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One of the logical places to start to teach students about morphology is with prefixes and suffixes added to base words. Even quite young students can understand inflective endings such as -ing, -ed, and -s and basic prefixes such as un-, non-, and re-. This collection of picture books is perfect for helping with teaching affixes and the concepts of prefixes and suffixes and offer specific examples of each.

Here are My Six Favorite Books for Teaching Affixes!
Download and print this book list for teaching affixes, here!
This picture book for elementary students introduces the concept of a suffix with a simple child-friendly definition. The repetitive line "If you were a suffix..." is reminiscent of the childhood favorite If You Give A Mouse A Cookie. It is an entertaining way to provide interesting information.

This book is an excellent age-appropriate introduction to morphology for young learners. It includes sweet examples and colorful, silly illustrations. This story is a great introduction to several high-use suffixes. The book also includes some hands-on activities for students to learn more about using suffixes. This author has several books related to grammar and words that are worth checking out. This series is called Word Fun.

This book is also part of the Word Fun series. It is aimed primarily at early elementary students and gives a child-friendly definition of what a prefix is, as well as giving the meanings and examples of several high-use prefixes. Like its partner book about suffixes, this book is modeled after the structure of If You Give A Mouse A Cookie. It gently informs and teaches complex concepts in a child-friendly way. The animal illustrations are cute and engaging.

This picture book serves double duty both as an exercise in phonological awareness and instruction on inflective endings. The format of the book is set up as a list of words on the left page and a funny sentence on the right. This is designed as an interactive book inviting children to identify additional rhyming words and locate the common inflective endings on each page.

The illustrations are cartoon-like and humorous. A mouse character pops in to invite student participation. The complexity of the sentences and the number of challenging words increases as the book goes on. This is part of a series by the author called Sounds Like Reading. This series is aimed at children who are having some difficulty with learning to read and utilizes phonological awareness and phonics skills.

This story is fun on many levels. It can be enjoyed simply as a silly story or turned into an interactive lesson for teaching affixes. The suffixes themselves are characters in the story. When Mr. Wright tells the children on the last day of school that they will be tackling suffixes after lunch, the children are not excited. They are ready to start summer vacation. The suffixes take Mr. Wright's words literally. They decide they do not want to be tackled, and they run away and hide. The story that follows shows the students how important word endings can be. The print highlights the word endings as they're used in the story. The suffix characters provide examples of their usage through their speech bubbles. The text even hints at suffixing spelling rules and would make an excellent review for that purpose.

This author also wrote Punctuation Takes A Vacation and this is in a similar style. While it seems aimed at elementary students, it is my belief that this book can be used in different ways at different levels and is fun for all ages.

This book, like its suffix partner, is also aimed at upper elementary students. The rhyming story teaches students about the characteristics of prefixes and how they work as well as providing numerous examples and the meanings of different common prefixes. The text itself has words with prefixes in color with the prefix itself made bold. In at least several examples, additional words are found in the illustrations. While this book would make an excellent introduction to prefixes, it also has further utility as it includes a list of the included prefixes and their meanings at the back.

This picture book introduction to suffixes is for a slightly older crowd, such as mid to upper-elementary age. This book also presents a child-friendly definition of a suffix and introduces the meanings and demonstrates its use through a humorous rhyming story. The playful illustrations of funny cats are engaging, while not appearing too babyish. This author also has a series of books related to grammar utilizing the same characters. The series is entitled Words Are CATegorical.
Take a peek inside these picture books! Watch, Fun Picture Books to Teach Affixes!
Because English is a morpho-phonological language, it is important to include the study of morphology from early on. These books are an excellent introduction to this concept both for classroom instruction and for the intervention setting. Most of these books can be used both as a read-aloud and for interactive activities, allowing one book to serve as a jumping-off point and resource for an entire unit. Several of the books even include additional activity suggestions to do with your child or students.
Looking for more picture book suggestions? Check out these book lists!
Are you looking for an easy way to create a list of words with affixes? Word List Builder has got you covered!

Save time searching for words with affixes! Create customized and meaningful review, build your folder of words, create templates and games, and much more in Word List Builder.

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Top 6 Picture Books for Teaching Affixes

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This collection of picture books is perfect for helping with teaching affixes and the concepts of prefixes and suffixes.

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What happens in the brain when people learn a new language?

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What happens in the brain when people learn a new language?

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Jun 18, 2024

Dr. Stanislas Dehaene delivered his virtual keynote, 'Learning to Read in One or More Languages: What Happens to the Brain, and How Can We Facilitate It?' at the Reading League Summit 2024 in San Diego, California, on April 27, 2024. Dr. Stanislas Dehaene is one of the world’s leading experts in the neuroscience of how humans learn to read. He is a member of nine scientific academies, the author of several books, and the recipient of major scientific awards for his work advancing our understanding of how reading develops in the brain. Learn more about the Summit and English Learners/Emergent Bilinguals and the Science of Reading at: https://www.thereadingleague.org/comp...#TRLSummit2024#TRLCompass

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Stanislas Dehaene Summit 2024 Virtual Keynote

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hand2mind Morphology Wall Card Set, Phonemic Awareness, Teaching Materials, Word Wall Classroom Posters for Elementary, Word Roots, Speech Therapy Materials, Literacy Centers Kindergarten Classrooms

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Our teacher-developed Morphology Wall Card Set provides an easy-to-use, interactive learning tool for your classroom! Morphology is the study of the formation of words as it relates to morphemes, the smallest meaningful unit of a word: prefixes, suffixes, bases, and roots. This comprehensive set ...

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hand2mind Mirror My Sounds Phoneme Set, Phonemic Awareness, Letter Sounds for Kindergarten, Phonics Flash Cards, Speech Therapy Tools, ESL Teaching Materials, Science of Reading Manipulatives

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Amazon.com: hand2mind Mirror My Sounds Phoneme Set, Phonemic Awareness, Phonics Games, Letter Sounds, Phonics Flash Cards, Speech Therapy Materials, Phonics for Kindergarten, Toys That Help with Speech : Office Products

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hand2mind Elkonin Boxes Magnetic Dry Erase Boards Set, Phonemic Awareness, Speech Therapy Materials, Letter Sounds for Kindergarten Phonics, Science of Reading Manipulatives (Set of 8)
Elkonin Box Magnetic Dry Erase Boards have a built-in slider that helps build phonological awareness! The built-in slider on these durable, easy-to-use, dry-erase boards provides a tactile element to sounding out and blending beginning, middle, and ending sounds. Use the dry erase boards to draw a picture of the word, break the word out into phonemes, and then use the slider to move from box to box to help pronounce the word. With phonemes segmented into boxes, students can learn to pronounce every syllable and sound of the word correctly. These are great for young learners, as well as for those learning English as a second language. Each board is magnetic and can be used with our Magnetic Wands and Lowercase Alphabet Chips! Plus, they provide plenty of space at the top for writing out a word or placing a flash card. Each set includes 8 double sided, dry erase boards (Four 2- and 4-sound boards and Four 3- and 5- sound boards). For over 50 years, hand2mind has encouraged hands-on learning and discovery, driving deeper understanding and helping children unlock their full potential. Hand2mind specializes in literacy activities and products designed to help students learn by doing. With products designed to help students with reading comprehension, sentence building, phonics for toddlers and more. We're also a leader in autism learning materials and dyslexic tools for kids who have a tougher time getting started with reading. From early reading to advanced reading, hand2mind has you covered with products designed to enhance learning in the classroom and the world around us. Through hands-on exploration and discovery we strive to find new ways to encourage students in math practice, literacy activities, STEM education and more!

hand2mind Little Minds at Work Sound Segmenting Trays by Tara West, Phonemic Awareness, Science of Reading Manipulatives, Elkonin Boxes, Letter Sounds, Preschool Learning Activities (Set of 6)
Integrate multisensory learning into your reading instruction with the Little Minds at Work Sound Segmenting Tray! This hands-on resource stimulates visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile experiences, allowing children to engage in whole brain learning on their path to becoming successful readers. The Sound Segmenting Tray is specifically designed to align with the best practices of Science of Reading. Children will love using this captivating resource while developing their blending, word building, decoding, and encoding skills! Sound Segmenting Trays are the perfect addition to a small group table with direct teacher instruction, during whole-group instruction, or in an independent center. An excellent resource when teaching phonemic awareness and phonics, teachers can use these trays to help children break down words with 2, 3, and 4 sounds. These write-and-wipe trays have a thin slot at the top to display cards, a large slot to hold magnetic wands or dry-erase markets, and 2 rows of circular indentations for segmenting words. These trays nest for convenient storage. Each tray measures 7"x9"x.5". This set includes 6 Rainbow-color Write On/Wipe-Off Trays and 1 Getting Started Guide by Tara West. Tara West has been involved in education for 15 years, serving as an early childhood educator, a curriculum writer, and a professional development speaker. Tara believes in the importance of creating instructional materials and resources that are fun and engaging to students and supporting the teachers who use her materials. For over 50 years, hand2mind has encouraged hands-on learning and discovery, driving deeper understanding and helping children unlock their full potential. Hand2mind specializes in literacy activities and products designed to help students learn by doing. With products designed to help students with reading comprehension, sentence building, phonics for toddlers and more. We're also a leader in autism learning materials and dyslexic tools for kids who have a tougher time getting started with reading. From early reading to advanced reading, hand2mind has you covered with products designed to enhance learning in the classroom and the world around us. Through hands-on exploration and discovery, we strive to find new ways to encourage students in math practice, literacy activities, STEM education and more!

hand2mind Magnetic Wands for Kids, Magnet Wands, Magnets for Kids Science, Magnets with Wand, Magnets for Teaching, Preschool Science, Magnet with Handle, Science Classroom Supplies (Set of 6)
Perfectly sized for small hands! Magnetic Wands provide a multisensory approach to building early literacy skills such as blending and segmenting sounds. For use in independent practice, literacy stations, or guided reading word work, these rainbow-colored wands are the perfect addition to your literacy block. When paired with our Lowercase Alphabet Chips, these wands provide a multisensory approach to learning early literacy skills such as blending and segmenting sounds. They are also great for learning the basic principles of magnetism! Let your students explore the properties of magnets, and see what attracts and repels. The handles are easy to grip for little hands, making them the perfect addition to any preschool classroom or daycare. This set includes 6 colorful Magnetic Wands. For over 50 years, hand2mind has encouraged hands-on learning and discovery, driving deeper understanding and helping children unlock their full potential. Hand2mind specializes in science kits and stem toys designed to help students learn by doing. Our offering of stem kits range from chemistry sets to rocket science kits to earth science sets and much more. From early science toys to middle school lab supplies, hand2mind has you covered with products designed to enhance learning in the classroom and the world around us. Through hands-on exploration and discovery we strive to find new ways to encourage students in math practice, literacy activities, STEM education and more!

