# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Word Recognition (GENERAL): Formative Boxes

# data[].attributes.body
UFLI Passages
The Measured Mom-Fiction  Nonfiction
Core Knowledge Student Readers
Beyond Decodables
Speld Phonic Books
Open Source Phonics (Passages)
Flyleaf Publishing
Starfall

Other decodable books to purchase

# data[].attributes.body
1-Prealphabetic (sounds)
2-Partial Alphabetic (short vowels, CVC)
3-Full Alphabetic (long vowels)
4-Consolidated Alphabetic (multisyllabic)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Grouping with Phases of Word Recognition

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
PA & Phonics Application Word Study Planner - Blank

# data[].attributes.body
Phonics Concepts Progression

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Decodable Text Linda Farrell  Michael Hunter Oct 2021

# data[].attributes.body
UFLI
CKLA
LETRS
The Measured Mom

# data[].attributes.headline
Word Chaining List from Burkins and Yates

# data[].attributes.subject
Word Chaining List from Burkins and Yates

# data[].attributes.body
Fast Phrase
Phrase Haste
Fleeting Phrases
Phrasing Progression

# data[].attributes.body
Summary 1 Page

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Rethinking Instruction in Phonological Awareness: Focus on What Matters!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The importance of phoneme awareness for acquiring the alphabetic principle and for learning to read has been documented since the 1970s, gaining broad recognition when the National Reading Panel Report was published in 2000. Since then, instruction to foster phonological awareness has become routinely recommended for the early grades.

However, the widespread practice in schools is to target awareness of larger phonological structures such as words, syllables, and onset-rimes before focusing on phonemes, with attention to the phoneme not occurring until well into kindergarten or first grade.

During this hour-long webinar, Dr. Susan Brady will examine studies that raise questions regarding whether following this "continuum" is necessary and/or beneficial for students. She also discusses:
- The developmental sequence of phoneme awareness
- The importance of conducting phoneme awareness activities with letter knowledge and handwriting
- The benefits of this approach for all students

Watch this webinar to deepen your understanding of how and when to teach phonemic awareness to set students up for reading success.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
Literacy Consultants & Consulting Services | Erin Kent Consulting

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Literacy Consultants & Consulting Services | Erin Kent Consulting

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
EKC provides literacy consultants, consulting services, and literacy professional learning for schools.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Word Ladder - Blank Word Ladder - 3-Letter Blends Word Ladder - Digraphs

# data[].attributes.body
Walks In the Park
A Day at the Zoo
Stew's Ready
Harry's Hiccups + Cooking Up Trouble
Sam's Day Outside + Feline Flees (students mark chunks/phrases)

# data[].attributes.body
Testing Manual/Test Directions (should read first!)
Printable Texting Booklets/Student Materials

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
PA & Phonics Application Word Study Planner

# data[].attributes.body
Bachelors Degree in Psychology

M.Ed. Curriculum & Instruction

22 years Lower Elementary Teacher

PYP coordinator, Curriculum Coordinator,Reading Intervention Teacher, EAL Teacher, Lit. Coach

Taught in: Ghana, Switzerland, Indonesia and USA

Loves: Hiking, Swimming, Laughing, Reading, Words... and Avocados

natashya@erinkentconsulting.com

# data[].attributes.body
Wiley Blevins

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
grades k-2: common causes of failure and 7 ingredients for success (corwin literacy)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
teaching methods & materials - reading & phonics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
education / teaching methods & materials / language arts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
education / teaching methods & materials / reading & phonics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
educational: first / native language: reading and writing skills

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
english language - orthography and spelling

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
phonics; phonics instruction; teaching phonics; phonemic awareness; reading comprehension

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
reading - phonetic method - united states

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
teaching methods & materials - reading & phonics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
native language: reading and writing skills

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
education / teaching methods & materials / language arts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
education / teaching methods & materials / reading & phonics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
educational: first / native language: reading and writing skills

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Fresh Look at Phonics, Grades K-2: Common Causes of Failure and 7 Ingredients for Success (Corwin Literacy)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Amazon.com: A Fresh Look at Phonics, Grades K-2: Common Causes of Failure and 7 Ingredients for Success (Corwin Literacy) (9781506326887): Blevins, Wiley W.: Books

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Lesson Resources

The UFLI Foundations Toolbox contains all the lesson resources to accompany the lesson plans provided in the UFLI Foundations manual. (Don't have a manual yet? Click here to order one) Every lesson has companion resources that will help you implement the lessons efficiently, effectively, and consistently.

Some of the companion lesson resources you will find below include:

Lesson slide decks (in PowerPoint and Google Slide formats)

Decodable passages

Homework sheets

Games and activities for additional practice

We have grouped the lessons into smaller units so you can access these resources more easily. Scroll down to use the buttons below to find the resources for each lesson or groups of lessons.

Please note that we are still building out these free resources, and we will be editing this page over the next few weeks. We wanted you to be able to access some materials as soon as possible, but be sure to come back later to see the rest!
New to UFLI Foundations? Learn about its development, check out a sample lesson plan, view the scope and sequence, and more.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The UFLI Foundations Toolbox contains all the lesson resources to accompany the lesson plans provided in the UFLI Foundations manual. (Don't have a manual yet? Click here to order one) Every lesson has companion resources that will help you implement the lessons efficiently, effectively, and consistently.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When I was in my second year of teaching Kindergarten, I tried something new.

A few times a week, I started having my students practice writing sounds on whiteboards. For example, I might say the /m/ sound and students would write the letter m.

Eventually, they began writing words - at first, with lots of help from me.

After that, they began writing sentences. (Again, with lots of help at first.)

I noticed that this several-times-weekly practice seemed to be really helpful. It appeared to be improving their letter sound knowledge, their decoding, and their overall phonics knowledge.

A year or two later, I learned that I was not the first teacher to have discovered this practice.

This instructional practice - the one I thought I'd "invented" - had a name. It was called a dictation.

And - good news - it WAS an effective practice!

But the funny thing about a dictation is that it seems SO simple...and yet there are lots of nuances.

So we're going to cover all of this in this post:

What is a dictation?

How do you give a dictation?

How do you support students who need extra help? (Or a challenge?)

Sound Dictation

As I mentioned, I began by having my Kindergarten students write sounds (or rather, the letter for a sound).

But hold on! Even if you teach 1st grade, 2nd grade, or above, you will still want to include sounds on some of your dictations.

For example, you might say the sound /ō/ (long o, as in "oatmeal") - and then your students would need to write all of the following:

You would have them write as many ways as they've learned to spell the sound. So if they only know "o" and "oa," for example, they would only be responsible for writing those two spellings.

Sound dictations aren't just for Kindergarteners! ?

Here are the steps I follow when I do a sound dictation:

Teacher: "The sound is /ch/. Repeat."

Students: "/ch/"

Students write "ch" on their whiteboards / paper.

Teacher: "What says /ch/?"

Students: (pointing to the letters) "C-h says /ch/." (They're naming the letters and giving the sound.)

Teacher writes "ch" on the board and students fix their work if needed. (Note: If you see many students spelling the sound incorrectly, you can do this step before asking "What says /ch/?". Either way, the kids get almost immediate feedback on their work and make changes if needed.)

Notice how I have them repeat the sound before they write it - and after they write it.

Word Dictation

Except for the first few weeks of Kindergarten, I always include individual words in my dictations.

I choose words that have our target phonics patterns PLUS some review patterns from previous weeks. Kids are only asked to spell sounds / patterns that they've already been taught.

(However, they might be asked to spell unfamiliar words, so that I can see if they can apply their sound knowledge to spell a new word.)

This is what it might look like in practice:

Teacher: "The word is flip. Repeat."

Students: "Flip"

Teacher: "She can do a flip on the monkey bars. Let's say the sounds in 'flip.'"

Teacher + Students: /f/ /l/ /ĭ/ /p/

Teacher: "Write 'flip.'"

Students write "flip" on their whiteboards / paper.

Once students are finished, the teacher writes "flip" on the board and students fix their work (if necessary).

You can then do some quick work with the word. For example:

Teacher: "Let's say the sounds in flip and touch the letters as we say them. Ready?"

Students + Teacher: "/f/ /l/ /ĭ/ /p/" (all pointing to each letter as they say the sounds)

Teacher: "What's the blend in this word?"

Students: "F-L"

Teacher: "What's the vowel sound in this word?"

Students: "/ĭ/"

Teacher: "Which letter says /ĭ/?"

Students: "i"

You don't need to go through all that for EVERY word, but I usually do discuss 1-2 of the words in depth in each dictation.

If you're thinking right now, "Well, some (or all) of my kids wouldn't be able to do that" - no worries! I've got you covered!
Ways to Provide More Support with Word Dictation

Tell students each sound in the word. (Like "/f/ /l/ /ĭ/ /p/," in the example above.) Have them repeat the sounds after you finish.

Tell them each sound, one at a time. After you say the sound, students write the corresponding letter(s). (Only do this if students truly need a lot of support.)

Ways to Provide Less Support with Word Dictation

Have students say the sounds in the word without your help.

Don't say the sounds in the word as a group - require students to say the sounds and write the word on their own.

You can provide more (or less) support if needed.

Sentence Dictation

Last but not least, my dictations usually include at least one (sometimes two) sentences.

High frequency words that I've taught

Words with sounds / spelling patterns that I've taught

The sentences only include:

In other words, students are practicing concepts they've already been introduced to (just like the sound and word dictations).

Have students repeat the sentence twice.

For younger students (Kinder and early 1st grade), consider drawing a line for each word to help students space correctly and develop concept of word. As they repeat the sentence a second or third time, they can touch each line as they say each corresponding word.

Keep the sentences shorter for younger students.

Incorporate high frequency words from previous weeks for review.

After you dictate the sentence, write it correctly so students get immediate feedback. Younger students do better with re-writing the entire sentence (as opposed to fixing their mistakes in their original work) - erasing can cause paper tears and other drama.

Use this opportunity to remind students about capitalizing the first letter in the sentence and ending the sentence with a punctuation mark.

