# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Ari Cotton, a first grader, reading a book at Garrison Elementary School in Washington, D.C., one of only two jurisdictions in the country that saw rising scores on national reading tests last year. Credit... Lexey Swall for The New York Times

As test scores lag, there's a growing debate between proponents of the "science of reading," which emphasizes phonics, and traditional educators who prefer to instill a love of literature.

Ari Cotton, a first grader, reading a book at Garrison Elementary School in Washington, D.C., one of only two jurisdictions in the country that saw rising scores on national reading tests last year. Credit... Lexey Swall for The New York Times

WASHINGTON - "Bit!" Ayana Smith called out as she paced the alphabet rug in front of her kindergarten students at Garrison Elementary School.

"Buh! Ih! Tuh!" the class responded in unison, making karate chop motions as they enunciated the sound of each letter. In a 10-minute lesson, the students chopped up and correctly spelled a string of words:

Top. "Tuh! Ah! Puh!"

Wig. "Wuh! Ih! Guh!"

Ship. "Shuh! Ih! Puh!"

Ms. Smith's sounding-out exercises might seem like a common-sense way to teach reading. But for decades, many teachers have embraced a different approach, convinced that exposing students to the likes of Dr. Seuss and Maya Angelou is more important than drilling them on phonics.

Lagging student performance and newly relevant research, though, have prompted some educators to reconsider the ABCs of reading instruction. Their effort gained new urgency after national test scores last year showed that only a third of American students were proficient in reading, with widening gaps between good readers and bad ones.

Now members of this vocal minority, proponents of what they call the "science of reading," congregate on social media and swap lesson plans intended to avoid creating "curriculum casualties" - students who have not been effectively taught to read and who will continue to struggle into adulthood, unable to comprehend medical forms, news stories or job listings.

The bible for these educators is a body of research produced by linguists, psychologists and cognitive scientists. Their findings have pushed some states and school districts to make big changes in how teachers are trained and students are taught.

The "science of reading" stands in contrast to the "balanced literacy" theory that many teachers are exposed to in schools of education. That theory holds that students can learn to read through exposure to a wide range of books that appeal to them, without too much emphasis on technically complex texts or sounding out words.

Eye-tracking studies and brain scans now show that the opposite is true, according to many scientists. Learning to read, they say, is the work of deliberately practicing how to quickly connect the letters on the page to the sounds we hear each day.

The evidence "is about as close to conclusive as research on complex human behavior can get," writes Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist and reading expert at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Phonics has gone in and out of style for decades, and the current conflict over how to teach reading is only the latest in a tug-of-war that dates to the 19th century. A major push for phonics instruction under President George W. Bush, through a federal program called Reading First, did not produce widespread achievement gains, raising questions about whether the current efforts can succeed.

Phonics boosters say they now know more about what works, and that phonics alone isn't the answer. Alongside bigger doses of sounding out, they want struggling students to grapple with more advanced books, so they won't get stuck in a cycle of low expectations and boredom. Some schools are devoting more time to social studies and science, subjects that help build vocabulary and knowledge in ways that can make students stronger readers.

States have passed laws requiring that schools use phonics-centric curriculums and screen students more aggressively for reading problems - or even hold back those who struggle most. In January, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos castigated colleges of education for teaching what she described as "junk science" about reading.

But the education establishment is pushing back, worried that too many lessons like Ms. Smith's could be stultifying - a poor substitute for a teacher reading aloud from a book of Shel Silverstein poems, or guiding children through lushly illustrated stories by Ezra Jack Keats. They blame low student performance on such factors as inexperienced teachers, school funding inequities and homes that lack books or time for parents to read to their children.

The guardians of balanced literacy acknowledge that phonics has a place. But they trust their own classroom experience over brain scans or laboratory experiments, and say they have seen many children overcome reading problems without sound-it-out drills. They value children picking books that interest them and worry that pushing students into harder texts could turn them off reading entirely.

Karen K. Wixson, an author of a recent report warning that too much phonics can harm children, called the new push "incredibly, scarily naïve."

Image

Madisyn Hall-Jones, 5, working on a reading lesson at Garrison Elementary School. Credit... Lexey Swall for The New York Times

In Ms. Smith's classroom in Washington, Madisyn Hall-Jones, 5, demonstrated her progress by reading aloud a short story about picking apples that she had written and illustrated herself.

"It's not rote," the school's principal, Brigham Kiplinger, said of the phonics-driven curriculum. "It's joyful."

Washington is one of only two jurisdictions, along with Mississippi, to increase average reading scores on National Assessment of Educational Progress tests between 2017 and 2019. Both did so despite high-poverty student populations, and both are requiring more phonics.

"For us, this is social justice work," Mr. Kiplinger said. The majority of students at Garrison Elementary come from low-income families. If parents express concerns about the new curriculum, he invites them to visit a classroom like Ms. Smith's and see the difference.

Parents in suburban St. Louis are looking for similar results. More than a third of kindergarten to third-grade students in the highly regarded Lindbergh school district tested as "at risk" for dyslexia last spring, after Missouri instituted mandatory screening. Angry district residents sent an open letter to the school board in November, demanding that the district embrace the science of reading.

The district said it had added a new phonics sequence in the early elementary grades and retrained some teachers. But it stands by its broader balanced literacy approach, which it said gives teachers the autonomy to tailor instruction to students at all levels.

That's not enough for parents like Diane Dragan. An attorney who has three children with dyslexia, Ms. Dragan noted that well-off parents in her area regularly pay thousands of dollars to have their children taught intensive phonics at private tutoring centers.

"The irony to me is that the public-school teacher who teaches balanced literacy during the day moonlights to do science-based tutoring for kids who fail to learn to read," Ms. Dragan said.

In Mississippi, all prospective elementary schoolteachers are now required to pass a test in the foundations of reading, including phonics. The state has also dispatched literacy coaches to struggling schools.

More controversially, it passed a law in 2013 requiring third graders to be held back if they score poorly on an end-of-year reading exam; last year, about 10 percent of them were retained, for reading difficulties or other reasons.

Some reading experts have called Mississippi's recent gains into question, arguing that by retaining so many of the lowest-scoring third graders, the state had stigmatized students and manufactured a higher-performing pool of test takers. But Shannon D. Whitehead, the principal of McNeal Elementary School in Canton, Miss., supported the state's decision to get tough.

Her school put in place a phonics sequence that continues through fifth grade, and started assigning more challenging literature, including Langston Hughes poems. It hosts early-morning, after-school and Saturday tutoring sessions for students at risk of failing state tests. Scores have improved modestly.

As painful as it can be to tell a child they have to repeat a year, Dr. Whitehead said, "in order for us to ensure that our students are able to compete globally, we have to have an accountability system."

Kate Drake and Frank Brier, who are both in first grade, reading a book together at Garrison Elementary School. Credit... Lexey Swall for The New York Times

One of the most popular reading curriculums in the country - used in about 20 percent of schools, including the Lindbergh district near St. Louis - was developed by Lucy Calkins, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is widely admired for her emphasis on helping students develop a love of reading and writing.

But her curriculum, which follows the balanced literacy model, has come under increasing fire from critics who say it devotes too little time to phonics practice and gives teachers and students too much choice over what books to read, allowing them to avoid more challenging texts. Earlier this month, the public schools in Oakland, Calif., told staff members that the district would move away from Professor Calkins's materials after the city's N.A.A.C.P. chapter and parent activists demanded the use of "research-proven" strategies.

In an interview, Professor Calkins decried what she called a feeling of "animosity and mistrust" between the camps in the reading wars. She acknowledged that many teachers needed more training on how to teach phonics effectively, and said she was working with schools in her network to provide that.

But she pushed back against a key argument of many phonics activists - that there is no downside to all of the children in a classroom getting the type of repetitive practice in letter-sound relationships that struggling readers need.

"There's not a chance we're going to want to hold an entire class to the pace of the 5 percent that have dyslexia," she said. "Other children need opportunities for comprehension, for writing instruction and for analytic thinking."

Wiley Blevins, a phonics expert who considers himself to be in the center of the reading wars, acknowledged that phonics instruction is often implemented badly. Texts created to help students practice sound-letter combinations can be boring and even nonsensical, he said.

Ideally, students in early elementary school would spend about half of their reading and writing time on phonics, he said, using quality materials. If this happened consistently, by third grade, most students would not need explicit phonics anymore.

Even some leading researchers in the science of reading, including Professor Seidenberg, acknowledge that studies do not yet point toward specific curriculum materials that will be most effective at teaching phonics.

"The science that you need to know it is good," he said. "The science on how to teach it effectively is not."

Ms. Smith, the Washington kindergarten teacher, has embraced her school's new focus on phonics, which she said had engaged both low-achieving and high-achieving students.

She reads to her class each day from beloved children's literature, like the "Elephant and Piggie" series by Mo Willems. But it is the simple phonics texts, she said, that have done the most to build the students' confidence, because over time, they are able to accurately read them aloud to their classmates.

"They will get to the end of the sentence and see a period," she said, "and their face will light up."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
An Old and Contested Solution to Boost Reading Scores: Phonics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As test scores lag, there's a growing debate between proponents of the "science of reading," which emphasizes phonics, and traditional educators who prefer to instill a love of literature. Ari Cotton, a first grader, reading a book at Garrison Elementary School in Washington, D.C., one of only two jurisdictions in the country that saw rising scores on national reading tests last year.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
There's been a lot of talk recently about the reading crisis in U.S. schools. Careful reporting has pinpointed a common problem: Many newly-trained and veteran teachers are not aware of the latest research on early reading instruction or comprehension. In 2016, NCTQ reviewed the syllabi of 820 teacher preparation programs across the country and found that only 39 percent of programs were teaching the basics of effective reading instruction. Four years later that number of programs has risen to 51 percent. While this signals a positive trend in adopting evidence-informed reading instruction, the fact remains that 49 percent of incoming teachers do not have the tools to effectively teach reading.

After examining our experiences at two well-known teacher training programs in Minnesota and looking at what we were-and were not-taught about the basics of literacy, we have come to the same conclusion: We were not prepared for the responsibility of the job. This failure to prepare teachers, we believe, should be a red flag for the current system in place for how we train and place teachers into classrooms.
Student interest and choice prioritized over high-quality instruction
As we went through our respective teacher training programs, we noticed a common theme to our coursework. At every turn, it seemed that student interest was front and center. The idealized teacher should be passive, give minimal guidance, and certainly not talk for more than five minutes. Teachers should not be instructing so much as they should be prioritizing and facilitating student choice. Phrases like this were perpetuated as best practice:
If I come to observe you, you shouldn't be at the front of the room...The worst thing a teacher can do when students ask questions is answer them...Students only want to write about what they're interested in.
Reading instruction was assumed to happen largely through osmosis and the now-dominant "workshop" model. The majority of early reading instruction revolved around "read-alouds" with picture books. There was minimal to non-existent training in effective whole-group instruction or the "Big 5" components of reading-phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension-although a consensus in research supports the effectiveness of utilizing these insights in reading instruction.

Most alarmingly, when students display lagging decoding skills, our teacher training encouraged us to utilize shortcuts to "increase engagement" like leveled reading, technology, audiobooks, and graphic novels. Clearly these strategies are not working: Minnesota has the widest gap in reading scores between white and nonwhite students in the nation-32 percent of black fourth-graders and 34 percent of Hispanic fourth-graders are proficient in reading, compared to 66 percent of white fourth-graders. Ironically, we also have some of the strictest teacher licensing requirements in the nation.

Rather than grappling with the gravity of the literacy crisis, motivation and interest seem to be top priorities and are seen as the solution to students who are unable to decode. Little attention was given to the fact that a deep and robust background knowledge (gained through social studies, science, and the arts) is a vital part of reading comprehension.

In terms of teaching writing, writers notebooks and other "multi-modal" forms of communication were emphasized instead of focusing on complex, expository writing.

The result of a teacher training dominated by student-interest and minimally-guided instruction was that, oddly enough, we were not trained in how to actually teach. Our training felt more like a philosophy of teaching degree than ensuring students could learn the tangible skills required for success in high school and beyond. As a result, as with many new teachers, the majority of our first experiences with teaching were filled with hours of searching for curricula or making plans from scratch, rather than focusing on whether or not students were actually learning-or worse, feeling unable to assign work for fear of not having time to grade it. Clearly, this is not a sustainable model and ultimately harms student learning and teachers' morale.
Simplifying teaching to improve learning
Teacher training is stuck in a model that includes extensive and expensive coursework, followed by varying lengths of student-teaching that ultimately don't prepare us for a sustainable workload. As Deans for Impact notes, there is very little time or focus given to purposeful practice in authentic teaching environments. Most teachers are simply put in a sink-or-swim position in their first classroom, while the message from veteran teachers is to "just survive" the first few years until you have built your curriculum.

Thankfully, though we did not receive much purposeful practice in our teacher training, we were fortunate to participate in programs like Breakthrough Collaborative and Minnesota Reading Corps prior to teacher training. These programs helped us understand how instrumental a sustained classroom experience with a set curriculum is to developing and rapidly improving the craft of teaching instead of the craft of curriculum development.

Additionally, rather than spending an inordinate amount of time in teacher training learning how to create and write lesson plans from scratch, our training should focus on improving instruction and lesson delivery using high-quality curricula as a foundation. Teachers should not be expected to create, teach, and revise curricula on their own, yet our training makes it seem as though this is sustainable.

Finally, teacher training programs should embrace the latest, most comprehensive cognitive science research available on literacy and learning for pre-K, elementary, and beyond. Empowering educators with these reliable insights on how we learn best should be a first priority if we are to take our profession seriously.
-
In the U.S., there is a system that continues to place the least experienced teachers in classrooms needing the best instruction. It does not help that many newly-trained teachers too often lack the fundamental training in literacy needed to even have a chance at being effective teachers. Continued and persistent educational inequity will not be addressed until we bring the science of learning into our preparation programs and give new teachers the research-informed training they and their students deserve.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There's been a lot of talk recently about the reading crisis in U.S. schools. Careful reporting has pinpointed a common problem: Many newly-trained and veteran teachers are not aware of the latest research on early reading instruction or comprehension.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Recently, the published an article about the latest hostilities in the "reading wars." Washington Post Article.

I noticed it because the columnist, Jay Matthews, quoted from this blog.

The column did a good job of surfacing the disagreements, but what really caught my eye was the comments section. More than 50 readers had weighed in - defending phonics or trying to clothesline it.

As a longtime phonics advocate, I was especially sensitive to the illogical arguments against decoding instruction. They were mostly the same arguments I've heard for the last 50 years of my career.

I might think these to be illogical arguments, but they appear to be persuasive to someone or they wouldn't keep getting repeated. That's the thing about logically fallacious arguments - they sound a lot like logically reasonable ones. That's particularly true for people who may not have a depth of knowledge on the topic, like a first-time mom whose kids are just reaching phonics age, or the experienced high school teacher who knows education, but is not well-versed on decoding.

This posting considers five of these claims.

1. Phonics is inherently boring.

This argument against teaching phonics is both wrong and inane. The inane part is that it suggests that we shouldn't teach whatever students might not like.

"In my experience, kids don't like long division so let's not bother with that anymore in math class." Musicians no longer need to play scales, and basketball players no longer need to shoot free throws, and... well, you get the idea. The argument is: don't teach anything that kids might find boring, no matter what the implications.

I have no problem with teachers and curriculum designers who fear phonics might be dull, so they try to juice it up a bit - making the it more energetic and fun in some way. But omitting an important part of the curriculum because it might not be fun? That's silly.

Of course, phonics instruction can be dull. But, so can fluency instruction, vocabulary, guided reading, workshop conferencing... and, there goes literacy.

Kobe Bryant wrote, "Why do you think I'm the best player in the world? Because I never ever get bored with the basics."

Great musicians will tell you the same thing about playing scales. They became great because they learned to manage or overcome their boredom, and teachers and coaches should try both to instill a respect for foundational skills and to make an effort to keep it interesting.

This advice is especially important for teachers who, themselves, may find phonics to be boring. Don't communicate that to your students about phonics or anything else that you teach. Enthusiasm is contagious, so buck it up.

In any event, there is nothing inherently boring in phonics, phonics isn't boring to everyone, and good teachers find ways to liven up what may be, for some, dull ground to cover.
2. English spelling is too inconsistent for phonics to make sense.
I'm surprised that this claim continues to be made. Extensive computer analysis has shown that English, while being complex, is not nearly as inconsistent as is often claimed (Hannah, Hodges, & Rudorf, 1966; Kessler & Treiman, 2003; Venezky, 1967, 1970). One must pay attention to syllable boundaries, letter positions, and morphological information, but English spelling and its relationship to pronunciation is systematic and quite consistent overall.
3. I learned to read without phonics.
The argument that it is pointless to teach decoding because of the chaotic nature of English spelling loses its persuasiveness when the language turns out to be not particularly chaotic. It may have made sense for the George Bernard Shaws and Theodore Roosevelts to seek English spelling reform, but in the 2020s to ignore the consistency identified in extensive empirical analyses of the language is foolish.

Some of the complaints against phonics were based on personal experience. It is not uncommon that a parent or teacher remembers learning to read without phonics, so any insistence on phonics seems them narrow and pig-headed ("just like an educator to insist things be done in a particular way even if it makes no difference"). This argument is also put forth this week by Barbara Murchison, the director of the educator excellence and equity division of the California department education in Education Week ( https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2020/01/30/advocates-for-science-based-reading-instruction-worry-california.html).

I've written about this before. There is no question that it is possible to learn to read without explicit phonics instruction. I'll concede that.
4. We all learn in different ways.
The problem with this argument is that it proceeds on the assumption that the outcomes are discrete rather continuous. It isn't that phonics leads to learning and other approaches do not. The differences are at the margins. They are statistical. The groups of kids taught with phonics score higher in reading on average or have fewer out-and-out failures.

In such cases, the anti-phonics person points out the kids who learned with little or no phonics, and the pro-phonics person points out the higher achievement and lowered incidence of failure. They're both right, but that it is possible to learn to read without phonics ignores the value that such instruction adds for the overall population and the kids on the margins. Writing them off because some kids can learn without phonics is illogical (and a little mean, too).

In some ways this is a corollary of the previous argument. The folks proposing this recognize the complexity and individuality of human beings. There's a reason Baskin & Robbins doesn't tout one flavor. We're all different, we all like different things, different strokes for different folks, you say potato and I say... well, you get it.

This is a very appealing argument. You learn one way, I learn another, and if schools would simply vary their instruction to address the learning needs, styles, and tastes of everybody, we'd all be happier. Hell, that's democracy! Viva, diversity!

And, we poor phonics idiots only have phonics to offer.
5. There is more to reading than phonics.
While that might seem like a bad trade, again, I turn to the research. Studies of reading show that anyone who learns to read English - no matter how they are taught - must master decoding (Barr, 1972; Biemiller, 1974), and brain studies show an incredible consistency in how this takes place in proficient readers (Dehaene, 2009).

Basically, research says that as readers, we aren't that diverse. We all process text in pretty much the same way. It makes greater sense to teach someone something they need to learn, rather than teaching them something else hoping they'll figure it out.

What that means is that, whether or not we teach phonics, is not a matter of learning style or taste, but effectiveness.

Great argument. I used to try this one with my father when as a boy I didn't want to eat my vegetables. "Dad, there is more to nutrition than just veggies. I'm eating my meat and drinking my milk."

Dad wasn't impressed with that tactic, and you shouldn't be either.

My claim correct, you won't be healthy if you only eat vegetables, but it was a distraction more than a real argument. Afterall, Dad was pro-protein and pro-calcium, too. The only reason he was so stridently insistent on the vegetables, was because I was hiding them under the edge of my plate instead of eating them - and when he challenged that practice, I made it sound like the argument was about who was most committed to a balanced diet, not whether I needed to eat my green beans.

I fear that we are engaged in that same dance step today. Someone isn't including phonics instruction, and when anyone challenges that omission, the response emphasizes the importance of teaching reading comprehension or writing. "Please don't notice the good things that we aren't giving kids, just notice the other good things we are."

As you can see, those five arguments against phonics, when considered carefully, hold no water.

And, what of the arguments for phonics?

I can think of only one: the only reason that I can think of for teaching phonics explicitly in the primary grades is because a large number of independent studies with a variety of approaches and methods have consistently found that providing such instruction to children gives them a clear advantage in learning to read. They, as a group, do better; we lose fewer kids off the lower end.

That's the only reason, and it ain't made of straw.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How to Knock Down Five Strawman Arguments Against Phonics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There are many arguments against teaching phonics: some people claim it is boring, others say it can't help because the English language is too complicated for that, others say that there is more than one way to learn or that they learned to read without phonics.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
North Carolina is on a growing list of states that are studying Mississippi's rising reading scores and discussing how to align reading instruction with the science of reading. That much was clear on Thursday when The Belk Foundation held a "North Carolina and the Science of Reading" event at the Friday Institute.

A large gathering of education stakeholders heard leaders of Mississippi's movement talk about how cognitive science influenced their policies on reading instruction and how those policies led to a rise from the bottom in national reading scores to the average.

They heard an expert on reading science talk about hallmarks of effective reading instruction.

And they heard from author Natalie Wexler, who focused on reading comprehension - which she says sometimes gets lost among heavy discourse around phonics, phonemic awareness, and the process of teaching kids how to decode written English.

"I want you all to really hold onto ... why we share this passion, as we listen to these speakers," Belk Foundation Executive Director Johanna Anderson said. "Let's take off team stripes, if that's even a thing, and listen with fresh, curious ears. Let's have curiosity be the theme of today."

Johanna Anderson at The Belk Foundation's event, "North Carolina and the Science of Reading." Carol Bono/EducationNC

Among the crowd were education stakeholders, including representatives from Gov. Roy Cooper and Sen. Phil Berger's office, at least one state legislator, members of the State Board of Education and a literacy task force it has created, leaders from the Department of Public Instruction, and officials from educator preparation programs, school districts, schools, community colleges, philanthropies, and non-profit organizations.

As the event closed, Anderson asked: What's next?

The literal answer was a convening of the State Board's literacy task force, which met afterward in an adjacent room - where debate ensued over the definition of high-quality reading instruction.

The less literal answer remains outstanding, including who will lead the charge to action and determine whether North Carolina can find common ground and common language to better teach kids how to read.

Rep. Ashton Wheeler Clemmons, D-Guilford, talks with Eric Naisbitt, education advisor to Sen. Phil Berger, R-Rockingham. Rupen Fofaria/EducationNC

The Mississippi story

While Mississippi's scores on the Nation's Report Card show a move from the bottom to the average overall, their fourth-grade reading scores among low-income students (79% of the state's fourth grade students) rank third nationally, and scores among black students (48% of the state's fourth grade students) rank seventh. When controlling for those two groups, the rise in fourth-grade reading scores has gone from 39th to 2nd.

Kelly Butler provided a historical overview of policy and instructional changes in Mississippi. She is the chief executive officer of the Barksdale Reading Institute which was created to improve education in Mississippi through a focus on pre-literacy and reading skills.

Butler laid out several critical elements before offering details on Mississippi's rise, with emphasis on being intentional.

"In many places, we are leaving it to chance by not having the strong policies in place that really require the science of reading to be taught," she said. "We want to move away from that."

She talked about the importance of finding common language - "so we can stop fighting each other and get on with the work." She also said consistency in implementation and a focus on purposeful coaching for teachers were instrumental.

Butler says Mississippi can provide a roadmap for other states and noted that she has heard from about 21 states interested in the Mississippi story.

"It kind of jolts you when you think that folks like North Carolina, California, Massachusetts, and Connecticut are calling Mississippi to find out what we're doing," she said. "The stars are lining up, or the tables are turning, or something. We really think there's a national conversation emerging."

Butler was joined in her presentation by Kymyona Burk, former director of literacy in Mississippi. Here's how they said Mississippi pulled off its turnaround, along with where North Carolina is:

Kelly Butler, left, and Kymyona Burk explain Mississippi's notable and sustained improvements in early reading. Carol Bono/EducationNC

What happened in MS:

What they said about it:

Where NC is:

2000 - Barksdale was founded with a $100 million gift.

This is the largest gift ever given in the nation specifically for literacy.

The philanthropy is spread out, with several funders making grants for literacy instruction.

2002 - Barksdale funded 12 faculty members across eight of MS's 15 ed prep programs (EPPs).

The goal was for these 12 faculty members to absorb and understand the findings from a 2000 National Reading Panel report and begin to implement them at their institutions. They found that not every EPP was teaching the five components of reading identified in the report, and that over two years the EPPs were spending an average of 20 minutes on phonics.

North Carolina has not done a similar study, though some data are available in the latest Teacher Prep Review. A Community of Practice (CoP) was formed in 2018 in response to a report by then-UNC System President Margaret Spellings, laying out shortcomings in teacher preparation. The CoP hasn't met since last year, and its future is uncertain. The State Board of Education (SBE) created a literacy task force, and one of its roles is to recommend ways to improve EPP alignment with effective practices for teaching reading. It had been expected to make recommendations to the State Board in March, but that timeline has been extended.

2005 - Barksdale partnered with the MS State Board of Education to create greater focus on literacy instruction at EPPs.

They created course schedules, course objectives, and course descriptions for two classes: Early Literacy 1 and Early Literacy 2. The goal was to standardize reading instruction at all 15 EPPs in the state.

There are no standardized early literacy courses at EPPs, though these issues are being discussed by the SBE literacy task force. Some elementary education programs have taken a similar approach to MS's.

2007 - Barksdale redesigned its approach to literacy coaches.

Barksdale had been sending about 30 literacy coaches into the state's 180 schools, but moved to create a demonstration classroom and identified a cohort of students for instruction by Barksdale-trained teachers. By December 2007, data showed that the Barksdale group was outperforming peers. Barksdale began training four principals to test how to scale the program.

At the local level, several districts offer training for their reading teachers. At the state level, the NC State Improvement Project has been training teachers in evidence-based practices for 20 years, averaging about 2,000 teachers trained per year.

2013 - MS passed the Literacy-Based Promotion Act, providing $9 million in funding the first year.

Among other things, the law specifically named the science of reading. The law and the funding allowed the education department to require training for every teacher and administrator in a program aligned with the science of reading ( LETRS), to hire literacy coaches to sit in residence at the lowest-performing schools, and to provide testing and accountability for teachers at each of grades K-2 (it had started at grade 3).

Read To Achieve was passed in 2012. While it was based on the same law as MS's (Florida's), much of the specificity in MS's law was lost in the version of RtA enacted. The state does not require training for every teacher and administrator, provide funding for coaches hired by the state, nor name the science of reading. Senate Bill 438, proposed last year, largely tracked MS's law, but that bill was vetoed.

2013-14 - MS schools increased adoption of a science-aligned curriculum.

"We invest in people - not programs," Burk said. "When you increase their knowledge about the science of reading and what it takes to teach reading to children, then they begin to adopt programs aligned with that."

The 2018-19 report on Read To Achieve lists a massive number of curricula and instruction materials used within and across school districts, including many districts using curricula not aligned with the cognitive science. The SBE task force has discussed providing a rubric, such as this one, and has echoed the MS approach of providing information around effective curricula but allowing districts to make their own choices.

2014 - MS Department of Education offered LETRS training to EPP faculty.

Burk said there was strong initial interest, but ultimately, many declined the free training.

2015 - The Department of Education was restructured to create offices for intervention services and early childhood.

"We've worked with our legislature and we have all these components of the law, and we are expecting school districts to do these things and implement these things, but our structure at the department did not even allow us to support them in that way," Burk said.

DPI has an Exceptional Children's department for students with disabilities and a Department of Early Learning. Each of these departments, along with leaders from each of DPI's other departments, are represented on a DPI B-12 council chaired by Deputy State Superintendent David Stegall and Director of Innovation Strategy Angie Mullennix that is studying literacy instruction.

2016 - The state passed a law to add new standards and components to reading law.

The department of education required individual reading plans (IRPs) for each student, raising standards for the student passing rate on reading exams, and every EPP graduate was required to pass a Foundations of Reading exam, with accountability tied to EPPs based on passing rate.

North Carolina does not have IRPs for all students, though that was included in SB 438 and State Board members have discussed proposing this requirement administratively.

Flaws in comprehension instruction persist

The large body of scientific research on the process of learning to read points to two main aspects: decoding and comprehension.

That research is often called the science of reading. But amid its resurgence in the national discourse, the greatest emphasis seems to be on decoding - which includes learning phonics, phonemic awareness (or the sounds letters make and how to combine them and take them apart), and the process of orthographic mapping, which turns phonemic awareness into reading fluency. Less discussed but just as important, Wexler said, is comprehension - both reading and writing.

"I would argue that the problems with comprehension instruction are, if anything, more pervasive, more widespread, and better hidden than the problems with decoding," Wexler said. "And much less attention is being brought to bear on that."

When teachers in early grades approach comprehension, they usually focus on specific skills and strategies. These might sound familiar: finding the main idea, identifying the author's purpose, making inferences.

Students are assigned texts based on whatever skill or strategy the teacher wants to emphasize, Wexler said. Those texts are based on students' individual reading levels determined by assessments. A student in third grade might be reading on a first- or second-grade reading level.

"The theory of this approach is that if you diligently practice your reading comprehension skills and strategies on books that are essentially easy for you to read - you get really good at finding the main idea - you'll be able to apply that skill to any text that's put in front of you, whether it's a passage on an end-of-the-year standardized reading test or a textbook you'll encounter down the road in high school," she said.

But Wexler said that theory doesn't take into account an important aspect of comprehension: background knowledge. She shared a 1988 study commonly referred to as "the baseball experiment." Researchers found poor readers who had prior knowledge on baseball scored significantly higher in comprehension on a text about the sport than skilled readers who didn't know anything about baseball.

Comprehension depends more on a student's knowledge of the content, Wexler said, than a student's reading level.

"There's really no such thing as an individual reading level," she said. "It's going to depend on the topic and how much you know about it."

Wexler said intense focus on math and reading in elementary schools has left students without much instruction in social studies, science, and the arts - subjects that inform a student's knowledge base to understand text.

Meanwhile, she said, reading tests are intentionally created to draw from students' general knowledge instead of specific subjects children are taught in class.

"Those passages on tests assume a lot of background knowledge," Wexler said. "They're not connected to anything kids may have learned in class; they're not supposed to be. They're supposed to be testing these general reading skills, so test designers try to avoid topics that kids might have learned about in class."

She said the students without the background knowledge needed to understand those texts are often from less-educated families.

These inequities produce a "snowballing process," Wexler said, since background knowledge is also linked to better absorption and retention of information. Students show up in high school expected to learn about world history and other complex subjects without the basic knowledge to comprehend content, she said.

Wexler said elementary schools need both curriculum and assessments that are based on content instead of skills to improve reading and student engagement.

"There are untold numbers of teachers and kids out there who are stuck in this false assumption that these kids are only capable of so much," she said. "We need to unlock all of that wasted potential that's out there as soon as possible."

From left to right, Kymyona Burk, Kelly Butler, Laura Stewart, and Natalie Wexler answer questions after the Belk Foundation's event "North Carolina and the Science of Reading." Carol Bono/EducationNC

What's next for North Carolina?

As the State Board of Education and the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) rethink literacy instruction across the state, leaders are struggling to find common ground and common language.

The State Board's task force on literacy instruction, educator preparation, and professional learning met before and after Thursday's Belk Foundation meeting to hone its initial recommendations to policymakers. Members heard from DPI officials on the creation of a definition of high-quality reading instruction.

The department's most recent definition is as follows:
High quality reading instruction, grounded in the science of reading and data-informed, encompasses the five domains of reading: phonological and phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. It is structured, explicit, systematic, and multi-sensory, resulting in learners who read and comprehend increasingly complex texts.
The definition is supposed to inform the State Board's strategic plan for reforming literacy instruction - and give stakeholders and teachers a common starting point.

But several task force members took issue with the proposed definition, as did literacy expert Barbara Foorman - who helped implement reading instruction reforms in Florida, upon which the Mississippi policies were based. Foorman separately consulted for Berger and the State Board last year, and was present at the task force meeting by way of invitation from The Belk Foundation.

"I just think we're 20 years beyond where that definition is," she said.

The "five domains" referenced in the definition refer to the five pillars of reading identified in a National Reading Panel report in 2000 that studied the most effective approaches to reading instruction.

Foorman said newer research has broadened the field's knowledge on what works best. For example, she said, other aspects of language besides vocabulary, including oral language, are important in learning to read.

She also cautioned against creating a strict definition of "the science of reading," since the body of research is evolving.

"We have the science of criminology, the science of reading; every domain, every field of study has a science," she said. "But it's a moving, it's a growing phenomenon. And I don't want people to think it's totally settled."

Foorman said the only aspects that are "settled" by scientific research are phonemic awareness and alphabetic principle.

The word "multisensory" also brought up concerns.

"It's not needed, and the danger is it triggers something," Foorman said of the word, adding that it is commonly associated with a set of curricular materials called Orton Gillingham. "It has a connotation that I don't think is part of the science of reading."

DPI K-3 Literacy Director Tara Galloway said that the feedback would be used to tweak the definition and that the language then might be put out for another round of public input. The current definition, she said, was agreed upon by 85% of stakeholders across the state.

"We want this right," Galloway said. "This is the foundation for what we do moving forward."

The word "phonics" was also seen by members as potentially divisive and linked to specific sets of materials. Some task force members worried that it might lead to schools searching for phonics resources to simply plug into existing practices.

Galloway said she wants to make sure the language signals to teachers and others that there needs to be broader change in the classroom. She said the two most important words of the definition in her mind were "systematic" and "explicit."

"What we need is transformation of practices that are happening across the state," Galloway said.

Vickie Sutton, Greene County's K-5 literacy coordinator, cautioned the group against insulting teachers and their work.

"I do think we need to be very aware that we can not afford to alienate the very people that we need to implement this," Sutton said. "They are the ones that are going to be in the trenches doing this work."
Editor's Note: The Belk Foundation is a Charlotte-based family foundation that supports public education by strengthening teachers and school leaders, and ensuring that students are achieving on or above grade level by the third grade. Now in its fourth generation of family leadership, The Belk Foundation serves as the public expression of gratitude and commitment shown by the family that created the Belk department store organization. The Belk Foundation had assets of more than $52 million as of September 30, 2017. Since 2000, The Belk Foundation has invested more than $46 million in our state. The Belk Foundation supports the work of EducationNC.

Rupen Fofaria

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Reading instruction needs to improve. Who will lead the charge, and how?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
North Carolina is on a growing list of states that are studying Mississippi's rising reading scores and discussing how to align reading instruction with the science of reading. That much was clear on Thursday when The Belk Foundation held a "North Carolina and the Science of Reading" event at the Friday Institute.

# data[].attributes.body
Twitter: Lucy Caukin’s to her TCRWP Schools

# data[].attributes.body
Scarborough’s Reading Rope - Geiser’s Tweet

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.text
From fb - SoR, What I Should Have Learned in College - comes this neatly simplified way to think of language comprehension. Obvi applies through K-12. More I think about The Rope, more I understand reading acquisition, instruction, need for disciplinary literacy in late elem, up.

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.original_text
From fb - SoR, What I Should Have Learned in College - comes this neatly simplified way to think of language comprehension. Obvi applies through K-12. More I think about The Rope, more I understand reading acquisition, instruction, need for disciplinary literacy in late elem, up. https://t.co/CpmEXX0BiM

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.embed_code
From fb - SoR, What I Should Have Learned in College - comes this neatly simplified way to think of language comprehension. Obvi applies through K-12. More I think about The Rope, more I understand reading acquisition, instruction, need for disciplinary literacy in late elem, up. pic.twitter.com/CpmEXX0BiM
— Scott Geisler (@ScottGeisler12) May 25, 2020

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
From fb - SoR, What I Should Have Learned in College - comes this neatly simplified way to think of language comprehension. Obvi applies through K-12. More I think about The Rope, more I understand reading acquisition, instruction, need for disciplinary literacy in late elem, up. https://t.co/CpmEXX0BiM

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
From fb - SoR, What I Should Have Learned in College - comes this neatly simplified way to think of language comprehension. Obvi applies through K-12. More I think about The Rope, more I understand reading acquisition, instruction, need for disciplinary literacy in late elem, up. https://t.co/CpmEXX0BiM

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
From fb - SoR, What I Should Have Learned in College - comes this neatly simplified way to think of language comprehension. Obvi applies through K-12. More I think about The Rope, more I understand reading acquisition, instruction, need for disciplinary literacy in late elem, up.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms. Founded in 2011, Zoom helps businesses and organizations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more done.

# data[].attributes.body
Emily Hanford Epically Explains the Science of Reading

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Today Emily Hanford joins Melissa and Lori to define the Science of Reading, addressing the current misinterpretation of the term and what it really means. She shares thoughts on teacher prep programs and where teachers get knowledge about what or how...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
ep. 23: emily hanford epically defines the science of reading

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
‎Melissa and Lori Love Literacy: Ep. 23: Emily Hanford Epically Defines the Science of Reading on Apple Podcasts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
‎Today Emily Hanford joins Melissa and Lori to define the Science of Reading, addressing the current misinterpretation of the term and what it really means. She shares thoughts on teacher prep programs and where teachers get knowledge about what or how...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
ABSTRACT

ABSTRACT
Reading comprehension is a complex task which depends on a range of cognitive and linguistic processes. According to the Simple View of Reading, this complexity can be captured as the product of two sets of skills: decoding and linguistic comprehension. The Simple View explains variance in reading comprehension and provides a good framework to guide the classification of reading disorders. This paper discusses how weaknesses in either or both of components of the Simple View are implicated in children's reading comprehension difficulties. It concludes with reflections on the strengths and limitations of the Simple View as a theoretical and practical framework to guide our understanding of reading comprehension and its development.

The ultimate goal of reading is comprehension: for the reader to reconstruct the mental world of the writer. As skilled readers, this usually feels pretty effortless and comprehension flows naturally as we read along. This sense of ease is misleading, however, as it belies the complexity of what we do as we read, even when a text is simple and straightforward. A whole range of cognitive and linguistic operations are at play, from identifying individual words through to making inferences about situations that are not fully described in the text (Castles, Rastle, & Nation, 2018). This complexity means that finding a simple answer to questions like "how does reading comprehension develop" and "why does it sometimes fail" quickly becomes an impossible task.

I begin by introducing the Simple View of reading and outlining some of the evidence that supports it. Part II will consider reading comprehension in children who struggle to read words. In Part III, attention turns to poor comprehenders-children who read words adequately but nevertheless have reading comprehension difficulties. Finally, in Part IV, I offer some reflections on the Simple View of reading and consider its many strengths, as well as some limitations.

Part I: introducing the Simple View of reading

What is the Simple View?

Imagine yourself a fluent speaker of a foreign language but with no knowledge of its written form. Reading comprehension would fail as you would have no ability to access meaning from print. If the text was read to you, however, understanding would follow, via listening. An alternative scenario is equally easy to imagine. It would be quite possible for you to learn to assign acceptable pronunciations to words printed in a foreign language, but this would not mean that you were able to comprehend what had been written in that language.

The Simple View of reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990) elegantly captures the essence of these scenarios by stating that reading comprehension is the product of two sets of skills, decoding and linguistic comprehension (RC = D x LC, illustrated in Figure 1). We will return to definitions shortly but for present purposes, decoding can be defined as the ability to identify words in print and linguistic comprehension as the ability to understand spoken language. The logical case for the Simple View is clear and compelling: both decoding and linguistic comprehension are necessary for reading comprehension and neither alone is sufficient. Like a fluent speaker of a foreign language who has never seen it written down, if a child cannot decipher words from print they have no facility to understand written language, no matter how sophisticated their understanding in the oral domain might be. Similarly, being able to decipher words brings no guarantee that a child will understand what it is they have read. The Simple View assumes that once written input is decoded,

reading comprehension is achieved via exactly the same processes used to understand spoken language. If those processes are absent or not working well, reading comprehension will also fail, even if the material has been decoded perfectly. The Simple View also states that the relative contributions of decoding and linguistic comprehension to reading comprehension should change over time. Early on, reading comprehension is highly constrained by limitations in decoding. As children get older and decoding skills increase, the correlation between linguistic comprehension and reading comprehension strengthens. This reflects the fact that once a level of decoding mastery has been achieved, reading comprehension is ultimately constrained by how well an individual understands spoken language.

It is hard to argue with the underlying principles of the Simple View, or with the evidence base that now supports it. For example, Lervag, Hulme, and Melby-Lervag ( 2018) followed nearly 200 Norwegian children as they learned to read. They measured decoding and linguistic comprehension in multiple ways to form latent variables to capture each construct. Nearly all of the variation in reading comprehension at 7.5 years was captured by the two constructs, decoding and linguistic comprehension. Other studies taking a similar approach have found the same (e.g., Language and Reading Research Consortium [LARRC] & Chui, 2018; Hjetland et al., 2019; Lonigan, Burgess, & Schatschneider, 2018) and findings are robust across alphabetic (Florit & Cain, 2011) and non-alphabetic writing systems (Ho, Chow, Wong, Waye, & Bishop, 2012). There is also evidence to support the changing pattern of associations between decoding, linguistic comprehension and reading comprehension over time, with the correlation between linguistic comprehension and reading comprehension strengthening, as children's decoding skills increase (Catts, Adlof, Hogan, & Weismer, 2005; García & Cain, 2014; LARRC, 2015). Taken together, this evidence base provides overwhelming support for the Simple View, including the principle that it "does not deny the complexity of reading, but asserts that such complexities are restricted to either of the two components" (Hoover & Gough, 1990, p. 150).

