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Since January of 2018 Ohio has had a state literacy plan for all schools based on the Science of Reading. This January 2020 update is a must-read for Ohio Educators.

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The podcast is engaging and easy to listen to along with being very thought-provoking and informative.

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

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EdReports

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If you are short on time you can start at 3min. Q & A starts 20 min. later.

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How the Brain Learns to Read - Prof. Stanislas Dehaene

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1:53

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The Science of Reading Basics, Part 2: The Simple View of Reading

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Uncategorized

Every couple of months I hear this phrase ...my triangle is upside down... and I am reminded of the need to clarify the tiered systems of support represented by the triangle graphic used in MTSS.

When people say their triangle is upside down, they mean they have more students who are at risk than who are on track. But the three-tiered model is about instruction, not students. There are no Tier 1 students, Tier 2 students and Tier 3 students, only Tier 1 instruction, Tier 2 instruction, and Tier 3 instruction. Understanding the three-tiered model and the purposes of universal screening can provide the mechanisms for turning things around.

The Three-Tiered Model

The three-tiered model is about prevention of reading failure. The tiers describe a system of increasingly intensive instructional supports that cause all students to reach grade-level reading expectations. The tiered model provides a framework for efficiently using data to match student needs to the least intensive instruction necessary to get the maximum benefit in student outcomes.

Depicted as the largest section at the base of the triangle graphic, the Tier 1 system of support represents primary prevention of reading failure. This system involves the differentiated supports provided to all students in the general education classroom. The Tier 2 system of support is conceptualized as secondary prevention of reading failure. Tier 2 supports are provided in addition to, not instead of, Tier 1 instruction, for the purpose of accelerating learning for the students who are at risk after receiving effective Tier 1 instruction. The Tier 3 system of support is described as tertiary prevention of reading failure, and includes the most individualized and intensive supports needed by the few students who are at risk for or are experiencing reading difficulties.

Students who are at risk for reading failure, or who are already struggling readers, typically need more time spent on reading instruction that is more explicit, supportive and delivered in a smaller group. Intensive intervention supports at Tiers 2 and 3 require resources such as people, materials, and time. Intervention systems represented by the sections at the top of the triangle rest on the solid foundation of effective classroom reading instruction. By meeting the needs of the majority of students through effective Tier 1 instruction, resources can be reserved for the students who need additional and more intensive supports.

The Purpose of Universal Screening

In the MTSS model, universal screening of foundational reading skills is done three times a year for two reasons:

1. early identification of students who are at risk

2. evaluating the effectiveness of the Tier 1 instructional system

Universal screening assessments include benchmark goals representing the lowest acceptable score that predicts adequate reading in the future. All students should reach these minimum expectations, but what it takes to get them there will vary in intensity. The vast majority of students (around 80%) should reach the benchmark goals with effective Tier 1 instruction alone - no additional intervention. Some students will need Tier 1 plus Tier 2 intervention to reach the goals. And a few students will need Tier 1 plus very individualized and intensive Tier 3 intervention to reach the goals. These are the concepts represented by the triangle graphic.

The goal is not to have 80% of students score at benchmark, 15% below benchmark and 5% well below benchmark. The goal of early reading instruction is to get 100% of students to the minimum expectations of the benchmark goals. The first step toward that goal is to make sure regular classroom reading instruction is used as an opportunity to maximize reading outcomes and reduce risk. When at least 80% of students score at benchmark through Tier 1 instruction alone, intervention resources can be devoted to getting the remaining 20% of students to the goals.

If less than 80% of the students score at benchmark, the grade level team can analyze the fit between the needs of the students and the instruction provided in Tier 1, rather than assigning students to interventions. Intervention systems can become overwhelmed and ineffective when they are used to attempt to support 40%, 50% or 60% of the students in a grade level. Using screening data to reflect the health of the Tier 1 reading instructional system is a powerful, but often overlooked, step toward improving reading outcomes.

Universal screening data provide rich information on the skills students have and don't yet have, how much time to spend on teaching those skills, and how to group students for classroom reading instruction. Students spend most of their instructional minutes allocated to reading in the regular classroom; therefore, classroom reading instruction in Tier 1 offers the best opportunity to meet student needs. No intervention, no matter how powerful, can make up for classroom reading instruction that is not matched to the needs of students that were identified during universal screening.

