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The Megabook of Fluency by Timothy Rasinski

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The Megabook of Fluency by Timothy Rasinski

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

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EBLI Evidence-Based Literacy Instruction: teacher training in research-based reading and writing skills, improving spelling, and improving student test scores

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Really Great Reading Complimentary Downloads

Thank you for visiting our complimentary download page. For each download you will receive individual emails*. In each email please click the link to access each diagnostic tool or sample lesson.

*Please check your JUNK/SPAM folder if you do not see an email come into your inbox.

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Thank you for visiting our complimentary download page. For each download you will receive individual emails*. In each email please click the link to access each diagnostic tool or sample lesson. *Please check your JUNK/SPAM folder if you do not see an email come into your inbox.

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Simple Phonic Code Chart

For Beginner Readers

This chart is for beginner readers with the first alternative spellings for vowel and consonant sounds.

Print out and use as a useful reference for reading and spelling activities.

Download Chart

Complex Phonic Code Chart

For Catch-up Readers

A Complex Phonic Code table listing more alternative spellings for consonant and vowel sounds.

Print out and use as a useful reference for reading and spelling activities.

Download Chart

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Phonic Code Table Simple Phonic Code Chart For Beginner Readers This chart is for beginner readers with the first alternative spellings for vowel and consonant sounds. Print out and use as a useful reference for reading and spelling activities. Complex [...]

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About Orton and Gillingham

Orton-Gillingham was among the first teaching approaches designed to help struggling readers by explicitly teaching the connections between letters and sounds. In the 1930s, neuropsychiatrist and pathologist Dr. Samuel T. Orton and educator, psychologist Anna Gillingham developed the Orton-Gillingham approach to reading instruction for students with "word-blindness," which would later become known as dyslexia. Their approach combined direct, multi-sensory teaching strategies paired with systematic, sequential lessons focused on phonics.

The Orton-Gillingham Approach

Orton-Gillingham is a highly structured approach that breaks reading and spelling down into smaller skills involving letters and sounds and then builds on these skills over time. It was the first approach to use explicit, direct, sequential, systematic, multi-sensory instruction to teach reading, which is effective for all students and essential for teaching students with dyslexia.

Orton-Gillingham and Dyslexia

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the fundamental philosophies of Orton-Gillingham were developed by Dr. Samuel Orton and educator Anna Gillingham. They believed that students with strephosymbolia (twisted symbols), what we now call Dyslexia, needed a multisensory approach to their literacy education that included the use of auditory, visual, and kinesthetic channels. A multi-sensory approach means students are learning language by ear (listening), mouth (speaking), eyes (seeing), and hand (writing). The process involves listening to sounds and saying the sounds and names of letters while writing them.

See Orton-Gillingham as a Part of Structured Literacy Training in Action

Structured Literacy can ensure that students are equally exposed to important foundational literacy skills in a sequential, systematic, and cumulative way.

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Orton-Gillingham | What is Orton-Gillingham?

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Orton-Gillingham was among the first teaching approaches designed to help struggling readers by explicitly teaching the connections between letters and sounds. In the 1930s, neuropsychiatrist and pathologist Dr. Samuel T. Orton and educator, psychologist Anna Gillingham developed the Orton-Gillingham approach to reading instruction for students with "word-blindness," which would later become known as dyslexia.

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An invaluable resource!

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The Science of Reading ﻿
EVERYTHING YOU WANT TO KNOW IS WITHIN YOUR GRASP

Welcome to the Science of Reading Info.com website.

This website was created to organize information shared on the Facebook group Science of Reading-What I Should Have Learned in College. As educators, specialists, and parents have joined the Facebook page to gain knowledge on the science of reading, a community has been created. This knowledgeable community shares resources and experiences on the Science of Reading and implementation in schools and at home. It is my hope to provide you with as many resources available worldwide in order to improve literacy outcomes for all. This website is fluid and will be updated frequently.
Donna Schultz Hejtmanek

Science of Reading Info.com

This website is a collection of links to various sites, companies, services, etc. that focus on the Science of Reading. I am not familiar with all of the material listed and I am not endorsing one product, company, or service over another. This site is simply a reference of Science of Reading resources. Copyright 2020-2022 Donna Hejtmanek.

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The Science of Reading ﻿ EVERYTHING YOU WANT TO KNOW IS WITHIN YOUR GRASP Welcome to the Science of Reading Info.com website. This website was created to organize information shared on the Facebook group Science of Reading-What I Should Have Learned in College.

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How Children Learn to Read Words: Ehri's Phases

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How Children Learn to Read Words: Ehri's Phases

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Dr. Holly Lane is the director of the Literacy Institute at the University of Florida

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A Research-Based Explanation of How Children Learn to Read Words With over 150 published papers, Linnea Ehri has been one of the most influential and cited reading scientists in the past 40 years. One of 14 members of the U.S. National Reading Panel (1997-2000), she served as Chair of both the Phonemic Awareness and the Phonics subgroups of the Panel.

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Another great primary resource!

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5 Helpful Literacy Assessment Tools for K-2 — Literacy Edventures

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When you hear about the science of reading, you often think about instruction, but sometimes, the missing piece is the assessment. We must use assessment to drive our instruction. Sometimes knowing where to start instruction is our biggest battle.

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Whole Phonics™ is a structured literacy program created by learning specialist and author Jill Lauren for beginning readers. Whole Phonics™ books are colorful, a bit silly and just plain fun to read. Young readers join the delightful adventures of multicultural characters and their animal friends to learn critical phon

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Same authors as Word Nerds, but this book is for middle school teachers.

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Vocabularians: Integrated Word Study in the Middle Grades

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Amazon.com: Vocabularians: Integrated Word Study in the Middle Grades: 9781625310163: Overturf, Brenda J: Books

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K-5 Book

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Word Nerds takes you inside classrooms at a high-poverty urban school and shows how two teachers implement creative, flexible vocabulary instruction that improves their students' word knowledge and confidence, enhances classroom community, and increases achievement. Leslie Montgomery and Margot Holmes Smith weave vocabulary into each school day using multisensory instruction that includes music, art, literature, movement, games, drama, writing, test-taking skills, and technology. Along the way, they turn every student into a lover of language.

With support from literacy specialist Brenda Overturf, Leslie and Margot have developed a five-part plan-introducing new words in context, adding related synonyms and antonyms, engaging students in several days of active learning, celebrating new words, and assessing vocabulary development-that teaches all students to learn and love vocabulary.

This easy-to-read reference explains how to plan, teach, and assess based on the latest research in vocabulary instruction and learning. Forget copying definitions from the dictionary and completing boring worksheets! Word mastery comes from intimate knowledge of language. From prediction to practice to performance, students from all backgrounds can discover how to make words their own. After incorporating Leslie's and Margot's vocabulary plan into your daily instruction, you and your students can become word nerds, too!

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Word Nerds: Teaching All Students to Learn and Love Vocabulary

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Amazon.com: Word Nerds: Teaching All Students to Learn and Love Vocabulary: 9781571109545: Overturf, Brenda J, Montgomery, Leslie, Holmes Smith, Margot: Books

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Dr. Graves is from the University of Minnesota!

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This text presents a comprehensive plan for vocabulary instruction from kindergarten through high school, one broad enough to instruct students with small vocabularies, exceptional vocabularies, and every child in between. Written by one of the top experts in the field, this practical book presents a research-based program with plenty of classroom examples and strategies that teachers can use. The comprehensive plan includes four parts: rich and varied language experiences, teaching individual words, teaching word learning strategies, and fostering word consciousness.

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The Vocabulary Book: Learning & Instruction (Language and Literacy Series)

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Amazon.com: The Vocabulary Book: Learning & Instruction (Language and Literacy Series): 9780807746271: Michael F. Graves: Books

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This was the book that really changed how I teach vocabulary.

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Hundreds of thousands of teachers have used this highly practical guide to help K-12 students enlarge their vocabulary and get involved in noticing, understanding, and using new words. Grounded in research, the book explains how to select words for instruction, introduce their meanings, and create engaging learning activities that promote both word knowledge and reading comprehension. The authors are trusted experts who draw on extensive experience in diverse classrooms and schools. Sample lessons and vignettes, children's literature suggestions, "Your Turn" learning activities, and a Study Guide for teachers enhance the book's utility as a classroom resource, professional development tool, or course text. The Study Guide can also be downloaded and printed for ease of use (www.guilford.com/beck-studyguide).

New to This Edition
*Reflects over a decade of advances in research-based vocabulary instruction.
*Chapters on vocabulary and writing; assessment; and differentiating instruction for struggling readers and English language learners, including coverage of response to intervention (RTI).
*Expanded discussions of content-area vocabulary and multiple-meaning words.
*Many additional examples showing what robust instruction looks like in action.
*Appendix with a useful menu of instructional activities.

See also the authors' Creating Robust Vocabulary: Frequently Asked Questions and Extended Examples , which includes specific instructional sequences for different grade ranges, as well as Making Sense of Phonics, Second Edition: The Hows and Whys , by Isabel L. Beck and Mark E. Beck, an invaluable resource for K-3.

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Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction

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Amazon.com: Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction: 9781462508167: Isabel L. Beck, Margaret G. McKeown, Linda Kucan: Books

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Great primary resource!

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TRT Podcast #130: 7 Mighty Moves with Lindsay Kemeny Today I'm talking with Lindsay Kemeny, author of the brand new book, 7 Mighty Moves. This book is a must-read for any teacher interested in applying the science of reading in K-3! Listen to today's episode to get 7 practical tips you can apply right away.

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(Bowers & Kirby, 2010 ). If you read that article, you will see that from the start the guiding principle of this instructional approach was that it was about using the principles of scientific inquiry as the basis of word level literacy instruction.

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Fountas and Pinnell have written a series of blog posts defending their popular curriculum, which is being criticized as based on discredited ideas about how children learn to read. (See Emily Hanford's post here; EdReports evaluation here, many comments in the blogosphere.) The question is why school systems should continue to invest in the F&P curriculum and other products if they are inadequate.

Their blog posts indicate that Fountas and Pinnell (hereafter F&P) have not benefited from ongoing discussions about approaches to reading instruction. They are staying the course. The posts are restatements of their views that add little new information.

Here are some further observations, from a reading researcher who has been looking closely at several curricula that dominate the enormous market for such materials. I've summarized basic flaws in their approach and responded to their defense of it. The quotes are from the F&P "Just to clarify" posts.

1. Fountas and Pinnell's misconceptions about the knowledge and mental operations that support reading, and how they are acquired, make both learning to read and teaching children to read more difficult.

Being able to read and understand words quickly and accurately is the basic foundation for reading, which enables the development of more advanced forms of literacy.

Because the F&P curriculum doesn't adequately address the development of these skills, it focuses on coping with the struggles that follow. Beginning readers are seen as plodders who, knowing little about the written code, need ways to figure words out. This can be done by using several "word solving" strategies. There is greater emphasis on teaching children how to cope with their lack of basic skills than on teaching those skills in the first place.

Thus: Fountas and Pinnell's approach to reading creates learning difficulties for which their curriculum then offers solutions. The rationale for the approach collapses if children are given sufficient opportunities to gain basic skills.

2. In defense of their approach, F&P (like Lucy Calkins) cite the example of a child who reads the word HORSE as PONY. This example clarifies what is at stake.

For F&P such errors are a natural occurrence in beginning reading. The error shows that the child understands the context (perhaps from pictures) and just needs the tools to correct the error, with the teacher's support. Later they will be taught to "monitor" their own reading to identify when errors have been made and use the strategies to correct them.

I view the error quite differently: it indicates an astonishing instructional flaw, failing to teach the child basic facts about print. A child who is attending to the printed word and has learned that the spelling of a word represents its sound would know that the word cannot be PONY. This type of error is called a semantic paralexia when it occurs in adults whose reading is impaired because of stroke or other brain injury. It's a rare error among beginning readers unless they haven't been adequately taught about print.

3. The best "cue" to a word is the word itself. That is the great thing about alphabetic writing: the spelling of a word tells you what the word is. B-o-o-k is the word BOOK, pronounced /bʊk/-rhymes with /tʊk/ and /lʊk/, similar in meaning to TEXT and MAGAZINE. The spelling is far more informative than strategies such as look at the picture, take a running start, skip the word and go back at the end, and other ways to "solve words." Readers who have gained the ability to recognize words quickly and accurately from the written code do not need the F&P strategies. The proof is that they can do this for words in isolation-with no context and no strategic options. This ability carries over to reading words in sentences, where skilled readers recognize words with little dependence on context.

Context is important, of course, just not in the way F&P recommend. A reader or listener uses the context in which the word occurs to determine which of its senses is relevant: whether TEXT is used as a noun or verb, for example, or whether the magazine is a periodical or weaponry. Language being inherently ambiguous we do this all the time, rapidly, automatically, and without conscious awareness. Recognizing a word and integrating it with the prior context is much more efficient than predicting or deducing the word using context and strategies. (For details, see chapter 11 in my book.)