Defining decoding and linguistic comprehension

What exactly is meant by "decoding" and "linguistic comprehension"? Starting with decoding, this has been operationalised in different ways in different studies. Some experiments have compared words and nonwords while others have investigated whether fluency is a better index than accuracy (e.g., Adlof, Catts, & Little, 2006; LARRC, 2015). Going back to the original article, it is clear that Gough and Tunmer ( 1986) themselves grappled with how best to define decoding. They explained that it can refer to the overt "sounding-out" of a word (sometimes termed phonological decoding or alphabetic decoding), perhaps as measured by nonword reading. But, they argued, this is not what good reading comprehension demands. Instead, comprehension in skilled readers depends on high quality input from a word recognition system that identifies words quickly and precisely (Perfetti, 2008). For the Simple View to adequately describe skilled reading, "decoding" needs to be defined and measured by something that captures this fluency and expertise. At the same time however, this definition does not work for children at the outset of learning to read as their word recognition system is not yet in place and reading is far from fluent and expert. What needs to be captured by the term "decoding" is dependent on the reading level of the individual.

At the heart of this issue is the need to consider learning and development. The beauty of the Simple View is that it explains variation in a way that is timeless: the equation RC = D x LC works for beginning readers as it does skilled readers, assuming the constructs have been measured appropriately. Critically however, the Simple View does not, on its own, explain how development happens-how children move from overt and laborious phonological decoding to reading words effortlessly and fluently. For that, we need focussed and precise cognitive models that are developmentally informed. There is consensus that phonological decoding provides the initial foundation for learning to read words in English (e.g., Ehri, 2005; Share, 1995). From this starting point, children gradually accumulate orthographic knowledge via reading experience. This is a slow process of building expertise through which children harness their powers of perception, memory and language to learn and to generalise (see Castles et al., 2018). The Simple View does not explain in detail how any of this is achieved. Nor does it intend to. Instead it provides a theoretical framework to help us understand variation in reading comprehension across individuals at any particular time-point. How "decoding" is defined and measured needs to reflect the appropriate developmental time-point, and also familiarity with the words being read. Learning is likely to proceed in an item-based fashion, so that at any point in time a person may be reading some words slowly and only with great effort, while other words are read rapidly and efficiently with less reliance on phonological decoding (Castles & Nation, 2006; Share, 1995).

Let us now turn to the other component of the Simple View, linguistic comprehension. This was defined by Hoover and Gough ( 1990, p. 131) as "the ability to take lexical information (i.e., semantic information at the word level) and derive sentence and discourse interpretations". At a descriptive level this captures exactly what has to happen for reading (and language) comprehension to be successful. But how should linguistic comprehension be measured? A common approach has been to use listening comprehension, typically measured using a reading comprehension test but one that has been adapted so that children listen to the text rather than read it themselves. Some studies have argued that another factor, be it vocabulary, inference-making or working memory, makes a direct contribution to reading comprehension (e.g., Oakhill & Cain, 2012; Ouellette & Beers, 2010; Tunmer & Chapman, 2012). A different approach has been to construct a latent variable that taps linguistic comprehension in a broad sense, drawing on multiple indicators. For example, Hjetland et al. ( 2019) formed a single factor from measures of vocabulary, grammar, listening comprehension and verbal working memory. In line with the central tenet of the Simple View, variations in performance on this latent factor, in combination with variations in decoding, predicted almost all of the variation in children's reading comprehension at 7 years of age. There is also good evidence that variation in listening comprehension is itself a consequence of variation in underlying oral language. Lervåg et al. ( 2018) assessed 7.5 year-olds' vocabulary, grammar, verbal working memory and inference making skills. Together, these abilities predicted the children's listening comprehension.

Drawing across these studies, a strong case can be made that linguistic comprehension is broadly captured by listening comprehension, that listening comprehension itself subsumes children's vocabulary, grammar and language processing abilities and that these abilities (along with decoding) predict reading comprehension (LARRC & Chui, 2018; Foorman, Petscher, & Herrera, 2018; Hjetland et al., 2019; Lonigan et al., 2018). As per our discussion of decoding, however, this does not explain how reading comprehension happens, nor how it develops. Comprehension is not typically a verbatim record of what's been read, replicating its form and structure. Instead, as people read or listen, they build a mental model, sometimes called a situation model, culminating in a rich interpretation of the text that goes beyond what is explicitly stated. The text is the substrate that allows the reader to pull in relevant information, including, for example, the meanings of words, rules of syntax, background knowledge and an appreciation of how the world works. This information is then processed to make connections, draw inferences and construct intended meaning. The Simple View does not tell us how any of this achieved. For that, once again we need to look to detailed cognitive models. An important lesson from the extensive literature on reading comprehension is that it is not one thing that can be measured by a single indicator. Instead, reading comprehension is the product of a complex set of cognitive and linguistic factors operating across a text (for discussion, see Castles et al., 2018; Perfetti & Stafura, 2014), in interaction with the nature of the text and the purpose of the reading situation.

This discussion of definitional issues is not to say that the Simple View is false or limited as a framework to help us understand variation in reading comprehension. On the contrary, the Simple View is extraordinarily successful in this regard. When measured comprehensively and reliably, variations in decoding and linguistic comprehension capture individual differences in reading comprehension almost perfectly (Hjetland et al., 2019); this means that the terms decoding and linguistic comprehension have utility, if we accept that they denote complex constructs rather than explaining a particular cognitive process. At the same time, however, to move us beyond capturing variance to understand how cognitive and linguistic processes happen-and why they might go awry in children with poor reading and language - we need to attend to finer level definitions. In keeping with the principles of the Simple View, I use the terms decoding and linguistic comprehension in a neutral way throughout this paper as labels to note "things to do with identifying words" and "things to do with understanding spoken language" respectively.

Varieties of reading disorder within the Simple View

Gough and Tunmer ( 1986) used the Simple View to classify different types of reading problems. To illustrate, Figure 2 shows decoding and linguistic comprehension plotted orthogonally. Individuals can be placed into this multidimensional space according to their abilities on tasks that tap each of the two constructs.

For children falling in quadrant A, reading comprehension is constrained by poor decoding, whereas poor linguistic comprehension constrains those in quadrant D. Quadrant C captures children who are poor at both decoding and linguistic comprehension. The logic of the Simple View is that all three varieties of reading disorder-termed dyslexia, hyperlexia and garden-variety poor reader in the original paper-result in poor reading comprehension but for different reasons. Nomenclature may vary, but there's plenty of evidence for these distinct reading profiles. It's rare to see mention of "garden-variety" poor readers in the more recent literature, but children with co-occurring dyslexia and language impairment are typically plotted in quadrant C (Bishop & Snowling, 2004; Catts et al., 2005). This quadrant is discussed in the next section, along with quadrant A ("classic" dyslexia). Turning to quadrant D, there are complexities with the term hyperlexia (Nation, 1999). That is not to say that a quadrant D reading profile does not exist. These children are more typically described as poor (or less skilled) comprehenders. We will return to discuss quadrant D in Part III.

Part II: reading comprehension in children with poor decoding

Reading comprehension tends to be low in children and young people with dyslexia (e.g., Ferrer et al., 2015; Shaywitz et al., 1999). This is considered a direct consequence of poor decoding, and dyslexia is usually associated with quadrant A in the Simple View (e.g., Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Stanovich & Siegal, 1994). Rather surprisingly, however, few studies have investigated the nature of reading comprehension in dyslexia in much detail. Bruck ( 1990) assessed reading comprehension in a group of adults who had a history of developmental dyslexia. Although the mean performance of the group was low-average (centile score of 41), there was huge variability in performance, with centile scores varying from 6 to 97. This shows that some children with dyslexia go on to make excellent progress in reading comprehension while others do not. Comparing those adults with good vs. poor reading comprehension, Bruck ( 1990) found no differences in word or nonword reading. However, the two groups did differ in vocabulary: poor reading comprehension was associated with vocabulary deficits whereas good reading comprehension was not. This finding can be accommodated within the Simple View, on the assumption that while all of the participants had poor decoding, only a subset (those with low vocabulary) also had poor linguistic comprehension. Arguably, as decoding skills strengthened through development, adults with good vocabulary (quadrant A) were able to make gains in reading comprehension whereas those with low vocabulary (quadrant C) did not.

Bruck's study tells us that some people with a diagnosis of dyslexia also have broader language problems. These problems are not unusual, with weaknesses in vocabulary, grammar and discourse-level processing being seen in many studies (e.g., Catts, Fey, Tomblin, & Zhang, 2002; McArthur, Hogben, Edwards, Heath, & Mengler, 2000). There has been a tendency to consider these broader language problems as a consequence of the deficit in phonological processing that underpins dyslexia, or of reading failure itself. For example, rather than a genuine problem with grammar, poor performance on a test of complex syntax might be a consequence of a phonological processing bottleneck disrupting working memory (e.g., Shankweiler et al., 1995). Or, if dyslexic children read less, they have less opportunity to build vocabulary via reading, such that vocabulary deficits emerge over time (Stanovich, 1986). Although these factors are likely to be at play, it is now abundantly clear that they are not the whole story. First, in adults with a history of developmental dyslexia, oral language accounts for direct variance in reading comprehension, even when decoding and phonological skills are controlled (e.g., Ransby & Swanson, 2003). Stronger evidence comes from family risk studies. These have consistently found that children who go on to receive a diagnosis of dyslexia in mid-childhood show language difficulties as infants and toddlers, well before reading failure could exert its influence (for meta-analysis across 21 independent studies and 95 articles, see Snowling & Melby-Lervåg, 2016). These findings confirm poor language as a precursor; they also add to the growing evidence base that sees low language as an important factor within a complex multiple risk model of the disorder (Snowling & Melby-Lervåg, 2016; Pennington, 2006). Such evidence also forces us to consider the overlap between dyslexia and spoken language difficulties, and how best to characterise the two types of difficulty. While a full discussion of this is beyond the scope of this paper (for further detailed discussion, see Adlof & Hogan, 2018; Bishop & Snowling; 2004; Catts et al., 2005; Nash, Hulme, Gooch, & Snowling, 2013; Ramus, Marshall, Rosen, & van der Lely, 2013), it is important to touch on some of this literature where it relates to reading comprehension outcomes in children with dyslexia.

Some studies following at-risk children have now traced the path from pre-school language to school-aged reading comprehension. Broadly, these findings sit comfortably with the Simple View. Hulme, Nash, Gooch, Lervåg and Snowling ( 2015) analysed data from the Wellcome Reading and Language project. This longitudinal study recruited pre-school children at high risk for poor reading (they had a diagnosis of developmental language disorder, or were at family risk for dyslexia) and followed them through the primary school years. Hulme et al. ( 2015) found that language skills (linguistic comprehension) at 3.5 years made a direct contribution to reading comprehension at 8.5 years, and an indirect contribution via their effect on decoding at 5.5 years, which also influenced reading comprehension at 8.5 years. Similar findings were reported by Van Settern et al. ( 2018) who found that vocabulary in Grade 3 explained a substantial amount of variance in Grade 6 in the Dutch Dyslexia Program, a longitudinal study following Dutch children at family risk for dyslexia. Snowling, Hayiou-Thomas, Nash & Hulme ( in preparation). categorised children from the Wellcome project into four groups, based on their decoding and oral language profile at 8 years: pure dyslexia (quadrant A), pure developmental language disorder (DLD; quadrant D), co-morbid dyslexia+DLD (quadrant C) or unimpaired (quadrant B). As predicted by the Simple View, all three impaired groups showed poor reading comprehension at 8 years. Interestingly, when re-assessed 12 months later, the pure dyslexia group had improved in reading comprehension, relative to both the DLD and the combined group, although they were still impaired relative to their typically-developing peers. Finally, the combined group showed the most severe deficits in reading comprehension at both time points, reflecting underlying weaknesses in both decoding and oral language.

Drawing across these at-risk studies, there is clear evidence in line with Gough and Tunmer's view that "there is a common denominator in every case of dyslexia, a deficit which could stand well as the proximal cause of the disorder. This is an inability to decode" ( 1986, p. 8). This exerts a direct influence on reading comprehension. Whether there are additional negative influences on reading comprehension from linguistic comprehension depends on the status of a child's oral language. Rather striking is the proportion of children with dyslexia who have language weaknesses, placing them into quadrant C rather than the traditional home of dyslexia, quadrant A. For example, of the 50 poor decoders identified by Snowling, Nash, Gooch, Hayiou-Thomas, and Hulme ( 2019) at 8 years, only 21 had "pure" dyslexia; the other 29 also showed significant levels of language impairment. One might argue that this high figure reflects the nature of the at-risk sample. However, it chimes with other work showing that approximately 50% of children with a diagnosis of dyslexia have language weaknesses measured concurrently in a sample not recruited for family risk (e.g., McArthur et al., 2000). It seems that when researchers measure oral language in children identified on the basis of a diagnosis of dyslexia, it is not at all unusual to find high levels of poor oral language (see also Adlof & Hogan, 2018).

Given the lack of research investigating reading comprehension in children with poor decoding, especially from studies that have not recruited on the basis of family risk, I took the opportunity to look into one of my own longitudinal datasets charting reading development from pre-school through the school years. The primary aim of the original project was to identify poor comprehenders and chart their reading and language development (Nation, Cocksey, Taylor, & Bishop, 2010; see Part III). However, this rich dataset also provided an opportunity to explore patterns of reading comprehension in children identified on the basis of poor decoding.

The learning to read longitudinal dataset

This study recruited a large and unselected sample of children on school entry shortly before their 5 th birthday, and followed their reading and language development through the primary school years. Seventeen primary schools serving a socially mixed range of neighbourhoods in Oxfordshire took part in the study. All children beginning these schools at the start of the study were invited to participate. Informed consent from parents was received for 242 children (141 girls and 108 boys). The children were first assessed within 3 months of starting school, corresponding to a mean age of approximately 4 years and 10 months.

Our primary focus here is with data from two time points: when the children first entered school (Reception class, M age = 4.83 years, SD = 0.34, N = 242) and three years later (Year 2 in school, M age = 7.23 years, SD = 0.35; N = 202). To compare profiles across language and literacy tests that had been standardised on different populations, raw scores on these tests were converted to z-scores, using the mean and standard deviation of the entire sample assessed at each time point; for ease of reference, z-scores were transformed to standard scores ( M = 100, SD = 15).

Reading skills at 7 years across the entire sample

At this time point, the children completed both the word ( Word Reading Efficiency) and nonword ( Phonemic Decoding) component of the Test for Word Reading Efficiency (TOWRE; Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 1999). This requires children to read aloud as many words (or nonwords) as possible in 45 s and the number read correctly is converted to a measure of word (or nonword) reading fluency. The Neale Analysis of Reading Ability-II (NARA-II; Neale, 1997) provided an assessment of text reading. In this test, children read aloud short passages of text (reading accuracy) and are then asked questions to assess literal and inferential understanding (reading comprehension). Finally, the British Ability Scales Word Reading subtest (Elliot, Smith, & McCullouch, 1996) provided an assessment of word reading. This is an untimed test in which children are presented with single words and asked to read each aloud. As is clear from the data summarised in Table 1, the correlation between performance across the different measures of reading was high.

Levels of reading comprehension in poor decoders at 7 years

Next we turn to those children who were poor at decoding. As discussed earlier, decoding is defined and measured in different ways in different studies. Here, children were identified on the basis of poor performance (standard score below 83) on the TOWRE, averaging across the two subtests. Thirty-four children were identified; from now on, I refer to these children as having a reading disorder (RD). Their performance across all reading assessments is detailed in Table 2. While there is some variation, it is notable that performance is low across the board, including in reading comprehension. It is also important to note that only 22 of the 34 RD children were able to complete the Neale Analysis: the other 12 struggled with reading individual words to the extent that testing was abandoned. This means that the text accuracy and comprehension scores reported in Table 2 underestimate the difficulties experienced by the RD children; nevertheless, reading comprehension was very poor with every child scoring below population average.

Oral language skills in children with RD at 7 years

Table 3 summarises the performance of the 34 children on five different measures of oral language. Expressive vocabulary was measured using the vocabulary subtest from the Wechsler Abbreviated Intelligence Scales (WASI, Wechsler, 1999). Children were asked to provide definitions for words supplied by the experimenter. Sentence comprehension was measured using the Comprehension subtest from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC, Wechsler, 2003), a test which requires children to answer orally-presented socially-relevant comprehension questions. Two subtests from the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (CELF-3 UK; Semel, Wiig, & Secord, 2000) provided an estimate of expressive and receptive language skills. Recalling Sentences requires children to repeat sentences of increasing length and grammatical complexity; Sentence Structure assesses acquisition of structural rules at the sentence level by asking children to select a picture that matches the target sentence. Finally, in the Bus Story (Renfrew, 1991) children listen to a narrative describing events in a picture book. They then re-tell the story and their responses are analysed. Scores here reflect the information content of their re-tells.

Averaging across the five tests produced a mean standard score of 88, right at the end bottom end of normal range. However, this average hides a substantial amount of variability. For each test, performance varied from extremely poor to good.

Comparison of "pure" RD and RD with poor language at 7 years

It is clear that some children with RD at 7 years of age also perform poorly on tasks tapping oral language: in Simple View terms, they have poor linguistic comprehension alongside poor decoding. To investigate further, I used Bishop et al.'s ( 2009) methodology to classify a child as language impaired if they obtained at least two standard scores more than 1.33SD below the population mean on the five oral language measures described above. Of the 34 children with RD, 13 also met this criterion for language impairment. The results of this classification exercise are summarised in upper part of Table 4. For children with reading disorder only, scores were at the population average. As to be expected, those classified as language impaired obtained scores well below the normal range.

Despite large differences in oral language characterising the two subgroups, they showed an identical pattern of reading achievement across the all the reading tests, including reading comprehension (see Figure 3).

Table 4 also shows the performance of the two subgroups on three assessments of phonological ability, namely two assessments of nonword repetition (the Children's Nonword Repetition Test, Gathercole et al., 1996 and from the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing [CTOPP]; Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 1999) and one measure of phoneme deletion (also from the CTOPP). Both groups performed below average on these tests, and there was no difference in profile or severity across the two groups.

In summary, children selected as having RD at 7 years of age, defined in terms of poor performance on word and nonword reading fluency, also showed significant impairments in reading comprehension (and phonological skills). Over a third of the group could be classified as having a language impairment, placing them in quadrant C rather than quadrant A. Interestingly, having a concomitant language impairment was not associated with more severe reading comprehension difficulties. Despite relative strengths in oral language, reading comprehension was as poor in the RD-only group as the RD+LI group.

Having identified children with RD at 7 years and classified them on the basis of oral language at that time point, we now turn to look back at the data from the two subgroups at school entry. Of interest is the children's oral language at this time, before the onset of reading.

Looking backwards in time: oral language, phonological skills and emergent literacy at school entry

The 34 children identified as RD at 7 years were 4.88 years old ( SD = 0.37) at the first assessment. Oral language was measured using three different tests. Expressive vocabulary was assessed using the vocabulary subtest from the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI, Wechsler, 2002). Initial items require children to name pictures but most items involve the child providing definitions for words supplied by the assessor. Children also completed the Test for Reception of Grammar-2 (TROG-2, Bishop, 2003). This measures children's comprehension of sentences, with grammatical complexity increasing over the test. Sentence comprehension was assessed using the comprehension subtest from the WISC, as administered at 7 years. Performance is plotted in Figure 4 for the 34 children identified as RD at 7 years, separated by language status at 7 years.

Consistent with their later classification, children in the RD+LI group showed substantially lower levels of oral language at school entry than children in the RD group. As the children were pre-readers, these language weaknesses cannot be attributed to lack of language learning via reading. It is notable that the RD-only children obtained mean language scores of 95, 93 and 93 for vocabulary, receptive grammar and sentence comprehension respectively. While there was variation within the group, this generally places the children within normal range, in contrast to those in the RD+LI group (recall that standard scores were calculated from the entire sample of children who were assessed at this time point, N = 242). Overall, these findings point to stability in language skills, with profiles at school entry mirroring those seen three years later.

Five tests provided an assessment of the children's phonological skills at school entry. Phonological awareness was measured using two subtests from the CTOPP (Wagner et al., 1999): Phoneme Elision, in which children delete an initial or final phoneme from orally presented words, and Sound Matching, where children hear three words and are asked to select which one starts (or ends) with the same sound as a target item. We also administered Rime Judgement, a task developed by Bird, Bishop, and Freeman ( 1995) to measure phonological awareness in young children. Children selected from an array of four pictures the one that rhymed with a target item. Nonword repetition was assessed using the Children's Test of Nonword Repetition (Gathercole & Baddeley, 1996) and the Nonword Repetition subtest from the CTOPP.

As shown in Figure 5, the two subgroups did not differ in terms of phonological awareness. It is important to note that performance across the entire sample was quite low in terms of phoneme deletion and sound-matching, as to be expected given the age of the children at this time point. As a consequence, the data must be interpreted cautiously. On the rime task (where performance was stronger across the entire cohort), the RD-only children scored within normal range, and performed better than the children in the RD+LI group. This pattern was also evident across both measures of nonword repetition. It is interesting to note that the RD-only children performed quite well across all measures of phonological processing at school entry, yet by 7 years of age, they were below normal range, and performed as poorly as the RD+LI children. This might reflect a pattern of phonological skills becoming more impaired over time, as children with RD benefit less from reciprocal links with reading and alphabetic knowledge (see Nation and Hulme ( 2011) for a detailed investigation of this within the same dataset).

Turning to reading, most of the children in the entire sample were unable to read at the start of the study. There was however a good amount of variation in letter knowledge. Tellingly, given their future difficulties with word reading, letter knowledge was low for the children who were later classified as RD-only and RD+LI (standard scores of 84 and 83 respectively).

Looking forward in time: reading accuracy and reading comprehension at 8 and 10 years

While it is possible to classify children as RD and RD+LI at 7 years, this is a young age to be measuring reading comprehension, especially in children with manifestly poor reading at the word level. We had the opportunity to assess reading skills later in time, when the children were 8 years of age ( N = 20 RD and 11 RD+LI) and once again at 10 years of age ( N = 12 RD and 7 RD+LI). Performance on both the reading accuracy and reading comprehension components of the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability from these two timepoints are plotted in Figure 6, along with data from 7 years. At no time point is there any difference in reading skills between the RD-only and RD+LI subgroups; at 10 years of age, it is clear that the RD-only children are still poor at reading comprehension, despite their strengths in oral language. Figure 6 indicates some improvements over time in both groups, but note that this upward trajectory reflects only small differences in terms of standard score.

Summary and discussion

This exploration of the Learning to Read dataset shows that 7-year-olds with poor decoding also show impairments in reading comprehension, in line with the principles of the Simple View. It would be a mistake, however, to infer that reading comprehension is compromised by poor decoding alone. Approximately one third of the sample showed poor oral language at 7 years, and these difficulties were evident earlier in time, at school entry. These findings align with data from family risk studies (Snowling & Melby-Lervåg , 2016) and reinforce the need to consider children's language skills as well as their decoding ability.

A number of implications follow for both research and educational practice. For research, there is a pressing need to look beyond standardised scores on an off-the-shelf test of reading comprehension to consider the nature of reading comprehension in children with poor decoding. It is surprising that few studies have looked at reading comprehension itself in dyslexia. It would be interesting to vary question type, or use methods such as eye tracking to investigate factors such as inference-making while reading. Such experiments could address whether there are systematic differences in RD children with and without concomitant oral language weaknesses. Longitudinal data are also needed to help us to understand which children make progress in reading comprehension, and how.

The consistent finding that a substantial proportion of children identified on the basis of poor decoding have co-occurring language problems highlights the need to assess broader language skills in poor readers, and for intervention approaches to target language as well as decoding. Duff, Fieldsend, Bowyer-Crane, Hulme, Smith, Gibbs and Snowling ( 2008) identified a subgroup of poor readers who had not responded to an intensive intervention programme targeting reading and phonology. As a group, these children showed low language. Their expressive vocabulary was at the 5 th centile, and their performance on tests of grammatical skill corresponded to the 5.5 year old level-yet they were nearly 8 years old. In contrast, poor decoders who had responded well to the reading and phonology programme in previous studies achieved normal-for-age vocabulary scores. These observations suggest that co-occurring language difficulties place children at risk of being "treatment resistors", meaning more intensive and specialist provision is required, extending to rich oral language intervention as well as instruction in decoding (see Duff et al., 2014; Fricke, Bowyer-Crane, Haley, Hulme, & Snowling, 2013). Extending these research findings to educational practice can be facilitated by collaborations between teachers and speech and language pathologists (Adlof & Hogan, 2018; Snow, 2019).

Part III: poor comprehenders

Having reviewed poor decoding as a source of reading comprehension difficulty, we now turn our attention to quadrant D. Poor comprehenders were first described in the scientific literature by Oakhill ( 1982; 1983; 1984) who used the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability to identify children who appear to have circumscribed difficulties with reading comprehension. In this test, children read aloud short passages of text (generating a score for reading accuracy) and then answer questions to assess their literal and inferential understanding of the text, generating a score for reading comprehension. Oakhill ( 1982) identified 7-8 year olds who were disproportionality poor at reading comprehension, despite age-appropriate reading accuracy. Looking across the experimental literature since Oakhill's original work, studies have used different selection criteria. This makes precise prevalence hard to estimate. Perhaps the most reliable estimates come from nationally representative and large samples in the UK, extracted from the data used in the standardisation of the York Assessment of Reading for Comprehension (Snowling et al., 2009; Stothard, Hulme, Clarke, Barmby, & Snowling, 2010). In the primary school sample, 5.3% of children with age-appropriate levels of word reading ability obtained reading comprehension standard scores below 77.5 (equating to more than 1.5 SD s below average for their age); in the secondary school sample, the figure was 5%. Thus, poor comprehenders of this severity exist and this profile of reading difficulty is not rare.

As reviewed earlier, according to the Simple View, reading comprehension is the product of decoding and linguistic comprehension. It follows from this that children identified as poor comprehenders must have deficits either in decoding, linguistic comprehension, or both. This logic forces the conclusion that reading comprehension deficits cannot be specific, but instead must be related to weaknesses in one or both of its component parts. For the children described above as having "specific" reading comprehension impairments, which component is at fault?

As is to be anticipated given the selection methods used to identify poor comprehenders, weak decoding is an unlikely explanation for the patterns of poor reading comprehension identified by Oakhill in her early studies. Subsequent research has bolstered this conclusion. It is not the case that poor comprehenders have accurate-but-slow reading, indicative of subtle decoding problems that cause a bottleneck and disrupt reading comprehension: it is perfectly possible to identify poor comprehenders who have good reading fluency alongside good reading accuracy. For example, Ricketts, Bishop and Nation ( 2007) used assessments of word and nonword reading fluency (provided by the TOWRE, Wagner et al., 1999) to identify and match poor comprehenders with control children. These children were 8-10 years old. This leaves open the possibility that they might have had poor decoding earlier in development and this has somehow left a lasting legacy of less than optimal decoding, which in turn hampers reading comprehension. But this does not seem to be the case. Reporting on data from the Learning to Read project introduced in Part II, Nation et al. ( 2010) identified poor comprehenders in mid-childhood. They then looked back in the dataset to chart reading development from its initial stages onwards. Those children who went on to show a poor comprehender profile at 8 years showed all the hallmarks of good decoding from the outset. They started school with normal levels of letter knowledge, and throughout development they showed age-appropriate reading fluency for words and nonwords, and text reading too. For children identified as poor comprehenders then, weaknesses in decoding cannot explain why reading comprehension is compromised.

Turning to the other component of the Simple View, there is plenty of evidence demonstrating that poor comprehenders show impairments on tasks that tap linguistic comprehension. Using a version of the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability where the children listened to the stories rather than read them, Nation and Snowling ( 1997) found that poor comprehenders performed less well than control children. As discussed earlier, listening comprehension is a broad construct: like reading comprehension itself, there are many reasons why a child might find it difficult. Nation et al. ( 2004) made a thorough investigation of 8-9 year-old poor comprehenders' oral language skills using a range of standardised assessments that tapped phonological skills as well as vocabulary, morphosyntax and the understanding of non-literal language. Consistent with evidence from earlier experiments (Cain, Oakhill, & Bryant, 2000; Nation & Snowling, 1998; Stothard & Hulme, 1995), the poor comprehenders performed as well as their peers on the phonological tasks. However, on all other tests they performed less well than the control children as a group, leading Nation et al. to conclude that low language characterises many (but not all) poor comprehenders. Furthermore, a substantial minority of the sample showed significant language difficulties and met criteria for specific language impairment (now known as developmental language disorder: Bishop, Snowling, Thompson, Greenhalgh, 2016).

The Learning to Read Project provided an opportunity to test this hypothesis directly. Nation et al. ( 2010) selected poor comprehenders on the basis of their reading profile at 8 years. Tracing back in the dataset to when the children started school, the children who went on to be identified as poor comprehenders at 8 years on the basis of their reading profile showed low oral language at 4.5 years and throughout the primary school years. Despite these language weaknesses, the poor comprehenders showed age-appropriate phonological skills, consistent with the view that relative strengths in phonological ability supported the development of word reading, but relative weaknesses in other aspects of language contributed to the children's difficulties with reading comprehension. Similar findings have been reported in other retrospective longitudinal studies (Catts, Adlof, & Weismer, 2006; Elwér, Keenan, Olson, Byrne & Samuelsson, 2013; Petscher, Justice, & Hogan, in press). Together, these findings show that oral language weaknesses precede reading development in poor comprehenders, meaning that difficulties observed later in development are not a straightforward consequence of lack of reading-although of course, reciprocal influences are to be expected.

Why does reading comprehension go wrong for poor comprehenders?

The Simple View is helpful in reminding us that reading comprehension has its bases in language comprehension. Once children can read words adequately, variation in reading comprehension is strongly associated with variation in language comprehension more generally. Beyond this truism, however, the Simple View does not provide further specification as to why comprehension might fail. Reading comprehension is not "one thing"; like language comprehension more generally, it is a complex construct, drawing on a range of cognitive and linguistic capacities (for review, see Castles et al., 2018; Perfetti & Stafura, 2014). Is it possible to further specify where in this complex set of processes comprehension breaks down for poor comprehenders?

To address this question, experiments have compared poor comprehenders and a control group on tasks hypothesised to be relevant to reading comprehension. These experiments have found that poor comprehenders are less able to make inferences (Cain & Oakhill, 1999), understand words or activate their meanings in context (Nation & Snowling, 1998, 1999), connect ideas in text (Ehrlich & Remond, 1997), remember verbal information (Hua & Keenan, 2014) and monitor their comprehension (Oakhill, Hartt, & Samols, 2005). They are also less skilled at learning and remembering new words and adding to their knowledge (Cain, Oakhill & Elbro, 2003; Ricketts, Bishop, & Nation, 2008). It is hard to derive conclusions across different experiments, not least because of methodological limitations such as sample size, and variations in age and the methods used to define samples. Nevertheless, two observations are noteworthy. First, there is no "magic profile" that captures all children and totally "explains" their poor comprehension. This reflects both the complexity of comprehension and the difficulty of separating one component of comprehension cleanly. As Castles et al. ( 2018) discuss in detail, comprehension is not only multifaceted with factors interacting in multiple ways during the process of reading, it is also complex developmentally, as factors interact and change over time. Second, common to most of the experiments that find a poor comprehender difference is that the task is within the verbal domain. For example, Pimperton and Nation ( 2010) found that poor comprehenders showed more interference in working memory, but only for verbal materials; when the task switched to the visuo-spatial domain, the poor comprehenders were indistinguishable from their peers. This is consistent with underlying language weaknesses influencing performance on any task that places demands on those linguistic resources-including, of course, reading comprehension. Further research is needed to unpack global constructs such as "reading comprehension" and "linguistic comprehension", not least in order to guide effective teaching and intervention in the classroom.

Assessment and intervention for poor comprehenders

The Simple View has been influential in highlighting the existence of the poor comprehender profile, and the need to identify appropriate approaches to assessment and intervention. It is clear that the ability to read words accurately and fluently-while critical for adequate comprehension-is no guarantee that adequate reading comprehension will follow. In turn, this means that a thorough assessment of reading should also include a measure of text comprehension. This is not, however, a straightforward matter. Reading comprehension tests vary. Some are heavily dependent on a child's word reading; others are so dependent on background knowledge that the questions can be answered quite well without actually reading the passage (Keenan & Meenan, 2014). The same test can also tap different component skills, depending on the performance level achieved by a child (Hua & Keenan, 2017). Knowledge effects are impossible to avoid-comprehension is a reflection of our knowledge and for all of us, reading comprehension is more difficult when topic knowledge is low. The message here is that we need to be mindful of the nature of the test being used, and appreciate that test performance depends not only on the child's knowledge and abilities, but also the features of the text (a point that holds for all children, not just poor comprehenders). The poor comprehender literature also has implications for the need to assess children's oral language (beyond phonological skills) as part of any thorough assessment of reading.

One approach to intervention is to address a particular component of reading comprehension, for example, vocabulary, inference making, or comprehension monitoring. Such intervention studies have generally been with poor decoders, or children who find both word reading and comprehension difficult, rather than with poor comprehenders specifically. While gains are made on what has been taught, transfer effects to non-trained components or on standardised measures of reading comprehension are small (Elleman, 2017; Elleman, Lindo, Morphy, & Compton, 2009). This is perhaps not surprising, given the complex nature of reading comprehension, and its dependence on strong content knowledge. That said, there are excellent examples of promising approaches to teaching reading comprehension (for review, see Oakhill, Cain, & Elbro, 2014) that could be developed and trialled for children identified as poor comprehenders.

A different approach is to consider the fundamental role of oral language (or linguistic comprehension, in terms of the Simple View) in reading comprehension and aim intensive intervention there. Working from the finding that poor comprehenders have impairments in linguistic comprehension, Clarke, Snowling, Truelove, and Hulme ( 2010) developed a language intervention that directly and explicitly worked on 8-9 year-olds' oral language with direct instruction tapping vocabulary, grammar and narrative. Using a randomised controlled design, they compared this 20-week intervention with one focussing on text comprehension itself, and a combined approach targeting both oral language and text comprehension. Intervention was delivered in small groups by trained teaching assistants, with three 30-minute sessions per week. Pleasingly, all three groups improved in reading comprehension relative to a waiting list control group. Those receiving oral language training showed most improvement in reading comprehension 11 months later, and improvements in reading comprehension were predicted by improvements in vocabulary. Fricke et al. ( 2013) used a similar approach but with materials designed for much younger children. They identified children with low language at around the time of school entry. Those who received an intensive language intervention showed improvements in oral language, and got off to a better start with reading comprehension than children in the control group. These findings are encouraging, and support the rationale for improving children's oral language as the basis for bringing about improvements in reading comprehension. Note however these interventions are intensive, and are designed to be delivered by teaching assistants who have been specifically trained-quick fixes are not to be expected.

Part IV: reflections on the Simple View

In the 30-plus years since the Simple View was first articulated by Gough and Tunmer ( 1986), its elegance and force in describing the essence of reading comprehension has become clear. By setting out decoding and linguistic comprehension as separate but interacting components, it reminds us that reading comprehension requires both the ability to identify individual words, and the ability to construct meaning from text. When assessed reliably using comprehensive measures, how good children are at decoding and linguistic comprehension predicts how good they are at reading comprehension extraordinarily well. The Simple View provides a framework for classifying reading difficulties, and it has done much to promote our understanding of the relationship between spoken language and reading development. It is not just children with "classic dyslexia" who need extra support in the classroom: research conducted within the Simple View framework has shown that a large proportion of children with low word reading also show poor oral language, as do children with reading comprehension impairments. These research findings have important implications for assessment and intervention and it is a positive development to see materials written for practitioners framed within the Simple View (e.g. Stuart & Stainthorp, 2015).

Despite these strengths, the Simple View has led to some false impressions. As noted earlier, the Simple View "does not deny the complexity of reading, but asserts that such complexities are restricted to either of the two components", linguistic comprehension and decoding (Hoover & Gough, 1990, p. 150). Nevertheless, Catts ( 2018) discusses how visualisations of the Simple View-diagrams like Figure 1, with the two components appearing to be the same size-have inadvertently camouflaged the complexity of reading comprehension and in doing, created false impressions about its malleability, and the extent to which it can be captured by a score on an omnibus test. These concerns intersect with some of our earlier discussion-that the Simple View is not a model of what needs to develop to bring about change in either of the two components. In terms of partitioning and explaining variance, it is clear that the relative weighting of the two constructs changes over time, with linguistic comprehension becoming more closely associated with reading comprehension as decoding skills strengthen (e.g., Language and Reading Research Consortium, 2015). Early on, the decoding component predominates, but beyond the early stages of learning to read, the linguistic comprehension oval in diagrams like Figure 1 needs to be much bigger, and have more indicators feeding into it, reflecting its multifaceted nature.

Another false impression is that the two components are entirely separable. A good deal of variation in reading comprehension is shared between the two components. Lonigan et al. ( 2018) suggested that this common variance might be related to some underlying general cognitive linguistic ability, and in their analyses, shared variance predicted differences in reading comprehension beyond the unique variance associated with each component. Consistent with this, longitudinal data have shown that some factors predict multiple components of reading. As noted earlier for example, Hulme et al. ( 2015) found that language skills at 3.5 years contributed to decoding at 5.5 years as well as reading comprehension at 8.5 years. Similarly, there is no doubt that oral vocabulary is a vital component of linguistic comprehension, nor that it is closely associated with reading comprehension. This does not mean it is irrelevant for word reading. On the contrary, vocabulary is also associated with word reading, both in typical development and atypical development (e.g., Nation & Snowling, 1998; Taylor, Duff, Woollams, Monaghan, & Ricketts, 2015). Consider too the importance of morphology. Numerous studies have found associations between children's reading comprehension and their knowledge and appreciation of morphology (e.g., Levesque, Kieffer, & Deacon, 2019; Tong, Deacon, Kirby, Cain, & Parrila, 2011), consistent with morphology being a critical component of linguistic comprehension. At the same time, however, skilled word recognition is highly sensitive to morphological regularities that are marked in the orthography, reminding us that English is a morphophonemic in nature (Rastle, 2019; Venezky, 1999). As reading develops, the word recognition system comes to embody this structure and this is reflected in how single words are read and processed (e.g., Dawson, Rastle, & Ricketts, 2018; Kearns & Al Ghanem, in press). Thus, morphological knowledge is not only part of linguistic comprehension. It is also core to word recognition and its development-that is, what is captured within the Simple View as "decoding".

What are the implications of these findings for the Simple View? To take development on board, it might be that our visual representation needs to be more complex, with some underlying language factor feeding into both components, and/or bi-directional connections between decoding and linguistic comprehension, as shown in Figure 7.

This figure also shows feedback arrows from reading comprehension into language. This is to remind us of the importance of reading experience. It is the substrate from which basic decoding skills develop and automatise (see Castles et al., 2018). It also provides rich and varied opportunities for language learning, as children encounter new vocabulary and new syntactic structures via reading (Montag & MacDonald, 2015; Montag, Jones, & Smith, 2015). The implication of this for children with reading difficulties is neatly captured by Stanovich's ( 1986) description of the Matthew effect-the richer get richer and the poor get poorer. Low levels of spoken language set the scene for reading difficulties, which in turn lead to greater differences in spoken language, relative to peers who read well. Or, in the words of Snow ( 2016), "language is literacy is language".

The Simple View provides a useful framework for thinking about reading comprehension and its development. It positions decoding as central to learning to read and reminds us that no amount of oral language prowess can bring about successful reading, if a child has not learned the principles of how their writing system works. This is what learning to read is about, and what needs to be taught at the outset. Getting better at reading words, and developing all that is needed to serve reading comprehension in all its infinite varieties, obviously demands more than decent decoding: the knowledge and processing skills nested within linguistic comprehension are fundamental. There is no doubt that the Simple View explains variance in reading comprehension. But we also need to look beyond the Simple View, if we are to understand more about how subcomponent processes work and develop, and how they can be optimised in the classroom and the clinic by well-designed reading and language instruction.

Word Fluency

Nonword Fluency

Word Reading

Text Accuracy

Text Comprehension

Word Fluency*a

Nonword Fluency*b

Word Readingc

Text Accuracyd

Text Comprehensiond

Expressive Vocabularya

Recalling Sentencesb

Sentence Structureb

Narrative Contentc

Sentence Comprehensiond

RD (N = 21)

RD+LI (N = 13)

M

SD

M

SD

Language classification tests

Phonological Skills

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Learning Difficulties Australia for the opportunity to discuss some of the work described in this paper in person. Its content has been shaped by the many interesting and lively discussions that ensued. Particular thanks to Anne Castles, Robyn Wheldall, Kevin Wheldall and Bartek Rajkowski for their wisdom and generous hospitality, and to Pye Twaddell, Tanya Serry and members of the LDA Committee for making it all possible. Thanks too to my collaborators on the Learning to Read Project: Dorothy Bishop, Joanne Cocksey, Jo Taylor and Philip Angell, to Anne Castles, Nicola Dawson, Tiffany Hogan, Tanya Serry and Maggie Snowling for constructive feedback, and Alexander Wilson for editorial assistance. This research was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, grants ES/M009998/1 and RES-000-23-0581.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, grants ES/M009998/1 and RES-000-23-0581.

References

Castles, A. , & Nation, K. (2006). How does orthographic learning happen? In S. Andrews (Ed.), From inkmarks to ideas: Challenges and controversies about word recognition and reading (pp. 151-179). New York: Psychology Press.

Elwér, s., Keenan, J. M., Olson, R.K., Byrne, B. & Samuelsson, S. (2013). Longitudinal stability and predictors of poor oral comprehenders and poor decoders. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 115, 497-516.

Gathercole, S. E. , & Baddeley, A. (1996). Children's test of nonword repetition. London, UK: Pearson.

Kearns, D. , & Al Ghanem, R. (in press). The role of semantic information in children's word reading: Does meaning affect readers' ability to say polysyllabic words aloud? Journal of Educational Psychology. doi:10.1037/edu0000316

Language and Reading Research Consortium. (2015). Learning to Read: Should we keep things simple? Reading Research Quarterly, 50(2), 151-169.

Language and Reading Research Consortium. (2017). Oral language and listening comprehension: Same or different constructs? Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 60(5), 1273-1284.

Perfetti, C. (2008). Reading ability: Lexical quality to comprehension (vol 11, pg 357, 2007). Scientific Studies of Reading, 12(1), 130.

