. A., Shaywitz, S. E. (2004). Effects of intensive reading remediation for second and third graders and a 1-year follow-up. Journal of Educational Psychology, 96(3), 444-461.

Breier, J. I., Simos, P.G., Fletcher, J. M., Castillo, E. M., Zhang, W., & Papanicolaou, A.C. (2003). Abnormal activation of temporoparietal language areas during phonetic analysis in children with dyslexia. Neuropsychology , 17(4), 610-621.

Foorman, B., Fletcher, J. & Francis, D. (1997). A scientific approach to reading instruction. Learning Disabilities Online. Available: http://www.ldonline.org/ld_indepth/reading/cars.html

Shaywitz, B. A., Shaywitz, S. E., Blachman, B. A., Pugh, K. R., Fulbright, R. K., Skudlarski, P., et al. (2004). Development of left occipitotemporal systems for skilled reading in children after a phonologically-based intervention. Biological Psychiatry, 55, 926-933.

Shaywitz, S. E. (1996, November). Dyslexia. Scientific American, 77-83.

Shaywitz, S. E. (2003). Overcoming Dyslexia: A new and complete science-based program for reading problems at any level. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Simos, P. G., Fletcher, J. M., Sarkari, S., Billingsley, R. L., Castillo, E. M., Pataraia, E., Francis, D. J., Denton, C., Papanicolauo, A. C. (2005). Early development of neurophysiological processes involved in normal reading and reading disability: A magnetic source imaging study. Neuropsychology, 19(6).

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See Brain. See Brain Read: Reading Instruction Changes the Brain

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Reading instruction changes the brain. New before- and after- images that show what happens to children's brains after they get systematic, research-based reading instruction show that the right teaching methods can actually normalize brain function and thereby improve a child's reading skills.

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The Reading League's updated Curriculum Guide (March 2023)

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The Reading League's updated Curriculum Guide (March 2023)

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Use the Curriculum Evaluation Guidelines to evaluate how well a curriculum aligns with the findings from the science of reading.

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Melissa and Lori Love Literacy is a podcast for educators interested in learning more about the science of reading, knowledge building, and high quality instructional materials! Join Melissa and Lori as they learn about new ways of thinking about how to teach reading and writing. Most of their experience has been in the classroom from primary through high school, but they also have experience at district and state leadership levels in literacy. Guests include school-based educators and leaders, district leaders, literacy researchers and experts, and passionate parents and community members. Website: www.literacypodcast.com

Melissa and Lori Love Literacy is a podcast for educators interested in learning more about the science of reading, knowledge building, and high quality instructional materials! Join Melissa and Lori as they learn about new ways of thinking about how to teach reading and writing. Most of their experience has been in the classroom from primary through high school, but they also have experience at district and state leadership levels in literacy. Guests include school-based educators and leaders, district leaders, literacy researchers and experts, and passionate parents and community members. Website: www.literacypodcast.com

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‎Melissa and Lori Love Literacy on Apple Podcasts

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Melissa and Lori Love Literacy is a podcast for educators interested in learning more about the science of reading, knowledge building, and high quality instructional materials! Join Melissa and Lori as they learn about new ways of thinking about how to teach reading and writing. Most of their exper...

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Phonological skill develops in a predictable progression. This concept is important, as it provides the basis for sequencing teaching tasks from easy to more difficult. Table 1 outlines the relative difficulty of phonological awareness tasks. Table 2 is a more specific synthesis of several research reviews and summaries (Adams et al., 1998; Gillon, 2004; Goswami, 2000; Paulson, 2004; Rath, 2001) that ties specific ages to the typical accomplishment of those phonological awareness tasks.

Prerequisite to phonological awareness is basic listening skill; the acquisition of a several-thousand word vocabulary; the ability to imitate and produce basic sentence structures; and the use of language to express needs, react to others, comment on experience, and understand what others intend.

Table 1. Phonological skills, from most basic to advanced

Word awareness

Tracking the words in sentences.

Note: This semantic language skill is much less directly predictive of reading than the skills that follow and less important to teach directly (Gillon, 2004). It is not so much a phonological skill as a semantic (meaning-based) language skill.

Responsiveness to rhyme and alliteration during word play

Enjoying and reciting learned rhyming words or alliterative phrases in familiar storybooks or nursery rhymes.

Syllable awareness

Counting, tapping, blending, or segmenting a word into syllables.

Onset and rime manipulation

The ability to produce a rhyming word depends on understanding that rhyming words have the same rime. Recognizing a rhyme is much easier than producing a rhyme.

Phoneme awareness

Identify and match the initial sounds in words, then the final and middle sounds (e.g., "Which picture begins with /m/?"; "Find another picture that ends in /r/").

Segment and produce the initial sound, then the final and middle sounds (e.g., "What sound does zoo start with?"; "Say the last sound in milk"; "Say the vowel sound in rope ").

Blend sounds into words (e.g., "Listen: /f/ /ē/ /t/. Say it fast").

Segment the phonemes in two- or three-sound words, moving to four- and five- sound words as the student becomes proficient (e.g., "The word is eyes. Stretch and say the sounds: /ī/ /z/").

Manipulate phonemes by removing, adding, or substituting sounds (e.g., "Say smoke without the /m/").

Table 2. Ages at which 80-90 percent of typical students have achieved a phonological skill

4

Rote imitation and enjoyment of rhyme and alliteration

pool, drool, tool
"Seven silly snakes sang songs seriously."

5

Rhyme recognition, odd word out

"Which two words rhyme:
stair, steel, chair?"

Recognition of phonemic changes in words

" Hickory Dickory Clock. That's not right!"

Clapping, counting syllables

5½

Distinguishing and remembering separate phonemes in a series

Show sequences of single phonemes with colored blocks: /s/ /s/ /f/; /z/ /sh/ /z/.

Producing a rhyme

"Tell me a word that rhymes with car." ( star)

Matching initial sounds; isolating an initial sound

"Say the first sound in ride (/r/); sock (/s/); love (/l/)."

6

Compound word deletion

"Say cowboy. Say it again, but don't say cow."

Syllable deletion

"Say parsnip. Say it again, but don't say par."

Phoneme segmentation of words that have simple syllables with two or three phonemes (no blends)

"Say the word as you move a chip for each sound."

6½

Phoneme segmentation of words that have up to three or four phonemes (include blends)

"Say the word slowly while you tap the sounds."

Phoneme substitution to build new words that have simple syllables (no blends)

"Change the /j/ in cage to /n/.
Change the /ā/ in cane to /ō/."

7

Sound deletion (initial and final positions)

"Say meat. Say it again, without the /m/."
"Say safe. Say it again, without the /f/."

8

Sound deletion (initial position, include blends)

"Say prank. Say it again, without the /p/."

9

Sound deletion (medial and final blend positions)

"Say snail. Say it again, without the /n/."
"Say fork. Say it again, without the /k/."

Paulson (2004) confirmed the hierarchy of phonological skill acquisition in 5-year-olds entering kindergarten. Only 7 percent of 5-year-olds who had not yet had kindergarten could segment phonemes in spoken words. The production of rhymes was more difficult for 5-year-olds than commonly assumed, as only 61 percent could give a rhyming word for a stimulus. Only 29 percent could blend single phonemes into whole words. Although some young students will pick up these skills with relative ease during the kindergarten year - especially if the curriculum includes explicit activities - other students must be taught these metalinguistic skills directly and systematically.

Moats, L, & Tolman, C (2009). Excerpted from Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS): The Speech Sounds of English: Phonetics, Phonology, and Phoneme Awareness (Module 2). Boston: Sopris West.

For more information on Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS) visit Voyager Sopris .

For any reprint requests, please contact the author or publisher listed.

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Basic listening skills and "word awareness" are critical precursors to phonological awareness. Learn the milestones for acquiring phonological skills.

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Reading depends on spoken language.* This is a simple statement with profound consequences for children whose spoken language differs from the language they are expected to read. For most children, the language skills they bring to school will support learning to read, which is mainly learning to understand their spoken language in a new form: print. However, some children's language skills differ in important ways from the classroom language variety, and teachers rarely receive sound guidance on how to enhance their literacy instruction to meet these children's needs.

Teaching reading to children whose language differs from the oral language of the classroom and from the linguistic structure of academic text adds an additional layer of complexity to reading instruction. There is a large and growing body of evidence indicating that language variation impacts reading, ¹ spelling, ² and writing ³ in predictable ways. In particular, it has been demonstrated that mismatches between the language variety spoken by many African American children in their homes and communities and the written language variety encountered in books and other text can slow the development of reading and writing. ⁴

The focus of this article is the impact of one language variety, African American English (AAE), on literacy development and on teaching, assessing, and learning. Our goal is to describe aspects of instruction, curricula, and assessment that may create obstacles to literacy for African American children (compounding the effects of other factors, such as growing up in systemically under-resourced neighborhoods) and to share ways to modify instructional practices to benefit AAE speakers in significant ways.

African American English

Many African American children are bidialectal speakers of English. That is, they speak two varieties of English: African American English and General American English (GAE). Whereas AAE is frequently spoken in the child's home and community, GAE is used in reading, writing, educational contexts, commerce, and the media. One of the major educational linguistic tasks for school-aged African American children who speak AAE is to bridge the two varieties in order to develop strong literacy skills. Importantly, for many African American children, particularly those growing up in communities enduring chronic poverty, though GAE may be encountered through media, such as television, it becomes prominent upon entry into school. GAE is the medium of instruction, and in school it is learned through exposure and modeling in the classroom. Also important, not every African American child speaks AAE, although most do. ⁵

The history of AAE has been fraught with social, educational, and political judgments about AAE's legitimacy and value. ⁶ AAE is a systematic, rule-governed variety of American English spoken by a community of speakers connected by race, culture, identity, and language. That fits the linguistic definition of a "dialect," but the term is problematic for other reasons. (See the "Changing Language About Language Variation" sidebar on the right; although we support a transition from dialect to language variety in colloquial usage because of misconceptions about dialects, we also use dialect occasionally in keeping with how it is defined in linguistics.) AAE has been referred to as "bad English," "poor grammar," and "ghetto" by people outside of its community of speakers. As a result, attempts to introduce AAE into classrooms or to leverage it to teach children who speak it how to read have been met with great resistance. ⁷ Unfortunately, these negative views of AAE sometimes become conflated with the children who speak it, and expectations for them are lowered. It is important that teachers understand that language varieties are linguistically equal, even when they are not socially equal. The social stigma surrounding varieties spoken by linguistic minorities can be compounded by race and class, but they are as linguistically valid as other dialects and highly valued by the people who speak them.

When a child who is learning English as their second (or third) language lags behind in reading English, we recognize that the learning curve is steeper because the child is learning to both speak and read a second language. We have not given this same consideration to children who use two dialects. Although AAE and GAE overlap more than two distinct languages, research has demonstrated that using two varieties can complicate learning new, language-influenced skills (i.e., reading and writing) as much as using two languages. In fact, the subtle transformations between the cultural and the general varieties of a single language may be even more difficult for young children to detect and resolve than the more obvious differences between two languages. ⁸ By design, curricula and instructional activities for children who are learning English take their dual language status into account. Extending these same benefits and considerations to dual variety speakers could have comparable, positive consequences for African American children.

By far the most studied variety of American English, AAE's characteristics in the five primary domains of language (morphology, phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics) have been well-documented in adults and are becoming better documented in children. ⁹ These investigations have demonstrated that as used by young children, AAE primarily involves variation in verb morphology, syntax, and phonology (see "Key Features of African American English" below). Because reading depends on spoken language, AAE is significantly implicated in learning to read.

Impact on Reading

The influence of AAE on reading has been a particular emphasis for research focused on school-aged African American children. Because reading depends on spoken language, AAE is an obvious candidate for understanding disparities in reading achievement between African American children and their white and Asian peers. Having documented these disparities for more than 50 years, perhaps it is time to examine potential solutions-such as materials and practices that are sufficiently sensitive to the needs of AAE speakers. ¹⁰

One key issue is the amount of dialect present in a child's language, which is referred to as dialect density. Dialect occurs on a continuum from low to high use. For example, children for whom dialect influences less than 10 percent of their oral language are said to have low dialect density; those for whom dialect influences 50 percent or more of their oral language have high dialect density.* Differences in density impact reading and writing in important ways. ¹¹ The higher the dialect density, the further the child's speech is from the language used in reading and writing. Simply put, linguistic distance influences how much instruction and practice a child is likely to need to bridge the differences between oral language at home, oral language spoken by the teacher, and the written language of books and other texts. ¹² The more AAE that a child uses, the more likely that reading, writing, and spelling growth may be slowed, ¹³ contributing to the reading struggles of African American children in later elementary school and adolescence. ¹⁴ Challenges in learning to read are not inevitable for children who speak AAE, but greater attention to the impact of their language on reading and writing development is critical.

The culture of education demands that AAE speakers engage in additional language learning compared with GAE speakers. Requiring AAE-speaking children to switch to GAE without using their linguistic strengths in AAE to bridge the two varieties represents a significant encumbrance. Children are required to demonstrate linguistic flexibility ¹⁵ at the same time that their cognitive resources are being allocated to learning the language of the classroom along with a wide array of new academic and social skills.

Some children manage these additional linguistic and social demands, but many do not. For example, AAE speakers already know how to conjugate verbs but must also learn a second set of rules for conjugation in GAE. Learning the second dialect involves discovering what is different in GAE, compared with what the child already knows in AAE. Although progress in reading is related to facility with GAE, providing the additional time and relevant opportunities to acquire knowledge of AAE and GAE differences tends not to be a priority in most schools or curricula. At school entry, AAE speakers' exposure to GAE varies and typically lags behind monodialectal GAE speakers simply because their language experiences prior to school entry do not always include GAE. Analogous effects are seen in bilingual children, who need extra time and support to become fully proficient in both their home language and English. Importantly, given that both bilingual and bidialectal speakers are typically stronger in one language or variety than the other, achieving parity between the two can take considerable time.

Nonlanguage Factors

In addition to the differences between AAE and GAE, other factors contribute to the difficulty many African American children experience with academic achievement in general and reading in particular. Some factors are related to the child's immediate environment, such as socioeconomic status and family factors; other factors are related to the broader social, economic, and political context, especially educational opportunity and quality, housing security, and access to adequate nutrition and healthcare. Of these, socioeconomic status (SES) has received the most attention. The impact of reading difficulties on many aspects of emotional health and well-being have also been examined, albeit to a lesser extent.

Socioeconomic Status

Income inequality and educational inequality have been linked historically. ¹⁶ Recent analyses suggest that disparities in students' academic achievement by race and socioeconomic status have remained virtually unchanged for the past half century. ¹⁷ In the United States, income, wealth, and access to higher education are unequally distributed. Although policymakers, researchers, and others have long talked about "achievement gaps," differences in academic performance between high- and low-SES students are more accurately referred to as opportunity gaps. For students from lower-SES backgrounds, their achievement often does not represent their potential to learn, but it does reflect the inequality in opportunity to learn resulting from lower-quality and less-abundant educational, social, and material resources that often plague children in both urban and rural environments.

The opportunity gap has been calculated as a 1.0 standard deviation disparity in achievement between children in the highest- and lowest-SES ends of the distribution. ¹⁸ This difference represents a disparity of approximately four years' worth of learning in both math and reading, and it persists through high school. Notably, among AAE speakers, nearly 100 percent of high-density dialect users are from low-income families and communities. ¹⁹ Thus, high density of dialect seems to reflect the social isolation characteristic of neighborhood poverty ²⁰ that limits experience with and exposure to GAE. In the classroom, this frequently translates into poor reading performance.