4. Skilled word recognition is like a reflex: looking at a word elicits recognition within a fraction of a second, providing access to information that is associated with it. This process is so automatic it is hard to prevent from happening. The goal of instruction is to help the child develop this "reflex," as efficiently as possible, allowing them to move on to the many other aspects of literacy. Whereas my model for reading words is the reflex-an involuntary response to a stimulus-F&P's model is figuring it out. Like this:

[Child has misread the word HORSE. Teacher responds.]

You said PONY; the letter P is not in this word. Try again!

Get a running start this time.

Look at the picture. What is that?

The children are at a farm. What kinds of animals live on a farm?

And so on.

Word solving is the opposite of word recognition as I've described it. It is slow and effortful. It requires conscious awareness. Whereas the spelling decisively identifies the word, the strategies are fallible and vary in how efficiently they guide the child to the word. Readers are meant to use "all types of information simultaneously," but the process of remembering and combining relevant information is effortful and inefficient.

F&P nonetheless remain concerned that teaching children to recognize words from print-sometimes called "decoding"-is ill-advised because it may draw their attention away from understanding the text:

"They may give so much attention to decoding that they have little attention to give to thinking about the meaning, the language, and the messages of the text."

This is only true if, as in the F&P program, children haven't been adequately taught to decode. Acquiring this skill requires instruction, feedback, and practice. There's a learning curve. It too can initially be slow and effortful. But the payoffs are huge. The readers gains sufficient knowledge to continue learning with less and less direct supervision. Facility with words frees attention to be focused on comprehending the text, the principal goal. That is why doing a good job with basic skills instruction is so important.

Ironically, F&P's focus on word solving itself draws children's attention away from comprehending the text. The child is focused on figuring out the word rather than following the text. Whereas learning about the spellings, pronunciations, and meanings of words carries over into and promotes the development of skilled reading, the strategies do not. "Get a running start" is not an element of skilled reading.

5. There is a major problem with the top-down, word-solving approach that seems to have been wholly overlooked. As in the horse-pony example, children often need several tries to "solve" the word (the same is true in the Calkins approach). Readers will often make multiple errors along the way: incorrect guesses, multiple mispronunciations, re-reads that produce new errors, and so on. Advocates of this approach ignore the fact that children learn from the errors they produce, not just when they arrive at the correct answer. Say a child has misread a word. The teacher suggests a strategy and the child produces another error. Such errors are not consistently corrected or explained; the teacher may instead turn to a different strategy. And then another. The child is continuously learning from these exchanges, including their incorrect responses.

This is a deep flaw in the strategies-guessing-solving approach. It creates a massively inefficient form of learning, which we know from studies of learning in humans and in AI systems ("machine learning"). The scenarios that F&P offer as illustrations of the merits of their approach have characteristics that produce slower, less efficient learning in computational learning systems.

I have only a few additional brief comments.

6. It's widely agreed that teachers need better preparation for teaching reading than colleges currently provide. Teachers are left to learn on the job, and on the job they learn about reading from curriculum gurus such as Fountas & Pinnell and Lucy Calkins. The teacher's manuals, supporting documents and materials, workshops, posters, websites and, yes, blog posts shape teachers' beliefs and practices.

Why are we ceding teacher education to the individuals and corporations that market these materials?

7. The leveled texts. The other big part of the F&P program is their unique system of assigning texts to levels. It's a complex, proprietary system with a scientific veneer. The leveling system and leveled texts raise concerns that I just cannot get into here. The basic concern (as expressed by teachers and other observers) is that the texts are not challenging enough. Children succeed at reading them but learn very little from the effort. I have not studied the links between the curriculum and the texts. But, if children are having difficulties gaining basic reading skills because they aren't adequately taught, and word solving strategies are fallible and inefficient, then the texts might well have to be simplified for children to get through them.

Finally, F&P note that teachers matter more than programs. I completely agree. But in the context of their blog posts, F&P seem to be saying: look, our materials may be flawed but not to worry, teachers matter more than programs. So, stay with us. I think that teachers need to have the best preparation for the job and the best instructional materials to use. They are not getting either from F&P. I'd like to see a moratorium on purchasing these systems until better ones come to market, which will happen. Invest the savings in teachers: in-service support, professional development, reading coaches and classroom aides.

Thanks to Emily Hanford, Maryellen MacDonald, and Steve Dykstra.

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Fountas and Pinnell have written a series of blog posts defending their popular curriculum, which is being criticized as based on discredited ideas about how children learn to read. (See Emily Hanford's post here; EdReports evaluation here, many comments in the blogosphere.) The question is why school systems should continue to invest in the F&P...

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This is a book to start with but not stay with. It's the tip of the iceberg when moving to structured literacy.

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"Finally, a book that has the power to stop the literacy pendulum swings! In Shifting the Balance, Burkins and Yates skillfully explore 'balanced literacy' and 'the science of reading' to find the sweet spots where they overlap, connect, and actually complement one another. The result is a resource that raises our level of instruction while helping children discover and reap the joyful rewards of reading."

"What are the research-based, critical elements for teaching reading? In Shifting the Balance, Jan and Kari give you the information, classroom examples, and tools to help you make the best decisions around six key shifts for instruction. After reviewing the misunderstandings, the science, and the needs of your students, you will be able to audit your current practices (individually, in a PLC, or system-wide) to provide responsive and effective literacy learning for all your students."

"In Shifting the Balance, Jan and Kari invite us to reflect and reexamine our beliefs about teaching reading. They gently nudge us to rethink and possibly adjust our early literacy practices. Jan and Kari have taken on this controversial topic by embracing vulnerability and modeling what it means to be truly reflective practitioners. This book is a must read for new and veteran teachers!"

"In Shifting the Balance, Kari and Jan have masterfully dispelled many of the myths and misunderstandings associated with reading instruction. Additionally, they offer classroom teachers and coaches six simple, practical shifts that have the power to transform the way we teach children how to read. Indeed, balanced literacy and science do exist in harmony, and we practitioners can offer our children both concurrently. Thank you, Kari and Jan, for this important work that is sure to change lives!"

"In Shifting the Balance, Jan Burkins and Kari Yates provide a safe space for teachers to courageously examine some long-held balanced literacy practices and turn a critical eye to where those practices have gotten out of balance. If you're willing to be vulnerable and move towards resolving the gap between research and practice, this book provides actionable steps you can take to shift your thinking and bring instruction into alignment with the scientific evidence."

"Shifting the Balance is a welcoming opportunity to reexamine our familiar teaching practices. Without judgment, Burkins and Yates invigorate these practices by inviting educators to make scientific shifts in the systems that have been in place for years. This book will revolutionize reading instruction and in turn, the lives of countless students."

"This book speaks to teachers. It is overwhelmingly clear that Jan Burkins and Kari Yates have been and are immersed in the world of today's classrooms. Shifting the Balance will help many rethink instruction in ways that will support all students. In the current version of the Reading Wars, it is difficult for any of us to say we were wrong about some of our beliefs or practices. And thus, few do. However, Jan Burkins and Kari Yates have done just that. This is as commendable as it is unusual."

"This book found me at just the right time! Shifting the Balance gives voice to the questions I've had in my mind about Balanced Literacy and the Science of Reading and provides clear insights on how to connect the best parts of both to benefit early readers. Throughout the book, Jan and Kari confirm practices worth holding onto while providing actionable next steps I can't wait to implement with students to strengthen my reading instruction."

Dr. Jan Burkins was an elementary classroom teacher for seven years and a literacy coach for seven years. She has worked as a part-time assistant professor, a district literacy leader, and is currently a fulltime writer and consultant.

Kari Yates is an author, speaker, consultant and staff developer with a passion for helping busy literacy educators thrive. Her experiences include classroom teacher, special education, Reading Recovery teacher, elementary principal and district literacy coordinator.

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Shifting the Balance: 6 Ways to Bring the Science of Reading into the Balanced Literacy Classroom

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Shifting the Balance: 6 Ways to Bring the Science of Reading into the Balanced Literacy Classroom

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Morpheme Magic – Lessons to Build Morphological Awareness

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Teachers and students alike, will become captivated by words as they explore together the world of language and morphology, and build awareness of morphemes, the meaningful parts in words.

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Timothy Shanahan, Distinguished Professor, recently wrote a blog entitled, "Should We Teach with Decodable Text," which caused a Tweetstorm on Twitter and lots of discussion in the Dyslexia community. Why? What exactly is decodable text and why should it be controversial? According to Shanahan, "This is not a highly researched topic. There have been only a handful of studies into the effectiveness of decodable texts since the term was first used back in the 1980s. And, truth be told, they are kind of [a] mess; with little evident agreement about what decodable text is, what it should be compared with, and what outcomes we should expect to derive from it."
So what is decodable text?
Decodable text offers beginning and/or struggling readers a chance to practice the phonics skills they have already been taught using connected text. Perhaps the definition of "decodable" could or should be tightened up, but its purpose is clear; decodable books focus on spelling patterns that the reader can decode given his or her existing knowledge of letter and sound correspondences. Decodable readers usually follow a specific sequence of skills and instructional procedures that cumulatively develop with each book. Quality decodable books will not only use simple short vowel words, they will reflect growth into advanced code knowledge and utilize vowel digraphs (vowel teams) and multisyllabic words. The better book series will introduce one or two new concepts at a time while offering lots of practice opportunities with simpler patterns. The structure will be apparent to anyone with or without a teaching degree, and it becomes easy to pinpoint skill deficits. Decodable text is only decodable if children have been taught that particular letter pattern. Decodable text would not (or should not) be handed to a child without the child having first been taught the letter and sound correspondences.

The goal should be to move children into authentic books they can handle independently. Phonics proponents feel that until beginner or struggling readers are ready to read authentic text, they should be given reading material that they can handle themselves without being forced into using ineffective strategies such as guessing, using pictures, or using cues based on context. Phonics instruction is more effective when children have immediate opportunities to apply what they learned to their reading, and decodable books facilitate this learning. Their easily observable progress will determine how long they remain in decodable text.

Contrary to Shanahan's assertion, the use of decodable text was researched thoroughly. Perhaps the confusion lies in the fact that the term "decodable" was not around at the time. In the 1960s, the Southwest Regional Laboratory for Educational Development and Research (SWRL) was one of a number of educational laboratories charged with bringing research-based programs and procedures to schools. In 1972, SWRL partnered with Ginn and Company to publish the early decodable readers, the Beginning Reading Program (BRP), better known as the "I See Sam books." The federally-funded research on these little "decodable" books has been in the public domain for years, and their positive results can be found quite easily in any search. This program became the focus of SWRL's efforts for fifteen years! This would qualify as thoroughly researched by anyone's standards. "The R&D effort required to design, develop, and field test the Program was, and still remains, unprecedented." (Durkin, 1990). The studies clearly indicate that teaching kindergarten children using BRP was successful. Children from all backgrounds, including minorities and the disadvantaged, became proficient beginner readers with only 20 to 30 minutes of daily instructional time devoted to teaching reading. Although most children who entered kindergarten with reading skills typically came from advantaged backgrounds, virtually all children were reading by the end of the year. Students who learned to read in kindergarten were found to be superior in reading skills and retained their advantage through high school.

As far as decodable books being a "mess," it is true that some books are poorly developed, but the aforementioned BRP readers were carefully researched and designed with specific content and sequencing of sounds and letters to help children "gain initial competence in reading." (Adams, 1990). The BRP books illustrate a superior design structure compared to others that rush through the code or stay in short words for too long. In the BRP books, phonics was taught at the same time as the books were presented, so there was no mistaking the value of its content. Decodable books should be "compared with" what beginning and struggling readers usually receive today, either leveled books or controlled readers. For a typical reader, phonics instruction combined with leveled books for Guided Reading will not harm them, and many children will begin to generalize patterns to non-decodable books easily. The amount of phonics introduced would be sufficient for such children. For the struggling reader, however, decodable books can make a huge difference because they provide much more steady practice. The goal is to break bad habits while forming new habits. The point of the decodable books is for children to apply what they learn and see if the code is being retained.

According to Shanahan, we are robbing children of the opportunity to make "cognitive calculations" by keeping children in decodable text. In other words, he implies many children can begin to internalize the alphabetic principle without the decodable text, or, at least, with very little practice. For a typical reader this might be true, but can a dyslexic child or a struggling reader make these "cognitive calculations"? Practitioners in the trenches, who work with such children, KNOW THAT THIS WOULD BE UNUSUAL TO SAY THE LEAST. Transfer and generalizations of code knowledge are significant leaps that frequently take time and intensive practice to develop. We do not keep children in decodable text if they can easily move through the sequence of skills required. Nobody wants children to only receive phonics and controlled, stilted language instruction. This is the false argument Whole Language proponents use to undermine phonics advocates.

Children should be exposed to more than decodable text - no argument there. But how? Shared reading and reading aloud to children are both necessary for children to build language and vocabulary. Dr. Shanahan does point out that decodable text has a place, but it should be "severely limited," without giving specific alternatives. We can only get a hint of what he must be thinking by looking at the basal reader series he has authored for McGraw-Hill. In the meantime, school districts will interpret his blog to suit their needs, and this can be unfortunate for all the children in need of decodable books.