Rastle, K . (2018). The place of morphology in learning to read in english. Cortex, 1-10. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2018.02.008

Rastle, K. (2019). Writing systems, reading, and language. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. Advanced online publication. doi: 10.1177/1747021819829696

Rose, J. (2006). http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/5551/2/report.pdf Independent review of the teaching of early reading final report. U.K. Department for Education and Skills. Retrieved from

Share, D. L. (1995). Phonological recoding and self-teaching: Cognition, 55(2), Sine qua non of reading acquisition. 151-218.

Snow, P. (2019). Why do speech-language pathologists work in literacy? Retrived from http://pamelasnow.blogspot.com/2019/01/why-do-speech-language-pathologists.html.

Snowling, M. J. , Hayiou-Thomas, E., Nash, H. M., & Hulme, C. (in preparation). Dyslexia and developmental language disorder: Comorbid disorders with distinct effects on reading comprehension. University of Oxford.

Snowling, M. J. , Stothard, S. E. , Clarke, P. , Bowyer-Crane, C. , Harrington, A. , Truelove, E. , Nation, K., ... Hulme, C. (2009). York assessment of reading for comprehension. London, UK: GL Assessment.

Stothard, S. E. , Hulme, C. , Clarke, P. , Barmby, P. , & Snowling, M. J. (2010). York assessment of reading for comprehension. Secondary test. London, UK: GL Assessment.

Stuart, M. , & Stainthorp, R. (2015). Reading development and teaching. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

Venezky, R. L. (1999). The American way of spelling: The structure and origins of America English. New York, NY: Guildford Press.

Wechsler, D. (2002). Wechsler preschool and primary scale of intelligence (3rd ed.). London: The Psychological Corporation.

Wechsler, D. (2003). The wechsler intelligence scale for children (4th ed.). London: The Psychological Corporation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Children's reading difficulties, language, and reflections on the simple view of reading

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
ABSTRACT ABSTRACT Reading comprehension is a complex task which depends on a range of cognitive and linguistic processes. According to the Simple View of Reading, this complexity can be captured as the product of two sets of skills: decoding and linguistic comprehension.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Listen to this episode on the Educate podcast. Subscribe now:

Podcast episodes by APM Reports have raised questions about materials for teaching reading that are widely used in American schools. An author of those materials, Lucy Calkins, recently fired back at "phonics-centric people." Calkins was one of several powerful people and organizations to weigh in on the debate about how to teach reading in the past few weeks.

Senior education correspondent Emily Hanford's work on the science of reading has helped spark a national conversation. There's been lively discussion on social media and at education conferences. And many teachers and education officials say they are changing their approach to reading instruction.

However not everyone is happy with the direction things are going.

The week before Thanksgiving, Calkins - a professor at Columbia University and the author of materials to teach reading - posted a response to the "phonics-centric people who are calling themselves 'the science of reading.'" APM Reports raised questions about Calkins' work in the podcast At a Loss for Words released in August. Her response to the science of reading mentioned work by "journalists" but did not specifically identify reporting by APM.

Cognitive scientist Mark Seidenberg wrote a blog post responding to Calkins, taking on her assertions about a discredited approach to teaching reading called "three cueing." The name comes from the notion that readers use three different kinds of information - or "cues" - to identify words as they are reading. Seidenberg wrote: "Dr. Calkins says she disdains 3-cueing, but the method is right there in her document...The question is whether educators like Calkins understand the science well enough to use it to examine the validity of their beliefs about reading and act on its implications for instruction."

On Dec. 4, the International Literacy Association, an organization representing literacy educators and researchers, released a brief from its leadership. It was written in response to what the authors called "a resurgence of articles and reports" about students experiencing reading difficulties. The brief said that "the current emphasis on dyslexia and direct phonics instruction is far too narrow."

The ILA represents more than 300,000 members with a wide range of views, but the organization has long been associated with prominent proponents of an approach to teaching reading that dismissed the importance of explicit phonics instruction. The scientific research on reading shows that phonics instruction helps children become better readers. In fact, the ILA released another brief earlier this year that said exactly that. The new brief by the ILA did not contradict the earlier statement but the tone of the piece raised questions about whether the ILA is warning educators that people talking about the importance of phonics instruction are not to be trusted. As APM Reports has reported, the science of reading shows that children need more than phonics instruction to become skilled readers.

On Dec. 5, the professional organization that has represented teachers of English for more than 100 years, released a position statement on reading. While it acknowledged the importance of phonics, it excluded phonics instruction in an outline of the foundations for effective reading instruction. The statement supports what's known as a "whole language" approach to teaching reading by recommending that teachers immerse students in a literate environment, make sure they have good books, and give them time to read and talk about what they read. Those are important elements, but the statement did not address the question of how to teach children to read words. The statement said: "Reading instruction must focus primarily on meaning. An overemphasis on words, letters, and sounds misleads developing readers as to the purpose of literacy."

On the same day, the Reading Recovery Council of North America published a blog by Patricia Scharer, professor emerita at The Ohio State University, called " Responding to the Reading Wars." The piece specifically referred to questions raised by APM Reports about the work of Reading Recovery's founder, Marie Clay. The group sent a response to APM reacting to claims made in the story and subsequently published a version of that response, available here. It claimed that APM Reports "posed many flawed ideas about Marie Clay and the cueing systems," while reaffirming its belief in the cueing systems theory. The Reading Recovery Council of North America also wrongly claimed that a 1998 article by cognitive psychologist Marilyn Adams disproved assertions made by APM Reports. In fact, Adams was a source in the APM Reports story who helped make the case about why cueing is a flawed idea.

Finally, last week, Richard Allington, professor emeritus at the University of Tennessee, presented at a conference of the Literacy Association of Tennessee. Allington said that he is "reasonably sure that (dyslexia) doesn't (exist)." Allington is among a number of high-profile literacy experts who have long questioned the existence of dyslexia even though there is scientific evidence that the learning disability exists. Allington criticized a dyslexia screening law signed by former Tennessee governor Bill Haslam and said that if the governor had called him, he would have told him to veto the legislation and "shoot whoever made this bill." Allington's comments were recorded by someone in the audience and posted online here.

Listen to Emily Hanford and Stephen Smith discuss these events and more in the latest episode of Educate.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
New salvos in the battles over reading instruction

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Listen to this episode on the Educate podcast. Subscribe now: Podcast episodes by APM Reports have raised questions about materials for teaching reading that are widely used in American schools. An author of those materials, Lucy Calkins, recently fired back at "phonics-centric people."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Listen to this audio documentary on the Educate podcast. Subscribe now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goodman concluded that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scientists take on three cueing

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

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

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

They couldn't have been more wrong.

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

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

Other studies revealed further problems with the cueing theory: 15

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

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

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

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

But cueing is still alive and well in schools.

Picture Power!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'That is not reading'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of Margaret Goldberg, Oakland Unified School District

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

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

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

And she started to wonder why not.

Balanced Literacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mapping the words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'So what if they use the picture?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I am a farm here," Belinda read.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'My science is different'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He dismissed my question.

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

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

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

"My science is different," Goodman said.

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

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

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

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

Share and discuss on Facebook
Support for this program comes from the Spencer Foundation and Lumina Foundation.
Sign up for email notifications
We're interested in hearing what impact APM Reports programs have on you. Has one of our documentaries or podcasts changed how you think about an issue? Has it led you to do something, like start a conversation or try to do something new in your community? Share your impact story.

Enter your address below and we'll let you know when we publish new stories.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers

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

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

# data[].attributes.body
Two types of Sight Words

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.text
Sight Words – Did you know there are 2 types of sight words? Most kids hate having to learn the 1st type, but that's precisely what they're required to do, repeatedly, under Balanced Literacy.

See my profile for FREE Synthetic Phonics books that teach without sight words.

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.original_text
Sight Words – Did you know there are 2 types of sight words? Most kids hate having to learn the 1st type, but that's precisely what they're required to do, repeatedly, under Balanced Literacy.

See my profile for FREE Synthetic Phonics books that teach without sight words. https://t.co/080ellVHDz

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.embed_code
Sight Words – Did you know there are 2 types of sight words? Most kids hate having to learn the 1st type, but that's precisely what they're required to do, repeatedly, under Balanced Literacy.

See my profile for FREE Synthetic Phonics books that teach without sight words. pic.twitter.com/080ellVHDz
— Stephen Parker (@ParkerPhonics) April 7, 2020

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
Sight Words – Did you know there are 2 types of sight words? Most kids hate having to learn the 1st type, but that's precisely what they're required to do, repeatedly, under Balanced Literacy.

See my profile for FREE Synthetic Phonics books that teach without sight words. https://t.co/080ellVHDz

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
Sight Words – Did you know there are 2 types of sight words? Most kids hate having to learn the 1st type, but that's precisely what they're required to do, repeatedly, under Balanced Literacy.

See my profile for FREE Synthetic Phonics books that teach without sight words. https://t.co/080ellVHDz

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
Sight Words – Did you know there are 2 types of sight words? Most kids hate having to learn the 1st type, but that's precisely what they're required to do, repeatedly, under Balanced Literacy.

See my profile for FREE Synthetic Phonics books that teach without sight words.

# data[].attributes.body
A simple view of reading

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.text
(1/5) Skilled reading is the product of decoding AND language comprehension. If kids can’t decode, their comprehension is moot, because they don’t know what the words are. If kids don’t have strong background knowledge/vocab, they won’t understand most of what they decode.

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.original_text
(1/5) Skilled reading is the product of decoding AND language comprehension. If kids can’t decode, their comprehension is moot, because they don’t know what the words are. If kids don’t have strong background knowledge/vocab, they won’t understand most of what they decode. https://t.co/IbyfdM7YF4

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.embed_code
(1/5) Skilled reading is the product of decoding AND language comprehension. If kids can’t decode, their comprehension is moot, because they don’t know what the words are. If kids don’t have strong background knowledge/vocab, they won’t understand most of what they decode. pic.twitter.com/IbyfdM7YF4
— Scott Dieter (@scottmdieter) March 1, 2020

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
(1/5) Skilled reading is the product of decoding AND language comprehension. If kids can’t decode, their comprehension is moot, because they don’t know what the words are. If kids don’t have strong background knowledge/vocab, they won’t understand most of what they decode. https://t.co/IbyfdM7YF4

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
(1/5) Skilled reading is the product of decoding AND language comprehension. If kids can’t decode, their comprehension is moot, because they don’t know what the words are. If kids don’t have strong background knowledge/vocab, they won’t understand most of what they decode. https://t.co/IbyfdM7YF4

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
(1/5) Skilled reading is the product of decoding AND language comprehension. If kids can’t decode, their comprehension is moot, because they don’t know what the words are. If kids don’t have strong background knowledge/vocab, they won’t understand most of what they decode.

# data[].attributes.body
How much time to students use to decode?

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.text
When it comes to reading in primary school, by far the most important question teachers and school leaders need to ask themselves (beyond phonics) is this:

How much time do the children actually spend decoding text?

I see lots on inference, summarising, etc, and this is...

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.original_text
When it comes to reading in primary school, by far the most important question teachers and school leaders need to ask themselves (beyond phonics) is this:

How much time do the children actually spend decoding text?

I see lots on inference, summarising, etc, and this is...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.embed_code
When it comes to reading in primary school, by far the most important question teachers and school leaders need to ask themselves (beyond phonics) is this:

How much time do the children actually spend decoding text?

I see lots on inference, summarising, etc, and this is...
— Christopher Such (@Suchmo83) May 28, 2020

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
When it comes to reading in primary school, by far the most important question teachers and school leaders need to ask themselves (beyond phonics) is this:

How much time do the children actually spend decoding text?

I see lots on inference, summarising, etc, and this is...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
When it comes to reading in primary school, by far the most important question teachers and school leaders need to ask themselves (beyond phonics) is this:

How much time do the children actually spend decoding text?

I see lots on inference, summarising, etc, and this is...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
When it comes to reading in primary school, by far the most important question teachers and school leaders need to ask themselves (beyond phonics) is this:

How much time do the children actually spend decoding text?

I see lots on inference, summarising, etc, and this is...

# data[].attributes.body
Skilled Readers do not use 3 Cues

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.text
SKILLED READERS DO NOT USE the 3 cues!!! Poor readers do! Key difference between poor and skilled is skilled readers do not need to GUESS. YOUR BRAIN processes a word faster than a picture! @ehanford

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.original_text
SKILLED READERS DO NOT USE the 3 cues!!! Poor readers do! Key difference between poor and skilled is skilled readers do not need to GUESS. YOUR BRAIN processes a word faster than a picture! @ehanford

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.embed_code
SKILLED READERS DO NOT USE the 3 cues!!! Poor readers do! Key difference between poor and skilled is skilled readers do not need to GUESS. YOUR BRAIN processes a word faster than a picture! @ehanford
— Anchored In Literacy (@AnchoredIn3rdGr) May 27, 2020

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
SKILLED READERS DO NOT USE the 3 cues!!! Poor readers do! Key difference between poor and skilled is skilled readers do not need to GUESS. YOUR BRAIN processes a word faster than a picture! @ehanford

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
SKILLED READERS DO NOT USE the 3 cues!!! Poor readers do! Key difference between poor and skilled is skilled readers do not need to GUESS. YOUR BRAIN processes a word faster than a picture! @ehanford

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
SKILLED READERS DO NOT USE the 3 cues!!! Poor readers do! Key difference between poor and skilled is skilled readers do not need to GUESS. YOUR BRAIN processes a word faster than a picture! @ehanford

# data[].attributes.body
The Decoding Dragon

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.text
The Decoding Dragon will keep you safe from that horrible Guessing Monster! I love this from @lifelonglit

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.original_text
The Decoding Dragon will keep you safe from that horrible Guessing Monster! I love this from @lifelonglit https://t.co/lAK1VKA2h4

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.embed_code
The Decoding Dragon will keep you safe from that horrible Guessing Monster! I love this from @lifelonglit pic.twitter.com/lAK1VKA2h4
— Troy (@TroyWood01) January 6, 2020

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
The Decoding Dragon will keep you safe from that horrible Guessing Monster! I love this from @lifelonglit https://t.co/lAK1VKA2h4

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
The Decoding Dragon will keep you safe from that horrible Guessing Monster! I love this from @lifelonglit https://t.co/lAK1VKA2h4

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
The Decoding Dragon will keep you safe from that horrible Guessing Monster! I love this from @lifelonglit

# data[].attributes.body
What the Science of Reading is not.

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.text
What the science of reading is not, UVA professor Emily Solari says. 👇 (She notes "I think there’s some confusion out there, especially if you spend any time on Twitter.”) https://t.co/xHBaLqNwGH

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.original_text
What the science of reading is not, UVA professor Emily Solari says. 👇 (She notes "I think there’s some confusion out there, especially if you spend any time on Twitter.”) https://t.co/xHBaLqNwGH

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.embed_code
What the science of reading is not, UVA professor Emily Solari says. 👇 (She notes "I think there’s some confusion out there, especially if you spend any time on Twitter.”) https://t.co/xHBaLqNwGH
— Sara Gregory (@saragregory) February 24, 2020

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
What the science of reading is not, UVA professor Emily Solari says. 👇 (She notes "I think there’s some confusion out there, especially if you spend any time on Twitter.”) https://t.co/xHBaLqNwGH

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
What the science of reading is not, UVA professor Emily Solari says. 👇 (She notes "I think there’s some confusion out there, especially if you spend any time on Twitter.”) https://t.co/xHBaLqNwGH

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
What the science of reading is not, UVA professor Emily Solari says. 👇 (She notes "I think there’s some confusion out there, especially if you spend any time on Twitter.”) https://t.co/xHBaLqNwGH

# data[].attributes.body
See Pam's Sound Wall

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.text
1. Sound walls for teacher learning? Check!  This sound wall created by reading specialist Tambra Isenberg was created for teachers & details the vowel valley sounds & corresponding graphemes- note how she added the frequency/percentages of the sound-spellings.

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.original_text
1. Sound walls for teacher learning? Check!  This sound wall created by reading specialist Tambra Isenberg was created for teachers & details the vowel valley sounds & corresponding graphemes- note how she added the frequency/percentages of the sound-spellings. https://t.co/yR7VnYsMKR

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.embed_code
1. Sound walls for teacher learning? Check! This sound wall created by reading specialist Tambra Isenberg was created for teachers & details the vowel valley sounds & corresponding graphemes- note how she added the frequency/percentages of the sound-spellings. pic.twitter.com/yR7VnYsMKR
— Pam Kastner (@liv2learn) August 16, 2019

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
1. Sound walls for teacher learning? Check!  This sound wall created by reading specialist Tambra Isenberg was created for teachers & details the vowel valley sounds & corresponding graphemes- note how she added the frequency/percentages of the sound-spellings. https://t.co/yR7VnYsMKR

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
1. Sound walls for teacher learning? Check!  This sound wall created by reading specialist Tambra Isenberg was created for teachers & details the vowel valley sounds & corresponding graphemes- note how she added the frequency/percentages of the sound-spellings. https://t.co/yR7VnYsMKR

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
1. Sound walls for teacher learning? Check!  This sound wall created by reading specialist Tambra Isenberg was created for teachers & details the vowel valley sounds & corresponding graphemes- note how she added the frequency/percentages of the sound-spellings.

# data[].attributes.body
See Martha's Vowel Valley

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.text
Finished up our Vowel Valley!!! Moving on to the consonants next! @tools4reading @ELCSouth_KISD @KellerSped #kidlips #phoneme #grapheme

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.original_text
Finished up our Vowel Valley!!! Moving on to the consonants next! @tools4reading @ELCSouth_KISD @KellerSped #kidlips #phoneme #grapheme https://t.co/RPgUNgWFcB

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.embed_code
Finished up our Vowel Valley!!! Moving on to the consonants next! @tools4reading @ELCSouth_KISD @KellerSped #kidlips #phoneme #grapheme pic.twitter.com/RPgUNgWFcB
— Martha Dixson (@MarthaDixson) December 10, 2019

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
Finished up our Vowel Valley!!! Moving on to the consonants next! @tools4reading @ELCSouth_KISD @KellerSped #kidlips #phoneme #grapheme https://t.co/RPgUNgWFcB

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
Finished up our Vowel Valley!!! Moving on to the consonants next! @tools4reading @ELCSouth_KISD @KellerSped #kidlips #phoneme #grapheme https://t.co/RPgUNgWFcB

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
Finished up our Vowel Valley!!! Moving on to the consonants next! @tools4reading @ELCSouth_KISD @KellerSped #kidlips #phoneme #grapheme

# data[].attributes.body
The importance of Phonics

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.text
Love this from @markseidenberg. Always go back to it when colleagues try to downplay the importance of phonics.

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.original_text
Love this from @markseidenberg. Always go back to it when colleagues try to downplay the importance of phonics. https://t.co/mtl5WdozT1

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.embed_code
Love this from @markseidenberg. Always go back to it when colleagues try to downplay the importance of phonics. pic.twitter.com/mtl5WdozT1
— John Kenny (@JohnKenny03) December 2, 2019

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
Love this from @markseidenberg. Always go back to it when colleagues try to downplay the importance of phonics. https://t.co/mtl5WdozT1

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
Love this from @markseidenberg. Always go back to it when colleagues try to downplay the importance of phonics. https://t.co/mtl5WdozT1

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
Love this from @markseidenberg. Always go back to it when colleagues try to downplay the importance of phonics.

# data[].attributes.body
See the Ladder of Reading

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.text
The #LadderOfReading brilliantly illustrates how #StructuredLiteracy benefits ALL children: “The portion along the far right notes that even the children at the top of the heap benefit from systematic instruction. Everyone does better. That is a critical message." — Steve Dykstra

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.author.name
Isabelle Duquennois | Structured Literacy Alliance

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.original_text
The #LadderOfReading brilliantly illustrates how #StructuredLiteracy benefits ALL children: “The portion along the far right notes that even the children at the top of the heap benefit from systematic instruction. Everyone does better. That is a critical message." — Steve Dykstra https://t.co/pCv1XdSIby

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
Isabelle Duquennois | Structured Literacy Alliance

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Isabelle Duquennois | Structured Literacy Alliance

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.embed_code
The #LadderOfReading brilliantly illustrates how #StructuredLiteracy benefits ALL children: “The portion along the far right notes that even the children at the top of the heap benefit from systematic instruction. Everyone does better. That is a critical message." — Steve Dykstra pic.twitter.com/pCv1XdSIby
— Isabelle Duquennois | Structured Literacy Alliance (@Isaology) October 29, 2019

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
The #LadderOfReading brilliantly illustrates how #StructuredLiteracy benefits ALL children: “The portion along the far right notes that even the children at the top of the heap benefit from systematic instruction. Everyone does better. That is a critical message." — Steve Dykstra https://t.co/pCv1XdSIby

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.includes.users[].name
Isabelle Duquennois | Structured Literacy Alliance

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
The #LadderOfReading brilliantly illustrates how #StructuredLiteracy benefits ALL children: “The portion along the far right notes that even the children at the top of the heap benefit from systematic instruction. Everyone does better. That is a critical message." — Steve Dykstra https://t.co/pCv1XdSIby

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
The #LadderOfReading brilliantly illustrates how #StructuredLiteracy benefits ALL children: “The portion along the far right notes that even the children at the top of the heap benefit from systematic instruction. Everyone does better. That is a critical message." — Steve Dykstra

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.author.name
Isabelle Duquennois | Structured Literacy Alliance

# data[].attributes.body
Guidance for the Phonics Routines

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.text
Marking: Engage children with a sense of their own learning. Do they know it? They tick in pencil. Don't they know it? Circle - understanding that it's OK not to know something. The teacher will teach you (or teach you again), and you may need more practice.

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.original_text
Marking: Engage children with a sense of their own learning. Do they know it? They tick in pencil. Don't they know it? Circle - understanding that it's OK not to know something. The teacher will teach you (or teach you again), and you may need more practice. https://t.co/QtyUAelbUq

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.embed_code
Marking: Engage children with a sense of their own learning. Do they know it? They tick in pencil. Don't they know it? Circle - understanding that it's OK not to know something. The teacher will teach you (or teach you again), and you may need more practice. pic.twitter.com/QtyUAelbUq
— Debbie Hepplewhite (@debbiehepp) November 28, 2019

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
Marking: Engage children with a sense of their own learning. Do they know it? They tick in pencil. Don't they know it? Circle - understanding that it's OK not to know something. The teacher will teach you (or teach you again), and you may need more practice. https://t.co/QtyUAelbUq

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
Marking: Engage children with a sense of their own learning. Do they know it? They tick in pencil. Don't they know it? Circle - understanding that it's OK not to know something. The teacher will teach you (or teach you again), and you may need more practice. https://t.co/QtyUAelbUq

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
Marking: Engage children with a sense of their own learning. Do they know it? They tick in pencil. Don't they know it? Circle - understanding that it's OK not to know something. The teacher will teach you (or teach you again), and you may need more practice.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Louisa Moats, Ed.D.

Dr. Moats has been a teacher, psychologist, researcher, graduate school faculty member, and author of many influential scientific journal articles, books, and policy papers on the topics of reading, spelling, language, and teacher preparation. After a first job as a neuropsychology technician, she became a teacher of students with learning and reading difficulties, earning her Master's degree at Peabody College of Vanderbilt. Later, after realizing how little she understood about teaching reading, she earned a doctorate in Reading and Human Development from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. ( full bio)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Spelling Supports Reading Instruction

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Dr. Moats has been a teacher, psychologist, researcher, graduate school faculty member, and author of many influential scientific journal articles, books, and policy papers on the topics of reading, spelling, language, and teacher preparation. After a first job as a neuropsychology technician, she became a teacher of students with learning and reading difficulties, earning her Master's degree at Peabody College of Vanderbilt.

# data[].attributes.body
New Frontier in Orthographic Processing and Spelling Theory

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Presented at Dyslexia and Literacy: Understanding Executive functions, language, and reading,

on Friday, October 18th, 2019 from
the Joseph B. Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical School.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
New Frontier in Orthographic Processing and Spelling Theory

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Presented at Dyslexia and Literacy: Understanding Executive functions, language, and reading, on Friday, October 18th, 2019 from the Joseph B. Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical School.

# data[].attributes.body
The Neuroscience of Orthographic Processions and Spelling

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Presented at Dyslexia and Literacy: Understanding Executive functions, language, and reading,

on Friday, October 18th, 2019 from
the Joseph B. Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical School.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Neuroscience of Orthographic Processions and Spelling

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Presented at Dyslexia and Literacy: Understanding Executive functions, language, and reading, on Friday, October 18th, 2019 from the Joseph B. Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical School.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The
authors' goals in this article were to revisit the science of reading through an epistemological lens to clarify what constitutes evidence in the science of reading, and to offer a critical evaluation of the evidence provided by the science of reading. To this end, the authors summarize those things that they believe have compelling evidence, promising evidence, or a lack of compelling evidence. The authors conclude...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Theauthors' goals in this article were to revisit the science of reading through an epistemological lens to clarify what constitutes evidence in the science of reading, and to offer a critical evaluation of the evidence provided by the science of reading.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Close Encounters with Students' Spelling:
What They Tell Us About Language Learning

Watch the Webinar

When they write and spell, students show us what they know and believe about spoken and written language. If we, as educators, look with an informed eye, we can readily see what needs to be taught and what that student needs to learn. Join us for this enlightening presentation during which Dr. Louisa Moats will share her unique insight and expertise as we take a close look at writing samples and explore what they tell us about students' instructional needs.

In this informative webinar, Dr. Moats will review:

Theoretical frameworks for analyzing errors in developing writers' work

Signs of underdeveloped phoneme awareness

How to recognize what students do and do not know about vowel and consonant spellings

How to recognize what students do and do not know about suffixes and other morphemes

Why and how we can teach language through spelling and writing

For the topics presented, attendees will learn best practices and new targets of instruction.

Louisa Moats, Ed.D.

Louisa Moats, Ed.D., is the lead author of LANGUAGE! Live, a blended program for adolescent students reading below grade level. She is also the lead author of LETRS professional development for literacy educators. Dr. Moats has authored many books, journal articles, policy papers, and materials for professional development in the areas of reading, writing, and language. She received her M.A. from Peabody College of Vanderbilt and her Ed.D. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

View Webinar

Complete form to view this webinar and slides.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Webinar | Close Encounters with Student Spelling

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Close Encounters with Students' Spelling: What They Tell Us About Language Learning Watch the Webinar When they write and spell, students show us what they know and believe about spoken and written language. If we, as educators, look with an informed eye, we can readily see what needs to be taught and what that student needs to learn.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Word Game is a simply named simple vocabulary and trivia game that you can play in your web browser. To play the game simply go to wordgame.betafactory.tech and you're into the game. The game consists of single questions that test your vocabulary and trivia knowledge. Only one question appears on the screen at a time. You do have to create an account if you want to save your scores and track your progress. Otherwise, it's completely free to play.

Word Game also offers a Chrome Extension that will display a new word and its definition whenever you open a new tab.

In the following video I provide a demonstration of Word Game and its corresponding Chrome extension.

Applications for Education
Word Game is the type of site that is nice to keep in a list on your classroom website or Google Classroom page under the heading of "things to do with extra time" or "things to do while waiting for classmates."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Word Game - A Simple Game Vocabulary Game

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Word Game is a simply named simple vocabulary and trivia game that you can play in your web browser. To play the game simply go to wordgame.betafactory.tech and you're into the game. The game consists of single questions that test your vocabulary and trivia knowledge. Only one question appears on the screen at a time.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
You are here

<< Learning About Your Child's Reading Development

About

In this tutorial, you will learn evidence-based information about your child's reading development from preschool through adolescence, all in an interactive online experience. You can use the table of contents to learn about the skills needed to learn to read, how reading typically develops, why children might struggle to read, and signs of risk for reading difficulties.

Approximate tutorial length per topic: 30 minutes.

Audience: Parents & Families, Schools & Districts

Accessibility Files

Implementation Toolkit

This toolkit helps parents and families understand the many different skills involved with teaching your child to learn to read and how to support your child's reading development at school and home.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Learning About Your Child's Reading Development Tutorial

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Learning About Your Child's Reading Development In this tutorial, you will learn evidence-based information about your child's reading development from preschool through adolescence, all in an interactive online experience. You can use the table of contents to learn about the skills needed to learn to read, how reading typically develops, why children might struggle to read, and signs of risk for reading difficulties.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The most fundamental responsibility of schools is teaching students to read. Because reading affects all other academic achievement and is associated with social, emotional, economic, and physical health, it has been the most researched aspect of human cognition. By the year 2000, after decades of multidisciplinary research, the scientific community had achieved broad consensus regarding these questions: How do children learn to read? What causes reading difficulties? What are the essential components of effective reading instruction and why is each important? How can we prevent or reduce reading difficulties? Two decades later, hundreds of additional studies have refined and consolidated what we know about bolstering reading achievement, especially for students at risk.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Warning: The following statement may be rather shocking, especially to long-standing teachers of reading. Brace yourself.

"We don't teach reading comprehension; it's a result."
Sharon Vaughn

Sharon Vaughn made this claim during her keynote address at the International Dyslexia Association's Annual Conference in Portland, Oregon a few weeks ago. These sentiments were echoed by several presenters at the conference, from Mark Seidenberg to Nancy Eberhardt and Margie Gills. In contrast to the way reading comprehension is often presumed to be directly taught through specific strategy instruction in most classrooms across the U.S., structured language and literacy's stance on how reading comprehension works is founded upon the Simple View of Reading first proposed in 1986 by University of Texas researchers Philip Gough and Bill Tunmer. According to this model, readers must be able to decode the print and possess sufficient oral language comprehension in order to extract meaning from a text.
Reading Comprehension = Decoding + Language Comprehension
To quote one of our favorite teachers of syntax, Mr. William Van Cleave, "Simple doesn't mean simplistic." The Simple View of Reading may be eloquently distilled into foundational terms, but that doesn't imply that the process of reading is easy or simplistic. Reading, and the process of acquiring literacy, is not a natural or simple process, but a complex restructuring of the brain to engineer novel pathways for the unnatural task of literacy to to be achieved.

Hollis Scarborough's Reading Rope visually captures the complexity implied in the Simple View of Reading through its multiple strands making up each component of reading comprehension. As we focus on the language comprehension piece, we see that it is made up of many prerequisites, such as background knowledge, vocabulary, syntax, semantics, literacy knowledge, and verbal reasoning abilities.

Hollis Scarborough's Reading Rope

The premise of many of the presenters at DyslexiaCon19 was that reading comprehension is not a skill but an end result. It's not something that can be directly taught, unlike the foundational components of decoding like phonological awareness or phonics. Reading comprehension will happen when each strand of the reading rope is strong and intertwined.

Look at that rope. There are a lot of strands, each one presenting its own unique complexities. Perhaps the strand least emphasized in our current educational moment is the background knowledge strand. With the recent release of Natalie Wexler's book, The Knowledge Gap, there's been a lot of conversation within the world of literacy about the necessity of background knowledge in order for reading comprehension to occur. As Sharon Vaughn puts it, readers need Word Knowledge and World Knowledge to comprehend what they're reading.

A landmark study by Donna Recht and Lauren Leslie in 1988 showed that possessing background knowledge about the topic was a greater predictor of successfully comprehending a text than word reading skills. In the study, children who were poor readers but had background knowledge about the topic better understood the text than stronger decoders who didn't have background knowledge. This fact is both astounding and common sensical. Prior knowledge creates schemata upon which the act of reading can build. Without some prior knowledge, the message conveyed through the symbolic world of print is often lost. But with background knowledge, even if deciphering the code is a challenge, one at least has a compass in hand to guide them in the right direction.

Background Knowledge is like a compass, guiding readers to comprehension.

This is why reading comprehension is not a linear process; we comprehend different texts at various degrees of competence based upon our unique prior knowledge we bring to the text. So in some ways, teachers are never truly teaching reading comprehension but rather assessing it, or more accurately, perhaps, assessing the sum product of a student's decoding abilities, background knowledge, vocabulary, and syntactical understanding. Reading comprehension is a result, not a skill in isolation to practice. Background knowledge is the neglected key to unlock comprehension for so many students.

Perhaps this is a simplistic illustration, but I'll never forget the first time I experienced a true fall scene; the leaves of every tree adorned themselves in multifarious hues-aflame in crimson, gilded in gold, or alit in amber. The visual beauty was heightened by the crisp freshness permeating the autumn afternoon and the satisfying staccato of crunchy leaves that accompanied my every step. Weeks later, I noticed a calendar hanging on an office wall depicting a beautiful autumnal landscape. The photograph took my breath away because I had experienced it. Of course, I had seen many similar photos before of lovely fall scenery and could appreciate the beauty of it, but until I had lived it, no picture had connected so viscerally.

It's similar for readers.

To truly take in, experience, and engage with a text, readers need to have some background knowledge of the topic. Otherwise, it's like asking a person with visual impairment to sketch a sunset. They may capture the general gradient, but the subtleties of hues, lines, and textures are lost and with it the whole message of the sunset. What we bring to a text in terms of prior knowledge in many ways determines how we understand what we read because a major component of reading is inferring that which authors do not explicitly make clear, assuming readers can fill in the gaps. Asking students to comprehend a text they have no prior knowledge of is like asking them to make a sketch of a sunset with blinders over their eyes.

Can you sketch a sunset with blinders over your eyes?

Reading strategies can be helpful, but as Natalie Wexler points out, all reading comprehension strategies "rely on activating prior knowledge-which means they only work if a reader has enough background knowledge to understand the text in the first place" (2019).

Much of what teachers do when purportedly teaching reading comprehension is have students read and then answer questions about the text. This is assuming the students actually understood what they read in the first place. To truly understand, students, once they've mastered the foundations of decoding, need the vocabulary and prior knowledge before any other reading strategy can assist them. In addition, they need to understand the subtle syntactical and grammatical structures indicating meaning and creating cohesion in a text. Yet, sadly, direct instruction in background-building content areas like social studies and science is often neglected in order to make room for huge literacy blocks, which are often not structured around the science of reading in the first place.

This is a social justice issue. We know that children who come from homes with lower socioeconomic statuses already enter kindergarten with a huge language deficit-in vocabulary, syntax, and, of course, background knowledge. Teaching reading comprehension strategies while forsaking background-building content and strong vocabulary development is like planting seeds in rocky soil. You can hope something may spring up, but chances are there is not enough soil for the seed to take root and grow. Our children- all children-deserve to have the soil of their minds cultivated through instruction that explicitly fosters the development of all the necessary strands of the complex and almost miraculous process of reading comprehension.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Background Knowledge: The Compass Pointing to Reading Comprehension

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Warning: The following statement may be rather shocking, especially to long-standing teachers of reading. Brace yourself. "We don't teach reading comprehension; it's a result."Sharon Vaughn Sharon Vaughn made this claim during her keynote address at the International Dyslexia Association's Annual Conference in Portland, Oregon a few weeks ago.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Planning with the creative and hard-working teachers on my fourth-grade team was rewarding (and occasionally hilarious), but our enthusiasm sometimes produced overly-complicated plans. If a plan was becoming unwieldy, one of us would interrupt the process and say to the team:

"If it's this complicated, it's probably not right."

We'd then pause, rearticulate our goals, and start over to create a more coherent instructional plan.

Thought leaders in the Balanced Literacy community are engaged in a similar process of reexamining plans for instruction. But as they review research and respond to the national discourse about reading, teachers are receiving increasingly complicated messages about reading instruction.

It Seemed Clear at First

Balanced Literacy used to provide us a clear plan:

Teach phonics and allow plenty of time for authentic reading and writing.

Use predictable texts for beginning and struggling readers.

Assess students using MSV analysis on reading records.

Explain reading as an orchestration of meaning, structure, and visual cues.

But Then It Got Complicated

A flurry of recent articles (eg. Getting Reading Right) questioned this plan for instruction, so leaders in the Balanced Literacy community added new layers to their earlier messages. Those of us in Balanced Literacy districts now wonder:
"What does this mean for our reading instruction?"
It may be time for us to pause, rearticulate our goals, and revise our plan for teaching reading.

Our Goals

We want every child to learn how to read authentic texts fluently and with deep understanding.

Nonstarters:

Phonics-only instruction

Surrounding kids with books and hoping for the best

Maintaining the status quo

To ensure every student becomes a strong reader, we'll need to make some instructional changes and we might want to start by unraveling some of Balanced Literacy's recent complications.

Complication #1: Don't Focus on Phonics, But Learn More About It

Leaders of Balanced Literacy have critiqued the national discussion about reading for being "phonics-centric," but they also acknowledge that teachers need to learn more about phonics.

"We find that not all teachers have strong understanding [sic] of the alphabetic system and it's very difficult to teach children how to use letter sound relationships, how to use word parts if they don't understand themselves the logic in the alphabetic system."

"Teachers- especially those teaching pre-K to second grade⁠-do need to learn more about phonics. Even teachers who have taught a phonics program for years sometimes haven't learned all they need to know."
District leaders and those who train teachers are left to wonder, "Should we provide professional development about the alphabetic system? Or should we stop talking about phonics?"

Complication #2: Yes, MSV but no "three cueing"

Proponents of Balanced Literacy have downplayed the role of three-cueing in reading instruction since Emily Hanford's At a Loss for Words.

Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell popularized the practice of coding student reading errors with MSV (meaning, structure, visual), but they have recently distanced themselves from the practice:

FOUNTAS & PINNELL READING RECORD FOR MSV ANALYSIS

"There's a lot of misunderstanding around what some people are calling three cueing systems, and I think it's related to maybe some coding that teachers are using." Gay Su Pinnell

In that same interview, Fountas described three-cueing analysis:

"[Teachers] can actually see what aspect of visual information or letter, sound relationships children are actually using in the reading process, with the meaning and the language [structure] of the text..."

But she closed this sentence by saying:

"...and we do not mean three cueing systems."

Pinnell explained:
Their comments left many of us wondering if we should stop analyzing for MSV. Without three-cueing, it's difficult to explain the purpose of miscue analysis.

"[Students are] using different sources of information, but it's not necessarily three."
Decodable texts teach students they should decode words. Predictable texts teach students they should predict them.

Complication #3: Try a mixture of predictable and decodable texts

Simply put:

To determine whether to scaffold beginning readers with decodable or predictable books, we need to consider how we want students to approach words once they are ready for authentic texts. Do we want students to sound out unfamiliar words? Or hunt for clues and then cross-check with the letters?

Simultaneous instruction in both decoding and predicting words is not only confusing to students, practice in one will undermine student progress in the other.

Texts that are designed to teach students to use strategies other than decoding- cueing based off pictures, syntax, and first letters- discourage children from sounding out words.

Calkins recently explained:

"The last thing children who are dyslexic need is encouragement to compensate by relying on pictures and meaning instead of sound-letter correspondences. They need books that help them rely upon the letters on the page and to trust that the phonics instruction they receive will pay off when they are reading continuous texts."

Fountas:

"The real measure of effective phonics instruction is how children use that knowledge as readers and writers... Kids need to know why they're learning what they're learning about letters, sounds and words and how they're using it as readers and how they're using it as writers."

Calkins:

"Decodable texts have value for all children in the earliest stages of learning to read."
If all beginning readers benefit from decodable texts and some students are harmed by predictable texts, should primary grade teachers remove predictable texts from their classrooms?

Calkins explained that predictable texts are for "approximating reading." In the pre-reading stage, simulating reading has value, but it does not make sense once reading instruction has begun. Students need books that allow them to apply what they are learning about the alphabetic code.

Educators face a choice: We can wait and see how the leaders of Balanced Literacy revise their materials.
If we no longer believe that skilled readers use meaning, structure, and visual cues to predict and cross-check words while reading, we have little need for predictable texts for instruction in the primary grades.

We can start making changes to benefit our students this school year.
Finding Clarity

As Balanced Literacy leaders distance themselves from MSV instruction and the student texts and assessments that go with it, teachers are left holding instructional materials without a rationale for implementing them. Without the three-cueing theory of reading to rely on, the Balanced Literacy community lacks a clear explanation of how we read, the books students should read, and how teachers should assess.

-or-

For those of us who are willing to embrace change now and revise our plan for teaching reading, below are some shifts we might consider.

The conversation about Balanced Literacy has become overly complicated. Let's pause.

"If it's this complicated, it's probably not right."

We can clarify things for ourselves and on behalf of our students by grounding ourselves in reading research.

As Calkins wrote:

"I am grateful to the science of reading proponents. I also am grateful that these educators are successfully calling attention to the importance of prioritizing professional education for teachers. I think that professional education is necessary for those of us in teacher education as well. I, for one, have benefitted from this discussion and am grateful to be on a learning trajectory.

The leaders we've looked to in the past are on a learning journey. Instead of waiting for them to get back to us with their discoveries, let's join in, learn together, and build a new plan for teaching reading.

Balanced Literacy decodable texts leveled books MSV reading science

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Balanced Literacy's Crumbling Foundation- What We Can Do About It

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Planning with the creative and hard-working teachers on my fourth-grade team was rewarding (and occasionally hilarious), but our enthusiasm sometimes produced overly-complicated plans. If a plan was becoming unwieldy, one of us would interrupt the process and say to the team: "If it's this complicated, it's probably not right."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
I had an idea in the 1980s and to my surprise, it changed education around the world

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This is the first of two essays exploring key theories - cognitive load theory and constructivism - underlying teaching methods used today. Explicit guidance and feedback from teachers is more effective in teaching students new content and skills than letting them discover these for themselves.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
There's some free online learning that I'd recommend to anyone who works with beginning or struggling readers/spellers. You'll find it on the Colorado Dept of Education website and was recorded at the 2017 Reading in the Rockies conference (thanks to the organisers!).

However, it's three videos, each more than an hour long. Teachers are time-poor. They understandably aren't keen to watch long work-related videos unless they know what they're about, and believe they and their students will benefit.

So I've decided to write a blog about each video, summarising what I think are the key points, and recording the time on the video clock each is made, to assist those skimming to find topics of interest. I hope people will then be motivated to go back and watch the whole thing.

The videos' presenter is Dr David A. Kilpatrick, a US school psychologist turned academic, whose book "Essentials of Assessing, Preventing and Overcoming Reading Difficulties" also explains these concepts (no, I'm not on his marketing team, it's just a good book, my copy is very dog-eared).