Here are some tips for success with the sentence dictation:

Putting It All Together

Many times, I'll dictate sounds, words, AND sentences for students to write. We do this in a 7-10 minute dictation.

If it sounds like a lot to fit into 10 minutes...it is! Earlier in the school year, we don't do very many words. Once students get in the routine, things do move more quickly!

As I mentioned, dictations can be done on whiteboards.

But I also like to do them on paper. In mid-Kindergarten and up, at least one weekly dictation is done on paper like this:

This dictation paper comes from my phonics program, From Sounds to Spelling. The lessons tell you exactly what sounds, words, and sentences to dictate to students - so that you cover your weekly patterns AND review previous patterns.

Notice that there are 2 columns for the sounds and words ("My letters" and "Copied letters;" "My words" and "Copied words"). This gives students a place to write the correct sounds and words after they see the teacher's version. ALL students re-copy, even if they were correct the first time. They leave their original work as-is, so that you can see their mistakes.

You may also have noticed that the "My words" column has sound boxes. These can be used to guide students in writing words. One sound goes in each box. The larger box in #5 is for a digraph, like "ch" or "sh."

Here's another version of a dictation paper. Notice how we aren't practicing sounds during this particular dictation. There are no sound boxes, and there are no individual word lines in the sentence:

As you can see, there are tons of minor variations and adaptations that you can make to the dictation process! It's all about meeting the needs of your students. You want to provide them with enough support so that they can be successful - but not too much support so that the tasks are easy.

Do you use dictations in the classroom? Or do you plan on giving them a try? Let me know in the comments!

And if you need a ready-to-use program to guide you in using dictations and other phonics teaching practices, check out From Sounds to Spelling. The program includes professional development videos to help you understand the "why" behind many phonics concepts - plus ALL the materials you need to teach phonics, phonological awareness, and spelling to Kindergarten, 1st grade, and 2nd grade students.

Happy teaching!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What Is a Dictation and Why Is It Valuable? - Learning at the Primary Pond

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Dictations are amazing for teaching phonics. But what is a dictation? How can it be used with K-2 students?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
UFLI Foundations: Progress Monitoring and Differentiation

# data[].attributes.body
Review pgs 14-23 especially

# data[].attributes.body
Certification in Elementary Ed, Special Ed, Bilingual Ed, and TESOL

Migrant Educational Outreach Teacher

Bilingual ICOT (Integrated Co-taught SPED, Spanish/English)

Literacy Coach and Coordinator

Head of Student Support Services

English as a New Language (ENL)

New York/China

Cheese-maker
Traveler
Pun-lover

Email: hannah@erinkentconsulting.com

# data[].attributes.body
Louisa Moats

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

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

the history of the English language and its effect on spelling

English phonology, including speech sounds and their distinctive features

how print represents speech in English

the morphological aspects of words

syntax and its instruction

how meaning is conveyed with language

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

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

New and updated chapter exercises

New faculty support materials

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

More accessible, undergraduate-friendly tone and structure

Additional graphics to illustrate key concepts

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

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
speech to print: language essentials for teachers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
education / teaching methods & materials / language arts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
education / teaching methods & materials / reading & phonics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
education/teaching methods & materials - language arts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
education/teaching methods & materials - reading & phonics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
language arts & disciplines / reading skills

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
language arts & disciplines/reading skills

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
teaching methods & materials - language arts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
teaching methods & materials - reading & phonics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
language development; language arts instruction; literacy; literacy instruction; language assessment; literacy assessment; teaching literacy skills; language arts teachers; language arts textbook; reading teachers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
education / teaching methods & materials / language arts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
education / teaching methods & materials / reading & phonics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
education/teaching methods & materials - language arts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
education/teaching methods & materials - reading & phonics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
language arts & disciplines / reading skills

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
language arts & disciplines/reading skills

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Amazon.com: Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers (9781681253305): Moats Ed.D., Louisa Cook, Brady Ph.D., Dr. Susan: Books

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Today we're going to talk about blending lines - a powerful, easy-to-use tool that will help your students become masters at decoding!

It's the fourth post in our 10-part series about teaching phonics.

Blending is the stringing of letter sounds to read a word.
There are two main types of blending:

Successive blending

Final blending

*Weird but important note: Some phonics experts use the terms "successive blending" and "final blending" differently. Beck and Beck ( Making Sense of Phonics) use the terms as I will use them in this article. Wiley Blevins, in his book ( A Fresh Look at Phonics) switches the terms around.

Successive and Final Blending
Successive blending
Successive blending is an excellent way to introduce blending to your students, and children who struggle will benefit from extended use of this approach.

The power of successive blending is that it helps students keep the sounds in their heads; short-term memory issues are a real problem for students who sound out p-a-t and come up with "tan."

While you should phase out successive blending after a few weeks, Beck and Beck recommend temporarily bringing it back when students start reading words with beginning blends (such as flat and swim).
Final blending
Final blending (which I like to call "sound by sound blending") is more efficient and the method you should use when your students understand the concept of blending.

However, if you are working with an individual student who is struggling, switch back to successive blending.
Watch this quick video to understand both types of blending.
(For a longer video of successive blending, see this post.)

Best practices for teaching blending

In his book, A Fresh Look at Phonic s, Wiley Blevins share these tips for teaching blending:

Model and practice blending often (every day for early readers).

When starting blending with new readers, use words that start with continuous sounds (such as mmmm and sssss).

Practice blending before reading a story (at least 20 words in 1st grade and up).

Select blending lines that include minimal contrasts so students have to fully analyze the words.

Create lines that allow you to informally assess your students.

Make sure your lines contain differentiated practice to meet everyone's needs.

Include sentences in your lines.

What are blending lines?

Blending lines are lines of words that students sound out using their phonics knowledge. Blending lines allow students to practice the new focus skill and review previously learned skills.

Students should read the these lines after the lesson but before reading their decodable book.

You can use the lines with a whole class or in a small group phonics lesson.

Sample blending lines
Wiley Blevins' tips for using blending lines

Model only one or two words at the beginning of the word set. You want your students to do the work.

Have students read the words chorally the first time through (observe to see which students drop out as the words become more challenging).

Revisit the lines by pointing to words in random order and calling on students to read them. Remember to call on struggling readers for the easier lines and advanced readers for the challenging ones. Keep the whole class engaged by having them give a thumbs-up to indicate when a word is read correctly.

Use the lines for multiple days of instruction as a quick review or warm-up.

Make copies of the week's lines for students to take home and practice.

Make sure that the time spent on the lines is no more than 5 minutes at a time.

More sample blending lines
So what do you think?
Are you ready to give blending lines a try?

It can be tricky to write your own blending lines, but I've made it easy for you!

As you can see in the above image, I've created a planning sheet for you that reminds you what to focus on for each line.

After you type in the words on the planning sheet, they auto-populate into the student page.

The page prints without the blue boxes, making it the perfect practice sheet for your students.

Just sign up below to get the freebie!

Check our the rest of our phonics series!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Are you wondering how to use blending lines in your phonics lessons? We're here to help - with editable blending lines!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Log into Facebook to start sharing and connecting with your friends, family, and people you know.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Teacher Friendly Guide to Reading Research.pdf

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Log into Facebook to start sharing and connecting with your friends, family, and people you know.

# data[].attributes.body
40 pg Presentation--user friendly!

# data[].attributes.body
-Many members
-Everyone is at a different point in their study of the SoR so some conflicts can arise

I prefer not to engage but read what piques my interest for my particular learners and colleagues.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Log into Facebook to start sharing and connecting with your friends, family, and people you know.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
READING IN THE BRAIN

Praise for Reading in the Brain

- The Wall Street Journal

"Fascinating . . . By studying the wet stuff inside our head, we can begin to understand why this sentence has this structure, and why this letter, this one right here, has its shape. . . . Eloquent . . . Provide[s] a wealth of evidence."

-Jonah Lehrer

"Dehaene's masterful book is a delight to read and scientifically precise."

"Combining research and narrative, Dehaene weaves a fascinating explanation of how the prefrontal cortex co-opted primeval neurological pathways to learn a uniquely human skill."

"The transparent and automatic feat of reading comprehension disguises an intricate biological effort, ably analyzed in this fascinating study. . . . This lively, lucid treatise proves once again that Dehaene is one of our most gifted expositors of science; he makes the workings of the mind less mysterious, but no less miraculous."

"Richly rewarding."

"[Dehaene] is that rare bird: a scientist who can write."

"Inspire[s] a sense of wonder at the complexity at the task readers are performing just by scanning from page to page."

-A.V. Club.com

-Oliver Sacks, M.D.

"In a moment when knowledge about the reading brain may be the key to its preservation, Stanislas Dehaene's book provides the next critical rung of that knowledge. He does this through insights gained from his own prolific research, through his comprehensive grasp of the neurosciences, and through his unique combination of common sense and wisdom that shines through every chapter."

-Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

"Stanislas Dehaene takes us on a journey into the science of reading. We travel past firing neurons in monkeys, brain activation patterns in humans, people with brain damage, and culture as a whole. It's a proactive and enjoyable synthesis of a tremendous amount of information, with just the right balance between getting the facts right and making them accessible to lay readers."

-Joseph LeDoux, University Professor, New York University, and author of Synaptic Self and The Emotional Brain

-Dean Falk, author of Finding Our Tongues: Mothers, Infants, and the Origins of Language

"The complicated partnership of eye and mind that transforms printed symbols into sound, music, and meaning, and gives rise to thought, is the subject of this intriguing study. It's a wondrous journey: like that of stout Cortez, like H. M. Stanley's search for Dr. David Livingstone, like the next stunning probe into outer space."

-Howard Engel, coauthor of The Man Who Forgot How to Read

Reading in the Brain

The New Science
of How We Read

STANISLAS DEHAENE

INTRODUCTION

The New Science of Reading

Withdrawn into the peace of this desert, along with some books, few but wise, I live in conversation with the deceased, and listen to the dead with my eyes

-FRANCISCO DE QUEVEDO

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

The reader's brain contains a complicated set of mechanisms admirably attuned to reading. For a great many centuries, this talent remained a mystery. Today, the brain's black box is cracked open and a true science of reading is coming into being. Advances in psychology and neuroscience over the last twenty years have begun to unravel the principles underlying the brain's reading circuits. Modern brain imaging methods now reveal, in just a matter of minutes, the brain areas that activate when we decipher written words. Scientists can track a printed word as it progresses from the retina through a chain of processing stages, each of which is marked by an elementary question: Are these letters? What do they look like? Are they a word? What does it sound like? How is it pronounced? What does it mean?