Faith Borkowsky, Founder of High Five Literacy and Academic Coaching, is a Certified Wilson Dyslexia Practitioner, is Orton-Gillingham trained, and has extensive training and experience in a number of other research-based, peer-reviewed programs that have produced positive gains for students with dyslexia, auditory processing disorder, ADD/ADHD, and a host of learning difficulties. Her book, Failing Students or Failing Schools? A Parent's Guide to Reading Instruction and Intervention, is available on Barnes and Noble https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/failing-students-or-failing-schools-faith-borkowsky/1128896546 and Amazon https://www.amazon.com/dp/1937615456/

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Timothy Shanahan, Distinguished Professor, recently wrote a blog entitled, "Should We Teach with Decodable Text," which caused a Tweetstorm on Twitter and lots of discussion in the Dyslexia community. Why? What exactly is decodable text and why should it be controversial? According to Shanahan, "This is not a highly researched topic.

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Heart Word Magic - Help Students Learn to Read and Spell High Frequency Words

Heart Word Magic is a complimentary teaching tool designed to help students learn to read and spell high-frequency words, particularly those that aren't very decodable. Show your students the animations, then try these fun, hands-on free Student Practice Activities>>

Student Introduction

Show your students this video to introduce them to Heart Word Magic! We use animations and practice techniques to clearly show students that the alphabetic principle doesn't completely disappear in Tricky Heart Words. The same skills students use for decoding are also helpful in learning to read and spell these less-decodable words. Heart Word Magic helps them to "make the tricky sticky."

What is Phonics Suite?

How can you give your students the skills they need to become strong decoders and accurate and fluent readers? Really Great Reading has a solution. It's called Phonics Suite, a comprehensive set of tools to diagnose, group and teach students with weakness in their foundational reading skills. There are even tools to monitor progress, report and adjust. Click here to read more>>

Explore Our Growing Library of Heart Word Magic Animations

After showing your students the Heart Word Magic animations, try these fun, hands-on activities with your kids.

Highlight the Tricky to Make It Sticky

One easy way to help students focus on and remember the parts of Tricky Heart Words they need to remember by heart is to simply have students highlight the part of the word that is "tricky" (the phonologically irregular part), such as the letter a in what. Check out our activities below.

Heart Word Magic Spelling

This activity allows students to practice spelling Heart Words (high-frequency words) with irregular letter-sound relationships by filling in a heart above the irregular part of the word that must be learned "by heart." Below are some suggested directions and sample scripts to use with the words said, have, from, and the.Click here to download Heart Word Magic Spelling Student Activity>>

NEW Heart Word Magic Scaffolded Spelling

This activity allows students to practice spelling Heart Words (high-frequency words) with irregular letter-sound relationships by listening to the individual phonemes in a word and then writing down the corresponding spellings. The teacher can give students the spelling for the irregular part of the word that must be learned "by heart." Below are some suggested directions and sample scripts to use with the words said, from, his, and of.
Click here to download Heart Word Magic Scaffolded Spelling Activity>>

NEW Heart Word Magic Dissect a Word

This activity allows students to practice dissecting Heart Words (high-frequency words) with irregular letter-sound relationships by listening to the individual phonemes in a word and then filling in the corresponding spellings. They fill in a heart above the irregular part of the word that must be learned "by heart" and write that tricky part again. Below are some suggested directions and sample scripts to use with the words said, from, his, of, and could.
Click here to download the Heart Word Magic Dissect a Word Student Activity>>

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Heart Word Magic - Read and Spell High Frequency Words

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Heart Word Magic - Help Students Learn to Read and Spell High Frequency WordsHeart Word Magic is a complimentary teaching tool designed to help students learn to read and spell high-frequency words, particularly those that aren't very decodable.

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Flyleaf Publishing has free decodables through 2022

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Flyleaf Publishing has free decodables through 2022

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Flyleaf Publishing decodable books provide beginning and struggling readers with abundant opportunities to transfer their newly acquired phonics knowledge to meaningful, engaging, and complex narratives, informational texts, and poetry. Our research-based instructional materials support teachers in explicitly guiding students to develop the skills and habits of competent readers. Our decodable books can authentically stand up to the rigors of both foundational skills and close reading instruction, making them a unique and invaluable resource for teachers and for students, who deserve the guidance that will enable them to become accurate, fluent, comprehensive, and joyful readers.

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decodable books and research-based instructional materials for prek

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Decodable Books: Research Based Readers - Flyleaf Publishing

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Engaging, meaningful, decodable books with fine-art illustrations tied to a systematic phonics scope & sequence.

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This is part four of the five-part series, What Is a Language-Based Learning Disability?
Originally published on the International Dyslexia Association website, Feb. 2017

A diagnosis of developmental dyslexia in elementary school is primarily based upon a "wait-to-fail-approach." This approach requires a child to demonstrate a significant struggle to learn to read over a prolonged period of time before more intensive (quality and quantity) interventional strategies are discussed and eventually put into place. Paradoxically, although a diagnosis of dyslexia usually is not given before the end of second grade or the beginning of third grade (after the requisite period of failing), intensive interventions are most effective in kindergarten or first grade (Wanzek & Vaughn, 2007).

Not only has this added to the difficulty of remediation, this practice of delayed identification of dyslexia can have tremendous psychological and clinical implications. Children with dyslexia show an increased incidence of internalizing anxious and depressive symptomatology (Mugnaini, Lassi, La Malfa, & Albertini, 2007) and are less likely to complete high school (Jimerson, Egeland, Sroufe, & Carlson, 2000) or to enroll in programs of higher education (Dougherty, 2003).

So, why are we not identifying children at risk earlier and providing them with the resources and tools they need to learn to read as early as possible? Here, I will review three common myths associated with early screening for children at risk for dyslexia.

MYTH 1
Signs of dyslexia can be seen only after two to three years of reading instruction.

While a diagnosis of dyslexia currently requires repeated failure in learning to read, this does not mean that early signs of dyslexia cannot be observed in preschool (or possibly earlier). Deficits in phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, verbal working memory, and letter knowledge have been shown to be robust precursors of dyslexia in children as young as age 3 (Puolakanaho et al., 2007).

A recent study of more than 1,200 kindergartners in New England not only identified six independent reading profiles, including three dyslexia risk profiles, but also showed that these reading profiles are remarkably stable over a two-year window (Ozernov-Palchik, in press).

Furthermore, studies involving brain measures, such as electroencephalography or magnetic resonance imaging, have shown that the brain characteristics of individuals with dyslexia can be observed as early as infancy and preschool, especially in children with a genetic risk for dyslexia.

A longitudinal dyslexia study in Finland, which followed children from birth until age 8, showed that early differential brain measures could distinguish at-risk children who later developed reading problems from those who did not (Leppanen et al., 2010). Additionally, several studies have shown alterations in white matter (the highways that connect two brain areas and enable fast information flow) in young pre-reading children who subsequently developed a reading disability (Wang et al., in press; Kraft et al., 2016). These studies suggest that these children are stepping into their first day of kindergarten with a brain less optimized to learn to read. Why wait three or more years before we give them access to additional resources essential for improving their reading performance?

MYTH 2
Even with early screening, early intervention is not effective.

It is certainly true that most reading interventions are designed for older children who have been struggling for some time. However, converging evidence points to the importance of high-quality classroom reading instruction in early grades and early interventions for at-risk students (e.g., in a small-group setting) to improve the effectiveness of remediation (Blachman et al., 2004).

A meta-analysis comparing intervention studies of at least 100 sessions reported larger effect sizes in kindergarten and first grade than in the later grades. Furthermore, a meta-analysis across six studies revealed that when at-risk beginning readers received explicit and intensive instruction, 50% to 90% of these children reached average reading performance levels (Torgesen, 2004). Without high-quality instruction and intervention, early reading problems can manifest as serious reading disabilities later on (Stanovich, 1986). Moreover, several studies have shown that the brain's ability to change and adapt in response to experience (brain plasticity) decreases throughout the childhood years (Johnson, 2001; Johnston, 2009) and that certain skills are harder to acquire after a 'sensitive period' (Johnson, 2005). For instance, for most people, learning to speak a second language, especially without an accent, comes with relative ease in early childhood but becomes more difficult later in life (Birdsong, 2001).

MYTH 3
Early screening costs too much for school districts, and there is no time for additional testing.

There is some truth to this statement. Each school and district must determine the costs of early universal screening. However, many districts already have valid tools for screening the key indicators of dyslexia on hand-the same tools used in second or third grade to assess children who repeatedly fail to learn to read. Reading specialists or special education teachers already may be trained to administer these assessments.

Early assessment could be conducted prior to the start of kindergarten (e.g., in combination with some pre-kindergarten events that already occur), at daycare centers, preschools, or even in collaboration with pediatricians' offices at the 4- or 5-year-old well-visits. This may add some personal costs, but would reduce screening hours and associated costs later in the school year and beyond.

Additional resources are needed for the interpretation and dissemination of the screenings and their results. Various companies now offer the scoring of standardized tests with turnarounds as fast as two weeks, and several online screening tools currently under development aim to reduce both labor and early screening costs.

Yes, early screenings entail significant costs, but given the costs associated with remediation and the treatment of accompanying psychological and medical problems (e.g., depression, anxiety, and psychosomatic conditions related to academic stress), the benefits of early screening outweigh the costs.

It is important to note that the re-allocation of resources for early identification/intervention should not negatively impact intervention efforts in older grades. More specifically, there will be students in older grades who need intervention, and funds used for early intervention should not be taken from the funds currently allocated for older students. If early screening and early intervention achieve expected goals, eventually there should be fewer older students who need that intense intervention. In the interim, those who missed the early screening and intervention still exist. Also, once early screening and early intervention become routine and effective (even with a 50% to 90% success rate), there will be some older students who continue to need support.

What Should Early Screening Look Like?

I recommend incorporating eight key characteristics when determining an optimal screening battery for an individual classroom, school, or district. The first letters of these characteristics spell the acronym SCREENED.

SHORT A screening battery should be no longer than 30 minutes. The goal is to identify children at risk in key domains and not to diagnose or comprehensively evaluate specific strengths and weaknesses.

COMPREHENSIVE Although short, a screening battery should include all the key domains, including phonological awareness, letter knowledge (letter-sound knowledge for kindergarten and older), rapid automatized naming, vocabulary, listening comprehension, and family history (see below).

RESOURCEFUL Most schools/districts already own assessments that can be used to assess the key domains in young children since these are used in second or third grade to assess children who are repeatedly struggling to learn to read.

EARLY Screening should be implemented as early as preschool but no later than kindergarten.

ESL/DIALECT INCLUSION Children who are English learners or speakers of dialect need to be included. Minority children and children from low socioeconomic backgrounds have been shown to have an increased risk for developing reading problems, which can be explained by differences in the quality and quantity of preschool literacy experiences and overall language exposure (Washington, 2001). Prior to third grade, culturally and linguistically diverse children with reading difficulties are under-diagnosed. After third grade, these children are often over-diagnosed (Mancilla-Martinez & Lesaux, 2011) because they are not identified early and do not gain access to the additional resources desperately needed to improve their reading performance.

It is important to note that teacher training is an essential piece in the screening equation. Teachers need to know how to address specific deficits once a child has been identified in order to implement early evidence-based instruction for all at-risk students.

NEUROBIOLOGY/GENETICS The cheapest and fastest screening is to ask parents whether there is a family history of reading disabilities. Dyslexia is strongly heritable, occurring in up to 50% of individuals who have a first-degree relative with dyslexia (Pennington, 1991). The risk and severity of dyslexia is higher when both parents are affected (Wolff & Melngalailis, 1994).

EVIDENCE-BASED RESPONSE TO SCREENING The best early screening battery will not make a difference if classroom instruction/intervention does not target the specific deficits with evidence-based instruction/intervention. The goal is not to refer the at-risk children to special education but to address their specific deficits within the classroom environment.

DEVELOPMENTALLY APPROPRIATE The assessment components of the screening need to be developmentally appropriate for the targeted age range.

It is important to note that teacher training is an essential piece in the screening equation. Teachers need to know how to address specific deficits once a child has been identified in order to implement early evidence-based instruction for all at-risk students. Furthermore, additional teacher training, professional development, classroom resources, and increased districtwide dyslexia awareness benefit all students.

Educators and researchers must work together to ensure that all young students are SCREENED, to ensure their access to evidence-based instruction/intervention, and most importantly, to maximize their joy in learning to read.

Through Landmark School's blog, Landmark360.org, we launched the five-part series What Is a Language-Based Learning Disability? This is the fourth article in the series. Other articles defined LBLD, addressed assessment of LBLD, discussed the importance of remediation of LBLD, and presented a case study of a family with two children with LBLDs.
References
Wanzek, J. & Vaughn, S. Research-based implications from extensive early reading interventions. School Psychology Review, 36, 541 (2007).

Mugnaini, D., Lassi, S., La Malfa, G. & Albertini, G. Internalizing correlates of dyslexia. World Journal of Pediatrics, 5, 255-264 (2009).

Jimerson, S., Egeland, B., Sroufe, L. A. & Carlson, B. A prospective longitudinal study of high school dropouts examining multiple predictors across development. Journal of school psychology, 38, 525-549 (2000).