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hand2mind Elkonin Boxes Magnetic Dry Erase Boards Set (Set of 8) & Little Minds at Work Sound Segmenting Trays by Tara West (Set of 6) & Magnetic Wands for Kids (Set of 6)

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hand2mind Elkonin Boxes Magnetic Dry Erase Boards Set, Phonemic Awareness, Speech Therapy Materials, Letter Sounds for Kindergarten Phonics, Science of Reading Manipulatives (Set of 8) Elkonin Box Magnetic Dry Erase Boards have a built-in slider that helps build phonological awareness! The built-...

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A bilingual site for educators and families of English language learners

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

Download the Spanish version

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

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The Reading League Compass: Providing Direction

The science of reading marketplace is difficult to navigate and digest. It is often full of misinformation that makes educators, educational leaders, and decision-makers vulnerable to implementing practices that are somehow labeled as "science of reading," yet they are not aligned with the scientific evidence base. Thus, The Reading League Compass will provide reliable and understandable guidance for a variety of targeted stakeholders.

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The Reading League Compass provides reliable and understandable guidance about the science of reading for a variety of targeted stakeholders.

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This is still under development, but may be worth checking out from time to time.

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Reading Universe: All About Reading and Writing

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Explore ready-to-use teaching strategies, resources, and concrete answers to common questions about teaching reading and writing -- developed by experts.

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This ASL "Word Wall" emphasizes sign phonemic awareness by showing where the sign is articulated on the body. I would love to see this taken a step further into a grid showing another area of articulation like handshape.

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This ASL "Word Wall" emphasizes sign phonemic awareness by showing where the sign is articulated on the body. I would love to see this taken a step further into a grid showing another area of articulation like handshape.

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Resources by MDE for SoR and Deaf and Hard of Hearing

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Resources by MDE for SoR and Deaf and Hard of Hearing

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New and Not-Well-Known Research about Reading Disabilities: Teachers Want to Know by Truckenmiller

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New and Not-Well-Known Research about Reading Disabilities: Teachers Want to Know by Truckenmiller

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This is a recent free-access article from The Reading Teacher. It might serve as a nice introductory reading.

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The Reading Teacher - 2024 - Truckenmiller - New and Not‐Well‐Known Research about Reading Disabilities  Teachers Want to

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Recording of Science of Reading for Deaf Children (Drs Leala Holcomb & Hannah Dostal)

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Recording of Science of Reading for Deaf Children (Drs Leala Holcomb & Hannah Dostal)

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Science of Reading for Deaf Children (Leala Holcomb & Hannah Dostal)

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Recording of DHH Learners and the Science of Reading (Dr Stacey Tucci) 

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Recording of DHH Learners and the Science of Reading (Dr Stacey Tucci) 

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DHH Learners and the Science of Reading (Stacey Tucci)

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Set of 40 Double-sided Dry Erase Boards with markers and erasers (good for higher ed courses)

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Set of 40 Double-sided Dry Erase Boards with markers and erasers (good for higher ed courses)

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Dry Erase Board with Lines for Kids, Ohuhu 40 Pack 9 x 12 Double Sided Whiteboards Set, Including 40 x Lap Board, 40 x Black Markers, 40 x White Boards Eraser for Classroom, Back to School Supplies

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Amazon.com : Dry Erase Board with Lines for Kids, Ohuhu 40 Pack 9 x 12 Double Sided Whiteboards Set, Including 40 x Lap Board, 40 x Black Markers, 40 x White Boards Eraser for Classroom, Back to School Supplies : Office Products

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After session 5 or 6, complete your stipend request form!

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This is the list of schools implementing Bridge2Read.

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Active Bridge2Read Partnerships with ServeMN.docx on Egnyte

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File Active Bridge2Read Partnerships with ServeMN.docx shared using Egnyte

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Prefix/Suffix and Greek/Latin Root Word Magnets

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Prefix/Suffix and Greek/Latin Root Word Magnets

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Languages across the world have unique phonemic systems. For individuals learning English as a second language, it is common for the phonemic system of their first language to influence the production of sounds in English.

Resources listed below are intended to contribute to foundational awareness of potential cultural and linguistic influences. There are variations within cultures, and regional and dialectal variances exist in all languages. Therefore, a single chart/page on cultural and/or linguistic features is not meant to provide a comprehensive overview. Clinical judgment, client/patient/student and caregiver input, and additional research are needed to ensure culturally responsive services.

How Can I Use This Information?

Speech-language pathologists can use this information to:

Identify sounds in a client's phonological system for languages other than English.

Determine phonemic influences of a client's native language on English.

Identify sounds from the client's first language that may not exist in English or identify sounds in English that do not exist in someone's native language.

Recognize that even if there are similar sounds across two languages, they may not be used the same way. For example, in some languages a sound may only be used at the ends of words and not as a word-initial sound.

Audiologists can use this information to:

Correlate the client's audiogram and the sounds of the client's language(s).

Recognize and respond to amplification needs.

Identify the effect of the individual's phonemic system on speech audiometry assessment.

Modify materials and procedures during speech audiometry assessment.

Phonemic Inventories and Cultural and Linguistic Information

ASHA has compiled resources on the phonemic systems for the following languages:

Amharic

Arabic

Bosnian

Burmese

Chinese

English

English Phonemic Inventory [PDF]
Dialect
Haitian Creole

Hindi/Urdu

Hmong

Japanese

Korean

Navajo

Pashto and Persian

Polish

Russian

Spanish

Somali

Tagalog

Turkish

Vietnamese

Refugee Profiles/Information
ASHA's policy documents state that SLPs and audiologists must consider the sound systems of all the languages used by a client in order to provide appropriate assessment and treatment services.
Websites with Phonemic Inventories

If you have any questions, please contact ASHA's Office of Multicultural Affairs at multicultural@asha.org.

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Phonemic Inventories and Cultural and Linguistic Information Across Languages

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Languages across the world have unique phonemic systems. For individuals learning English as a second language, it is common for the phonemic system of their first language to influence the production of sounds in English. Resources listed below are intended to contribute to foundational awareness of potential cultural and linguistic influences.

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Liza Charlesworth is the author of The Couple's Guide to In Vitro Fertilization: Everything You Need to Know to Maximize Your Chances of Success (Da Capo Press). Through the years, this bestselling fertility title has helped thousands of people achieve their dreams of parenthood and was nominated for a prestigious Hope Award in 2011.

In addition, Liza has written dozens of popular children's titles for Scholastic Inc. including Monsterella, Birthday Hiccups, The Little Red Ladybug, The Legend of Johnny Comma, and The No-Good, Rotten, Run-on Sentence.

She has been a featured speaker at several writing conferences as well as the esteemed NYU Publishing Institute. Liza lives in New York City with her husband and twin sons, who provide daily inspiration.

To learn more, visit Liza Charlesworth's web site: leftyseditorial.com.

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Nonfiction Phonics Readers SET 1: Short Vowels, Blends & More (Single-Copy Set): 25 Motivating Decodable Books That Reinforce Key Reading Skills

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Nonfiction Phonics Readers SET 1: Short Vowels, Blends & More (Single-Copy Set): 25 Motivating Decodable Books That Reinforce Key Reading Skills

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Tim Shanahan - Should We Teach Phonics to English Learners?

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Tim Shanahan - Should We Teach Phonics to English Learners?

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Should We Teach Phonics to English Learners? | Shanahan on Literacy | CoHost

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This podcast explores the research on phonics teaching to English Learners and concludes that such instruction is important. However, ELs are more likely to str

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A team led by Carrie Maguire developed these materials to help professors teach structured literacy to elementary education students.

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This site includes resources to use in foundational literacy courses, sample syllabi, and a planning rubric to use as a guide while revising or developing syllabi.

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Faculty Resources | The Center For Readi

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This article summarizes research on using hands-on manipulatives while teaching foundational reading skills, and gives "how-to" tips.

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English Learner Institute for Teaching and Excellence

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English Learner Institute for Teaching and Excellence

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The English Learner Institute for Teaching and Excellence (ELITE) operates within The Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk at The University of Texas at Austin. ELITE aims to improve outcomes for English learners (ELs) through a range of research-to-practice initiatives funded by the Office of Special Education Programs, the Institute of Education Sciences, and the Office of English Language Acquisition.

In collaboration with practicing professionals throughout Central Texas, we develop, implement, and refine educational models that address the language and literacy needs of ELs. ELITE's goal is to promote capacity building among educators through job-embedded professional learning, culturally and linguistically responsive instructional tools and resources, ongoing evaluation of stakeholder needs and outcomes, and educator-driven action planning.

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Project ELITE2 is a model demonstration project sponsored by the Office of Special Education Programs in the U.S. Department of Education. Our project operates within the Language for Learning Institute of The Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk at The University of Texas at Austin.

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Compare and Contrast
(5th Grade English Co-teaching) Look for:
- Co-teaching of English Language Development Specialist with 5th Grade Teacher
- Active engagement strategies
- Language supports (teacher models, students practice)
- Sentence frames posted
- Structured opportunities for language
- Mo…

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Ehri's Phases of Word Reading Development

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Ehri's Phases of Word Reading Development

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Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989

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Learning Resources Magnetic Ten-Frame Answer Boards - Set of 4 with 100 Colorful counters/Discs, Ages 5+ | Grades K+ Giant Magnetic Ten Frame Boards Set, Math Manipulatives

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Amazon.com: Learning Resources Magnetic Ten-Frame Answer Boards - Set of 4 with 100 Colorful counters/Discs, Ages 5+ | Grades K+ Giant Magnetic Ten Frame Boards Set, Math Manipulatives : Office Products

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In this webinar, Zaretta Hammond discusses culturally responsive teaching paired with the science of reading.

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In this webinar, Zaretta Hammond discusses culturally responsive teaching paired with the science of reading.

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When children receive high-quality literacy instruction aligned to the Science of Reading in classrooms that incorporate culturally responsive instruction, systemic barriers to educational equity begin to break down.

Tune in to this powerful on-demand webinar to hear Zaretta Hammond, author of the best-selling book Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain , discuss:

The natural synergy between the Science of Reading and culturally responsive instruction

The top three misconceptions about the Science of Reading and culturally responsive instruction

Why just having more diverse literature isn't enough and what's also needed

How to set up older striving readers for success and accelerate reading development using three basic culturally responsive teaching techniques

Don't miss this chance to gain insight into how to provide instruction that gives all students, including those who have historically been marginalized, the opportunity to become strong readers and the tools to pursue college and career paths that improve social and economic outcomes.