Emotional Health and Well-Being

The persistence of reading difficulties among most African American children, and the challenges it presents for other learning that depends on reading, often has negative effects on confidence, self-image, and willingness to engage in school. ²¹ Struggles with reading become aversive and can promote avoidance of the activity. Unsuccessful educational outcomes are associated with numerous negative consequences, many of which have lifelong impacts. Because these are well known, we turn to a less discussed concern.

For individuals who succeed at becoming bidialectal and managing the associated educational demands, there are other personal costs to consider. Biases surrounding the use of AAE can be very harmful to children, negatively affecting not only their motivation in the classroom but also their linguistic identities. Usage of GAE is expected and valued in educational and other institutional contexts. Effective use of GAE in such contexts involves not only learning and using GAE but also inhibition of AAE, which requires cognitive effort. Similar to bilingual speakers, bidialectal speakers engage in monitoring their own speech to evaluate its appropriateness and self-correct as needed. They may actively avoid speaking in fear of producing non-GAE expressions. They may consciously engage in mental translation from AAE to GAE before speaking, and they may compose utterances to conform to linguistic expectations rather than speaking freely. Anecdotally, African American college students for whom switching from AAE to GAE does not occur automatically report great concern about participating in discussions in the college classroom for fear of "saying it wrong." When AAE is the speaker's culturally and personally authentic code, using GAE is an adaptation to external constraints, including pressure to assimilate. Corrections of AAE as "bad English" convey to the speaker that their cultural language (and therefore their culture) is inadequate or defective. As a result, the use of GAE may be performative rather than authentic.

Assuming different personas in differing contexts, in this case school and home, creates the "double consciousness" described by sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois. ²² Monitoring the presentation of self, which includes language, carries cognitive and emotional costs. Cognitively, it is an additional task to be performed while engaged in other activities (such as reading). Emotionally, it involves continuous self-evaluation, criticism, and correction. Research on this topic is almost nonexistent, but it is a part of the bidialectal experience that needs close attention. ²³

Recommendations for Teaching

Speaking AAE is not inherently an obstacle to becoming a reader, but it becomes one when children's specific needs are not recognized or addressed. The issues we have reviewed suggest many supportive steps school systems and educators could take. We offer six recommendations below to help school systems and educators begin reconsidering how they engage African American children who are becoming bidialectal and learning to read. Collectively, the essential supports mainly involve (a) providing sufficient opportunities to learn; (b) using materials and practices that are effective given the students' backgrounds; and (c) eliminating the unwarranted stigma associated with using AAE and instead focusing on effectively addressing the educational needs of AAE speakers in ways that build on their knowledge rather than disparaging it.

1. Expand teachers' knowledge of language variation.

As part of their professional training, prospective teachers usually are made aware of a number of cultural differences that may affect education. However, language variation and its impact on reading and instruction are rarely emphasized. Teachers who gain this background will know that language variation is a universal linguistic phenomenon and that AAE, like other dialects, differs from the codified, more general version of American English used in education but is otherwise linguistically unremarkable-it is a "standard" example of dialectal variation, so to speak. They could also gain greater understanding of how such variation affects educational goals and practices, as discussed below.

2. Expand children's knowledge of language and the world prior to school entry.

Many AAE-speaking children are less ready than their peers to benefit from reading instruction on the first day of kindergarten because they are not familiar with the school dialect. But young children are exceptionally good language learners; AAE speakers could gain greater facility with GAE in a language-intensive pre-K environment that provided rich and abundant access to both oral and written language. In 2018, only 38 percent of Black 3- to 5-year-olds were enrolled in preschool, compared with 43 percent of their white peers. ²⁴ This disparity in early childhood education should not only be eliminated-we should invest in greatly expanding access to high-quality, language-focused preschools throughout our most under-resourced neighborhoods.

Children learn language via exposure and use, not explicit instruction. In the course of a school year, teachers whose own language backgrounds vary would provide thousands of examples of utterances in each variety and would model the ways that people who speak somewhat differently successfully communicate. Children can learn pronunciations of words and ways to conjugate verbs that differ from their own language use if given sufficient opportunities to learn them. Children can also gain greater awareness of conditions that govern movement between codes (e.g., their use in different settings or with different individuals), a critical skill for any child who speaks two languages or two varieties. Learning more about GAE does not require extinguishing knowledge of AAE, any more than learning a second language requires unlearning the first. Rather, it places AAE speakers on a more equal footing with children who have learned GAE in the home, while still honoring the need, and desire, to communicate with their families, communities, and friends who also use AAE.

Parents and other caregivers can also be encouraged to create additional language-learning opportunities for children outside of school. Efforts to gain families' participation will be more successful if their role in helping their children thrive is emphasized; parents and caregivers are committed to the success of their children but often do not know how to help. Reading books to children may provide a vehicle for introducing linguistic expressions and aspects of the world beyond their immediate experiences. The language in books for children includes vocabulary and grammatical constructions that differ from those in everyday speech, and thus are not available anywhere else except books. ²⁵ "In the light of the moon a little egg lay on a leaf" is the first line of an enormously popular book for very young children, ²⁶ but few people talk that way. Shared reading can provide a context for expanding children's world knowledge and giving them additional practice in using language. For parents who do not read well themselves or are uncomfortable with reading, educators (as well as librarians and others who engage with families) can help caregivers find books paired with audiobooks that parents and children can listen to together. The audiobooks do not take the place of books but allow parents and children to interact around the book, listening to the story together, and prompt parents when to turn the page.

Parents can also provide language-learning opportunities simply by having conversations with their children. Parents are often encouraged to talk to their children, but it is important to stress having conversations that are, by definition, interactive. This kind of talk encourages turn-taking, requiring input from both the caregiver and child. If teachers are concerned about how much conversation is happening outside of school, it might be helpful to send children home with conversation starters, encouraging them to be the catalysts for sparking family conversations. For example, educators could: teach or make a game at school, then send it home with children and encourage them to teach it to their families; encourage the class to ask a parent or caregiver to teach them how to make their favorite food and write down the recipe to share at school; or read a book to the class several times and then send it home with students to share. In each case, children rehearse the skill or activity at school first, making them eager to show what they have learned when they get home. Both parents and children get very excited about this kind of sharing; it removes the burden from both to figure out how to do or initiate what the teacher has instructed and makes children proud to share what they have learned.

3. Use classroom materials and practices that are effective with AAE speakers.

The curricula and support materials produced by major educational publishers assume that GAE is the language of the child and the classroom. With rare exceptions, these materials do not accommodate differences in language background or provide clear guidance about appropriate practices for children who need support to become bidialectal. Unfortunately, this means that it is left to classroom teachers to develop materials and practices on their own. The table on the right provides a list of the major features of AAE likely to be present in young children's language use. It is not an exhaustive list but provides some guidance regarding the language structures that children use and what they will need to learn to speak, read, and write in GAE. Especially in the case of phonology, the table highlights places where children may need extra time to learn a new phonological form because it differs significantly from their own sound system. Here, we note several key implications for instruction.

Phonological awareness: It is commonly assumed that spoken word play, such as rhyming, develops phonological awareness (knowledge of the structure of spoken words), which facilitates later reading acquisition. The activity emphasizes perfect rhymes such as bear-care, which share the same rime (pronounced air). Perfect rhymes are less prominent in AAE word play than other types of phonological overlap, however. ²⁷ Indeed, for any child whose language variety impacts the vowel system, the words that rhyme will differ. For example, for an African American child in the southern United States, the word thing may rhyme with either king or rang, depending upon how it is pronounced. Moreover, even perfect rhymes work differently because AAE phonology allows optional deletion of final consonants in some cases. For example, cold and hole can rhyme in AAE because of deletion of the final /d/. The net effect is that these activities do not always function in the same way as for GAE speakers.

Phonemic awareness: Tasks such as deciding if two words begin or end with the same sounds bring attention to phonemic structure, which is a key to learning spelling-sound correspondences. The validity of the exercise can again be vitiated by differences in pronunciation. When the task involves comparisons of initial phonemes (e.g., ball, book), AAE and GAE speakers perform comparably. In contrast, some AAE speakers may perform poorly on comparisons involving final consonants, because they are variably included in AAE. It may take AAE-speaking children as much as a year longer to master phonemic awareness in the final position of words. 28 Deciding that cold and hole do not end in the same sound may be difficult if cold is usually pronounced cole. When children take longer to acquire such knowledge, we should not assume that they are less capable learners. We should realize that AAE speakers are learning both a new oral language variety and to identify final consonants (whereas GAE speakers only have to learn the latter).

Phonics: Learning the correspondences between the spellings of words and their pronunciations is an important step in learning to read. Instruction typically assumes that words are pronounced as in GAE. What happens if the child's pronunciations are different, as occurs for many words in AAE? For example, a teacher might write the word gold on the board, pronounce each of the component sounds, and model how they are blended to form gold. For a GAE speaker, the lesson is about the correspondences between four letters and four sounds. The lesson is different for an AAE speaker who pronounces it gole. AAE speakers may be able to figure out the correspondence between the teacher's pronunciation and their own, but translating between the two involves extra effort and a single spelling now corresponds to two pronunciations. Then, in a future phonics lesson, AAE-speaking children may be confused as they learn to spell the homophonic word goal.

We have investigated these conditions using computational models that learn phonics (i.e., spelling-sound correspondences). ²⁹ The models first learned the GAE pronunciations of a large set of monosyllabic words. In the AAE condition, half the words had different pronunciations than in the GAE condition because of final consonant deletions. The models were then taught the correspondences between the spellings of the words and their GAE pronunciations. Although both models could learn the correspondences with sufficient experience, the AAE model took much longer because it was learning the alternative pronunciations of half the words at the same time. This model provided an explicit, mechanistic account of the impact of mismatches between the oral and written language system that children who are becoming bidialectal invariably encounter.

Reading aloud: Reading aloud is an important, widely used learning activity. Children's accuracy and fluency as they read aloud is an indicator of their progress and provides opportunities for feedback-but learning two varieties can make the task more difficult. A child who knows the AAE and GAE pronunciations of cold needs to produce one and suppress the other. The child may be able to generate the "correct" (for the school setting) pronunciation, but may do so more slowly, giving the appearance of lack of fluency. Researchers have found a tradeoff between rate and accuracy when African American children read aloud, such that they achieved a lower score on fluency because they slowed down their reading in order to improve the grammatical accuracy of their oral reading. ³⁰ In this same study, as the complexity of reading passages increased, students appeared to sacrifice reading accuracy in an effort to manage the lexical and syntactic complexity of passages. These outcomes provide evidence of the active decision making that can constrain the cognitive resources that bidialectal readers are able to apply to oral reading. In addition to reducing fluency while reading aloud, this may impact reading comprehension. (Similar results are found among children who are becoming bilingual, but their challenges with reading aloud in English tend to be better understood.) When reading aloud occurs in front of other students, the appearance of lower proficiency can be deeply embarrassing and can create aversion to reading.

Attention and effort: Children who are still learning the school dialect have to focus greater attention and effort on understanding the teacher's speech, which can detract from being able to focus on the content. In a busy classroom setting where the teacher is harder to hear or see, the impact will be greater. These difficulties can be lessened for children by providing in writing any important information that has been presented orally, as well as providing visual supports whenever possible. In addition, we encourage teachers to become more familiar with AAE in order to better comprehend and communicate with children and families who are high-density AAE speakers. ³¹

4. Provide enough time on task.

Sensitivity to the time a child who is becoming bidialectal may need to master a new language skill is critically important. A child who has more to learn to reach a goal needs more time to get there. ³² It takes ample learning opportunities, sufficient practice, and, for many children, additional instruction. This requires rethinking our views about what constitutes "typical" developmental trajectories. Instead, teachers should offer as much learning time in early childhood and throughout the elementary grades as needed for African American children to enter the middle grades as confident readers and writers.

Bidialectal children may take more time to gain the knowledge that supports skilled reading, but that is a byproduct of acquiring more knowledge to connect with the knowledge that they already have. ³³ Educational outcomes for these children are modulated by numerous factors, including educational quality, amount of experience using each language variety, and availability of educational resources in the home and community. Successfully addressing these initial challenges-and doing so in a way that values the home language variety-can eventually yield the many personal, social, and economic benefits of being bidialectal.

5. Respond constructively to AAE use in the classroom.

Teachers face difficult choices when students use AAE in the classroom. If AAE is viewed as "bad English," the response may be to provide a GAE correction, which conveys to children that their home language is bad. It should be possible to help children learn the classroom language variety without negative messages about AAE. With very young children, in preschool through first grade, simply providing full-form models of classroom language is helpful. For example, if a child is deleting the copula, a teacher can cheerfully produce the same utterance, making the copula salient and lengthening the child's production slightly.

Child: "This my backpack."
Teacher: "Yes, this IS your backpack. Let's put it away."

After several such opportunities to learn, children who were once deleting the structure will begin to include it. This is a common, effective technique used in interactions designed to enhance language development that can be easily applied in a classroom.

Based on a classroom observation, a researcher ³⁴ provided an example of a teacher who corrects Joey, a third-grade boy, who pronounces the word street as skreet (which is a common cultural and regional variant). When Joey says Orange Skreet rather than Orange Street, his teacher replies by saying, "Not skreet. Say street." Joey responds, "Skreet." His teacher makes him read the sentence again, but Joey continues to say skreet. The classroom teacher corrects him again in front of the class. When the teacher finally leaves him alone, he continues to read aloud, but this time haltingly, mumbling and fearful of saying the wrong thing and being further embarrassed by the teacher. This is a great example of what not to do. By treating the phonological variation in the child's reading as an error, the teacher eroded Joey's self-confidence, making him likely to be more resistant to reading aloud in the future. It is an experience he will likely never forget! A more helpful approach would be for Joey's teacher to make a note of the skr/str pronunciation and include it in a whole-class language lesson without singling out Joey or any other child. This is typically a regional variant. Since Joey is doing it, there are likely others who are as well, and everyone would benefit from spending time learning the sound-phoneme mapping for this consonant cluster.

At the other extreme, many teachers are averse to commenting on children's use of their home language variety, concerned that it is not their role to encourage becoming bidialectal. The philosopher Jennifer M. Morton discusses issues of justice and ethics associated with dialect differences. ³⁵ She acknowledges the perceived need to accommodate GAE given its importance for health, education, and employment under existing circumstances but also the threats to personal and cultural integrity that adopting GAE entails. The need for one group to adapt to the language and culture of another in order to thrive is an intrinsic form of inequality. She concludes that gaining knowledge of both GAE and AAE is nonetheless the most favorable accommodation to non-ideal circumstances.

Teachers need additional guidance and opportunities to engage in professional dialogue on this issue. Not responding to use of the home variety is an instructional choice that conveys information about linguistic expectations. The challenge is to balance the need to respect children's language and culture, while helping them gain additional facility with the classroom language variety because it serves other functions (as in learning to read).

6. Recognize the impact of bidialectal experience on comprehending and producing language.

Becoming fluent in using two languages or dialects is a positive achievement, but there are bumps along the way, such as the interference between codes that often occurs in comprehension and speaking or reading aloud. Slower responses, dysfluencies, and other "errors" occur because the child's knowledge of the two codes and how to use them is still developing, not because the child lacks the ability to learn. Many studies have demonstrated that children who speak AAE also understand GAE. They may be slowed down in some areas where the two dialects contrast, as we noted above. With few exceptions, AAE and GAE are mutually intelligible. Given sufficient time and relevant experience, bidialectal speakers, like bilinguals, will learn to navigate the two codes in both oral language and print.