The first video is about preventing word reading difficulties and intervening with those who struggle. Here it is, if you just want to watch it yourself straight-up. My summary is below, numbers in brackets are video clock times, and any oversimplifications or misrepresentations are my own, my apologies. If you see something you think needs fixing, please tell me.

How we remember the words we read: orthographic mapping

In the 1970s and 1980s Linnea Ehri developed her theory of how we remember the words we read, via a process called orthographic mapping, which bonds the sounds in spoken words to their spellings. This theory is constantly cited in the reading research.

In 1994 some researchers including Snowling and Hulme tested out Ehri's theory in three airtight studies, and found that (as far as anything ever does in science) it stacked up very well. Then in the early 2000s, Torgeson called it our best theory to explain skilled word-level reading.

However, Ehri's theory hasn't had much traction in education, or in other areas of the reading research, perhaps due to professional silos and the complexity of the theory.

Orthographic mapping is quite a hard concept to get your head around, and it seems that people have often cited Ehri without really understanding her.

But when you read thousands of research reports through the lens of a really good theory, things start to tie together.

How to reduce reading failure by 75%: understand the research

(5:34) The schools where Kilpatrick was working had been doing Reading Recovery, and not getting great results, but then switched over to intervention consistent with Ehri's theory, and within five years reduced reading disabilities by 75%.

Once teachers understood the theory, they changed their teaching, and got great results. Our prevention and our intervention has to be based on how reading works.

(8:00) Phonemic awareness and blending matter for how well you can read. Rapid Automatised Naming (RAN) also matters, but even the best researchers in the field aren't really sure why - whether it's a separate cause of problems, a consequence of the phonological core deficit, or related in some other way.

(9:50) Phonological memory (the passive, temporary buffer in which we store whatever we just heard for a few seconds) and working memory (our mental workspace) also matter for reading, and both are phonological in nature, but whether problems in these areas are also symptoms of the phonological core deficit, or related in some other way, is also unclear.

Children with limited working memory, who struggle with reading, spelling and also maths, benefit from repetition and multisensory teaching. Limited working memory slows down learning, but does not mean a kid is not smart.

(15:20) What we do know is that visual memory is not how we read. We read based on orthographic memory. We don't read by guessing from context. When you combine sounding out and set for variability (the ability to determine correct pronunciations from incorrectly pronounced words) you can get a lot of unfamiliar words, you don't need to guess.

(16:00) Orthographic mapping is how we learn new words, and thus is true of words with both transparent (regular) and opaque (irregular) spellings. Kids who are good readers are good orthographic mappers. Kids who learn to orthographically map can close the gap between themselves and their peers.

Written words are anchored mainly to their sounds, not their meanings

(17:25) Words we've heard before are stored in phonological long-term memory, regardless of whether we know their meanings. Once we learn their meanings, we add them to our semantic long-term memory. There are more words that we've heard than words that we know.

Second language learners and young children thus have a much larger store of words in their phonological LTM than their semantic LTM. Research by Kate Nation and others has shown that the main anchor point for learning new written words is whether the word is in phonological LTM, not whether it is in semantic LTM.

(23:40) Yes, concrete words are remembered a little more easily than abstract words, so semantics does play a role, but the main way we get written words into long-term memory is by anchoring them in their sounds, not their meanings.

Awareness/knowledge versus proficiency

(25:00) Storing written words in long-term memory requires not just phonemic awareness and letter-sound knowledge but phonemic and letter-sound proficiency.

When you have phonemic proficiency, words pull apart into their component sounds automatically, and link to letters/spellings without any need for conscious effort. These skills have become automatised.

(28:12) This then allows you to teach yourself new words, as per David Share's self-teaching hypothesis. Even if you don't know what a word means, if you've heard it before and then see it in written form, you can start to match the written form to the spoken form, and in this way teach yourself new words by reading.
Regular and irregular words are mapped the same way

Learning phonics helps with the mapping process, as it makes sense of the words that don't have transparent relationships between sounds and letters.

(31.50) We used to assume that phonics was good for figuring words out, but that after you'd seen a word a few times, you just started to remember it through visual memory. This is simply not true. We make the connection through mapping, and mapping is easier if you know how the letter patterns work.

(33:00) Irregularly-spelt words are only exceptions if you are using a phonic decoding strategy. Orthographic mapping works from pronunciation to spelling, not the other way around, so once you have a spoken word in your phonological memory, and then you meet it in printed form, it is secured in the same way regularly-spelt words are secured.

Most irregularly-spelt words only have one sound spelt an unusual way, and the rest of the word is spelt pretty normally. In our relatively opaque spelling system, we need to make adjustments all the time, it's just that some are common adjustments and some less common. The mapping process doesn't distinguish between regular and irregular words.

Reading practice doesn't help kids who can't orthographically map

(38:54) Psychology reports often make three key recommendations: do a lot of reading practice, learn to decode, and learn irregular words as whole units.

However, if you are a child who doesn't remember words efficiently, reading practice is of very little benefit. First you have to develop phonemic and letter-sound proficiency, so that you can start orthographic mapping, and thus benefit from reading practice.

If you're a child who DOES remember words, reading practice is essential, and the only thing that will make you a better reader.

Put this chart on your wall

The things on the left-hand side of this chart are hard to observe, and in typical children happen naturally as part of the process of being taught to read and practising reading and spelling. However, they do not occur naturally in children with the phonological core deficit. The right side skills are the ones that are easier to observe.

If you're using the CTOPP test to examine skills on the left-hand-side of this chart, the blending test usually tells you nothing after about second grade, as by then most children can blend, it's the elision test that tells you whether they have the advanced phonemic awareness that will allow them to start orthographic mapping. This skill usually starts in late second or early third grade, and leads to phonemic proficiency.

Prevention of reading problems

(48:50) If we teach all young children phonemic awareness and explicit letter-sound skills, all kids improve their reading performance, on average by about eight standard score points (on standardised tests, where the average is 100 and the average range is 85-115).

The whole group does not retain this gain over time, it drops down to about four standard score points, because typically developing kids develop phonemic proficiency no matter how you teach them.

However, the weaker/at risk kids do gain about 13 standard score points. This increases to about 20 standard score points over time. So there was a well-sustained benefit to the bottom third of children. So it's very important to teach this way in the first two years of schooling.

(50.30) Why doesn't everyone teach this way? People say "it's boring". Well, yes, if you want to do it in a boring way. It's a matter of style not content.

If we keep using current early literacy teaching approaches, the bottom third of kids will stay at the bottom. As Mark Seidenberg says, we're teaching all kids to read like weak readers, by guessing, and only using their linguistic skills as a backup.

(52:30) One interesting experiment used an unfamiliar alphabet to write familiar 3, 4 and 5-letter words, and taught typical kids to read the words via whole word flashcard teaching. They never told them what the letters were. Then they gave them brand new words made up of these letters with the same sound-letter relationships, and found the kids could read them because they had worked out the sound-letter relationships. That's how alphabetic writing works, and that's the only way we can read words.

Only between 2% and 5% of children should be struggling

(54:27) Another piece of research took children who were at the 18th percentile and below and divided them into three groups. They were all doing three-cueing systems-based intervention.

One group were taught in classrooms with explicit direct teaching about sounds and letters. Another group had this classroom teaching embedded in word-family activities, which is OK as a starting point/early crutch, but doesn't make sense if continued. It's sounds and letters that matter for decoding. A third group had only implicit and incidental teaching about sound-letter relationships.

The kids taught explicitly and directly had standard scores averaging 96 (right in the middle of the average range) compared with 88 and 89 in the other two groups.

44-46% of the kids in the embedded and implicit phonemic awareness and phonics groups made no progress. Only 16% of the kids receiving explicit, direct teaching made no progress, which is 2% of the total population of children not making it to average.

(59:48) American educational journals are now not publishing studies showing that explicit teaching of phonemic awareness and phonics is the best way to teach kids to read, because they think it's a settled issue.

In 2008, UK researchers Shapiro and Solity published a study that showed that explicit, systematic teaching of phonemic awareness and phonics left only 5% of children struggling, whereas business as usual teaching left 20% of children struggling. So they had a 75% reduction in reading problems based on several minutes a day of phonological awareness instruction and letter-sound instruction.

Planned, small group phonemic awareness and phonics teaching

(1:01:00) The key to successful teaching is the combined teaching of phonemic awareness and teaching of phonics, not just teaching more phonics. Once kids can sound out nonsense words, they have enough phonics. Teaching in both areas must also be systematic, as non-systematic instruction is no better than no instruction. Systematic means, "I have a plan, it's going to start with easier developmental things and work up to harder things".

The length of teaching time required is something that varies between studies. One study did seven weeks in kindergarten small groups, four days per week, and this had huge preventative benefits. Others did a whole year. Some groups worked at the pace of the weakest kids, so more able kids were able to do tasks easily, and enjoyed this, but at the end of the year all the kids had the skills they needed, and nobody was left behind.

(1:06:54) The key components that make preventative teaching effective are phonemic awareness, teaching about letter-sound relationships, and reading connected text. However the National Reading Panel's conclusion that studies using letters to teach phonemic awareness had better results than ones that didn't use letters is misleading, if you go back and look at the original research.

If you're teaching with letters, you're doing phonics. If you're teaching children to think about sounds in words as a starting point, that's phonemic awareness. Once they can think about sounds in words, you can tie the sounds to the letters.

More to come...

The other two videos in this series are below, in case you want to watch them before I get around to summarising them for blog posts.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Things tie together when you have a really good theory

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There's some free online learning that I'd recommend to anyone who works with beginning or struggling readers/spellers. You'll find it on the Colorado Dept of Education website and was recorded at the 2017 Reading in the Rockies conference (thanks to the organisers!). However, it's three videos, each more than an hour long.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In our first report from the Learning by Scientific Design Network, we dive into results from a first-of-its-kind formative assessment given to over 1,000 future teachers - and teacher-educators - across the network. What do future teachers know about learning science and its translation to rigorous instructional practice? How are programs using this information to transform preparation? Read our report to find out.

Learning by Scientific Design

Learning by Scientific Design shares insights from educator-preparation programs - and over 1,000 future teachers - that are transforming preparation through the lens of learning science.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Learning by Scientific Design | Deans for Impact

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In our first report from the Learning by Scientific Design Network, we dive into results from a first-of-its-kind formative assessment given to over 1,000 future teachers - and teacher-educators - across the network. What do future teachers know about learning science and its translation to rigorous instructional practice?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Blast from the Past: This entry was first published on October 4, 2016 and was reissued on February 29, 2016. The reason for revisiting this one is the steady accumulation of new research data supporting my original contentions. The latest studies are reporting that independent reading can have positive impacts on learning, but that these payoffs take a very long time to manifest and are quite small (Eklund & Torpa, in press). Studies are also showing that reading achievement has a decidedly bigger impact on motivation than the other way around (Hebbecker, Förster, & Souvignier, 2019). Teacher question: You have attacked DEAR time [Drop Everything and Read] because you say it does little to raise reading achievement. But what about having kids read on their own as a way to motivate them to be readers? As a teacher I want my kids to be lifelong readers, so I provide 20 minutes of daily independent reading time. What do you think?
Shanahan response:

I think you sound like a nice teacher, but perhaps not a particularly effective one.

As you remind me, the effects of DEAR, SSR, SQUIRT or any of the other "independent reading time" schemes are tiny when it comes to reading achievement. Many of those studies have not been particularly well done, but even when they have been the learning payoffs have been tiny.

Surprising to me is that this pattern holds even with summer reading programs - which should be the clearest test of the power of such reading (since recreational reading isn't replacing other academic activities during a school day). James Kim has studied that kind of thing a lot and while he concludes that some very small learning benefits can be derived from such programs, he has had a lot of difficulty obtaining even those result from study to study.

Unfortunately, the motivational impact of such procedures has been studied less-and with even less payoff. In my experience, the better readers enjoy the free reading time-so they continue to like reading even within a DEAR time framework-but the other kids don't enjoy it much since they don't read very well. Yikes!

I definitely understand the logic that you are working with-I believed in it as a classroom teacher. The idea that kids practicing independent reading would make them want to be independent readers in the future seemed compelling at the time. But when you think deeply about the practice, its problems become more evident.

How do kids perceive these practices? I know one program that requires kids to read 45 minutes per day on their own at school and another 45 minutes at home. This doesn't seem particularly "independent" since it is mandated and I'm not sure that kids see this as being qualitatively different than the more circumscribed reading assignments in traditional textbooks. So what is it that distinguishes so-called independent reading from other classroom assignments?
1. Whether the reading is going to be done or not.
If the teacher makes me read for the next half hour, that doesn't seem particularly "independent." She might let me choose the text I read, and she doesn't make herself available to provide assistance, but what if I'd rather not read at all or would prefer reading during math class? Now that would be independent. Required reading time - even when it does not include much teaching - isn't inherently motivational for everyone (studies show reading motivation to be closely linked to how well kids can read and their home background). Making somebody do something may accomplish compliance, but compliance doesn't necessarily contribute to motivation. (As they say, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him take a bath.)
2. Whether the reader picks the text.
This one is a bit easier. In fact, many experts talk about "self-selected" reading rather than independent reading, since book choice may be the only agency students are allowed in these routines. Lots of times the unmotivated kids still can't find anything they want to read, and, of course, there are complications. Many teachers/schools constrain these "free choices," such as only allowing students to read books at particular levels ( à la Accelerated Reader). If I can choose only books with blue dots, then my choices are decidedly constrained; and if I'm not particularly interested in reading about any topic, then choice wouldn't be much of a motivator. (Someone I know is fascinated with tennis. I once bought him a book about tennis, sure he'd love it. Instead he was a real pill: "I love playing tennis, not reading about it." There is an important motivational lesson there.)
3. How accountable is the reading? Do I have to answer the teachers' questions? Or write a summary to be evaluated? Or read a segment aloud so the teacher can check on my fluency? Or discuss this with the book club group and not look like an idiot?
As research accumulated exposing the lack of learning from unaccountable reading (e.g., DEAR, SSR), teachers started adopting procedures for conferencing with kids about their books. In other words, they are trying to make independent reading more like reading lessons - we'll determine the levels of the texts that you will be allowed to read and you must prove you read the material and understood it; not exactly how most of us use our free time. My point isn't that such accountability is bad - au contraire - but certainly doesn't seem particularly well-aligned with the idea of fostering a love or reading.

See what I mean? The logic of requiring kids to read for enjoyment doesn't seem as brilliant as it may have at first blush.

What does motivate us? I've read a lot of that literature on motivation and being required to do something never comes up as a powerful stimulator of lifelong desire; though self-control does. Being sent off to do something on one's own has not been found to entice kids (it can feel isolating) but working cooperatively with others has. Being engaged in activities that provide a sense of accomplishment or fulfillment may contributed to a lifelong love of literacy, but how much accomplishment or fulfillment do you think most of the poorer readers get from such "independent reading"?

If you don't want kids to love reading, then focus on motivation rather than learning. Instead of providing explicit teaching and stimulating group discussions, require that they choose books by F&P levels, read them on their own, and punctuate this supposedly motivational routine occasionally with one-on-one conferencing. (Not surprisingly, the extensive scientific literature on motivation doesn't entertain such practices as being likely to stimulate motivation).

But if you really want kids to love reading, teach them to read. Achievement does more for motivation than the other way around. Set up opportunities for kids to work together and with you around books. Encourage them to include reading in their daily live away from school. If you want them to care about books, give them a chance to take on books that may be too hard for them, but that they think to be worth the effort. Give them ways to gain social rewards for using the knowledge they gain from their reading.

I appreciate your evident devotion to your students. I hope you care so much that you'll be willing to alter your methods to meet your very appropriate goals for them.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Does Independent Reading Time During the School Day Create Lifelong Readers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This discussion explores the benefits or lack of benefits of having kids read on their own during the school day. The effects of DEAR, SSR, SQUIRT or any of the other "independent reading time" schemes are tiny when it comes to reading achievement.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Abstract

There is intense public interest in questions surrounding how children learn to read and how they can best be taught. Research in psychological science has provided answers to many of these questions but, somewhat surprisingly, this research has been slow to make inroads into educational policy and practice. Instead, the field has been plagued by decades of "reading wars." Even now, there remains a wide gap between the state of research knowledge about learning to read and the state of public understanding. The aim of this article is to fill this gap. We present a comprehensive tutorial review of the science of learning to read, spanning from children's earliest alphabetic skills through to the fluent word recognition and skilled text comprehension characteristic of expert readers. We explain why phonics instruction is so central to learning in a writing system such as English. But we also move beyond phonics, reviewing research on what else children need to learn to become expert readers and considering how this might be translated into effective classroom practice. We call for an end to the reading wars and recommend an agenda for instruction and research in reading acquisition that is balanced, developmentally informed, and based on a deep understanding of how language and writing systems work.

Learning to read transforms lives. Reading is the basis for the acquisition of knowledge, for cultural engagement, for democracy, and for success in the workplace. Illiteracy costs the global economy more than $1 trillion (U.S. dollars) annually in direct costs alone ( World Literacy Foundation, 2015). The indirect costs are far greater because the failure to attain satisfactory literacy blocks people from acquiring basic knowledge, such as understanding information about hygiene, diet, or safety. Consequently, low literacy is a major contributor to inequality and increases the likelihood of poor physical and mental health, workplace accidents, misuse of medication, participation in crime, and welfare dependency, all of which also have substantial additional social and economic costs ( World Literacy Foundation, 2015). Low literacy presents a critical and persistent challenge around the world: Even in developed countries, it is estimated that approximately 20% of 15-year-olds do not attain a level of reading performance that allows them to participate effectively in life ( Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2016).

Not surprisingly, then, there has been intense public interest for decades in how children learn to read. This interest has often been realized in the form of vociferous argument over how children should be taught to read-a period of exchange that has become known as the "reading wars" (for reviews, see Kim, 2008; Pearson, 2004). Over many years, the pendulum has swung between arguments favoring a phonics approach, in which the sounds that letters make are taught explicitly ( Chall, 1967; Flesch, 1955), and a whole-language approach, which emphasizes the child's discovery of meaning through experiences in a literacy-rich environment ( Goodman, 1967; F. Smith, 1971). Most famously, Goodman (1967) characterized reading not as an analytic process but as a "psycholinguistic guessing game" in which readers use their graphic, semantic, and syntactic knowledge to guess the meaning of a printed word. More recently, a three-cueing approach (known as the Searchlight model in the United Kingdom) has become pervasive, in which beginning readers use semantic, syntactic, and "graphophonic" (letter-sound) cues simultaneously to formulate an intelligent hypothesis about a word's identity (for discussion, see Adams, 1998). Debate around these broad approaches has played out across the English-speaking world.

The beginnings of the reading wars go back more than 200 years, when Horace Mann (then the Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education) rallied against teaching the relationship between letters and sounds, referring to letters as "skeleton-shaped, bloodless, ghostly apparitions" and asserting "It is no wonder that the children look and feel so death-like, when compelled to face them" ( Adams, 1990, p. 22; see also Kim, 2008). It was standard practice at that time to teach children to read in such a way that they learned the links between letters and sounds explicitly. This practice goes back to the 16th century ( Hart, 1569/1969; Mulcaster, 1582), but it became especially popular through Noah Webster's "blue-backed spellers" (so called because of their blue binding) produced during the 18th and 19th centuries. In particular, The American Spelling Book ( Webster, 1787) was continuously republished over the following century and became one of the best-selling books of all time ( Kendall, 2012).

Today, research in psychological science spanning several decades has provided answers to many of the most important questions about reading. There is a rich literature documenting reading development and a large and diverse body of work on the cognitive processes that serve skilled reading in adults. Much of this evidence is highly relevant to the question of how reading should be taught and, pleasingly, it has been examined in comprehensive government reviews of reading instruction, including those conducted in the United States (e.g., the National Reading Panel, 2000), the United Kingdom (e.g., the Rose Review; Rose, 2006), and Australia (e.g., the Department of Education, Science and Training, or DEST; Rowe, 2005). These reviews have revealed a strong scientific consensus around the importance of phonics instruction in the initial stages of learning to read. The research underpinning this consensus was surveyed in an article published in this journal more than 15 years ago ( Rayner, Foorman, Perfetti, Pesetsky, & Seidenberg, 2001). Yet this research has been slow to make inroads into public policy. Although some progress has been made relatively recently, most notably in the United Kingdom, there remains a very wide gap between the state of research knowledge about learning to read and the state of understanding in the public and in professional domains. Further, even where there is strong national guidance around reading instruction, implementation often devolves to the local level and is influenced by variations and biases in teacher training (see, e.g., Buckingham, Wheldall, & Beaman-Wheldall, 2013; Seidenberg, 2017).

The quality and scope of the scientific evidence today means that the reading wars should be over. But strong debate and resistance to using methods based on scientific evidence persists (see, e.g., Moats, 2007; Seidenberg, 2017). Why should this be the case? We believe that there have been two major limitations in the presentations of the scientific evidence in the public and professional domains. The first limitation is that, although there have been many reviews describing the strength of the evidence for phonics instruction (e.g., Rose, 2006), it is more difficult to find an accessible tutorial review explaining why phonics works. Our experience is that once the nature of the writing system is understood, the importance of phonics instruction in the initial stages of learning to read becomes obvious.

The second limitation is that there has not been a full presentation of evidence in a public forum about reading instruction that goes beyond the use of phonics. It is uncontroversial among reading scientists that coming to appreciate the relationship between letters and sounds is necessary and nonnegotiable when learning to read in alphabetic writing systems and that this is most successfully achieved through phonics instruction. Yet reading scientists, teachers, and the public know that reading involves more than alphabetic skills. To become confident, successful readers, children need to learn to recognize words and compute their meanings rapidly without having to engage in translation back to sounds. Therefore, it is important to understand how children progress to this more advanced form of word recognition and how teaching practice can support this. In addition, reading comprehension clearly entails more than the identification of individual words: Children are not literate if they cannot understand text. We believe that the relative absence of discussion of processes beyond phonics has contributed to ongoing resistance to the use of phonics in the initial stages of learning to read. That is, instead of showing how a foundation of phonic knowledge permits a child to understand and gain experience with text, this imbalance has allowed a characterization of phonics as "barking at print" (reading aloud robotically without understanding) to continue among educationalists (e.g., Davis, 2013; Samuels, 2007) and public figures (e.g., Rosen, 2012).

We aim in this review to address these important omissions. We define the goal of reading as being able to understand text-a task of immense complexity (see Box 1 for more detail on what we mean by reading)-and review what is known about how children achieve this goal. We then consider how reading should be taught to best support its development. Our article is structured in three major parts, spanning from children's early experiences of mapping letters to sounds to the fluent text processing characteristic of expert readers. In the first part, we explain why cracking the alphabetic code is so central to learning to read in alphabetic writing systems such as English and why it forms the foundation for all that comes later. Our central message here is that that the writing system matters. Although our review focuses primarily on reading in alphabetic systems, by providing a detailed account of the structure of different writing systems and the way in which they systematically map onto oral language, we aim to demystify the evidence about learning to read. In doing so, we hope to provide our readers with deep insight as to why particular teaching methods support initial reading acquisition.

In the second part, we move beyond alphabetic skills, reviewing the latest research on the acquisition of fluent word-recognition skills. Here, our central message is that experience matters. Children's experiences in reading are often subsumed under terms such as print exposure. However, to understand fully how children become skilled word readers, we need to unpack these terms and capture in much greater detail the rich and wide-ranging reading experiences that children have and how these experiences interact with their knowledge at different points in learning.

In the final section, we move to text comprehension. Here, our key message is that reading comprehension is multifaceted. To understand its complexities, we need to consider the range of linguistic and cognitive processes that are implicated in text comprehension and appreciate how these depend on children's knowledge, as well as features of the text itself and the purpose and goals of the reading situation.

At the end of each major section, we consider the implications of the science we have reviewed for the classroom and address controversies surrounding the teaching of these different aspects of reading. We note here that our focus is on typical reading development and on effective instruction in standard classroom settings. The extensive and important body of work on the complex needs of children with various kinds of learning difficulties is beyond our scope. Our aim, rather, is to provide our readers with the scientific background they need to promote best practice in the classroom and so minimize the proportion of children who struggle with reading as a result of nonoptimal teaching, or "instructional casualties " ( Lyon, 2005).

1. Cracking the Alphabetic Code

If a child is exposed to a rich spoken-language environment, that child will almost certainly learn to understand and produce spoken language. As Pinker (2009) puts it, "there is almost no way to prevent it from happening, short of raising a child in a barrel" (p. 29). The same cannot be said for reading. Although reading is a heritable trait ( Olson, Keenan, Byrne, & Samuelsson, 2014), influenced by multiple genes interacting with environmental factors in complex ways, it is nevertheless a learned skill that typically requires years of instruction and practice. When children begin to learn to read, they usually already have relatively sophisticated spoken-language skills, including knowledge of the meanings of many spoken words. The challenge of reading is to learn to associate arbitrary visual symbols-patterns of lines, curves, and dots-with those meanings. It is difficult for a skilled reader with perhaps decades of practice to appreciate the scale of this challenge. Although a child might be able to memorize the shapes or distinguishing features of a handful of words (e.g., yellow has "two sticks in the middle"; Seymour & Elder, 1986), the high confusability of written language together with limitations on memory means that this strategy would be very unlikely to scale up to a full vocabulary. Instead, children need to learn to analyze the printed forms of words and map these onto meaning. Precisely how they might most easily accomplish this depends on the nature of the writing system, so we turn now to considering the world's writing systems and how they are structured.

Writing is a recent cultural invention, and writing systems vary substantially in how their visual symbols represent spoken language. All writing systems are a kind of code for spoken language, and learning to read requires children to crack how the code works for their language. Once this is understood, children have the means to access their rich spoken-language knowledge from print. The code that children must learn varies across different languages. Indeed, for languages that have more than one script (e.g., Japanese), children may need to learn more than one code, as these scripts may map onto spoken language in different ways. There are three major categories of writing system: alphabetic (in which symbols represent individual sounds or phonemes; e.g., English), syllabic (in which symbols represent whole syllables; e.g., Japanese Hiragana), and morphophonetic (in which symbols represent elements of both meaning and sound; e.g., Chinese). This latter class of writing system is sometimes referred to as logographic. There are also variations within these broad categories; for example, an abjad is an alphabetic writing system that represents the consonants of spoken language but not many of the vowels (e.g., Hebrew; for a description of writing systems associated with 131 languages, see Chang, Chen, & Perfetti, 2018).

There are many reasons why particular writing systems emerge for particular languages: Political influences, invasions, nationalism, and missionary activities have all contributed to the nature of writing around the world (for historical information about particular writing systems, see, e.g., Ager, 2018; Kamusella, 2009). However, one interesting idea, developed by Katz and Frost (1992), that is worthy of further study is that particular writing systems may be more suitable for individual languages than others-indeed, that "most languages get the orthography they deserve" (p. 67). For example, spoken Mandarin Chinese is characterized by a small number of syllables and consequently by a high number of homophones, or words with different meanings but pronounced the same way. A troublesome instance of this is the word si, which means both the number 4 and death, which is why it is quite common for hotels in China to skip from the third floor to the fifth floor. If Chinese were written using an alphabet (particularly an alphabet with a one-to-one mapping between letters and sounds), then the ambiguity in the spoken language would be mirrored in the written language, leading to many homographs, or words with different meanings spelled in exactly the same way. The development of Chinese characters to communicate the spoken language prevents some of this ambiguity. In contrast, Katz and Frost (1992) argue that Indo-European languages such as English are characterized by less homophony and a larger number of much more complex syllables. The use of an alphabet in these cases permits the spoken language to be communicated visually with a relatively simple set of letters mapping to sounds ( Katz & Frost, 1992; see also Frost, 2012).

There have been decades of argument, often invoking pedagogical philosophy, over how children can best learn to associate the visual symbols of writing to spoken language. However, a crucial point is that the most appropriate way to learn this mapping is governed not by pedagogical philosophy but by the nature of the writing system the child needs to learn. In alphabetic systems, the phonemes of the language are represented by letters or groups of letters ( graphemes; e.g., b → /b/, ph → /f/). If a child learns to decode that symbol-to-sound relationship, then that child will have the ability to translate printed words into spoken language, thereby accessing information about meaning. In contrast, failing to appreciate the symbol-sound mapping in an alphabetic language would effectively turn reading acquisition into a paired-associate learning task, as the child attempts to memorize meanings for individual printed words. Although this strategy may be possible for a relatively small number of words, it is hard to imagine it scaling up to the tens of thousands of English words that adult readers can recognize ( Brysbaert, Stevens, Mandera, & Keuleers, 2016).

Indeed, one virtue of learning to read in an alphabetic system is that each learning experience can facilitate future learning. For example, learning the pronunciation of vet can help the child to learn other words, such as van and vow. This capacity for generalization is much more limited in Chinese. Chinese characters are built from phonetic and semantic components that can provide some basis for generalization (although the information in these components may have quite low reliability; Lü, 2017). However, there are many more of these components that must be memorized than is the case for an alphabetic system; estimates suggest that there are 895 phonetic components and 214 semantic components that give rise the 4,300 or so characters thought to be sufficient for full literacy ( Katz & Frost, 1992). Because of the difficulty and slow pace of learning characters through primary school, an alphabetic system for writing Chinese known as Pinyin was introduced in 1958. Pinyin instruction in Mainland China runs alongside the learning of Chinese characters in the early years of schooling and has been shown to facilitate reading achievement ( Lin et al., 2010).

Even among the alphabetic systems that are the focus of this article, there is substantial variation in their orthographic depth, or the transparency with which symbols (graphemes) represent sounds (phonemes). Shallow orthographies are characterized by a consistent relationship between graphemes and phonemes (e.g., Italian), whereas deep orthographies are characterized by substantial inconsistency in this relationship (e.g., English). Nevertheless, even in deep orthographies, pronunciation is still strongly governed by the spelling-sound relationship. To put this into quantitative terms, Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, and Ziegler (2001) estimated that approximately 80% of English monosyllables could be pronounced using a relatively small set of rules relating graphemes to phonemes. In the remaining 20% of cases, typically only one grapheme deviates from its most frequent pronunciation (e.g., pint, have, chef; see Section 1.4.2.2). However, most of the work on spelling-sound relationships has been conducted with monosyllables; researchers are only just beginning to consider spelling-sound relations in letter strings with more than one syllable (e.g., Ktori, Mousikou, & Rastle, 2018; Mousikou, Sadat, Lucas, & Rastle, 2017; Perry, Ziegler, & Zorzi, 2010).

Research on learning to read in English has often focused on the high degree of inconsistency in the relationship between spelling and sound (for discussion, see Share, 2008). However, it is important to recognize that this inconsistency can take a variety of forms, and this ultimately may have implications for reading instruction. English contains words with highly unusual spelling-sound relations, such as friend, yacht, aisle, and plaid, but there are also cases in which surrounding context can mitigate apparent spelling-sound inconsistency. For example, the vowel in wash appears unusual compared with cash, stash, and dash. However, this vowel pronunciation is shared with other words beginning with the letter w (e.g., want, wand, watt). Likewise, although the vowel pronunciation in thread is inconsistent with that in beach, leap, and seat, it is shared with other words ending with the letter d (e.g., bread, stead, dead). If these subregularities are taken into account, then the consistency of English spelling increases ( Kessler & Treiman, 2001). Further, as we discuss in Section 2.2.3, many spelling-sound inconsistencies arise because of the preservation of morphological regularities in printed words (e.g., magic vs. magician; Treiman & Bourassa, 2000).

Substantial research has been conducted to determine whether orthographic depth has an impact on reading acquisition in alphabetic writing systems. In the most ambitious study of this type, Seymour, Aro, and Erskine (2003) compared children's reading aloud of simple words and nonwords across 13 European languages at the end of the first year of schooling (including nonwords in addition to words in studies of reading acquisition is important, given that they permit an assessment of a child's decoding skills that is relatively independent of his or her existing word knowledge; see Section 1.4.2). Results showed a substantial impact of orthographic depth: Children reading in English lagged well behind those reading in languages with shallow orthographies (e.g., Finnish). However, it is difficult to draw firm conclusions about the impact of orthographic depth from cross-linguistic comparisons of this nature because of the differences in the age at which children begin schooling in different countries. In the data reported by Seymour et al. (2003), the English children were up to 2 years younger than those in the other groups at the point of testing, and there were probably also variations in the nature of reading instruction across the groups.

L. H. Spencer and Hanley (2004) were able to investigate orthographic depth in a natural experiment made possible by the schooling system in Wales at that time. The children could attend either Welsh-medium or English-medium schools. Welsh, in contrast to English, has a shallow orthography, but across the two types of school, the children started at the same age, had the same form of reading instruction, and were broadly equivalent in socioeconomic status. Results of reading-aloud tests conducted across three time points during the first year of reading instruction showed a dramatic benefit for the children learning to read in Welsh. These data indicate that orthographic depth has a substantial impact on acquiring spelling-sound knowledge in the initial stages of learning to read. However, we are unaware of any evidence that these initial gains as a result of shallow orthography translate to later advantages in reading comprehension. Further, although orthographic depth affects the time taken to learn the spelling-to-sound mapping, the cognitive factors underlying reading performance appear to be similar across different European languages ( Caravolas et al., 2012; Ziegler et al., 2010).

The nature of the writing system determines what will be required for children to make links between print and meaning, but it does not specify precisely how they do so. Therefore, we now turn to the rich body of work that has explored in detail how children's skills in alphabetic decoding develop-delineating what children initially bring to this complex task, how their knowledge changes over development, and the way in which their instructional experiences shape and modify their learning. We outline here just some key insights from this large body of work, providing references to reviews that expand on the theory and evidence in detail.

We have established that learning to read in an alphabetic writing system such as English requires the acquisition of the alphabetic principle-the insight that the visual symbols of the writing system (graphemes) represent the sounds of the language (phonemes). We have also established that virtually all children require at least some assistance in learning this principle. Foundational skills such as phonemic awareness and letter knowledge are key precursors to this alphabetic insight, and these skills and bodies of knowledge interact reciprocally in complex ways (for reviews, see Bowey, 2005; Hulme et al., 2012; Marinus & Castles, 2015). Once this initial insight is acquired, children acquire increasingly sophisticated skills in alphabetic decoding, moving in broad phases from partial to full decoding ability ( Ehri, 2017). In the next section, we consider the implications of these scientific findings for classroom instruction in relation to the initial periods of reading acquisition.

Some Myths About Phonics Instruction

2. Becoming a Skilled Word Reader

We have argued that cracking the alphabetic code is essential for learning to read and that assisting children to do so is a nonnegotiable part of teaching them to read. It is this initial knowledge of spelling-sound relationships that allows children to access the meanings of printed words and thus gain the text experience that is essential for the acquisition of higher-level reading skills. However, the acquisition of phonic knowledge is by no means all there is to learning to read, even at the single-word level. In our view, one of the impediments to the translation of research into teaching practice and to the resolution of the reading wars has been a relative lack of attention to aspects of reading acquisition that go beyond alphabetic decoding, which give rise to arguments that "reading is more than phonics." This is a statement of the obvious to any reading scientist. Yet such statements are often used in public debate to undermine the case for the use of phonics in the initial stages of learning to read. In this section, we discuss how children move beyond alphabetic decoding to develop the ability to recognize words accurately and with ease. We begin with a review of what is known about the word-reading system and how it operates in skilled readers, making the case for processes beyond alphabetic decoding.

We have discussed how the process of alphabetic decoding is essential for learning to read, but it is important to note that even skilled adult readers continue to use alphabetic decoding and phonological processes as a matter of routine. The most obvious evidence of this is that skilled readers can generalize: They can read not only words with which they are highly familiar but also new words that they have never seen before (or indeed nonwords, such as slint and vib). There is also substantial evidence that alphabetic decoding processes affect skilled readers' word recognition and comprehension ( Rayner, Schotter, Masson, Potter, & Treiman, 2014). One powerful demonstration of the impact of phonological decoding on skilled word recognition is the pseudohomophone effect. The letter strings feal and feep are both nonwords, but skilled readers find it more difficult to judge the former as not being a real word (see, e.g., Ziegler, Jacobs, & Klüppel, 2001). Both of these letter strings are different from the word feel by just one letter, so the only explanation for this result is that readers are translating the letter strings to sound. Likewise, participants who were asked to judge whether a printed word was a member of a particular semantic category made more false-positive errors in response to homophones of correct responses (e.g., responding that the word rows is a type of flower) than in response to similarly spelled control words (e.g., robs). This result indicates that the participants had translated rows into a phonological code, for only by doing so could they mistake this word for a type of flower. It is also important to note that the translation into a phonological code actually hurt performance in this task, but participants could not "turn off" that process. Further research suggests that this translation from spelling to sound occurs very rapidly in skilled readers and indeed is apparent even in cases in which participants are not aware that a stimulus has been presented (for reviews, see Rastle & Brysbaert, 2006; Leinenger, 2014).

Thus, skilled readers of alphabetic writing systems continue to draw on the systematic relations between letters and sounds when they read and understand words. These skills alone, however, are not sufficient for fluent word reading. A simple example serves to illustrate this point: Readers of this article will be able to reliably distinguish the meanings of the two printed words sail and sale, even if they are presented in isolation with no contextual support. Yet readers cannot achieve this via alphabetic decoding alone because it would produce exactly the same pronunciation for each word. They can also immediately recognize and understand irregular words such as have, come, and eye, despite the fact that they cannot reach the meanings of these words via alphabetic decoding alone (and, in the case of come, despite the fact that alphabetic decoding actually leads to an incorrect meaning, that of a hair implement). Such words would place heavy demands on a reading system reliant purely on alphabetic decoding, requiring extra time and effort and perhaps the harnessing of additional top-down support from oral vocabulary or sentence context. But there is no evidence that this is so for skilled word readers: They can recognize and identify highly familiar irregular words just as efficiently as they can regular ones ( Seidenberg, Waters, Barnes, & Tanenhaus, 1984).

These examples are taken from English, which is arguably an "outlier" orthography because of the high degree of inconsistency of its spelling-to-sound mappings ( Share, 2008; see Section 1.1). Maybe expert readers of shallow orthographies continue to read words primarily via alphabetic decoding? This does not appear to be the case. Alphabetic decoding is a process of mapping graphemes onto phonemes, and it has been argued that this is carried out in a serial, left-to-right manner ( Rastle & Coltheart, 1999, 2006; Rastle, Havelka, Wydell, Coltheart, & Besner, 2009). Therefore, if this process is being relied on, longer letter strings will be slower to read than shorter ones. For nonwords, which are unfamiliar to all readers and so must be read via alphabetic decoding, this is indeed the case: Long nonwords produce much longer reading latencies than short nonwords ( Weekes, 1997). However, when skilled readers are reading familiar words, length has little or no effect on their reading latencies, and this is the case in English orthography ( Weekes, 1997) and in a range of other orthographies, including Spanish, French, and German ( Acha & Perea, 2008; Juphard, Carbonnel, & Valdois, 2004; Ziegler, Perry, Jacobs, & Braun, 2001).

The fact that word reading involves more than just alphabetic decoding is reflected in all major theories of skilled reading. Theories of skilled reading are among the most elaborate and well-specified in the field of psychological science. Indeed, several have been expressed as computer programs known as computational models that describe the precise cognitive operations involved in visual word recognition and reading aloud (e.g., Coltheart et al., 2001; Harm & Seidenberg, 2004; Perry, Ziegler, & Zorzi, 2007, 2010; Plaut, Mcclelland, Seidenberg, & Patterson, 1996). Box 3 provides an introduction to these computational models, although our review is agnostic as to which provides the most successful account of skilled reading performance. The important point is that all of the models converge in that they represent two key cognitive processes in word reading: one that involves the translation of a word's spelling into its sound and then to meaning, and one that involves gaining access to meaning directly from the spelling, without the requirement to do so via phonology.

Computational Models of Reading

That these two broad mechanisms should emerge in readers of alphabetic orthographies makes perfect sense: Together, they allow optimal processing of words across the full spectrum from being new and unfamiliar to a reader, where alphabetic decoding is critical, to highly familiar, where direct access to meaning is more efficient ( Share, 2008). Regardless of the particular orthography being read, it appears that a direct pathway from print to meaning is preferred for familiar words, most probably because the alphabetic decoding mechanism is slow, attention demanding ( Besner, Reynolds, & O'Malley, 2009; Paap & Noel, 1991), and therefore not optimal for supporting the fast and efficient word reading that characterizes skilled readers. This dual-pathway architecture for deriving meaning from printed words is also apparent in the neural implementation of the reading system, as described in Box 4.

The Neural Bases of Reading

In summary, cognitive models converge in representing the fluent reading of familiar words as proceeding directly from print to meaning, without the requirement for alphabetic decoding. Knowing this is important because it maps out for us what the child needs to learn to become a skilled word reader and what the ultimate goal of educational instruction should be. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that knowledge of how the skilled system works is all that is needed to inform instruction. On the contrary, the assumption that the endpoint of learning to read determines how it should be taught was precisely the error made by theorists such as Goodman (1967). These theorists observed rapid construction of meaning for texts in skilled adult readers and concluded that instruction should focus on these skills. But such a conclusion is analogous to observing skilled concert pianists and concluding that piano instruction should involve putting a child in front of a Tchaikovsky score. The missing piece of the puzzle here is how these processes develop in children, so we turn now to reviewing the science on this question.

As children progress toward becoming skilled readers, their heavy reliance on alphabetic decoding gradually decreases ( Doctor & Coltheart, 1980; Harm & Seidenberg, 2004; Zoccolotti et al., 2005). That is, children make the transition from being "novices," reading words primarily via alphabetic decoding, to "experts," recognizing familiar written words rapidly and automatically, mapping their spellings directly to their meanings without recourse to decoding, a process we have referred to as orthographic learning ( Castles & Nation, 2006; Nation & Castles, 2017). It is important to note that phonological processes still exert an influence on reading at this point, but they do so in a less overt way. For example, from as young as 7 years old, children reading sentences process nonwords that sound like words (e.g., gerl) more efficiently than control nonwords (e.g., garl). This shows that even in children's silent reading, phonological processing is at play (e.g., Blythe, Pagán, & Dodd, 2015; Jared, Ashby, Agauas, & Levy, 2016).