On this empirical ground, a theory of reading is materializing. It postulates that the brain circuitry inherited from our primate evolution can be co-opted to the task of recognizing printed words. According to this approach, our neuronal networks are literally "recycled" for reading. The insight into how literacy changes the brain is profoundly transforming our vision of education and learning disabilities. New remediation programs are being conceived that should, in time, cope with the debilitating incapacity to decipher words known as dyslexia.

My purpose in this book is to share my knowledge of recent and little-known advances in the science of reading. In the twenty-first century, the average person still has a better idea of how a car works than of the inner functioning of his own brain-a curious and shocking state of affairs. Decision makers in our education systems swing back and forth with the changing winds of pedagogical reform, often blatantly ignoring how the brain actually learns to read. Parents, educators, and politicians often recognize that there is a gap between educational programs and the most up-to-date findings in neuroscience. But too frequently their idea of how this field can contribute to advances in education is only grounded in a few color pictures of the brain at work. Unfortunately, the imaging techniques that allow us to visualize brain activity are subtle and occasionally misleading. The new science of reading is so young and fast-moving that it is still relatively unknown outside the scientific community. My goal is to provide a simple introduction to this exciting field, and to increase awareness of the amazing capacities of our reading brains.

From Neurons to Education

Reading acquisition is a major step in child development. Many children initially struggle with reading, and surveys indicate that about one adult in ten fails to master even the rudiments of text comprehension. Years of hard work are needed before the clockwork-like brain machinery that supports reading runs so smoothly that we forget it exists.

Why is reading so difficult to master? What profound alterations in brain circuitry accompany the acquisition of reading? Are some teaching strategies better adapted to the child's brain than others? What scientific reasons, if any, explain why phonics-the systematic teaching of letter-to-sound correspondences-seems to work better than whole-word teaching? Although much still remains to be discovered, the new science of reading is now providing increasingly precise answers to all these questions. In particular, it underlines why early research on reading erroneously supported the whole-word approach-and how recent research on the brain's reading networks proves it was wrong.

Understanding what goes into reading also sheds light on its pathologies. In our explorations of the reader's mind and brain, you will be introduced to patients who suddenly lost the ability to read following a stroke. I will also analyze the causes of dyslexia, whose cerebral underpinnings are gradually coming to light. It is now clear that the dyslexic brain is subtly different from the brain of a normal reader. Several dyslexia susceptibility genes have been identified. But this is by no means a reason for discouragement or resignation. New intervention therapies are now being defined. Intensive retraining of language and reading circuits has brought about major improvements in children's brains that can readily be tracked with brain imaging.

Putting Neurons into Culture

One of the basic techniques in the neurobiologist's toolkit consists of "putting neurons in culture"-letting neurons grow in a petri dish. In this book, I call for a different "culture of neurons"-a new way of looking at human cultural activities, based on our understanding of how they map onto the brain networks that support them. Neuroscience's avowed goal is to describe how the elementary components of the nervous system lead to the behavioral regularities that can be observed in children and adults (including advanced cognitive skills). Reading provides one of the most appropriate test beds for this "neurocultural" approach. We are increasingly aware of how writing systems as different as Chinese, Hebrew, or English get inscribed in our brain circuits. In the case of reading, we can clearly draw direct links between our native neuronal architecture and our acquired cultural abilities-but the hope is that this neuroscience approach will extend to other major domains of human cultural expression.

The Mystery of the Reading Ape

There are good reasons why this deceptively simple question deserves to be called a paradox. We have discovered that the literate brain contains specialized cortical mechanisms that are exquisitely attuned to the recognition of written words. Even more surprisingly, the same mechanisms, in all humans, are systematically housed in identical brain regions, as though there were a cerebral organ for reading.

Following in Darwin's footsteps, Stephen Jay Gould provided many examples of the imperfect outcome of natural selection, including the panda's thumb.1 The British evolutionist Richard Dawkins also explained how the delicate mechanisms of the eye or of the wing could only have emerged through natural selection or are the work of a "blind watchmaker."2 Darwin's evolutionism seems to be the only source of apparent "design" in nature.

When it comes to explaining reading, however, Paley's parable is problematic in a subtly different way. The clockwork-like brain mechanisms that support reading are certainly comparable in complexity and sheer design to those of the watch abandoned on the heath. Their entire organization leans toward the single apparent goal of decoding written words as quickly and accurately as possible. Yet neither the hypothesis of an intelligent creator nor that of slow emergence through natural selection seems to provide a plausible explanation for the origins of reading. Time was simply too short for evolution to design specialized reading circuits. How, then, did our primate brain learn to read? Our cortex is the outcome of millions of years of evolution in a world without writing-why can it adapt to the specific challenges posed by written word recognition?

Biological Unity and Cultural Diversity

In the social sciences, the acquisition of cultural skills such as reading, mathematics, or the fine arts is rarely, if ever, posed in biological terms. Until recently, very few social scientists considered that brain biology and evolutionary theory were even relevant to their fields. Even today, most implicitly subscribe to a naïve model of the brain, tacitly viewing it as an infinitely plastic organ whose learning capacity is so broad that it places no constraints on the scope of human activity. This is not a new idea. It can be traced back to the theories of the British empiricists John Locke, David Hume, and George Berkeley, who claimed that the human brain should be compared to a blank slate that progressively absorbs the imprint of man's natural and cultural environment through the five senses.

This view of mankind, which denies the very existence of a human nature, has often been adopted without question. It belongs to the default "standard social science model"3 shared by many anthropologists, sociologists, some psychologists, and even a few neuroscientists who view the cortical surface as "largely equipotent and free of domain-specific structure."4 It holds that human nature is constructed, gradually and flexibly, through cultural impregnation. As a result, children born to the Inuit, to the hunter-gatherers of the Amazon, or to an Upper East Side New York family, according to this view, have little in common. Even color perception, musical appreciation, or the notion of right and wrong should vary from one culture to the next, simply because the human brain has few stable structures other than the capacity to learn.

Empiricists further maintain that the human brain, unhindered by the limitations of biology and unlike that of any other animal species, can absorb any form of culture. From this theoretical perspective, to talk about the cerebral bases of cultural inventions such as reading is thus downright irrelevant-much like analyzing the atomic composition of a Shakespeare play.

On the basis of these data, I propose a novel theory of neurocultural interactions, radically opposed to cultural relativism, and capable of resolving the reading paradox. I call it the "neuronal recycling" hypothesis. According to this view, human brain architecture obeys strong genetic constraints, but some circuits have evolved to tolerate a fringe of variability. Part of our visual system, for instance, is not hardwired, but remains open to changes in the environment. Within an otherwise well-structured brain, visual plasticity gave the ancient scribes the opportunity to invent reading.

A Reader's Guide

In forthcoming chapters, I will explain how neuronal recycling can account for literacy, its mechanisms in the brain, and even its history. In the first three chapters, I analyze the mechanisms of reading in expert adults. Chapter 1 sets the stage by looking at reading from a psychological angle: how fast do we read, and what are the main determinants of reading behavior? In chapter 2, I move to the brain areas at work when we read, and how they can be visualized using modern brain imaging techniques. Finally, in chapter 3, I come down to the level of single neurons and their organization into the circuits that recognize letters and words.

I tackle my analysis in a resolutely mechanical way. I propose to expose the cogwheels of the reader's brain in much the same way as the Reverend Paley suggested we dismantle the watch abandoned on the heath. The reader's brain will not, however, reveal any perfect clockwork mechanics designed by a divine watchmaker. Our reading circuits contain more than a few imperfections that betray our brain's compromise between what is needed for reading and the available biological mechanisms. The peculiar characteristics of the primate visual system explain why reading does not operate like a fast and efficient scanner. As we move our eyes across the page, each word is slowly brought into the central region of our retina, only to be exploded into a myriad of fragments that our brain later pieces back together. It is only because these processes have become automatic and unconscious, thanks to years of practice, that we are under the illusion that reading is simple and effortless.

The reading paradox expresses the indisputable fact that our genes have not evolved in order to enable us to read. My reasoning in the face of this enigma is quite simple. If the brain did not evolve for reading, the opposite must be true: writing systems must have evolved within our brain's constraints. Chapter 4 revisits the history of writing in this light, starting with the first prehistoric symbols and ending with the invention of the alphabet. At each step, there is evidence of constant cultural tinkering. Over many millennia, the scribes struggled to design words, signs, and alphabets that could fit the limits of our primate brain. To this day, the world's writing systems still share a number of design features that can ultimately be traced back to the restrictions imposed by our brain circuits.

Continuing on the idea that our brain was not designed for reading, but recycles some of its circuits for this novel cultural activity, chapter 5 examines how children learn to read. Psychological research concludes that there are not many ways to convert a primate brain into that of an expert reader. This chapter explores in some detail the only developmental trajectory that appears to exist. Schools might be well advised to exploit this knowledge to optimize the teaching of reading and mitigate the dramatic effects of illiteracy and dyslexia.

I will also go on to show how a neuroscientific approach can shed light on the more mysterious features of reading acquisition. For instance, why do so many children often write their first words from right to left? Contrary to the accepted idea, these mirror inversion errors are not the first signs of dyslexia, but a natural consequence of the organization of our visual brain. In a majority of children, dyslexia relates to another, quite distinct anomaly in processing speech sounds. The description of the symptoms of dyslexia, their cerebral bases, and the most recent discoveries concerning its genetic foundations are covered in chapter 6, while chapter 7 provides an insight into what mirror errors can tell us about normal visual recognition.