Final Takeaways

Most languages have several within-language varieties. An inclusive way to think about language varieties is that they occur along a continuum from those that differ little from the general variety to those that are more distant. This framing includes all communication practices across all speakers ³⁶ and does not consider one variety to be superior. It allows us to put languages and speakers in their proper perspective as equally valued, especially as we support children learning to read and write. All children need to have the skills to make linguistic choices across contexts: formal, informal, home, school, speaking, reading, or writing. Even within these contexts, there are choices that require varied skills, such as writing a report for school, writing a thank-you card for a birthday gift, or writing a text to meet up with friends.

Above all, our shared goal should be for all children to become good readers; this requires practice with reading. For children who speak more than one language variety, learning to read requires learning the differences between their oral language and print, in addition to the inconsistencies of English orthography, making supportive instruction and abundant practice even more critical for mastering reading. The burden placed on the child can be tremendous, but it can be mitigated by effective, culturally responsive instruction and through being given the time needed to master new skills.

Finally, teaching children who are becoming bidialectal to read does not require an entirely new, separate theory of reading instruction. The same elements that have been identified for all developing readers to break the code are necessary for children who speak AAE as well. What differs is the delivery of these elements. Reading is a language-based task; introducing language variation affects the efficacy of many standard instructional practices and reading-related activities. The impact of language variation on reading is not an intractable issue. Adapting instruction and materials to encompass and embrace such variation reduces the load for both teachers and students, allowing them to reach their respective goals.

Julie A. Washington is a professor in the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine. A speech-language pathologist and fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, she directs a Learning Disabilities Research Innovation Hub and the Dialect, Poverty, and Academic Success Lab. Mark S. Seidenberg is the Vilas Research Professor and Donald O. Hebb Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also codirects the Language and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab. Seidenberg's work is supported by the Deinlein Language and Literacy Fund.

*The exception is the case of deaf children who use a visual-gestural, rather than spoken, language. ( return to article)
†Although this assertion is anecdotal, it is based on our combined 70 years of experience. ( return to article)

Endnotes

1. M. Brown et al., "Impact of Dialect Use on a Basic Component of Learning to Read," Frontiers in Psychology 6, no. 196 (2015); and J. Washington et al., "The Impact of Dialect Density on the Growth of Language and Reading in African American Children," Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 49, no. 2 (2018): 232-47.
2. C. Kohler et al., "African American English Dialect and Performance on Nonword Spelling and Phonemic Awareness Tasks," American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 16, no. 2 (May 2007): 157-68; and N. Terry, "Relations Between Dialect Variation, Grammar, and Early Spelling Skills," Reading and Writing 19, no. 9 (2006): 907-31.
3. Brown et al., "Impact of Dialect Use"; and C. Puranik, L. Branum-Martin, and J. Washington, "The Relation Between Dialect Density and the Codevelopment of Writing and Reading in African American Children," Child Development 91, no. 4 (2020): e866-e882.
4. Brown et al., "Impact of Dialect Use"; and Washington et al., "The Impact of Dialect Density."
5. H. Craig and J. Washington, "Oral Language Expectations for African American Preschoolers and Kindergartners," American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 11, no. 1 (2002): 59-70; J. Washington and H. Craig, "Morphosyntactic Forms of African American English Used by Young Children and Their Caregivers," Applied Psycholinguistics 23, no. 2 (2002): 209-31; and C. Connor and H. Craig, "African American Preschoolers' Language, Emergent Literacy Skills, and Use of African American English: A Complex Relation," Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 49, no. 4 (2006): 771-92.
6. J. Baugh, Out of the Mouths of Slaves: African American Language and Educational Malpractice (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999).
7. J. Baugh, Beyond Ebonics: Linguistic Pride and Racial Prejudice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
8. J. Siegel, Second Dialect Acquisition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
9. R. Fasold and W. Wolfram, "Some Linguistic Features of Negro Dialect," Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 3, no. 4 (1972): 16-49; and W. Wolfram, C. Adger, and D. Christian, Dialects in Schools and Communities (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999).
10. E. Ferrer et al., "Achievement Gap in Reading Is Present as Early as First Grade and Persists Through Adolescence," Journal of Pediatrics 167, no. 5 (2015): 1121-5, e1-e2; and W. Teale, K. Paciga, and J. Hoffman, "Beginning Reading Instruction in Urban Schools: The Curriculum Gap Ensures a Continuing Achievement Gap," Reading Teacher 61, no. 4 (2007): 344-48.
11. Washington et al., "The Impact of Dialect Density"; Puranik, Branum-Martin, and Washington, "The Relation Between Dialect Density"; and J. McDonald and J. Oetting, "Nonword Repetition Across Two Dialects of English: Effects of Specific Language Impairment and Nonmainstream Form Density," Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 62, no. 5 (2019): 1381-91.
12. Brown et al., "Impact of Dialect Use."
13. Brown et al., "Impact of Dialect Use"; Washington et al., "The Impact of Dialect Density"; and Puranik, Branum-Martin, and Washington, "The Relation Between Dialect Density."
14. A. Tatum, Teaching Reading to Black Adolescent Males: Closing the Achievement Gap (Portland, ME: Stenhouse, 2005); and A. Tatum, "Breaking Down Barriers That Disenfranchise African American Adolescent Readers in Low-Level Tracks," Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 44, no. 1 (2000): 52-64.
15. L. Makalela, "Moving Out of Linguistic Boxes: The Effects of Translanguaging Strategies for Multilingual Classrooms," Language and Education 29, no. 3 (2015): 200-17.
16. E. Hanushek et al., The Unwavering SES Achievement Gap: Trends in U.S. Student Performance, working paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, March 2019; and E. Hanushek et al., "The Achievement Gap Fails to Close," Education Next 19, no. 3 (2019): 8-17.
17. Hanushek et al., The Unwavering SES Achievement Gap; and S. Reardon, "The Widening Income Achievement Gap," Educational Leadership 70, no. 8 (2013): 10-16.
18. Hanushek et al., The Unwavering SES Achievement Gap; and Hanushek et al., "The Achievement Gap."
19. Washington et al., "The Impact of Dialect Density"; and Puranik, Branum-Martin, and Washington, "The Relation Between Dialect Density."
20. B. Rankin and J. Quane, "Neighborhood Poverty and the Social Isolation of Inner-City African American Families," Social Forces 79, no. 1 (2000): 139-64.
21. S. Rowley et al., "Framing Black Boys: Parent, Teacher, and Student Narratives of the Academic Lives of Black Boys," Advances in Child Development and Behavior 47 (2014): 301-32.
22. W. Du Bois, "Double-Consciousness and the Veil," in Social Class and Stratification: Classic Statements and Theoretical Debates, ed. R. Levine (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 203; and W. Du Bois, "Strivings of the Negro People," The Atlantic, August 1897.
23. L. Delpit and J. Dowdy, eds., The Skin That We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in the Classroom (New York: New York Press, 2002).
24. National Center for Education Statistics, "Preschool and Kindergarten Enrollment," in The Condition of Education (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, 2020).
25. J. Montag, M. Jones, and L. Smith, "The Words Children Hear: Picture Books and the Statistics for Language Learning," Psychological Science 26, no. 9 (2015): 1489-96.
26. E. Carle, The Very Hungry Caterpillar (New York: World Publishing Company, 1969).
27. A. Shollenbarger et al., "How African American English-Speaking First Graders Segment and Rhyme Words and Nonwords with Final Consonant Clusters," Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 48, no. 4 (2017): 273-85.
28. S. Thomas-Tate, J. Washington, and J. Edwards, "Standardized Assessment of Phonological Awareness Skills in Low-Income African American First Graders," American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 13, no. 2 (2004): 182-90.
29. Brown et al., "Impact of Dialect Use."
30. H. Craig et al., "Performance of Elementary-Grade African American Students on the Gray Oral Reading Tests," Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 35, no. 2 (2004): 141-54; and C. Thompson, H. Craig, and J. Washington, "Variable Production of African American English Across Oracy and Literacy Contexts," Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 35, no. 3 (2004): 269-82.
31. T. Beyer, K. Edwards, and C. Fuller, "Misinterpretation of African American English BIN by Adult Speakers of Standard American English," Language & Communication 45 (2015): 59-69.
32. M. Seidenberg and M. MacDonald, "The Impact of Language Experience on Language and Reading," Topics in Language Disorders 38, no. 1 (2018): 66-83.
33. Thomas-Tate, Washington, and Edwards, "Standardized Assessment."
34. B. Wright, The Brilliance of Black Boys: Cultivating School Success in the Early Grades (New York: Teachers College Press, 2018).
35. J. Morton, "Cultural Code-Switching: Straddling the Achievement Gap," Journal of Political Philosophy 22, no. 3 (2014): 259-81.
36. Makalela, "Moving Out of Linguistic Boxes"; and O. García and C. Sylvan, "Pedagogies and Practices in Multilingual Classrooms: Singularities in Pluralities," Modern Language Journal 95, no. 3 (2011): 385-400.

[illustrations by Ojima Abalaka]

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Teaching Reading to African American Children

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Reading depends on spoken language.* This is a simple statement with profound consequences for children whose spoken language differs from the language they are expected to read. For most children, the language skills they bring to school will support learning to read, which is mainly learning to understand their spoken language in a new form: print.

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Phonemic awareness might be one of the most important, most talked about, and most misunderstood aspects of literacy. Some of that confusion stems from the similarities and differences between phonological and phonemic Awareness. They are very much related, but not interchangeable. If Phonological Awareness is an umbrella that covers skills, those skills include hearing words in sentences, rhyming, hearing syllables and phonemic awareness.

Phonemic Awareness is one aspect of Phonological Awareness. It is about the individual sounds in words and includes isolating, segmenting, blending and manipulating those phonemes.

Research has been very clear that while phonological awareness is important, phonemic awareness is key to literacy development. It is important for efficient decoding, encoding, and even fluency. The most recent research has pointed to the importance of advanced phonemic awareness skills and automaticity with these skills.

But, what about the student that is young and just starting out their literacy journey?

How can teachers and parents help build phonological and phonemic awareness for their youngest students?

Many of the activities you see in a great early childhood classroom are great for developing phonological awareness.

Reading aloud lays a fabulous foundation.

Books with rhymes are particularly good at tuning the ears.

Helping children to understand the concept of a word as one spoken part (such as their name),

Singing songs

Playing games

These are are all early ways to build PA skills.

Should you worry about rhyming?

By the time formal schooling starts, formal instruction in phonemic awareness becomes necessary as well. Remember, while phonological awareness is important, the individual phonemes are key. Many tutors and parents get hung up when a student has a great deal of difficulty with rhyming. Students with dyslexia often struggle greatly with rhyming. While it is valuable to keep working at it, don't neglect the more important syllable and phoneme-based skills. Sometimes it is necessary to let rhyme go for a little while. But, a student that is struggling with phonological awareness skills, likely struggles with phonemic awareness and other aspects of reading.

For those children who are struggling in the development of these skills, here are some tips to keep in mind:

BUT FIRST- AN IMPORTANT AND OFTEN OVERLOOKED POINT I HAVE TO MAKE.

Incorporate activities that focus on strengthening listening skills! I can nearly guarantee if your students aren't demonstrating age appropriate listening skills or practicing them with age appropriate activities, they WILL struggle with phonemic awareness tasks. Children hear a barrage of noises coming in many different directions all the time whether it's at home or in school. We need to train them how to be still, and quiet enough to hear single sounds. This takes a great deal of focus for young children to listen to the task, process what you are asking them, and retrieve the correct answer. Make listening tasks into quick games. The tried and true Simon Says is a great one, and is always a hit.

Here are some more: Have them close their eyes and play a mystery sound. They have to guess which direction in the classroom it's coming from. Choose five mystery objects either and hide them behind a presentation board, or hide just one object inside a box. Make the sound of each object and have children guess which object that is. And finally- a GREAT listening task that is also a prerequisite to phonemic awareness tasks is playing three sounds in row. They have to tell you which came first, which came in the middle, and which came last. Using silly puppets or animal sounds is great for younger students. They won't realize you're prepping them for phonemic awareness tasks, so make it FUN.

Start with an assessment. or another phonemic awareness skill inventory will REALLY help you inform your instruction. This is particularly important for struggling readers as they need to make efficient progress to catch up. It is important not only to test for accuracy but automaticity. The PAST is a FREE download and easy to implement! See Equipped For Reading Success by Dr. David Kilpatrick for further instructions, scoring, and next steps after administration.

Move through phonemic awareness skills in an organized way. Isolating individual sounds is easier than segmenting all the sounds in a word. Segmenting is easier than blending. Adding sounds is easier than taking sounds away. Taking sounds away is easier than changing one sound to another. Beginning sounds are easier than ending sounds. Ending sounds are easier than middle sounds. Following a progression of skills from simple to complex helps stay within a student's ideal zone of learning.

In addition to moving through skills systematically, move through instructional activities in a systematic way. For example, judging whether two sounds are the same is easier than identifying which in a series doesn't belong. Sorting rhymes is easier than producing them. Sounds and words that are very different are easier than words and sounds more similar. Gradually increasing the difficulty of activities will make

Phonemic awareness is an auditory skill. For younger learners, it is best to teach the skills without any letters attached. The exercise is about listening or as I like to call it "ear training". Instead of words, you can use pictures to represent words. Note: Phonemic awareness practice is also a highly metacognitive skill. Simply put- metacognitive tasks force you to think about your thinking. Your children, and even some adults, will have to REALLY concentrate on what you ask them in a task when it comes to thinking about individual phonemes. That's why I emphasized the importance of building listening skills at the beginning of this post.

Make it hands-on: Use manipulatives to make segmenting and changing phonemes concrete. Even though we aren't using letters, this doesn't mean there is no visual support. The only limit to possible options is your imagination. Small toys, pennies, colored squares of paper, mini erasers, pieces of felt, pony beads on a pipe cleaner, linking cubes, colored wooden blocks and even small snacks help to make the activities multisensory and engaging. Read "How To Organize Materials for Teaching Phonological Awareness" for organizational ideas.

Use hand motions and physical movement to help students focus on particular sounds. Use your voice, by bouncing or stretching sounds to help students isolate specific phonemes. Teach students about mouth position, voiced and unvoiced sounds to help them more accurately analyze the sounds in words.

Above all else... Make it FUN.

Simple movement activities and games make learning highly engaging for younger children. When you make phonemic awareness tasks into a game, you also have an opportunity to build language skills, which so many challenged learners NEED. This phonological awareness bundle is made with activities that are quick and impactful. It is FILLED with games your students will enjoy as they begin to strengthen their phonemic awareness skills.

Traditionally, curriculums and teachers stop teaching phonemic awareness once students are able to segment words. There is research to support that accuracy with basic phoneme segmentation is not enough. Students need to become proficient and automatic with even advanced phonemic awareness concepts in order for these skills to transfer to reading and writing fluently.

1. Be sure to read "Equipped For Reading Success" by Dr. David Kilpatrick.

2. Skills and lessons are broken down in a systematic format with a TON of hands on activities and games your students will love in this Phonological Awareness bundle.

3. Heggerty has manuals with scripted lessons to address phonemic awareness skills in an easy to follow, week by week format.

Next time, I'll get into phonemic awareness tasks for older readers. We'll talk about more advanced phoneme manipulation tasks, how to recognize when your students are ready to move onto this critical step in their foundational literacy skills, and ways to help them gain not only phonemic awareness, but phoneme proficiency.

Did you happen to see the post on helping older students with phonemic awareness? You'll find lots of helpful tips if you work with younger kids.

Thank you for stopping by today!