Orthographic learning is an umbrella term that encompasses both the acquisition of the word-specific knowledge required to access a particular word's meaning from print and also the accumulation of more general knowledge about orthographic regularities within the writing system (for example, in English, double letters such as "ll" tend to appear at the ends of words but not the beginnings; Cassar & Treiman, 1997; Pacton, Perruchet, Fayol, & Cleeremans, 2001). In the sections below, we explore what is known about this important, but less well understood, aspect of reading acquisition.

We have reviewed the evidence that expert readers can gain access to the meanings of many words directly from their printed forms and that reading progress is characterized by a gradual transition from a profile of reading words primarily via alphabetic decoding to one of heavy reliance on this direct mechanism. Acquiring knowledge of morphological regularities is an important part of this transition, allowing the child to capitalize on systematic mappings between spelling and meaning. The process by which this transition from novice to expert word reader occurs is complex, and many questions remain. However, it is clear that reading experience matters. Exposure to print provides the dynamic database from which children can accumulate detailed orthographic knowledge, supported by a foundation of alphabetic decoding skill.

What, then, are the implications for teaching? What can be done in an educational setting to promote this transition? The answers to these questions are less straightforward than in the case of phonics and alphabetic decoding. In the next section, we consider some of the misunderstandings and controversies in relation to teaching fluent word-reading skills, and we provide guidance based on the implications of the scientific research.

3. Learning to Comprehend Text

Children need to be able to identify the majority of words contained in a written text if they are to comprehend it. Clearly, however, text comprehension requires much more than the capacity to identify and read individual words. Indeed, these simple but important insights are the basis of the highly influential Simple View of Reading ( Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990; for a discussion, see Box 5).

The Simple View of Reading

A glance back to Box 1 reminds us that reading comprehension is complex, even for a simple two-sentence text. The multifaceted nature of reading comprehension means that no single unified model or account details all that happens as a person reads a text, let alone how a child develops the capacity to understand written language. In its broadest sense, understanding comprehension requires us to describe how people construct meaning from information in their environment-a huge topic that is not restricted to written language and that is well beyond the scope of this article. Instead, we will constrain our review to key factors that influence the development of reading comprehension and those aspects of the literature that are most relevant for teaching and classroom practice.

As for word reading (see Section 2.1), much is known about the processes involved in reading comprehension in skilled adult readers. The sentence processing literature is rich and extensive, much of it informed by experiments that monitor eye movements as people read text silently (for review, see Rayner et al., 2016). Complementing this is the large discourse processing literature (for review, see Schober, Rapp, & Britt, 2018). Alongside eye-movement studies that monitor reading as it happens on-line, much has been learned using methods that probe comprehension off-line-that is, after the material has been read. Standard paradigms for this include probing memory for text or asking participants comprehension questions after they have read a passage. This evidence base from adults is important because it identifies what needs to develop, so we begin by summarizing some findings from this literature (for detailed reviews, see Kintsch, 1998; Kintsch & Rawson, 2005; McNamara & Magliano, 2009; O'Brien, Cook, & Lorch, 2015; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998). Another important point to note at the outset is that many of the cognitive operations involved in reading comprehension are not specific to reading, but serve language comprehension more generally.

There is general consensus that as people read, they construct a mental representation of the situation being described by the text, linking information from the text with relevant background knowledge. The product of comprehension is not a verbatim record of what has been read, replicating its form and structure; instead, meaning emerges from the formation of a situation model (e.g., Kintsch, 1998; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998) that builds dynamically as people read, culminating in a rich representation of the text that goes beyond what is stated explicitly. The foundation of the situation model is delivered by incremental analysis of words and their syntactic roles in phrases or sentences. This connects with knowledge drawn either from information provided explicitly in the text or from readers' relevant background knowledge. Knowledge is broadly conceived and may include information such the meanings of words, rules of grammar, knowledge of events and temporal relations, episodes, scenarios, emotions, and characters. Inferences need to be made beyond what is overtly stated to establish meaning within and between sentences and need to draw on background knowledge (see Box 1, in which we infer that Denise was in a car and on her way to work). Good evidence suggests that important aspects of reading comprehension and inference generation happen automatically, but readers can also deploy strategies to support comprehension (for relevant discussion, see Cook & O'Brien, 2015). Together, these allow people to construct meaning actively as they read, adapting their strategies and focus according to the properties of the text (e.g., its difficulty) and their goals (e.g., reading for pleasure versus reading for study).

In summary, reading comprehension is not a single entity that can be explained by a unified cognitive model. Instead, it is the orchestrated product of a set of linguistic and cognitive processes operating on text and interacting with background knowledge, features of the text, and the purpose and goals of the reading situation.

Having set out some of the steps involved in skilled reading comprehension, we turn to consider what might be important for its development. By the time children learn to read, they already have a sophisticated language system that allows them to produce and comprehend oral language; this oral language system continues to develop during the primary school years. This system and the linguistic knowledge derived from it serve reading comprehension, once children can read for themselves. As we shall see, oral language sets a vital foundation for reading comprehension and its development.

Perfetti and Stafura's (2014) Reading Systems Framework identifies three constructs that underpin reading comprehension. The first is concerned with knowledge, be it linguistic knowledge, orthographic knowledge, or general knowledge. The second describes processes involved in reading, in which they include decoding, word identification, meaning retrieval, sentence parsing, inferring, and comprehension monitoring, along with the interaction of these processes with each other, and with knowledge. The third factor captures general cognitive resources such as memory. All of these factors matter. Consider, for example, poor comprehenders-children who read words at age-appropriate levels but have difficulty understanding what they have read (or heard-listening comprehension also tends to be low). A common research strategy is to compare the performance of poor comprehenders and skilled comprehenders on a particular task hypothesized to be relevant to explaining individual differences in reading comprehension. Broadly speaking, poor comprehenders show weaknesses on measures that tap all three of Perfetti and Stafura's constructs-knowledge, processes implicated in reading, and general cognitive factors (for review, see Nation, 2005; Oakhill, Cain, & Elbro, 2014). Importantly however, no "magic profile" captures why an individual child might struggle. Given the complexities of comprehension, this is perhaps not surprising: As Perfetti (1994) notes, "there is room for lots of things to go wrong when comprehension fails" (p. 885).

Another important lesson from the literature on poor comprehenders is that even when a group-level difference is seen on a particular task, it does not follow that the factor manipulated in that task is the underlying cause or explanation for the reading comprehension problem. Although knowledge, processing, and general cognitive factors are ostensibly separable, the reality is that they are difficult to disentangle, as Perfetti and Stafura (2014) recognize. For example, how well a child knows a word influences how efficiently it is processed, and this, in turn, influences the demands placed on general resources such as working memory (defined as the mechanisms or processes involved in the control, regulation, and active maintenance of task-relevant information in the service of complex cognition; Baddeley, 2012). Thus, a group difference in working memory might be observed for verbal information, but this might not reflect a memory problem per se; it might be a consequence of differences in vocabulary knowledge. Low vocabulary constrains comprehension, as we discuss shortly, but low knowledge itself might be a consequence of differences in processing. For example, children who struggle to generate inferences are less able to use context to discover the meaning of new words ( Cain, Oakhill, & Lemmon, 2004), and this might lead to differences in vocabulary knowledge over time, as children get older. Thus, not only is comprehension multifaceted (i.e., the factors interact in multiple ways during the process of reading), it is also complex developmentally. With this complexity in mind, we now discuss what is needed to bring about effective reading comprehension, guided by our brief overview of the processes involved in reading comprehension and the principles set out by the Reading Systems Framework ( Perfetti & Stafura, 2014).

The Reading Systems Framework ( Perfetti & Stafura, 2014) helps set out the complexities of reading comprehension and how this interfaces with the word-reading system. Word recognition and high-quality lexical knowledge provide the necessary input to reading comprehension, but knowledge and processes beyond the individual word level are vital too. These aspects are not all specific to reading but are features of language comprehension more broadly. As we have noted, by the time children learn to read, they already have in place a sophisticated language system, setting the critical foundation for reading comprehension. Consistent with this, a range of oral language skills measured in preschool are closely associated with later reading comprehension, and this relationship continues through the primary school years (e.g., LARRC & Logan, 2017; Lervåg et al., 2017). Reading brings additional challenges-not just the need to learn how to read words but also the fact that written language has complexities that are less evident in conversational language ( Box 6). In the early years of reading development, reading comprehension is constrained by limitations in word-reading ability, for obvious reasons: comprehension will suffer if a child cannot read the words in a text. As word-reading skills strengthen, reading comprehension becomes constrained by limitations in knowledge and the capacity to build a rich and coherent representation of language, regardless of whether the language is heard or read (LARRC, 2015). This demands a range of spoken-language skills, often subsumed under the general construct of "listening comprehension" (see Box 5); in skilled readers, the correlation between listening comprehension and reading comprehension is almost perfect (e.g., Gernsbacher, Varner, & Faust, 1990).

Our key messages highlight the complex and multifaceted nature of reading comprehension and the associated difficulty of separating knowledge, processing, and general resources such as memory. High-quality knowledge promotes efficient processing, which places fewer demands on resources. Taking a developmental perspective adds further complexity as we try to explain why children might have difficulty with reading comprehension. What might start as a processing difference (e.g., the ease of word identification) might escalate to differences in knowledge (e.g., vocabulary), and vice versa. Undoubtedly, other factors beyond the scope of this review-such as motivation to read, attitudes about reading, or knowledge about reading for different purposes-also contribute in complex and important ways (for review, see Willingham, 2017a).

Our review has made clear that reading comprehension is complex and multifaceted. Its foundation is in language more generally, but written language presents additional challenges for the reader, including but not limited to the need to identify and recognize printed words. We have described how comprehension comes about through the interaction of knowledge (e.g., vocabulary, background knowledge), processes that operate on text (e.g., meaning activation, inference generation), and general cognitive factors (e.g., working memory). With this as a backdrop, we consider implications for the classroom.

The appreciation that reading comprehension is a complex construct leads quickly to the realization that improving reading comprehension is unlikely to be simple. The literature on reading comprehension instruction is vast, and its methodological quality varies. We focus on some key messages here because a comprehensive review is beyond the scope of this article. Fortunately, however, some of the literature has been expertly synthesized into accessible accounts and practical guides, including recent books by Oakhill et al. (2014), Stuart and Stainthorp (2015), and P. J. Clarke, Truelove, Hulme, and Snowling (2013).

Understanding that reading comprehension is complex and multifaceted is relevant for thinking about assessment and effective instruction. The foundation of reading comprehension is provided by oral language: Vocabulary, grammar, and narrative skills at school entry and beyond predict later reading comprehension (e.g., LARRC & Logan, 2017; Lervåg et al., 2017). Even before children can read, interventions that target oral language lead to improvements in reading comprehension ( Fricke, Bowyer-Crane, Haley, Hulme, & Snowling, 2013). This is an important observation and underlines the idea that not all teaching to improve reading comprehension needs to involve written text. While children are focusing on the discovery of the alphabetic principle and learning to read words, for example, instruction in oral language will bring about gains in knowledge and enhance the processing skills that will subsequently serve reading comprehension. Given that language proficiency at school entry varies enormously (e.g., Norbury et al., 2016), some children will need extensive language support.

Comprehension strategies can be taught, and evidence suggests that they can be learned quickly and applied to new reading material after relatively little instruction. More evidence is needed to identify which strategies should be taught, when, and for how long. While strategy instruction might be quick, the acquisition of knowledge is gradual and continuous. This can be assisted by direct teaching and using structured materials that support the curriculum; ultimately, however, it relies on rich input, much of which will come from reading experience itself (e.g., Hirsch, 2016). We discussed earlier the value of reading experience and the need to motivate children to read more (Section 2.4.2). We repeat that message here-teaching children to read and then providing opportunities for varied, extensive, and successful reading experience is fundamental.

4. Conclusions

We commenced this review by asking why the reading wars have continued. Despite extensive scientific evidence, accumulated over decades, for the centrality of alphabetic decoding skills as a foundation of learning to read, there remains resistance to using phonics instruction methods in the classroom. We suggested that two factors may have contributed to this resistance. First, limited knowledge about the nature of writing systems among many practitioners means that they are not equipped to understand why phonics works for alphabetic systems. Second, practitioners know that there is more to reading than alphabetic skills, but a full presentation of the scientific evidence in relation to these more advanced aspects of reading acquisition in a public interest forum has been lacking; as a result, calls for a greater focus on phonics instruction can seem unbalanced.

We have sought to address both of these issues by providing a comprehensive tutorial review on the science of learning to read that spans from foundational alphabetic skills right through to the sophisticated set of processes that characterize skilled reading comprehension. We have attempted throughout to explain not just the whats of the evidence, but also the whys, so that practitioners are in a position to make informed judgments about how the evidence we have presented might be translated into effective classroom practice. Emerging from these explanations are three central messages in relation to each of the major aspects of reading acquisition we have reviewed: that the writing system matters, that experience matters, and that the ultimate goal of reading-comprehension-is not a unitary construct but a multifaceted process. Given its breadth, our review is of course limited in detail; in Box 7, we make recommendations on further reading suitable for practitioners that covers many of these issues in depth.

Recommended Further Reading for Practitioners and Parents

What then, are the broad implications of our review for developing instructional principles and for setting an agenda for ongoing research in reading acquisition? One clear message is that teaching and research must be informed by a detailed knowledge of the writing system being learned and of the broader language system it represents. In relation to teaching, teacher training programs are doing future educators a huge disservice if they do not equip them with this knowledge. There appears to be a long way to go: Evidence from studies across a range of countries suggests that teacher knowledge in these areas is typically very limited (see, e.g., Aro & Björn, 2016; Fielding-Barnsley, 2010; Hurry et al., 2005; Moats, 2009). In relation to research, much remains to be learned about how children acquire more sophisticated knowledge about the structure of their writing system and the way in which it represents sound and meaning, particularly for morphologically complex and polysyllabic words. Questions about the development of text comprehension also remain.

A second broad implication of our review is the need to get the balance right in setting the agenda for instruction, and for future research. The term balanced literacy is in widespread use, often to describe programs with "a bit of everything" and typically involving limited and nonsystematic phonics instruction (see P. Snow, 2017). This is unfortunate because it is clear from our review that many different factors come together to produce a child who reads fluently for meaning and that instruction needs to consider all of them. In our view, it would be valuable to reclaim a term such as balanced instruction and recast it in a more nuanced way that is informed by a deep understanding of how reading develops. The guiding principle here would be that although there are many different aspects of reading that must be learned-alphabetic decoding, fluent word reading, text comprehension-this does not mean that instructional time should be devoted equally to all of them at all points in reading acquisition. Rather, instructional regimens to support these various abilities are likely to be most effective at particular points in development, and limited teaching time should be structured to reflect this. For example, detailed instruction in morphological regularities or strategies for text comprehension is unlikely to produce maximum benefits before children have mastered basic alphabetic decoding skills. From a research perspective, there is much to be learned about the time-course of acquisition of different reading skills and how they interact with each other and with the knowledge they depend on and produce. Further research is needed to produce a developmentally informed and balanced literacy instruction program, well-placed to prevent instructional casualties ( Lyon, 2005).

In conclusion, the state of the science of learning to read was reviewed comprehensively in this journal more than 15 years ago ( Rayner, Foorman, Perfetti, Pesetsky, & Seidenberg, 2001). It is thus surprising and concerning that the reading wars continue. It is our hope that this review will contribute to ending these wars, so that a further examination of the status of this debate 15 years hence will not be required.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to our editors, reviewers, and many others who provided helpful feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript, including Max Coltheart, Saskia Kohnen, Rauno Parrila, Charles Perfetti, Valerie Reyna, Roddy Roediger, Elizabeth Schotter, Maggie Snowling, Rhona Stainthorp, Rebecca Treiman, and Hua-Chen Wang. We also gratefully acknowledge research assistance support from Megan Bird, Benedetta Cevoli, Nardeen Massoud, and Julianne Pascoe.

Notes

References

Aro, M., Björn, P. M. (2016). Preservice and inservice teachers' knowledge of language constructs in Finland. Annals of Dyslexia, 66, 111-126. |
Google Scholar Crossref | Medline

Baayen, R. H. (2010). Demythologizing the word frequency effect: A discriminative learning perspective. Mental Lexicon, 5, 436-461.
Google Scholar

Baayen, R. H., Piepenbrock, R., Van Rijn, H. (1993). The CELEX Lexical Database [CD-ROM]. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania.
Google Scholar

Baines, L. (1996). From page to screen: When a novel is interpreted for film, what gets lost in the translation? Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 39, 612-622. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40015652
Google Scholar

Brown, M. (2017 August 27) Flybraries [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20170829052440/https://interlibnet.org/2017/08/27/flybraries
Google Scholar

Brysbaert, M., Stevens, M., Mandera, P., Keuleers, E. (2016). How many words do we know? Practical estimates of vocabulary size dependent on word definition, the degree of language input and the participant's age. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1116. doi: |
Google Scholar Crossref | Medline

Buckingham, J., Wheldall, K., Beaman-Wheldall, R. (2013). Why Jaydon can't read: The triumph of ideology over evidence in teaching reading. Policy, 29(3), 21-32.
Google Scholar

Casalis, S., Quémart, P., Duncan, L. G. (2015). How language affects children's use of derivational morphology in visual word and pseudoword processing: Evidence from a cross-language study. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, Article 452. doi: |
Google Scholar Crossref

Clarke, A. (2012, July 31). Teaching sight words [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.spelfabet.com.au/2012/07/teaching-sight-words
Google Scholar

Compton, D. L., Miller, A. C., Elleman, A. M., Steacy, L. M. (2014). Have we forsaken reading theory in the name of "quick fix" interventions for children with reading disability? Scientific Studies of Reading, | 18, 55-73. doi:
Google Scholar Crossref

Deacon, S. H., Whalen, R., Kirby, J. R. (2011). Do children see the | danger in dangerous? Grade 4, 6, and 8 children's reading of morphologically complex words. Applied Psycholinguistics, 32, 467-481. doi:
Google Scholar Crossref

Ehri, L. C. (1999). Phases of development in learning to read words. In Oakhill, J., Beard, R. (Eds.), Reading, development and the teaching of reading: A psychological perspective (pp. 79-108). Oxford, England: Blackwell Science.
Google Scholar

Eilers, S., Tiffin-Richards, S. P., Schroeder, S. (2018). The repeated name penalty effect in children's natural reading: Evidence from eye tracking. | Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. Advance online publication. doi:
Google Scholar SAGE Journals

Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 , Pub. L. No. 114-95 § 114 Stat. 1177 (2015-2016).
Google Scholar

Hart, J. (1969). An orthographie. Menston, England: The Scolar Press. (Original work published 1569).
Google Scholar

Hoover, W., Gough, P. (1990). The simple view of reading. Reading | and Writing, 2, 127-160. doi:
Google Scholar Crossref

Hua, A. N., Keenan, J. M. (2014). The role of text memory in inferencing and in comprehension deficits. | Scientific Studies of Reading, 18, 415-431. doi:
Google Scholar Crossref

Hulme, C., Bowyer-Crane, C., Carroll, J. M., Duff, F. J., Snowling, M. J. (2012). The causal role of phoneme awareness and letter-sound knowledge in learning to read: Combining intervention studies with mediation analyses. Psychological Science, 23, 572. doi: |
Google Scholar SAGE Journals

Johnston, R., Watson, J. (2004). Accelerating the development of reading, spelling and phonemic awareness skills in initial readers. Reading | and Writing, 17, 327-357. doi:
Google Scholar Crossref

Lervåg, A., Hulme, C., Melby-Lervåg, M. (2017). Unpicking the developmental relationship between oral language skills and reading comprehension: It's simple, but complex. Child Development. Advance online publication. doi: |
Google Scholar Crossref

Liberman, A. M., Cooper, F. S., Shankweiler, D. P., Studdert-Kennedy, M. (1967). Perception of the speech code. Psychological Review, 74, 431-461.
Google Scholar

Liberman, I. Y., Shankweiler, D., Fischer, F. W., Carter, B. (1974). Explicit syllable and phoneme segmentation in the young child. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 18, 201-212. |
Google Scholar Crossref | ISI

MacDonald, M. C., Christiansen, M. H. (2002). Reassessing working memory: Comment on Just and Carpenter (1992) and Waters and Caplan (1996). Psychological Review, 109, 35-54. doi:
Google Scholar

Marinus, E., Castles, A. (2015). Precursors to reading: Phonological awareness and letter knowledge. In Bavin, E., Naigles, L. (Eds.), Handbook of child language (2nd ed., pp. 661-680). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. |
Google Scholar Crossref

Martin, A., Schurz, M., Kronbichler, M., Richlan, F. (2015). Reading in the brain of children and adults: A meta-analysis of 40 functional magnetic resonance imaging studies. Human Brain Mapping, 36, 1963-1981.
Google Scholar

Melby-Lervåg, M., Lyster, S. A., Hulme, C. (2012). Phonological skills and their role in learning to read: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 138, 322-352.
Google Scholar

Moats, L. C. (2007). Whole-language high jinks: How to tell when "scientifically-based reading instruction" isn't. Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Retrieved from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED498005.pdf
Google Scholar

Mulcaster, R. (1582). Elementarie. London, England: T. Vautroullier. Retrieved from http://ota.ox.ac.uk/text/3176.html
Google Scholar

National Reading Panel . (2000). Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction (NIH Publication No. 00-4769). National Institute of Child Health & Development. Retrieved from https://www1.nichd.nih.gov/publications/pubs/nrp/Documents/report.pdf
Google Scholar

No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 , P.L. 107-110, 20 U.S.C. § 6319 (2002).
Google Scholar

Olson, D. R. (1977). From utterances to text: The bias of language in speech and writing. Harvard Educational Review, 47, 257-281. |
Google Scholar Crossref | ISI

Olson, D. R. (1996). Towards a psychology of literacy: On the relations between speech and

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition From Novice to Expert - Anne Castles, Kathleen Rastle, Kate Nation, 2018

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Abstract There is intense public interest in questions surrounding how children learn to read and how they can best be taught. Research in psychological science has provided answers to many of these questions but, somewhat surprisingly, this research has been slow to make inroads into educational policy and practice.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
More the same than different

Many of us assume that, because each child is a unique human being, every child learns to read in a different way. This widespread misconception causes unnecessary difficulty for teachers and for our students.

"It is simply not true that there are hundreds of ways to learn to read... when it comes to reading we all have roughly the same brain that imposes the same constraints and the same learning sequence." Dr. Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 2009

Understanding that each reader must master the same set of skills in order to comprehend text opens the door to a host of potential benefits:

Better understanding of how the reading brain works

Rethinking our teacher-training

Determining the cause of reading difficulty

Efficiently delivering effective instruction

Reevaluating our beliefs about student achievement

Teaching every child to read

Words of Wisdom from Dr. Wolf:
"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
Tolstoy began Anna Karenina with that famous line.
In our work, each happy reader is happy because they have learned the skills necessary to become a fully comprehending reader.
It may be tempting to assume each unhappy (struggling) reader is different, but each has been impeded by not having mastered some or many of the same basic skills.

Our Training Shapes Our Beliefs

As teachers, we need to understand how skilled readers decode a text and derive meaning from it. But coursework in teacher preparation programs instead prioritizes analyzing case studies, administering surveys of students' interests, and collecting observational data.

"The people who enter the field of education are being underserved by the authorities they have entrusted with their careers." Dr. Mark Seidenberg, Language at the Speed of Sight, 2017

We are taught to be attuned to each child individually and to value individualized instruction, but the research supporting our hyper-focus on differentiation is shaky at best. For example, some professional development emphasizes different "learning styles" (for more on this, see Learning Styles Don't Exist) and long-debunked theories about how reading works (for more on this, listen to At a Loss for Words).

We are encouraged to develop our own philosophies of effective reading instruction rather than learning the science behind skilled reading. And because we are trained to value observational data over valid, predictive, reliable assessments, it's difficult to be unbiased as we analyze the efficacy of our instruction.

Contrast our training with that of physicians: They first learn how humans are the same (e.g., basic anatomy), so as to identify well-documented and defined conditions that diverge from this. Only then do they learn how to apply this basic knowledge to the differences that can occur among individual patients.

Comparable training for teachers would include extensive study of the science that explains the teacher-training equivalent of basic anatomy - how all children learn to read.

Teachers Need to Know Every Child Learns to Read the Same Way

Every teacher should have a chance to learn what science has discovered about skilled reading as illustrated, for example, by Seidenberg-McClellan's four-part processing model of how the brain reads.

We deserve to be taught how to use valid and reliable data to diagnose reading difficulties. And before we cultivate our own philosophies of education, we need to understand what scientists already know.

Our Beliefs Shape Our Teaching

Observing our students is a critical skill, but only when our observations are informed by an understanding of how proficient reading actually works. As cognitive scientist Dr. Mark Seidenberg explains:

"Because most of what goes on in reading is subconscious: we are aware of the result of having read something- that we understood it, that we found it funny, that it conveyed a fact, idea, or feeling- not the mental and neural operations that produced that outcome. That is why there is a science of reading: to understand this complex skill at levels that intuition cannot easily penetrate." Dr. Mark Seidenberg, Language at the Speed of Sight, 2017

Most teachers are trained to observe each child's reading behaviors, determine an instructional plan based on those observations, and deliver one-on-one coaching, which we then must monitor to begin the cycle all over again. But observations that are not informed by an understanding of the science of reading cannot guide us to the instruction that most effectively rewires the brain for skilled reading.

Without an understanding of the reading brain, these observations of reading behavior are not a good use of the precious few minutes we have to work with each student

"Parents and educators must have a better understanding of what reading changes in a child's brain. Children's visual and language areas constitute an extraordinary machine that education recycles into an expert reading device. [There is no question that] increased knowledge of these circuits will greatly simplify the teacher's task." Dr. Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 2009

When educators understand how the brain learns to read - that reading requires the repurposing of parts of the brain evolved to perform other cognitive functions - we are compelled to rethink our instruction and our assessments, and to reexamine our previous beliefs about why students struggle.

Our Beliefs Shape Our Expectations

Recently, a brave group of teachers who had shifted to scientifically-aligned reading instruction reflected on their old beliefs.

A kindergarten teacher explained to the group:

"I think teachers like to believe that every child learns to read differently because it explains our lack of success."

The others nodded in agreement.

A second grade teacher added:

"It seems to explain the spread of abilities in our classrooms. Like, 'They all learn to read differently and that's why a third of my students can't read.' It seems to give a reason for why we didn't reach them all."

And another added:

"It justifies the lag. When some kids start to fall behind, we can tell ourselves, 'Some of them are just learning differently. They'll catch up later.'"

The belief that because each of our students is a unique individual, each one follows a unique path in learning to read, is so entrenched in our educational culture that teachers (and even parents) are not adequately alarmed when students leave kindergarten or first grade without basic reading skills.

The hardest part of coming to understand the science of reading is realizing that the learning delays we've come to expect in the primary grades can be an early sign of reading failure.

"We can not read the tea leaves of the behavior of five year olds and definitively determine who is going to be dyslexic and who isn't, moreover, it's going to depend on how they are taught. So, we'll cast a wide net, we'll find the kids who seem to be falling behind, on things like "Do you know your letter names?" "Can you associate a sound with the letter?" "Have you begun to start sounding out simple words?" There are a number of very simple sorts of measures you can use to find the children who are at risk... they get extra help, extra monitoring, and many of them will go on to become fine readers." Dr. Mark Seidenberg in the podcast Lexicon Valley: Why We Stopped Teaching Children How to Read

The best part of learning the science of reading is the discovery that we can raise our expectations for student and school achievement, and, consequently, improve the public perception of teachers.

Low reading achievement, more than any other factor, is the root cause of chronically low-performing schools, which harm students and contribute to loss of public confidence in our school system. When many children don't learn to read, the public schools cannot and will not be regarded as successful- and efforts to dismantle them will proceed. American Federation of Teachers

Every teacher deserves to know the science of reading. And every child deserves a teacher who knows it.

decoding professional development reading science teacher preparation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Every Child Is Unique... and Every Child Has to Learn the Same Skills

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Many of us assume that, because each child is a unique human being, every child learns to read in a different way. This widespread misconception causes unnecessary difficulty for teachers and for our students.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Appealing to personal experience seems to play an important role in the marketing of popular early literacy teaching approaches, so perhaps a personal experience angle might be useful in building understanding of the Simple View of Reading? Let's give it a go.

Try reading these texts

See if you can get any meaning out of this text:

Не́которые иностра́нцы ду́мают, что в Росси́и медве́ди хо́дят по у́лицам. Коне́чно, э́то непра́вда! Медве́ди живу́т в лесу́ и не лю́бят люде́й.*

If, like me, you don't speak Russian, you'll get nowhere. I know neither the code nor the language. Even if a Russian speaker read it aloud, I wouldn't understand it.

In Simple View terms, my Decoding is zero, my Language Comprehension is zero, so my Reading Comprehension (zero multiplied by zero) is also zero.

What about this English sentence written in Wingdings*?

Although it's in English, it makes no more sense to me than the Russian text. I can't access the language I know, because I don't know the code in which it is written. In Simple View terms , my Decoding is zero, my Language Comprehension is one (I'd understand it perfectly if I could crack the code) so my Reading Comprehension is still zero.

However, if I have this decoder with the English letter under each Wingding...

..the decoding problem is gone, and I can decode and comprehend it, though this is a slow, laborious task, as I haven't paired the sound-symbol relationships in long-term memory to the point at which they automatically evoke each other, which would allow me to store the words in long-term memory via orthographic mapping, recognise them instantly and read the sentence fluently.

How about a sentence in Gunditjamara, an indigenous language from my home town, which is written in the same alphabet as English:
Yangi-yangi ngutjung kal-ngan ngutuk-ngat*
If Gunditjamara speakers heard me reading this sentence aloud, they'd probably understand it, but I wouldn't. I can get the words off the page, but don't understand the language (sadly, my generation wasn't taught anything about our local Aboriginal languages). So here, my decoding might be close to one, but since my language comprehension is zero, my reading comprehension is still also zero.

I have a similar problem to a lesser degree with this sentence in English:
Consistency between different and independent geochemical techniques (stable carbon isotopes of algal alkenones, Zhang et al., 2013) and the boron isotopic composition of planktic foraminifera (Martínez-Botí et al., 2015) and inverse modelling techniques relating CO2 changes to ocean temperature and ice volume (Stap et al., 2016), support the assessment of AR5 (Masson-Delmotte et al., 2013) that mPWP CO2concentrations were 300-450 ppmv.
This comes from the supporting materials for the recent IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate. I can say all the words, but don't have the vocabulary or background knowledge to understand it well. In Simple View terms, my decoding is about 0.95 (I'm not entirely sure how to pronounce "alkenones", "foraminifera", "Martínez-Botí" or "Delmotte"), but my comprehension is only about 0.5, so I'm only comprehending about half of the meaning. If you know any climate scientists, best to ask them about it, not me.

The Simple View of Reading says we must do two main things in order to read for meaning:

1. Identify the words AND

2. Understand the language.

Unless we have Developmental Language Disorder or intellectual disability, evolution has equipped us to learn how to do number 2 pretty well, given the right environments, including of course educational environments.

Evolution has not equipped us to do number 1, so this needs to be a major focus of early reading education, or the many kids who find word identification difficult won't nail it down (phonemic awareness, decoding/encoding and mapping words into long-term memory for instant retrieval), and thus won't be able to read proficiently for meaning. Which is the point of reading, but (because of the way our brains and writing system work) not the starting point.

* In case you're wondering, the Russian text above says: "Some foreigners think that in Russia, bears walk along the streets. Of course, that is not true! Bears live in forests and do not like people." The Wingdings text says "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". The Gunditjamara text says: "My dog is better than your dog".

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Appealing to personal experience seems to play an important role in the marketing of popular early literacy teaching approaches, so perhaps a personal experience angle might be useful in building understanding of the Simple View of Reading? Let's give it a go.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Advancing Structured Literacy Practices Alliance

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Regarding the #phonics and whole language debate. From Dr Kilpatrick via the listserve SpellTalk:

Homographs like present/present, dove/dove, lead/lead represent a tiny fraction of words in English....

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Elementary Education Has Gone Terribly Wrong

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the early grades, U.S. schools value reading-comprehension skills over knowledge. The results are devastating, especially for poor kids.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Share This:
By David P. Hurford
It is encouraging that the New York Times showed an interest in the very important issue of reading failure. It is critically important that everyone understands that a third of U.S. students do not read at the Basic Level, which represents a rudimentary ability to read, and that nearly two-thirds of our students do not read at the Proficient Level. And, although we would all agree that we need to do better, not everyone knows that we have the ability to do better right now.

Unfortunately, most of those who train pre-service teachers to teach reading are not using the scientific data that should be directing their pedagogy. It needs to be strongly pointed out that the "Science of Reading" is not a methodology or system designed to teach reading. The Science of Reading, just like any other specific application of science, is a process that helps scientists discover the essence of reality. That is, the Science of Reading is everything that is known about reading, including how it should be taught.

More Than Phonics

In short, the Science of Reading is much more than just phonics. Phonics is only one component among many that must be taught to individuals learning to read. Phonics simply describes the relationship between the sounds of a language and how they are visually represented by symbols or letters. One of the important components of reading an alphabetically based writing system, such as English, is learning this code and how to use it.

However, the Science of Reading includes much more than learning this code, and it does not and has never suggested that phonics should be the sole method used to teach reading-phonics instruction in isolation is insufficient. The Science of Reading also includes the genetic and neurological bases of reading, the components of reading; phonological processing, sound-letter correspondences, decoding, synthesizing, word recognition, spelling, comprehension, writing systems and their influence on reading issues, how to teach reading, how to teach reading to struggling readers, and everything else related to reading.

The strategies that the Science of Reading have identified help all children, those with dyslexia, those who struggle to learn to read, and those who do not struggle to learn to read. So, why are we not using these processes? This is not only frustrating for parents, but also for the scientists who have studied and determined the best strategies to teach reading, legislators who are now writing laws to help children become competent readers, teachers who want to teach their students to read and, most importantly, children who are struggling to learn to read.

Becoming a Competent Reader

The first step is to guide the child through the process of the mechanics of reading; sound-letter correspondences, decoding, synthesizing, word recognition, fluency, vocabulary, spelling, comprehension, etc. If teachers are taught how to teach their students with the mechanics of reading and structured literacy, reading failure rates plummet. Once a student fully understands how to use the code, he or she will be on the path to becoming a competent reader. It is a challenging journey, but it is a journey that will lead to learning to read. Collectively, our goal is to help children become competent readers; using the scientific basis for teaching reading is how we will make this happen.

David P. Hurford, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology and counseling at Pittsburg State University. He directs the Center for Research, Evaluation and Awareness of Dyslexia (Center for READing) and is the founder and manager of the Center for the Assessment and Remediation of Reading Difficulties (CARRD, Inc.) a nonprofit dedicated to assisting individuals with dyslexia become competent readers.
Copyright © 2020 International Dyslexia Association (IDA). Opinions expressed in the Examiner and/or via links do not necessarily reflect those of IDA. We encourage sharing of Examiner articles. If portions are cited, please make appropriate reference. Articles may not be reprinted for the purpose of resale. Permission to republish this article is available from info@dyslexiaIDA.org

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Science of Reading (A Response to the New York Times) - International Dyslexia Association

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Share This: By David P. Hurford It is encouraging that the New York Times showed an interest in the very important issue of reading failure. It is critically important that everyone understands that a third of U.S.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
How is this reading program different from all other reading programs?

It's not Passover yet, but we should be asking the following four questions:
Do the 60% or more of students across the country not meeting grade level proficiency in reading all have learning disabilities?

Why is student growth stagnant even though so many children receive reading pullout services?

Why do so many students have IEPs?

Why is the importance of "fundamental" skills recognized in all disciplines and endeavors but literacy education?

To answer these four questions, I can't help but use metaphor. The following is a quote taken from the book Cured, by Dr. Jeffrey Rediger, who describes the work of the scientist, Antoine Bechamp, a less-known contemporary of Louis Pasteur. Bechamp thought Pasteur's approach to killing germs with antibiotics was dangerous and short-sighted.

According to Dr. Rediger, Bechamp "compared the situation to a pile of excrement sitting on the ground, attracting flies. Do you keep swatting the flies away one by one, indefinitely? Or do you remove the pile of excrement?"

Rather than using an ever-increasing smorgasbord of antibiotics to treat illness, Bechamp urged physicians to first focus on prevention of disease. Keeping tissues healthy and ensuring cells have the nutrients to function optimally should be the priority, according to Bechamp.

Nobody listened, and today we are seeing the effects of the over-use of antibiotics and a movement toward prevention.

In education, we continue to "swat flies." Just as the medical establishment's focus had long been on "killing the germs," the education establishment continues to pour money into interventions without removing the underlying cause of failure. Unfortunately, we cannot intervene our way out of problems caused by ineffective core instruction.

When, as Dr. Rediger suggests, we "fixate on tearing down disease at all costs instead of building up flourishing health and immunity," there's a tendency to overprescribe antibiotics to patients at an alarming rate. This is the same risk we are confronted with in literacy education.

If we screen children for dyslexia but, at the same time, continue to use teaching strategies such as picture cueing, whole word memorization, and repetitive leveled books, we will spend a fortune on "destroying the microbe" without addressing the fundamental cause. Many of the screened children will be deemed at-risk for dyslexia and placed in groups for remediation when all they really needed was to be taught correctly from the start.

In school districts across America, administrators are finally recognizing the importance of explicit instruction for some children. On the surface, this approach gives the appearance that the problem can easily be eradicated. However, it is simply another example of the "kill the germ at all costs" theory Bechamp found questionable. In the medical model, despite obscene amounts of money spent on finding the next miracle pill, we haven't been able to eradicate many of the most serious diseases.

Perhaps rather than focusing on remediation or a quick fix when signs of a problem arise or are finally recognized, we should build a strong "immune" system. Let's ask our schools to find ways to create a learning environment free of toxins by nurturing a healthy foundation.

The quality of a question determines the quality of an answer. We in education should be asking better questions.

How is reading taught in general education? This is THE most important question, as it determines the number of children in intervention services and special education!

Which assessments point to the skills necessary for reading success?

Do the assessments being used value "levels" over skills?

Does an A-Z gradient system help inform us sufficiently to give children targeted instruction?

Are children being taught with phonics but told to use the context and pictures receiving conflicting and confusing messages?

Do the books used in our classrooms encourage guessing instead of decoding words?

Do reading teachers understand how to teach reading using evidence-based practices or are they using the same ineffective strategies that do not produce results?
It's time to stop swatting flies, remove the excrement, and ask better questions.
Faith Borkowsky is the founder of High Five Literacy and Academic Coaching, with over thirty years of experience as a classroom teacher, reading and learning specialist, regional literacy coach, administrator, and tutor. Ms. Borkowsky is a Certified Dyslexia Practitioner and provides professional development for teachers and school districts, as well as parent workshops, presentations, and private consultations. Ms. Borkowsky is the author of the award-winning book, Failing Students or Failing Schools? A Parent's Guide to Reading Instruction and Intervention and the "If Only I Would Have Known..." series. She is also a board member of Teach My Kid to Read, a 501(c) non-profit organization with a mission to support and empower students, teachers, and parents through education so all kids, including those with dyslexia, learn to read.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Asking the Right Questions About Reading Instruction and Intervention

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It's not Passover yet, but we should be asking the following four questions: Do the 60% or more of students across the country not meeting grade level proficiency in reading all have learning disabilities? Why is student growth stagnant even though so many children receive reading pullout services?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
If Americans truly understood the devastating effects our approach to reading instruction has on ... [+]
Getty

Recent events have shined a spotlight on police brutality and racial injustice. Americans also need to recognize and address the injustice that takes place every day in our classrooms.

On national tests last year, only 18 percent of black 4 th-graders scored proficient or above in reading; the figure for white 4 th-graders was 45 percent. For 8 th graders, the percentages were 15 and 42 percent. It's sobering that more than half of white students fail to meet the proficiency bar. But the figures for black students should outrage anyone who cares about social justice. These dry statistics translate into greater struggles in high school, lower college attendance and graduation rates, a higher likelihood of incarceration, and generally bleaker futures. And we're going in the wrong direction: Those abysmal percentages for black students are lower than the figures from two years before.

Want to know something even more outrageous? There's abundant scientific evidence that explains why our standard approach to reading instruction isn't working for so many black kids-and others. But educators and policymakers are often unaware of that research; some reject it. Schools continue to double down on the same things that haven't worked for decades, expecting a different result.

Reading scores for black, Hispanic, and low-income students have been so low for so long, and efforts to raise them have been so fruitless, that many have come to simply accept them. They've given up on education as a means of righting social wrongs, arguing that the effects of poverty and racism are so powerful we can't expect education to overcome them.

They are powerful. But there's much more that education can do, right now, for our most vulnerable children that we simply haven't tried. When it comes to reading, what works is a simultaneous mix of two things at early grade levels: systematic instruction in phonics, and starting to build the kind of knowledge students will need in high school and beyond. What doesn't work is what schools have been doing: giving a token nod to phonics while encouraging kids to guess at words, and scrapping social studies and science to focus on illusory reading comprehension skills.

Yes, the system works for some kids-mostly, those with highly educated parents who have ample resources. A disproportionate number are white. But a lot of those kids are doing okay in spite of the system, not because of it.

To the extent that advocates for social justice still focus on education, they often call for motivating students through topics that relate to their own lives and cultures. That's important. But having followed a second-grade classroom where all the students were black or brown and came from low-income families, I have seen how interested children can become in a wide range of topics. Those children were lucky enough to attend a school using an atypical elementary curriculum focused on meaty content: Ancient India, Greek mythology, the human digestive system, the War of 1812- and the Civil War, slavery, and civil rights heroes. They were deeply engaged in the material and proud of all they were learning. And the knowledge and vocabulary they were acquiring-words like labyrinth and plummeted -would provide a foundation for their success in high school and beyond.