Dougherty, C. Numeracy, literacy and earnings: evidence from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Economics of education review, 22, 511-521 (2003).

Puolakanaho, A. et al. Very early phonological and language skills: estimating individual risk of reading disability. J Child Psychol Psychiatry, 48, 923-931 (2007).

Ozernov-Palchik, O. et al. Longitudinal stability of pre-reading skill profiles of kindergarten children. Developmental Science (In press).

Leppanen, P. H., Hamalainen, J. A., Salminen, H. K., Eklund, K. M., Guttorm, T. K., Lohvansuu, K., Puolakanaho, A., & Lyytinen, H. Newborn brain event-related potentials revealing atypical processing of sound frequency and the subsequent association with later literacy skills in children with familial dyslexia. Cortex, 46, 1362-1376 (2010).

Wang, Y. et al. Development of tract-specific white matter pathways during early reading development in at-risk children and typical controls. Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhw095 (In press).

Kraft, I. et al. Predicting early signs of dyslexia at a preliterate age by combining behavioral assessment with structural MRI. Neuroimage, 143, 378-386 (2016).

Blachman, B. A. et al. Effects of intensive reading remediation for second and third graders and a 1-year follow-up. Journal of Educational Psychology, 96, 444-461 (2004).

Torgesen, J. K. Avoiding the devastating downward spiral: The evidence that early intervention prevents reading failure. American Educator, 28, 6-19 (2004).

Stanovich, K. E. Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 21, 360-407 (1986).

Johnson, M. H. Functional brain development in humans. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2, 475-483 (2001).

Johnston, M. V. Plasticity in the developing brain: implications for rehabilitation. Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews, 15, 94-101 (2009).

Johnson, M. H. Sensitive periods in functional brain development: problems and prospects. Developmental Psychobiology, 46, 287-292 (2005).

Birdsong, D. & Mollis, M. On the evidence for maturational constraints in second language acquisition. Journal of Memory and Language, 44, 235-249 (2001).

Washington, J. A. Early literacy skills in African-American children: Research considerations. Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, 16, 213-221 (2001).

Mancilla-Martinez, J. & Lesaux, N. K. The gap between Spanish speakers' word reading and word knowledge: a longitudinal study. Child Development, 82, 1544-1560 (2011).

Pennington, B. F. Reading Disabilities: Genetic and Neurological Influences. (Kluwer, 1991).

Wolff, P. H. & Melngailis, I. Family patterns of developmental dyslexia: clinical findings. Am J Med Genet, 54, 122-131, doi:10.1002/ajmg.1320540207 (1994).

About the Author
Dr. Gaab is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Boston Children's Hospital and the Harvard Medical School and a member of the faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She received a PhD in Psychology from the University of Zurich in Switzerland. She did postdoctoral training with John Gabrieli, Gary Glover, and Paula Tallal at Stanford University and MIT. Her current research within the Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience at Boston Children's Hospital focuses on auditory and language processing in the human brain and its applications for the development of typical and atypical language and literacy skills.
What Is a Language-Based Learning Disability? Five Part Series

This is part four of the five-part series, WhatIs a Language-Based Learning Disability?

Part One: What We Know About LBLD and Learning, by Bob Broudo
Part Two: Language-Based Learning Disabilities: A Primer, by Melody O'Neil
Part Three: Help Your Struggling Learner: Remediation Is a Key to Success, by Christine Ozahowski
Part Four: It's a Myth That Young Children Cannot Be Screened for Dyslexia, by Nadine Gaab, PhD
Part Five: Language-Based Learning Disabilities on the Homefront, by Angela Timpone Gowans
more learning disabilities posts Landmark360.org's post by Bob Broudo about LBLD and Learning won a 2017 Gold InspirED School Marketers Brilliance Award in the national competition that recognizes excellence in private and independent school marketing and communications.

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It's a Myth That Young Children Cannot Be Screened for Dyslexia

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This is part four of the five-part series, What Is a Language-Based Learning Disability? Originally published on the International Dyslexia Association website, Feb. 2017 A diagnosis of developmental dyslexia in elementary school is primarily based upon a "wait-to-fail-approach."

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This was made by a teacher from Calgary.

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This recent article explains why Calkins's recent changes are not enough.

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Early reading teachers and researchers are reacting with surprise, frustration, and optimism after the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, the organization that designs one of the most popular reading programs in the country, outlined a new approach to teaching children how to read.

"[P]oring over the work of contemporary reading researchers has led us to believe that aspects of balanced literacy need some 'rebalancing,'" the document reads.

While the document suggests that these ideas about how to teach reading are new and the product of recent studies, they're in fact part of a long-established body of settled science. Decades of cognitive science researchhas shown that providing children with explicit instruction in speech sounds and their correspondence to written letters is the most effective way to make sure they learn how to read words.

But it's significant to see these ideas coming from the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. The program, founded by Lucy Calkins and housed at Columbia University, has long downplayed the importance of these foundational skills in early reading instruction, and has pushed other, disproven strategies for identifying words.

In a statement to Education Week, Calkins said that the document reflects work they have done with researchers at the Child Mind Institute, a nonprofit that supports children with mental health and learning disorders.

"Those who know us well, know that we are a university-based learning community, and that the knowledge we offer is constantly evolving and expanding. The document reflects my strong belief that children will benefit when people with diverse perspectives and backgrounds sit at the same table and listen carefully to each other," Calkins wrote.

Calkins also noted that the document has been shared at dozens of TCRWP events, including a virtual reunion for teachers this past weekend.

Mixed Signals on Cueing

The curriculum doesn't include systematic, explicit teaching in phonemic awareness or phonics in the early grades, as Education Week has reported. The company started publishing a supplemental phonics program in 2018, but marketing materials for the new units imply that phonics shouldn't play a central role in the early years classroom. "Phonics instruction needs to be lean and efficient," the materials read. "Every minute you spend teaching phonics (or preparing phonics materials to use in your lessons) is less time spent teaching other things."

But it's not only that the materials sideline phonemic awareness and phonics-they also teach reading strategies that can make it harder for students to learn these skills.

Calkins' materials promote a strategy called "three-cueing," which suggests that students can decipher what words say by relying on three different sources of information, or cues. They can look at the letters, using a "visual" cue. But they can also rely on the context or syntax of a sentence to predict which word would fit, the theory goes. Reading researchers and educators say that this can lead to students guessing: making up words based on pictures, or what's happening in the story, rather than reading the words by attending to the letters.

This new document seems to signal a major change in instructional theory from the organization.

It emphasizes the importance of foundational skills, recommending that students in kindergarten and the fall of 1st grade receive daily instruction in phonemic awareness, and saying that all early readers could benefit from frequent phonics practice. It recommends decodable books-those with a high proportion of letter-sound correspondences that students have already learned-be a part of young children's "reading diets." And it suggests regular assessments of phonemic awareness, as problems in that area can indicate reading difficulties.

Especially notable, the document seems to do an about-face on cueing. Students should not be "speculating what the word might say based on the picture," the document reads. Instead, teachers should tell children to "respond to tricky words by first reading through the word, sound-by-sound, (or part by part) and only then, after producing a possible pronunciation, check that what she's produced makes sense given the context," it reads.

In that statement last year, Calkins said teachers shouldn't encourage students to guess at words. But she did say that students could create a hypothesis based on the context of the sentence.

Teachers Need 'Fine-Grained Guidance'

"I don't think there's any way that we can expect a shift in [TCRWP's] philosophy and ideas to change anything unless it's documented and really clear to teachers where they need to change," she said.

Curriculum and implementation is complex, Kaufman added: "Teachers need specific and detailed and fine-grained guidance in order to know what they need to do in the classroom."

In their reporting on this recent document, APM Reports noted that educators at a recent TCRWP training received supplemental curriculum materials that encouraged decoding.

Unless and until TCRWP puts out a new edition of the Units of Study for Teaching Reading, with detailed teacher guidance that reflects these philosophical shifts, Kaufman said she wouldn't expect to see much change in elementary classrooms.

Others expressed frustration over a move they saw as too little, too late.

Sharon Contreras, the superintendent of Guilford County schools, noted that any changes would likely come at a cost for districts using Calkins' materials.
Image: Lucy Calkins -Peter Cunningham-File

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Lucy Calkins Says Balanced Literacy Needs 'Rebalancing'

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Early reading teachers and researchers are reacting with surprise, frustration, and optimism after the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, the organization that designs one of the most popular reading programs in the country, outlined a new approach to teaching children how to read.

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Powerful, evidenced-based independent seat work that serves as consistent review

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What teachers are saying about Mountain Math and Mountain Language:

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"I loved the product. I showed it to my school administrators and encouraged them to look into this. I used my personal math and science bonus money to purchase the bulletin board math kit. It arrived a few days ago. I had to use math and science bonus math so I purchased the math kit.

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In just 5-7 minutes, Really Great Reading's complimentary diagnostic decoding assessments answer these key questions: Which students are struggling with decoding? What types of words are they struggling with? What is the source of the underlying confusion?

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Co-Author of LETRS Explaining How She Changed Her Practice

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Co-Author of LETRS Explaining How She Changed Her Practice

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Carol Tolman's Defining Moment in her Career

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AMAZING Resource!

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PaTTAN Literacy Resource Hub - Language Comprehension Strand

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Explore the "top strands" of Scarborough's Rope with the videos and supporting documents here.

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Reading Simplified - streamilined instruction, accelerated achievement

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Discover How To Accelerate Yes, teaching children how to read was once perplexing, overwhelming, and discouraging for me, too. But after years of trial-and-error, research, professional learning, and practice with hundreds of children, I have discovered a simplified pathway for reading success for all children-an approach that distills the clamoring voices of the teaching reading world into just a few simple steps.

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Not just a letter or a lexile

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Barton | Reading & Spelling System Since 1998

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The Barton Reading & Spelling System is a one-on-one tutoring system that will greatly improve the spelling, reading, and writing skills of children, teenagers or adults who struggle due to dyslexia or a learning disability.

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Part 1: The Purple Challenge

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Is My Kid Learning How to Read? Part 1: Purple Challenge

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Comprehensive Orton-Gillingham Training by IMSE

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Comprehensive Orton-Gillingham Training by IMSE

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IMSE is offering Live Virtual Training courses in several different formats and time zones. Download our course Preview Guide to see what's in store.
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Participants can register for:

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If you have a large group or would like a private training for your district, please contact IMSE at (844) 292-3249.

Certain courses are offered asynchronously. These pre-recorded videos allow you to take a certified IMSE course at your own pace. A complete list can be found here.
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Training Options

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IMSE | institute for multi-sensory education

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IMSE offers training across the United States. If you cannot find a training near you, or you would like to bring IMSE to your schools, please call us.

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What's Wrong with Repetitive Texts or Predictable Texts?

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What's Wrong with Repetitive Texts or Predictable Texts?

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Spelfabet Website  - Setup by Alison Clarke an Australian Speech Pathologist

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What's wrong with predictable or repetitive texts

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Phonological Awareness Screening Test (PAST) Forms A-D

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Phonological Awareness Screening Test (PAST) Forms A-D

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By David A. Kilpatrick

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F & P Benchmark Assessment System: Doesn't Look Right, Sound Right, or Make Sense

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F & P Benchmark Assessment System: Doesn't Look Right, Sound Right, or Make Sense

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R2R Project

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My district, like so many others, uses Fountas and Pinnell's Benchmark Assessment System (BAS) as the primary measure of student reading progress. But if you've had doubts about the assessment and the ways BAS data is often used, you're on to something...

Limited Materials

An F&P Benchmark Assessment System kit provides us with only two books (one fiction and one nonfiction) for each reading level, so we end up using the books over and over again. We see the problem with these limited materials when struggling readers memorize the predictable texts or get stuck because they lack the background knowledge required by the two books at a particular level.

Heinemann has issued three editions of the assessment but has yet to produce any additional texts. Providing more assessment books is challenging because the texts are not authentic, but rather purpose-written assessment materials. Making more books available at a given level would call attention to leveling inconsistencies in the existing materials.

Leveling Inconsistencies

Most of us instinctively know the books in BAS are not consistent at a given level and not progressively difficult across levels. In fact, we select strategically from the book choices. I've heard colleagues say, "I use the Loose Tooth book because it's a lot easier than the one about the zoo." (both Level E) or "I skip G and go straight to H."

The Common Core recommends that we use objective measures (Lexile, Dale-Chall, and Flesch-Kincaid are cited in CCSS Appendix A) to evaluate text complexity. Due to lack of transparency about its formula, the F&P leveling system is notably absent in CCSS recommendations. Lexile, cited repeatedly in CCSS appendices, analyzes written text and the features that make it objectively complex, such as decodability, sentence length, word choice. According to Lexile, the BAS Level E book At the Zoo is more similar to the Level H book Trucks than to the companion Level E book provided in the assessment kit. An objective leveling system confirms our own hunches about the books.

Selecting the BAS book The Zoo may lead us to believe that a student reads at Level E, but a closer look reveals that the same child might do just as well reading the Level H book, Trucks. These designations can mean the difference between a student being "at grade level" or "below grade level" and can impact the perception of a student's ability, both for the student and for the teacher.