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How To Help Younger Students Build Phonemic Awareness Skills

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Phonemic awareness might be one of the most important, most talked about, and most misunderstood aspects of literacy. Some of that confusion stems from the similarities and differences between phonological and phonemic Awareness. They are very much related, but not interchangeable.

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In this special Reading Rockets video series, reading expert Linda Farrell works one-on-one with students in grades K-3 to help ensure that they master the skills they need to become proficient readers.

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Learn from nationally known researchers and experts in literacy and early education. Topics include phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, spelling, comprehension, writing, summer learning, early childhood education, dyslexia, and more.

Featured Experts

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Video Interviews with National Literacy Experts

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Learn from nationally known researchers and experts in literacy and early education. Topics include phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, spelling, comprehension, writing, summer learning, early childhood education, dyslexia, and more. Featured Experts

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The Reading League has put together a list of options, not recommendations, of frequently requested decodable texts.

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At a glance

Working memory helps kids hold on to information long enough to use it.

Working memory plays an important role in concentration and in following instructions.

Weak working memory skills can affect learning in many different subject areas including reading and math.

Have you ever gone to the store without a list, thinking you'll remember everything you need...but discovered when you got home that you forgot several items? If so, you've experienced the limitations of working memory. Working memory is the mental sticky note we use to keep track of information until we need to use it.

Working memory is key to learning. Here are five ways children use working memory to learn.

1. Working memory and accessing information

There are two types of working memory: auditory memory and visual-spatial memory. You can think of these skills in terms of making a video. Auditory memory records what you're hearing while visual-spatial memory captures what you're seeing. But that's where working memory's similarity with making a video ends.

When you make a video, visual and auditory information is stored for safekeeping and can be played back when you need to access it. You don't necessarily need to pay attention to details when you're filming. Working memory, on the other hand, isn't just stored for later use. It has to be accessed and "played back" immediately - even as new information is arriving and needing to be incorporated.

Imagine a teacher reads a word problem in math class. Kids need to be able to keep all the numbers in their head, figure out what operation to use, and create a written math problem at the same time.

Kids with weak working memory skills have difficulty grabbing and holding on to that incoming information. This means they have less material to work with when they're performing a task.

In math class, they may know how to do different kinds of calculations. However, they run into trouble with word problems. It's difficult to listen for clue words that indicate which operation to use, while at the same time remembering the numbers that need to be plugged into the equation.

2. Working memory and remembering instructions

Kids rely on both incoming information and information stored in working memory to do an activity. If they have weak working memory skills, it's hard to juggle both. This can make it challenging to follow multi-step directions. Kids with weak working memory skills have trouble keeping in mind what comes next while they're doing what comes now. For example, your child may not be able to mentally "go back" and recall what sentence the teacher wanted written down while also trying to remember how to spell out the words in that sentence.

3. Working memory and paying attention

The part of the brain responsible for working memory is also responsible for maintaining focus and concentration. Here, working memory skills help kids remember what they need to be paying attention to. Take, for example, doing a long division problem. Your child needs working memory not only to come up with the answer, but also to concentrate on all of the steps involved in getting there.

Kids with weak working memory skills have trouble staying on task to get to the end result. You could think of it like the learning equivalent of walking into a room and forgetting what you came in to get.

4. Working memory and learning to read

Working memory is responsible for many of the skills children use to learn to read. Auditory working memory helps kids hold on to the sounds letters make long enough to sound out new words. Visual working memory helps kids remember what those words look like so they can recognize them throughout the rest of a sentence.

When working effectively, these skills keep kids from having to sound out every word they see. This helps them read with less hesitation and become fluent readers. Learning to read isn't as smooth a process for kids with weak working memory skills.

5. Working memory and learning math

Being able to solve math problems depends on a number of skills that build on one another like building blocks. The block at the bottom - the most important one in the stack - is the ability to recognize and reproduce patterns. It's the foundation for the next block: seeing patterns in numbers in order to solve and remember basic math facts.

From there, kids build up to storing information about a word problem in their head; they then use that information to create a number sentence to solve the problem. This eventually leads to the ability to remember mathematical formulas.

What keeps the blocks from toppling over is the ability to remember, sequence, and visualize information - all of which can be difficult for a child with weak working memory skills.

The good news: There are ways to help

Having weak working memory creates obstacles to learning. But there are ways to get around these obstacles. You can try working memory boosters like playing cards or numbering directions. With help from you and supports at school, your child can build up working memory skills so learning is less of a struggle.

Key takeaways

Working memory is like a mental sticky note that keeps track of short-term information.

There are two kinds of working memory that work together: auditory memory and visual-spatial memory.

There are things to do at home and at school to help your child strengthen working memory skills.

About the author

About the author

Amanda Morin is the author of "The Everything Parent's Guide to Special Education" and the former director of thought leadership at Understood. As an expert and writer, she helped build Understood from its earliest days.

Reviewed by

Reviewed by

Bob Cunningham, EdM serves as executive director of learning development at Understood.

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Why Is Working Memory Important? | Working Memory and Learning

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Working memory helps kids hold on to information long enough to use it. Working memory plays an important role in concentration and in following instructions. Weak working memory skills can affect learning in many different subject areas including reading and math.

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Catch Them Before They Fall: Identification and Assessment to Prevent Reading Failure in Young Children

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Early identification is crucial when it comes to helping children who are having trouble learning to read. This seminal article by Joseph Torgesen explains the assessment process and reviews the more commonly used assessment tools.

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The authors of this article are a group of researchers and practitioners who are looking to end the divisiveness of the "reading wars" - and help children learn to read and write with competence and pleasure. See the list of contributing editors as well as the 25 nationally recognized colleagues who support this effort.

Introduction

Recently there have been many discussions among academics about the "Science of Reading." Such discussions advance science which is constantly evolving over time, but in the meantime, what's a practitioner on the front lines to do?

Teachers need clarity, not confusion, about how to deliver the evidence-based and meaningful instruction that we know can bring 90-95% of students to grade-level reading.

While reading is a complex endeavor, one area of confusion seems to be in how to teach the foundational skills usually occurring from pre-K to Grade 1 or 2.

As concerned researchers and practitioners, we offer a brief summary of what we consider most important in early instruction to reach this critically important goal for our children and for our society.

Literacy begins with oral language

The new mastering of literacy is built upon the continuing mastery of spoken language that children develop while listening to others and expressing their own ideas and feelings. As they listen to interesting books being read, as they carry on conversations and discuss topics of interest, children are strengthening spoken language pathways in the brain. Effective literacy instruction gradually maps new neural networks intimately interlocked with these speech networks.

With modeling and explicit, systematic instruction, reading and writing skills develop together over time as children gain knowledge of the world, grow vocabularies, and expand their understanding of how spoken words are represented in print.

Early literacy benefits from both print-to-speech and speech-to-print instruction, creating connections in the brain that link new knowledge about the alphabet to what children already know and are continuously learning about words - their pronunciation, their meaning, and their use.

Understanding the alphabet code

Children cannot become skilled readers by memorizing the visual appearance of words or by using cues like pictures to guess at written words. They need to understand that the alphabet is a code, to learn to use it to make their own spoken words visible ( en-code), and to figure out words that someone else has written ( de-code).

Letters represent the individual sounds we say and hear when we pronounce a word. When we learned to speak, we didn't need to be aware of saying separate sounds in words (phonemes). However, to use the alphabet as a code for those spoken sounds, children need to become conscious of each phoneme they say as they pronounce a word. This essential skill is known as phoneme awareness (PA).

To master the alphabet code, it is important to develop an automatic ability to identify these speech sounds (around 40 in English) and link them to letters or combinations of letters (graphemes). An understanding of this process helps teachers guide children's learning with explicit and systematic instruction. Weakly developed PA is consistently associated with poor reading and spelling. Present evidence supports PA instruction in segmenting and blending for all early readers, and more intensive instruction for struggling readers. Teachers should tailor instruction whenever possible to the needs of individual students.

Segmenting and encoding spoken words

When children are told that the letter 'm' stands for the sound /mm/, they understand that a letter stands for a sound that they say and hear. However, to read and spell a word like mat, children also must recognize that they are saying three different sounds when they say the word mat. Spelling words requires focusing on the pronunciation of each sound as the word is segmented. The crucial and most difficult step is becoming aware of the full sequence of sounds as a word is spoken so that those speech sounds can be linked to letters and used to spell out a meaningful word.

Segmenting the word's sounds is not easy for many students and must be learned through instruction and practice, until it becomes automatic. Phoneme awareness and segmenting should be taught in parallel with letter knowledge and phonics instruction. If children segment a familiar word like mat in order to spell it, the speech sounds get linked to concrete letters that are used to make that spoken word visible.

The visible letters they assemble or write can help them to retain the memory of pronouncing that sound. The physical act of writing also adds more motor learning to these multi-modal links. This process is called encoding.

Introducing speech-to-print and print-to-speech together

Children do not need to learn the names, shapes, and sounds of all 26 upper- and lower-case letters before they tackle the construction of real words. Children as young as four can develop PA and practice a few phoneme-letter pairs as they learn to encode simple consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words. Using letters to spell meaningful words is physically engaging and constructive. For example, children might begin by listening to a sentence with the word cat in it. Then they can be shown how to segment cat into its sounds and use movable alphabet tiles to spell cat - C-A-T. They can point to the letters as they blend them back into the word cat.

A new word mat can be used in a sentence, segmented, spelled, decoded, and connected to meaning in the same way. Now the 'm' can be removed from mat leaving at. When children proceed to try the word sat, they should be asked what sound they are saying at the beginning of the word sat. At this point, children need to say the word sat, and try to identify the first sound they are saying on their own. This process may need repetition and scaffolding at first.

As they learn their letter-sounds, children begin to choose the letters and spell out the words by themselves. They are turning words they can say into words they can see. As they read back the word that they have spelled, children are also practicing decoding. Some children may need more deliberate steps to encoding by practicing oral segmenting and blending of spoken words, or by manipulating blank tiles before tackling letters. By mastering both functions of the alphabet code (encoding and decoding), children may be surprised to discover that they can independently read and write real words.

Segmenting and spelling their own spoken words, then blending those letter sounds back into spoken words, contributes powerfully to skilled reading. It is important that children know the meaning of the words they are learning to encode and decode. Through these activities, they are developing linked pathways in the brain connecting what they already know about words (their pronunciation, meaning and use) with the new symbols used for reading and writing. They can listen with pleasure to books with rich vocabularies and exciting stories that you read and discuss with them, and tackle more decodable books on their own.

Recognizing repeated patterns

It is possible for children to "discover" on their own some of the rules involved in how spoken words are made visible. A few children seem to learn to read with little or no systematic instruction. They have learned to master the code through other source - a helpful adult, software, or television - and generalize the patterns they recognize to figure out how letters stand for the sounds they say and hear.

However, for many children this implicit learning that involves recognizing patterns does not come easily, and they will need more intensive and explicit instruction, and time for practice. Patterns are recognized when they are repeated over and over. Introducing too many words that are not regularly spelled, like said or was, can interrupt the process of noticing the regular patterns of spelling. As children learn to encode and decode, it is helpful to work with regularly spelled words as much as possible.

Spelling words phonetically

Once children grasp the concept that letters stand for sounds that they say, whether in English or other European languages, they begin to figure out that they can write any word they can say. As they learn to express their own ideas on paper, they will spell words phonetically for a while, practicing PA and phonics as they write.

Spelling corrections can be made as they write to dictation, and orthographic patterns can be introduced gradually, so that a child's early pleasure in writing is not dampened by too many "mistakes." Time for encoding/writing should be scheduled daily.

Developing automatic word recognition

Brain research shows that early reading requires development of neural pathways linking speech to new learning about print. Memorizing the visual appearance of words does not require the same participation of speech. More efficient brain pathways develop as children master PA, phonics, the alphabet code, and word knowledge in order to encode and decode meaningful text.

These networks will be elaborated over time as new words, (their pronunciations, spellings, usage, and sometimes multiple meanings) are mapped and stored. When these neural maps are created and repeated, familiar words are no longer decoded intentionally, but are recognized automatically. Introducing morphemes to change words like play into plays, player, played, and playing can dramatically increase the number of words that are recognized automatically.

Mastering the early foundation skills of letter recognition, PA, word knowledge, decoding, and encoding, requires conscious attention and effort at first. Like learning to ride a bicycle, with practice these skills become automatic and unconscious for most children. Automaticity with a code requires both encoding and decoding. When both become proficient and automatic, reading and writing enable a lifetime of enjoyment and learning.

In summary, it is our view that early literacy, like breathing, requires equal measures of in and out: both print-to-speech and speech-to-print instruction.

Our group of reading researchers and practitioners

Instigating author

Jeannine Herron, Ph.D., Research Neuropsychologist
Director, Talking Fingers

Author, Making Speech Visible

Contributing critics and editors

Jane Ashby, Ph.D., Professor of Reading Science, Mount St. Joseph University, OH,

Kelly Butler, M.Ed., Chief Executive Officer, Barksdale Reading Institute, Jackson, MS

Linnea Ehri, Ed.D. Educational psychologist, Distinguished Professor Emerita, Graduate Center, CUNY

Margie B. Gillis, Ed.D., Educational consultant, President Literacy How, Inc., Research Affiliate, Haskins

Margaret Goldberg, M.A., Literacy Coach, co-founder of the Right to Read Project

Jan Hasbrouck, Ph.D. Researcher/Consultant. JH Educational Services, Co-author, Reading Fluency

Louisa Moats, Ed.D. Psychologist, author of LETRS Professional Development, and Speech to Print

Laura Stewart, M.F.A., CAO, 95 Percent Group, co-author The Everything Guide to Informational Text

Jan Wasowicz, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, BCS-CL, CEO SPELL-Links/Learning by Design, Inc., Inventor Earobics

Maryanne Wolf, Ph.D., Professor-in- Residence, UCLA, Author, Proust and the Squid, Reader Come Home

Supporting colleagues

Donald Bolger, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Department of Human Development, University of Maryland

Jan Burkins, Ed. D., Co-author of Shifting the Balance, co-founder of "The Six Shifts"

Mary E. Dahlgren, Ed.D. CEO Tools 4 Reading

Linda Diamond, author Teaching Reading Sourcebook, founder CORE

Steven P. Dykstra, PhD, Psychologist, Wisconsin Reading Coalition

Elsa Cardenas Hagan Ed.D., SLP, Pres. Valley Speech Language & Learning Center, Research Associate UH, TX

Marcia K. Henry, Ph.D., Professor Emerita San Jose State U., President, IDA 1992-1996

Tiffany P. Hogan Ph.D., Professor, MGH Institute of Health, Research Associate Harvard University.

Wesley A. Hoover, Ph.D. Cognitive Psychologist , EO , (retired) SEDL, AIR Austin, TX

Ryan Lee-James, Ph.D. CCC-SLP, Chief Academic Officer, Atlanta Speech School

Pam Kastner, Ed.D. Literacy Statewide Lead, Penn Training & Tech Assistance Network (PaTTAN)

David Kilpatrick, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Psychology, State University of NY at Cortland, NY

G. Reid Lyon, Ph.D., former Chief Child Development and Behavior Branch, NIH

Nancy Mather, PhD., Professor Emerita, University of Arizona

Terrie Noland, Ph.D., CALP, Vice-President, Educator Initiatives, Learning Ally

Charles Perfetti, Distinguished University Prof., Director Learning Res. & Dev Center, U. of Pittsburgh

Ken Pugh, Ph.D., President and Director of Research, Haskins Laboratories

Tim Shanahan, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois at Chicago

Donald Shankweiler, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, U. of Connecticut, Research Staff, Haskins Laboratories

Keith Stanovich, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of Applied Psych. & Human Development., U. of Toronto

Louise Spear-Swerling, Ph.D. Professor Emerita Southern Connecticut State University

Stephanie A. Stollar, Ph.D., Assistant Professor at Mount St. Joseph U., Founder Reading Science Academy

Danielle M. Thompson, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, Ed. Consultant, President, Transformative Reading Teacher Group

Joseph Torgesen, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Director Emeritus FCRR

Nancy Cushen-White, Ed.D., Clinical Professor Dept. Pediatrics UCSF, UCSF Dyslexia Research Team

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Print-to-Speech and Speech-to-Print: Mapping Early Literacy

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The authors of this article are a group of researchers and practitioners who are looking to end the divisiveness of the "reading wars" - and help children learn to read and write with competence and pleasure. See the list of contributing editors as well as the 25 nationally recognized colleagues who support this effort.