Finally, in chapter 8, I will return to the astonishing fact that only our species is capable of cultural inventions as sophisticated as reading-a unique feat, unmatched by any other primate. In total opposition to the standard social science model, where culture gets a free ride on a blank-slate brain, reading demonstrates how culture and brain organization are inextricably linked. Throughout their long cultural history, human beings progressively discovered that they could reuse their visual systems as surrogate language inputs, thus arriving at reading and writing. I will also briefly discuss how other major human cultural traits could be submitted to a similar analysis. Mathematics, art, music, and religion might also be looked on as evolved devices, shaped by centuries of cultural evolution, that have encroached on our primate brains.

How Do We Read?

Written word processing starts in our eyes. Only the center of the retina, called the fovea, has a fine enough resolution to allow for the recognition of small print. Our gaze must therefore move around the page constantly. Whenever our eyes stop, we only recognize one or two words. Each of them is then split up into myriad fragments by retinal neurons and must be put back together before it can be recognized. Our visual system progressively extracts graphemes, syllables, prefixes, suffixes, and word roots. Two major parallel processing routes eventually come into play: the phonological route, which converts letters into speech sounds, and the lexical route, which gives access to a mental dictionary of word meanings.

The existence of the text is a silent existence, silent until the moment in which a reader reads it. Only when the able eye makes contact with the markings on the tablet does the text come to active life. All writing depends on the generosity of the reader.

-ALBERTO MANGUEL, THE HISTORY OF READING

At first sight, reading seems close to magical: our gaze lands on a word, and our brain effortlessly gives us access to its meaning and pronunciation. But in spite of appearances, the process is far from simple. Upon entering the retina, a word is split up into a myriad of fragments, as each part of the visual image is recognized by a distinct photoreceptor. Starting from this input, the real challenge consists in putting the pieces back together in order to decode what letters are present, to figure out the order in which they appear, and finally to identify the word.

Over the past thirty years, cognitive psychology has worked on analyzing the mechanics of reading. Its goal is to crack the "algorithm" of visual word recognition-the series of processing steps that a proficient reader applies to the problem of identifying written words. Psychologists treat reading like a computer science problem. Every reader resembles a robot with two cameras-the two eyes and their retinas. The words we read are painted onto them. They first appear only as splotches of light and dark that are not directly interpretable as linguistic signs. Visual information must be recoded in an understandable format before we can access the appropriate sounds, words, and meanings. Thus we must have a deciphering algorithm, or a processing recipe akin to automatic character recognition software, which takes the pixels on a page as input and produces the identity of the words as output. To accomplish this feat, unbeknownst to us, our brain hosts a sophisticated set of decoding operations whose principles are only beginning to be understood.

The Eye: A Poor Scanner

The tale of reading begins when the retina receives photons reflected off the written page. But the retina is not a homogeneous sensor. Only its central part, called the fovea, is dense in high-resolution cells sensitive to incoming light, while the rest of the retina has a coarser resolution. The fovea, which occupies about 15 degrees of the visual field, is the only part of the retina that is genuinely useful for reading. When foveal information is lacking, whether due to a retinal lesion, to a stroke having destroyed the central part of the visual cortex, or to an experimental trick that selectively blocks visual inputs to the fovea, reading becomes impossible.6

The need to bring words into the fovea explains why our eyes are in constant motion when we read. By orienting our gaze, we "scan" text with the most sensitive part of our vision, the only one that has the resolution needed to determine letters. However, our eyes do not travel continuously across the page.7 Quite the opposite: they move in small steps called saccades. At this very moment, you are making four or five of these jerky movements every second, in order to bring new information to your fovea.

Even within the fovea, visual information is not represented with the same precision at all points. In the retina as well as in the subsequent visual relays of the thalamus and of the cortex, the number of cells allocated to a given portion of the visual scene decreases progressively as one moves away from the center of gaze. This causes a gradual loss of visual precision. Visual accuracy is optimal at the center and smoothly decreases toward the periphery. We have the illusion of seeing the whole scene in front of us with the same fixed accuracy, as if it were filmed by a digital camera with a homogeneous array of pixels. However, unlike the camera, our eye sensor accurately perceives only the precise point where our gaze happens to land. The surroundings are lost in an increasingly hazy blurriness (figure 1.1).8

Figure 1.1 The retina stringently filters what we read. In this simulation, a page from Samuel Johnson's The Adventurer (1754) was filtered using an algorithm that copies the decreasing acuity of human vision away from the center of the retina. Regardless of size, only letters close to fixation can be identified. This is why we constantly explore pages with jerky eye movements when we read. When our gaze stops, we can only identify one or two words.

One might think that, under these conditions, it is the absolute size of printed characters that determines the ease with which we can read: small letters should be harder to read than larger ones. Oddly enough, however, this is not the case. The reason is that the larger the characters, the more room they use on the retina. When a whole word is printed in larger letters, it moves into the periphery of the retina, where even large letters are hard to discern. The two factors compensate for each other almost exactly, so that an enormous word and a minuscule one are essentially equivalent from the point of view of retinal precision. Of course, this is only true provided that the size of the characters remains larger than an absolute minimum, which corresponds to the maximal precision attained at the center of our fovea. When visual acuity is diminished, for instance in aging patients, it is quite logical to recommend books in large print.

Because our eyes are organized in this way, our perceptual abilities depend exclusively on the number of letters in words, not on the space these words occupy on our retina.9 Indeed, our saccades when we read vary in absolute size, but are constant when measured in numbers of letters. When the brain prepares to move our eyes, it adapts the distance to be covered to the size of the characters, in order to ensure that our gaze always advances by about seven to nine letters. This value, which is amazingly small, thus corresponds approximately to the information that we can process in the course of a single eye fixation.

I shall then suppose, not that God who is supremely good and the fountain of truth, but some evil genius not less powerful than deceitful, has employed all his energy to deceive me; I shall consider that the heavens, the earth, colors, figures, sound, and all other external things are naught but the illusions and dreams of which this genius has availed himself in order to lay traps for my credulity. I shall consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, nor any senses, yet falsely believing myself to possess all these things.

As soon as the eyes move, the computer discreetly refreshes the display. Its goal is to show the appropriate letters at the place where the person is looking, and strings of x's everywhere else:

Using this device, McConkie and Rayner made a remarkable and paradoxical discovery. They found that the participants did not notice the manipulation. As long as enough letters are presented left and right of fixation, a reader fails to detect the trick and believes that he is looking at a perfectly normal page of text.

This surprising blindness occurs because the eye attains its maximum speed at the point when the letter change occurs. This trick makes the letter changes hard to detect, because at this very moment the whole retinal image is blurred by motion. Once gaze lands, everything looks normal: within the fovea, the expected letters are in place, and the rest of the visual field, on the periphery, cannot be read anyway. McConkie and Rayner's experiment thus proves that we consciously process only a very small subset of our visual inputs. If the computer leaves four letters on the left of fixation, and fifteen letters on the right, reading speed remains normal.11 In brief, we extract very little information at a time from the written page. Descartes' evil genius would only have to display twenty letters per fixation to make us believe that we were reading the Bible or the U.S. Constitution!

Twenty letters is, in fact, an overestimate. We identify only ten or twelve letters per saccade: three or four to the left of fixation, and seven or eight to the right. Beyond this point, we are largely insensitive to letter identity and merely encode the presence of the spaces between words. By providing cues about word length, the spaces allow us to prepare our eye movements and ensure that our gaze lands close to the center of the next word. Experts continue to debate about the extent to which we extract information from an upcoming word-perhaps only the first few letters. Everyone agrees, however, that the direction of reading imposes asymmetry on our span of vision. In the West, visual span is much greater toward the right side, but in readers of Arabic or Hebrew, where gaze scans the page from right to left, this asymmetry is reversed.12 In other writing systems such as Chinese, where character density is greater, saccades are shorter and visual span is reduced accordingly. Each reader thus adapts his visual exploration strategy to his language and script.

Using the same method, we can also estimate how much time is needed to encode the identity of words. A computer can be programmed so that, after a given duration, all of the letters are replaced by a string of x's, even in the fovea. This experiment reveals that fifty milliseconds of presentation are enough for reading to proceed at an essentially normal pace. This does not mean that all of the mental operations involved in reading are completed in one-twentieth of a second. As we shall see, a whole pipeline of mental processes continues to operate for at least one-half second after the word has been presented. However, the initial intake of visual information can be very brief.

In summary, our eyes impose a lot of constraints on the act of reading. The structure of our visual sensors forces us to scan the page by jerking our eyes around every two or three tenths of a second. Reading is nothing but the word-by-word mental restitution of a text through a series of snapshots. While some small grammatical words like "the," "it," or "is" can sometimes be skipped, almost all content words such as nouns and verbs have to be fixated at least once.

These constraints are an integral part of our visual apparatus and cannot be lifted by training. One can certainly teach people to optimize their eye movement patterns, but most good readers, who read from four hundred to five hundred words per minute, are already close to optimal. Given the retinal sensor at our disposal, it is probably not possible to do much better. A simple demonstration proves that eye movements are the rate-limiting step in reading.13 If a full sentence is presented, word by word, at the precise point where gaze is focalized, thus avoiding the need for eye movements, a good reader can read at staggering speed-a mean of eleven hundred words per minute, and up to sixteen hundred words per minute for the best readers, which is about one word every forty milliseconds and three to four times faster than normal reading! With this method, called rapid sequential visual presentation, or RSVP, identification and comprehension remain satisfactory, thus suggesting that the duration of those central steps does not impose a strong constraint on normal reading. Perhaps this computerized presentation mode represents the future of reading in a world where screens progressively replace paper.

The Search for Invariants

Can you read, Lubin?

Yes, I can read printed letters, but I was never able to read handwriting.

-MOLIÈRE, GEORGES DANDIN

If perceptual invariance is a problem, it is because words are not always in the same location, in the same font, or in the same size. If they were, just listing which of the cells on the retina are active and which are not would suffice to decode a word, much like a black-and-white computer image is defined by the list of its pixels. In fact, however, hundreds of different retinal images can stand for the same word, depending on the form in which it is written (figure 1.2). Thus one of the first steps in reading must be to correct for the immense variety of those surface forms.