Time Spent on the Wrong Things

While assessing using BAS, we listen to a student read and take "Reading Records" that we're later expected to analyze in order to determine which of three sources of information - meaning, syntax, visual - the child used for word identification. This attention to the disproven three-cueing theory diverts our attention from the fact that an error is simply evidence that the child was unable to apply phonics to accurately read the word.

"Although oral-passage reading rate and accuracy are good measures of overall reading ability because they measure word-recognition speed and accuracy, the classification of 'miscues' is unreliable, invalid, and a waste of the teacher's time." Whole Language Lives On

Assessing students with BAS takes approximately 20 minutes per student, but more reliable oral reading fluency assessments take just 1 minute.

" While there are other issues to consider in terms of establishing instructional reading levels, in terms of reliability, it may make more sense to focus on more technically sound procedures available. It may be surprising to many teachers that some of the most valid and reliable measures of a student's overall reading level include simple measures of word-recognition accuracy and speed, in and out of context (Rasinski, 2000; Torgesen, Wagner, Rashotte, Burgess, & Hecht, 1997). "
Toward the Peaceful Coexistence of Test Developers, Policy Makers, and Teachers

Listening to students read is important for many reasons, but the books and scoring sheets provided in the BAS are not worthy of the time we're asked to devote to them.

"Typical" Students?

According to Heinemann, the Benchmark Assessment System was field-tested on "typical students," but they included in their study only proficient English students who were already reading at grade level (and very few of them at that!) By excluding diverse learners from their study, Heinemann ignored the demographics of our classrooms and missed important factors in determining text difficulty.

The books in the assessment represent experiences typical of middle class children (eg. sleepovers and trips to the farm). Pictures in the books allow some students to cue for words (eg. climbing and snow plow), while students without that background knowledge and vocabulary must sound the words out.

Reading Record for Trucks in BAS 1

The book Trucks is not a good indicator of whether an English-learner will be able to read other books labeled H by Fountas and Pinnell because it is written in present tense and is more decodable (despite snow plow!), even when compared to the other BAS Level H book, which includes tricky-to-decode irregular past-tense verbs.

"Educators are on shaky ground when a test is used in a way or for a purpose other than that for which it was intended. If a test has been developed specifically for a certain population (eg. preschool students, native English speakers) then it is imperative that the test be used solely for those it was designed to assess." Toward the Peaceful Coexistence of Test Developers, Policy Makers, and Teachers

Contradictions Between the Authors and their Product

Say we were to use the assessment only on proficient English speakers who are reading at grade level and we ignored the miscue analysis, could BAS work then?

Well, work to do what?

Attempting to use the data collected from BAS has led many of us to make instructional decisions Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell have spoken against:

Fountas and Pinnell have stated, repeatedly, that a leveling system is simply a tool for a teacher to use to match students with books. But district administrators love the assessment because it generates data that seems easy to understand ("a Level H reader is more skilled than a Level E reader") and appears actionable ("Label and level your library and have students pick from the right bins.")

Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell knew that reading one Level E book does not mean that the child will be able to read other books at the level equally well, and yet their names are on an assessment that sells that myth.

As teachers, we are required to spend valuable time administering this poorly constructed assessment on students for whom it was not designed, and to use the data in ways that limit student choice and even limit their access to grade-level content. It's time for us to insist on being provided more reliable assessments and being given the flexibility to use more authentic methods for matching our diverse learners with texts they can read.

For More from Fountas and Pinnell:
Fountas and Pinnell Say Librarians Should Guide Readers by Interest, Not Level
Leveled Books K-8: Matching Texts to Readers for Effective Teaching - Irene C. Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, 2006

(Click for Downloadable PDF of this blog)

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F&P Benchmark Assessment System: Doesn't look right, sound right, or make sense

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My district, like so many others, uses Fountas and Pinnell's Benchmark Assessment System (BAS) as the primary measure of student reading progress. But if you've had doubts about the assessment and the ways BAS data is often used, you're on to something...

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Decodable Books: Boring, Useful, or Both?

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Decodable Books: Boring, Useful, or Both?

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'Decodable' Books: Boring, Useful, or Both?

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To really learn a new skill, you need to practice. That theory drives much of Katie Farrell's reading instruction. In her 1st grade class at Bauer Elementary School in Hudsonville, Mich., Farrell teaches students phonics-how letters on the page represent the spoken sounds children hear.

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Helping Older Students Build Phonemic Awareness: Grades 3 and Up

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Helping Older Students Build Phonemic Awareness: Grades 3 and Up

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The Literacy Nest

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You may think of phonemic and phonological awareness as something for the primary grades, for early readers or non-readers. If you teach older struggling readers or language arts classes for upper elementary or middle school, you may not find phonemic awareness tasks among the materials at your disposal. However, for a lot of readers that struggle or are reluctant readers, difficulties with phonemic awareness may underlie many of their struggles.

Phonemic and phonological awareness are key to the development of fluency and automaticity as words that are instantly recognized become part of a reader's repertoire. It is important not only to continue to teach these skills for students that struggle, but to ensure that we are teaching to mastery and automaticity for all students.

If an older student has a phonological deficit, you may observe certain characteristics. The older reader may struggle with fluency. This reader may appear to read at approximately grade level, but they avoid reading. You often see them referred to as a reluctant reader. You are likely to see spelling struggles with these students as well. You may see them referred to as primarily "sight word readers".

Your assessment of older struggling readers is one of your most important tools. Often, these learners are complex and have a tangled web of understandings. Careful assessment can help you untangle this web and find the missing connections. The PAST is an excellent starting place for looking at phonemic awareness. Kilpatrick's PAST is particularly valuable because it analyzes a student's automaticity and fluency with these tasks, not just their accuracy. Older students can sometimes complete phonemic awareness tasks backwards by using their knowledge of spelling patterns and written words. You may see this in students who are highly accurate with these tasks, but slow. They are likely struggling far more with phonological awareness than you may realize, but they have adapted. Those skills are still very important.

Using an assessment of sounds and words in isolation, particularly one that also assesses nonsense words can be a good way to uncover decoding and encoding difficulties. I like the Gallistel-Ellis test of encoding and decoding. I have assessed many upper elementary reluctant readers who can read and comprehend grade level material; but are unable to read cvc nonsense words in isolation. They either know a word, or don't know it. They lack the skills to take apart and solve an unknown word.

If you have older students who didn't master phonemic awareness at younger ages still benefit from phoneme manipulation. The window for learning is not closed.

The PAST will identify specific areas of weakness. You can use this assessment to laser focus on those skills most needing practice.

Take a systematic, structured, and sequenced approach to developing phonemic awareness skills. Don't cherry-pick. Follow your assessments and teach in the order that phonemic awareness skills develop. See Equipped for Reading Success for more information.

Brief, ideally daily, practice is ideal. Quick drills and games done frequently build skills effectively. These are all auditory activities, so no special materials are necessary.

As you introduce new phonemic awareness concepts, make sure to use manipulatives. Even older students love games and benefit from hands-on learning. If your students who are older have struggled with phonemic awareness skills for a long time, you may need to use letters initially to introduce a new concept before moving into using only auditory cueing and manipulatives. Letters should only be a temporary scaffolding step.

Make a goal of moving into advanced phonemic awareness tasks. These more advanced skills translate to increased fluency and more efficient orthographic mapping.

Activities

blending longer words - Segmenting and blending words of 4 or 5 phonemes is a logical extension of blending shorter words. Practice blending with words such as /s//p//l//i//t/ or /p//l//u//m//p/. There is value in using multisyllabic words to strengthen student blending abilities as well. /f//ī//r//t//r//u//k/.

sound chaining - You can use this activity both as a phonemic awareness task with sounds only and manipulatives or as a spelling/phonics activity with letters. For our purposes here, we are focusing on sounds only. Use blocks to show the word cat, change sound to make it say mat, change sound to make it say met, let, leg, beg, bed, bid, did, kid, Kim, Tim, tom, top, pop.

words with blends at the beginning or end - This would include segmenting, blending, adding and deleting phonemes using words with blends. For example, blending the word /c//l//a//p/, or say /lap/ but add /k/ to the beginning, or say /clap/ but without the /l/, or saying /clap/ but say /f/ instead of /k/.

practice with minimal pairs - When we are working with students developing skills, we typically use words that are very distinct from each other. Gradually as their skills improve, we want to include work with minimal pairs. These are words that differ by only one phonemic element such as "cat" and "cap". This allows us to concentrate on specific phonemes or locations within a word to provide students with targeted practice.

sound deletion - Deleting sounds is easiest at the beginning of a word such as saying mat without /m/, more challenging at the end of a word such as saying lamp without /p/. Deleting the first or second sound in a blend is more challenging still.

sound reversal - This is an advanced phonemic awareness task that may prove difficult for even some adults. This task asks students to hold a series of sounds in their memory and rearrange them such as to say cat backwards which would be tack or map which would be Pam.

substitute or delete with syllables and/or affixes - Substituting or deleting syllables is an easier task. Substituting and deleting individual phonemes in longer words such as those that contain multiple syllables or affixes can be more challenging. For example, saying sunshine without sun, is an easier task. Saying sunshine but instead of shine saying bathe is harder. But saying floating, but instead of /fl/ saying /b/ to get boating, would be more challenging still.

the trickiest of all, but super fun, pig Latin - The primary purpose of this activity is to build adeptness with sound play and manipulation. Obviously, pig Latin has limited direct utility for reading and spelling, but it builds flexibility. Words in Pig Latin are formed by removing the onset, saying the rhyme followed by the onset + ay. So the phrase Pig Latin would become igpay atinlay.

Invaluable Resources

So where can you turn for more information about phonemic awareness and older students?

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

Thank you for stopping by today!

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How To Help Older Students Build Phonemic Awareness Skills

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Older students who still struggle with reading will benefit from phonemic awareness practice. Find out the essential activities to help you older students.

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Get Ready to Read: Screening Tool by Reading Rockets

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Get Ready to Read: Screening Tool by Reading Rockets

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This screener is for preschool children headed to kindergarten

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Reading Rockets is a national multimedia project that offers a wealth of research-based reading strategies, lessons, and activities designed to help young children learn how to read and read better. Our reading resources assist parents, teachers, and other educators in helping struggling readers bui…

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10 Reasons the Three Cueing System is Ineffective

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10 Reasons the Three Cueing System is Ineffective

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I've written a lot about the problems with three-cueing approaches to teaching reading recently, but given that it's a topic many people remain unfamiliar with, I thought it would be helpful to lay all the major issues out in one place.
Here is how the three-cueing approach (also popularly known as MSV) is supposed to work:
Students memorize a number of common "sight words": short, high-frequency words such as are, can, we, and it. They also learn to focus on beginning letters so that they can use the initial sound in a word to help them identify unfamiliar terms.

The first books they use are repetitive readers that typically include one non-sight word per page/line of text; each page is accompanied by an illustration so that students can learn to use picture cues as well as first letters (and sometimes also last letters) to identify unknown words.

As they progress, children are instructed to ask themselves the following questions when identifying words via cues:

Does the word [I plugged in] make sense?

Does the word sound right?

Does the word look right?"

The use of leveled readers and the focus on "just right" books ensure that the number of unfamiliar words-as well as the number of cues-a child encounters are limited to a manageable level. The idea is that new words learned from context this way will be stored in the child's memory, adding to their "bank" of words and gradually allowing them to read more challenging texts.

In a more extreme version of the theory (based on Ken Goodman's influential but staggeringly wrongheaded assertion that "reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game"), children may not even be expected to memorize non-sight words at all: the assumption is that virtually any unknown term can be figured out from context, and that the goal of reading instruction is effectively to help children become more accurate guessers.

To be fair, some balanced-literacy programs do contain a substantial phonics component. The problem is that although giving children multiple strategies for figuring out unknown words may intuitively seem like a good idea, cueing methods do not complement phonetic reading but rather contradict it by pulling children's attention away from the specific sequence of letters in a word.

This approach also gives children easy options such as looking at pictures and guessing, which are understandably preferable to the hard work of decoding but result in dramatically different skill levels. So while children may identify many words correctly in the short term, giving the illusion of proficiency, they do not build the kind of foundation that will ultimately allow them to read at an advanced level.

To be very clear, there are situations in which the use of context clues is perfectly appropriate. For example, a child who phonetically decodes an irregularly pronounced word such as mosquito may be initially confused and need to use context to figure out what it is. That's fine as long as the textual cues are used to supplement the phonetic process, not to replace it.
The problem occurs when external cues are used as a substitute for phonics in situations where words are decodable, or as an excuse to teach phonics poorly or haphazardly.
So that said, when you look closely at the assumptions on which three-cueing methods are based, things fall apart pretty quickly, and in a very serious way. Here's why:
1) Sound-spelling relationships are not established
As cognitive scientists have known since the 1980s, strong readers are able to identify words effortlessly and efficiently because sound-spelling correspondences are wired together in their brains, allowing for automatic recall. (The formal term for this is orthographic mapping.) Skilled readers have not simply memorized what words look like; rather, their brains have recorded what words look-sound like and turned them into true "sight words" that are recognized immediately, allowing the reader to focus on meaning.