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Integrating the Science of Reading and Culturally Responsive Instruction as a Path to Equity - Pivot Learning

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Tune in to hear Zaretta Hammond discuss the intersection of the Science of Reading & culturally responsive instruction.

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Yuanhe Magnetic Bingo Chips Set- Magnetic Wands with Metal Chips for Counting and Sorting, Educational Activities

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Description: Oops, the chips droped on the floor and roll to everywhere. It is really a big chore to pick all of them up, but this set is the perfect solution.The chips can be attracted by magnetic wand. When the game is over,just pick chips up with your magnetic wand,make cleanup a breeze!

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Review summary

This book is great for kids and the family, as it encourages lateral thinking and learning. It is a fun way to practice spelling and vocabulary, and students learn new words with substitution. It is also a great way to get students and teachers together to practice problem solving.

Pros

Fun and engaging

Helps with spelling practice

Encourages lateral thinking

Great for family activities

Enhances vocabulary

Cons

Some words difficult to guess

Not suitable for all skill levels

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Daily Word Ladders Grades 2-3 by Timothy Rasinski & Timothy V Rasinski Paperback - Bing - Shopping

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Enjoy great deals on Daily Word Ladders Grades 2-3 by Timothy Rasinski & Timothy V Rasinski Paperback at Bing Shopping! Find what you're looking for at a great price today.

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Morpheme Magic – Lessons to Build Morphological Awareness

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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.

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Gamenote Classroom Magnetic Letters Kit 234 Pcs with Double-Side Magnet Board - Foam Alphabet Letters for Kids Spelling and Learning
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Gamenote Classroom Magnetic Letters Kit 234 Pcs with Double-Side Magnet Board - Foam Alphabet Letters for Kids Spelling and Learning

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Conforms to ASTM D4236, Complies with CPSIA/CPSC standard. With our giant classroom magnetic letters kit, it's easy for the students to practice alphabet skills...on any magnetic surface!. You will get 234 magnetic letters and 1 double-side magnetic borad-all in a compartmentalized storage box with...

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hand2mind Elkonin Boxes Magnetic Dry Erase Boards Set, Phonemic Awareness, Speech Therapy Materials, Letter Sounds for Kindergarten Phonics, Science of Reading Manipulatives (Set of 8)

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Amazon.com: hand2mind Elkonin Boxes Magnetic Dry Erase Boards Set, Phonemic Awareness, Speech Therapy Materials, Letter Sounds for Kindergarten Phonics, Science of Reading Manipulatives (Set of 8)

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Integrate multisensory learning into your reading instruction with the Little Minds at Work Sound Segmenting Tray! This hands-on resource stimulates visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile experiences, allowing children to engage in whole brain learning on their path to becoming successful readers. The Sound Segmenting Tray is specifically designed to align with the best practices of Science of Reading. Children will love using this captivating resource while developing their blending, word building, decoding, and encoding skills! Sound Segmenting Trays are the perfect addition to a small group table with direct teacher instruction, during whole-group instruction, or in an independent center. An excellent resource when teaching phonemic awareness and phonics, teachers can use these trays to help children break down words with 2, 3, and 4 sounds. These write-and-wipe trays have a thin slot at the top to display cards, a large slot to hold magnetic wands or dry-erase markets, and 2 rows of circular indentations for segmenting words. These trays nest for convenient storage. Each tray measures 7"x9"x.5". This set includes 6 Rainbow-color Write On/Wipe-Off Trays and 1 Getting Started Guide by Tara West. Tara West has been involved in education for 15 years, serving as an early childhood educator, a curriculum writer, and a professional development speaker. Tara believes in the importance of creating instructional materials and resources that are fun and engaging to students and supporting the teachers who use her materials. For over 50 years, hand2mind has encouraged hands-on learning and discovery, driving deeper understanding and helping children unlock their full potential. Hand2mind specializes in literacy activities and products designed to help students learn by doing. With products designed to help students with reading comprehension, sentence building, phonics for toddlers and more. We're also a leader in autism learning materials and dyslexic tools for kids who have a tougher time getting started with reading. From early reading to advanced reading, hand2mind has you covered with products designed to enhance learning in the classroom and the world around us. Through hands-on exploration and discovery, we strive to find new ways to encourage students in math practice, literacy activities, STEM education and more!

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hand2mind Little Minds at Work Sound Segmenting Trays by Tara West, Phonemic Awareness, Science of Reading Manipulatives, Elkonin Boxes, Letter Sounds, Preschool Learning Activities (Set of 6)

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Integrate multisensory learning into your reading instruction with the Little Minds at Work Sound Segmenting Tray! This hands-on resource stimulates visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile experiences, allowing children to engage in whole brain learning on their path to becoming successful rea...

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Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition From Novice to Expert

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

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

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

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

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

Marilyn wrote:

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

Further, she wrote:

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

Her final words which are still relevant to this day:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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These are decodable chapter books for older students who are still working on automatizing patterns.

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Supercharged Readers - Decodable Chapter Books (Grades 3-5)

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Supercharged Readers is a series of decodable chapter books for students in grades 1-2, and can be used as an intervention for students in grades 3-5.

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Grades K-4

What is Power Readers?

The Power Readers series is comprised of 28 decodable stories with pre- and post-reading skill-building activities. As stories progress, students work on the systematic building of phonological awareness, decoding and irregular word recognition, fluency, vocabulary, morphology, and comprehension.

Power Readers can be used alongside any core reading program for K-1 students or for strategic or intensive reading reinforcement in lower elementary grades. Power Readers helps readers feel successful, confident and powerful.

NEW Second Edition!

For years, Power Readers have been a trusted tool used in classrooms across the world. New for back-to-school 2023, a fully colored and revised second edition of Power Readers is available for purchase.
Buy Now

Why Power Readers?

Fun, recurring cast of characters and animals keep students engaged

Promotes vocabulary and reading comprehension

Students build skills through vocabulary and sight word practice

Realistic fiction of an expository nature and poetry used throughout

Aligned to Acadience® Reading K-6 Measures

Fun and Engaging for Every Student

The colorful pictures and engaging stories are motivating for all students. Readers have so much fun with the content, they are unaware of the rich foundational skills they are building.

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Power Readers - Success for Beginner Readers (Grades K-4)

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Power Readers Features Stories, Phonics, Poetry, Vocabulary & Comprehension, Sight Word Practice & More. Ideal for all Beginning Readers.

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Some of the books intentionally include SEL topics in the text.

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Decodable books lay the groundwork for confident and proficient readers, supporting educators in delivering effective reading instruction.

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The Reading League's List of Decodable Texts

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The Reading League's List of Decodable Texts

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

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Nell Duke clarifies her view regarding the 3-cueing approach at minutes 43:35-52:50.

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Nell Duke clarifies her view regarding the 3-cueing approach at minutes 43:35-52:50.

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Nell Duke also discusses the purpose of decodable texts starting at 52:50.

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The One About   Nell Duke and What We Really Know About Teaching Reading

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Rhode Island and the CEEDAR Literacy Institute partnered to create this document with suggested resources for the components of structured literacy.

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These slides were used in the Twin Cities to discuss Parts 4 & 5.

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Elsa Cardenas-Hagan (Editor), Sharon Vaughn (Foreword) Format: Kindle Edition

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Literacy Foundations for English Learners: A Comprehensive Guide to Evidence-Based Instruction

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Buy Literacy Foundations for English Learners: A Comprehensive Guide to Evidence-Based Instruction: Read Kindle Store Reviews - Amazon.com

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The “bilingual brain” and reading research: Questions about teaching English Learners to read in English

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Controversies over how best to teach children to read go back many years. Most recently, two questions have emerged that leave teachers of English Learners puzzled:First, does research on reading, sometimes referred to as “the science of reading,” include English Learners, or is it based solely on E…

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Inspired by Paulo Freire's teaching methods, this article shares an idea of connecting teaching the alphabet sounds to classroom community.

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Inspired by Paulo Freire's teaching methods, this article shares an idea of connecting teaching the alphabet sounds to classroom community.

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A Culturally Responsive Approach to Teaching the Alphabet

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Students get excited about phonics when educators teach the alphabet alongside art, citizenship, and explorations of culture.

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Slides of Kelly Cartwright Presentation on Executive Functions & Reading 

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Slides of Kelly Cartwright Presentation on Executive Functions & Reading 

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I had Dr. Cartwright present at a conference I hosted last year, and the presentation was terrific - here are the slides if you would like to check them out. -Kayna

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Recording of Kelly Cartwright Presentation on Executive Functions & Reading 

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Recording of Kelly Cartwright Presentation on Executive Functions & Reading 

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I had Dr. Cartwright present at a conference I hosted last year, and the presentation was terrific - here is the recording if you would like to check it out. -Kayna

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Executive Functions: Foundations for Self-Regulated Reading

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Podcast Episode: Why are so many Professors Reluctant to Let Go of Balanced Literacy?

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Podcast Episode: Why are so many Professors Reluctant to Let Go of Balanced Literacy?

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Hello! This is Anna Geiger from The Measured Mom, and in this episode I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Pam Snow. She's a professor of cognitive psychology in the School of Education at La Trobe University. I became familiar with Dr. Snow through some of her work as well as her blog, The Snow Report, which has very interesting articles about how to teach reading, and also quite a few clear criticisms of balanced literacy.

In our conversation today, we talk about why it might be that higher education professors are often reluctant to let go of balanced literacy. We tried to work through why that might be. I can't tell you that we came up with any big solutions, but I think that understanding the problem is the first step. And she certainly offers encouragement at the end of the episode for people who are trying to change things in higher education to reach out to her, because they've made some big changes at their university.

Normally I trim my episodes so they're not quite this long, but I really didn't want to take out any of the things we discussed. I think there are a lot of interesting things that Dr. Snow shares that are worth thinking about.

I also apologize that I did not click my proper microphone, so I'm a little fuzzy, but Dr. Snow is the main speaker in this episode. I hope you enjoy it!

Anna Geiger: Welcome, Dr. Snow!

Pam Snow: Welcome to you too, Anna! Thank you for having me.

Anna Geiger: It's such an honor to have you on the podcast. I've been reading your Snow Report for a number of years now, although it was a little hard for me at first because I was coming out of balanced literacy, and you're pretty hard on balanced literacy. You have a great place in a university to educate people about the science of reading, and so I wanted to talk to you today about why it's so hard to get this out of our higher education systems, and maybe steps that can be taken to get there.