Figure 1.2 Visual invariance is one of the prime features of the human reading system. Our word recognition device meets two seemingly contradictory requirements: it neglects irrelevant variations in character shape, even if they are huge, but amplifies relevant differences, even if they are tiny. Unbeknownst to us, our visual system automatically compensates for enormous variations in size or font. Yet it also attends to minuscule changes in shape. By turning an "s" into an "e," and therefore "sight" into "eight," a single mark drastically reorients the processing chain toward entirely distinct pronunciations and meanings.

Several cues suggest that our brain applies an efficient solution to this perceptual invariance problem. When we hold a newspaper at a reasonable distance, we can read both the headlines and the classified ads. Word size can vary fiftyfold without having much impact on our reading speed. This task is not very different from that of recognizing the same face or object from a distance of two feet or thirty yards-our visual system tolerates vast changes in scale.

A second form of invariance lets us disregard the location of words on the page. As our gaze scans a page, the center of our retina usually lands slightly left of the center of words. However, our targeting is far from perfect, and our eyes sometimes reach the first or last letter without this preventing us from recognizing the word. We can even read words presented on the periphery of our visual field, provided that letter size is increased to compensate for the loss of retinal resolution. Thus size constancy goes hand in hand with normalization for spatial location.

Finally, word recognition is also largely invariant for character shape. Now that word processing software is omnipresent, technology that was formerly reserved to a small elite of typographers has become broadly available. Everyone knows that there are many sets of characters called "fonts" (a term left over from the time when each character had to be cast in lead at a type foundry before going to the press). Each font also has two kinds of characters called "cases," the UPPERCASE and the lowercase (originally the case was a flat box divided into many compartments where lead characters were sorted; the "upper case" was reserved for capital letters, and the "lower case" for the rest). Finally, one can choose the "weight" of a font (normal or bold characters), its inclination ( italics , originally invented in Italy), whether it is underlined or not, and any combination of these options . These well-calibrated variations in fonts, however, are nothing compared to the enormous variety of writing styles. Manuscript handwriting obviously takes us to another level of variability and ambiguity.

In the face of all these variations, exactly how our visual system learns to categorize letter shapes remains somewhat mysterious. Part of this invariance problem can be solved using relatively simple means. The vowel "o," for instance, can easily be recognized, regardless of size, case, or font, thanks to its unique closed shape. Thus, building a visual o detector isn't particularly difficult. Other letters, however, pose specific problems. Consider the letter "r," for instance. Although it seems obvious that the shapes r, R, and all represent the same letter, careful examination shows that this association is entirely arbitrary-the shape e, for instance, might serve as well as the lowercase version of the letter "R." Only the accidents of history have left us this cultural oddity. As a result, when we learn to read, we must not only learn that letters map onto the sounds of language, but also that each letter can take on many unrelated shapes. As we shall see, our capacity to do this probably comes from the existence of abstract letter detectors, neurons that can recognize the identity of a letter in its various guises. Experiments show that very little training suffices to DeCoDe, At An EsSeNtIaLly NoRmAl SpEeD, EnTiRe SeNtEnCes WhOsE LeTtErS HaVe BeEn PrInTeD AlTeRnAtElY iN uPpErCaSe aNd In LoWeRcAsE.15 In the McConkie and Rayner "evil genius" computer, this letter-case alternation can be changed in between every eye saccade, totally unbeknownst to the reader!16 In our daily reading experience, we never see words presented in alternating case, but our letter normalization processes are so efficient that they easily resist such transformation.

In passing, these experiments demonstrate that global word shape does not play any role in reading. If we can immediately recognize the identity of "words," "WORDS," and "WoRdS," it is because our visual system pays no attention to the contours of words or to the pattern of ascending and descending letters: it is only interested in the letters they contain. Obviously, our capacity to recognize words does not depend on an analysis of their overall shape.

Amplifying Differences

Although our visual system efficiently filters out visual differences that are irrelevant to reading, such as the distinction between "R" and "r," it would be a mistake to think that it always discards information and simplifies shapes. On the contrary, in many cases it must preserve, and even amplify, the minuscule details that distinguish two very similar words from each other. Consider the words "eight" and "sight." We immediately access their very distinct meanings and pronunciations, but it is only when we look more closely at them that we realize that the difference is only a few pixels. Our visual system is exquisitely sensitive to the minuscule difference between "eight" and "sight," and it amplifies it in order to send the input to completely different regions of semantic space. At the same time, it pays very little attention to other much greater differences, such as the distinction between "eight" and "EIGHT."

Every Word Is a Tree

Our visual system deals with the problem of invariant word recognition using a well-organized system. As we shall see in detail in chapter 2, the flow of neuronal activity that enters into the visual brain gets progressively sorted into meaningful categories. Shapes that appear very similar, such as "eight" and "sight," are sifted through a series of increasingly refined filters that progressively separate them and attach them to distinct entries in a mental lexicon, a virtual dictionary of all the words we have ever encountered. Conversely, shapes like "eight" and "EIGHT," which are composed of distinct visual features, are initially encoded by different neurons in the primary visual area, but are progressively recoded until they become virtually indistinguishable. Feature detectors recognize the similarity of the letters "i" and "I." Other, slightly more abstract letter detectors classify "e" and "E" as two forms of the same letter. In spite of the initial differences, the reader's visual system eventually encodes the very essence of the letter strings "eight" and "EIGHT," regardless of their exact shape. It gives these two strings the same single mental address, an abstract code capable of orienting the rest of the brain toward the pronunciation and meaning of the word.

What does this address look like? According to some models, the brain uses a sort of unstructured list that merely provides the sequence of letters E-I-G-H-T. In others, it relies on a very abstract and conventional code, akin to a random cipher by which, say, [1296] would be the word "eight" and [3452] the word "sight." Contemporary research, however, supports another hypothesis. Every written word is probably encoded by a hierarchical tree in which letters are grouped into larger-sized units, which are themselves grouped into syllables and words-much as a human body can be represented as an arrangement of legs, arms, torso, and head, each of which can be further broken down into simple parts.

A good example of the mental decomposition of words into relevant units can be found if we dissect the word "unbuttoning." We must first strip off the prefix "un" and the familiar suffix or grammatical ending "ing." Both frame the central element, the word inside the word: the root "button." All three of these components are called "morphemes"-the smallest units that carry some meaning. Each word is characterized, at this level, by how its morphemes are put together. Breaking down a word into its morphemes even allows us to understand words that we have never seen before, such as "reunbutton" or "deglochization" (we understand that this is the undoing of the action of "gloching," whatever that may be). In some languages, such as Turkish or Finnish, morphemes can be assembled into very large words that convey as much information as a full English sentence. In those languages, but also in ours, the decomposition of a word into its morphemes is an essential step on the path that leads from vision to meaning.

A lot of experimental data show that, very quickly and even downright unconsciously, our visual system snips out the morphemes of words. For instance, if I were to flash the word "departure" on a computer screen, you would later say the word "depart" slightly faster when confronted with it. The presentation of "departure" seems to preactivate the morpheme [depart], thus facilitating its access. Psychologists speak of a "priming" effect-the reading of a word primes the recognition of related words, much as one primes a pump. Importantly, this priming effect does not depend solely on visual similarity: words that look quite different but share a morpheme, such as "can" and "could," can prime each other, whereas words that look alike but bear no intimate morphological relation, such as "aspire" and "aspirin," do not. Priming also does not require any resemblance at the level of meaning; words such as "hard" and "hardly," or "depart" and "department," can prime each other, even though their meanings are essentially unrelated.17 Getting down to the morpheme level seems to be of such importance for our reading system that it is willing to make guesses about the decomposition of words. Our reading apparatus dissects the word "department" into [depart] + [ment] in the hope that this will be useful to the next operators computing its meaning.18 Never mind that this does not work all the time-a "listless" person is not one who is waiting for a grocery list, nor does sharing an "apartment" imply that you and your partner will soon live apart. Such parsing errors will have to be caught at other stages in the word dissection process.

Our visual system has learned to treat these groups of letters as bona fide units, to the point where we no longer pay attention to their actual letter content. Let us do a simple experiment to prove this point. Examine the following list of words and mark those that contain the letter "a":

Did you feel that you had to slow down, ever so slightly, for the last three words, "coat," "please," and "meat"? They all contain the letter "a," but it is embedded in a complex grapheme that is not pronounced like an "a." If we were to rely only on letter detectors in order to detect the letter "a," the parsing of the word into its graphemes would not matter. However, actual measurement of response times clearly shows that our brain does not stop at the single-letter level. Our visual system automatically regroups letters into higher-level graphemes, thus making it harder for us to see that groups of letters such as "ea" actually contain the letter "a."20

The nature of these constituents remains a hot topic in research. It would appear that multiple levels of analysis can coexist: a single letter at the lowest level, then a pair of letters (or "bigram," an important unit to which we will return later), the grapheme, the syllable, the morpheme, and finally the whole word. The final point in visual processing leaves the word parsed out into a hierarchical structure, a tree made up of branches of increasing sizes whose leaves are the letters.

Reduced to a skeleton, stripped of all its irrelevant features like font, case, and size, the letter string is thus broken down into the elementary components that will be used by the rest of the brain to compute sound and meaning.

The Silent Voice

Writing-this ingenious art to paint words and speech for the eyes.

-GEORGES DE BRÉBEUF (FRENCH POET, 1617-1661)

When he paid a visit to Ambrose, then bishop of Milan, Augustine observed a phenomenon that he judged strange enough to be worth noting in his memoirs:

When [Ambrose] read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.22

In the middle of the seventh century, the theologian Isidore of Seville similarly marveled that "letters have the power to convey to us silently the sayings of those who are absent." At the time, it was customary to read Latin aloud. To articulate sounds was a social convention, but also a true necessity: confronted with pages in which the words were glued together, without spaces, in a language that they did not know well, most readers had to mumble through the texts like young children. This is why Ambrose's silent reading was so surprising, even if for us it has become a familiar experience: we can read without articulating sounds.