By contrast, most elementary classrooms use a form of tracking that goes by the name "leveled reading." Imagine you're a fourth-grader. Periodically, your teacher takes you and each of your classmates aside and tests your individual reading levels. She'll ask you to read a text while she counts the number of mistakes you make, then ask questions to test your comprehension. One day, she gives you a passage about how crocodiles are related to dinosaurs. You're not sure what a crocodile or a dinosaur is; you haven't learned anything about them in school. Nor do you know the words fossil, ancient, and grubs. Maybe you can't even read those words because you've never been taught how to sound them out. After the test, the teacher says you're a level "L"-a second-grade level.

Every day during the two- or three-hour reading block, your teacher demonstrates a comprehension skill-maybe "visualizing," or "comparing and contrasting." Then you and your classmates practice it on books you can choose, as long as they're at your level. Maybe you jealously eye other kids who are reading books at level R or S-or even T, a fifth-grade level. Or maybe almost everyone in your class is also reading below grade level. In any event, you keep practicing your "skills," because your teacher assures you that if you do you'll become a better reader.

Now imagine your school has been closed for months because of Covid-19, and you've had little or no access to instruction of any kind. When school finally reopens, your teacher finds you've slipped to a first-grade reading level. Maybe by this time you've concluded that you're just not a good reader and never will be. That it's your fault.

It's not. There's no evidence that leveled reading boosts comprehension. And given stagnant or declining reading scores, there's plenty of evidence it doesn't. But kids don't know that. In addition to depriving them-and us-of the opportunity to live up to their potential, this system is making untold numbers of them feel like failures for no good reason.

Especially in schools where test scores are low, students may get nothing but math and "reading" through middle school. When they get to high school, they may not know basic facts like the difference between a city and a state, or what the American Revolution was-not because they can't learn those things, but because no one has taught them those things. Their teachers water down grade-level material because they don't know what else to do. Even if students manage to graduate from high school, they may not be able to read and understand a newspaper article or an instruction manual-or read and write at all.

Well-intentioned as it may be, the prevailing approach to literacy is failing millions of children who are disproportionately black and brown. If people truly understood the needless damage being done by our schools every day, they would be out in the streets demanding change.
Update, 6.9.20: The headline and some of the text of this post have been changed for clarity, and quotes from author Zaretta Hammond were deleted because they didn't fully and accurately reflect her views.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How 'Reading Instruction' Fails Black And Brown Children

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Recent events have shined a spotlight on police brutality and racial injustice. Americans also need to recognize and address the injustice that takes place every day in our classrooms. On national tests last year, only 18 percent of black 4 th-graders scored proficient or above in reading; the figure for white 4 th-graders was 45 percent.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The state's reliance on cognitive science explains why.

Credit... Celia Krampien

Ms. Hanford is the senior education correspondent for APM Reports.

"Thank God for Mississippi."

That's a phrase people would use when national education rankings came out because no matter how poorly your state performed, you could be sure things were worse in Mississippi.

Not anymore. New results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a standardized test given every two years to measure fourth- and eighth-grade achievement in reading and math, show that Mississippi made more progress than any other state.

The state's performance in reading was especially notable. Mississippi was the only state in the nation to post significant gains on the fourth-grade reading test. Fourth graders in Mississippi are now on par with the national average, reading as well or better than pupils in California, Texas, Michigan and 18 other states.

What's up in Mississippi? There's no way to know for sure what causes increases in test scores, but Mississippi has been doing something notable: making sure all of its teachers understand the science of reading.

Yes, there is a science to how people read. For the past several decades, in labs and classrooms all over the world, scientists have been studying how skilled reading works, what children need to learn to become skilled readers, and what's going on when students struggle. Reading is probably the most studied aspect of human learning.

But a lot of teachers don't know this science. In 2013, legislators in Mississippi provided funding to start training the state's teachers in the science of reading.

To understand what the science says, a good place to start is with something called the "simple view of reading." It's a model that was first proposed by researchers in 1986 to clarify the role of decoding in reading comprehension. Everyone agrees the goal of reading is to comprehend text, but back in the 1980s there was a big fight going on over whether children should be taught how to decode words - in other words, phonics.

The simple view says that reading comprehension is the product of two things. One is your ability to decode words: Can you identify the word a string of letters represents? For example, you see the letter string "l-a-s-s" and you are able to sound it out and say the word.

You may have no idea what "lass" means. This is where language comprehension comes in. Language comprehension is your ability to understand spoken language. So, when someone says to you, "Let's have all the lads and lasses line up at the door," you know that's what all the boys and girls are supposed to do.

The simple view is an equation that looks like this:
decoding ability x language comprehension = reading comprehension
Notice that reading comprehension is the product of decoding ability and language comprehension; it's not the sum. In other words, if you have good language comprehension skills but zero decoding skills, your reading comprehension will be zero, because zero times anything is zero. The simple view also says that if you have good decoding skills but poor language comprehension skills, your reading comprehension isn't going to be very good either.

The simple view model was proposed more than 30 years ago and has been confirmed over and over again by research. But a study in Mississippi several years ago showed that teachers were not being trained to use this model and that many professors and deans in colleges of education had never even heard of it. Now, through workshops and coaching paid for by state taxpayers, teachers in Mississippi are learning about the simple view and other key takeaways from the science of reading.

The simple view is critical for understanding how children learn to read. Most children entering school have very little decoding skill. They know the meaning of lots of words, but they don't know how to decode those words. If the goal is to get to reading comprehension, children have to learn how to decode. That's why people who know the science of reading call for an emphasis on phonics instruction in the early grades.

Now, the simple view clearly shows that focusing only on decoding would be a mistake because that's only half the equation. Reading instruction has to include language comprehension, too. This means lessons and activities that expand children's oral vocabularies and knowledge, so they know the meaning of the words they can decode.

In my reporting on the debates about reading, I've found there's a lot of confusion in schools about the role of decoding in learning how to read. Teachers want their students to love reading, and phonics has a reputation for being rote and boring.

So, reading instruction tends to begin with having children focus on making meaning from text while giving short shrift to helping them develop the skills involved in reading words. Some children develop good word reading skills anyway. Research suggests that about 40 percent of children will learn to read no matter how inadequate the instruction.

What about the other 60 percent? The lack of skills instruction can be a disaster for them, especially for pupils from low-income families. When children from higher-income homes struggle to read, their parents will often pay for tutoring or specialized private school. But children from poor families tend to have no backup if schools don't teach them how to read words.

And while children from poor families often enter school at a disadvantage when it comes to language comprehension, if they're taught how to decode they've just been given their best shot at catching up because now they have the means to gain knowledge and expand their vocabulary through reading.

For years, everyone assumed Mississippi was at the bottom in reading because it was the poorest state in the nation. Mississippi is still the poorest state, but fourth graders there now read at the national average. While every other state's fourth graders made no significant progress in reading on this year's test, or lost ground, Mississippi's fourth-grade reading scores are up by 10 points since 2013, when the state began the effort to train its teachers in the science of reading. Correlation isn't causation, but Mississippi has made a huge investment in helping teachers learn the science behind reading.

And when children are taught in ways that line up with the science, they can learn.

Emily Hanford (@ehanford) is the senior education correspondent for APM Reports and the producer of several podcasts and articles about the science of reading.
The Times is committed to publishing Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | There Is a Right Way to Teach Reading, and Mississippi Knows It (Published 2019)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The state's reliance on cognitive science explains why. Ms. Hanford is the senior education correspondent for APM Reports. "Thank God for Mississippi." That's a phrase people would use when national education rankings came out because no matter how poorly your state performed, you could be sure things were worse in Mississippi.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I used to tell the parents of my students that sight words were words that could not be sounded out. When my students would start sounding out a sight word, I would stop them and tell them they couldn't read it that way. I taught these words as basically whole words...the spelling just needed to be memorized. I have since learned that teaching these words as primarily whole units to be memorized visually, inhibits the way the brain actually stores and learns these words. It's actually critical that students match the individual sounds of the word with their visual representations. This process is known as orthographic mapping. Any time we draw a student's attention to only the spelling of the word, in a rote memorization fashion, we are inhibiting the orthographic mapping process. In other words, they need to sound it out...even when the spelling is not phonetically regular.

Because of this I have completely changed the way I approach sight words. I'd like to share my current plan for teaching these tricky words. I'm still perfecting the process and tweaking things to get the best results. Feel free to chime in with your own suggestions.This part of my routine I learned from the EBLI training I received this fall. I'm really grateful for this training...I had read about orthographic mapping last spring in David Kilpatrick's books...but when I saw the way EBLI taught sight words (and all words), it really hit me! This is facilitating orthographic mapping!

The first thing I want to make sure I do is have my students pay attention to the sounds in the word.So I don't show them the word first. I SAY the word.

"Today we'll be learning the word: said.Listen: said (say it slow). How many sounds do you hear in the word said?"

Students say the sounds, while I hold up a finger for each sound, /s/ /e/ /d/.

"Good. I'm going to say the sounds again while I write the sound lines."

I draw a line on my white board for each sound as I say them aloud /s/ /e/ /d/.

"Now I want you to say the sounds while you write the sound lines on your white board."

Then students once again segment the sounds while drawing a line for each sound on their individual boards.

Now I show them the spelling of the word. -Note that I haven't shown them the visual word up until this point. Sometimes I like to get a little dramatic as I unveil the word.-Especially for really irregular ones...my students died laughing when I revealed the spelling for "of" and showed the shock and craziness of the word with my expressions.

I show them the word "said" and ask, "What's the /s/ spelling?"

The students reply with "s" and I say and write /s/ on my first sound line.

"Now I want you to say /s/ as you write it on the first sound line." Students write the letter s while saying the sound it makes.

Then I ask, "Which letters do you think spell the /e/ sound?"

I write "ai" on the second sound line while saying /e/. I have students say as they write the /e/ spelling.

Finally I ask students which letter spells the /d/ spelling and we say and write the d on the third sound line.

We take some time to reflect on the spellings and note any unusual ones. In this case, only the /e/ spelling is tricky. I have the students circle the "ai" on the second sound line and have them put two lines underneath it (because two letters spell that sound).

Next, we use our fingers to erase the letters, but leave the lines and circles.

I cover up my "said" card and have the students try to write the word from memory.

Lastly, we erase everything (letters, lines, circles) and write the word again with no visual cues.

If we come across a sight word in a text we are reading and they don't know the word...I don't just tell them the word. Instead, I have them sound it out...and when we come to the tricky part, I will tell them the sound. For example, if they came across "said", I would simply say, "In this word, the ai is going to say /e/." Then I'd have them sound it out, making sure they say /e/ for ai.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I used to tell the parents of my students that sight words were words that could not be sounded out. When my students would start sounding out a sight word, I would stop them and tell them they couldn't read it that way. I taught these words as basically whole words...the spelling just needed to be memorized.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How to Teach Handwriting—and Why It Matters

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Teaching young students how to write by hand before moving on to keyboarding can help improve their reading fluency as well.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For a downloadable PDF click here. Summer 2016
By Carolyn D. Cowen

IDA infographics help make complex information easy to digest, remember, and share and are made for a wide audience-those new to dyslexia and related literacy/learning issues as well as the experts. Please share our infographics as well as our Fact Sheets to raise awareness about dyslexia and to help support the policy and practice changes needed to bring effective instruction (particularly in reading) to every child with dyslexia in every classroom across the nation.
Author's Note: You may need to zoom in to read small text.
Carolyn D. Cowen, Ed.M., is the Social Media Editor/Strategist for the International Dyslexia Association's Examiner. She also serves on the Board of Trustees for the Newgrange School, Ann Robinowitz Education Center, and Laurel School and on the Board of Directors for the Research Institute for Learning and Development. Carolyn is especially interested in creative ways nonprofits and movements can "power the mission with the message." Follow her on Twitter .

More infographics!

Good News! Most Reading Difficulties Can Be Resolved or Greatly Diminished (April 2016)

How Widespread Is Dyslexia? (February 2016)
Copyright © 2016 International Dyslexia Association (IDA). We encourage sharing of Examiner articles. If portions are cited, please make appropriate reference. Articles may not be reprinted for the purpose of resale. Permission to republish this article is available from info@interdys.org.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What Is Structured Literacy? - International Dyslexia Association

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I often see people referring to phonics as a "method" for teaching reading. Some are 'fans' of phonics, some ardent opponents, but every time I read such a statement, I wince a little at the subtle, yet crucial, misunderstanding therein. Because the simple fact is no, phonics is not a method for teaching reading. Phonics is the body of knowledge and skills needed to decode written English which, despite some protestations to the contrary, is a phonics-based writing system. Phonics is, therefore, not a pedagogy (a method of teaching) but is essential content or curriculum. This distinction is important because the choice you are making when deciding whether to teach phonics is not which method to use to teach children how to read but whether to directly teach reading at all.

Children need phonics because the fact is that all fluent readers of English, whether they realise it or not, DECODE. They/you/we are not aware of decoding while reading, precisely because we are so fluent that it becomes almost effortless. To be clear, this is not a matter of scientific debate. Decoding is how *all* competent readers read. Even our ability to build a bank of fluency-enhancing, instantly recognised 'sight words' is inextricably linked to, and reliant on, our knowledge of the alphabetic principle and our ability to bond the pronunciation of each word to the orthographic map of each word.

Dr. Hollis Scarborough's 'Reading Rope' deftly illustrates what it takes to read with understanding. Decoding and its related skills comprise the 'word recognition' strand i.e. how to accurately identify the words on the page, while it is our oral language, vocabulary and background knowledge that reveal the meaning in print. Both strands are vital. Both need deliberate and explicit teaching in a curriculum designed with this understanding, and schools need to excel in both aspects for children to flourish.

Scarborough (2001)
To further understand reading we need first to understand writing. Writing is a technology invented in some human cultures over the last few thousand years. In most cultures, until very recently, writing/reading was a skill acquired only by a few scribes and a select elite. So, while writing is an extension of our ability to speak, there is a critical distinction to draw between them. Humans universally evolved with the ability to communicate through speech. It clearly conferred a survival advantage. We did not, however, evolve an ability to read and write. This matters a lot. In the words of evolutionary psychologist David C. Geary, how to speak (or walk, for example) is biologically primary knowledge or knowledge that we have evolved to learn easily. Such knowledge is characterised by not needing to be taught. Everything else, including reading and writing, is biologically secondary knowledge, it is much harder to learn and is characterised by needing to be taught.

The writing systems invented also varied in nature. Some forms of writing were/are logographic, where a picture or symbol represents a whole word. Others developed a way of representing/encoding, the individual speech sounds in words. English, like its European counterparts, is of the latter type. Written English is essentially an alphabetic code. Symbols/graphemes (letters) are used to represent the individual sounds (phonemes) that combine to make a spoken word. The reason that some find this difficult to appreciate is that, over time, the English system has become very complex, it has a deep, and to the casual observer, almost impenetrable orthography (spelling system). In a phonics-based writing system a grapheme is the written representation of a phoneme, in other words the spelling of a speech sound. In a simple writing system, a specific grapheme (in such a case, this is usually a single letter) will only ever correspond to, one speech sound and, in reverse, each of the language's speech sounds will only ever be represented by a unique grapheme. Such systems are easy to learn. Finnish for example, has a very simple orthography and thus, Finnish children are usually fluent readers and spellers within a few weeks of starting school (or even before they arrive). In English however, while there are some simple grapheme-phoneme correspondences, most phonemes are represented by more than one spelling and most spellings (single letters or combinations of letters) are used to represent more than one sound.

So, if this complicated map of how English is encoded and decoded (and the skills to use it) is the content, then how do we teach it? The simple answer, given the critical importance of reading, is REALLY WELL! Thankfully, while phonics can appear fiendishly complicated, it literally becomes child's play when broken down into small steps and observable patterns, and is presented in a systematic way, building from simple to complex. Phonics, being by nature multi-faceted, multi-sensory and highly practical, lends itself very well to such treatment. This is what good systematic phonics programmes do. This is the pedagogical aspect of phonics.

Consciously choosing not to teach phonics as the foundation of reading, but instead to immerse children in language and print in the hope that they might deduce how to read, is adopting what might be described as a minimally-guided approach. Sometimes a little 'incidental phonics' is taught in such scenarios, but this is often a last resort. Instead, when children cannot read the words, they are taught to use a variety of 'compensatory strategies' such as guessing from pictures or what they think to be the context. In fact, this has been the 'pre-eminent' way to teach reading in most English-speaking countries for many decades and, if you've been around a while, you might tell me ''this can work". You/your child or children you have taught, learned to read without any phonics, "you just need lots of stories, being read to, sharing books, sharing a love of books" and so on. Well, yes, it is true that some children, if immersed in a print- and language-rich environment, will apparently learn to read with little direct phonics' instruction. But we need to qualify this statement. Firstly, while a few might learn to read very well, many others might only learn to read well enough to get by at school (and therefore not attract attention or support) but not nearly as well or as effortlessly as they might have with explicit instruction. Indeed, many children, who excelled at school and were considered good readers, only hit the limits of their reading ability at high school or university, when they met more challenging material than their imperfect reading schema could cope with. Many hitherto high-achievers are only diagnosed dyslexic in the tertiary phase of their education.

Secondly, such autodidacts will usually have considerably-impaired spelling compared to pupils who have been explicitly taught the alphabetic code. Reading is 'fuzzy' compared to spelling. Children can in-fill decoding gaps with context guesses or can just ignore words they cannot decipher. But spelling is much more exacting. There is only one way to spell each word and the evidence is clear that children who are explicitly taught how English writing works, spell much more accurately than those who are not.

But the final and most important point is this; the children who learn to read well by merely being immersed in books haven't learned to read so well because of how reading was taught but in spite of the fact that it wasn't. Such children will have been born doubly blessed. Not only will they have had ample access to books and language, but they will also have inherited a neurobiology that means that they are adept at phonemic awareness, blending and segmenting sounds, phoneme manipulation, rapid-naming, symbol-sound pattern matching etc., so much so, that the phonic-based nature of written English becomes apparent to them without the direct guidance that most children need. They are able to grasp the alphabetic principle and intuit an approximation of how the language works. Note that this is not the same as saying reading is natural (or biologically primary) to these children. It is simply that they got lucky, and their brains were able to adapt relatively easily to the demands of reading English. Most children are not this lucky.

In their 2006 paper Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching, Kirschner, Sweller and Clark concluded that (with my added emphasis):
"After a half-century of advocacy associated with instruction using minimal guidance, it appears that there is no body of research supporting the technique. In so far as there is any evidence from controlled studies, it almost uniformly supports direct, strong instructional guidance rather than constructivist-based minimal guidance during the instruction of novice to intermediate learners. Even for students with considerable prior knowledge, strong guidance while learning is most often found to be equally effective as unguided approaches. Not only is unguided instruction normally less effective; there is also evidence that it may have negative results when students acquire misconceptions or incomplete or disorganized knowledge."
The evidence is unequivocal. Direct, explicit instruction is the most effective way to teach novices, and as an experienced reading/dyslexia tutor, the emphasised sentence, above, leaps out. Every reading tutor who understands the role of decoding and phonics will tell you that they often spend as much time dismantling their students' damaging and unhelpful misconceptions about reading as they do teaching them how to read. Sadly, the damage is often permanent. The child who must be retaught how to read, after falling behind, will often never develop into as fluent a reader as they might have become had phonics been taught well in the first place. The rich-get-richer, poor-get-poorer Matthew Effect compounds the misery. Children who find reading easy tend to enjoy reading, and so read more. This results in improved fluency/vocabulary/background-knowledge; they progress faster, find reading even easier, more enjoyable and so a virtuous cycle develops. The child who struggles, however, will likely do less reading than is needed, and will thus fall behind their peers in both decoding and language. The gap between them and their progressing peers grows, as will their disdain for reading. A vicious downward cycle ensues.

However, when phonics is taught well, even those children with apparently little aptitude for decoding will never need to struggle to the point that a negative cycle develops. Well-designed phonics curricula ensure that steps are small and recursive, and the child is only ever expected to read what they have first been given the knowledge and skills to read. Every child is set up for, and can then be inspired by, success. The design and the delivery of the phonics curriculum is crucial. Hence you will often see phonics specified as ' systematic synthetic phonics'. 'Synthetic' indicates that phonics should be taught by starting at the individual grapheme-phoneme level. This avoids hard-to-shift misconceptions that arise when an 'analytic' route is taken (where words are first learned as 'wholes' and then analysed into component parts). 'Systematic' means following an intricately planned, detailed phonics curriculum designed to avoid the "misconceptions or incomplete or disorganized knowledge" referred to by Kirschner et al. So, while I've been at pains to explain that 'phonics' is vital content it is hopefully also clear that how it is taught is equally crucial. It is not enough to add some 'incidental phonics' here and there, or to teach a basic amount and assume that all will be well.

As an aside, it has become increasingly common for Balanced Literacy/Whole Language advocates to claim they teach phonics 'systematically' in an effort to persuade teachers, schools, policy-makers that their programmes meet evidence-informed standards. When 'systematic phonics' is specified it means that phonics/decoding should be directly taught as the first and only way to identify words when reading, and that this should be done in the systematic way described above. Teaching some phonics as part of a wider, multi-strategy approach, is not what is meant by the term "systematic phonics" even if you could argue that the phonics element is 'systematically' taught (e.g. 'every lesson mentions phonics').

Over the decades where minimal guidance in the teaching of reading prevailed, HUGE numbers of children across the English-speaking world left school functionally illiterate (as high as 40% in the UK). A very large proportion of these will have been casualties of the inadequate teaching of phonics. This is simply untenable. The ability to read is crucial, many would argue an inalienable right. It is the key that unlocks access to every other part of the curriculum and a huge world beyond. We cannot leave it to chance. Children from deprived backgrounds are the most likely to be damned by inadequate teaching of phonics. They are the least likely to have access to good schools, the least likely to have access to books and rich language, and the least likely to have parents with the expertise to tutor them or the money to pay someone else to do so.

If you have got this far and are still struggling to see why I find the distinction between phonics content and phonics pedagogy so important, it is simply this, that someone who thinks that phonics is just one way to teach reading likely thinks, mistakenly, that phonics is just one way to read. There is no other way to read English fluently, and it is imperative for all children to know and be able to use phonics. If this were better understood, then I am sure that all would do their best to teach phonics as well and as comprehensively as possible.

*****************************

While this blog focuses on the word recognition aspect of reading, I will take this opportunity to recommend several books for ideas as to how to provide a language- and content-rich environment needed to support the language comprehension strand. Natalie Wexler's The Knowledge Gap, Doug Lemov's Reading Reconsidered, Isabel Beck's Bringing Words to Life and Creating Robust Vocabulary, Alex Quigley's Closing the Vocabulary Gap and Closing the Reading Gap.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Is phonics a 'method' for teaching reading?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I often see people referring to phonics as a "method" for teaching reading. Some are 'fans' of phonics, some ardent opponents, but every time I read such a statement, I wince a little at the subtle, yet crucial, misunderstanding therein. Because the simple fact is no, phonics is not a method for teaching reading.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
UPDATE: In light of this post on Timothy Shanahan's blog, I am persuaded that reading comprehension is a thing, but the advice below still stands.
Most of the schools I visit are unsurprisingly keen to explore ideas to narrow the gap between their most and least advantaged students. Whilst there are also sorts of complex chains of causation which go some way to explaining why children from wealthier backgrounds outperform their less fortunate peers, one particularly vexed question that I'm frequently asked about is that of reading.

The case I'm making here is that reading comprehension should be more properly thought of as language comprehension. Once word recognition has been mastered (phonological awareness, decoding and sight recognition of familiar words) children's ability to understand what they read is broadly the same as their ability to understand what they hear. If they can't understand information communicated verbally the root cause is likely to be due to lack of vocabulary knowledge or the lack of background knowledge that would help them make sense of the information being communicated.

The most significant barrier to comprehension of written texts is that of reading fluency. Too many students in secondary schools simply cannot decode quickly enough to read effortlessly. Anything that occupies our attention reduces our capacity to think and, if some of our limited cognitive resources are being used to blend graphemes into phonemes, then we'll have fewer resources with which to consider meaning. The optimal speed of reading for comprehension is somewhere around 250 wpm*; if reading speed falls much below this speed then comprehension quickly tails off. Have a go at reading the text in the video below:

Now ask yourself the following questions:

1. How far did they climb?

2. Where did the characters find themselves?

3. At what point did they first see Pemberley House?

4. Where were they standing when they first saw the house?

5. How did the author describe the road?

It's surprisingly hard. You probably got the first question right easily enough but after that you may well have found yourself guessing. Obviously the constraints are highly artificial but reading like this allows us to glimpse the lived experience of an estimated 20% of children in secondary age students in the UK. If this is in anyway similar to your experience of reading it's almost certainly not something you'd do for pleasure.

If you read the same text without the constraints, comprehension becomes much more straightforward:

They gradually ascended for half a mile then found themselves at the top of a considerable eminence where the wood ceased and the eye was instantly caught by Pemberley House situated on the opposite side of the valley, into which the road with some abruptness wound.

Barriers now are caused by the possibility that some of the words in the passage are unfamiliar (ascended, eminence) or that the syntax of the sentence is unfamiliar and hard to follow. Now consider the following question: What is the writer suggesting about Pemberley House? The phase is "the eye was instantly caught" suggests there's something visually striking about Pemberley House, but gives no indication of what this might be. But, if you recognise that Pemberley is the ancestral home of Mr Darcy in Jane Austin's novel Pride and Prejudice, then you will probably know it's a stately home and it's likely to be considered striking because of its size and beauty. Even if you didn't know this, you might still have assumed that a house with a name rather than a number in the middle of wooded countryside is likely to be fairly swanky. Whether or not you know these things has nothing to do with your reading ability per se.

Why does this matter? Well, if you believe reading comprehension is distinct from language comprehension then you might well be persuaded that it's worthwhile to spend curriculum time teaching reading comprehension. I've written about how this plays out in English lessons here and here. I've also written about the promise of following an approach which dispenses with trying to teach comprehension skills and focusses instead on just reading. Essentially, children are more likely to improve their reading comprehension by reading more than by being taught more about inference and analysis because they'll encounter a wider range of vocabulary in a wider range of contexts beyond their direct experience.

This is not to say that there's no merit to giving children some instruction on strategies that might make it easier for them to understand written texts. For instance, it's probably useful to teach children that the conventions of fiction and non-fiction are very different. But it still remains true that children are more likely to understand either by reading lots of examples of each rather than by investing lots of time in practising generic comprehension strategies.

The sort of strategy I think it's worth spending some time on is to explicitly teach students how to skim and scan. Skilled readers do these things without thinking but for struggling readers they're likely to be more alien. So, for instance, it's worth telling students that the key to unlocking the meaning of a paragraph of non-fiction text is to pick out the head noun in the topic sentence.

The Laki eruption was one of the most devastating eruptions in human history. Iceland lies on the mid-Atlantic ridge and its volcanoes pose a constant threat, although very few of them produce violent eruptions because the magma is usually basaltic and relatively free-flowing. In 1783-84, a major eruption from the Laki fissure poured out an estimated 14 km3 of basaltic lava and clouds of poisonous compounds. The volcano is located in a remote part of Iceland and no one was killed by the event itself. However, the secondary effects were devastating because the poisonous cloud killed over half of Iceland's livestock population, leading to a famine which killed approximately a quarter of the population.

In the example above, the head noun is the phrase 'the Laki eruption'. Skilled readers don't even notice the definite article and are hardly slowed down by the fact they probably have no idea what Laki is. Thir attention latches on to 'eruption'. If this were a passage of fiction the word could relate to an angry teacher but because it's non-fiction the list of things likely to erupt is strictly limited. Even if only given two seconds to read the whole passage, skilled readers are developing a volcano hypothesis long before they actually see the word.

Struggling readers will attempt to read the passage very differently. Unless specifically told not to, they're likely to spend as much time decoding 'the' as any other word and, because they're so used to encountered unfamiliar vocabulary are likely to be completely thrown by 'Laki'. It may be they give up before even getting to 'eruption' but even if they do persevere they're less likely to be familiar with the word.

One important tip is for teachers to ensure that students know at least the head nouns before being asked to read a passage, but it's also worth explicitly teaching how to go about skimming a text. Students who don't read much need to be told to ignore 'the' and that it doesn't matter that they don't know what 'Laki' is. If they need to know it will become clear later.

There's a similar body of knowledge we can share around scanning for information. In the extract below, try to locate the answers to the following questions:

1. How many Irish provinces were there?

2. When did Henry II persuaded Pope Adrian IV to give him authority to conquer Ireland?

3. What were the names of the 3 towns taken by the English?

Six kings ruled six Irish provinces, each of which had many tribes with their own kings. Traditionally a High King of Ireland claimed tribute from the other kings. The last High King was Brian Boru, King of Munster, who died in 1014 while defeating the Danes at Clontarf. His rival, the King of Leinster, aided by the Danes who, after 1014, ruled Dublin, Waterford and Limerick. Four Kings - of Leinster, Munster, Connaught and Ulster - fought for Boru's crown. In 1154 Henry II persuaded Pope Adrian IV to give him authority to conquer Ireland. In 1166 he had his chance. MacMurrough (Leinster) had stolen the wife of O'Rourke of Breffney, a neighbour of O'Connor (Connaught). All the kings condemned MacMurrough and banished him. He asked for Henry's help. He sent de Clare (Strongbow), Earl of Pembroke to lead an army of chain-clad knights, supported by Welsh archers. The unarmoured Irish, with their Danish battle-axes were no match for them. The English took Wexford, Waterford and Dublin.

Easy, right? But for many struggling readers this is a daunting task. The slightly trivial sounding observation that makes it easy for skilled readers is the knowledge that the first answer is at the beginning, the second is in the middle and the third is at the end. Once you've located the answer to the second question there's no way you'd go back to the beginning to look for number 3. You just know that the answer will be presented sequentially. This makes the process to scanning way for efficient for skilled readers. The reason why some children take forever to complete these kinds of comprehension activities is that they go back to the beginning of the text for every single new question!

We should tell children that the answer to a 'how many' question will always be a number and, in the case of a history text book, the answer to a 'when' question will almost always be a date rather than something vaguer like 'last Tuesday'. And the answer to question asking for names will always result in the need to locate proper nouns. Dates and capital letters are easy to scan for because they're like little eye-magnets.

But even more importantly we should let students know that in the context of school, the answers to comprehension questions emerge sequentially. The answer to the first question is likely to be in the first paragraph and the answer to the second question in the second paragraph. Skilled readers seem to know this instinctively, struggling readers do not.

So, is reading comprehension actually a thing, or is it all just language comprehension? I think the best answer here is to acknowledge that written text and spoken language tend to be very different and the kind of language that is used in text is likely to be very different from that used in speech. But, it remains true if you find it easier to comprehend something read aloud, then you almost have a fluency problem. Once children are fluent readers is likely to be the case that text that doesn't make sense when read wouldn't make sense when heard either. If this is the case the problem is due to a lack of knowledge.

To conclude, my best bets for improving children's comprehension of written texts are as follows:

1. Make sure children can decode at around 250 wpm. Reading fluency is a limiting factor.

2. Spend more lesson time reading aloud with students ensuring that they encounter unfamiliar vocabulary and contexts and that these are discussed and understood.

3. Beyond that, it's worth giving children specific advice on how to use glossaries, headings, references and other mechanisms to make reading non-fiction easier and it's also probably worth giving some generic insights into how to pull information out of texts.

In answer to the question is reading comprehension a thing: it probably is, but it's definitely not the same thing many people assume it to be.
* There's some general confusion about the difference between the speed at which we read aloud and that with which we read silently. It ought to be obvious that skilled reader will read faster when reading silently. My figure of 250 wpm is derived from a range between 238 wpm for non-fiction to 260 wpm for fiction and comes from a 2019 systematic review and meta analysis by Marc Brysbaert available as a pre print here. For comparison, Tim Roach has linked to a 2017 Reading Rockets post with data or oral reading fluency.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
UPDATE: In light of this post on Timothy Shanahan's blog, I am persuaded that reading comprehension is a thing, but the advice below still stands. Most of the schools I visit are unsurprisingly keen to explore ideas to narrow the gap between their most and least advantaged students.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Leveled Reading Groups Don’t Work. Why Aren’t We Talking About It?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
You might want to sit down for this one, friends. The most pervasive practice in K–5 reading instruction is probably small group work in which students are grouped by reading level. Experts estimat…

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
On Sequences of Instruction | Shanahan on Literacy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This weekend I received an interesting question from a third grade teacher in Frankfort, KY. She writes, “In my district we do not have a specific scope and sequence for teaching vocabulary, nor phonics.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
If you want to do something with a student that feels like a game, sorting syllables is a fun way to get going. There aren't many rules. I have attached a cutout to this post for download. You can print it, cut it out and get started. You can also make more syllables and keep going once your student has conquered these. First, put REVLOC and "other" lined across the top. If your student is only capable of Open and Closed then you can put the O and C at the top and add more to the line as the student gets more advanced. "Other" is for Latin Connectives, Prefixes...

Why does Orton Gillingham work? The Orton Gillingham method is used to teach reading, writing and spelling. It's not a "fast" approach to learning - it's a thorough approach. Orton Gillingham starts with the most basic part of language, the phoneme, the smallest unit of sound, and teaches all the sounds the letter makes - that's right, many letters have more than one sound! (Think letter s - it says "s" as in moss or it can say "z" as in rose.) Orton Gillingham then builds on this to add blends, beginning sounds and ending sounds. Then moves into rules like FLOSS, Magic E, Hard/Soft C&G, and more. OG then...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
If you want to do something with a student that feels like a game, sorting syllables is a fun way to get going. There aren't many rules. I have attached a cutout to this post for download. You can print it, cut it out and get started.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Today, Capitol Hill often seems a dark and gloomy place, drained by quarantine of virtually all the energy and activity typically found in the halls of Congress. But 20 years ago, on a beautiful April morning in our nation's capital, with the sun shining and the remnants of cherry blossoms hanging in the air, a crowd gathered in a room under the Capitol dome. In this same room, individuals written about in our history books debated wars, new national policies, constitutional amendments and federal budgets. But on this particular day in 2000, the room was used for a different yet equally important purpose: Congressional leaders gathered to hear the findings of the National Reading Panel (NRP), a work group charged to determine the best, research-proven ways to teach children to read.

After determining that "Johnny can't read" and that we were living in "a nation at risk," the country was finally ready to shift from what was wrong to what could be done to fix it. The members of the panel detailed nearly two years of examination of decades of research, and more than 100,000 experimental and quasi-experimental research studies, on what works to get virtually every child reading at grade level by fourth grade.

In the years that followed, many researchers tried to disprove its findings, believing that the results were too prescriptive or that its funnel for qualifying research was too narrow. Despite these efforts, however, it is now two decades later, and the panel's findings remain as strong and supported as they were that April day 20 years ago last week. The panel emphasized that good reading instruction incorporates explicit and systematic instruction in five components of reading:

Phonemic awareness: the ability to hear, identify and play with individual sounds - or phonemes - in spoken words

Phonics: an understanding that there is a relationship between the letters of written language and the sounds of spoken language

Fluency: the capacity to read text accurately and quickly

Vocabulary: the knowledge of words necessary to communicate effectively

Comprehension: the ability to understand and gain meaning from what has been read

Despite the clarity of the NRP's determinations, we are still facing the same literacy challenges two decades later. We have continued to fail at improving the teaching and learning of reading. More than a third of our fourth-graders still can't read at grade level, according to national tests, with the numbers even more dire when it comes to African-American, Latino and low-income students. As highlighted by journalists such as APM Reports' Emily Hanford, although we may know how to effectively teach virtually all children to successfully read, we simply aren't putting that knowledge to work in our teacher education programs and elementary school classrooms.

It shouldn't be this way. Soon after the NRP report's release, No Child Left Behind provided meaningful dollars for Reading First, a program designed to ensure that states used scientifically based reading instruction in their classrooms, that publishers produced research-based instructional materials for school districts, and that pre-service and in-service teacher education was rooted in the same research. The shift proved fleeting. Federal dollars dried up, and states, school districts and schools largely went back to what they were doing before.

Since then, the resistance to the NRP model has grown. Efforts to transform teacher education - by moving away from the instructional philosophy of whole language to the research-based phonics approach - were rejected by many of the same faculty who have been preparing elementary school teachers for decades. Rejection of value-added measures in teacher evaluations underscored the education community's pushback to data-based approaches to teaching and learning. And as families and educators grew more frustrated with high-stakes testing and the Common Core, it became easier to cast off what decades of experimental research had found in favor of personal preferences and comforts.

More importantly, though, the NRP's findings didn't have the long-term impact originally intended for the simple reason that change is hard. No matter how clear or strong the research is, advocates of that research must make a forceful hearts-and-minds argument for why and how the research should be adopted, who should adopt it, how we should pay for its adoption, and how we should effectively measure that the adoption has been done properly and successfully. When it came to the NRP, though, advocates - including me - originally believed the data were so incontrovertible that it would be adopted with little resistance.

Twenty years later, we celebrate the findings of the National Council on Teacher Quality that roughly half (51 percent) of traditional educator preparation programs are teaching at least four of the panel's five non-negotiables in literacy instruction. Yet, just as that paper was released, the Council of Chief State School Officers bemoaned that "millions of students are still taught using outmoded or debunked methods with no scientific justification." Regardless of the spin, two decades have passed, and nearly half of teacher preparation programs still aren't using the full NRP findings, and millions of learners aren't being taught to read.

Producing a strong research study that collects dust on the shelf can hardly win the day. For generations now, we have fought ideological skirmishes over literacy instruction, watching the pendulum swing as classroom educators simply waited it out until the latest "hot" thing lost favor and classrooms returned to what they were previously doing. If we truly want to declare a reading victory and tout our collective instructional successes, we need to commit to some basic truths.

When it comes to effective literacy instruction, every teacher should require:

proper preparation in practices that are based on scientific research

adequate materials that support the research principles

adaptive instruction to meet the diverse strengths and weaknesses of children

a supportive structure and environment that is coherent, is systematic and allows ample instructional and collaboration time

continued in-service professional development that ensures that they have the skills and support necessary to produce the highest student achievement possible.

And when it comes to becoming a successful reader, every learner should be:

properly prepared and supported by teachers who understand the most effective way to teach reading

taught with methods that are based on proven research

given the opportunity to learn phonemic awareness, phonics, how to become fluent, how to increase his/her vocabulary and comprehension of written language

instructed based on a continuous measure of progress

Two decades ago, reading advocates assumed that the findings of the National Reading Panel would settle these debates and result in immediate, comprehensive improvement to how literacy is taught and learned. We were wrong. As the years have passed, we unfortunately see that too little was done too slowly to move that research into practice, forcing us to settle for half-victories. As a result, multiple generations of subsequent learners lack the reading skills necessary to succeed in our global, digital information economy. Until we seize these rights, we will remain a nation at risk.
Patrick Riccards is the executive director of Best in the World Teachers. Patrick previously served as chief of staff to the National Reading Panel and as director of the federal Partnership for Reading Collaborative. He is the author of Why Kids Can't Read: Continuing to Challenge the Status Quo in Education.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Riccards: Twenty Years After the National Reading Panel, It's Time for a Reading Rights Movement

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Today, Capitol Hill often seems a dark and gloomy place, drained by quarantine of virtually all the energy and activity typically found in the halls of Congress. But 20 years ago, on a beautiful April morning in our nation's capital, with the sun shining and the remnants of cherry blossoms hanging in the air, a [...]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
All students deserve equitable access to high-quality literacy and reading instruction and opportunities in their schools. This will only be accomplished when policymakers pay heed to an overall body of high-quality research evidence and then make available the resources necessary for schools to provide our children with the needed supports and opportunities to learn. This joint statement from NEPC and the Education Deans for Justice and Equity provides guiding principles for what any federal or state legislation directly or indirectly impacting reading should and should not do.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Policy Statement on the "Science of Reading"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
All students deserve equitable access to high-quality literacy and reading instruction and opportunities in their schools. This will only be accomplished when policymakers pay heed to an overall body of high-quality research evidence and then make available the resources necessary for schools to provide our children with the needed supports and opportunities to learn.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
ABSTRACT

Learning to associate written letters with speech sounds is crucial for the initial phase of acquiring reading skills. However, little is known about the cortical reorganization for supporting letter-speech sound learning, particularly the brain dynamics during the learning of grapheme-phoneme associations. In the present study, we trained 30 Finnish participants (mean age: 24.33 years, SD: 3.50 years) to associate novel foreign letters with familiar Finnish speech sounds on two consecutive days (first day ~ 50 minutes; second day ~ 25 minutes), while neural activity was measured using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Two sets of audiovisual stimuli were used for the training in which the grapheme-phoneme association in one set (Learnable) could be learned based on the different learning cues provided, but not in the other set (Control). The learning progress was tracked at a trial-by-trial basis and used to segment different learning stages for the MEG source analysis. The learning-related changes were examined by comparing the brain responses to Learnable and Control uni/multi-sensory stimuli, as well as the brain responses to learning cues at different learning stages over the two days. We found dynamic changes in brain responses related to multi-sensory processing when grapheme-phoneme associations were learned. Further, changes were observed in the brain responses to the novel letters during the learning process. We also found that some of these learning effects were observed only after memory consolidation the following day. Overall, the learning process modulated the activity in a large network of brain regions, including the superior temporal cortex and the dorsal (parietal) pathway. Most interestingly, middle- and inferior-temporal regions were engaged during multi-sensory memory encoding after the cross-modal relationship was extracted from the learning cues. Our findings highlight the brain dynamics and plasticity related to the learning of letter-speech sound associations and provide a more refined model of grapheme-phoneme learning in reading acquisition.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Rapid changes in brain activity during learning of grapheme-phoneme associations in adults

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Learning to associate written letters with speech sounds is crucial for the initial phase of acquiring reading skills. However, little is known about the cortical reorganization for supporting letter-speech sound learning, particularly the brain dynamics during the learning of grapheme-phoneme associations.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Moats, L, & Tolman, C (2009). Excerpted from Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS): Spellography for Teachers: How English Spelling Works (Module 3). Boston: Sopris West.