Maximizing the opportunity to prevent reading failure by aligning the needs of your students to instruction in the general education classroom will keep your triangle right side up.

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Uncategorized Every couple of months I hear this phrase ...my triangle is upside down... and I am reminded of the need to clarify the tiered systems of support represented by the triangle graphic used in MTSS. When people say their triangle is upside down, they mean they have more students who are at risk than who are on track.

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Look for the Launching of Ohio's chapter of The Reading League Summer, 2021!!

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The Science of Reading - The Reading League

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The Reading League's mission is to advance the understanding and use of evidence-aligned reading instruction through the science of reading.

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Check out Appendix F - Changing Emphasis of the Subskills of the 5 Components of Reading.

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How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers! Another must listen!

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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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Evidence for a New Era of Reading Instruction

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Ehri's Phases of Word Reading Development

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Ehri's Phases of Word Reading Development

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From UFLI

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"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"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How Your Brain Learns to Read: Professor Stanislaus Dehaene

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

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5:51

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Listen to this audio documentary on the Educate podcast. Subscribe now.

Sonya Thomas knew something wasn't right with her son C.J. He was in first grade and he was struggling with reading. "Something was going on with him, but I could not figure it out," she said.

Teachers and school officials told her that C.J. was behind but would catch up. They told Sonya to read to him at home. But she did read to him. C.J. liked the Veggie Tales stories and "The Big Friendly Giant" by Roald Dahl. His older sister read the Goosebumps books to him.

C.J. went to Amqui Elementary, a public school in Nashville, Tennessee, where 80 percent of the students were Black or Hispanic and almost all of them were from low-income families. Test scores show most children in the school were struggling with reading. But Sonya didn't know that. She sent C.J. to Amqui because she liked the school and it's where her best friend's son went; her friend picked the kids up after school because Sonya worked late as a nurse.

C.J. is the youngest of Sonya's four kids. The three older ones had no trouble learning to read but something was different with C.J. "I started asking myself, does he have a learning disability?" She sent a handwritten note to the school, requesting that he be tested. Records show the school didn't do it.

Second grade came and went. Then third and fourth grade, and C.J. was still having trouble reading. Sonya didn't know what to do. Tutoring? Private school? Those weren't things she could afford. She was desperate.

And she knew something about how C.J. felt. She'd struggled to learn how to read, too.

As she grew older, she says it wasn't that she couldn't read the words; it's that she didn't know what a lot of the words meant. Not just when she was reading, but when people were talking, too. She noticed it with colleagues at work. "Sometimes when they would have conversations, I didn't know what they were talking about," she said. "I would find myself Googling words." It was embarrassing. She did not want this to happen to C.J.

But the schools kept telling her C.J. was doing fine. His grades were good. He was a well-behaved kid. Then, seventh grade, 2018. C.J. had moved to a new school that year, a public charter school in Nashville. C.J.'s adviser called Sonya in for a meeting. She told her that C.J. was reading on a second-grade level.

"I lost it," Sonya said. "I sobbed." Remembering the moment during an interview brought tears to her eyes.

The adviser said the school would help C.J., and Sonya wanted to believe it. But she'd put her faith in the school system for years, and now she had a seventh grader who was reading on the level of kids nearly half his age.

Sonya was determined to figure out what happened with C.J. - and to help other families in the same situation. "Nobody else should walk away feeling like that," she said.

The kids left behind

There are kids like C.J. all over the country. Learning to read does not come easily to them. Schools tell their parents: Read to them. They'll be OK. But many won't be.

Reading is essential - not just for school success, but for life. When children have trouble learning to read, it can kick off a devastating downward spiral. 1 Struggling readers are more likely to report feeling sad, lonely, angry, anxious and depressed. 2 Their poor reading skills make it hard for them to keep up in other subject areas. They're more likely to have behavior problems, to drop out of school and to end up in the criminal justice system. 3

Despite the high stakes, lots of kids in this country can't read very well. You can see it in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a standardized test given every two years to measure the reading comprehension of American students. More than a third of fourth graders don't read on a basic level.
U.S. fourth-graders' reading levels over time
SOURCE: The National Assessment of Educational Progress. *In 1992 and 1994, testing accommodations were not permitted.

Why are so many children struggling with reading - the most basic, most fundamental academic skill?