I'd like to start by you telling us about yourself and what brought you to what you're doing now.

Pam Snow: Okay. Well, when you're my age, there's always a bit of a long story there, Anna. I don't want to take up all of our time, but it seems to me that a lot of academics in particular land in certain places for a variety of reasons, and that's certainly the case for me.

By background, I'm a speech-language pathologist. I'm also a registered psychologist. My PhD a very long time ago was in the field of acquired brain injury, which meant that I learned a lot about neuropsychology, which has stood me in good stead in various different ways in my career.

After I finished my PhD, I deliberately wanted to go wide and widen my knowledge and skills, and I worked for three years as a research fellow in a role that was essentially an adolescent mental health well-being and health promotion kind of role. It had a focus on drugs and alcohol, but really it was about adolescent mental health and well-being.

That really got me thinking about factors that drive adolescent mental health and who flourishes in adolescence. I couldn't take off my speech language pathology hat in that work that I was doing, and I was reading more and more about risk and protective factors in adolescents and thinking more and more about the role of academic achievement as a protective factor.

It was a kind of a metaphorical peeling of the onion, I suppose. Who succeeds academically, and what are the factors that contribute to academic success? Of course, that got me thinking about reading as a driver of academic success and therefore as a mental health protective factor.

Now, protective factors collude with each other as do risk factors. So one protective factor on its own is not going to do all the work that we need done for children and adolescents to promote their well-being. But we know that succeeding academically is an important protective factor, and we know that struggling academically is an important risk factor when it comes to children and adolescents' well-being.

That led me then to do research kind of metaphorically down the bottom of the cliff and look at language in particular, but also the literacy skills of young people in the youth justice system, young people in out-of-home care, and in the child protection system.

Then more recently, I looked at young people in what we in Australia call flexible or alternative education systems. These are young people who are not managing the demands of mainstream schooling, but everybody wants them to stay connected to school in some way. I'm sure you have similar kind of settings in the United States to what we call flexible education settings.

Of course, that research that I did over a couple of decades showed me just how vulnerable children and adolescents are with respect to language and literacy. But it really got me thinking in public health terms about the role that schools can play as an intervention, as something that can, if we get it right, be a protective factor and can contribute to better trajectories, particularly for children who are coming from behind in some ways.

They might be coming from behind because they come from a very chaotic and sometimes, frankly, dysfunctional home environment. They might live in crime-prone, socioeconomically-disadvantaged communities. They might be plagued by that awful soft bigotry of low expectations that everybody has for them.

So what is it that school can do to actually alter the life trajectories of those young people? To my mind, it can't do very much if it doesn't get reading instruction right.

That's how I really became engaged with the importance of reading instruction as a public health intervention. It's something that we have to get right for all children, but particularly for those who don't have a raft of other protective factors around them, like affluent, well-educated parents who are doing a lot at home with respect to language and literacy, who can pay for tutors, and who take their kids to libraries.

As I said, risk and protective factors hang around together, and this is a protective factor that we are in a position, the grown-ups are in a position, to actually do something about.

Anna Geiger: So about what decade was it that you started getting interested in and started paying attention to what was happening with teaching reading?

Pam Snow: In the early 2000s. I've always been interested in reading, and my own children, who are now in their mid-thirties, went to primary school and elementary school in the early 1990s, and so they were exposed to...

I wasn't playing in this space then, but I remember them bringing home predictable texts. I think they were getting some reasonably-okay phonics instruction, decoding instruction, but they were bringing home predictable texts.

I can remember as a parent thinking, "This is just silly," and feeling like I was breaking the rules by actually teaching them phoneme-grapheme correspondences and teaching them how to decode through the word.

I did that really just using the logic that applied in my mind from my speech pathology and psychology background. These were skills that my kids needed, and I was going to teach them those skills.

But as a researcher, it was really in the early 2000s.

Anna Geiger: So balanced literacy kind of took hold in the United States in the late '90s, early 2000s, and whole language was a couple decades before that. Did you follow the same kind of path in Australia?

Pam Snow: Unfortunately we have. When you have a bad idea, we say, "Oh, can we have that too? Send it our way!"

We have been inclined to adopt big ideas, I think, in a very uncritical way, like the big idea of whole language, and the whole zeitgeist that that was part of really. Even going back a bit earlier to the 1970s and the social upheaval, that in many ways needed to happen and was positive and important when we think of feminism and protests about Australia and America's involvement in the war in Vietnam. There were a lot of entrenched ways of thinking that needed to be challenged.

But of course, what was happening in schools got caught up in that slipstream, including ideas about how we teach children how to read.

There were ideas that had good face appeal, and if they were correct, would've made everybody's life easier. It would be easier for teachers if whole language and balanced literacy worked. It would make a teacher's job easier. It would make policymakers' jobs easier. Everybody's life would be easier if it worked.

Unfortunately, the grown-ups managed to create and buy into a big illusion or delusion, probably more of a delusion, that this was a good thing to do.

But once you deconstruct how learning happens in schools, which we've shown can be done relatively quickly, it's very difficult then to rebuild that knowledge. Because now we've got a generation of teachers who themselves are products of whole-language, balanced-literacy classrooms, who have an implicit knowledge of how language works, but no explicit mastery of spelling or rules of grammar, so they can't articulate a rule. They can see that a sentence is not grammatically correct, but they can't articulate that this is not a sentence because it doesn't have a subject and a predicate, and a predicate has to contain a verb. That's perhaps an obvious example of the kind of knowledge.

Once that knowledge is taken out, it's not just a matter of a policymaker flicking a switch one day and saying, "Okay, as of next week, next year, we're going to teach this stuff again," because teachers can't teach what they don't know.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, that's very interesting. I hadn't really thought about that so much, that it's not just people who've been teaching for decades who don't want to change, but it's new people who don't even know the difference.

I was reading one of your posts and you were quoting someone. I don't remember exactly what it was, but how they were complaining about how learning to read with phonics was very boring, and they wanted to do something different.

Your point was, "Yeah, but you learned to read."

It's funny because I used to say that too! I remember that I loved to read, but reading class was very boring. That's probably because there wasn't really differentiation, but I did very well with reading, and spelling, and all of that, so obviously the instruction worked. And we can certainly throw in things about the art of teaching that can improve the delivery, but that's just interesting to think about.

I know Margaret Goldberg, when she talks about the teaching that she does, she's a bit younger than me, but she was in California. I learned phonics out East, but she was a whole language baby. For her, she really didn't know, like what you said, she really didn't know how English works. That really puts people in a tough position.

Why do we have so many people in colleges that are... I would guess many of them learned the phonics way, they learned how to decode using phonics, so why do we have so many of them that really jumped on balanced literacy and don't want to let go?

Pam Snow: It's such an important and interesting question. As with all big, complex questions, I don't think there's one simple answer. But I think it's partly a paradigm issue that schools and faculties of education in colleges and universities - and I'm going to make a generalization here, but I think it's a generalization that holds up - are more influenced by sociology than they are by cognitive psychology.

There have been decades of research going on in cognitive psychology, in the field of cognitive psychology, in psychology buildings that might be on the campus adjacent to the education building. This is on everybody that there hasn't been enough knowledge translation. Perhaps the cognitive psychologists have assumed that by putting this research out there in the peer-reviewed literature, that education academics would seize upon it and say, "This is really interesting and useful," but they haven't.

The education academics have been very much swimming in sociological water and seeing the world through different lenses, and I think have bought into the - I'm going to say it, but people won't necessarily like this - but bought into the fantasy of whole language and balanced literacy.

Because as I said earlier, if that were right, everybody's life would be much easier. Universities wouldn't need to have people on faculty who have a detailed knowledge of the structure of the English language linguistically. We wouldn't have to expect our students to learn that information.

Now we've got a whole lot of food chain issues here, and I can probably speak for Australia - I can't speak with any authority for America. But in Australia, it's not that difficult to get into an education degree. For a school leaver, how we accept students into university courses is basically an issue of supply and demand. It's very difficult to get into a medical degree, because there are a lot of students who want to do medicine and a smaller number of places. Not all universities offer medical degrees, so the supply and demand curve favors academically very high-achieving students. They have to satisfy other criteria as well to get into medicine, but you've got to be an academically very strong student.

Now in Australia, you don't have to be academically very strong. There've been some changes in recent years that have meant that, in theory at least, universities need to be only accepting students from the top 30% of school leavers, but there are some workarounds to that.

So then if we are going to move away from balanced literacy, we've got to deal with the fact that we're going to be teaching some conceptually really quite complex information to students who in some cases may not have adequate levels of prior knowledge and preparation in terms of their own language skills, their own mastery of how the English writing system works.

I see this in my own work in the School of Education with students coming in as first year students. Bear in mind that in Australia, school leavers can go straight into a four-year university degree. We don't have the tiered college system that you have, that I don't completely understand.

We, and when I say we I mean Australian universities, take in students who have, in many cases, very weak language and literacy skills. That's not their fault.

I wrote a blog post about this a while ago called "This is Not a Sentence," reflecting on my frustrations in marking the first year essays of those students. Actually, one of our PhD students in the SOLAR Lab, Emina McLean, is doing her research with academics across the board, their perception of the writing skills, in particular of university students. She's not looking just in education, but in law, in social sciences, in health sciences, everything, and the data is very depressing.

So going back to your original question of why is it so difficult to shift balanced literacy, I think it's the level of disruption that truly shifting it is going to create. There are signs in Australia that our federal government is up for that level of disruption, but they may not fully appreciate what it's going to mean in terms of bringing the whole house of cards down because we're going to need academics who actually have knowledge of reading, not of literacy, of multiple literacies, of digital literacies. Which - I think, again, people won't like me saying this - in some cases, I think they're really fluffy concepts. If a child can read, then they're digitally literate. All this business about multiple literacies and viewing texts, don't get me started on us asking children to view texts.

So I think the status quo is very appealing because of the level of disruption and upheaval that is going to be created at a number of levels in the system if we are serious about moving away from balanced literacy. As a fantasy, it's served us well. As a reading instruction approach, it served us very poorly.

Anna Geiger: That's a great quote. I'll have to remember that one.

I like what you said about how if balanced literacy worked, it would make everyone's lives easier, because it was so appealing. That's why so many of us did it.

I was recently giving a new webinar to people that follow me, and it was about using data to form small groups and give differentiated instruction. It was a lot of time and study to put that together compared to the one I gave four or five years ago about using running records to form guided reading groups. That was so simple. You just listen to them read and figure out their level, and then put them in groups and follow this lesson plan. But now we know that there's nothing to be said for text leveling like that in research and a lot of other things. But it was simple. It just was so beautifully simple, four simple steps.