Nowadays, a consensus has emerged: in adults, both reading routes exist, and both are simultaneously active. We all enjoy direct access to word meaning, which spares us from pronouncing words mentally before we can understand them. Nevertheless, even proficient readers continue to use the sounds of words, even if they are unaware of it. Not that we articulate words covertly-we do not have to move our lips, or even prepare an intention to do so. At a deeper level, however, information about the pronunciation of words is automatically retrieved. Both the lexical and phonological pathways operate in parallel and reinforce each other.

There is abundant proof that we automatically access speech sounds while we read. Imagine, for instance, that you are presented with a list of strings and have to decide whether each one is a real English word or not. Mind you, you only have to decide if the letters spell out an English word. Here you go:

You perhaps hesitated when the letters sounded like a real word-as in "demon," "carpet," or "knee." This interference effect can easily be measured in terms of response times. It implies that each string is converted into a sequence of sounds that is evaluated like a real word, even though the process goes against the requested task.23

Mental conversion into sound plays an essential role when we read a word for the first time-say, the string "Kalashnikov." Initially, we cannot possibly access its meaning directly, since we have never seen the word spelled out. All we can do is convert it into sound, find that the sound pattern is intelligible, and, through this indirect route, come to understand the new word. Thus, sounding is often the only solution when we encounter a new word. It is also indispensable when we read misspelled words. Consider the little-known story by Edgar Allan Poe called "The Angel of the Odd." In it, a strange character mysteriously intrudes into the narrator's apartment, "a personage nondescript, although not altogether indescribable," and with a German accent as thick as British fog:

"Who are you, pray?" said I, with much dignity, although somewhat puzzled; "how did you get here? And what is it you are talking about?"

"Az vor ow I com'd ere," replied the figure, "dat iz none of your pizzness; and as vor vat I be talking apout, I be talk apout vat I tink proper; and as vor who I be, vy dat is de very ting I com'd here for to let you zee for yourzelf. . . . Look at me! Zee! I am te Angel ov te Odd."

"And odd enough, too," I ventured to reply; "but I was always under the impression that an angel had wings."

"Te wing!" he cried, highly incensed, "vat I pe do mit te wing? Mein Gott! Do you take me vor a shicken?"

In reading this passage we return to a style we had long forgotten, one that dates back to our childhood: the phonological route, or the slow transformation of totally novel strings of letters into sounds that miraculously become intelligible, as though someone were whispering them at us.

What about everyday words, however, that we have already met a thousand times? We do not get the impression that we slowly decode through mental enunciation. However, clever psychological tests show that we still activate their pronunciation at a nonconscious level. For instance, suppose that you are asked to indicate which of the following words refer to parts of the human body. These are all very familiar words, so you should be able to focus on their meaning and neglect their pronunciation. Try it:

Perhaps you felt the urge to respond to the word "hare," which sounds like a body part. Experiments show that we slow down and make mistakes on words that sound like an item in the target category.24 It is not clear how we could recognize this homophony if we did not first mentally retrieve the word's pronunciation. Only an internal conversion into speech sounds can explain this type of error. Our brain cannot help but transform the letters "h-a-r-e" into internal speech and then associate it with a meaning-a process that can go wrong in rare cases where the string sounds like another well-known word.

Of course, this imperfect design is also what grants us one of the great pleasures of life: puns, or the "joy of text," as the humorist Richard Lederer puts it. Without the gift of letter-to-sound conversion, we would not be able to enjoy Mae West's wisecrack ("She's the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong") or Conan Doyle's brother-in-law's quip ("there's no police like Holmes"). Without Augustine's "silent voice," the pleasure of risqué double entendres would be denied us:

An admirer says to President Lincoln, "Permit me to introduce my family. My wife, Mrs. Bates. My daughter, Miss Bates. My son, Master Bates."

"Oh dear!" replied the president.25

Further proof that our brain automatically accesses a word's sound patterns derives from subliminal priming. Suppose that I flash the word "LATE" at you, immediately followed by the word "mate," and ask you to read the second word as fast as you can. The words are shown in a different case in order to avoid any low-level visual resemblance. Nevertheless, when the first word sounds and spells like the second, as in this example, we would observe a massive acceleration of reading time, in comparison with a situation where two words are not particularly related to one another ("BOWL" followed by "mate"). Part of this facilitation clearly arises from similarity at the level of spelling alone. To flash "MATH" eases recognition of "mate," even though the two strings sound quite different. However, crucially, even greater facilitation can be found when two words share the same pronunciation ("LATE" followed by "mate"), and this sound-based priming works even when spelling is completely different ("EIGHT" followed by "mate"). Thus, pronunciation seems to be automatically extracted. As one might expect, however, spelling and sound are not encoded at the same time. It takes only twenty or thirty milliseconds of word viewing for our brain to automatically activate a word's spelling, but an additional forty milliseconds for its transformation into sound, as revealed by the emergence of sound-based priming.26

Simple experiments thus lead us to outline a whole stream of successive stages in the reader's brain, from marks on the retina to their conversion into letters and sounds. Any expert reader quickly converts strings into speech sounds effortlessly and unconsciously.

The Limits of Sound

Covert access to the pronunciation of written words is an automatic step in reading, but this conversion may not be indispensable. Speech-to-sound conversion is often slow and inefficient. Our brain thus often tries to retrieve a word's meaning using a parallel and more direct pathway that leads straight from the letter string to the associated entry in the mind's lexicon.

To boost our intuition about the direct lexical route, we have to consider the plight of a make-believe reader who would only be able to mentally enunciate written words. It would be impossible for him to discriminate between homophonic words like "maid" and "made," "raise" and "raze," "board" and "bored," or "muscles" and "mussels." Purely on the basis of sound, he might think that serial killers hate cornfields, and that one-carat diamonds are an odd shade of orange. The very fact that we readily discern the multiple meanings of such homophonic words shows that we are not obliged to pronounce them-another route is available that allows our brain to solve any ambiguity and go straight to their meaning.

I abhor such fanatical phantasimes, such insociable and point-devise companions; such rackers of orthography, as to speak dout , fine, when he should say doubt ; det , when he should pronounce debt -d, e, b, t, not d, e, t: he clepeth a calf, cauf ; half , hauf ; neighbour vocatur nebor ; neigh abbreviated ne . This is abhominable-which he would call abbominable : it insinuateth me of insanie.

English is an abominably irregular language. George Bernard Shaw pointed out that the word "fish" might be spelled ghoti : gh as in "enough," o as in "women," and ti as in "lotion"! Shaw hated the irregularities of English spelling so much that in his will he provided for a contest to design a new and fully rational alphabet called "Shavian." Unfortunately, it never met with much success, probably because it departed too much from all other existent spelling systems.27

Of course, Shaw's example is far-fetched: no one would ever read ghoti as "fish," because the letter "g," when placed at the beginning of a word, is always pronounced as a hard g or a j , never as an f . Likewise, Shakespeare notwithstanding, in present-day English the letters "alf" at the end of a word are always pronounced af , as in "calf" and "half." If letters are taken in context, it is often possible to identify some higher-order regularities that simplify the mapping of letters onto sounds. Even then, however, exceptions remain numerous-"has" and "was," "tough" and "dough," "flour" and "tour," "header" and "reader," "choir" and "chair," "friend" and "fiend." For most irregular words, the recovery of pronunciation, far from being the source of word comprehension, seems to depend on its outcome: it is only after we have recognized the identity of the word "dough" that we can recover its sound pattern.

The Hidden Logic of Our Spelling System

One may wonder why English sticks to such a complicated spelling system. Indeed, Italians do not meet with the same problems. Their spelling is transparent: every letter maps onto a single phoneme, with virtually no exceptions. As a result, it only takes a few months to learn to read. This gives Italians an enormous advantage: their children's reading skills surpass ours by several years, and they do not need to spend hours of schooling a week on dictation and spelling out loud. Furthermore, as we shall discuss later, dyslexia is a much less serious problem for them. Perhaps we should follow Italy's lead, burn all our dictionaries and desine a noo speling sistem dat eeven a θree-yia-old tchaild cood eezilee reed.

Nevertheless, before any revisions can be made, it is essential to fully understand the hidden logic of our spelling system. Spelling irregularities are not just a matter of convention. They also originate in the very structure of our language and of our brains. The two reading routes, either from spelling to sound or from spelling to meaning, place complex and often irreconcilable constraints on any writing system. The linguistic differences between English, Italian, French, and Chinese are such that no single spelling solution could ever suit them all. Thus the abominable irregularity of English spelling appears inevitable. Although spelling reform is badly needed, it will have to struggle with a great many restrictions.

First of all, it is not clear that English spelling, like Italian, could attribute a single letter to each sound, and a fixed sound to each letter. It would not be a simple thing to do because the English language contains many more speech sounds than Italian. The number of English phonemes ranges from forty to forty-five, depending on speakers and counting methods, while Italian has only thirty. Vowels and diphthongs are particularly abundant in English: there are six simple vowels (as in bat , bet , bit , but , good , and pot ), but also five long vowels (as in beef , boot , bird , bard , and boat ) and at least seven diphthongs (as in bay , boy , toe , buy , cow , beer , bear ). If each of those sounds were granted its own written symbol, we would have to invent new letters, placing an additional burden on our children. We could consider the addition of accents to existing letters, such as ã, õ, or ü. However, it is entirely utopian to imagine a universal alphabet that could transcribe all of the world's languages. Such a spelling system does exist: it is called the International Phonetic Alphabet and it plays an important role in technical publications by phonologists and linguists. However, this writing system is so complex that it would be ineffective in everyday life. The International Phonetic Alphabet has 170 signs, some of which are particularly complex . Even specialists find it very hard to read fluently without the help of a dictionary.

In order to avoid learning an excessive number of symbol shapes, languages with a great many phonemes, such as English and French, all resort to a compromise. They indicate certain vowels or consonants using either special characters such as ü, or groups of letters like "oo" or "oy." Such peculiarities, which are unique to any given language, are far from being gratuitous embellishments: they play an essential role in the "mental economy" of reading, and have to find their place in any kind of spelling reform.