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

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Learn the six types of syllables found in English orthography, why it's important to teach syllables, and the sequence in which students learn about both spoken and written syllables.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
V 2 Reading Science In Schools Assessment Schedule.pdf

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily. Never email yourself a file again!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Last week I happened to watch a brilliant 60 Minutes interview with George Church, a Harvard University geneticist who was diagnosed with dyslexia as a child. I was thrilled to learn about someone with dyslexia whose work in genetics is groundbreaking. By sharing his struggle with dyslexia alongside his achievements as a geneticist, Church reminded the world that dyslexia has nothing to do with intelligence. Church acknowledged that school had been a struggle due to educators not knowing how to support him, but now he is living his dream directing transformational research at Harvard Medical School. He is currently working on gene therapy to reverse aging while leading over a hundred scientists in a lab that holds more than fifty patents. Church's breakthroughs may very well be because of his dyslexic brain!

Watching this interview and learning more about this man's journey was inspiring. However, a few days later I came across an article published in Education Week, and I was reminded of the powerful negative stigma surrounding dyslexia that still exists. Richard Allington is a prominent literacy expert, a professor emeritus at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and an outspoken dyslexia-denier. He was a featured speaker at the Literacy Association of Tennessee's fall conference, where he announced that he's "reasonably sure" dyslexia doesn't exist. He went on to attack recently passed state legislation that provides dyslexic students with targeted interventions. "If only [Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam] had called me," Allington said to a room full of educators. "I would have said, 'Just veto it and shoot whoever made this bill.'" I'm not sure what was more upsetting, that Allington was speaking to the very people who determine what kind of help kids get, or that his language was violent and dehumanizing. Regardless, his statements are simply counterfactual.

Research based on fMRI studies reveals structural differences in the brains of people with dyslexia (see Disruption of Functional Networks in Dyslexia: A Whole-Brain, Data-Driven Analysis of Connectivity, 2014, and How Children Learn to Read, 2015). These differences can cause challenges when learning to read but provide opportunities for creative thinking and innovation (see An eye for the unusual: creative thinking in dyslexics, 1999). Numerous studies further show that a student's environment predicts whether a person with dyslexia will succeed or fail in school and life (see The School's Role in Creating Successful and Unsuccessful Dyslexics, 2016 or Impact of mentoring on socio‐emotional and mental health outcomes of youth with learning disabilities and attention‐deficit hyperactivity disorder, 2019). Right now, in America, nearly twenty percent of students with learning disabilities (LD), such as dyslexia, drop out of high school-nearly three times the rate of all students (6.5 percent). Without early and effective interventions, a staggering number of them end up in the criminal justice system (The State of LD, 2017). These are the same targeted interventions Allington wants to do away with, and they are the difference for these at-risk students. Instead of spending time in prison, many of them go to college. We've seen that with the right environment, an effective individualized education program (IEP), and social-emotional skill development, a struggling dyslexic student can transform into an achiever (Impact of mentoring on socio‐emotional and mental health outcomes of youth with learning disabilities and attention‐deficit hyperactivity disorder, 2019). Imagine how much society would benefit if more students with learning disabilities were armed with appropriate IEPs and supported by understanding teachers, mentors, peers, and parents.

Allington's remarks aren't just irresponsible, they're dangerous. Actively denying that dyslexia exists furthers the myth that students with learning disabilities are stupid or just need to try harder, and contributes to these students having unsupportive environments in and out of the classroom. Inaccurate widespread beliefs like these, therefore, contribute to higher rates of depression, low self-esteem, and suicide within this population (Internalizing correlates of dyslexia, 2009). These are outcomes that rob bright and talented students from a future of immense possibilities. Rather than tearing these students down, we need to be acknowledging their learning disabilities and providing them with the right tools to reach their fullest potential.

Because I'm a proud dyslexic and leader of a nonprofit devoted to helping students with learning disabilities succeed, I feel a responsibility to hold Allington accountable and fight for what is right. To deny the existence of dyslexia is to reject the identity and experience of an entire population of people. Now, more than ever, we as a society are inching to build a world that embraces difference and inclusivity. None of us should be comfortable with language that borders on hate speech. If you're with me on this, please help me spread the truth. We can't let this moment go unnoticed. The twenty percent of people who learn differently have a voice. We are here, and we deserve to be seen, heard, and valued.

Sincerely,

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Denied & Rejected: Students with Dyslexia Deserve Better | Eye To Eye

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Earlier this week, as many were celebrating the accomplishments of a brilliant geneticist who is dyslexic, our community was stunned by the remarks of a speaker at the Literacy Association of Tennessee's fall conference. The notions and sentiment the speaker shared only serve to deepen the stigma...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Here comes a handy blog written for educators seeking to learn more about phonics. Just in time for summer professional learning season!

First... why all the hoopla about phonics?

In the last year, we've seen a growing national conversation about an unfortunate reality: many teacher preparation programs didn't arm teachers with enough information on how kids learn to read.

This helped to foster considerable buzz, from media to school districts to parent communities. I captured it in an executive summary of this 'literacy tsunami'.

The result: today, many educators are on a professional learning journey around the science of reading.

I'm down for that, y'all! And happy to help where I can.

Phonics Research: A Self-Study Syllabus

Here's my list of progressively-deepening reads for anyone trying to understand phonics Instructional Musts, particularly in early grades.

Primers:

A recent Science News article does an excellent job of introducing the context around the phonics vs whole language approaches, and summarizing the evidence in favor of phonics - both the well-known National Reading Panel and studies and evidence in favor of phonics that emerged in the subsequent 20 years.

Then, this EdWeek overview of the research on phonics is extensive and excellent.

Timothy Shanahan does a great job of explaining what quality phonics instruction is - and is not - in his recent blog, What is the science of reading?

In Phonics: 13 things every teacher should know, Clare Sealy shares tangible insights on phonics instruction.

Misunderstandings abound, and this recent article in AFT magazine, Phonics Faux Pas, by respected research scientists Nell Duke and Heidi Mesmer, focuses on common mistakes and how to avoid them.

David Liben and David Paige authored a truly informative, practical paper, Why a Structured Phonics Program is Effective, which tops my must-read list. It's a bit longer, but this research-rich overview defines structured phonics, contrasts it with other approaches, unpacks pitfalls to getting it right, and cites curricula that nail it.

For a sage educator voice, teacher Kyle Redford penned a stellar EdWeek editorial that confronts misconceptions head-on: Explicit Phonics Instruction: It's Not Just for Students With Dyslexia.

And for a quick glimpse of a strong phonics work in a classroom, check out this video of a first grade lesson from EL Education.

Common word recognition strategies like 'Skippy the Frog' get in the way of phonics learning, as unpacked in this blog on what not to do.

Deeper Learning:

How much time should we spend on comprehension and phonics? is an excellent blog by Timothy Shanahan, delving into the balance we need to find between different literacy foci. He's also on point in How would you schedule the reading instruction?

Louisa Moats penned the classic Teaching Reading IS Rocket Science, and it's an oldie but a goodie, touching on phonics and other reading instruction essentials.

Moats dispels confusion in How Spelling Supports Reading: And Why It Is More Regular and Predictable Than You May Think. For anyone skeptical of phonics due to the belief that English is such a wacky language that sound-symbol correspondences can't be taught systematically, Moats shows otherwise.

There are two different types of systematic phonics: analytic and synthetic. In Synthetic Phonics or Analytic Phonics: What does the research really say?, Timothy Shanahan discusses the evidence base for both. "The take away: Make sure young children receive daily, explicit, systematic decoding instruction. But don't be fanatical about synthetic or analytic approaches."

Teaching Phonics to English Learners is another Timothy Shanahan gem.

We shouldn't just talk about phonics instruction, we should also talk about the ways the rest of the curriculum supports the phonics learning (ex. using decodable readers to help students practice the sounds they have learned). And we need to name the approaches, like the use of 'meaning, syntax, and visual' cues, that impede phonics learning; here's a collection of reads on that important nuance.

Master Class:

To go to 201 level:

Achieve the Core offers a seven-module learning series on foundational skills, with an emphasis on phonological awareness and phonics, which includes webinars, powerpoints, and handouts. Excellent for professional learning!

Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition from Novice to Expert is a free, widely-praised journal article that is incredibly informative, albeit dense.

Mark Seidenberg wrote the book on this stuff - Language at the Speed of Sight - and it earns raves. Pro Tip: time-starved educators can read chapter 1 then skip to chapters 4-9 (the 'How We Read' section) and still absorb the key info; if you're tight on reading time, take a pass on chapters 2-3, which go into the historical weeds... interesting, but not critical to get instruction right.

Meredith and David Liben just penned a book on foundational skills, Know Better Do Better, that's getting heaps of praise from a who's who of literacy leaders. It tops my summer reading list because the Libens are my literacy oracles; they taught me much of what I know. Also, they're former successful school leaders who later became research luminaries, so their work always has a refreshingly practical and accessible bent.

The Free Instructional Materials We Need

Did you know that two curricula with excellent phonics components are FREE, openly-licensed resources... so you can use the full curricula - or just the foundational skills components - gratis?

More folks need to know this!! I discussed the OER landscape with Jennifer Gonzalez for her Cult of Pedagogy podcast and blog; check it out for the bigger picture on OER.

These free OER curricula are highly-rated on phonics: EL Education Language Arts and Core Knowledge Language Arts. Explore them as exemplars - or as your new source of materials!

The Excellent Curricula We Need

Six curricula are lauded for their strong foundational skills components - and for being strong on the other key pillars of early reading instruction.

They're also relatively new options, mostly becoming available in the last few years, in what literacy leaders call a 'curriculum renaissance.' Many come from providers beyond the traditional publishers, often pioneering nonprofits. Odds are, you probably haven't looked at them.

So, I'll try to tell you a bit about them. As a group, they're consistently distinguished for their excellent, engaging texts; the intentional way that they get all kids working with grade level texts; a content knowledge-building approach ( which is key, based on research); strong writing components; use of formative assessments; and more.

Four K-5 curricula have all-green reviews from EdReports, including strong scores for phonics:

ARC Core from American Reading is notable because it allows schools to customize subjects studied from an array of knowledge-building options, and for its strong 'IRLA' assessment tool; I've heard teachers rave about how this assessment supports differentiation as well as student ownership of learning, with each student working on individual 'Power Goals.'

Core Knowledge Language Arts is designed to build content knowledge across a broad array of history and science topics; its foundational skills components are described as easy to use by teachers; and it's available for free; it was developed by the nonprofit Core Knowledge foundation, and Amplify offers a slightly enhanced version with services like print materials and PD.

EL Education K-5 Language Arts, developed by the nonprofit school network leader EL Education, is designed around science and social studies themes; notable for its unique social-emotional learning attributes; and available for free, with services like print materials and PD available from nonprofit Open Up Resources or Learnzillion.

ReadyGen from Pearson. [Jan, 2020 Update: I have been hearing concerns about this program, which I am looking into... largely 'cause I can't find anyone who's happy with it to vouch for it. Kick the tires hard on this one.]

These curricula are also recommended by literacy leaders:

Wit & Wisdom - this K-2 curriculum, developed by nonprofit Great Minds, doesn't have its own phonics component, but it was designed around the Fundations phonics program; combined, they represent a comprehensive core, and Fundations users will find Wit & Wisdom to be a natural complement; in addition, Wit & Wisdom and Wilson developed a new library of decodable readers - called Geodes - which are apparently quite well done. Schools always have the option of using phonics programs other than Fundations. Wit & Wisdom does have all-green EdReports reviews in grades 3+, but it's unreviewed in grades K-2, because EdReports doesn't have a means of evaluating curricula that have been designed to work alongside other third-party programs.

Bookworms Reading and Writing - the first version of this curriculum was excellent on phonics, but earned middling reviews by EdReports because the curriculum lacked a writing component. The nonprofit Open Up Resources recently worked with author Sharon Walpole, of the University of Delaware, on an upgrade that turned Bookworms into a full reading & writing program; it has been getting lots of attention for its strong outcomes and more. Bookworms is distinguished for its frequent formative assessment, which feeds into skill-based small group work.

There's a lot more to say about each of the curricula above. Check out #CurriculumMatters in Twitter to find educators using each of these core programs.

Phonics Supplements

Yes, there are phonics supplements out there, some better than others. But as a literacy advocate, I recommend that folks look at the options on the core curriculum list, above.

Why? A few reasons:

Firstly, I'm with David Liben and David Paige when they name the downsides of using phonics components that are disconnected from the rest of Tier 1 ELA instruction. To wit:

'Even if a school provides a structured phonics program for its students, there are still common errors made that cause "failure to thrive" conditions for too many children. Some schools now combine a structured phonics program (e.g., "Fundations," "Reading Mastery," and others) with predictable or leveled texts. While this combination is clearly better than no structured phonics at all, it has two potential pitfalls. Time spent on the predictable or leveled readers often means less time attending to spelling/sound patterns. If little or no attention is paid to spelling/sound patterns when students work with the predictable or leveled texts, then students could end up losing the spelling/sound knowledge they have acquired. It also is difficult (though not impossible) to attend to spelling/sound patterns in these texts since the texts are not aligned with the patterns students have learned. In addition, a student may need more work with a specific pattern that does not appear in the predictable text in use.

There are other critical underpinnings for student reading success that few schools address adequately. As mentioned previously, a major one is reading fluency. In order to read with comprehension, students need to read with fluency. Fluency is defined as reading accurately, at a rate appropriate to the text, and with proper expression (Rasinski, 2004). The first step in fluent reading is to accurately and effortlessly recognize the words in the text; this step is called automaticity. A proficient reader reads about four to five words per second. Students who frequently stumble or hesitate in recognizing words are prevented from reading a text fluently. A structured phonics program, by continually assessing and addressingstudents' progress in mastering spelling/sound patterns, assures that all students going through the program can decode with automaticity, without which fluent reading is not possible.'

This is real talk. Great curricula take pains to align the phonics instruction with the rest of the reading work. Here's a recent teacher tweet that drives the point home; her curriculum (ARC Core, one of the ones named above) lines up the foundational skills work and the reading practice artfully:

This week, the friends of room 24 are learning about the beautiful, bright and bubbly letter Bb! The friends are also reading decodable library books about words that start with /b/! #keepingupwiththekindergarteners pic.twitter.com/ZhgMRHZLSP

- Miss Murray (@kmurrayroom24) September 5, 2019

Also, we all know that there's a lot more to reading instruction than phonics. K-2 reading instruction is described as "rocket science" for good reason, and using a comprehensive core lets schools know they are attending to all of these key elements (hat tip to Achieve the Core for the helpful graphic):

Lastly, if you have a phonics gap, you could have other reading instruction gaps. Most folks do... I've seen numerous school and district leaders conduct literacy audits using a good tool (ex. the Instructional Materials Evaluation Tool); I don't think I've ever heard anyone conclude by saying, "we were getting it all right, except for just one thing!"

All of that says to me: start by looking at the core programs. The whole of a strong core is consistently greater than the sum of supplement parts.

Thanks for reading. Thanks for sharing. Let's keep the important national conversation about reading instruction going, y'all!

Reading Research Fans Might Also Enjoy...

Essential Research No One Knows: Knowledge Matters To Reading Comprehension is another blog that aggregates articles and videos to support educators in understanding an important literacy pillar.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Here comes a handy blog written for educators seeking to learn more about phonics. Just in time for summer professional learning season! First... why all the hoopla about phonics? In the last year, we've seen a growing national conversation about an unfortunate reality: many teacher preparation programs didn't arm teachers with enough information on how...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The spelling "ough" can be pronounced eight different ways in English.

Don't panic, there aren't many words, and some of them are so arcane I usually don't bother teaching them. But let's be fairly comprehensive here.

There are five different single sounds, and three sound combinations.

"aw" as in bought, brought, fought, nought, ought, sought, thought and wrought iron.

"ou" as in when the bough or the drought breaks, and the UK spelling of plough (in the US regularised to plow), as well as doughty old characters, the soughing wind and a deep slough of depression.

"oh" as in dough, furlough and though, as well as doughnut and although, if you want to count them separately.

"ooh" as in through.

"uh" as in thorough and borough, and names like Gainsborough, Marlborough, Peterborough and Scarborough.

"u" plus "f" as in rough, tough and enough, plus a snake sloughing off its skin.

"o" plus "f"* as in cough, former Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and a cattle trough.

"u" plus "p" in hiccough, though nowadays many people seem to spell this hiccup.

That's it, as far as I know. Not so terrible after all.

* The "gh" spelling of the sound "f" is also used in the word "laugh", and goes after a vowel. Before a vowel, "gh" usually represents the sound "g" as in "Afghan", "ghost", "spaghetti" and "yoghurt".

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The spelling "ough" can be pronounced eight different ways in English. Don't panic, there aren't many words, and some of them are so arcane I usually don't bother teaching them. But let's be fairly comprehensive here. There are five different single sounds, and three sound combinations.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
There's a wrong way to teach reading and, unfortunately, it's also the most popular way.So, if you've ever committed these teaching errors, don't worry, you're not alone.I've been there, too.I was shocked when I realized that many teacher prep courses and even professional development classes are teaching reading methods not supported by science.If you're reading this blog and find yourself surprised or even defensive at these "errors," please take a moment to step back, take a deep breath, and use it as a springboard to start your journey into learning more about the science of reading.Instead of feeling denial, guilt, or anger...I encourage you to simply learn more and do better.

I know they're cute and cuddly. I know everyone uses them. I know you've scoured dozens of thrift stores to finally complete your set.But there is actually no research to support these "Beanie Baby Strategies."You heard that right. No research to support them.In fact, what the research does tell us, is that these are strategies that poor readers use, NOT good readers.So, if you'd like to teach your students to read like a struggling reader, by all means...use these reading cues.Otherwise, I'd steer clear.

I'm not talking about beautiful, authentic books like The Napping House.I'm talking about those contrived, early readers with repetitive patterns such as, "We cleaned the garage.We cleaned the house. We cleaned the school, etc."The ONLY way for brand new readers to get through these texts is by memorizing the patterns and using the 3-cueing strategies I warned about above. This is not reading!This is guessing and memorizing. It creates damaging habits that are extremely tough to break.

I visited another kindergarten classroom the very first week of school.The teacher was attempting to teach the sight word "from."After quite a bit of labored instruction and activities, she excitedly exclaimed, "So what's our sight word of the day?"The bewildered students simply stared at her, until one excitedly shouted, "F!"Young students are still learning the difference between a letter and word, and yet, many insist on teaching them a certain number of "high-frequency words." I am disheartened when I see the pressures some districts place on their kindergarten students (and teachers!), demanding 50, 75, even over 100 sight words memorized.Instead of focusing our efforts on getting these students to memorize words, we need to intensify our focus on phonemes and the graphemes that represent them.There is a limit to how many sight words a child can memorize.But if they learn to "orthographically map" these words, the number is endless.

Many educators think of phonemic awareness as a "kindergarten skill," but it goes much beyond that.David Kilpatrick states that phonemic awareness should be explicitly taught to ALL students until at least the second grade, and then beyond for those who haven't mastered it yet.Older, struggling readers almost always have weaknesses in this area that were never addressed. And because the most common source of reading difficulties is phonemic awareness, every teacher needs to make this a priority.Teach it to the whole class through 2 nd grade, and in small groups for those who need it in all other grades.A student is never too old to learn this skill and studies show that as phonemic awareness improves, reading ability improves as well.

The National Reading Panel does not only advocate for phonics, but for systematic phonics. Some reading approaches encourage the teacher to teach phonics incidentally, only when an opportunity presents itself. For example, a child stumbles upon a word he/she doesn't know in a text, and then the teacher decides to teach that particular grapheme.In contrast, systematic phonics is much more explicit.The teacher follows a planned sequence of phonics skills. This ensures students will have a strong foundation, without holes or the need to rely on guessing strategies.

Teaching systematic and explicit phonics is very effective, as long as it is not taught in isolation. Most of the instruction time should be spent applying the phonics skill you are teaching in authentic reading and writing experiences.

Sometimes we work so hard teaching our students basic decoding skills, that it can be easy to neglect vocabulary and background knowledge.But it's important not to forget the other side of Scarborough's Reading Rope.Many curriculum programs neglect these areas by focusing too much on "skills" and not enough on actual content.Natalie Wexler talks about this in her book, The Knowledge Gap. Teaching comprehension skills such as "finding the main idea" and "text features" do not necessarily lead to improved comprehension.Teaching a student to find the main idea in one text, will not lead to being able to find the main idea in other text. Cognitive scientists have known for years that the most important factor in good reading comprehension, is how much vocabulary and content knowledge you have of the subject.Instead of focusing so much of our attention on these comprehension "skills," we need to make sure we build their vocabulary and background knowledge.

Using the science of reading to provide students with the most effective reading instruction is the greatest gift we can give them.There is a right and wrong way to teach reading and the sooner we can come to grips with that fact, the sooner our nation's reading proficiency rates will improve.We, as educators, have a moral obligation to teach our students to read. The ability to read will open up countless opportunities for them. I feel strongly that teachers do the very best with the knowledge they have.It is unfortunate that most of us have not had access to this knowledge.And worse, have been taught ways that are not in line with what cognitive scientists have learned about reading and the brain.If some of these things are surprising or new to you, I beg you to dig deeper and begin your learning journey today.Our students deserve it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There's a wrong way to teach reading and, unfortunately, it's also the most popular way.So, if you've ever committed these teaching errors, don't worry, you're not alone.I've been there, too.I was shocked when I realized that many teacher prep courses and even professional development classes are teaching reading methods not

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Lorna Wooldridge is a dyslexia specialist tutor with over twenty-five years of experience and qualifications in the field of learning differences, from both the UK and USA. Lorna has a unique perspective on this condition as she has dyslexia, and her passion is to serve this community in any way she can.

"In a series of three blogs on the Simple View of Reading (SVR 1, 2, 3), I described three types of readers or reading profiles, but I didn't major on the fourth profile of an adequate or good reader."

"The diagram above shows these profiles, but in this blog I plan to talk about the reader that in some cases may look like an adequate reader, but is performing below their potential. In the diagram above they would fall in the cloud labeled 'compensating reader.' These are students with phonological awareness deficiencies that go unnoticed. They often test as average to low average in reading, particularly in the early years, but only with a lot of time and effort on their part. We can describe them as 'compensators.'"

For more on this topic, visit our blog: The Compensating Reader

In this blog post, Lorna describes ways to recognize the compensating reader and provides a few remediation tools.

Thank you for your time!

OGOA Team
Orton Gillingham Online Academy
brittany.ogonlineacademy@gmail.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Lorna Wooldridge is a dyslexia specialist tutor with over twenty-five years of experience and qualifications in the field of learning differences, from both the UK and USA. Lorna has a unique perspective on this condition as she has dyslexia, and her passion is to serve this community in any way she can.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Phonemic awareness, although of great importance, is one of the least understood components of reading instruction. Less than a third of teacher prep programs reviewed by the National Council for Teacher Quality are providing training in phonemic awareness. This is probably why many teachers and teacher educators have misconceptions about phonemic awareness and have trouble identifying the definition and applying the skill, like counting the number of phonemes within words. Yet, phonemic awareness is the foundation for instruction in word-level reading skills and the typical deficit of a student with dyslexia.

What is phonemic awareness?

Phonemic awareness is the ability to distinguish, synthesize, and manipulate the smallest sounds (or phonemes) in words that make a difference in the word's meaning. There are 4 phonemes in the words clap (/k/, /l/, /ă/, /p/), shapes (/sh/, /ā/, /p/, /s/), box (/b/, /ŏ/, /k/, /s/), and quick (/k/, /w/, /ĭ/, /k/) even though each of those words has a different number of letters.

To demonstrate phonemic awareness, try each of the following tasks:

Isolation: What is the last sound your mouth makes when you say the word "fix"?

Blending: Tell me the word that I am saying in this robot voice: /k/ /y/ /oo/ /t/

Segmentation: Break apart the sounds in the word "swished"

Addition: Say "white" - Add /k/ to the beginning.

Deletion: Say "quip" - Take off the /k/

Substitution: Say "click" - Change /l/ to /w/

The answers are at the bottom of the post!

Why does phonemic awareness matter?

According to research, phonemic analysis skills in kindergarten are among the best predictors of later reading achievement. Deficits in phonemic awareness abilities consistently separate children with and without a disability in word-level reading (i.e., dyslexia). These deficits persist into adulthood if adequate intervention is not given. We also have a large body of research evidence that suggests instruction in phonemic awareness promotes the acquisition of reading skills.

In order to sound out a word, a child must not only match each letter in the word to its corresponding sound, but then also synthesize, or blend, those sounds together. Even if children have all of the phonics knowledge in the world, without phonemic awareness the child will be left at guessing what the actual words on the page say. For example, one little boy in my first grade class at the beginning of the year picked up the book, "The Hill" to read to me. He promptly said "the" (had clearly memorized it in Kindergarten) and then went on to sounding out the next word. /h/..... /ĭ/...... /l/......, /h/..... /ĭ/...... /l/......, /h/..... /ĭ/...... /l/......, /h/... /ĭ/.... /l/..., /h/... /ĭ/.... /l/..., /h/... /ĭ/.... /l/... He couldn't synthesize the sounds together and pronounce the word "Hill."

A few children come into PreK with this skill. Some pick up this skill more naturally along the way. Others don't. For children at-risk of reading difficulties, phonemic awareness is the most common deficit. Yet studies suggest this is the skill least likely to be taught in intervention for students with reading difficulties, accounting for less than 2% of total reading intervention time.

What are some common misconceptions about phonemic awareness?

There are still many misconceptions around phonemic awareness. Many people conflate phonemic awareness with phonological awareness. Phonological awareness is the ability to distinguish, synthesize, and manipulate the sounds of the English language. This is the bigger umbrella term over phonemic awareness. It includes rhyming, word awareness (separating words in sentences), syllable awareness, onset-rime awareness (str-ing, spl-ash, b-ig), and phonemic awareness skills.

The problem with conflating the two is that phonemic skills are the high-impact skills. These are the ones that are directly correlated with reading (to sound out and read a word, you must have phonemic blending skills) and spelling (to break apart the sounds and connect them to letters, you must be able to segment phonemes). So when teachers work on rhyming or clapping syllables, there is no direct effect on word reading or phonemic awareness. If this time was spent instead on phonemic awareness skills, more direct benefits would ensue.

Another misconception is that you must first teach students how to rhyme or segment syllables before moving onto phonemic awareness tasks. This is not true. Although rhyming and syllable awareness are less complex skills, it does not mean they are prerequisites to phonemic awareness or even that working on these skills first will show a benefit to phonemic awareness lessons in the future. Teachers can go straight to phonemic awareness games and tasks with students before they even know their letter sounds.

Many people think you have to only do phonemic awareness orally-that is not true. These two skills of phonemic awareness and letter-sound correspondences can be taught simultaneously-that is where the most "bang for your buck" will be found. Phonemic awareness also plays a large role in orthographic mapping-or turning unfamiliar words into familiar, sight words (but that is a whole other future post).

The last one I'll discuss is more of a misunderstanding than a misconception. When pronouncing the phonemes, it's important to hold continuous sounds (like /fffff/, /shhhhh/, /sssss/, /lllllll/, /mmmm/) out long and also make sure to not add an "uh" at the end of clipped sounds (like "buh" for /b/ or "juh" for /j/). Saying the sounds in the most pure way possible will help students to better understand how to segment and blend sounds themselves.

How can this look in a PreK or Kindergarten classroom?

When I taught PreK and Kindergarten, these are some of the games we played to work specifically on phonemic awareness:

Jumping the sounds in words (/ch/-/ĭ/-/p/)

Saying a sound each time you take a step to line up (/b/-/l/-/ŏ/-/k/)

Saying a word in a sentence segmented and having students blend the word: "It is time for /l/-/ŭ/-/n/-/ch/!" (Side note: I also used this with our now 3 year old... he loved this game!)

Sorting pictures by their number of phonemes during center time (and using nuts and bolts to screw the picture to the correct number).

Playing Candy Land or another board game with FCRR's phoneme pictures-move a space for each sound in the word!

Using Elkonin boxes in small group settings to segment and blend words-you can use race cars, fruit loops, or even dinosaur stomps with the littlest ones for fun! Add letters that they've learned so far!

Allowing students to use invented spelling-teaching them explicitly how to segment sounds in words and assign a letter to each sound.

Phonemic awareness is the foundation underlying all of reading. It's what separates poor word readers from skilled word readers. And, it can be taught.

So go have fun! Teach your 2, 3, or 4 year old phonemic awareness skills at home to get them on the path to reading. Share this info with their teachers. And include the neighbors in on your games too!

[Answers to phonemic tasks: /s/, "cute," /s/-/w/-/ĭ/-/sh/-/t/, quite, whip, quick]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Foundational Importance of Phonemic Awareness

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Phonemic awareness, although of great importance, is one of the least understood components of reading instruction. Less than a third of teacher prep programs reviewed by the National Council for Teacher Quality are providing training in phonemic awareness. This is probably why many teachers and teacher educators have misconceptions about phonemic awareness and have trouble...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Reading for Understanding Research Initiative

Dr. Elizabeth Albro
(202) 245-8495
Elizabeth.Albro@ed.gov

The Reading for Understanding Research Initiative (Reading for Understanding) was created to develop effective approaches for improving reading comprehension for all students. Reading for Understanding takes a comprehensive approach to tackling the problem of improving reading comprehension and includes (a) applied basic research to identify underlying processes that contribute to comprehension; (b) development and evaluation of instructional approaches, curricula, technology, and teacher professional development programs to improve reading comprehension for students in prekindergarten through Grade 12; and (c) development and validation of assessments of reading comprehension. In addition, IES created Reading for Understanding to change the way in which research on reading has been conducted by accelerating the research process and creating a tightly linked network of researchers. Central to the success of the initiative is the full participation of teachers and other school-based personnel in the design and interpretation of the research studies and interventions.

Six teams were selected through a competitive, scientific review process to participate in the Reading for Understanding Network. Five of the teams focus on increasing understanding of basic processes that contribute to reading comprehension and developing and evaluating instructional approaches, curricula, technology, and professional development for enhancing reading comprehension. The five teams address a broad range of research questions and engage in a variety of research strategies including experimental, observational, and longitudinal studies. The sixth team developed assessments designed to measure the developmental trajectories of reading comprehension skills. Altogether, the six teams include over 130 researchers representing linguistics, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, reading, speech and language pathology, assessment, and evaluation.

A 2020 IES-funded synthesis of the more than 200 scholarly articles produced by the Reading for Understanding Research Initiative highlights three key findings. They include: (a) the importance of emphasizing comprehension in pursuit of knowledge and insight; (b) redoubling our efforts to enhance language development, both oral and written, for students across the age-span; and (c) changing the culture of classrooms to emphasize collaboration, deep comprehension, critique, and the generative use of comprehension.
Grade Levels:
A quick overview of work of the Reading for Understanding is available here.

The Request for Applications for the Reading for Understanding Research Initiative is posted online at: https://ies.ed.gov/funding/pdf/2010_84305F.pdf.

IES also funds research on reading through the National Center for Education Research's Reading and Writing program and The National Center for Special Education Research's Reading, Writing, and Language Development program.
RELATED PUBLICATION

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Search Funded Research Grants - Program Details

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Reading for Understanding Research Initiative Dr. Elizabeth Albro (202) 245-8495 Elizabeth.Albro@ed.gov The Reading for Understanding Research Initiative (Reading for Understanding) was created to develop effective approaches for improving reading comprehension for all students.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Since we've been having, and will continue to have, a series of posts on Zoroastrianism and related topics, this is a good opportunity to review a recent, substantial publication related to this subject: Barakatullo Ashurov, " Religions and Religious Space in Sogdian Culture: A View from Archaeological and Written Sources", Sino-Platonic Papers, 306 (December, 2020), 1-41.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Science of Reading in Teacher Preparation | School of Education | myMount

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In April 1967, Kenneth Goodman presented his landmark paper at the American Educational Research Association. 'Reading: A Psycholinguistic Guessing Game' (Goodman, 1967) was the culmination of five years of research and took the world of reading instruction by storm. It has been reprinted in eight anthologies, is his most widely cited work and stimulated myriad of research into similar models of reading. The aftershocks for reading instruction are still felt to this day.

The central tenet of the paper was the refutation of reading as a precise process that involves 'exact, detailed, sequential perception and identification of letters, words, spelling patterns and large language units...' (1982, p33), but that it is a selective process that involves the partial use of available language cues based on 'readers' expectations' (1982, p33). The reader guesses words based on semantic and contextual expectations and then confirms, rejects and refines these guesses in 'an interaction between thought and language...' (1982, p34). Inaccuracies, or 'miscues', as Goodman (1982) calls these errors, are inherent (indeed, vital) to this process of psycholinguistic guesswork.

Goodman (1982) justifies his theory by linking it to Chomsky's (1965) model of oral sentence production which results in precise encoding of speech being sampled and approximated when the message is decoded. Thus, he maintains, the oral output of the reader may not be directly related to the graphic stimulus of the text and may involve 'transformation in vocabulary and syntax' (1982, p38) even if meaning is retained. The implication is profound: the reader is reading for meaning not for accuracy and it is semantics and context that drives the reading process not alphabetic decoding. The tether with the work of Chomsky (1965) is intuitively attractive but evolutionarily awkward. Chomsky's (1965) research theorised that language and language structures for humans are an inherent, intuitive, natural attribute developed over millions of years of genetic selection and are thus biologically primary (Geary, 2002). To suggest that reading and writing aligned to Chomsky's (1965) oral model of grammatical intuition and that a reader was an 'Intuitive grammarian' (Goodman, 1982, p161) ignored the inconvenient truth that the five thousand years it has taken to develop writing is not an evolutionary period (Dehaene, 2014).

Goodman's (1982) 'whole language' approach was highly critical of Chall's (1967) research which separated code-breaking from reading for meaning. Although never addressing the weight of research from which she drew her conclusions, and which contradicted his hypothesis, he accused her of misunderstanding how the linguistic code operated and was used in reading. 'A language is not only a set of symbols...' he opined, 'it is also a system of communication...' (1982, p127) and he accused her of overlooking the 'fact' that phonemes do not really exist and that oral language is no less a code than written language, maintaining that even in an alphabetic system it is the interrelationship between graphophonic, syntactic and semantic information and the switching between these cuing systems that enables the reader to extract meaning from text. He states with certainty that:

'Reading is a process in which the reader picks

and chooses from the available information only

enough to select and predict a language structure

that is decodable. It is not in any sense a precise

perceptual process.' (1982, p128).

Goodman's consistent conflation of oral language with written language, and his failure to acknowledge the vastly differing processes required to decode and recode the two systems of communication lies at the heart of the failure the whole language approach to reading. With resounding echoes of Gestalt theory (Ellis, 2013), and supported by Clay's (1991) assertion that readers rely on sentences for rapid word perception, he took his flawed model of reading to its illogical conclusion, deducing that whole texts contained more meaning and were thus easier to read than pages, paragraphs and sentences. The grapheme and letter, containing the lowest level of meaning, were therefore, the most difficult to read and were, for reading instruction, the most irrelevant (Goodman and Goodman, 1981).

There was little room for phonics and phonemic awareness within the theory. Smith (1975) believed it did have a place but only after children had learned to read. Nonetheless, in line with all of Chall's (1967) research, even he couldn't fail to notice that all of his best readers had excellent phonemic awareness. His conclusion was a triumph of confirmation bias (Wason, 1960): a good reader was intuitively able to make sense of phonics. In other words, phonics mastery did not make a good reader; good reading enabled phonics mastery. Smith's (2012) book for teachers, 'Understanding Reading', supports and encourages Goodman's (1972) guesswork technique for poor readers, recommending skipping unknown words, guessing them or, as a last resort, sounding the word out. It concludes with the emphatic statement that, 'Guessing...is the most efficient manner in which to learn to read...' (2012, p 232). Goodman and Smith had developed a model of reading that followed exactly the paradigm of the poor reader (Adams and Bruck, 1993).

Whole language reading as a pedagogical technique spread like wildfire. It was fanned by two powerful empirical gusts drawn relentlessly by the doldrums of intuition. Firstly, it appeared to work; at least initially. The more difficulty a child has with reading, the more reliant they become on memorisation of texts and the utilisation of word shape and visual and contextual cues and the more fluent they appear, although often paraphrasing and skipping words (Juel et al. 1985). By being taught non-phonological compensatory strategies, poor readers seem to make progress; progress that eventually stalls once they reach seven years old and texts become more demanding, have fewer visual cues and the child's logographic memory capacity had been reached. By this stage, confident readers have cracked the phonetic code for themselves (Adoniou, 2017) so appear to have mastered reading through 'whole word' methods.

Secondly, the method appealed to teachers. Both Smith and Goodman appealed directly to teachers to ignore the gurus and experts, trust their intuition and carry out their own research (Kim, 2008). The theory that reading was, like oral language, intuitive, absolved teachers from having to teach it. This aligned perfectly with the constructivist teaching theories of Dewey (1916) that abounded in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s (Peal, 2014) with the belief that knowledge, including knowing how to read, could be discovered and constructed. This despite Perfetti's warning that, 'learning to read is not like acquiring one's native language, no matter how much someone wishes it were so' (1991, p. 75). Teaching phonics on the other hand was highly technical, complex and required training, practice and repetition gaining it a reputation for 'drill and kill'. Whole language methods, with the emphasis on guessing and intuitive learning enabled teachers to abdicate responsibility for the teaching of reading and concentrate on the far more enticing elements of literacy.

It is this professional abdication of reading instruction that has been the most damaging legacy of Smith and Goodman. In 2012 the National Union of Teachers (NUT), the second largest teaching union representing in excess of three hundred thousand teachers, denounced the introduction of systematic synthetic phonics as the promotion of a single fashionable technique with one NUT executive stating, "Most adults do not read phonically. They read by visual memory or they use context cueing to predict what the sentence might be...' (Mulholland, 2014). The union was emphatic that phonics alone would not produce fluent readers and that 'mixed methods' were essential. The largest teaching union, the NAS/UWT, asserted that children, '...need to use a combination of cues such as initial letter sounds and illustrations to make meaning from text...' (politics.co.uk, 2013). This resistance from educational institutional leadership clearly reflected the attitudes of their memberships. According to a NFER (2012) survey the majority of teachers specifically mentioned the use of picture cues as a reading technique along with the visual memorisation of word shapes and the sight learning of words. Further research by the NFER (Walker and Bartlett, 2013) found that 67% of teachers believed that a 'mixed methods' approach to the teaching of reading was the most effective. A survey by the NAS/UWT in 2013 (politics.co.uk, 2013) showed that 89% of teachers believed that children needed to use a variety of cues to extract meaning from text confirming the results of Sheffield Hallam University's research two years earlier that revealed 74% of primary school teachers encouraged pupils to use a range of cueing systems that included picture clues (Gov.uk, 2011).

The whole language approach to reading instruction has maintained traction under cover of the balanced literacy. This compromise arrangement attempted to end the reading wars by empowering teachers to decide which methods best suited individual children and use a cocktail of approaches to address reading failure (Seidenberg, 2017). In practice, this meant that the vast majority of older teachers continued with their whole language approach and thus ignored phonics instruction except where statutory assessments enforced it (Seidenberg, 2017).

Marie Clay's Reading Recovery (1995) programme is perhaps the most remarkable evidence of the indestructability of the whole language approach to reading. Clay (1991) popularised the whole language approach in New Zealand along with Smith and Elley who maintained that, 'children learn to read themselves; direct teaching plays only a minor role...' (1995, p87) as learning to read was akin to learning to speak. This resulted in 20% of all six-year-olds in New Zealand making little or no progress in toward gaining independence in reading in their first year of schooling (Chapman, Turner and Prochnow, 2001). The solution was Clay's Reading Recovery programme: the same approach that had failed the same children in their first year of teaching. It seemed the ultimate insult to these struggling readers and should have been the final nail in the whole language coffin. But this reading instruction Rasputin refused to die and clung to life with a remarkable feat of resurrection.

Reading recovery worked.

Studies showed that not only is it beneficial, it is cost effective too (May et al, 2015) and is recognised as good practice by the Early Intervention Foundation, European Literacy Policy Network, Institute for Effective Education and What Works Clearinghouse as well as being advocated by London University's UCL. A recent US study (Sirindes et. al, 2018) reaffirmed these assertions which were backed on social media by education heavyweight Dylan Wiliam (2018).

How can a whole language model of reading instruction defy the avalanche of research that undermines the efficacy of the approach? How can it work when the eyes and brain cannot process the contextual adjustment involved in psycholinguistic guessing fast enough for it facilitate efficient reading (https://www.thereadingape.com/single-post/2019/01/03/Why-the-reading-brain-cant-cope-with-triple-cueing).

The answer lies partly in the model and partly in the research. The programme constitutes twenty weeks of daily, thirty-minute one-to-one sessions with a trained practitioner. Fifty hours of one-to-one reading, however poor the instruction, will result in some improvements for most readers. This may be the result of improved guessing strategies, greater numbers of words recognised by shape and far greater opportunities for the child to start to crack the alphabetic code by themselves as well as any phonics instruction the child is receiving outside of the programme. Furthermore, the research is not nearly as positive as it at first appears. Tumner and Chapman (2016) questioned the research design of May et al (2015) as a result of the lowest performing students being excluded from the study. They concluded that the successful completion rate of students was modest and that there was no evidence that reading recovery leads to sustained literacy gains. More damning, however, is their highlighting of the range of experiences and interventions that the control group were exposed to. This cuts to the kernel of the traction maintained by Reading Recovery: until it is tested directly against an efficient systematic phonics programme it will continue to indicate modest improvements in reading for its participants. Reading Recovery versus fifty hours of extra one-to-one linguistic phonics instruction: no contest.

When the study is finally commissioned and completed, expect some very red faces in the world of education academia - not least at UCL.

This post is number 16 in a series of posts.