With the webinar I just gave, I thought, "Oh boy, I hope I don't end up confusing people because this is deep. There are so many things to think about in terms of screening data and diagnostic data." People were up for it, but like you said, it's a challenge.

Another thing you said too about the literacies, that was interesting to hear because when I was in grad school, I thought I was learning all the right stuff. This is what I was doing. But there was a lot of that, and I never really understood it. I remember taking a class about learning disabilities, and I did not get a thing out of it. I don't know what we talked about every class, but it was very fluffy. I don't think she mentioned dyslexia at all. There was nothing practical. I don't even know what we talked about! But even as I was in it, I was thinking, "I'm not sure what I'm supposed to learn from this."

Pam Snow: Yeah, and people are paying for higher degrees that, in many cases, are not fit for purpose. In Australia, a number of education academics have really railed against the most recent federal government-auspiced review of initial teacher education, so not just reading instruction, but initial teacher education.

The basis of the protest is, "Well, is the federal government going to turn on medicine or engineering next? Are they the next ones who are going to be told that their initial university programs are not good enough?"

My answer to that is, well no, because those professions have really managed themselves very well, and they've managed the trust that has been placed in them by government, by the community. We are not having inquiries into nurse education, or medical education, or engineering education, because the community and government are not anxious about the content of those courses. But we have had, by some estimates, more than one hundred inquiries into initial teacher education in recent years, and where there's smoke, there's fire.

Anna Geiger: I was in a Facebook group earlier today, and often, if you're in a really big group and everybody's on a different page, someone had a question about... I don't remember... It was something about balanced literacy versus science of reading practices. One person chimed in to say, "This is just another pendulum swing. They did balanced literacy because it was backed by research, but now we've learned more research, and now I do this."

I wondered, does anyone in the higher education sector, do they think that balanced literacy is backed by research? Do they really believe that, or do they just not think about it?

Pam Snow: Well, as I said in a presentation that I gave recently at a conference, if there's a research study somewhere that says that balanced literacy is a preferable, optimal, superior way of teaching children how to read at scale, then I will read that study tonight. I will cancel all of my plans because I'm not aware of any studies that say that balanced literacy at scale is preferable to teaching in a structured, explicit way with a scope and sequence, and ensuring that teaching is delivered by very knowledgeable teachers.

Balanced literacy doesn't ask us to be creating a knowledgeable teaching workforce, and I think that is really pernicious for teacher professionalism, because that's the other kind of angle here, of course, that teachers are professionals so we should leave them alone. They know what's right for the children in their classroom. You've heard this kind of reasoning.

But as I also point out when I give presentations, the professions in my society, and I think in yours too, Anna, that we hold in high esteem are the ones who actually have low levels of professional autonomy.

Airline pilots don't get to make their own decisions about how they take off and how they land airplanes. They don't get to create their own safety checklists. They use safety checklists that are provided by the airline industry, and they're expected to adhere to those safety checklists.

For medical practitioners, the example that I often use is of your local emergency department. If you arrive there with chest pain, the nurse or the doctor who is going to triage you is not going to just kind of put their finger in the air and see which way the wind's blowing. They're going to follow a care pathway that says you're going to get an ECG and you'll get some bloods done. There's a set of narrow parameters to be followed.

So if we're going to talk about professionalism, we have to have this conversation about accountability, and about professionalism not meaning choose your own adventure. It actually means that we need teachers to have some specialized knowledge and skills that other people don't have. We know that about pilots, we know that about engineers and doctors. They know stuff that we don't know. Well, I want teachers to know stuff that other people don't know. I want them to have that really, deeply specialized knowledge. Now I'm only talking about literacy, but of course it has to apply numeracy and other areas as well.

Then we have to expect that teachers apply that in the same accountable way that we ask members of other professions to apply their knowledge, because members of other professions are actually held to account. We make notifications to regulatory authorities when a nurse or a doctor makes an error, a medication error, or they behave inappropriately, or they don't order a test that should have been ordered. This can have really serious consequences for people.

But in our system at least, people aren't held to account. Teachers aren't held to account if they don't teach someone how to read. That gets explained away as being, "Well, the parents didn't read to them enough," or "Some kids don't like reading," or "We haven't found something that they like reading yet." It's never the instruction. It's always externalized, and I think that's very bad for teaching as a profession.

Anna Geiger: That is so interesting. I'd never thought about that before about how the more respected professions have criteria and all that stuff that they have to follow. That's really interesting.

I agree with you that this idea of teacher autonomy is a big barrier to teachers being willing to learn more.

I think another one too is the idea that for some people... I think I put something on my Facebook page about, "Teaching reading is rocket science," quoting Louisa Moats.

Someone responded like, "No, it isn't. I taught my child to read."

The thing is, for plenty of kids, it doesn't seem like rocket science. But it becomes rocket science when you're trying to help kids who don't learn through balanced literacy or whole language, which as we've found is quite a large percent.

So that's maybe another barrier is for people that have an easy experience doing it, or at least they think they do, to realize there's more to it.

Pam Snow: That's part of the problem with balanced literacy, that it works, or it works well enough, for a significant proportion of students. Nancy Young's Ladder of Reading & Writing is a good way of demonstrating that.

But then my question for balanced literacy proponents is, "Well, is it okay to build an entire education system around the proclivities and advantages of maybe 60% of students?" It's not unusual to go into a school where 40% of students are needing some kind of intervention.

At a public health level, we wouldn't be accepting measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines that work for 60% of babies. We want as close to 100% coverage as we can. In fact, RtI, Response to Intervention, as you know, is really fundamentally a public health framework. It's a public health way of preventing difficulties.

Just because something works for some children, and probably the children who, going back to the early part of our conversation, have more of an aggregation of protective factors - not always, because there are children from advantaged families who struggle. But again, at a population level, there's more of an aggregation of protective factors, so they're the ones who are going to get across that metaphorical bridge in the first three years of school, and other children are not going to.

How is that okay? How have education academics who cast themselves, in many cases, as social justice warriors, how have they been able to sleep at night knowing that balanced literacy is leaving so many children behind?

Anna Geiger: Yeah, that's a really good question.

When we think about, like you said, the academics, the people who are teaching future teachers... You mentioned in one of your blog posts about how we want to teach our students to be excited about learning new things, and yet for some reason, there's a barrier to learning new things about the science of reading in many in higher education.

Then also, I don't know if the autonomy goes over to them too. In higher education, do professors get a lot of freedom in general about what they get to teach, or is it more oversight?

Pam Snow: It's a good question. There is this thing called academic freedom that does bestow a high level of autonomy on what people teach and how they teach it, except in the case of vocational courses like teaching allied health professions like physiotherapy, speech-language pathology, or you say physical therapy, medicine, where there is a professional body that's accrediting courses. That's a kind of gatekeeping mechanism, so there are accreditation requirements that have to be met.

But this is where things - I'll use that word fluffy again - can get fluffy, because there can be some box ticking in saying, "Yes, we do that. Yes, we do that, and this is where we do that," but the actual detail of how we do that...

Phonics is a good example of where there may, for argument's sake, be a requirement in accreditation documents that pre-service teachers learn about phonics instruction. Well they could learn about phonics instruction in the context of balanced literacy, being very low-touch and incidental, and probably something that's not really favored or preferred, or they could learn about phonics instruction in the context of a structured, explicit approach to reading instruction that's built on a deep knowledge of the English writing system.

Now, both of those things will earn you a tick in the box to say, "We teach about phonics," but this isn't a binary thing. It's a dimensional thing.

What we've done at La Trobe University in the last couple of years is really said, "We are not teaching balanced literacy." We've been the first mover in this space, and we've gone down the path of structured explicit teaching really privileging teacher knowledge. We've been building up the knowledge of our pre-service teachers about the nature of the English writing system, historical factors that give us the spelling conventions that we have, obviously sentence structure and figurative language, the whole Reading Rope if you like.

BUT we will meet accreditation requirements just as much as another university that's doing full-blown balanced literacy will meet accreditation requirements. There's not been enough attention to detail. That may change, if the recommendations of this most recent review are actually implemented and become real.

For structural, political reasons, it's difficult in Australia for a federal education minister... It's probably similar to you in the United States because we've got eight states and territories, and education is predominantly managed at a state level, and we obviously don't have as many states as you do. It is difficult to pull the right levers to get things penetrating down into individual universities.

Anna Geiger: So back to universities and not wanting to learn new things - that's not how they would see it - about the science of reading. I think one issue probably is the same issue that a lot of classroom teachers have faced, that I did this wrong. Nobody wants to have to say that, and maybe for them, the stakes are higher because if they really publicly say that, that's saying that we've mistrained teachers. Do you think that's a lot of it?

Pam Snow: Absolutely. I think human nature is such that it's difficult to acknowledge when you've been on the wrong tram and been on the wrong tram for a long time. It means letting go of your affiliations. Sometimes those affiliations with colleagues are deeply personal as well as professional.

We've known for decades that one of the barriers to people giving up smoking was having to let go of friendships. In workplaces, Australia's very, very well down the track on anti-smoking policies, but it certainly used to be the case that the smokers would go outside in morning tea breaks and afternoon tea breaks, and hang out together. So if you decided to stop smoking, then you kind of were betraying your little smoking network.

I think human nature is such that it is difficult to say, "I think we got this wrong, and I'm going to now join this other group."

The debate has been fierce. I don't see any other option to that, because it matters. We're not talking about whether we like pink or purple more. We're talking about whether children learn to read and what that means for their entire life trajectories, so the debate needs to be quite forceful. Any attempts at kind of meeting in the middle have given us balanced literacy, and the fallacy is in it's name, that when there's two opposing ideas you just meet in the middle and everything will be all right.

I think human nature is our biggest barrier in this respect. That's probably going to be the focus of my next blog post, actually, the one that's sort of writing itself in my head at the moment, because it IS hard.

BUT teachers are doing it and school leaders are doing it, and kudos to them. We need education academics to step up and have the mea culpa, I was wrong, conversation that teachers at scale are starting to have, and school leaders at scale are starting to have. If it's good enough for them, why is it not good enough for education academics?

Anna Geiger: Do you have any thoughts about how that change can happen, or have you seen a positive change among professors where they've shown an interest in learning about the science of reading and turned their backs on balanced literacy? Sometimes it feels like you're just hitting a wall.

Pam Snow: Yeah. I would say that the silence is fairly deafening in Australia when it comes to change.