For the sake of argument, we can try to imagine what a purely phonetic writing system would look like-one that Voltaire might have considered ideal. When we speak, we alter the pronunciation of words as a function of the sounds that surround them. It would be disastrous if spelling were to reflect the obtuse linguistic phenomena of so-called coarticulation, assimilation, and resyllabification, of which most speakers are usually unaware. A matter of context would end up having the same word spelled differently. Should we, for instance, use distinct marks for the various pronunciations of plurals? Should we spell "cap driver," under the pretext that the sound b , when followed by a d , tends to be pronounced like a p ? At one extreme, should we factor in the speaker's accent ("Do you take me vor a shicken?"). This would be apsurd (yes, we do pronounce this word with a p sound). The prime goal of writing is to transmit meaning as efficiently as possible. Any servile transcription of sounds would detract from this aim.

The Impossible Dream of Transparent Spelling

Rivalry between reading for sound and reading for meaning is true the world over. All writing systems must somehow manage to address this problem. Which compromise is best depends on the language to be transcribed. Life would certainly be easier if English spelling were as easy to learn as Italian or German. These languages, however, benefit from a number of characteristics that make them easy to transcribe into writing. In Italian as in German, words tend to be long, often made up of several syllables. Grammatical agreement is well marked by resonant vowels. As a result, homonyms are quite rare. Thus, a purely regular transcription of sounds is feasible. Italian and German can afford a fairly transparent spelling system, where almost every letter corresponds to a unique sound.

Of course, it is more difficult to learn to read Chinese than to learn to read Italian. Several thousand signs have to be learned, as opposed to only a few tens. These two languages thus fall at the two extremities of a continuous scale of spelling transparency, where English and French occupy intermediate positions.29 In both English and French, words tend to be short, and homophones are therefore relatively frequent ("right," "write," "rite"). To accommodate these constraints, English and French spelling rules include a mixture of phonetic and lexical transcription-a source of difficulty for the writer, but simplicity for the reader.

In brief, we have only just begun to decipher the many constraints that shape the English spelling system. Will we ever be able to reform it? My own personal standpoint on this score is that drastic simplification is inevitable. We owe it to our children, who waste hundreds of hours at this cruel game. Furthermore, some of them may never recover, handicapped for life by dyslexia or simply because they were raised in underprivileged or multilingual families. These are the real victims of our archaic spelling system. My hope is that the next generation will have become so used to abridged spelling, thanks to cell phones and the Internet, that they will cease to treat this issue as taboo and will muster enough willpower to address it rationally. However, the problem will never be resolved by a simple decree that instates phonological spelling. English will never be as simple as Italian. The dream of regular spelling is something of an illusion, as has been pointed out in a pamphlet that has been circulating in Europe for some time:

Figure 1.3 Spelling irregularities are not as irrational as they seem. For instance, although Chinese writing uses up to twenty or thirty different characters for the same syllable, the redundancy is far from pointless. On the contrary, it is very helpful to Chinese readers because the Chinese language includes a great many homophones-words that sound alike but have different meanings, like the English "one" and "won." Here, an entire Chinese story was written with the sound "shi"! Any Chinese reader can understand this text, which would clearly be impossible if it were transcribed phonetically as "shi shi shi . . ." Chinese characters disambiguate sounds by using distinct characters for distinct meanings. Similarly, homophony explains why English sticks to so many different spellings for the same sounds ("I scream for ice cream").

The European Union commissioners have announced that agreement has been reached to adopt English as the preferred language for European communications, rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, the British government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a five-year phased plan for what will be known as Euro English (Euro for short).

In the first year, "s" will be used instead of the soft "c." Sertainly, sivil servants will resieve this news with joy. Also, the hard "c" will be replaced with "k." Not only will this klear up konfusion, but typewriters kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced by "f." This will make words like "fotograf" 20 per sent shorter.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read [Dehaene, Stanislas] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read

# data[].attributes.body
Less overwhelming than SoR group, tends to be more focused on practical application with kind and helpful feedback

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
UFLI Foundations Community: Building Strong Readers | Facebook

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This group is for users of the UFLI Foundations program to ask questions, provide ideas and suggestions, and share success stories.

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

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

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

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

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

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Amazon.com: Language at the Speed of Sight: 9781541617155: Seidenberg, Mark: Books

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
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.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
UFLI Foundations | UF Literacy Institute

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
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.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Morpheme Magic – Lessons to Build Morphological Awareness

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Teachers and students alike, will become captivated by words as they explore together the world of language and morphology, and build awareness of morphemes, the meaningful parts in words.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Explore reading basics as well as the key role of background knowledge and motivation in becoming a lifelong reader and learner. Watch our PBS Launching Young Readers series and try our self-paced Reading 101 course to deepen your understanding.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

There's an idea about how children learn to read that's held sway in schools for more than a generation - even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this podcast, host Emily Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. It's an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn't true and are now reckoning with the consequences - children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.

Sixty years ago, Marie Clay developed a way to teach reading she said would help kids who were falling behind. They'd catch up and never need help again. Today, her program remains popular and her theory about how people read is at the root of a lot of reading instruction in schools. But Marie Clay was wrong.
Sold a Story is an independent investigative journalism project from American Public Media. We rely on your donations to support this kind of rigorous reporting.
The controversial educational publishing company has sold instructional materials and professional resources in almost every state, earning at least $1.6 billion over a decade. Explore a map of school districts.

More states are now requiring districts to adopt curriculum that adheres to the science of reading. Look up the policy in your state.

At least 15 states have passed laws about how schools teach reading since the Sold a Story podcast was released in 2022, but there is pushback.

Here's a reading list put together by Emily Hanford.

This discussion guide, created by a teacher, invites educators, parents, community members and kids to have a conversation about the podcast.

Emails and voice messages poured in from people who listened to Sold a Story.

We'll let you know when we release new episodes of the podcast. Enter your address below.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There's an idea about how children learn to read that's held sway in schools for more than a generation - even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read.

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

# data[].attributes.headline
Cortex in the Classroom: Advancing the Science of Reading in the Early Years

# data[].attributes.subject
Cortex in the Classroom: Advancing the Science of Reading in the Early Years

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Advancing Science of Reading in the Early Years - K–5 Literacy Program & Curriculum | Amplify CKLA

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
About the 2022 Symposium

The 2022 PaTTAN Literacy Symposium will provide educators in all capacities with the opportunity to deepen their knowledge and skills pertaining to evidence-based practices in reading instruction in grades K-12.

Target Audience

Elementary Educators, Secondary Educators, Special Education Teachers, Speech Language Practitioners, School Leaders/Administrators, Reading Specialists, Teachers of English Language Learners, Literacy Coaches, Instructional Support Team Members, School Psychologists, Pre-Service Teachers, Higher Education Instructors, Paraprofessionals, and Families.

View the PaTTAN Literacy Symposium '22 schedule & directory.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The 2022 PaTTAN Literacy Symposium will provide educators in all capacities with the opportunity to deepen their knowledge and skills pertaining to evidence-based practices in reading instruction in grades K-12. Target Audience Elementary Educators, Secondary Educators, Special Education Teachers, Speech Language Practitioners, School Leaders/Administrators, Reading Specialists, Teachers of English Language Learners, Literacy Coaches, Instructional Support Team Members, School Psychologists, Pre-Service Teachers, Higher Education Instructors, Paraprofessionals, and Families.

# data[].attributes.body
Many, many articles and resources

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Blog

The senior year for high school students and their parents can be an exciting time and a time of anxiety. For many, much anxiety focuses on the college application process. Some believe it is imperative to enroll in one of those colleges considered elite or "one of the best." Often this thinking is that an elite school will provide a better education than a non-elite one. This thinking is misguided....Read More

Thanks to a great kindergarten teacher, my mom, and my dad, I learned how to read before starting first grade. My journey illustrates that the path literacy is not always straight and narrow, children can come into literacy in a variety of different ways....Read More

Read this email from 7th grade teacher Kelly Beggs and learn how she used phonics and fluency instruction with her struggling readers in the 7th grade to increase her students' Lexile scores in just one school year....Read More

Freedom and independence are never free. They are won by those willing to stand up and work for these bedrock human values. Twice in the 20th century the people of the United States rose up to defend their freedom and independence. Among these people were hundreds of thousands of immigrants who came to the United States to gain these human rights and who then often found themselves fighting their own countrymen to keep these rights....Read More

I was first introduced to a Rapid Recognition Chart (RRC) during my initial-level Orton-Gillingham training. It is a tool that can be used during the fluency portion of a lesson; a way to add variety. During my advanced-level training, I used RRCs to improve my student's oral reading fluency and words read correct in their decodable texts. As I started to see the benefits of the RRC when working one on one with students, I began to use them in my reading intervention groups with exciting results....Read More

When phonics instruction is done with high-leverage instructional practices, using interactive writing, and decodable texts, the impact is palpable and leaves plenty of time for other types of reading and writing experiences, imaginative play, and knowledge-building across the curriculum. Learn why this type of deliberate practice is essential in getting all of our children to decode and encode with automaticity....Read More

Because of the kindness and support with which my dad inspired me, I have gained the confidence to invest in others while creating a synergy of positive goodness in my students and my colleagues. The pride that I take in my students' accomplishments is similar to that which my dad always took in my accomplishments. I am proud to say that even though this journey still has many more steps for me to take, I am finally becoming you, Dad....Read More

The "reading wars" have been around for longer than you might think. In the last century and now again, we have gone in and out of debates about the best way to teach reading - as if there was a single best way for all children - with the arguments focusing on phonics, whole language and balanced literacy. This post - written by David Reinking, Peter Smagorinsky, and David B. Yaden - looks at the debate on phonics in a different way than is most often voiced these days....Read More

I'm an elementary music teacher and I am going to describe a process for teaching songs that I frequently employ in my music lessons. I believe that it is a unique approach to song instruction and that it can be used for strengthening fluent reading in students...Read More

Read Two Impress is a synergistic reading intervention that combines the Neurological Impress Method (NIM), Repeated Readings, and Echo Reading. Essentially, read chunks of text with a student using NIM and stop frequently and have the student read each section aloud. Here are the steps in more detail....Read More