Children who learn to read by associating syllables and sounds need very few exposures to a word to learn it permanently. But in order for this to occur, they must be able to distinguish the individual sounds (phonemes) in a word and relate them to the letters and letter-combinations. The spelling-sound relationship involving all the phonemes in a word is the crucial component missing in the three-cueing approach.

Furthermore, children who focus only on beginning/ending letters when identifying unfamiliar words are unlikely to pay close enough attention to overall spellings to retain them as sight words (in the sense of words whose spellings are learned visually by rote), and thus they may not recognize them in other contexts. The whole point of three-cueing is that cues are used to substitute for sound-spelling relationships. It is illogical to expect that children taught to focus on only some letters in a word will be able to accurately assess whether a word "looks" right.
2) Speed
When it comes to proficient reading, speed is skill. For example, a student reading around 75 words per minute at the end of second grade is spending so much time and effort on word recognition and decoding that they will be unable to absorb the meaning. (In contrast, second graders reading upwards of 140 wpm, the 90th percentile, absorb text much more automatically.) The three-cueing approach, however, turns the process of identifying unfamiliar words into a cumbersome, time-consuming game of guess-and-check as students hunt elsewhere on the page for clues to their meanings and stop to ask them themselves whether they look right, sound right, etc. It's not hard to imagine what happens to reading speed when a child has to stop and go through this process every few sentences.

Yes, students who learn to read phonetically may initially spend a lot of time sounding words out, but in that case, speed is a comparatively easy issue to resolve (even if it is challenging in absolute terms). In contrast, there is no way for three-cueing strategies to result in reading that is both faster and more accurate; a student may learn to plug in words more quickly, but there is a high probability that a number of those words will be wrong.
3) Pictures
Another enormous problem is that the three-cueing approach encourages children to focus on images rather than words-precisely what people who cannot read do. Very young children may come away thinking that words say what they say because of the pictures illustrating them, rather than because they consist of letters written in a particular sequence. Essentially, they may develop a faulty understanding of what reading is.

Furthermore, children who are accustomed to relying on pictures will encounter enormous difficulty when they begin to read books consisting of text alone.
4) Confusion between similar-looking words
When children are taught to focus on first and last letters, they learn that the letters in the middle of a word do not really matter and that it is unnecessary to pay them much attention. As a result, they are likely to confuse words with similar beginnings and endings but different middles. As texts become more challenging, these types of misreadings (e.g., resolve for revolve; differ for defer; inhabitfor inhibit) have a progressively more detrimental effect on comprehension.

Interestingly, focusing on first and last letters is a stage that children typically go through when learning to read phonetically; however, three-cueing methods are essentially designed to keep them stuck there more or less indefinitely.

Alternately, students who "look for little words in big words" may guess based only on letters in the middle of a word and ignore the beginning and end.
5) Multiple words may make sense in context
In many instances, more than one word may make sense in context, and there is no guarantee a child will come up with the right one. For example, if the text reads, "One day, the old man said, 'Let us have some turnip soup'" and a child does not know what a turnip is or has never seen the word, they might guess tomato because it begins with a "t" and the picture accompanying the text shows a man pulling up a plant. (How many kids can identify a tomato plant vs. a turnip plant?!)

Likewise, there is nothing in the three-cueing model to account for plug-ins that aren't correct but also not wrong enough for a child to pick up on the error. For example, consider the sentence "Once during the war Washington decided it would be a good idea if his troops swore allegiance to the United States." Stumbling over allegiance, a student might plug in a simpler, known term like again because it begins with an "a," contains some of the same letters, and makes basic grammatical sense.
6) Misunderstanding context clues
The directive to rely on context clues to figure out unfamiliar words is based on the assumption that students will have correctly read and understood the context clues; however, that is not a reliable assumption. It is entirely possible-even probable-that readers will sometimes have difficulty recognizing, or understanding, more than one word per sentence or section of text. (Thanks to Mark Seidenberg for pointing this out.)

If the cues a student uses to determine an unfamiliar word are themselves faulty, correct identification of the word may be impossible and create a domino effect of misunderstandings.
7) Absence of context clues
Another major problem with three-cueing methods is that they are designed to get early elementary students reading on grade level; there is no apparent thought given to the issues that children taught to read this way may face years down the line.

In the early grades, the use of carefully selected leveled readers can allow teachers to ensure that students only encounter books in which unfamiliar words can be determined from context. In the real world, however, books many contain many challenging words that cannot be identified, or even guessed at, from other elements in the text.

For example, a student who has learned to read by relying on context clues and has poorly developed decoding skills will be at a complete loss when trying to understand, say, a tenth-grade chemistry textbook. There is no way to figure out specialized scientific or technical vocabulary terms such as isotope or oxidization from context unless one is already very familiar with them.

Likewise, a history book may be filled with references to proper names (including places) that are impenetrable to a student who cannot decode.

If teachers do not engage in direct instruction, students may not hear these words spoken aloud either and thus miss out on the opportunity to make the connection between speech and writing.
8) The self-monitoring problem
As a general rule, young children lack the metacognitive skills-that is, ability to think about their thinking-to monitor their own reading consistently and effectively. With guidance, they may be able to recognize their errors; when they are working independently (or in pairs), however, they may not be aware of them.

Even if they can think about the meaning, readers who do not have a strong sense of how written English works may not notice that a word they have plugged in is illogical. In extreme cases, they may even plug in the wrong part of speech without noticing a problem.
9) Limited vocabulary development
Research has shown that unlike children taught phonetically, first-graders taught via non-phonetic methods do not produce either nonsense words or real-but-unknown words when trying to read unfamiliar terms. Instead, children taught non-phonetically plug in only words that are already part of their vocabulary.

If a student cannot even recognize that a particular sequence of letters represents an unknown word, not only do they miss out on the opportunity to acquire new vocabulary, but they do not even have the chance to learn what they do not know. This is in turn makes self-monitoring even more difficult.
10) Eyes roaming around the page
The ability to read well, and at an appropriate speed, depends in large part on a reader's ability to absorb entire lines of text, sequentially from left to right, whereas three-cueing methods encourage students to repeatedly move their eyes around the page. A student may read the first letter or two in a word, then immediately shift their eyes to a picture, or to another part of the sentence or paragraph.

Children who learn to read this way may develop difficulty reading words in a normal left-to-right sequence; instead, their eyes may dart erratically around the page, preventing them from obtaining a coherent understanding of a text.

This is not a problem that goes away on its own-in fact, I first got interested in how reading gets taught after observing it repeatedly in high-school aged students. As readings become more challenging and clues less obvious or absent, students who are unable to identify unfamiliar terms may scan the page randomly in a search for clues or stare into space in an attempt to pull an option from the recesses of their mind.

At a certain point, it morphs from a conscious process into an automatic reaction, and once that happens, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to remedy-even with intensive intervention.

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10 Reasons the Three-Cueing system (MSV) Is Ineffective

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I've written a lot about the problems with three-cueing approaches to teaching reading recently, but given that it's a topic many people remain unfamiliar with, I thought it would be helpful to lay all the major issues out in one place.

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95% Group Teaching with Decodable Text Webinar

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95% Group Teaching with Decodable Text Webinar

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Teaching with Decodable Text Webinar Replay

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The process of learning to read is the same for all children. The road to success differs depending on the barriers placed on the path. One of those barriers can be the materials used to practice learned skills. When students are still in the decoding stages of reading, they benefit from applying newly acquired skills in passages that contain familiar words.

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Using Decodable Books: Webinar by Linda Farrell

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Using Decodable Books: Webinar by Linda Farrell

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Transitioning from Word Walls to Sound Walls

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Transitioning from Word Walls to Sound Walls

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K-2 Classrooms

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Transitioning from Word Walls to Sound Walls

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Sound walls support students with learning those tricky high-frequency words. They also support students in retaining and learning to read unfamiliar words on their own. A sound wall does the work of matching our articulation of speech sounds/phonemes to the letters/graphemes that represent those so…

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The Hourglass Figure: Orthography by Dr. Carol Tolman

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The Hourglass Figure: Orthography by Dr. Carol Tolman

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Not teaching spelling hugely impacts a student's literacy learning.

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The Bottom Part of Tolman's Hourglass Figure:  Orthography

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Reading Rockets

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Science of Reading vs Science of Reading Instruction

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Science of Reading vs Science of Reading Instruction

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Explanation by Timothy Shanahan

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Episode 5: Science of Reading Interview With Timothy Shanahan

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This podcast was developed by two teachers from Baltimore.

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‎Melissa and Lori Love Literacy on Apple Podcasts

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‎Hi teacher friends! We are Melissa and Lori, two literacy educators in Baltimore. Our purpose is to bring teachers together in a positive way to share successes and struggles with Wit and Wisdom curriculum implementation. We are SO excited to talk with you!

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Outstanding comprehensive training on the two strands of Scarborough's Reading Rope.  Our MN governor just signed a bill on June 30, 2021 for 1,500 MN teachers to receive training paid for by the state! I put myself through this training, but had to pay $800.00 to do so!

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Lexia Learning Systems https://www.lexialearning.com/Assets/img/logo.svg 1984 978-405-6232 info@lexialearning.com 300 Baker Avenue, Suite 320 Concord MA 01742 USA

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The Lexia LETRS® (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling) Suite is comprehensive professional learning designed to provide early childhood and elementary educators and administrators with deep knowledge to be literacy and language experts in the science of reading. Developed by Dr. Louisa Moats and leaders in the field of literacy, Lexia LETRS teaches the skills needed to master the foundational and fundamentals of reading and writing instruction-phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and written language.
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Lexia LETRS provides a professional learning course of study based in the science of reading for elementary educators. The course teaches the how, what, and why of literacy acquisition to improve instructional practice and achieve long-term systemic change in literacy instruction.

LETRS for elementary educators is an investment in teachers' literacy knowledge and professional practice. Teachers gain essential knowledge and skills to master the fundamentals of literacy instruction required to apply and transform student learning.

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LETRS® For Early Childhood Educators professional learning provides deep knowledge of literacy instruction for the youngest learners. The more children know about language and literacy before they begin kindergarten and first grade, the better equipped they are to succeed in literacy learning and beyond.

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Lexia LETRS provides a professional learning course of study based in the science of reading for elementary educators which teaches the how, what, and why of literacy acquisition to improve instructional practice and impact long-term systemic change in literacy instruction. The more children know about language and literacy before they begin kindergarten and first grade, the better equipped they are to succeed in literacy learning and beyond.

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Many educators and education leaders are not well prepared to teach reading, or lead those who teach reading. The Lexia LETRS Suite provides science of reading-based professional learning through three different courses of study designed for elementary educators, education leaders, and early childhood educators. Each course of study teaches the how, what, and why of literacy acquisition to educators to improve literacy instruction and positively impact long-term systemic change in literacy outcomes.

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Professional Learning for Educators Grades Pre-K-5 | Lexia

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This is a podcast about connecting research to practice.

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Reading researcher and author Dr. Mark Seidenberg is joined by Dr. Molly Farry-Thorn and a variety of guests to discuss how to bridge the gaps between researchers and educators-with each meeting focusing on a specific topic. These meetings provide an opportunity for a deeper dive into topics that are complicated and require nuance. Another goal is to model how people who disagree about important issues can communicate and learn from each other. Visit our website (seidenbergreading.net/zoom) and check out @SeidenbergRead on twitter to see what else we are thinking about and to connect with us!

Reading researcher and author Dr. Mark Seidenberg is joined by Dr. Molly Farry-Thorn and a variety of guests to discuss how to bridge the gaps between researchers and educators-with each meeting focusing on a specific topic. These meetings provide an opportunity for a deeper dive into topics that are complicated and require nuance. Another goal is to model how people who disagree about important issues can communicate and learn from each other. Visit our website (seidenbergreading.net/zoom) and check out @SeidenbergRead on twitter to see what else we are thinking about and to connect with us!

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‎Reading Meetings with Mark and Molly on Apple Podcasts

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‎Reading researcher and author Dr. Mark Seidenberg is joined by Dr. Molly Farry-Thorn and a variety of guests to discuss how to bridge the gaps between researchers and educators-with each meeting focusing on a specific topic. These meetings provide an opportunity for a deeper dive into topics that ar...

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Dr. Mary Dahlgren "Sound Walls and Phonemes"

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Differentiated Literacy Instruction in Grades 4 & 5: Strategies and Resources

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Differentiated Literacy Instruction in Grades 4 & 5: Strategies and Resources

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By same authors as the above text, but for upper elementary.

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Sharon Walpole, PhD, is Director of the Professional Development Center for Educators at the University of Delaware, where she is also Professor in the School of Education. She has extensive school-based experience designing and implementing tiered instructional programs. Dr. Walpole has also been involved in federally funded and other schoolwide reform projects. She is a recipient of the Early Career Award for Significant Contributions to Literacy Research and Education from the Literacy Research Association and the Excellence in Teaching Award from the University of Delaware, and was named the Jerry Johns Outstanding Teacher Educator in Reading by the International Literacy Association. Her current work involves the design and effects of the open educational resource Bookworms K-5 Reading and Writing. She has coauthored or coedited several books, including Differentiated Literacy Instruction in Grades 4 and 5, Second Edition: Strategies and Resources; How to Plan Differentiated Reading Instruction, Second Edition: Resources for Grades K-3; The Literacy Coach's Handbook, Second Edition; and Organizing the Early Literacy Classroom.