La Trobe University has definitely broken away from the pack and is not teaching balanced literacy. We're teaching ABOUT balanced literacy, because we think it's really important that our students understand the broader context, and understand that reading instruction is a contested space. Also they may be going on to placements in schools where balanced literacy is the favored pedagogical approach, so they need to be prepared for that and know how to manage that potentially challenging situation.

There are another couple of universities that I won't name here, because it's not my place to name them, where I think there are positive indications. But I think the majority of Australian universities are going to try and dig in and build the fortress even higher around balanced literacy for a range of reasons because they don't want to acknowledge that the way that they have been positioning reading... In many cases, reading itself is not even a word that turns up very much in...

Anna Geiger: Yeah, interesting.

Pam Snow: It's all about literacy, and as I said earlier, multiple literacies, digital literacies. Talking about reading is somehow dry and boring, and very teacher focused.

So no, I think unless our federal government can find meaningful carrots and sticks, and it needs to be the right combination of both, then we're not going to see a lot of change, and we're going to continue to lag behind on global indicators of reading proficiency or continue to fall further behind.

Anna Geiger: Talk to me about La Trobe University. Was your university ever teaching balanced literacy?

Pam Snow: Absolutely! Absolutely. La Trobe University is a relatively new university in Australia in the sense that it was established in 1970, and it was established in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, which didn't at that stage... Unless you count Melbourne University, which is just slightly on the north of the Yarra River in Melbourne, but Melbourne University is one of our sandstone universities. It's a prestigious university.

La Trobe was created really to serve a growth corridor in the 1970s, and has a very strong social justice imperative in everything about its establishment, but it was like every other faculty of education in Australia, very much a balanced literacy school of education.

In late 2019, my colleague Tanya Serry and I were appointed to the School of Education by the then newly appointed dean, Professor Joanna Barbousas, who I really need to give a big shout-out to here, because she has been a very strong advocate of explicit teaching in general. She sees the importance of positioning the science of reading within a broader science of learning context.

Tanya and I were appointed from different positions in the university, so we were in different... In fact, we were and are still on different campuses. I work at the Bendigo Campus, which is about 170 kilometers away. What's that in miles? Maybe about 130 miles north of Melbourne. Tanya works at the Melbourne Campus.

We came across to the School of Education in January 2020, which, as you know, was a very interesting time to be doing anything in this world. We were really charged with responsibility for overhauling reading instruction in the School of Education at La Trobe, which of course was not popular with everybody.

Joanna has supported us all the way. We said we wanted to create a specific platform for our work in the school, hence the SOLAR Lab, the Science of Language and Reading Lab, which is just a virtual entity that supports our research, our teaching, our PhD supervision, and consultancies that we do with various departments of education. Then we've been fortunate more recently to appoint Dr. Nathaniel Swain, who you know, and Dr. Tessa Weadman.

So we've got a strong team that is working on a complete refresh, which we've already obviously started. We're not just working on it, we're already delivering that, in our initial teacher education programs and in our master's level programs.

Some people become teachers through a master's entry program if they have an existing degree. We have a master's of education for practicing teachers, and other professionals can do that too. That now has a language and literacy specialization.

Then we've also designed and delivered three online short courses that we've had over 10,000 participants complete in three years. Overwhelmingly it's been teachers from all around Australia. We've had some people from other nations as well, but predominantly Australian teachers, so we know there's a big appetite for this knowledge.

And teachers are angry. As you would know, there's a lot of emotion in the realization that there have been a lot of children in my career who I could have taught to read. Teachers remember names and faces; it's not just a general sense of all those kids. It's that little kid called Rebecca, or that little kid called Kai, or whoever. They still feel very strong emotions about the fact that the knowledge that they have now would've worked with those children. The feedback on our short courses has been very powerful actually.

Anna Geiger: So you're doing what a lot of universities need to do, which is switch over. But obviously, like you said, that's going to be really hard.

I know in a lot of American schools, they train their whole elementary school, or the whole staff, primary teachers maybe, with LETRS with Louisa Moats. Is something like that needed for a staff of a university? How do you even get started with people who are pushing back?

Pam Snow: Well, you can lead a horse to water, I guess, and making it drink is very difficult.

There was some work done, a report done. I don't know whether you're familiar with the Five From Five website, but your listeners would be interested in that. Jennifer Buckingham did a desktop audit back in roughly 2018 I'm thinking, of the publicly accessible curricula for initial teacher education programs in Australia at that time. She looked at what they said about reading instruction and what the prescribed texts were, because that's often a very strong indicator of the orientation of the teaching. She looked at the qualifications of the people who are actually delivering that subject content, and sometimes, those people had no discernible background in language and linguistics at all. They could have been drama teachers, art teachers, or have physical education backgrounds.

I think this is a genuine challenge for universities. I don't think it's the one that they are happy to talk about. I think they want to position the debate around academic freedom, around, "No, we've got this. We're doing this. It's all fine. You are overstating the extent of reading difficulties. You're just kind of drumming up a moral crisis by saying that there are children who aren't being taught to read. And if there are children who aren't being taught to read, it's because schools aren't being given enough money," because we have an inequitable funding system for schools in Australia, which is probably a fair argument.

But we know that there are many schools in low socioeconomic status communities who've overhauled their instructional model and are doing amazing things, and getting amazing results without getting any extra money. So you can't just keep playing the money card and say give schools more money, because it's what schools do with the money that matters. If they just keep spending it on sets of leveled readers, low-impact teaching practices, and low-impact teacher professional learning, then they're not going to see any changes. They're going to keep blaming the parents, the children, the color of the walls, I don't know, anything but the instruction.

Anna Geiger: So do you have any advice for professors who are seeing the light, and they want to make changes, but they're on a staff with people who aren't interested? Any tips for next steps?

Pam Snow: That's a good question, Anna. Tanya and I do connect with such people from time to time. We have to meet in a dark alley, metaphorically. No one's allowed to know that they're talking to us. It's in the same way that over the years, teachers have contacted me and said, "If my principal knew I was talking to you, I'd be in so much trouble." We are happy for people to reach out to us and make contact.

This is as difficult for university academics to make change in as it is for individual teachers in schools who want to move away from balanced literacy. It is just as challenging.

Similar to the United States I would guess, a lot of academics are on fixed-term contracts, and you are vulnerable if you rock the boat. If you're a junior academic on a fixed-term contract, without tenure, without job security, then rocking the boat isn't going to be a very strategic career move, unfortunately.

Anna Geiger: So do you have any answers? What's it going to take?

Pam Snow: I hope that it doesn't take ten years for people to see that La Trobe graduates are graduates of choice, and probably staying in the workforce longer because they're going to be more satisfied with their knowledge and skills. Because that's another big problem that we have in Australia, the attrition after five years away from the teaching workforce. I think a lot of that comes back to initial teacher preparation and not having a proper toolkit around classroom management, the science of learning, the science of reading, and so forth.

What I can see is that there are more and more examples of ground-up shift occurring. That's individual schools, the teachers, and in some cases, sectors saying, "We're going to change the way we teach reading."

I just don't want it to be one school at a time. The bottom-up stuff is very powerful, and we support that as much as we possibly can. We roll up our sleeves, work with those schools, provide guidance, and advice, and so forth.

But this needs to be happening top-down. Policy makers need to be leaning in and saying, "At a population level, this is a public health issue. And yes, the research may not answer every question that we want it to answer, but there is enough research to tell us that on the basis of probabilities, we're going to get more success if we prepare our teacher workforce this way, and we're going to see better outcomes for students." It's a slow burn kind of proposition, and it really needs bipartisan political support.

Anna Geiger: Which that's hard to come by around here.

Pam Snow: It's very hard to come by. Yeah.

Anna Geiger: Well, I know that people who are listening, especially people who are professors, would really like to learn more about how things have progressed for you. Are there specific places that I can send them to?

Pam Snow: Yeah, thank you. We will have a website going live hopefully next week. You and I are talking in late September, so hopefully in early to mid-October, there will be a SOLAR Lab website, and that will continue to evolve over time. We're always happy to chat to academics who are keen to make changes, recognizing that within a university, some top-down leadership is really needed to make this real.

For example, one of the things that our dean, Joanna Barbousas has done, is worked with us on the staffing profile that's needed in the School of Education, recognizing that we can't do all of this on our own. The school or the faculty needs to have an appropriate staffing profile. It's not just a matter of saying to two people, "You fix this whole thing on your own. You do this."

We're not there yet. We're well underway. We are still a work in progress, and we fully acknowledge that. We need to continue to have some hard discussions about what we mean by the science of learning and how we can be sure that our programs have coherence and consistency. We talk about subjects where you talk about courses. We've still got work to do, and I think that will be an ongoing process of ensuring the coherence and the consistency in our messaging.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, it's a process with a lot of moving parts. I'm sure people will be really happy to know they can reach out to you to get help with some of those, because it just takes someone that's gone through it to help you, encourage you, and maybe give you a few small steps to focus on.

Pam Snow: Yeah, absolutely.

I think we need to kind of zoom out and ask ourselves how history is going to judge us on this time, and what history is going to record about what actually was the best way to teach children how to read. All children, not just the fortunate ones who are going to get there anyway by hook or by crook, by virtue of their circumstances, and their parents' resources, and so forth.

As you know, Anna, as a former balanced literacy teacher, even for those children who do get there in balanced literacy classrooms, many of them have major deficiencies in their spelling. Explicit teaching is not just about getting to efficient automaticity with decoding as quickly as possible. It's also about improving spelling and writing.

But I think history already tells us that there is a preferred method. It just happens to be harder and require us to walk up a steeper hill. We need to work out how to do that in ways that produce better outcomes. It sounds so cheesy and simple, but better outcomes for all children because, at the end of the day, this is about children and children's futures. It's not about the academics' egos, and their tribal affiliations, and their preferences. Adults who are proficient readers and writers need to be very careful about decisions that they make about other people's children.

Anna Geiger: Well, thank you very much. Thank you for the voice that you've been for so long, and continue to be, and for all the day-to-day work you're doing to train future teachers in Australia. It was such a pleasure to talk with you!

Pam Snow: Thank you, Anna! And thank you for all that YOU do. I love your podcast. I always am excited to see a new Triple R Teaching podcast episode dropping, and I hope that we get to talk again at some stage.

Anna Geiger: Thank you so much.

Thank you for listening! You can find the show notes at themeasuredmom.com/episode143. Talk to you next time!

Closing: That's all for this episode of Triple R Teaching. For more educational resources, visit Anna at her home base, themeasuredmom.com, and join our teaching community. We look forward to helping you reflect, refine, and recharge on the next episode of Triple R Teaching!