I'd spent my life teaching little ones to read and write with a clear focus on the struggler, and in a moment, I was one of them. Unable to even speak my own name, I started my journey unable to read a kindergarten-level book, had no recognition of the alphabet, and many preschoolers could surely write better than I could. I feel impassioned to share my deepened understanding of the process with teachers, especially those who struggle with becoming literate....Read More

In this media-driven world of fast messages and even faster decisions, we educators must create optimal learning environments that encourage mindfulness, playfulness, exploration, careful thought, and a sense of wonder and joy. These traits constitute the artistic nature of teaching. As my seventh-grade integrated language arts students would say, "You're making sure that your lessons are 'lit' (by placing the emphasis on literacy)."...Read More

This study evaluated a 12 week intervention delivered by regular teaching staff as a whole class, to assess whether it could make a difference for 8-9 year old children. The study included 103 students from two Local Authority schools and five teaching staff. ...Read More

In my kindergarten classroom, it turns out I do work on fluency more than I realized. Songs and poems are a key component of my reading instruction. Every morning we begin with a "morning dance party." This is a wonderful way to start any day for many reasons, but it is actually important to my instruction as well. ...Read More

I have always enjoyed challenging and enriching my second grade students with word work since becoming a teacher in 2003. During my second year of teaching 2005 Daily Word Ladders were brand new and I instantly fell in love with them. The routine became part of my bell ringer work. I always knew the transfer into daily writing was evident and continued to make this important daily work a priority. I bragged about this transfer to my peers and told them they were missing out on a daily 8-10 minute activity, one that would profoundly impact writing outcome....Read More

This project presents results of whole class Fluency Development Lessons (FDL) in four upper elementary classrooms on fluency and reading comprehension. Findings provide insight into the ways in which the various components of FDL (repeated reading, prosodic reading, teacher modeling, explicit instruction of comprehension strategies and time with texts of age-appropriate complexity) can be effectively and flexibly integrated into whole class instruction....Read More

As we gratefully transition to the summer of 2021, our eyes are opened but our nerves are frayed. It's a time of change, but change brings opportunity. We need to choose to act courageously to reconsider relationships with parents. We have a new opportunity to learn from the pandemic experience and reconstruct our relationship with the 'first and forever' teachers in our students' lives. We need to change the paradigm of the passive parent role to a true teaching partnership. Summer Reading is the logical place to start...Read More

Abbey Galeza, conducted an action research project on the role of repeated singing/reading in her class of preschoolers. Findings from her study are quite promising. In addition to singing/reading being an enjoyable and community building experience, the children learned concepts of print, so important for early literacy development....Read More

We can all celebrate the creative and innovative work of teachers, parents, grandparents, caretakers and others in keeping our kids engaged and learning during the most challenging school year in recent history....Read More

Building students' knowledge of word meanings is essential to their success in reading, writing, and content area learning. The Building Vocabulary series is a groundbreaking structured approach to developing your students' general and academic vocabularies for the present and future. ......Read More

Long before the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s in which certain Americans demanded that all citizens, regardless of the color of their skin, be treated fairly and with respect. Read this Readers Theater Script to celebrate Sojourner Truth and the fight for equal rights for women...Read More

Singing and Music-Making is Essential for Brain Development. Neuroscientific research has found that early music-making is highly correlated with reading achievement...Read More

Fluency: A Central Component of Effective Literacy Instruction........Read More

David L. Harrison writes poems for young readers and partners with authorities on early language and literacy development to create books to support classroom teachers. In this blog he gives six reasons why poetry is a powerful teaching tool...Read More

Herts for Learning (HfL) is an award-winning provider of products and services to schools and educational settings within and outside Hertfordshire...Read More

"Fast Start has been an amazing journey for our students, parents, and teachers...Read More

"My granddaughter, Helena has a rare syndrome......Read More

"The process of determining the base of a Latin verb is systematic and consistent....Read More

"Alan Becker's journey with using Greek and Latin roots as an educator began in 2011...Read More

"Tammy Noska learns about the Fluency Development Lesson during her work as a reading clinician at the Kent State University Reading Clinic....Read More

"What do solo and sole (as in "sole survivor") have in common?...Read More

"Activities and a special video from Tim Rasinski. Video link: https://go.tcmpub.com/rasinski-video ...Read More

"It's Poetry Month! Grab a favorite poem and immerse your students in it with these ideas to integrate repeated readings in an engaging way! ...Read More

"Start with "Winter", a season of cold and snow. ...Read More

"Start with "boy" another name for a young man. ...Read More

"Start with "pop" another name for a fizzy soda drink. ...Read More

"Veteran - Take away 4 letters to make the past tense of "run." ...Read More

"Start with "Quarter" - One fourth of an object; a coin worth 25 cents. ...Read More

"Start with "Touch" - To come into contact with someone or something. ...Read More

"Start with the word "Summer" - a time for sun, swimming and play. ...Read More

"Start with the word "Sham" - a word that means something that is fake or false. ...Read More

"Start with the word "Love" - the emotion celebrated on Valentine's Day. ...Read More

"Start with the word "King" - a ruler of a country....Read More

"Start with the word "Harbor" - a place of safety, usually for ships and boats...Read More

"Most of us can remember the traditional way of teaching vocabulary"...Read More

"Start with Foot - the part of our body we use for standing and walking."...Read More

"Here's a Halloween word ladder. Enjoy! Start with the word "trick"...Read More

"I recently visited the National Art Museum and Portrait Gallery in Washington DC."...Read More

"Start with Hurricane - a large and sever tropical storm in the Atlantic Ocean."...Read More

"Let's start with sun, our star that gives us warmth"...Read More

"With vacation time rapidly approaching, here's a quick lesson to help your students expand their vocabulary and learn a bit more about the English language."...Read More

"Start with Spring, the season where April showers bring May flowers"...Read More

"Let's start with May, the fifth month of the year"...Read More

"Let's start with April, the fourth month of the year"...Read More

"Let's start with a word that describes our Earth and all the large bodies in the solar system"...Read More

"Let's start with a word the famous spring Holiday"...Read More

"April Showers bring May Flowers." One of the meanings for shower is a type of rain."...Read More

"Hello Everyone - here's a word ladder that you can do with your students on the first day of April. Word study can be fun!..."...Read More

"Besides being the name of month, the word "March" refers to a particular way of walking (in unison as a group)..."...Read More

"Let's start with a word that describes an animal that roars..."...Read More

"Let's start with a word that describes the man who can leap tall buildings and is faster than a locomotive..."...Read More

"Start with the top word and guide your students to make a series of new words..."...Read More

"Now that it's October, the days are getting shorter (in the northern hemisphere) and the temperature is starting to dip"...Read More

"In the U.S. Sept 5th is a holiday - Labor Day; a day to celebrate the working person"...Read More

"Here's a Word Ladder to share with your students on the first day of school! Feel free to add to or change the clues. Go from top to bottom"...Read More

"I am a self-proclaimed and unapologetic lexophile, word nerd, or vocabulary zealot! I love words! I love to learn about how words came to be; I love the fact that some words have the same spelling but varied pronunciations and meanings while other words may have the same pronunciation but different spellings; and I love how words can be used to convey facts, tell a story, or elicit emotion"...Read More

"A few years ago several colleagues and I were engaged in a study of reading fluency in high school students. Our study involved having ninth-grade students from a local urban high school read orally a relatively short informational text. Our intent was to check their reading rate (words read correctly per minute) to see if fluency may be an issue that is causing students difficulty in their reading. Our findings confirmed our hypothesis. Many 9th graders experienced difficulty in fluency and this appeared to be a contributor to their reading difficulties..." Read More

"November is one of my favorite times of year. Despite the weather getting increasingly colder and the threat of winter weather on the horizon, I view November as a time for nesting, when family and friends often come for visits. During these visits it is not unusual to bring out a board or card game...Read More

"Teaching Is Joyous Work: It's early September and school has begun or will begin soon for teachers, principals, and other educators. I certainly believe that teaching is a joyous profession; however, it is also a profession that requires lots of work. Thankfully, Labor Day rolls around on the first Monday in September and gives teachers a chance to take a quick breather. Here's a word ladder I did that connects work to labor..." Read More

The resources on this page require Adobe Acrobat to view, Get Adobe Acrobat Reader now

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Timothy Rasinski is a professor of literacy education at Kent State University. He has written over 150 articles and has authored, co-authored or edited over 15 books or curriculum programs on reading education.

# data[].attributes.body
How do we rethink guiding reading to support word recognition?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
COMPLETELY REVISED AND UPDATED

Dyslexia is the most common learning disorder on the planet, affecting about one in five individuals, regardless of age or gender. Now a world-renowned expert gives us a substantially updated and augmented edition of her classic work: drawing on an additional fifteen years of cutting-edge research, offering new information on all aspects of dyslexia and reading problems, and providing the tools that parents, teachers, and all dyslexic individuals need. This new edition also offers:

* New material on the challenges faced by dyslexic individuals across all ages
* Rich information on ongoing advances in digital technology that have dramatically increased dyslexics' ability to help themselves
* New chapters on diagnosing dyslexia, choosing schools and colleges for dyslexic students, the co-implications of anxiety, ADHD, and dyslexia, and dyslexia in post-menopausal women
* Extensively updated information on helping both dyslexic children and adults become better readers, with a detailed home program to enhance reading
* Evidence-based universal screening for dyslexia as early as kindergarten and first grade - why and how
* New information on how to identify dyslexia in all age ranges
* Exercises to help children strengthen the brain areas that control reading
* Ways to raise a child's self-esteem and reveal her strengths
* Stories of successful men, women, and young adults who are dyslexic
From one of the world's preeminent experts on reading and dyslexia, the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and practical book available on identifying, understanding, and overcoming reading problems--now revised to reflect the latest research and evidence-based approaches.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Overcoming Dyslexia (2020 Edition): Second Edition, Completely Revised and Updated

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Overcoming Dyslexia (2020 Edition): Second Edition, Completely Revised and Updated [Shaywitz M.D., Sally] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Overcoming Dyslexia (2020 Edition): Second Edition, Completely Revised and Updated

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Six Shifts Where Science of Reading Meets Balanced Literacy. We provide resources, professional development, and literacy audits for busy literacy educators like you.