It's a question I've been reporting on for several years. What I've found is that reading instruction in many schools is based on a belief that if children are read to a lot, reading should come pretty easily for them. Decades of scientific research on reading shows this isn't true. Some kids learn to read easily, but many children struggle. It doesn't matter how much they are read to or the number of books in their home. They will not become good readers unless they are taught how their written language works. 4

But prevailing approaches to early reading instruction in this country minimize direct instruction. 5 The teacher's role is mainly to guide students, to create an environment that is conducive to learning how to read: setting up reading groups, reading with kids, helping them find books on their reading level.

This approach creates a lot of struggling readers. Some of these struggling readers get the help they need but a lot can depend on their family income, their race and ethnicity, and what kind of school they go to. Family income matters, because if a school isn't teaching a child how to read, there are other options such as paying for tutors or private schools. Race matters, because white children are significantly more likely to go to public schools where more kids are successful with reading; that means when white kids struggle, their reading problems tend to stand out and get attention. 6 And if a child has a reading disability, a white child is much more likely to get special education services.

America's approach to reading instruction is having an especially devastating impact on Black, Hispanic and American Indian children.
U.S. fourth-graders' reading levels by race/ethnicity
SOURCE: The National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2019.

The downward spiral that can start with early reading problems is a source of profound inequality in our society. This could be prevented if more educators and policymakers understood what cognitive scientists have figured out over the past several decades about what's going on when kids struggle with reading.

A proposal for understanding reading difficulty

Wes Hoover is a cognitive psychologist who first got interested in reading when he was a graduate student at the University of Texas in the 1970s. 7 At the time, a big debate was going on among academics about what children need to learn to become good readers. The fight was focused on phonics instruction.

One side said: If kids know how the sounds in words are represented by letters, reading comprehension will follow. Teach kids decoding.

The other side said: If kids are focused on the meaning of what they're reading, they can figure out what the words say. Teach kids comprehension.

"Word recognition is complex. Language comprehension is complex. But the big idea of reading is that if you can master those two complex skills, then you can master reading comprehension."
Wes Hoover

Hoover studied under a professor, Philip Gough, who was trying to figure out the relationship between decoding and comprehension. 8 Gough was particularly interested in why some people have a hard time understanding what they read. He was interested in reading difficulty.

What Gough knew was this: When children start school, the vast majority of them are already quite good at speakingtheir native language. "The average American 6-year-old," he wrote in a paper, "has a mastery of English [that] would be the envy of any college graduate learning English as a second language." 9

But young children don't know how to read most of the words they know how to say. If children can learn to decode, Gough thought, they should be able to comprehend text up to the level at which they can comprehend spoken language.

In 1986, Gough and a colleague, William Tunmer, came up with an equation to describe this idea. They called it the Simple View of Reading. 10

The equation says that a person's ability to comprehend what they read is the product of their decoding skills and their language comprehension ability.

Language comprehension is your ability to understand meaning when someone is talking or when text is read out loud to you.

Decoding is your ability to read printed words quickly and accurately. (Decoding is more commonly referred to now as "word recognition" in the Simple View equation, because scientists have discovered that readers become so skilled they don't have to sound out most of the words they see; they know the words instantly, on sight.) 11

The Simple View doesn't say that reading is simple. It says that reading comprehension can be divided into two parts.

"It's the big idea of reading," Hoover said. "Word recognition is complex. Language comprehension is complex. But the big idea of reading is that if you can master those two complex skills, then you can master reading comprehension. That's the hypothesis."

The hypothesis was first tested and verified in a study Hoover published with Gough in 1990. 12 It's been confirmed in more than 150 studies since. 13 The studies show the only way to be a good reader is to have both good language comprehension ability and good word recognition skills, as this figure illustrates.

The Simple View doesn't say how word recognition or language comprehension skills develop. And it does not say how they should be taught. 14 But it makes clear that the first task of the beginning reader is to learn how to decode the words he or she knows how to say.

Children who don't learn to decode in the early grades can easily grow into adulthood without knowing how to read. I met some of these kids at a juvenile detention facility in Houston. They're being taught to read as part of an ongoing study by researchers at the University of Houston who are investigating the links between reading problems and involvement with the juvenile justice system. 15

Stumped by the words

I visited the Burnett-Bayland Rehabilitation Center in February 2018. It's a large, tan building surrounded by metal fencing. The lobby reminded me of an auto repair shop: worn-out stuffed chairs, old magazines, a chemical odor.