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Why are so many professors reluctant to let go of balanced literacy?

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TRT Podcast #143: Why are so many teachers reluctant to let go of balanced literacy? with Dr. Pam Snow Dr. Pam Snow and I discuss why balanced literacy is still taught in colleges and universities

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The Reading League has this page that links to many helpful tools, resources, and example syllabi. 

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The Reading League has this page that links to many helpful tools, resources, and example syllabi. 

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What is Meant by the Term Science of Reading: A Defining Guide

The Reading League collaborated with numerous experts to develop the Science of Reading: A Defining Guide (2022). This guide provides a clear understanding of what the term means and includes additional material to support that understanding. It is very helpful for teacher educators to build their own knowledge or to provide it as a part of their coursework (copies can be purchased or downloaded as free PDFs by following the link in this paragraph).

The Defining Guide defines the science of reading as "a vast, interdisciplinary body of scientifically-based* research about reading and issues related to reading and writing. This research has been conducted over the last five decades across the world, and it is derived from thousands of studies conducted in multiple languages. The science of reading has culminated in a preponderance of evidence to inform how proficient reading and writing develop; why some have difficulty; and how we can most effectively assess and teach and, therefore, improve student outcomes through prevention of and intervention for reading difficulties."

This scientifically-based research is the kind of research that has historically been absent from many educator preparation programs. Typically, the kind of research featured in EPPs includes qualitative studies, observational studies, and other methodologies that are useful when the research questions are not seeking to address causal claims. Scientifically-based reading research addresses questions about causal relationships between instruction and student outcomes, providing pre-service teachers with knowledge of how our brains read, how brain circuitry changes as we develop skilled reading, the instructional practices that best support these cognitive processes, and more.
On page 11 of the Defining Guide, a table articulates the components of scientifically- based research:
The majority of educator preparation programs have been preparing pre-service teachers using a Balanced Literacy framework. This framework emphasizes student choice and implicit learning to encourage an early love for reading and writing with the belief this will lead students to successful literacy outcomes. Unfortunately, these underlying tenets of Balanced Literacy are not substantiated by scientifically-based reading research. In contrast, scientific evidence shows that explicit and systematic instruction in components of language such as phoneme awareness, phonics, semantics, and syntax result in better reading outcomes because they provide students with the understanding of the relationships between oral and written language. Structured Literacy is the term used for an instructional approach that integrates these components of instruction based on the science of reading.

Educator Preparation Program Community of Practice

TRL hosts monthly community of practice meetings for faculty from educator preparation programs. During these virtual meetings, professors share resources such as sample syllabi and course outlines, provide feedback and advice, and discuss challenges. To learn more or to join, complete this Google Form.

Developing Department Unity for Program Transformation: Syllabi and Course Refinement Tools That Can Help

An essential first step in integrating evidence-aligned / scientifically-based reading instruction into an educator preparation program is developing unity among faculty in a department so that there can be commitment to engaging in the work. Through The Reading League's EPP community of practice meetings, faculty from over 200 EPPs have agreed that this work is challenging, and particularly challenging and less successful if done independently. Following are tools that can make this work less challenging for faculty members.

Curriculum Evaluation Guidelines

The Reading League's Curriculum Evaluation Guidelines (CEGs) feature pages of scientifically-based reading research within its resource section. This research substantiates the instructional practices identified within the CEGs that are aligned with the scientific evidence ("aligned practices") and those that are not aligned with the evidence ("red flags").

Education preparation program faculty can use the CEGs to identify the instructional practices to teach pre-service educators and base student assignments. Pre-service educators can be provided with copies of the CEGs to understand how certain instructional practices are supported by the science of reading and how others are not supported by it.

CEEDAR Center Resources

The CEEDAR Center offers many innovation configurations that EPPs can use to evaluate programs on a variety of evidence-based practices.

One such Innovation Configuration that has been helpful to EPPs as they engage in the work of aligning course content to the science of reading is the Rhode Island Science of Reading and Structured Literacy Syllabi Refinement Tool and Resource Bank for Syllabi Enhancement

International Dyslexia Association (IDA) Knowledge and Practice Standards (KPS)

The International Dyslexia Association offers a standards-based accreditation process for EPPs that have developed course content that meets or exceeds the IDA Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teaching Reading and Spelling: Implementing Structured Literacy. These standards are also a useful tool to refine and supplement course content within an educator preparation program.

A list of accredited programs is available on the IDA website.

Additional resources

There are many useful resources for EPP faculty to use within their course content regarding both "the what" and "the how." Following are some samples.

Syllabi Refinement Consultants

Dr. Cara McDermott-Fasy's blog describes the transformation of Rhode Island College as its faculty united to abandon its single syllabi perspective and use the Rhode Island Science of Reading and Structured Literacy Syllabi Refinement Tool to build a cohesive program. The tool allows faculty to identify gaps and redundancies in evidence-aligned instructional practices among syllabi and coursework. They credit this tool with helping them improve their National Council for Teacher Quality (NCTQ) rating from an F in 2018 to an A+ in 2023.

How the Science of Reading Supports Multilingual Learners and Students who Speak English Language Variations

Educator preparation programs must prioritize the inclusion of content from the science of reading regarding how to support English Learners and Emergent Bilinguals (ELs/EBs). Visit The Reading League Compass: English Learners / Emergent Bilinguals and the Science of Reading for resources to support this population of students.

Pre-service teachers should graduate with an understanding of the benefits of recognizing and embracing bilingualism as an asset, as well as viewing dialects and English language variations as an asset. Linguistic diversity benefits students, fostering cultural inclusivity and acknowledging the unique characteristics and expressions found within different dialects. Understanding that dialects are governed by their own grammar rules helps both students and their teachers realize that language variations are not a lesser form of standard English.

Model Syllabi

Participants from The Reading League's educator preparation program community of practice have generously shared their syllabi as examples of what a course that integrates components of evidence-aligned literacy instruction may look like.

Model Syllabi from Mount St. Joseph's University

Model Syllabi from Excellence in Teaching/CESA9 virtual courses

Model Syllabi from William Carey University

Model Syllabi from Eastern Oregon University

Model Syllabi from William Penn University

Model Syllabi from Mars Hill University

Model Syllabi from the University of Missouri

Connecting to Classrooms

Many schools and universities are currently transforming by building knowledge in scientifically-based research. Faculty participating in The Reading League's EPP community of practice have noted that a major challenge is providing pre-service teachers with practicums in classrooms that feature practices aligned to the science of reading.

Some EPP faculty and deans have solved this issue by offering cohorts of professional development in the science of reading in which both EPP faculty and partner school teachers build their knowledge together. Sometimes, resources such as grants or initiatives from a state education agency, or partnerships with organizations such as the CEEDAR Center are used to support such field placement efforts. EPPs have also partnered with local community organizations and after-school programs to establish tutorial practicums to have greater control and assurance that pre-service teachers will be using the evidence-aligned instruction that they've learned.

Dr. Katie Pace-Miles and Andrew Fletcher developed another replicable solution. They designed a tutoring model that has been supporting the needs of New York City's youth while also allowing pre-service teachers authentic, paid, experience using evidence-aligned materials.

Textbooks and Materials

Selecting textbooks and course materials that are aligned to the science of reading can be a challenge. To make this task easier, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) created a searchable database of reading instructional materials. The database includes more than 1,000 educational resources-including textbooks, journal articles, and instructional videos-currently used in teacher preparation programs' coursework. Each resource is rated on how well it aligns with scientifically-based reading instruction and has a detailed review written by a leading reading expert from the field.

Users can search by the core components of scientifically-based reading instruction (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension); by types of reader (struggling readers, English language learners, English language variations); by rating; and by intended use.

NCTQ Reviews and Resources

Though we know scientifically-based reading instruction is imperative, it can be hard to determine if educator prep programs are preparing teachers with the knowledge base to make the best instructional choices In turn, this can make it difficult to identify strong educator prep programs that can serve as models for others. To help with this, the National Council on Teacher Quality produced the Teacher Prep Review: Strengthening Elementary Reading Instruction, which examines nearly 700 teacher prep programs across the country to determine the extent to which they are preparing future teachers in scientifically based reading instruction. NCTQ looks for evidence that coursework for future elementary teachers includes all the core components of scientifically based reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The analysis breaks down how future elementary teachers are prepared in each aspect of the science of reading through instructional hours, assigned readings, assignments and assessments, and opportunities to practice.

This tool can help state leaders and advocates discern which educator prep programs in their state are strong and which need additional support. The review also includes

The Center for Reading Science: Higher Education

The Center for Reading Science at Mount St. Joseph University provides resources to support EPPs seeking to enhance the alignment of educator preparation to reading research. The center offers tools, consultation, and collaboration through the STARS in Higher Education alliance, which is open to educator preparation providers.

Resources such as course enhancement tools and sample syllabi can be found on the Faculty Resources page.

Deans for Impact

Deans for Impact (DFI), a national nonprofit organization with a mission of ensuring every child is taught by well-prepared teachers, supports aspiring teachers to enact equitable, evidence-based instruction, including in early literacy.

Their team of literacy experts works with teacher-educators to build content area knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge in scientifically-based reading instruction and supports efforts to design aligned coursework and clinical experiences that create meaningful learning opportunities for aspiring teachers. Notably, their Early Literacy by Scientific Design Network helped educator preparation programs to employ a series of seven asynchronous, practice-based modules drawn from high-quality instructional materials, resulting in significant pre- to post-assessment gains in candidates' mastery of foundational skills instruction.

DFI has published resources for educators on early learning and development, provides on-the-ground training and technical support, and supports alignment across teacher preparation and pre K-12 education.

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Our educator preparation programs (EPPs) help educators to improve their professional knowledge and skills in the science of reading.

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Here is a link to Lindsay Kemeny's new book, 7 Mighty Moves: Research-backed, Classroom-tested strategies to Ensure K to 3 Reading Success.  This is the book we are using in The Reading League MN zoom book study.

I'm not sure why you see the 'moves' and not the cover of the book on this link, but it should take you to Amazon.