Michael C. McKenna, PhD, was Thomas G. Jewell Professor of Reading at the University of Virginia until his death in 2016. He authored, coauthored, or edited more than 20 books, including Assessment for Reading Instruction, Third Edition; How to Plan Differentiated Reading Instruction, Second Edition: Resources for Grades K-3; The Literacy Coach's Handbook, Second Edition; and Organizing the Early Literacy Classroom; as well as over 100 articles, chapters, and technical reports on a range of literacy topics. Dr. McKenna also served as Series Editor, with Sharon Walpole, of The Essential Library of PreK-2 Literacy. His research was sponsored by the National Reading Research Center and the Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement. He was a corecipient of the Edward B. Fry Book Award from the Literacy Research Association and the Award for Outstanding Academic Books from the American Library Association, and a member of the Reading Hall of Fame.

Zoi A. Philippakos, PhD, is Assistant Professor in the College of Education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her research interests include reading and writing instruction for students in the elementary grades, strategy instruction and self-regulation, and professional development for classroom teachers. She has worked as an elementary school teacher and literacy coach, and she provides professional development to teachers on effective reading and writing strategies. Since 2010, Dr. Philippakos has codeveloped and organized the Writing Research Study Group at the Literacy Research Association, and she is Chair of the Writing Task Force at the International Literacy Association. She is coauthor of several books, including Developing Strategic Young Writers through Genre Instruction: Resources for Grades K-2, Developing Strategic Writers through Genre Instruction: Resources for Grades 3-5, and Differentiated Literacy Instruction in Grades 4 and 5, Second Edition: Strategies and Resources.

John Z. Strong, PhD, is Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. Previously, he taught undergraduate and graduate courses in literacy education at the University of Delaware. A former high school English language arts teacher, his research interests include integrated reading and writing interventions for adolescents. His dissertation research investigated the effects of an informational text structure intervention on fourth- and fifth-grade students' reading comprehension and informative writing. Dr. Strong is a recipient of the Steven A. Stahl Research Grant from the International Literacy Association and the Richard L. Venezky Award for Creative Research in Literacy from the University of Delaware. He has coauthored articles published in The Elementary School Journal, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, The Reading Teacher, and Reading Research Quarterly.

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differentiated literacy instruction in grades 4 and 5

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second edition: strategies and resources

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education / teaching methods & materials / reading & phonics

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education/teaching methods & materials - reading & phonics

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language arts & disciplines / reading skills

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language arts & disciplines/reading skills

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teaching methods & materials - reading & phonics

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differentiated reading instruction; intermediate grades; upper elementary students; teaching reading; small-group; differentiating instruction; differentiation; lesson plans; planning; lessons; assessments; response to intervention; rti; comprehension; curriculum; fluency; interventions; elementary reading methods; struggling readers; teachers; vocabulary; word recognition; words; writing; decoding; building a literacy program; teaching literacy in intermediate grades; english language arts; differentiated small groups; differentiated reading and writing instruction; teacher resources; teacher guides; fourth-graders; fifth-graders; reading development; teacher professional development; instructional planning; grouping children; tier 1; tier 2; tier 3; books for teachers; reading specialists; literacy coaches; curriculum directors

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education / teaching methods & materials / reading & phonics

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education/teaching methods & materials - reading & phonics

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language arts & disciplines / reading skills

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language arts & disciplines/reading skills

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Differentiated Literacy Instruction in Grades 4 and 5, Second Edition: Strategies and Resources

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Amazon.com: Differentiated Literacy Instruction in Grades 4 and 5, Second Edition: Strategies and Resources (9781462540815): Walpole, Sharon, McKenna, Michael C., Philippakos, Zoi A., Strong, John Z.: Books

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How To Plan Differentiated Reading Instruction: Resources for Grades K-3 by Sharon Walpole & Michael McKenna

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How To Plan Differentiated Reading Instruction: Resources for Grades K-3 by Sharon Walpole & Michael McKenna

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An excellent "read and then immediately implement" book!

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How to Plan Differentiated Reading Instruction, First Edition: Resources for Grades K-3 (Solving Problems in the Teaching of Literacy)

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Amazon.com: How to Plan Differentiated Reading Instruction, First Edition: Resources for Grades K-3 (Solving Problems in the Teaching of Literacy): 9781606232644: Walpole PhD, Sharon, Michael C. McKenna: Books

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The Hourglass Figure: Phonological Awareness by Dr. Carol Tolman

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The Hourglass Figure: Phonological Awareness by Dr. Carol Tolman

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Co-author of LETRS professional development course

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The Top Part of Tolman's Hourglass Figure: Phonological Awareness

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"How the Brain Learns to Read" by Stanislas Dehaene

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"How the Brain Learns to Read" by Stanislas Dehaene

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Cognitive Neuroscientist

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How the Brain Learns to Read - Prof. Stanislas Dehaene

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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."

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How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers

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

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The Kastner Collection: Dr. Kastner's Comprehensive Literacy Collection

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This "Wakelet of Wakelets" in a one stop shop :) for access to the entire Kastner Collection. Follow me on Twitter: @liv2learn

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Lead author of LETRS professional development course

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Language At The Speed of Sight by Mark Seidenberg

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Language At The Speed of Sight by Mark Seidenberg

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Another quintessential SoR book

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In 2011, when an international survey reported that students in Shanghai dramatically outperformed American students in reading, math, and science, President Obama declared it a "Sputnik moment": a wake-up call about the dismal state of American education. Little has changed, however, since then: over half of our children still read at a basic level and few become highly proficient. Many American children and adults are not functionally literate, with serious consequences. Poor readers are more likely to drop out of the educational system and as adults are unable to fully participate in the workforce, adequately manage their own health care, or advance their children's education.

In Language at the Speed of Sight, internationally renowned cognitive scientist Mark Seidenberg reveals the underexplored science of reading, which spans cognitive science, neurobiology, and linguistics. As Seidenberg shows, the disconnect between science and education is a major factor in America's chronic underachievement. How we teach reading places many children at risk of failure, discriminates against poorer kids, and discourages even those who could have become more successful readers. Children aren't taught basic print skills because educators cling to the disproved theory that good readers guess the words in texts, a strategy that encourages skimming instead of close reading. Interventions for children with reading disabilities are delayed because parents are mistakenly told their kids will catch up if they work harder. Learning to read is more difficult for children who speak a minority dialect in the home, but that is not reflected in classroom practices. By building on science's insights, we can improve how our children read, and take real steps toward solving the inequality that illiteracy breeds.

Both an expert look at our relationship with the written word and a rousing call to action, Language at the Speed of Sight is essential for parents, educators, policy makers, and all others who want to understand why so many fail to read, and how to change that.

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language at the speed of sight: how we read

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teaching methods & materials - reading & phonics

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language experience approach in education

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language experience approach in education.

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education / teaching methods & materials / reading & phonics

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education/teaching methods & materials - reading & phonics

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language experience approach in education

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language experience approach in education.

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teaching methods & materials - reading & phonics

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learning to read; teaching reading; reading comprehension; comprehension strategies; how to teach reading; reading skills; triangle framework; reading speed; phonology; phonemes; orthography; literacy; morphology; graphemes; how we read

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education / teaching methods & materials / reading & phonics

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education/teaching methods & materials - reading & phonics

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

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

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Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read by Stanislas Dehaene

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Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read by Stanislas Dehaene

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Heavier read

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PENGUIN BOOKS

READING IN THE BRAIN

French scientist Stanislas Dehaene was trained as a mathematician and psychologist before becoming one of the world's most active researchers on the cognitive neuroscience of language and number processing in the human brain. He is the director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit in Saclay, France; professor of experimental cognitive psychology at the Collège de France; and a member of both the French Academy of Sciences and the pontifical Academy of Sciences. He has published extensively in peer-reviewed scientific journals and is the author of several books, including The Number Sense.

Praise for Reading in the Brain
A Washington Post Best Science Book of 2009 A Library Journal Best Sci-Tech Book of 2009
"In his splendid Reading in the Brain, French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene reveals how decades of low-tech experiments and high-tech brain-imaging studies have unwrapped the mystery of reading and revealed its component parts. . . . A pleasure to read. [Dehaene] never oversimplifies; he takes the time to tell the whole story, and he tells it in a literate way."

- The Wall Street Journal

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

-Jonah Lehrer

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

- Nature

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

- Seed

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

- Publishers Weekly

"Richly rewarding."

- Kirkus Reviews

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

- The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

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

-A.V. Club.com

"We are fortunate that Stanislas Dehaene, the leading authority on the neuro-science of language, is also a beautiful writer. His Reading in the Brain brings together the cognitive, the cultural, and the neurological in an elegant, compelling narrative. It is a revelatory work."

-Oliver Sacks, M.D.

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

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

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

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

" Reading in the Brain isn't just about reading. It comes nearer than anything I have encountered to explaining how humans think, and does so with a simple elegance that can be grasped by scientists and nonscientists alike. Dehaene provides insight about the neurological underpinnings of the spectacular cognitive skills that characterize our species. Students of human evolution are not the only ones who will find Reading in the Brain fascinating. Parents, educators, and anyone else who nurtures the intellectual development of children cannot afford to ignore Dehaene's observations about the best methods for teaching them to read!"

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

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

-Howard Engel, coauthor of The Man Who Forgot How to Read
Reading in the Brain
The New Science
of How We Read

STANISLAS DEHAENE

INTRODUCTION

The New Science of Reading
Withdrawn into the peace of this desert, along with some books, few but wise, I live in conversation with the deceased, and listen to the dead with my eyes
-FRANCISCO DE QUEVEDO

At this very moment, your brain is accomplishing an amazing feat-reading. Your eyes scan the page in short spasmodic movements. Four or five times per second, your gaze stops just long enough to recognize one or two words. You are, of course, unaware of this jerky intake of information. Only the sounds and meanings of the words reach your conscious mind. But how can a few black marks on white paper projected onto your retina evoke an entire universe, as Vladimir Nabokov does in the opening lines of Lolita:

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

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

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

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

From Neurons to Education

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

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

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

Putting Neurons into Culture

Our ability to read brings us face-to-face with the singularity of the human brain. Why is Homo sapiens the only species that actively teaches itself? Why is he unique in his ability to transmit a sophisticated culture? How does the biological world of synapses and neurons relate to the universe of human cultural inventions? Reading, but also writing, mathematics, art, religion, agriculture, and city life have dramatically increased the native capacities of our primate brains. Our species alone rises above its biological condition, creates an artificial cultural environment for itself, and teaches itself new skills like reading. This uniquely human competence is puzzling and calls for a theoretical explanation.

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

The Mystery of the Reading Ape

If we are to reconsider the relation between brain and culture, we must address an enigma, which I call the reading paradox: Why does our primate brain read? Why does it have an inclination for reading although this cultural activity was invented only a few thousand years ago?

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

But writing was born only fifty-four hundred years ago in the Fertile Crescent, and the alphabet itself is only thirty-eight hundred years old. These time spans are a mere trifle in evolutionary terms. Evolution thus did not have the time to develop specialized reading circuits in Homo sapiens. Our brain is built on the genetic blueprint that allowed our hunter-gatherer ancestors to survive. We take delight in reading Nabokov and Shakespeare using a primate brain originally designed for life in the African savanna. Nothing in our evolution could have prepared us to absorb language through vision. Yet brain imaging demonstrates that the adult brain contains fixed circuitry exquisitely attuned to reading.

The reading paradox is reminiscent of the Reverend William Paley's parable aimed at proving the existence of God. In his Natural Theology (1802), he imagined that in a deserted heath, a watch was found on the ground, complete with its intricate inner workings clearly designed to measure time. Wouldn't it provide, he argued, clear proof that there is an intelligent clockmaker, a designer who purposely created the watch? Similarly, Paley maintained that the intricate devices that we find in living organisms, such as the astonishing mechanisms of the eye, prove that nature is the work of a divine watchmaker.

Charles Darwin famously refuted Paley by showing how blind natural selection can produce highly organized structures. Even if biological organisms at first glance seem designed for a specific purpose, closer examination reveals that their organization falls short of the perfection that one would expect from an omnipotent architect. All sorts of imperfections attest that evolution is not guided by an intelligent creator, but follows random paths in the struggle for survival. In the retina, for example, blood vessels and nerve cables are situated in front of the photoreceptors, thus partially blocking incoming light and creating a blind spot-very poor design indeed.