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Essential Instructional Practices in Early Literacy: Grades K to 3

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Website for Michigan Association of Intermediate School Administrators

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The Six Shifts Where Science of Reading Meets Balanced Literacy. We provide resources, professional development, and literacy audits for busy literacy educators like you.

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Essential Instructional Practices in Early Literacy: Grades K to 3

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Website for Michigan Association of Intermediate School Administrators

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Teacher Professional Learning | Literacy, Math | MTSS

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Curriculum Adoption

Curriculum Implementation

Literacy Coaching & Site Implementation Support

Early Literacy Planning & Implementation Collaboration

Publisher Approved Professional Learning

Online Elementary Reading Academy

Adolescent Literacy Solutions

Curriculum Adoption

Curriculum Implementation

Rise in Math

Math Coaching

Online Math Academy

Onsite Math Academy

Teaching Reading Sourcebook 3rd Edition

Curriculum Adoption

Curriculum Implementation

Literacy Coaching & Site Implementation Support

Early Literacy Planning & Implementation Collaboration

Publisher Approved Professional Learning

Online Elementary Reading Academy

Adolescent Literacy Solutions

Curriculum Adoption

Curriculum Implementation

Rise in Math

Math Coaching

Online Math Academy

Onsite Math Academy

Teaching Reading Sourcebook 3rd Edition

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Assessing Reading: Multiple Measures, 2nd Edition - Teacher Professional Learning | Literacy, Math | MTSS

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Curriculum Adoption Curriculum Implementation Literacy Coaching & Site Implementation Support Early Literacy Planning & Implementation Collaboration Publisher Approved Professional Learning Online Elementary Reading Academy Adolescent Literacy Solutions Curriculum Adoption Curriculum Implementation Rise in Math Math Coaching Online Math Academy Onsite Math Academy Teaching Reading Sourcebook 3rd Edition Curriculum Adoption Curriculum Implementation Literacy Coaching & Site Implementation Support Early Literacy Planning & Implementation Collaboration Publisher Approved Professional Learning Online Elementary Reading Academy Adolescent Literacy Solutions Curriculum Adoption Curriculum Implementation Rise in Math Math Coaching Online Math Academy Onsite Math Academy Teaching Reading Sourcebook 3rd Edition

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Dr. Kilpatrick's Phonological Awareness Skills Test (PAST)

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Dr. Kilpatrick's Phonological Awareness Skills Test (PAST)

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The PAST can be downloaded above. Please also download and carefully read the instructions before using. Information can also be found in the manual “Equipped for Reading Success” by David A. Kilpatrick, Ph.D in chapter 11 on how to effectively use the test. Make sure to also practice using the test before using it with […]

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What Resources do ElementaryTeachers Use for EnglishLanguage Arts Instruction?The K-5 ELA CurriculumLandscape in Michigan

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What Resources do ElementaryTeachers Use for EnglishLanguage Arts Instruction?The K-5 ELA CurriculumLandscape in Michigan

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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We believe all children deserve to learn to read and all teachers can learn to teach them.

The Reading League is a national education nonprofit led by educators and reading experts dedicated to promoting knowledge that will accelerate the global movement toward evidence-aligned reading instruction. We train and support educators and school leaders, and by extension, we also serve parents, specialists, and researchers.

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The Science of Reading - The Reading League

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We believe all children deserve to learn to read and all teachers can learn to teach them. The Reading League is a national education nonprofit led by educators and reading experts dedicated to promoting knowledge that will accelerate the global movement toward evidence-aligned reading instruction.

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To achieve fluency, a student must read with appropriate rate, expression, and accuracy. All three components are required for fluency, but are they equally important? Jan Hasbrouck, Ph.D., is a reading researcher and Read Naturally supporter who has devoted her career to studying fluency. In this guest post, she discusses as the foundational component of fluency.

Dr. Hasbrouck's thoughts and research are consistent with Read Naturally's approach to building fluency. During the Pass step of the Read Naturally Strategy, students must read accurately, making no more than three errors. For students at various rates of fluency performance, three or fewer errors translates into:

98% accuracy at 150 WCPM (Words Correct Per Minute)
98% accuracy at 125 WCPM
97% accuracy at 100 WCPM
96% accuracy at 75 WCPM
95% accuracy at 50 WCPM*

By mandating these percentages in order for students to move through the program, the Read Naturally Strategy effectively trains students to become more accurate readers.

Here is what Dr. Hasbrouck has to say on the topic:
What is the FOUNDATION of reading fluency? I have been thinking about reading fluency in one way or another since I became a reading teacher over 40 years ago. My first job after getting my degree was to serve as the Title I reading teacher for a rural district about 30 miles from my home. I worked with students from grades one to six who struggled with reading. A common characteristic of these students-whether they were attempting to identify letter sounds, read CVC words, or decode and understand text-was that they read slowly and laboriously. Reading was clearly hard for them, and plainly not motivating. These students had poorly developed fluency skills. We've come to understand that achieving a certain level of fluency is necessary for both comprehension and motivation. The National Reading Panel Report (2000) pointed out that, "Despite its importance as a component of skilled reading, fluency is often neglected in the classroom." Teachers everywhere heard that admonition, and fluency has now become a BIG focus in many classrooms. That's the good news. Unfortunately, the bad news is that we are too often seeing a misunderstanding of what fluency really is. Too many educators seem to believe that a fluent reader is someone who can read FAST. They may have forgotten that the FOUNDATION of reading fluency is accuracy. Of course rate has an important role in fluency, but rate must be layered on top of accuracy. I often remind teachers of the Five F's of Fluency: FIRST, FOREMOST and FOREVER the FOUNDATION of FLUENCY is accuracy! Researchers have been helpful in providing us with guidelines for just how accurate a reader should be. In the chapter on fluency in the recent Handbook on Reading Research (2011), the authors suggest that we need to teach students to maintain at least 95% accuracy when they read independently, in order to sufficiently access the meaning of the text and enjoy the process of reading. This is the level of accuracy they suggest for established readers, say by the middle of 2nd grade or so. It may surprise you to learn that they suggest that our emerging readers in K and grade 1 should read text independently with no less than 98% accuracy. Why the difference? It has a lot to do with motivation. We want our beginning readers to use the decoding skills we've taught them with confidence. We want them to read appropriate text (consisting of short sentences comprised of pre-taught sight words and CVC words and rebuses as necessary) accurately, because that builds their sense of accomplishment and motivation. (Please note that these figures are for independent reading. When students are receiving instruction, we must correct and provide appropriate feedback on every error, achieving 100% accuracy during guided practice so that they will be sufficiently accurate during independent practice.) So, while we should continue to embrace the essential importance of fluency for successful reading, let's be sure we don't ever sacrifice accuracy for speed in the process!
* Note that 95% accuracy for beginning readers is adequate for Read Naturally students because Read Naturally programs target struggling readers. Accuracy expectations increase as our programs help these struggling readers become more fluent.

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Blog :: Guest Post: Jan Hasbrouck on the Foundation of Reading Fluency :: Read Naturally, Inc.

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To achieve fluency, a student must read with appropriate rate, expression, and accuracy. All three components are required for fluency, but are they equally important? Jan Hasbrouck, Ph.D., is a reading researcher and Read Naturally supporter who has devoted her career to studying fluency. In this guest post, she discusses as the foundational component of fluency.

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Essential Instructional Practices in Early Literacy: Grades K to 3

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Website for Michigan Association of Intermediate School Administrators

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WWC | Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade

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Students who read with understanding at an early age gain access to a broader range of texts, knowledge, and educational opportunities, making early reading comprehension instruction particularly critical. This guide recommends five specific steps that teachers, reading coaches, and principals can t…

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Keys to Literacy founder, Joan Sedita, is the creator of framework for writing instruction. Based on research findings, the framework organizes effective writing instruction practices into five strands. Educators can use The Writing Rope to determine if their writing curriculum or program addresses all essential components of writing instruction.

View the 2019 article The Writing Rope: The Strands That Are Woven Into Skilled Writing published by Keys to Literacy.

Joan has written a book published by Brookes Publishing titled The Writing Rope: A Framework for Explicit Writing Instruction in All Subjects. The book delves into each strand in the rope and includes teaching suggestions drawn from Joan's writing professional development courses.

About the Book

From the back cover:
Joan Sedita's innovative Writing Rope weaves multiple skills and strategies into five fundamentals of a comprehensive writing curriculum: critical thinking, syntax (sentence structure) text structure, writing craft, and transcription (spelling and handwriting). Teachers will get crystal-clear guidelines that demystify the process of helping students learn to write and write to learn across academic content areas. With dozens of included templates, handouts, and other resources - available for download online - teachers will have all the tools they need to design and deliver explicit, high-quality writing instruction.
The target audience for the book is grades 4-8, but many of the instructional suggestions can be used with children in younger grades and with high school students, especially those who have writing difficulty.

To Order the Book

Click here to order the book at the Brookes Publishing store.

Free Book Study Guide

Joan has prepared a set of questions designed to help individuals or groups of educators reflect on the content of the book. Click here for a free set of the book study questions.
Archived Book Study
Click here to access free recordings of a 5-part webinar series of Joan Sedita's book study sponsored by PaTTAN (PA Training & Technical Assistance Network).

Are you interested in professional development related to The Writing Rope?

WORKSHOPS: If your organization is looking for a 60- to 90-minute overview workshop for a conference or school-district professional development day, contact Keys to Literacy to schedule one of our writing consultants. This workshop begins with a brief overview of research related to effective writing instruction, followed by a review of the five strands in The Writing Rope: Critical Thinking, Syntax/Sentences, Text Structure, Writing Craft, Transcription Skills. Examples of effective instruction for each strand are highlighted.

MORE IN-DEPTH TRAINING: In writing the book, Joan combined the research on effective writing instruction with her decades of experience teaching students and training teachers. Many of the instructional suggestions in The Writing Rope are part of Keys to Literacy writing professional development programs. Click on each title below to learn more about the professional learning options, online courses, and books, or contact us to discuss professional learning options.

These professional development courses provide detailed suggestions and guided practice for using many of the instructional practices that are introduced in The Writing Rope book.

Permission to Use The Writing Rope

Joan Sedita holds the copyright and trademark to The Writing Rope. To ask for permission to reference The Writing Rope, send an email including a contact name and email, and a brief description of how The Writing Rope will be used to: info@keystoliteracy.com

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"The Writing Rope" by Joan Sedita - Keys to Literacy

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Keys to Literacy founder, Joan Sedita, is the creator of The Writing Rope framework for writing instruction. Based on research findings, the framework organizes effective writing instruction practices into five strands. Educators can use The Writing Rope to determine if their writing curriculum or program addresses all essential components of writing instruction.

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Presented by Mary Dahlgren, Ed.D., Founder and CEO, Tools 4 Reading, LLC
Moderated by Terrie Noland, Ph.D., CALP, Vice President of Educator Initiatives, Learning Ally

Sponsored by Learning Ally
Register Here Learn more about viewing the live presentation and the recording, earning your CE certificate, and using our new accessibility features.
Using a sound wall in your classroom can transform instruction! Because of the Science of Reading, we are becoming more aware of the role of phonetics and phonology in beginning reading and spelling. While learning to speak happens long before learning to read, teaching how speech maps to print has not always been a part of general classroom instruction. Developing phonemic awareness to a prescribed level must happen prior to the development of automatic sight word reading.

Explicitly teaching the sounds, how they are produced in the mouth, attending to what is happening with your tongue, teeth, and lips and the flow of air makes learning more concrete. In this edWebinar, we will examine the 44 speech sounds, how to introduce them and build a sound wall with consonants and vowel phonemes, and discuss strategies for engagement as part of daily practice. These are some of the stepping stones to orthographic mapping so all students can become fluent and proficient readers. Educators will:

Learn about the importance of articulation and the connection to phoneme awareness

Understand the reason for the layout of a sound wall and how it is more student friendly than a word wall

Analyze common phonological errors students make and how to give corrective feedback

This edWebinar will be of interest to K-12 teachers and school and district leaders. There will be time for questions at the end of the presentation.
About the Presenter About the Moderator
Mary Ellis Dahlgren, Ed.D. is Founder and President of Tools 4 Reading. She is an experienced educator with over 35 years in the field, having served as a dyslexia therapist, elementary classroom teacher, international literacy consultant, and published author. She is also the author of a respected and successful phonics tool kit which includes Kid Lips and Phoneme-Grapheme Instructional Cards for teachers of elementary, special education, and English language learners. Dr. Dahlgren is a past national trainer for the distinguished teacher curriculum Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS), and President of The Reading League Oklahoma Chapter. She says, "My passion is to help every professional involved in teaching reading feel empowered, equipped and confident in providing the highest quality instruction possible."

Listen. Learn. Teach. It's that simple. Terrie Noland uses this philosophy as an innovator and a motivator, and it's evident as she leads, coaches and mentors thousands of K-12 educators about the science of reading each year. She has a unique perspective on the need to unify all stakeholders around a vision for education to smash the reading divide for the millions of struggling readers. Her daily mission is to add value to educators to help influence transformational changes in school districts across the country by addressing the needs of marginalized students. Terrie seeks to share her expertise and passion to encourage and to illuminate a path towards success and measurable outcomes.
Learn more about viewing the live presentation and the recording, earning your CE certificate, and using our new accessibility features.
If you looked at Terrie's resume, you would be confused. Her undergraduate and graduate degree work placed her in the field of criminal justice. However, it was through continuous listening and learning that led her on a journey in education starting out in preschool teaching and administration, then becoming a Certified Academic Language Practitioner (CALP) and earning a Ph.D. in literacy and educational leadership from St. John's University. Terrie is also a John Maxwell certified speaker and coach.

As Vice President of Educator Initiatives at Learning Ally, Terrie works to ignite enthusiasm and excitement by building champion educators and administrators on creating cultures of literacy and learning.

Join the Empowering Struggling Readers community to network with educators, participate in online discussions, receive invitations to upcoming edWebinars, and view recordings of previous programs to earn CE certificates.

Learning Ally is a leading education solutions organization committed to transforming the lives of struggling learners. The Learning Ally Audiobook Solution is a proven reading accommodation comprised of human-read audiobooks, student centric features and a suite of teacher resources. Used in more than 17,000 schools, this solution successfully helps students with reading deficits become engaged learners and reach their academic potential.

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Sound Walls: The Benefits of Using Them for ALL Students - edWeb

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Presented by Mary Dahlgren, Ed.D., Founder and CEO, Tools 4 Reading, LLC Moderated by Terrie Noland, Ph.D., CALP, Vice President of Educator Initiatives, Learning Ally Sponsored by Learning Ally Register Here Learn more about viewing the live presentation and the recording, earning your CE certificate, and using our new accessibility features.