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- TRACY WHITE WEEDEN, Ed.D., President and CEO, Neuhaus Education Center

" An accessible and appealing book that is chock-full of useful and doable strategies for building the foundation necessary for reading proficiency. Lindsay Kemeny has created a window into the what and how of effective instruction, while articulating the why that should drive the 'moves' of all reading teachers. "

" This book is pure gold! In what feels like a conversation with your most knowledgeable teacher friend, Lindsay Kemeny expertly weaves together reading research and practical suggestions for the classroom. 7 Mighty Moves should be required reading for teaching early literacy. "

- KATE WINN, teacher, structured literacy presenter, and host of IDA Ontario's Reading Roadmap Podcast

- PAM KASTNER, Ed.D., State Lead for Literacy, Pennsylvania Training and Technical Assistance Network (PaTTAN)

- STEPHANIE A. STOLLAR, Ph.D., founder of the Reading Science Academy

- ERNESTO ORTIZ, JR., Ed.D., senior literacy engagement specialist, AIM Institute for Learning & Research

- NANCY CHAPEL EBERHARDT, educational consultant and co-author of Sortegories and Syntax: Knowledge to Practice

- MARGARET GOLDBERG, teacher and co-founder of the Right to Read Project

"A university professor is a teacher of teachers. Lindsay Kemeny is a teacher's teacher. In 7 Mighty Moves , she invites us into her classroom and generously shares the what , how , and why in this accessible book that bridges the research-to-practice gap. School administrators will also find valuable information as they move in a new direction."

- FAITH BORKOWSKY, literacy consultant and author of Failing Students or Failing Schools? and the "If Only I Would Have Known..." series

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7 Mighty Moves: Research-Backed, Classroom-Tested Strategies to Ensure K-to-3 Reading Success (The Science of Reading in Practice)

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In this no-nonsense guide, primary reading expert and classroom teacher Lindsay Kemeny shares seven ways K-3 teachers can modify what they are currently doing to transform their reading instruction. Each chapter focuses on a critical area of foundational reading-from the most efficient ways to te...

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Pathways to Reading Comprehension: A Longitudinal Study from 4 to 9 Years of Age

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Pathways to Reading Comprehension: A Longitudinal Study from 4 to 9 Years of Age

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This study was heavily referenced in Chapter 13. It's worth the read!

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A Cognitive View of Reading Comprehension: Implications for Reading Difficulties

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A Cognitive View of Reading Comprehension: Implications for Reading Difficulties

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Kendeou and team describe the cognitive view of reading comprehension and practical ideas for applying the research to help striving comprehenders.

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The Role of Educator Preparation Programs in Preparing Teachers in the Science of Reading

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The Role of Educator Preparation Programs in Preparing Teachers in the Science of Reading

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If you have a chance, please read this before Session 3. We will discuss applying the recommendations in Sessions 3-6.

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Here are the fabulous posters you made to summarize the key takeaways from the chapters.

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This is an optional study guide. Feel free to make a copy and use it to take notes and bring it to the discussion if that is helpful to you.

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Enhancing Alphabet Knowledge Instruction Article 

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Enhancing Alphabet Knowledge Instruction Article 

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Our group discussing Chapter 6 brought up alphabet instruction. This linked & free article was mentioned as a great way to help teachers understand how research can be applied in regard to alphabet instruction.

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Journal/Book Title/Conference

Early Childhood Education Journal

Abstract

Alphabet knowledge is consistently recognized as the strongest, most durable predictor of later literacy achievement. Recent research offers practical implications for increased effectiveness of teaching alphabet knowledge to young children. In this article, we outline Enhanced Alphabet Knowledge instruction (EAK), a method of practical instruction that early childhood teachers can use to organize, plan, and teach the essential skills of alphabet knowledge. EAK emphasizes identifying the letter name and sound, recognizing the letter in text, and producing the letter form, through flexible, distributed cycles of review based on factors that influence acquisition of alphabet knowledge.

Recommended Citation

Jones, Cindy D'On; Clark, Sarah K.; and Reutzel, D. Ray, "Enhancing alphabet knowledge instruction: Research implications and practical strategies for early childhood educators" (2012). Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications. Paper 404.
https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/teal_facpub/404

DOWNLOADS

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Enhancing alphabet knowledge instruction: Research implications and practical strategies for early childhood educators

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Alphabet knowledge is consistently recognized as the strongest, most durable predictor of later literacy achievement. Recent research offers practical implications for increased effectiveness of teaching alphabet knowledge to young children. In this article, we outline Enhanced Alphabet Knowledge instruction (EAK), a method of practical instruction that early childhood teachers can use to organize, plan, and teach the essential skills of alphabet knowledge.

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Learning in a New Language, by Dr. Lori Helman

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Learning in a New Language, by Dr. Lori Helman

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This is the HELP book for their summer book club. You can register to join the book club here.

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Learning in a New Language: A Schoolwide Approach to Support K-8 Emergent Bilinguals

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Learning in a New Language: A Schoolwide Approach to Support K-8 Emergent Bilinguals [Helman, Lori] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Learning in a New Language: A Schoolwide Approach to Support K-8 Emergent Bilinguals

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Description

A children's history of the world told via the development of language, featuring the wordsmiths, civilizations, and tools that have shaped the ways humans communicate.

A History of Words for Children explores the uniquely human ability to share thoughts using words. Written in a lively narrative style, this book presents a history of the world through language, introducing young readers to the civilizations, inventions, and writers who have shaped the way we communicate.

Divided into themed chapters to help young minds grasp difficult concepts, the book explores what words are and how humans communicate; the development of writing implements; the history of printed books; the process of learning another language; dialects and accents and the way language can reflect our identity; the power of words to calm, inspire, and rally crowds; graffiti's role in spreading messages; codes and invented languages; the patterns of poetry; the future of words; and languages facing extinction.

Featuring examples like the Grimm Brothers, Emily Dickinson, and King Ashurbanipal's library, the book also includes illustrations by Rose Blake that add a cast of humorous and helpful characters to explain the wide variety of ideas. A History of Words for Children inspires creative minds and helps them understand how we communicate.

About the Author

Mary Richards is an award-winning art publisher, writer, and illustrator. She adapted and edited David Hockney's best-selling A History of Pictures for Children and is the author of A History of Music for Children and A History of Words for Children.

Rose Blake is an award-winning artist and illustrator who has illustrated numerous books for children, including A History of Pictures for Children.

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A History of Words for Children (Hardcover)

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A children's history of the world told via the development of language, featuring the wordsmiths, civilizations, and tools that have shaped the ways humans communicate.

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phonics and spelling through phoneme grapheme mapping

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Phonics and Spelling Through Phoneme-Grapheme Mapping

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Phonics and Spelling Through Phoneme-Grapheme MappingWritten by Kathryn E. S.

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This classroom-tested program teaches spelling concepts explicitly, systematically, cumulatively, and enjoyably! A perfect complement to your current reading and language arts program, Spellography was designed to help all students make sense of the English spelling system, and thus become better at understanding, reading, and writing words.

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What does explicit instruction look like? 

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What does explicit instruction look like? 

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See the attached file for 4 graphics based on the work of Anita Archer and Charles Hughes.

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Part 1 discussed priming studies. Here is a short video that demonstrates how priming works.

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"Executive Functions and Morphological Awareness Explain the Shared Variance between Word Reading and Listening Comprehension" by Young-Suk Grace Kim

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"Executive Functions and Morphological Awareness Explain the Shared Variance between Word Reading and Listening Comprehension" by Young-Suk Grace Kim

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Researcher Kim (2023) found that executive functioning and morphology are the main factors that explain differences between word recognition and listening comprehension. (This article was mentioned in the Twin Cities Session 1).

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Optional study guide. Please make a copy if you'd like to type your own answers.

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Description
A stunning non-fiction picture book about the origins of the English Language. You'll be surprised at the global and cultural diversity hidden in the words we use every day
Did you know that English words come from all over the world? And often their meanings have changed over time? Find out about the journeys of a selection of words from the English Language in this amazing visual resource. Each word is paired with a two-page spread illustration, which takes inspiration from the origins of the word itself.

Author Patrick Skipworth has carefully selected words with a diversity of origins from all around the globe: some are derived from phrases ("companion" - the Latin for "with bread"), some from actions or behaviours ("caribou" - meaning "snow shoveler" in Mi'kmaq, an indigenous language of eastern Canada), and some from sounds or onomatopoeia ("Kookaburra" - Australian Aboriginal languages).

With simple descriptions and dazzling, evocative and witty illustrations, this is a fascinating introduction to the rich history and cultural diversity of our language. The perfect book for budding linguists aged 7 - 11 to learn about the origins and meanings of the English language.

About the Author

Patrick Skipworth studied Classics and Linguistics in London and the Netherlands, connecting the dots between ancient cultures, their histories, and their languages. Today, Patrick is a children's book editor, but he likes to write his own books when he can. Some of his favorite topics are prehistoric bugs, super-intelligent robots, and legends from far away places. Patrick's favorite word is "mosaic."Nicholas Stevenson's personality and past are as colorful as his illustrations. Now living in London, he spent years in the Seychelles "dressing like Peter Pan most days." Nicholas produces lively, engaging, mysterious and deeply painterly work for the publishing and music industries.

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Literally: Amazing Words and Where They Come from (Hardcover)

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A stunning non-fiction picture book about the origins of the English Language. You'll be surprised at the global and cultural diversity hidden in the words we use every day Did you know that English words come from all over the world? And often their meanings have changed over time?

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Reading Rods - a hands-on way to learn about word parts.

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Although we don't need students to memorize every rule, this book is helpful for professors and teachers to understand the "why" behind letter/sound correspondences.

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Uncovering the Logic of English: A Common-Sense Approach to Reading, Spelling, and Literacy

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Amazon.com: Uncovering the Logic of English: A Common-Sense Approach to Reading, Spelling, and Literacy: 9781936706211: Denise Eide: Books

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

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Amazon.com: Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can't, and What Can Be Done About It: 9780465019328: Seidenberg, Mark: Books

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Once Upon a Word: A Word-Origin Dictionary for Kids

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Once Upon a Word: A Word-Origin Dictionary for Kids

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This includes helpful charts of prefixes, suffixes, and root word. It also includes a dictionary of common words and explains the etymology and roots.

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Once Upon a Word: A Word-Origin Dictionary for Kids―Building Vocabulary Through Etymology, Definitions & Stories

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Once Upon a Word: A Word-Origin Dictionary for Kids―Building Vocabulary Through Etymology, Definitions & Stories [Zafarris, Jess] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Once Upon a Word: A Word-Origin Dictionary for Kids―Building Vocabulary Through Etymology, Definitions & Stories

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Please make a copy of this form and email it to abbey-payeur@bethel.edu if you traveled for 90 minutes or more to your PLC meeting.

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Copy of SoR PLC - Gas Mileage - SV 5.18.23

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"How Words Cast Their Spell"

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Shanahan, "What Constitutes a Science of Reading Instruction?".

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This could be a helpful resource for preservice teachers.

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How the Brain Learns to Read - Prof. Stanislas Dehaene