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

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

Biological Unity and Cultural Diversity

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

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

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

In this book, I refute this simplistic view of an infinite adaptability of the brain to culture. New evidence on the cerebral circuits of reading demonstrates that the hypothesis of an equipotent brain is wrong. To be sure, if the brain were not capable of learning, it could not adapt to the specific rules for writing English, Japanese, or Arabic. This learning, however, is tightly constrained, and its mechanisms themselves rigidly specified by our genes. The brain's architecture is similar in all members of the Homo sapiens family, and differs only slightly from that of other primates. All over the world, the same brain regions activate to decode a written word. Whether in French or in Chinese, learning to read necessarily goes through a genetically constrained circuit.

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

In general, a range of brain circuits, defined by our genes, provides "pre-representations"5 or hypotheses that our brain can entertain about future developments in its environment. During brain development, learning mechanisms select which pre-representations are best adapted to a given situation. Cultural acquisition rides on this fringe of brain plasticity. Far from being a blank slate that absorbs everything in its surroundings, our brain adapts to a given culture by minimally turning its predispositions to a different use. It is not a tabula rasa within which cultural constructions are amassed, but a very carefully structured device that manages to convert some of its parts to a new use. When we learn a new skill, we recycle some of our old primate brain circuits-insofar, of course, as those circuits can tolerate the change.

A Reader's Guide

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

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

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

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

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

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

One last enigma remains: if learning exists in all primates, why is Homo sapiens the only species with a sophisticated culture? Although the term is sometimes applied to chimpanzees, their "culture" barely goes beyond a few good tricks for splitting nuts, washing potatoes or fishing ants with a stick-nothing comparable to the seemingly endless human production of interlocking conventions and symbols systems, including languages, religions, art forms, sports, mathematics or medicine. Nonhuman primates can slowly learn to recognize novel symbols such as letters and digits-but they never think of inventing them. In my conclusion, I propose some tentative ideas on the singularity of the human brain. The uniqueness of our species may arise from a combination of two factors: a theory of mind (the ability to imagine the mind of others) and a conscious global workspace (an internal buffer where an infinite variety of ideas can be recombined). Both mechanisms, inscribed in our genes, conspire to make us the only cultural species. The seemingly infinite variety of human cultures is only an illusion, caused by the fact that we are locked in a cognitive vicious circle: how could we possibly imagine forms other than those our brains can conceive? Reading, although a recent invention, lay dormant for millennia within the envelope of potentialities inscribed in our brains. Behind the apparent diversity of human writing systems lies a core set of universal neuronal mechanisms that, like a watermark, reveal the constraints of human nature.

CHAPTER 1

How Do We Read?

Written word processing starts in our eyes. Only the center of the retina, called the fovea, has a fine enough resolution to allow for the recognition of small print. Our gaze must therefore move around the page constantly. Whenever our eyes stop, we only recognize one or two words. Each of them is then split up into myriad fragments by retinal neurons and must be put back together before it can be recognized. Our visual system progressively extracts graphemes, syllables, prefixes, suffixes, and word roots. Two major parallel processing routes eventually come into play: the phonological route, which converts letters into speech sounds, and the lexical route, which gives access to a mental dictionary of word meanings.
The existence of the text is a silent existence, silent until the moment in which a reader reads it. Only when the able eye makes contact with the markings on the tablet does the text come to active life. All writing depends on the generosity of the reader. -ALBERTO MANGUEL, THE HISTORY OF READING
At first sight, reading seems close to magical: our gaze lands on a word, and our brain effortlessly gives us access to its meaning and pronunciation. But in spite of appearances, the process is far from simple. Upon entering the retina, a word is split up into a myriad of fragments, as each part of the visual image is recognized by a distinct photoreceptor. Starting from this input, the real challenge consists in putting the pieces back together in order to decode what letters are present, to figure out the order in which they appear, and finally to identify the word.

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

The Eye: A Poor Scanner

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

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

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

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

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

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

To prove that we see only a very small part of each page at a time, George W. McConkie and Keith Rayner developed an experimental method that I like to call the "Cartesian devil." In his Metaphysical Meditations, René Descartes imagined that an evil genius was playing with our senses:

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

Much like the supercomputer in the Matrix movies, Descartes' evil genius produces a pseudo-reality by bombarding our senses with signals carefully crafted to create an illusion of real life, a virtual scene whose true side remains forever hidden. More modestly, McConkie and Rayner designed a "moving window" that creates an illusion of text on a computer screen.10 The method consists in equipping a human volunteer with a special device that tracks eye movements and can change the visual display in real time. The device can be programmed to display only a few characters left and right of the center of gaze, while all of the remaining letters on the page are replaced with strings of x's:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At any rate, as long as text is presented in pages and lines, acquisition through gaze will slow reading and impose an unavoidable limitation. Thus, fast reading methods that advertise gains in reading speed of up to one thousand words per minute or more must be viewed with skepticism.14 One can no doubt broaden one's visual span somewhat, in order to reduce the number of saccades per line, and it is also possible to learn to avoid moments of regression, where gaze backtracks to the words it has just read. However, the physical limits of the eyes cannot be overcome, unless one is willing to skip words and thus run the risk of a misunderstanding. Woody Allen described this situation perfectly: "I took a speed-reading course and was able to read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia."

The Search for Invariants
Can you read, Lubin? Yes, I can read printed letters, but I was never able to read handwriting. -MOLIÈRE, GEORGES DANDIN
Reading poses a difficult perceptual problem. We must identify words regardless of how they appear, whether in print or handwritten, in upper- or lowercase, and regardless of their size. This is what psychologists call the invariance problem: we need to recognize which aspect of a word does not vary-the sequence of letters-in spite of the thousand and one possible shapes that the actual characters can take on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amplifying Differences

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

As with invariance for case, this capacity to attend to relevant details results from years of training. The same reader who immediately spots the difference between letters "e" and "o," and the lack of difference between "a" and " a," may not notice that the Hebraic letters and differ sharply, a fact that seems obvious to any Hebrew reader.

Every Word Is a Tree

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

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

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

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

If we continue to undress the word "unbuttoning," the morpheme [button] itself is not an indivisible whole. It is made up of two syllables, [bΛ] and [ton], each of which can be broken down into individual consonants and vowels: [b] [Λ] [t] [o] [n]. Here lies another essential unit in our reading system: the grapheme, a letter or series of letters that maps onto a phoneme in the target language. Note that in our example, the two letters "tt" map onto a single sound t.19 Indeed, the mapping of graphemes onto phonemes isn't always a direct process. In many languages, graphemes can be constructed out of a group of letters. English has a particularly extensive collection of complex graphemes such as "ough," "oi," and "au."

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

garage

metal

people

coat

please

meat

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

In turn, graphemes are automatically grouped into syllables. Here is another simple demonstration of this fact. You are going to see five-letter words. Some letters are in bold type, others in a normal font. Concentrate solely on the middle letter, and try to decide if it is printed in normal or in bold type:

List 1: HO RNY RIDER GRAVY FIL ET

List 2: VODKA ME TRO HAN DY SU PER

Did you feel that the first list was slightly more difficult than the second? In the first list, the bold characters do not respect syllable boundaries-in " RID ER," for instance, the "D" is printed in bold type while the rest of the syllable is in normal type. Our mind tends to group together the letters that make up a syllable, thus creating a conflict with the bold type that leads to a measurable slowing down of responses.21 This effect shows that our visual system cannot avoid automatically carving up words into their elementary constituents even when it would be better not to do so.

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

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

The Silent Voice
Writing-this ingenious art to paint words and speech for the eyes. -GEORGES DE BRÉBEUF (FRENCH POET, 1617-1661)
When he paid a visit to Ambrose, then bishop of Milan, Augustine observed a phenomenon that he judged strange enough to be worth noting in his memoirs:

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

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

Whether our mind ever goes straight from the written word to its meaning without accessing pronunciation or whether it unconsciously transforms letters into sound and then sound into meaning has been the topic of considerable discussion The organization of the mental pathways for reading fueled a debate that divided the psychological community for over thirty years. Some thought that the transformation from print to sound was essential-written language, they argued, is just a by-product of spoken language, and we therefore have to sound the words out, through a phonological route, before we have any hope of recovering their meaning. For others, however, phonological recoding was just a beginner's trait characteristic of young readers. In more expert readers, reading efficiency was based on a direct lexical route straight from the letter string to its meaning.

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

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

rabbit

bountery

culdolt

money

dimon

karpit

nee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

knee

leg

table

head

plane

bucket

hare

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

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

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

"Oh dear!" replied the president.25

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

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

The Limits of Sound

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

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

A further problem exists for purely sound-based theories of reading: the route from spelling to sound is not a high-speed highway devoid of obstacles. To derive a word's pronunciation from the sequence of its letters is often impossible in the absence of additional help. Consider the word "blood." It seems obvious that it should be pronounced blud and that it rhymes with "bud" or "mud." But how do we know this? Why shouldn't "blood" rhyme with "food" or "good"? Why doesn't it sound like "bloom" or "bloomer"? Even the same word root can be pronounced differently, as in "sign" and "signature." Some words are so exceptional that it is hard to see how their pronunciation relates to their component letters ("colonel," "yacht," "though" . . .). In such cases, the word's pronunciation cannot be computed without prior knowledge of the word.

English spelling bristles with irregularities. Indeed, the gap between written and spoken language is centuries old, as attested by William Shakespeare in Love's Labour's Lost, where the pedant Holofernes says:

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

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

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

The Hidden Logic of Our Spelling System

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

There is no doubt that English spelling could be simplified. The weight of history explains a lot of its peculiarities-today's pupils should lament the loss of the battle of Hastings, because the mixture of French and English that ensued is responsible for many of our spelling headaches, such as the use of the letter "c" for the sound s (as in "cinder"). Centuries of academic conservatism, sometimes bordering on pedantry, have frozen our dictionary. Well-meaning academics even introduced spelling absurdities such as the "s" in the word "island," a misguided Renaissance attempt to restore the etymology of the Latin word insula. Worst of all, English spelling failed to evolve in spite of the natural drift of oral language. The introduction of foreign words and spontaneous shifts in English articulation have created an immense gap between the way we write and the way we speak, which causes years of unnecessary suffering for our children. In brief, reason calls for a radical simplification of English spelling.

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

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

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

Although we cannot easily assign a single letter shape to each speech sound, we could perhaps try the opposite. Many spelling errors could be avoided if we systematically transcribed each sound with a fixed letter. For instance, if we were to avoid writing the sound f with both the letter "f" and with "ph," life would be much simpler. There is little doubt that we could easily get rid of this and many other useless redundancies whose acquisition eats up many years of

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reading in the brain: the new science of how we read

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language arts & disciplines / reading skills

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language arts & disciplines/reading skills

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psychology / cognitive psychology & cognition

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cognition; evolution; biology; cognitive science; language; mind; neurology; neuroscience; psychology; brain; science; consciousness; self help books; motivational books; psychology books; confidence; self help books for women; motivation; self help; communication; self improvement books; brain science; science books; mental health; speed reading; reading; psychology book; self development books; best selling books for women; cognitive psychology; social skills; body language; introvert; communication skills

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language arts & disciplines / reading skills

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language arts & disciplines/reading skills

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psychology / cognitive psychology & cognition

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self-help / communication & social skills

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personal development and practical advice

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

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

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Great foundational podcast!

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Science of Reading: The Podcast will deliver the latest insights from researchers and practitioners in early reading. Via a conversational approach, each episode explores a timely topic related to the science of reading.

Science of Reading: The Podcast will deliver the latest insights from researchers and practitioners in early reading. Via a conversational approach, each episode explores a timely topic related to the science of reading.

Dr. Reid Lyon Episodes

Fascinating.

Horrible

I thought this was about science / potential energy and forces and motion acceleration and kinetic energy I'm maddddd

So when do we actually get to the science of reading?

The first five episodes are about how teachers are horrible to children, and how they have been letting them down for years, and that children only aren't learning because they've had horrible teachers. Not a single mention behind any of the science of reading methods or practices or theories. Just some interviews with some people who hate teachers

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‎Science of Reading: The Podcast on Apple Podcasts

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Science of Reading: The Podcast will deliver the latest insights from researchers and practitioners in early reading. Via a conversational approach, each episode explores a timely topic related to the science of reading.

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Equipped for Reading Success by David A. Kilpatrick

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Equipped for Reading Success by David A. Kilpatrick

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Should be required reading for all elementary educators

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The Original SPIRAL BOUND Book! Our CANADIAN Distributors: Caversham CLICK HERE West Coast Literacy CLICK HERE Payment Options: 1) School PURCHASE ORDERS: CLICK HERE 2) Orders for Individuals * Ch...

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Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers by Louisa Cook Moats

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Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers by Louisa Cook Moats

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A quintessential SoR book. Heavier read

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Louisa Cook Moats Ed.D. (Author), Dr. Susan Brady Ph.D. (Foreword)

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Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers

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Amazon.com: Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers: 9781681253305: Moats Ed.D., Louisa Cook, Brady Ph.D., Dr. Susan: Books

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8-Minute Explanation of the Science of Reading by Dr. Holly Lane

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8-Minute Explanation of the Science of Reading by Dr. Holly Lane

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The Science of Reading is a body of research from multiple disciplines that has existed for decades, but is not always taught in teacher preparation programs. This is NOT "new" research although there are newer books that have been published in the last 5-6 years that have reminded us of this existing research.