I was led through two large locked doors by a staff member, who took me on a tour. It was all boys, as young as 10. More than 90 percent of them were Black or Hispanic. They walked the halls in blue jumpsuits, their hands clasped behind their backs. We passed the units where they slept on thin plastic mattresses and the isolation room where they were sent when their behavior was out of control. And then we got to a windowless cinderblock room with heavy locked doors on each side. Inside were a table and two green chairs. This was where the boys visited with their families once a week. It was also where some of them were finally being taught how to read.

I sat in on a few of these tutoring sessions. They included short lessons on concepts as basic as how two letters can represent one sound. There were vocabulary building activities. Then the students did some reading. Some of the boys could barely read. 16

"B-l-ee ..." said one boy I'll call Mateo, struggling to read the word "bleak." I wasn't allowed to use the boys' real names or ask why they were here. Mateo was 15 at the time, short and skinny with a shadow of a mustache above his lip.

He was trying to read a story about a man taking a bus ride. Occasionally, he'd successfully sound out and there'd be a flash of recognition. "Woman!" he exclaimed after slowly decoding the word. But it was clear from earlier in the lesson that Mateo didn't know the meaning of a lot of the words he was trying to say: fleet, sneer, gloat. If someone had read the story out loud to him, he wouldn't have understood it all. Mateo had a reading comprehension problem because he was having a hard time with both word recognition and language comprehension.

But if Mateo had been taught how to sound out words earlier in his life, it's likely he would have known the meaning of a lot more words at the age of 15.

That's because of something reading researchers call "Matthew" effects, a term borrowed from the Bible. 17 It's the idea that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Here's how it works in reading.

Let's say you start school, and you get off to a good start learning how to decode words. Now you can read the words you know how to say, and through reading you begin to learn the meaning of words you've never heard before. That's how the rich get richer.

But the opposite can happen. You have a hard time learning to decode. Maybe you have a learning disability. Or maybe no one teaches you how to decode. Or both. Now you're a struggling reader. You can't read very well, so you don't read much, and you miss out on the opportunity to learn the meaning of new words through reading. One study estimated that a fifth grader who reads at the 90th percentile encounters about 2 million words every year just in text she or he reads outside of school. 18 A reader at the 10th percentile encounters just 8,000 words. That's the poor getting poorer.

When a person reaches age 15 without knowing how to sound out the word "bleak," is that a learning disability or was the child never taught how to read?

The kids in the study at the juvenile detention facility in Houston all read at the third grade level or below when they started in the tutoring program. Latashia Crenshaw, who was director of Education Support Services for the juvenile probation department when I visited, estimated that close to half the kids who come through the system have disabilities that were never identified by their schools. When she talked to their parents, they would tell her: "I knew my son had a problem in first grade when I was coming up to the school every day, telling you that something was wrong, and no one listened."

The University of Houston researchers are betting that a lot of the struggling readers locked up in the juvenile detention system can be taught how to read. Students in the study each receive 24 reading lessons of 90 minutes each. The researchers are collecting data over time to see if the reading lessons translate into things like reduced criminal activity or better educational outcomes.

I asked some of the kids in the study what they remembered about being taught to read in school. "That it was hard," said a 17-year-old I'll call DeShawn. "I just didn't know none of the words." I asked what he was learning in his reading lessons. "Like, 'ph.' It's a 'f,'" he said. "Like physics. I never knew that."

DeShawn might have a learning disability. But that's not why he couldn't read the word "physics." Someone finally taught him what he needed to know, and now he can read that word.

'Surround him with books'

Paul Morgan is a professor at Penn State University who studies the risk factors for learning difficulties. 19 He had a case study in his own home about a decade ago.

His younger son was in first grade and reading was really hard for him. Morgan's other son had been fine. "Our oldest is a voracious reader and took to it readily," he said. "He seemed to benefit from what our local school did in terms of teaching reading."

"If you can't read well in the early grades it really starts to have negative consequences on your social emotional development and your behavior."
Paul Morgan

When Morgan and his wife brought up their younger son's struggles with the school, they were told: "Read storybooks to him, surround him with books." But they'd been reading to him since he was a baby. They had tons of books in their home.