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Scientific research has shown how children learn to read and how they should be taught. But many educators don’t know the science and, in some cases, actively resist it. As a result, millions of kids are being set up to fail.

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The Science of Reading: Defining Guide provides a firm definition of what the science of reading is, what it is not, and how all stakeholders can understand its potential to transform reading instruction.

Download the Spanish version

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The Reading League's new book, Science of Reading: Defining Guide, provides in-depth information on the science of reading and key instructional practices to help you make the shift in your practice.

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Hilary Muñoz is a special education teacher at Chicago Public Schools who has taught reading to bilingual students on the city's southwest sides.

The national board certified teacher was finding that her students, who are native Spanish speakers, had not been progressing in reading before coming to her classroom. After a fruitless search for answers and receiving pushback from administrators, she did her own research and created an approach that enabled her students to progress. It was based on phonics-based instruction.

When asked if her students were struggling with reading due to a language barrier or a reading issue, she said that it was an issue with the instruction that they received in the past. Muñoz said at a panel on Tuesday night that rather than focusing on curriculum, she devised an approach to help her students learn to read and comprehend what they were reading.

Muñoz spoke to educators, reading advocates, and parents at a discussion on literacy instruction hosted by the CPS Parent Literacy Collaborative and the non-profit group Brightbeam.

Reading advocates throughout Illinois say students struggle to read because schools are not using the science of reading, including teaching phonics. Now, they say, it's even more important for schools to embrace effective methods as they try to catch up students who are not reading at grade level after the coronavirus pandemic disrupted learning for more than two years.

Illinois test scores from the 2021-22 school year show that only 29.9% of students from third to eighth grades met state standards in reading, a 7.5 percentage point drop from 2019.

Earlier this year, literacy advocates pushed a bill to standardize reading instruction across the state. The Right to Read Act would have required the state to create a list of evidence-based reading programs and develop lists of support, training, and grants for interested districts The bill also would have created a statewide online training program for current teachers in early education and elementary schools, and would have required teachers seeking licensure to show knowledge of effective reading instruction.

The bill did not pass, but reading advocates anticipate reviving it during the lame-duck session in January or in the spring legislative session.

Even with momentum to change how schools teach reading, schools throughout Illinois and the country still stick to debunked methods. Some local schools use an approach called "balanced literacy" that mixes some phonics into "whole language instruction," which is based on a philosophy that reading is a natural process.

Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan, a bilingual speech-language pathologist, said during the panel discussion on Tuesday that schools must embrace an evidence-based approach to teaching reading and that educators must use multiple strategies to help students learn how to read.

"To be able to learn to read, you have to have those foundational skills, and that includes understanding how the structure of language works," said Cárdenas-Hagan, who is president of the Valley Speech Language and Learning Center in Texas. "What are those letters and sounds, how do we blend them together, do we have the ability to process those sounds, can we read them ... all the while to be working on language and those high levels of comprehension."

Maurice Swinney, a former Chicago Public Schools administrator, said he spent time as a principal trying to figure out how to help his high school students read at grade level.

"One of the missed opportunities that I had looking back was not focusing on how the brain takes in information in order to create a reading schema. Meaning, when you start to see these words all the time you know what they mean," Swinney said. "I think it is important for classroom teachers to become scientists to understand how the brain works."

If students are not proficient in reading by the end of third grade, they are four times more likely to drop out of school or fail to graduate, according to a national study. Also, some incarcerated people are not able to read or have undiagnosed dyslexia.

Some families are taking action against schools for not teaching their children to read. A group of Michigan students sued the state in 2020 for not providing them with a proper education. A similar case was settled in California.

States around the country have passed laws to teach the science of reading in the early grades and states have used federal COVID relief funds to expand reading programs. Some have created a statewide curriculum and recommended textbooks, third grade literacy screenings, professional development for teachers, and revamping teacher preparation programs.

At Tuesday's panel, an audience member asked how schools can prevent failure and instead help students succeed in reading before they fail.

Kareem Weaver, a national advocate for the science of reading, said that "Prevention looks like early screening. Prevention looks like tier one instruction that follows the science and research consensus. Prevention means that you're not skipping steps," said Weaver, the co-founder of the Oakland, Calif.-based literacy group Fulcrum. "Prevention means that you have a solid curriculum that includes phonemic awareness, so we can attend to the sounds kids are hearing."

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Literacy advocates push for schools to use research to teach students how to read

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Hilary Muñoz is a special education teacher at Chicago Public Schools who has taught reading to bilingual students on the city's southwest sides. The national board certified teacher was finding that her students, who are native Spanish speakers, had not been progressing in reading before coming to her classroom.

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Reading Above the Fray: Reliable, Research-Based Routines for Developing Decoding Skills

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Dr. Julia B. Lindsey's evidence-based routines help young readers decode words efficiently so they can spend more energy on comprehending-and enjoying-what they read! You'll find: 1. Need-to-know essentials of how kids learn to read. 2. Principles of high-quality found...

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This practice guide was prepared for the WWC by Mathematica under contract ED-IES-13-C-0010.

The following research staff contributed to the guide: Nicholas Beyler, Kelley Borradaile, Joshua Furgeson, Juliette Henke, Betsy Keating, Samina Sattar, Andrei Streke, and Sarah Wissel.

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WWC | Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade

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This practice guide provides four recommendations for teaching foundational reading skills to students in kindergarten through 3rd grade. Each recommendation includes implementation steps and solutions for common obstacles. The recommendations also summarize and rate supporting evidence.

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Did you know that learning to read is one of the most complex things we ask our brain to do?

What goes on in our brain that makes it possible for us to translate the little squiggly marks that are letters on a page, into meaning?

One of the world's foremost experts on reading, Professor Stanislas Dehaene, a French neuroscientists and author of the book " Reading in the Brain" has some answers. He explains in this video:

Here are some of the key points he makes in the video
From the brain's point of view, learning to read consists of:

1. First, recognising the letters and how they combine into written words

2. Second, connecting them to the brain systems for coding of speech sounds and for meaning.

Reading starts in your brain like any other visual stimulation, in the general visual areas of the occipital pole of the brain, but then very quickly moves into an area which concerns the recognition of the written word.

Professor Dehaene calls this area the brain's "letter box" because it is where we store our knowledge of letters.

From there it's an explosion of activity into at least two brain networks; one that concerns the meaning of the words, and another that concerns the pronunciation and the articulation of the words.

When first you went to school to learn to read, your brain already had a very sophisticated spoken language system. It also had a very sophisticated visual system, but it needed to create an interface with the visual word form area, the brain's letter box.

Reading consists essentially of creating an interface between your vision system in your brain and your language system, your spoken language system.

Your brain has areas that are shared between spoken language and written language. And these areas are in your brain before you learn to read. They already existed when you were a very young child.
Brain is changed by reading
Everyone's brain anatomy is changed by learning to read, and Professor Dehaene and his colleagues have managed to make a complete map of the brain areas that have been changed by reading.

The first major change is making the "letter box area" active. It is not active in people who haven't learnt to read.

Learning to read is to a large extent the capacity to attend to the individual phonemes of speech and to attribute them different letters.
What predicts how well a child will learn to read
The predictors of learning to read in young children are:

How well they know phonics - the understanding of the sound systems of language

How large is the size of their spoken vocabulary. If they know a large number of words, they will learn to read faster.

We can help children learn to read, way in advance, by enhancing their vocabulary and their sound system of language at the age of three, four and five - even if we don't start to teach reading until the age of six or seven, as some European countries do, says Professor Dehaene.
Phonics versus whole word reading
We now understand better the question of phonics versus whole-word reading.

Should we teach the whole-word level, or should we really teach every single letter and the pronunciation?

The answer is clear. Professor Dehaene says, "whole-word reading is a myth". The brain processes every single letter and does not look at the whole word shape.

Teaching letter to sound correspondence is therefore essential. It is the fastest way to acquire reading and comprehension.

Preschools should be preparing children for learning to read and phonics exercises can help a lot.
Brains are the same all around the world
We understand now a lot about reading, and we understand that in all cultures, there's not much variability. We all have the same brain mechanisms - they are very universal.

Reading always requires specialising of visual system for the shape of letters and connecting them to speech sounds. Even in Chinese.
How can we make learning to read faster
We should modify the brain's inner-chemical systems: systems that help you focus your attention and that are also sensitive to rewards.

When you give a child a reward, you are changing his brain chemical composition in a way that reinforces his behaviour.

Sleep is also a very essential component of learning. They're very compelling studies showing that giving children more sleep is one way to help them learn.
Related Posts The Brain Science of Language, Learning & Reading Fast ForWord Builds Learning Capacity & Reading Skills 7 Tips for Parents of Struggling Readers & How to Give Reading Help The New Science of Learning: Teachers Build Brains with Neuroscienc

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How Your Brain Learns to Read: Professor Stanislaus Dehaene

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Did you know that learning to read is one of the most complex things we ask our brain to do? What goes on in our brain that makes it possible for us to translate the little squiggly marks that are letters on a page, into meaning?

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The Simple View of Reading: Still Conclusive After 36 Years

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Science of Reading: The Podcast, hosted by Susan Lambert, delivers the latest insights from researchers and practitioners in early reading. Listen today!

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Scarborough's Reading Rope

Scarborough's Reading Rope is a famous framework that depicts the complexities involved in learning to read. Dr. Hollis Scarborough spoke of skilled reading as resembling the "strands" of a rope, using pipe cleaners to illustrate the interconnectedness and interdependence of all the components. The Reading Rope consists of lower and upper strands. The word-recognition strands (phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition of familiar words) work together as the reader becomes accurate, fluent, and increasingly automatic with repetition and practice. Concurrently, the language-comprehension strands (background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge) reinforce one another and then weave together with the word-recognition strands to produce a skilled reader. This does not happen overnight; it requires explicit instruction and practice over time.

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Scarborough's Reading Rope is a famous framework that depicts the complexities involved in learning to read. Dr. Hollis Scarborough spoke of skilled reading as resembling the "strands" of a rope, using pipe cleaners to illustrate the interconnectedness and interdependence of all the components. The Reading Rope consists of lower and upper strands.

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Essential Instructional Practices in Early Literacy: Grades K to 3

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Website for Michigan Association of Intermediate School Administrators

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Julie Washington - Teaching African American Children to Read: The Impact of Dialectal Variation

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‎Right To Read Initiative on Apple Podcasts

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University of Florida Literacy Institute

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University of Florida Literacy Institute

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For years, the most urgent and persistent request we heard from the teachers we work with was for a more effective and more easily implemented program for foundational skills instruction.

While most language arts standards include learning targets for foundational reading skills for kindergarten through second grade, they are not detailed enough to build a day-by-day sequence of instruction. While most schools have an abundance of resources in the form of book rooms, basal readers, and a variety of intervention program kits, there is typically insufficient guidance for how, when, and with whom to use these materials.

In response to this persistent need, our team developed UFLI Foundations, a program that includes the necessary professional learning, resources, and scaffolding for teachers to deliver high-quality instruction in foundational reading skills.

This is how UFLI Foundations was born.

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UFLI Foundations | UF Literacy Institute

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For years, the most urgent and persistent request we heard from the teachers we work with was for a more effective and more easily implemented program for foundational skills instruction. While most language arts standards include learning targets for foundational reading skills for kindergarten through second grade, they are not detailed enough to build a day-by-day sequence of instruction.

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SST3 Literacy - The Four-Part Processing Model

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The Four Part Processing Model for Word Recognition

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Written words represent speech and language. This fundamental truth explains why reading and spelling skill depend on language abilities; why explicit teaching of sounds, words, and discourse is the most effective way to ensure that all students learn to read and write; and why we have been persistent advocates for teachers' knowledge of language-which is the focus of Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS®). Within that big idea is a less settled question: How should instruction in beginning reading and writing proceed?

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Speech to Print or Print to Speech? It Makes a Difference

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Written words represent speech and language.

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Equipped for Reading Success book. Read 46 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. Research-based methods for boosting phonemic awareness...

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Dr. Kilpatrick's Phonological Awareness Skills Test (PAST)

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Dr. Kilpatrick's Phonological Awareness Skills Test (PAST)

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The PAST can be downloaded above. Please also download and carefully read the instructions before using. Information can also be found in the manual “Equipped for Reading Success” by David A. Kilpatrick, Ph.D in chapter 11 on how to effectively use the test. Make sure to also practice using the test before using it with […]

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BBC Radio, 2009, 2010

BBC Radio 2012: Series on Language

United States and Canada (selected):

Kojo Nnamdi Show "Pixels vs. Pages: E-Books Take A Hit" September 2015

Kojo Nnamdi Show "Reading, Technology and...Still With Us? Attention Span", April 2014,

Hear and Now, WBUR - "Is Online Skimming Hurting Reading Comprehension?", April 2014

To the Best of our Knowledge, NPR "Why It's hard to read in a digital age" July 26 ,2015

Morning Edition, NPR, "The Technology of Books has changed, but Bookstores are hanging on there", May, 28, 2015

The Takeaway, "Your Paper brain and your Digital Brain aren't the same thing", Sept 18, 2014

All Things Considered, NPR, "Why Johnny Can't Deep Read", August 2010

Chronicle Channel 5 Boston

On Point - Boston NPR - "The Reading Mind", September 2007

Canadian Public Broadcasting, 2015, 2009

Tech Nation - San Francisco, NPR

Brain PodCast - Dr. Ginger Campbell (2 shows)

Front Porch - New Hampshire, NPR

Kojo Nnamdi Show/National Public Radio, Washington DC - "Understanding the Reader's Brain", October 2007

ABC Affiliate News, San Francisco

Leonard Lopate Show/New York Public Radio

University of Wisconsin/On Point/NPR

Earth and Sky/Pod Cast Series.
Germany
Deutsche Kultur (public radio), June 2010
Austria
Austrian Public Radio, November, 2010

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BBC Radio, 2009, 2010 BBC Radio 2012: Series on Language United States and Canada (selected): Kojo Nnamdi Show "Pixels vs. Pages: E-Books Take A Hit" September 2015 Kojo Nnamdi Show "Reading, Technology and...Still With Us?

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Reading depends on spoken language.* This is a simple statement with profound consequences for children whose spoken language differs from the language they are expected to read. For most children, the language skills they bring to school will support learning to read, which is mainly learning to understand their spoken language in a new form: print. However, some children's language skills differ in important ways from the classroom language variety, and teachers rarely receive sound guidance on how to enhance their literacy instruction to meet these children's needs.

Teaching reading to children whose language differs from the oral language of the classroom and from the linguistic structure of academic text adds an additional layer of complexity to reading instruction. There is a large and growing body of evidence indicating that language variation impacts reading, ¹ spelling, ² and writing ³ in predictable ways. In particular, it has been demonstrated that mismatches between the language variety spoken by many African American children in their homes and communities and the written language variety encountered in books and other text can slow the development of reading and writing. ⁴

The focus of this article is the impact of one language variety, African American English (AAE), on literacy development and on teaching, assessing, and learning. Our goal is to describe aspects of instruction, curricula, and assessment that may create obstacles to literacy for African American children (compounding the effects of other factors, such as growing up in systemically under-resourced neighborhoods) and to share ways to modify instructional practices to benefit AAE speakers in significant ways.