You may be interested in reading:

1. https://www.thereadingape.com/single-post/2018/01/07/Phonics---the-lever-of-civilisation

2. https://www.thereadingape.com/single-post/2018/03/30/Why-English-is-just-so-darned-difficult-to-decode---a-short-history

3. https://www.thereadingape.com/single-post/2018/04/09/Phonics-2000-years-ago---Quintilianthe-accidental-phonics-genius-with-a-toxic-legacy

4. https://www.thereadingape.com/single-post/2018/04/29/Martin-Luther---the-unshackling-of-literacy---but-a-fatal-flaw

5. https://www.thereadingape.com/single-post/2018/06/01/Universal-literacynot-in-England---the-historical-roots-of-a-divided-education-system

6. https://www.thereadingape.com/single-post/2018/06/10/How-America-helped-ruin-English-reading-instructionwith-some-help-from-the-Germans

7. https://www.thereadingape.com/single-post/2018/07/08/Short-term-gains-long-term-pain-The-Word-Method-starts-to-take-hold

8. https://www.thereadingape.com/single-post/2018/08/06/How-assessment-and-inspections-ruined-reading---England-1870

9. https://www.thereadingape.com/single-post/2018/09/01/Efficacy-vs-intuition---phonics-goes-for-a-knockout-blow-in-the-late-19th-century-but-is-floored-by-bad-science

10. https://www.thereadingape.com/single-post/2018/10/14/Huey-and-Dewey---no-Disney-double-act

11. https://www.thereadingape.com/single-post/2018/10/23/Virtual-insanity-in-reading-instruction---teaching-reading-without-words

Follow the reading ape on twitter @thereadingape

12.https://www.thereadingape.com/single-post/2018/11/25/Bad-science-the-end-of-phonics

13. https://www.thereadingape.com/single-post/2018/12/09/Rudolph-Flesch-points-out-the-elephant-in-the-room

14.https://www.thereadingape.com/single-post/2019/01/03/Why-the-reading-brain-cant-cope-with-triple-cueing

15. https://www.thereadingape.com/single-post/2019/02/03/The-final-battle-of-the-reading-wars-Why-1965-should-have-marked-the-end-of-the-war

Follow the reading ape on twitter - @thereadingape

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The very peculiar case of Goodman, Smith and Clay (or why the whole language approach just wont die)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In April 1967, Kenneth Goodman presented his landmark paper at the American Educational Research Association. 'Reading: A Psycholinguistic Guessing Game' (Goodman, 1967) was the culmination of five years of research and took the world of reading instruction by storm. It has been reprinted in eight anthologies, is his

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The literature and discourse related to literacy instruction tends to focus on reading, even though writing is just as important for student literacy achievement. In addition, significant attention is paid to the multi component nature of skilled reading, while writing tends to be referred to as a single, monolithic skill.

Much has been written about the multiplicity of skills involved in reading, beginning with the "five components" model that became popular after the 2000 report of the National Reading Panel (i.e., phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension). Levels of language skills are often referred to in terms of how they contribute to skilled reading (i.e., phonology, orthography, morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse). School assessment plans typically organize formal and informal measures around the discreet reading skills that they measure (e.g., phonemic awareness, word or passage oral reading fluency, vocabulary knowledge, sentence or passage reading comprehension). Some published reading programs focus on specific reading components by design (e.g., phonological awareness programs for young children, phonics programs for the primary grades) and core reading programs identify how discreet reading skills are addressed in daily or weekly lessons.

On the other hand, when attention is paid to writing instruction, teachers are not sure what that should include. Many educators who are knowledgeable about effective reading instruction are stymied when asked to: (1) identify the components of skilled writing, (2) explain how levels of language contribute to skilled writing, (3) identify a set of writing assessments, or (4) suggest a comprehensive curriculum for teaching writing.

With a nod towards Hollis Scarborough's "Reading Rope", I'd like to suggest a model that identifies the multiple components that are necessary for skilled writing. In 2001, Scarborough published a graphic that depicts multiple components of language comprehension (i.e., background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, literacy knowledge) and word recognition (i.e., phonological awareness, decoding, sight recognition) as strands in a rope. As students develop skills in these components they become increasingly strategic and automatic in their application, leading to fluent reading comprehension.

A similar "rope" metaphor can be used to depict the many strands that contribute to fluent, skilled writing, as shown in the graphic below. It should be noted that instruction for many skills that support writing also support reading comprehension.

For a more detailed explanation of the "writing rope", see my December 1, 2019 article "The Strands That Are Woven Into Skilled Reading" available at the Free Resources part of the Keys to Literacy website. For a PDF of the graphic, click here.

Joan Sedita

Joan Sedita is the founder of Keys to Literacy and author of the Keys to Literacy professional development programs. She is an experienced educator, nationally recognized speaker and teacher trainer. She has worked for over 35 years in the literacy education field and has presented to thousands of teachers and related professionals at schools, colleges, clinics, and professional conferences.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
We Need a "Writing Rope"! - Keys to Literacy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The literature and discourse related to literacy instruction tends to focus on reading, even though writing is just as important for student literacy achievement. In addition, significant attention is paid to the multi component nature of skilled reading, while writing tends to be referred to as a single, monolithic skill.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Its program is one of the most popular in K-12, especially in my neck of the woods. We can learn from its enduring popularity, as well as the things it gets right - such as instruction designed around authentic texts and lauded professional learning experiences.

Yet I've spoken with numerous educator friends who use (or once used) Reading Workshop, and who find that - for all its virtues - it does an inadequate job of bringing evidence-based practice into classrooms.

Those perspectives are sure to surprise a lot of folks - and they deserve important, reflective conversations.

Still, I put off writing this. I prefer to write blogs citing programs that DO align to research - like and and . I don't relish penning critiques, to be honest.

But, in the wake of new reviews of its Units of Study product, which raise substantive concerns about Reading Workshop, folks have a lot of questions. They deserve answers. So, I'm going to simplify the concerns, complete with links for additional reading.

Then we are gonna talk about equity. Because equity is at the heart of it.

Three Key Literacy Instruction Musts emerge from the evidence. Schools need to:

1. Ensure all kids can decode words successfully, as a foundation to reading success. ( Details here )

2. Build content knowledge for students from the earliest grades, because background knowledge (and its attendant vocabulary) is critical to reading comprehension. ( ) Details here

3. Get all kids working with texts at their grade level, including the kids that are below benchmark, because evidence supports this approach over leveled reading instruction in Tier 1 ELA. ( Details here )

There's more to reading instruction... much more. Still, those three pillars are so essential that we need to start there.

Seven literacy experts, including Marilyn Jager Adams, Tim Shanahan, David Paige, and Tim Rasinski, just reviewed the Reading Workshop Units of Study , primarily against the criteria above. It went 0 for 3.

1. Reviewers found that the program gives too little time to phonics instruction, as well as too little guidance on how to differentiate based on assessments. In addition, Reading Workshop includes practices (MSV / 3-cueing) that interfere with phonics learning.

2. The program "falls short on building knowledge systematically" and provides weak support for vocabulary acquisition.

3. Regarding complexity of its texts, reviewers "found the program's approach to complex text and language development to be too unsystematic to ensure that all students would encounter adequate challenge or receive sufficient supports for successful progress, particularly in grades K-2."

The reviewers also found that "research-based EL supports are barely present in the Units of Study ."

You can read more about the study in EdWeek. The expert reviewers are interviewed in . But I'd start with the this APM podcast . extensive report itself

Other recent articles have raised questions about Reading Workshop - mostly with respect to foundational skills.

(Background: historically, many have felt that Reading Workshop diminished the importance of foundational skills, a concern reinforced by the fact that Units of Study didn't have a phonics component. The program guides were clear that it was a reading ... a set of program ... rather than a comprehensive curriculum. Yet some folks bought model units without getting that memo and finding phonics supplements, worrying literacy advocates. In 2018, a new, optional phonics program became available from Reading Workshop.) Units of Study

Last August, explained that Reading Workshop includes a problematic practice; when students are taught to use 'Meaning, Structure, Visual' cues for word recognition, it impedes phonics learning. (You'll find a .) 'MSV,' also known as 3-cueing, is common in balanced literacy programs including Reading Workshop and Fountas & Pinnell, and by calling this out, brief explainer for this nuanced concept here At a Loss for Words spawned discussion about these programs.

As critiques intensified, Reading Workshop author Lucy Calkins penned an open letter describing a "learning trajectory." She acknowledged advocates' points about phonics instruction and dyslexia, which drew a range of responses. Some, like Margaret Goldberg, thanked Lucy for her open embrace of new practices and to Reading Workshop. Cognitive neuroscientist Mark Seidenberg (among others) had a pushed for necessary refinements . EdWeek more critical take . covered the developments

Soon after, Reading Workshop was one of the programs called out in a seismic EdWeek article, The Most Popular Reading Programs Aren't Backed By Science . " The program assumed a lot of knowledge-of oral language, of phonics-that students just didn't have."

"The most common approach to reading instruction in U.S. classrooms - grouping students by reading level - isn't actually supported by research. This approach poorly supports below-benchmark readers in catching up with their peers. Yet it remains conventional wisdom that leveled reading groups serve children, and they are promoted by the most popular reading programs in the country, such as Fountas & Pinnell and the Teachers College Readers Workshop program."

Ironically, Kingsley's widely-praised article on reading science published adjacent to a piece by Calkins, touting the virtues of Reading Workshop... a . much-noted dichotomy

Educators have shared concerns, as well. Mostly these have been shared as social media posts, but this elementary teacher's blog shares detailed pros and cons of Reading Workshop, and actually covers subtly different concerns, such as "minimal guidance" provided to students. Margaret Goldberg wrote an insightful blog about the text level concerns.

Reading Workshop was also at the center of 2019's largest-scale parent protest around reading instruction. In a district near St. Louis, 118 residents penned an open letter protesting the use of Reading Workshop, as well as weak PD for teachers. A noteworthy detail: 42% of K-3 students in the district had been screened "at-risk" for dyslexia, essentially proving the parents' point about poor phonics instruction in their schools.
December, 2020 Update: There have been major developments in this story, as Calkins acknowledged issues with her program's approach to foundational skills in October, 2020. Reactions from the field were fierce. It's nonetheless interesting to look back on Calkins's initial defensive responses from early 2020, for context. Calkins has not signaled any changes to the program with regard to the other issues cited in this blog.

'In an emailed statement to Education Week, Calkins responded to the critiques in the report. "The Teachers College Reading and Writing Project has always been a learning community. We'll learn from this review as we have learned from everything else," she wrote.

Calkins also said that the program develops other skills that the review didn't evaluate. "Teachers in our schools work to help students become passionate, critical, life-long readers, and writers who develop confident voices," she wrote. "We applaud our schools for creating communities that increase equity as well as achievement."'

Calkins sent a more in-depth message to school leaders on January 16th, as the new study debuted:

"Dear Leaders of TCRWP Schools,

I am writing to give you a heads up. Sue Pimentel, one of the authors of the CCSS and a founder of Student Achievement Partners, has issued a report on TCRWP that may receive far more press than would have happened had it not been for the maelstrom around the science of reading and the Ed Week articles. I want you to know this will be coming out today. I just learned of this earlier today, so I'm sorry you haven't gotten more of a heads up. I anticipate that this could create problems for some of you, as well as for those of us at TCRWP central, and I couldn't be more sorry. We don't yet know what kind of attention this will receive. If the report happens to go under the radar, let's let it stay there-be forewarned, but don't amplify it by sharing.

I believe their intent was to review one balanced literacy curriculum, one basal, and two other programs in all, in a way that suggests that perhaps they think their reviews of selected representative programs will have broader implications. I do believe that a good deal of what they question about Units of Study are questions that could be raised about any sister/brother balanced literacy program.

The report is attached. It's long, detailed, and not pretty. They seem to have reviewed Units of Study in Reading and Phonics, and not writing. They have mostly focused on the younger grades, not reviewing our work on critical and interpretive reading, writing development, higher level comprehension, etc. I'll issue a formal response as soon as I can. Here are some early responses.

First, it's important to say that the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project has always been a learning community. We'll learn from these reviews as we have learned from everything else. I've been very intent on learning from any air between TCRWP and the science of reading, as I think that research needs to be brought to schools. I believe we have already been doing that, and we need to continue to do that work. This new review also examines us with new lenses and I'll need to think about the assumptions that are baked into those perspectives.

When you read the Student Achievement Partners review, you'll see that running through it are concerns that the Units of Study do not support growth in reading and writing for below benchmark students. Their fear seems based especially on the belief that too much is left to choice. A major way that Paige (in critiquing K-2 phonics and workshop) and Shanahan (in critiquing access to complex texts) critique Units of Study is that the curriculum leaves too much choice to teachers (to select the relevant small group work and extensions that their students need) and to kids (to choose books that will gradually become more challenging). The idea that kids are reading self-selected books instead of working with teacher support on a whole-class text is prevalent. I'm not entirely sure how to talk back to these portions of the critique. It is true we believe in teacher and student autonomy, and in communities that develop growth mindsets, where adults and children strive to continuously improve. We have found that choice leads to agency and independence, and that both are important to achievement.

And, of course, our data shows that our faith in our teachers and in what they have taught their children is well-placed. I am pleased that our students outperform their peers. In 2019, students in core TCRWP schools (schools that have been with us for an average of ten years) outperformed those in non TCRWP schools in New York by over 30 percentage points in proficiency. Language learners in core TCRWP schools out-performed other language learners in the City by 13.5 percentage points. Students in all TCRWP schools-including those working with us for just a year-outperformed other students by almost 5 percentage points-and these numbers have continued to improve every year.

This data is important because the Student Achievement Partners review suggests they are most worried that language learners won't move forward. Yet language learners in TCRWP schools out-perform language learners in non-TCRWP schools-so our faith in teachers making deliberate and intelligent choices about small group work, extensions, and helping students move up levels of text complexity is well-placed.

I also need to say that we strive to teach beyond the criterion that are critiqued in the Student Achievement Partners. Teachers in our schools work to help students become passionate, critical, life-long readers, and writers who develop confident voices. We applaud our schools for creating communities that increase equity as well as achievement.

Again, my heartfelt apologies for problems this will cause you. Please let me know ways we can help. What is that saying, "When it is dark enough, we see the stars?" I'm looking into the night sky...

Calkins points out that most issues from the expert study "could be raised about any sister/brother balanced literacy program."

One hundred percent accurate!

These issues are absolutely present in other programs - and that's what makes this discussion so important: Many of the top programs suffer from alignment to research.

So, this is about Reading Workshop, and so much more.

Said differently... I have zero beef with Teachers College, and I hope that my blog, the expert reviews, and other pieces about the program won't be read as anything personal, against anyone. They shouldn't be.

I have major beef with teachers being asked to use materials that don't align with extensive research. Based on its market share, Reading Workshop is a leading source of this issue, but it's far from alone. The pervasiveness of curricula with these same shortcomings lends urgency to this conversation.

We need to talk about the equity implications. Especially because this isn't just about Reading Workshop.

The #1 reinforcer of equity gaps in reading: leveled reading instruction. The kids who start below-benchmark get a steady diet of lower-level texts, so they tend to finish where they started: below-benchmark. ( ) Explained here.

To put a fine point on it: the issues with the Reading Workshop program are equity issues. Full stop.

The literacy experts are clear about this in their recent review:

"Children who arrive at school already reading or primed to read, researchers agreed, may integrate seamlessly into the routines of the Units of Study model and maintain a successful reading trajectory. However, children who need additional practice opportunities in a specific area of reading or language development likely would not."

If we have one conversation, let's have that essential conversation. These are addressable equity issues , y'all!
1. Will the Reading Workshop team be responding to the latest concerns?
Educators across the US are having "Aha!" moments about these important principles (case in point below), in part because of the proliferation of reading about it. And then they are addressing these issues.
2. When Calkins says that schools using her curriculum "increase equity as well as achievement," what does that mean?

I am OBSESSED with this book by @natwexler regarding the #knowledgegap. I'm only 20 or so pages in, but I've already experienced so many "ah-ha", and "uh-oh" moments....presented in the most reflective and honest way possible!#teachertwitter#edutwitter #elachat pic.twitter.com/bG2uU0l0KD

- Michael Hart (@MichaelHartEDU) January 17, 2020

3. What data will we get on Reading Workshop outcomes?
It sounds like we may get a more extensive response from Teachers College.

Here is what folks are buzzing about. I'll be watching this:

Or do they hope that these issues will go away, if this study stays "under the radar," as Lucy Calkins seems to encourage in her letter?

If the approach/product doesn't align with the key equity research... what is the claim to improving equity?
4. How will the Reading Workshop program be changing in light of Calkins's "learning trajectory"? When will changes take effect?
K-12 watchers have long sought efficacy data for Reading Workshop; it has been on the market for more than a decade, yet we've lacked statistically significant studies showing its effectiveness. Will we now get to see such data - complete with detailed sources that can be verified by outsiders?

I'm especially curious about this one. My daughter attends one of the NYC Teachers College 'Project Schools,' closely aligned with the Reading Workshop team, and eligible for special staff development. Its outcomes exceed the NYC average... but it's a school with two Gifted & Talented classrooms per grade, which skews its data meaningfully. Based on a number of factors, including a population that's approximately a third Gifted & Talented, I think the school may punch below its weight on reading outcomes, even though its numbers look good to an outsider.

I am guessing that her school is in the data set to which Calkins alludes in her letter. I'd like the chance to dig into the data at that level, so we know: How many schools in the data set are outliers because of factors like G&T programs?

Update: Emily Hanford's request to get a list of these schools was "declined" by representatives, as she shared in her January 27th podcast.

Calkins writes that she is "very intent on learning from any air between TCRWP and the science of reading."

In this case, the proof is in the product. How and when will the Reading Workshop model and the Units of Study program evolve to address these concerns?
Update: on January 29th, Teachers College published a response to the reviews which can be read here.
To date, Calkins's recent "learning trajectory" has not translated to product changes. For example, her open letter devoted a section to the role of decodable readers, saying "decodable texts have value for all children in the earliest stages of learning to read." Also, "very early books (A through D especially) heavily supported by pictures and repetition should be just one part of a child's reading diet, and that including a range of decodable texts would be a wise move." Calkins recommends the decodables by Elfrieda Hiebert. Ready Readers

Neither Reading Workshop Units of Study nor the new phonics program come with a set of decodable readers. Recent calls to Heinemann suggest that this remains unchanged; Heinmann representatives are neither aware of decodables coming soon, nor do they recommend purchase of . So schools buying Caklins's program for 2019-20 will not get a component that everyone agrees is important, including Calkins. I find that troubling. Ready Readers

A Facebook post is not a product evolution. Only the latter has the potential to shift practice in the tens of thousands of classrooms using Units of Study .

So, as Calkins's thinking evolves, we should keep a close watch on the Units of Study materials. What practices do they bring into schools? And in asking this question, I mean "all schools, not just the Teachers College Project Schools," which have staff developers on site.

By its nature, curriculum is robust and multilayered. So, there's a lot more to say. I hope to write more about the virtues of Reading Workshop, because we can learn a lot from its best aspects and its popularity in K-12.

There should be a blog unpacking the fact that Writing Workshop then Reading Workshop were designed as models, not as actual curriculum, for many misunderstand this aspect of the programs. (if anyone knows of such a blog, please send it my way?)

But every conversation about a curriculum needs to start somewhere, and seven expert reviews is a pretty good place.

Let's keep the conversation going, friends.

PostScript: Reading Workshop vs Units of Study

I've updated this blog in response to comments from a thoughtful reader, who raised concerns about the distinction between the workshop model and the Units of Study program.

That topic really deserves its own blog. Reading Workshop started as an instructional model and eventually turned into published curricular materials (the Units of Study). They are very connected but different things, lending murkiness to the whole conversation...for example, a school could use the Reading Workshop model without purchasing Units of Study, implementing the approach with its own modifications. Unpacking related matters - such as distinctions between Reading Workshop and Writing Workshop, getting into the different versions of a program that has evolved over time (including the addition of a phonics option, as noted in my blog) - is kind-of a rabbit hole. I opted to save that for another blog, because this one was already getting long.

Here, I used Reading Workshop as shorthand for the Units of Study and the Reading Workshop model as implemented in many schools, for two reasons:

1. Schools that implement the Reading Workshop model, without major modifications to address for the issues in the study, are gonna have the same issues that are present in Units of Study, making it fair (and even helpful) to reinforce the connectedness of the approach and the materials.

2. Much of K-12 uses similar shorthand in the same way (saying "we're a TC school" to mean "we purchased Units of Study"); and in fact, it seems to me that Calkins's own letter uses "TCRWP" as shorthand for her work, inclusive of the Units of Study, in a not-dissimilar fashion.

That said, upon rereading, I noticed two spots where ' Units of Study ' was more apt than a reference to Reading Workshop, and I tweaked the blog to be more clear, with gratitude to that reader for her nudge to put fresh eyes on this nuance.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Understanding the Concerns About Teachers College Reading Workshop

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I've been meaning to write about Reading Workshop for ages. Its program is one of the most popular in K-12, especially in my neck of the woods. We can learn from its enduring popularity, as well as the things it gets right - such as instruction designed around authentic texts and lauded professional learning experiences.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Anxiety about America's approach to reading instruction is all around us once again, making its cyclical appearance like a plague of 17-year cicadas. Much of this is due to journalist Emily Hanford, whose radio documentaries on the science of reading and our schools' unwillingness to embrace it have earned her awards and accolades while placing the issue of early literacy back near the top of the education-reform conversation.

This brings more than a little nostalgia for the late 1990s and early 2000s, the last time the country took a serious swipe at changing the way kids learn to read. The National Reading Panel declared in 1999 that students needed to be taught to read explicitly, including purposeful attention to phonics and phonemic awareness; by 2002, Congress was funding a new billion-dollar-a-year investment called Reading First, intended to get such an approach into the classroom. The program proved to be hugely popular with teachers. But it was polarizing among education-publishing oligarchs and, of course, infuriating to the "whole language" crowd, who prefer an approach that focuses on textual meaning and downplays the importance of learning to sound out words. A faux scandal soon put the initiative on ice, and almost immediately, many popular publishers starting dressing the now-suspect whole-language wolf in "balanced literacy" clothing.

It's no surprise, then, that Hanford could easily find young teachers who had never encountered the science of systemic reading instruction during their pre-service preparation programs, as well as tenured professors who continue to spout the whole-language nonsense that children can learn to read naturally, just as they learn to speak.
An "adequacy" path
So now what? Nobody seems to be in the mood to propose another big federal effort to fund professional development for teachers, especially one with the guts to separate the science-based wheat from the whole-language chaff. Besides, it would (in concept, anyway) be far more efficient to fix the problem at the root-to find a way to make schools of education teach science instead of schlock.

Plenty of good folks are trying, among them the National Council on Teacher Quality, which has been pumping out reviews of state policies that would promote good reading instruction (especially by demanding that elementary-school and special-education teacher candidates pass tests on the science of reading), as well as reviewing teaching-training programs themselves. There are isolated examples of improvement-Mississippi, for example, requires aspiring teachers to take two phonics-focused classes in reading instruction, and it passed a law supporting phonics training for professors at schools of education throughout the state. The latest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed Mississippi students making progress in reading, even as student performance declined nationwide. Mostly, though, the states and schools of education have remained impervious to change. And as a result, the malpractice continues.

Perhaps it's time to dust off another favorite strategy from the early 2000s: the adequacy lawsuit. (Yes, I know I'm writing in Education Next, but stay with me here.) As is well-known, that round of lawsuits latched onto state constitutional language (such as passages requiring a state to provide an "adequate" or "thorough and efficient" education) to demand more funding for schools. And according to Michael Rebell, lead litigant in New York State's successful adequacy lawsuit, one of advocates' key arguments was that more money was necessary to recruit and retain qualified teachers, without whom an adequate education was impossible.

It's not such a stretch, then, to argue that states have a constitutional responsibility to ensure that the teachers produced under their aegis and employed by their public schools are prepared to provide an adequate education. And what is less adequate than an education that doesn't lead to basic literacy for children? (This is a separate question, I should note, from whether there is a so-called federal right to literacy.)

Rebell said he thinks such suits just might work, especially if courts were to find that "states are not enforcing their own laws, or are derelict in monitoring the quality of graduates from teacher-preparation programs." Al Lindseth, an attorney who spent many years opposing lawyers like Rebell, reluctantly agrees. "You could make a case," he told me, "that a state is not setting its standards for teachers high enough, or enforcing them, for students to get an adequate education."
Handicapping a court-ordered solution
For both Rebell and Lindseth, the idea brought to mind Vergara v. California, a lawsuit in which advocates asked California's courts to find the state's teacher-tenure laws to be unconstitutional because they interfered with students' right to a quality education. (See " Teacher-Tenure Decision Is NOT an Abuse of Judicial Power," Fall 2014.) That case was unsuccessful, though, because it was brought on equal-protection grounds and plaintiffs failed to show that tenure was hurting kids of color any more than their peers. An equal-opportunity challenge related to shoddy teacher preparation would likely face the same roadblock. Further, there is little, if any, legal precedent for suing schools of education; even medical schools enjoy significant protections from charges of malpractice related to the physicians they train.

All of which is why it would be important to go after states, and in particular states that have already lost finance-adequacy cases. It would also help if the chosen target states do not require elementary-school teachers to pass an in-depth test of the science of reading before entering the classroom, and if the states host several big education schools that earn failing grades when it comes to preparing candidates to teach reading effectively. States that appear to meet those criteria include Kentucky, South Carolina, and Washington.

I'm well aware that even succeeding with such a lawsuit in one or more states wouldn't solve the teacher-training problem nationwide. Furthermore, there's no guarantee that a court-ordered resolution would lead to better preparation programs (though it wouldn't be hard for a court to mandate that future teachers take a test of scientifically based reading instruction). It's even possible that an inexpert but bookish judge could find the whole-language view of reading compelling and be hoodwinked by that crowd. Or perhaps this would open the door to ever more micromanagement from the bench. (If a judge could mandate phonics, why not a particular approach to physical education?)

Still, putting the defenders of whole language and balanced literacy on trial would be its own form of justice-one that might even lead education schools nationwide to get religion on the science of reading.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and executive editor of Education Next.
For more, please see "The Top 20 Education Next Articles of 2020."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Anxiety about America's approach to reading instruction is all around us once again, making its cyclical appearance like a plague of 17-year cicadas. Much of this is due to journalist Emily Hanford, whose radio documentaries on the science of reading and our schools' unwillingness to embrace it have earned her awards and accolades while placing the issue of early literacy back near the top of the education-reform conversation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Science of Language and Reading (SOLAR) Lab brings together teachers and allied health professionals, including speech-language pathologists and psychologists, to ensure new knowledge is incorporated into classroom practice.

SOLAR Lab Co-Director Professor Pamela Snow said many Australian schools are teaching children to read using methods for which the empirical evidence base is weak or non-existent.

"Methods for teaching children to read in primary school - and consolidating those skills in secondary school - vary greatly from one school to another. Some approaches have a firm basis in scientific evidence, but unfortunately many do not," Professor Snow said.

SOLAR Lab Co-Director Associate Professor Tanya Serry said the Lab's work is premised on the critical importance of word decoding skills and language comprehension.

"The practice in many classrooms is for early readers to memorise banks of sight words, read predictable texts and use pictures as cues to decipher meaning.

"Research shows us that students who are instead taught to systematically decode, and better understand the relationship between oral language and the written word, are more likely to develop into confident readers," Associate Professor Serry said.

Professor Snow said the importance of schools using effective, research-backed methods for teaching children to read cannot be overstated.

"We know that children who are confident readers are more engaged with their learning, have fewer behavioural and emotional problems, are more likely to complete Year 12, and are less likely to have contact with the youth justice system or adult corrections.

"Getting reading instruction right for all children, regardless of the backgrounds and starting points, is absolutely vital if we are to give children the best start in life, and address some of society's most pressing social and economic issues," Professor Snow said.

The Lab's foundations are most notably based on the Simple View of Reading (Hoover & Gough, 1990) and the Cognitive Foundations of Learning to Read model (Tunmer & Hoover, 2019). Its research also aligns closely with Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS; Hall, 2018).

The SOLAR Lab's research will be used to inform future classroom practice and will also be incorporated into future reviews of La Trobe's Education courses.

The SOLAR Lab offers short online courses for classroom teachers, literacy leaders, principals, allied health clinicians and parents interested to know more about the linguistic basis of reading, and how to approach this from a structured literary perspective.

Currently there are two short courses available: The Science of Language and Reading: An Introduction and The Science of Language and Reading: Intermediate.
Media Contact: Kate O'Connor - k.o'connor@latrobe.edu.au - 0436 189 629

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
New research lab to improve children's language and reading skills

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Do read this full report and follow the links in the report.

We have watched the battle for evidence-informed reading instruction in Australia for a number of years - with more and more people of varying roles coming on board with the international research findings but at the same time as phonics detractors and proponents of some form of 'balanced literacy' continue to argue against the need for systematic synthetic phonics and the implementation of a national phonics check. I just wish we could speed up this battle and ensure provision of the the best literacy foundations for all the children.

Will we see the 'tipping point' in Australia any time soon?

Poor phonics instruction fuelling decline in children's reading skills: study
By EducationHQ News Team
Published February 21, 2020

Early primary students' reading skills are declining, a new study claims.

https://educationhq.com/news/poor-phoni ... udy-73926/

The report was funded by the Australian Research Council and tracked the development of 118 students from schools in disadvantaged communities, as well as the quality of teaching and support they received.

The students completed standardised measures assessing their development, attitudes, relationships, behaviour, oral language competence, and progress in literacy and numeracy.

The researchers write that, "scaled scores from the 118 children in our sample show a significant decline in word-level reading scores over time relative to age norms."

Some at-risk students that initially recorded 'below average' results fell to 'poor' or 'very poor' over time. The study found that very few of these students ever had access to "evidence-based reading interventions".

Instead, these students were more likely to receive behaviour plans, wobble chairs or supervision from teaching aides.

"We found that it was rare for teachers to consider behaviour as a possible indicator of underlying academic difficulties," Graham said.

"Instead, teachers typically viewed it the other way around - that behaviour affects learning.

State education ministers recently agreed to back the Federal Government's plan to embed the teaching of phonics and reading instruction into initial teacher education (ITE) and increase the amount of time allocated to literacy in ITE courses.

Professor Pamela Snow is a member of the IFERI's Advisory Group. She is an outstanding and prolific blogger and a contributor to the featured study.

"This finding suggests that explicit phonics-based instruction is potentially a neglected component of reading instruction," lead researcher Professor Linda Graham said.

"This is a common criticism of the 'balanced literacy' approach; an approach that dominates early reading instruction in most Australian schools."

Graham worked alongside Associate Professor Sonia White and Haley Tancredi from QUT, Professor Pamela Snow from La Trobe University and Dr Kathy Cologon from Macquarie University to produce the report.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Aus: 'Poor phonics instruction fuelling decline in children's reading skills: study' - iferi.org

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Do read this full report and follow the links in the report. We have watched the battle for evidence-informed reading instruction in Australia for a number of years - with more and more people of varying roles coming on board with the international research findings but at the same time as phonics detractors and proponents of some form of 'balanced literacy' continue to argue against the need for systematic synthetic phonics and the implementation of a national phonics check.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Here comes a handy blog written for educators seeking to learn more about phonics. Just in time for summer professional learning season!

First... why all the hoopla about phonics?

In the last year, we've seen a growing national conversation about an unfortunate reality: many teacher preparation programs didn't arm teachers with enough information on how kids learn to read.

This helped to foster considerable buzz, from media to school districts to parent communities. I captured it in an executive summary of this 'literacy tsunami'.

The result: today, many educators are on a professional learning journey around the science of reading.

I'm down for that, y'all! And happy to help where I can.

Phonics Research: A Self-Study Syllabus

Here's my list of progressively-deepening reads for anyone trying to understand phonics Instructional Musts, particularly in early grades.

Primers:

A recent Science News article does an excellent job of introducing the context around the phonics vs whole language approaches, and summarizing the evidence in favor of phonics - both the well-known National Reading Panel and studies and evidence in favor of phonics that emerged in the subsequent 20 years.

Then, this EdWeek overview of the research on phonics is extensive and excellent.

Timothy Shanahan does a great job of explaining what quality phonics instruction is - and is not - in his recent blog, What is the science of reading?

In Phonics: 13 things every teacher should know, Clare Sealy shares tangible insights on phonics instruction.

Misunderstandings abound, and this recent article in AFT magazine, Phonics Faux Pas, by respected research scientists Nell Duke and Heidi Mesmer, focuses on common mistakes and how to avoid them.

David Liben and David Paige authored a truly informative, practical paper, Why a Structured Phonics Program is Effective, which tops my must-read list. It's a bit longer, but this research-rich overview defines structured phonics, contrasts it with other approaches, unpacks pitfalls to getting it right, and cites curricula that nail it.

For a sage educator voice, teacher Kyle Redford penned a stellar EdWeek editorial that confronts misconceptions head-on: Explicit Phonics Instruction: It's Not Just for Students With Dyslexia.

And for a quick glimpse of a strong phonics work in a classroom, check out this video of a first grade lesson from EL Education.

Common word recognition strategies like 'Skippy the Frog' get in the way of phonics learning, as unpacked in this blog on what not to do.

Deeper Learning:

How much time should we spend on comprehension and phonics? is an excellent blog by Timothy Shanahan, delving into the balance we need to find between different literacy foci. He's also on point in How would you schedule the reading instruction?

Louisa Moats penned the classic Teaching Reading IS Rocket Science, and it's an oldie but a goodie, touching on phonics and other reading instruction essentials.

Moats dispels confusion in How Spelling Supports Reading: And Why It Is More Regular and Predictable Than You May Think. For anyone skeptical of phonics due to the belief that English is such a wacky language that sound-symbol correspondences can't be taught systematically, Moats shows otherwise.

There are two different types of systematic phonics: analytic and synthetic. In Synthetic Phonics or Analytic Phonics: What does the research really say?, Timothy Shanahan discusses the evidence base for both. "The take away: Make sure young children receive daily, explicit, systematic decoding instruction. But don't be fanatical about synthetic or analytic approaches."

Teaching Phonics to English Learners is another Timothy Shanahan gem.

We shouldn't just talk about phonics instruction, we should also talk about the ways the rest of the curriculum supports the phonics learning (ex. using decodable readers to help students practice the sounds they have learned). And we need to name the approaches, like the use of 'meaning, syntax, and visual' cues, that impede phonics learning; here's a collection of reads on that important nuance.

Master Class:

To go to 201 level:

Achieve the Core offers a seven-module learning series on foundational skills, with an emphasis on phonological awareness and phonics, which includes webinars, powerpoints, and handouts. Excellent for professional learning!

Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition from Novice to Expert is a free, widely-praised journal article that is incredibly informative, albeit dense.

Mark Seidenberg wrote the book on this stuff - Language at the Speed of Sight - and it earns raves. Pro Tip: time-starved educators can read chapter 1 then skip to chapters 4-9 (the 'How We Read' section) and still absorb the key info; if you're tight on reading time, take a pass on chapters 2-3, which go into the historical weeds... interesting, but not critical to get instruction right.

Meredith and David Liben just penned a book on foundational skills, Know Better Do Better, that's getting heaps of praise from a who's who of literacy leaders. It tops my summer reading list because the Libens are my literacy oracles; they taught me much of what I know. Also, they're former successful school leaders who later became research luminaries, so their work always has a refreshingly practical and accessible bent.

The Free Instructional Materials We Need

Did you know that two curricula with excellent phonics components are FREE, openly-licensed resources... so you can use the full curricula - or just the foundational skills components - gratis?

More folks need to know this!! I discussed the OER landscape with Jennifer Gonzalez for her Cult of Pedagogy podcast and blog; check it out for the bigger picture on OER.

These free OER curricula are highly-rated on phonics: EL Education Language Arts and Core Knowledge Language Arts. Explore them as exemplars - or as your new source of materials!

The Excellent Curricula We Need

Six curricula are lauded for their strong foundational skills components - and for being strong on the other key pillars of early reading instruction.

They're also relatively new options, mostly becoming available in the last few years, in what literacy leaders call a 'curriculum renaissance.' Many come from providers beyond the traditional publishers, often pioneering nonprofits. Odds are, you probably haven't looked at them.

So, I'll try to tell you a bit about them. As a group, they're consistently distinguished for their excellent, engaging texts; the intentional way that they get all kids working with grade level texts; a content knowledge-building approach ( which is key, based on research); strong writing components; use of formative assessments; and more.

Four K-5 curricula have all-green reviews from EdReports, including strong scores for phonics:

ARC Core from American Reading is notable because it allows schools to customize subjects studied from an array of knowledge-building options, and for its strong 'IRLA' assessment tool; I've heard teachers rave about how this assessment supports differentiation as well as student ownership of learning, with each student working on individual 'Power Goals.'

Core Knowledge Language Arts is designed to build content knowledge across a broad array of history and science topics; its foundational skills components are described as easy to use by teachers; and it's available for free; it was developed by the nonprofit Core Knowledge foundation, and Amplify offers a slightly enhanced version with services like print materials and PD.

EL Education K-5 Language Arts, developed by the nonprofit school network leader EL Education, is designed around science and social studies themes; notable for its unique social-emotional learning attributes; and available for free, with services like print materials and PD available from nonprofit Open Up Resources or Learnzillion.

ReadyGen from Pearson. [Jan, 2020 Update: I have been hearing concerns about this program, which I am looking into... largely 'cause I can't find anyone who's happy with it to vouch for it. Kick the tires hard on this one.]

These curricula are also recommended by literacy leaders:

Wit & Wisdom - this K-2 curriculum, developed by nonprofit Great Minds, doesn't have its own phonics component, but it was designed around the Fundations phonics program; combined, they represent a comprehensive core, and Fundations users will find Wit & Wisdom to be a natural complement; in addition, Wit & Wisdom and Wilson developed a new library of decodable readers - called Geodes - which are apparently quite well done. Schools always have the option of using phonics programs other than Fundations. Wit & Wisdom does have all-green EdReports reviews in grades 3+, but it's unreviewed in grades K-2, because EdReports doesn't have a means of evaluating curricula that have been designed to work alongside other third-party programs.

Bookworms Reading and Writing - the first version of this curriculum was excellent on phonics, but earned middling reviews by EdReports because the curriculum lacked a writing component. The nonprofit Open Up Resources recently worked with author Sharon Walpole, of the University of Delaware, on an upgrade that turned Bookworms into a full reading & writing program; it has been getting lots of attention for its strong outcomes and more. Bookworms is distinguished for its frequent formative assessment, which feeds into skill-based small group work.

There's a lot more to say about each of the curricula above. Check out #CurriculumMatters in Twitter to find educators using each of these core programs.

Phonics Supplements

Yes, there are phonics supplements out there, some better than others. But as a literacy advocate, I recommend that folks look at the options on the core curriculum list, above.

Why? A few reasons:

Firstly, I'm with David Liben and David Paige when they name the downsides of using phonics components that are disconnected from the rest of Tier 1 ELA instruction. To wit:

'Even if a school provides a structured phonics program for its students, there are still common errors made that cause "failure to thrive" conditions for too many children. Some schools now combine a structured phonics program (e.g., "Fundations," "Reading Mastery," and others) with predictable or leveled texts. While this combination is clearly better than no structured phonics at all, it has two potential pitfalls. Time spent on the predictable or leveled readers often means less time attending to spelling/sound patterns. If little or no attention is paid to spelling/sound patterns when students work with the predictable or leveled texts, then students could end up losing the spelling/sound knowledge they have acquired. It also is difficult (though not impossible) to attend to spelling/sound patterns in these texts since the texts are not aligned with the patterns students have learned. In addition, a student may need more work with a specific pattern that does not appear in the predictable text in use.

There are other critical underpinnings for student reading success that few schools address adequately. As mentioned previously, a major one is reading fluency. In order to read with comprehension, students need to read with fluency. Fluency is defined as reading accurately, at a rate appropriate to the text, and with proper expression (Rasinski, 2004). The first step in fluent reading is to accurately and effortlessly recognize the words in the text; this step is called automaticity. A proficient reader reads about four to five words per second. Students who frequently stumble or hesitate in recognizing words are prevented from reading a text fluently. A structured phonics program, by continually assessing and addressingstudents' progress in mastering spelling/sound patterns, assures that all students going through the program can decode with automaticity, without which fluent reading is not possible.'

This is real talk. Great curricula take pains to align the phonics instruction with the rest of the reading work. Here's a recent teacher tweet that drives the point home; her curriculum (ARC Core, one of the ones named above) lines up the foundational skills work and the reading practice artfully:

This week, the friends of room 24 are learning about the beautiful, bright and bubbly letter Bb! The friends are also reading decodable library books about words that start with /b/! #keepingupwiththekindergarteners pic.twitter.com/ZhgMRHZLSP

- Miss Murray (@kmurrayroom24) September 5, 2019

Also, we all know that there's a lot more to reading instruction than phonics. K-2 reading instruction is described as "rocket science" for good reason, and using a comprehensive core lets schools know they are attending to all of these key elements (hat tip to Achieve the Core for the helpful graphic):

Lastly, if you have a phonics gap, you could have other reading instruction gaps. Most folks do... I've seen numerous school and district leaders conduct literacy audits using a good tool (ex. the Instructional Materials Evaluation Tool); I don't think I've ever heard anyone conclude by saying, "we were getting it all right, except for just one thing!"

All of that says to me: start by looking at the core programs. The whole of a strong core is consistently greater than the sum of supplement parts.

Thanks for reading. Thanks for sharing. Let's keep the important national conversation about reading instruction going, y'all!

Reading Research Fans Might Also Enjoy...

Essential Research No One Knows: Knowledge Matters To Reading Comprehension is another blog that aggregates articles and videos to support educators in understanding an important literacy pillar.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Here comes a handy blog written for educators seeking to learn more about phonics. Just in time for summer professional learning season! First... why all the hoopla about phonics? In the last year, we've seen a growing national conversation about an unfortunate reality: many teacher preparation programs didn't arm teachers with enough information on how...