African American English

Many African American children are bidialectal speakers of English. That is, they speak two varieties of English: African American English and General American English (GAE). Whereas AAE is frequently spoken in the child's home and community, GAE is used in reading, writing, educational contexts, commerce, and the media. One of the major educational linguistic tasks for school-aged African American children who speak AAE is to bridge the two varieties in order to develop strong literacy skills. Importantly, for many African American children, particularly those growing up in communities enduring chronic poverty, though GAE may be encountered through media, such as television, it becomes prominent upon entry into school. GAE is the medium of instruction, and in school it is learned through exposure and modeling in the classroom. Also important, not every African American child speaks AAE, although most do. ⁵

The history of AAE has been fraught with social, educational, and political judgments about AAE's legitimacy and value. ⁶ AAE is a systematic, rule-governed variety of American English spoken by a community of speakers connected by race, culture, identity, and language. That fits the linguistic definition of a "dialect," but the term is problematic for other reasons. (See the "Changing Language About Language Variation" sidebar on the right; although we support a transition from dialect to language variety in colloquial usage because of misconceptions about dialects, we also use dialect occasionally in keeping with how it is defined in linguistics.) AAE has been referred to as "bad English," "poor grammar," and "ghetto" by people outside of its community of speakers. As a result, attempts to introduce AAE into classrooms or to leverage it to teach children who speak it how to read have been met with great resistance. ⁷ Unfortunately, these negative views of AAE sometimes become conflated with the children who speak it, and expectations for them are lowered. It is important that teachers understand that language varieties are linguistically equal, even when they are not socially equal. The social stigma surrounding varieties spoken by linguistic minorities can be compounded by race and class, but they are as linguistically valid as other dialects and highly valued by the people who speak them.

When a child who is learning English as their second (or third) language lags behind in reading English, we recognize that the learning curve is steeper because the child is learning to both speak and read a second language. We have not given this same consideration to children who use two dialects. Although AAE and GAE overlap more than two distinct languages, research has demonstrated that using two varieties can complicate learning new, language-influenced skills (i.e., reading and writing) as much as using two languages. In fact, the subtle transformations between the cultural and the general varieties of a single language may be even more difficult for young children to detect and resolve than the more obvious differences between two languages. ⁸ By design, curricula and instructional activities for children who are learning English take their dual language status into account. Extending these same benefits and considerations to dual variety speakers could have comparable, positive consequences for African American children.

By far the most studied variety of American English, AAE's characteristics in the five primary domains of language (morphology, phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics) have been well-documented in adults and are becoming better documented in children. ⁹ These investigations have demonstrated that as used by young children, AAE primarily involves variation in verb morphology, syntax, and phonology (see "Key Features of African American English" below). Because reading depends on spoken language, AAE is significantly implicated in learning to read.

Impact on Reading

The influence of AAE on reading has been a particular emphasis for research focused on school-aged African American children. Because reading depends on spoken language, AAE is an obvious candidate for understanding disparities in reading achievement between African American children and their white and Asian peers. Having documented these disparities for more than 50 years, perhaps it is time to examine potential solutions-such as materials and practices that are sufficiently sensitive to the needs of AAE speakers. ¹⁰

One key issue is the amount of dialect present in a child's language, which is referred to as dialect density. Dialect occurs on a continuum from low to high use. For example, children for whom dialect influences less than 10 percent of their oral language are said to have low dialect density; those for whom dialect influences 50 percent or more of their oral language have high dialect density.* Differences in density impact reading and writing in important ways. ¹¹ The higher the dialect density, the further the child's speech is from the language used in reading and writing. Simply put, linguistic distance influences how much instruction and practice a child is likely to need to bridge the differences between oral language at home, oral language spoken by the teacher, and the written language of books and other texts. ¹² The more AAE that a child uses, the more likely that reading, writing, and spelling growth may be slowed, ¹³ contributing to the reading struggles of African American children in later elementary school and adolescence. ¹⁴ Challenges in learning to read are not inevitable for children who speak AAE, but greater attention to the impact of their language on reading and writing development is critical.

The culture of education demands that AAE speakers engage in additional language learning compared with GAE speakers. Requiring AAE-speaking children to switch to GAE without using their linguistic strengths in AAE to bridge the two varieties represents a significant encumbrance. Children are required to demonstrate linguistic flexibility ¹⁵ at the same time that their cognitive resources are being allocated to learning the language of the classroom along with a wide array of new academic and social skills.

Some children manage these additional linguistic and social demands, but many do not. For example, AAE speakers already know how to conjugate verbs but must also learn a second set of rules for conjugation in GAE. Learning the second dialect involves discovering what is different in GAE, compared with what the child already knows in AAE. Although progress in reading is related to facility with GAE, providing the additional time and relevant opportunities to acquire knowledge of AAE and GAE differences tends not to be a priority in most schools or curricula. At school entry, AAE speakers' exposure to GAE varies and typically lags behind monodialectal GAE speakers simply because their language experiences prior to school entry do not always include GAE. Analogous effects are seen in bilingual children, who need extra time and support to become fully proficient in both their home language and English. Importantly, given that both bilingual and bidialectal speakers are typically stronger in one language or variety than the other, achieving parity between the two can take considerable time.

Nonlanguage Factors

In addition to the differences between AAE and GAE, other factors contribute to the difficulty many African American children experience with academic achievement in general and reading in particular. Some factors are related to the child's immediate environment, such as socioeconomic status and family factors; other factors are related to the broader social, economic, and political context, especially educational opportunity and quality, housing security, and access to adequate nutrition and healthcare. Of these, socioeconomic status (SES) has received the most attention. The impact of reading difficulties on many aspects of emotional health and well-being have also been examined, albeit to a lesser extent.

Socioeconomic Status

Income inequality and educational inequality have been linked historically. ¹⁶ Recent analyses suggest that disparities in students' academic achievement by race and socioeconomic status have remained virtually unchanged for the past half century. ¹⁷ In the United States, income, wealth, and access to higher education are unequally distributed. Although policymakers, researchers, and others have long talked about "achievement gaps," differences in academic performance between high- and low-SES students are more accurately referred to as opportunity gaps. For students from lower-SES backgrounds, their achievement often does not represent their potential to learn, but it does reflect the inequality in opportunity to learn resulting from lower-quality and less-abundant educational, social, and material resources that often plague children in both urban and rural environments.

The opportunity gap has been calculated as a 1.0 standard deviation disparity in achievement between children in the highest- and lowest-SES ends of the distribution. ¹⁸ This difference represents a disparity of approximately four years' worth of learning in both math and reading, and it persists through high school. Notably, among AAE speakers, nearly 100 percent of high-density dialect users are from low-income families and communities. ¹⁹ Thus, high density of dialect seems to reflect the social isolation characteristic of neighborhood poverty ²⁰ that limits experience with and exposure to GAE. In the classroom, this frequently translates into poor reading performance.

Emotional Health and Well-Being

The persistence of reading difficulties among most African American children, and the challenges it presents for other learning that depends on reading, often has negative effects on confidence, self-image, and willingness to engage in school. ²¹ Struggles with reading become aversive and can promote avoidance of the activity. Unsuccessful educational outcomes are associated with numerous negative consequences, many of which have lifelong impacts. Because these are well known, we turn to a less discussed concern.

For individuals who succeed at becoming bidialectal and managing the associated educational demands, there are other personal costs to consider. Biases surrounding the use of AAE can be very harmful to children, negatively affecting not only their motivation in the classroom but also their linguistic identities. Usage of GAE is expected and valued in educational and other institutional contexts. Effective use of GAE in such contexts involves not only learning and using GAE but also inhibition of AAE, which requires cognitive effort. Similar to bilingual speakers, bidialectal speakers engage in monitoring their own speech to evaluate its appropriateness and self-correct as needed. They may actively avoid speaking in fear of producing non-GAE expressions. They may consciously engage in mental translation from AAE to GAE before speaking, and they may compose utterances to conform to linguistic expectations rather than speaking freely. Anecdotally, African American college students for whom switching from AAE to GAE does not occur automatically report great concern about participating in discussions in the college classroom for fear of "saying it wrong." When AAE is the speaker's culturally and personally authentic code, using GAE is an adaptation to external constraints, including pressure to assimilate. Corrections of AAE as "bad English" convey to the speaker that their cultural language (and therefore their culture) is inadequate or defective. As a result, the use of GAE may be performative rather than authentic.

Assuming different personas in differing contexts, in this case school and home, creates the "double consciousness" described by sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois. ²² Monitoring the presentation of self, which includes language, carries cognitive and emotional costs. Cognitively, it is an additional task to be performed while engaged in other activities (such as reading). Emotionally, it involves continuous self-evaluation, criticism, and correction. Research on this topic is almost nonexistent, but it is a part of the bidialectal experience that needs close attention. ²³

Recommendations for Teaching

Speaking AAE is not inherently an obstacle to becoming a reader, but it becomes one when children's specific needs are not recognized or addressed. The issues we have reviewed suggest many supportive steps school systems and educators could take. We offer six recommendations below to help school systems and educators begin reconsidering how they engage African American children who are becoming bidialectal and learning to read. Collectively, the essential supports mainly involve (a) providing sufficient opportunities to learn; (b) using materials and practices that are effective given the students' backgrounds; and (c) eliminating the unwarranted stigma associated with using AAE and instead focusing on effectively addressing the educational needs of AAE speakers in ways that build on their knowledge rather than disparaging it.

1. Expand teachers' knowledge of language variation.

As part of their professional training, prospective teachers usually are made aware of a number of cultural differences that may affect education. However, language variation and its impact on reading and instruction are rarely emphasized. Teachers who gain this background will know that language variation is a universal linguistic phenomenon and that AAE, like other dialects, differs from the codified, more general version of American English used in education but is otherwise linguistically unremarkable-it is a "standard" example of dialectal variation, so to speak. They could also gain greater understanding of how such variation affects educational goals and practices, as discussed below.

2. Expand children's knowledge of language and the world prior to school entry.

Many AAE-speaking children are less ready than their peers to benefit from reading instruction on the first day of kindergarten because they are not familiar with the school dialect. But young children are exceptionally good language learners; AAE speakers could gain greater facility with GAE in a language-intensive pre-K environment that provided rich and abundant access to both oral and written language. In 2018, only 38 percent of Black 3- to 5-year-olds were enrolled in preschool, compared with 43 percent of their white peers. ²⁴ This disparity in early childhood education should not only be eliminated-we should invest in greatly expanding access to high-quality, language-focused preschools throughout our most under-resourced neighborhoods.

Children learn language via exposure and use, not explicit instruction. In the course of a school year, teachers whose own language backgrounds vary would provide thousands of examples of utterances in each variety and would model the ways that people who speak somewhat differently successfully communicate. Children can learn pronunciations of words and ways to conjugate verbs that differ from their own language use if given sufficient opportunities to learn them. Children can also gain greater awareness of conditions that govern movement between codes (e.g., their use in different settings or with different individuals), a critical skill for any child who speaks two languages or two varieties. Learning more about GAE does not require extinguishing knowledge of AAE, any more than learning a second language requires unlearning the first. Rather, it places AAE speakers on a more equal footing with children who have learned GAE in the home, while still honoring the need, and desire, to communicate with their families, communities, and friends who also use AAE.

Parents and other caregivers can also be encouraged to create additional language-learning opportunities for children outside of school. Efforts to gain families' participation will be more successful if their role in helping their children thrive is emphasized; parents and caregivers are committed to the success of their children but often do not know how to help. Reading books to children may provide a vehicle for introducing linguistic expressions and aspects of the world beyond their immediate experiences. The language in books for children includes vocabulary and grammatical constructions that differ from those in everyday speech, and thus are not available anywhere else except books. ²⁵ "In the light of the moon a little egg lay on a leaf" is the first line of an enormously popular book for very young children, ²⁶ but few people talk that way. Shared reading can provide a context for expanding children's world knowledge and giving them additional practice in using language. For parents who do not read well themselves or are uncomfortable with reading, educators (as well as librarians and others who engage with families) can help caregivers find books paired with audiobooks that parents and children can listen to together. The audiobooks do not take the place of books but allow parents and children to interact around the book, listening to the story together, and prompt parents when to turn the page.

Parents can also provide language-learning opportunities simply by having conversations with their children. Parents are often encouraged to talk to their children, but it is important to stress having conversations that are, by definition, interactive. This kind of talk encourages turn-taking, requiring input from both the caregiver and child. If teachers are concerned about how much conversation is happening outside of school, it might be helpful to send children home with conversation starters, encouraging them to be the catalysts for sparking family conversations. For example, educators could: teach or make a game at school, then send it home with children and encourage them to teach it to their families; encourage the class to ask a parent or caregiver to teach them how to make their favorite food and write down the recipe to share at school; or read a book to the class several times and then send it home with students to share. In each case, children rehearse the skill or activity at school first, making them eager to show what they have learned when they get home. Both parents and children get very excited about this kind of sharing; it removes the burden from both to figure out how to do or initiate what the teacher has instructed and makes children proud to share what they have learned.

3. Use classroom materials and practices that are effective with AAE speakers.

The curricula and support materials produced by major educational publishers assume that GAE is the language of the child and the classroom. With rare exceptions, these materials do not accommodate differences in language background or provide clear guidance about appropriate practices for children who need support to become bidialectal. Unfortunately, this means that it is left to classroom teachers to develop materials and practices on their own. The table on the right provides a list of the major features of AAE likely to be present in young children's language use. It is not an exhaustive list but provides some guidance regarding the language structures that children use and what they will need to learn to speak, read, and write in GAE. Especially in the case of phonology, the table highlights places where children may need extra time to learn a new phonological form because it differs significantly from their own sound system. Here, we note several key implications for instruction.

Phonological awareness: It is commonly assumed that spoken word play, such as rhyming, develops phonological awareness (knowledge of the structure of spoken words), which facilitates later reading acquisition. The activity emphasizes perfect rhymes such as bear-care, which share the same rime (pronounced air). Perfect rhymes are less prominent in AAE word play than other types of phonological overlap, however. ²⁷ Indeed, for any child whose language variety impacts the vowel system, the words that rhyme will differ. For example, for an African American child in the southern United States, the word thing may rhyme with either king or rang, depending upon how it is pronounced. Moreover, even perfect rhymes work differently because AAE phonology allows optional deletion of final consonants in some cases. For example, cold and hole can rhyme in AAE because of deletion of the final /d/. The net effect is that these activities do not always function in the same way as for GAE speakers.

Phonemic awareness: Tasks such as deciding if two words begin or end with the same sounds bring attention to phonemic structure, which is a key to learning spelling-sound correspondences. The validity of the exercise can again be vitiated by differences in pronunciation. When the task involves comparisons of initial phonemes (e.g., ball, book), AAE and GAE speakers perform comparably. In contrast, some AAE speakers may perform poorly on comparisons involving final consonants, because they are variably included in AAE. It may take AAE-speaking children as much as a year longer to master phonemic awareness in the final position of words. 28 Deciding that cold and hole do not end in the same sound may be difficult if cold is usually pronounced cole. When children take longer to acquire such knowledge, we should not assume that they are less capable learners. We should realize that AAE speakers are learning both a new oral language variety and to identify final consonants (whereas GAE speakers only have to learn the latter).

Phonics: Learning the correspondences between the spellings of words and their pronunciations is an important step in learning to read. Instruction typically assumes that words are pronounced as in GAE. What happens if the child's pronunciations are different, as occurs for many words in AAE? For example, a teacher might write the word gold on the board, pronounce each of the component sounds, and model how they are blended to form gold. For a GAE speaker, the lesson is about the correspondences between four letters and four sounds. The lesson is different for an AAE speaker who pronounces it gole. AAE speakers may be able to figure out the correspondence between the teacher's pronunciation and their own, but translating between the two involves extra effort and a single spelling now corresponds to two pronunciations. Then, in a future phonics lesson, AAE-speaking children may be confused as they learn to spell the homophonic word goal.

We have investigated these conditions using computational models that learn phonics (i.e., spelling-sound correspondences). ²⁹ The models first learned the GAE pronunciations of a large set of monosyllabic words. In the AAE condition, half the words had different pronunciations than in the GAE condition because of final consonant deletions. The models were then taught the correspondences between the spellings of the words and their GAE pronunciations. Although both models could learn the correspondences with sufficient experience, the AAE model took much longer because it was learning the alternative pronunciations of half the words at the same time. This model provided an explicit, mechanistic account of the impact of mismatches between the oral and written language system that children who are becoming bidialectal invariably encounter.

Reading aloud: Reading aloud is an important, widely used learning activity. Children's accuracy and fluency as they read aloud is an indicator of their progress and provides opportunities for feedback-but learning two varieties can make the task more difficult. A child who knows the AAE and GAE pronunciations of cold needs to produce one and suppress the other. The child may be able to generate the "correct" (for the school setting) pronunciation, but may do so more slowly, giving the appearance of lack of fluency. Researchers have found a tradeoff between rate and accuracy when African American children read aloud, such that they achieved a lower score on fluency because they slowed down their reading in order to improve the grammatical accuracy of their oral reading. ³⁰ In this same study, as the complexity of reading passages increased, students appeared to sacrifice reading accuracy in an effort to manage the lexical and syntactic complexity of passages. These outcomes provide evidence of the active decision making that can constrain the cognitive resources that bidialectal readers are able to apply to oral reading. In addition to reducing fluency while reading aloud, this may impact reading comprehension. (Similar results are found among children who are becoming bilingual, but their challenges with reading aloud in English tend to be better understood.) When reading aloud occurs in front of other students, the appearance of lower proficiency can be deeply embarrassing and can create aversion to reading.

Attention and effort: Children who are still learning the school dialect have to focus greater attention and effort on understanding the teacher's speech, which can detract from being able to focus on the content. In a busy classroom setting where the teacher is harder to hear or see, the impact will be greater. These difficulties can be lessened for children by providing in writing any important information that has been presented orally, as well as providing visual supports whenever possible. In addition, we encourage teachers to become more familiar with AAE in order to better comprehend and communicate with children and families who are high-density AAE speakers. ³¹

4. Provide enough time on task.

Sensitivity to the time a child who is becoming bidialectal may need to master a new language skill is critically important. A child who has more to learn to reach a goal needs more time to get there. ³² It takes ample learning opportunities, sufficient practice, and, for many children, additional instruction. This requires rethinking our views about what constitutes "typical" developmental trajectories. Instead, teachers should offer as much learning time in early childhood and throughout the elementary grades as needed for African American children to enter the middle grades as confident readers and writers.

Bidialectal children may take more time to gain the knowledge that supports skilled reading, but that is a byproduct of acquiring more knowledge to connect with the knowledge that they already have. ³³ Educational outcomes for these children are modulated by numerous factors, including educational quality, amount of experience using each language variety, and availability of educational resources in the home and community. Successfully addressing these initial challenges-and doing so in a way that values the home language variety-can eventually yield the many personal, social, and economic benefits of being bidialectal.

5. Respond constructively to AAE use in the classroom.

Teachers face difficult choices when students use AAE in the classroom. If AAE is viewed as "bad English," the response may be to provide a GAE correction, which conveys to children that their home language is bad. It should be possible to help children learn the classroom language variety without negative messages about AAE. With very young children, in preschool through first grade, simply providing full-form models of classroom language is helpful. For example, if a child is deleting the copula, a teacher can cheerfully produce the same utterance, making the copula salient and lengthening the child's production slightly.

Child: "This my backpack."
Teacher: "Yes, this IS your backpack. Let's put it away."

After several such opportunities to learn, children who were once deleting the structure will begin to include it. This is a common, effective technique used in interactions designed to enhance language development that can be easily applied in a classroom.

Based on a classroom observation, a researcher ³⁴ provided an example of a teacher who corrects Joey, a third-grade boy, who pronounces the word street as skreet (which is a common cultural and regional variant). When Joey says Orange Skreet rather than Orange Street, his teacher replies by saying, "Not skreet. Say street." Joey responds, "Skreet." His teacher makes him read the sentence again, but Joey continues to say skreet. The classroom teacher corrects him again in front of the class. When the teacher finally leaves him alone, he continues to read aloud, but this time haltingly, mumbling and fearful of saying the wrong thing and being further embarrassed by the teacher. This is a great example of what not to do. By treating the phonological variation in the child's reading as an error, the teacher eroded Joey's self-confidence, making him likely to be more resistant to reading aloud in the future. It is an experience he will likely never forget! A more helpful approach would be for Joey's teacher to make a note of the skr/str pronunciation and include it in a whole-class language lesson without singling out Joey or any other child. This is typically a regional variant. Since Joey is doing it, there are likely others who are as well, and everyone would benefit from spending time learning the sound-phoneme mapping for this consonant cluster.

At the other extreme, many teachers are averse to commenting on children's use of their home language variety, concerned that it is not their role to encourage becoming bidialectal. The philosopher Jennifer M. Morton discusses issues of justice and ethics associated with dialect differences. ³⁵ She acknowledges the perceived need to accommodate GAE given its importance for health, education, and employment under existing circumstances but also the threats to personal and cultural integrity that adopting GAE entails. The need for one group to adapt to the language and culture of another in order to thrive is an intrinsic form of inequality. She concludes that gaining knowledge of both GAE and AAE is nonetheless the most favorable accommodation to non-ideal circumstances.

Teachers need additional guidance and opportunities to engage in professional dialogue on this issue. Not responding to use of the home variety is an instructional choice that conveys information about linguistic expectations. The challenge is to balance the need to respect children's language and culture, while helping them gain additional facility with the classroom language variety because it serves other functions (as in learning to read).

6. Recognize the impact of bidialectal experience on comprehending and producing language.

Becoming fluent in using two languages or dialects is a positive achievement, but there are bumps along the way, such as the interference between codes that often occurs in comprehension and speaking or reading aloud. Slower responses, dysfluencies, and other "errors" occur because the child's knowledge of the two codes and how to use them is still developing, not because the child lacks the ability to learn. Many studies have demonstrated that children who speak AAE also understand GAE. They may be slowed down in some areas where the two dialects contrast, as we noted above. With few exceptions, AAE and GAE are mutually intelligible. Given sufficient time and relevant experience, bidialectal speakers, like bilinguals, will learn to navigate the two codes in both oral language and print.

Final Takeaways

Most languages have several within-language varieties. An inclusive way to think about language varieties is that they occur along a continuum from those that differ little from the general variety to those that are more distant. This framing includes all communication practices across all speakers ³⁶ and does not consider one variety to be superior. It allows us to put languages and speakers in their proper perspective as equally valued, especially as we support children learning to read and write. All children need to have the skills to make linguistic choices across contexts: formal, informal, home, school, speaking, reading, or writing. Even within these contexts, there are choices that require varied skills, such as writing a report for school, writing a thank-you card for a birthday gift, or writing a text to meet up with friends.

Above all, our shared goal should be for all children to become good readers; this requires practice with reading. For children who speak more than one language variety, learning to read requires learning the differences between their oral language and print, in addition to the inconsistencies of English orthography, making supportive instruction and abundant practice even more critical for mastering reading. The burden placed on the child can be tremendous, but it can be mitigated by effective, culturally responsive instruction and through being given the time needed to master new skills.

Finally, teaching children who are becoming bidialectal to read does not require an entirely new, separate theory of reading instruction. The same elements that have been identified for all developing readers to break the code are necessary for children who speak AAE as well. What differs is the delivery of these elements. Reading is a language-based task; introducing language variation affects the efficacy of many standard instructional practices and reading-related activities. The impact of language variation on reading is not an intractable issue. Adapting instruction and materials to encompass and embrace such variation reduces the load for both teachers and students, allowing them to reach their respective goals.

Julie A. Washington is a professor in the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine. A speech-language pathologist and fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, she directs a Learning Disabilities Research Innovation Hub and the Dialect, Poverty, and Academic Success Lab. Mark S. Seidenberg is the Vilas Research Professor and Donald O. Hebb Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also codirects the Language and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab. Seidenberg's work is supported by the Deinlein Language and Literacy Fund.

*The exception is the case of deaf children who use a visual-gestural, rather than spoken, language. ( return to article)
†Although this assertion is anecdotal, it is based on our combined 70 years of experience. ( return to article)

Endnotes

1. M. Brown et al., "Impact of Dialect Use on a Basic Component of Learning to Read," Frontiers in Psychology 6, no. 196 (2015); and J. Washington et al., "The Impact of Dialect Density on the Growth of Language and Reading in African American Children," Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 49, no. 2 (2018): 232-47.
2. C. Kohler et al., "African American English Dialect and Performance on Nonword Spelling and Phonemic Awareness Tasks," American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 16, no. 2 (May 2007): 157-68; and N. Terry, "Relations Between Dialect Variation, Grammar, and Early Spelling Skills," Reading and Writing 19, no. 9 (2006): 907-31.
3. Brown et al., "Impact of Dialect Use"; and C. Puranik, L. Branum-Martin, and J. Washington, "The Relation Between Dialect Density and the Codevelopment of Writing and Reading in African American Children," Child Development 91, no. 4 (2020): e866-e882.
4. Brown et al., "Impact of Dialect Use"; and Washington et al., "The Impact of Dialect Density."
5. H. Craig and J. Washington, "Oral Language Expectations for African American Preschoolers and Kindergartners," American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 11, no. 1 (2002): 59-70; J. Washington and H. Craig, "Morphosyntactic Forms of African American English Used by Young Children and Their Caregivers," Applied Psycholinguistics 23, no. 2 (2002): 209-31; and C. Connor and H. Craig, "African American Preschoolers' Language, Emergent Literacy Skills, and Use of African American English: A Complex Relation," Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 49, no. 4 (2006): 771-92.
6. J. Baugh, Out of the Mouths of Slaves: African American Language and Educational Malpractice (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999).
7. J. Baugh, Beyond Ebonics: Linguistic Pride and Racial Prejudice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
8. J. Siegel, Second Dialect Acquisition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
9. R. Fasold and W. Wolfram, "Some Linguistic Features of Negro Dialect," Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 3, no. 4 (1972): 16-49; and W. Wolfram, C. Adger, and D. Christian, Dialects in Schools and Communities (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999).
10. E. Ferrer et al., "Achievement Gap in Reading Is Present as Early as First Grade and Persists Through Adolescence," Journal of Pediatrics 167, no. 5 (2015): 1121-5, e1-e2; and W. Teale, K. Paciga, and J. Hoffman, "Beginning Reading Instruction in Urban Schools: The Curriculum Gap Ensures a Continuing Achievement Gap," Reading Teacher 61, no. 4 (2007): 344-48.
11. Washington et al., "The Impact of Dialect Density"; Puranik, Branum-Martin, and Washington, "The Relation Between Dialect Density"; and J. McDonald and J. Oetting, "Nonword Repetition Across Two Dialects of English: Effects of Specific Language Impairment and Nonmainstream Form Density," Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 62, no. 5 (2019): 1381-91.
12. Brown et al., "Impact of Dialect Use."
13. Brown et al., "Impact of Dialect Use"; Washington et al., "The Impact of Dialect Density"; and Puranik, Branum-Martin, and Washington, "The Relation Between Dialect Density."
14. A. Tatum, Teaching Reading to Black Adolescent Males: Closing the Achievement Gap (Portland, ME: Stenhouse, 2005); and A. Tatum, "Breaking Down Barriers That Disenfranchise African American Adolescent Readers in Low-Level Tracks," Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 44, no. 1 (2000): 52-64.
15. L. Makalela, "Moving Out of Linguistic Boxes: The Effects of Translanguaging Strategies for Multilingual Classrooms," Language and Education 29, no. 3 (2015): 200-17.
16. E. Hanushek et al., The Unwavering SES Achievement Gap: Trends in U.S. Student Performance, working paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, March 2019; and E. Hanushek et al., "The Achievement Gap Fails to Close," Education Next 19, no. 3 (2019): 8-17.
17. Hanushek et al., The Unwavering SES Achievement Gap; and S. Reardon, "The Widening Income Achievement Gap," Educational Leadership 70, no. 8 (2013): 10-16.
18. Hanushek et al., The Unwavering SES Achievement Gap; and Hanushek et al., "The Achievement Gap."
19. Washington et al., "The Impact of Dialect Density"; and Puranik, Branum-Martin, and Washington, "The Relation Between Dialect Density."
20. B. Rankin and J. Quane, "Neighborhood Poverty and the Social Isolation of Inner-City African American Families," Social Forces 79, no. 1 (2000): 139-64.
21. S. Rowley et al., "Framing Black Boys: Parent, Teacher, and Student Narratives of the Academic Lives of Black Boys," Advances in Child Development and Behavior 47 (2014): 301-32.
22. W. Du Bois, "Double-Consciousness and the Veil," in Social Class and Stratification: Classic Statements and Theoretical Debates, ed. R. Levine (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 203; and W. Du Bois, "Strivings of the Negro People," The Atlantic, August 1897.
23. L. Delpit and J. Dowdy, eds., The Skin That We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in the Classroom (New York: New York Press, 2002).
24. National Center for Education Statistics, "Preschool and Kindergarten Enrollment," in The Condition of Education (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, 2020).
25. J. Montag, M. Jones, and L. Smith, "The Words Children Hear: Picture Books and the Statistics for Language Learning," Psychological Science 26, no. 9 (2015): 1489-96.
26. E. Carle, The Very Hungry Caterpillar (New York: World Publishing Company, 1969).
27. A. Shollenbarger et al., "How African American English-Speaking First Graders Segment and Rhyme Words and Nonwords with Final Consonant Clusters," Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 48, no. 4 (2017): 273-85.
28. S. Thomas-Tate, J. Washington, and J. Edwards, "Standardized Assessment of Phonological Awareness Skills in Low-Income African American First Graders," American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 13, no. 2 (2004): 182-90.
29. Brown et al., "Impact of Dialect Use."
30. H. Craig et al., "Performance of Elementary-Grade African American Students on the Gray Oral Reading Tests," Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 35, no. 2 (2004): 141-54; and C. Thompson, H. Craig, and J. Washington, "Variable Production of African American English Across Oracy and Literacy Contexts," Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 35, no. 3 (2004): 269-82.
31. T. Beyer, K. Edwards, and C. Fuller, "Misinterpretation of African American English BIN by Adult Speakers of Standard American English," Language & Communication 45 (2015): 59-69.
32. M. Seidenberg and M. MacDonald, "The Impact of Language Experience on Language and Reading," Topics in Language Disorders 38, no. 1 (2018): 66-83.
33. Thomas-Tate, Washington, and Edwards, "Standardized Assessment."
34. B. Wright, The Brilliance of Black Boys: Cultivating School Success in the Early Grades (New York: Teachers College Press, 2018).
35. J. Morton, "Cultural Code-Switching: Straddling the Achievement Gap," Journal of Political Philosophy 22, no. 3 (2014): 259-81.
36. Makalela, "Moving Out of Linguistic Boxes"; and O. García and C. Sylvan, "Pedagogies and Practices in Multilingual Classrooms: Singularities in Pluralities," Modern Language Journal 95, no. 3 (2011): 385-400.

[illustrations by Ojima Abalaka]

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Teaching Reading to African American Children

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Reading depends on spoken language.* This is a simple statement with profound consequences for children whose spoken language differs from the language they are expected to read. For most children, the language skills they bring to school will support learning to read, which is mainly learning to understand their spoken language in a new form: print.

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Essential Instructional Practices in Early Literacy: Grades K to 3

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Website for Michigan Association of Intermediate School Administrators