Morgan knew, from his own research, that his son needed something he wasn't getting enough of in school. He needed to be taught how to read words. So, Morgan and his wife started doing that.

"We were in a position to reorganize our work schedules," he said. They bought a book online and every morning, one of them would work with him before school. "And then he was OK. Things made sense to him. He was decoding and starting to read quickly and fluently."

They caught the problem and were able to fix it. That's not going to be the case with every child. Some kids will need lots of help. But intervening early is critical because when kids don't get off to a good start with word recognition, it can begin to affect their motivation and their mental health. 20

"If you can't read well in the early grades, your peers notice, your teacher notices, you notice," Morgan said. "And it really starts to have negative consequences on your social emotional development and your behavior."

Children who are still struggling with reading at the end of first grade rarely catch up because the kids who get off to a good start reading words are catapulting ahead. It's the rich get richer phenomenon. Everyone else quickly gets left behind.

Yet a 2019 Education Week survey found that more than half of teachers and 56 percent of postsecondary instructors who teach courses on reading said kids don't need a good grasp of phonics to read. 21 That doesn't necessarily mean they reject phonics instruction. The majority of teachers describe their approach to teaching reading as "balanced literacy" and that typically includes some phonics. But it also includes the idea that readers don't need to understand how the sounds in words are represented by letters. It's that idea from the 1970s that if kids are focused on the meaning of what they're reading, they can figure out what the words say.

This idea has been repeatedly debunked by cognitive scientists, but it lingers in education because the idea that children need to be taught how to read words has long been resisted by many educators and literacy experts. 22 Even as some people who previously dismissed the importance of phonics instruction now embrace it, an assumption that continues to undergird reading instruction is that reading skill develops naturally, as long as kids are in an environment that supports and encourages lots of reading.

When this approach doesn't work for a child, there are typically two responses.

1. There must be a problem in the home. The child wasn't read to enough.

2. There must be a problem in the child. He or she has a disability.

But usually it's neither. Most of the time, when kids can't read, it's because they weren't taught how to do it.

The importance of language comprehension

You can't be a good reader without good word recognition skills. Reading scientists refer to word recognition as a "sine qua non" of being a good reader. 23 But good word recognition skills are only half the equation. Research shows that once kids have mastered the basics of decoding, their ability to understand what they read is largely determined by the level of their language comprehension. 24

There's a lot to language comprehension. 25 It's all the words you know the meaning of, and your understanding of how language works - grammar, syntax. 26 It also includes the things you know. For example, if you don't know what "sine qua non" means, you may not have fully understood the paragraph above. "Sine qua non" is a Latin phrase that means "an essential condition; something that is absolutely necessary."

Knowledge is critical when it comes to understanding what you read. 27 Consider this passage:

Australia failed to fully capitalise on the second-wicket stand of 182 between Smith and Finch, as Michael Clarke's men were stunted by the off-breaks of Ravichandran Ashwin and a curious collective failure against back-of-a-length bowling. 28

You may be able to read all the words just fine but have absolutely no idea what this passage is about - unless you know something about cricket. This passage is from a BBC report on Australia's victory in the 2015 Cricket World Cup semi-final.

Your ability to comprehend what you read is linked to your knowledge. This is one reason there's an association between a child's reading comprehension and their family's income; more income often means more opportunity for experiences that build knowledge of the world.

But how well you do on a reading comprehension test is going to be partly a function of what's on the test. A 10-year-old in New Zealand, where there's lots of cricket, would probably fare much better on a test that included a passage about cricket than a 10-year-old in the United States would. The American kid would likely do better with a passage about baseball. But of course, some kids know much more about baseball than others. A famous study found that struggling readers who know a lot about baseball did better comprehending a passage about baseball than good readers who don't know much about baseball. 29

The challenge with reading comprehension tests is that, at the end of the day, they are tests of knowledge, and in the United States we don't have a canon of knowledge we've decided every child needs to master. We have common standards, which are essentially lists of things students should be able to do, such as "determine the main idea" and "describe characters in a story." 30 We don't have agreed upon curriculum. It's up to states, to schools - sometimes to individual teachers - to decide what to teach. They choose the books, the materials, the content.

One of the ironic consequences of nationwide concern about poor reading scores is that schools appear to be focusing more on reading instruction at the expense of other subjects. 31 Time spent on reading instruction in the early grades typically takes 90 minutes to three hours daily; science and social studies might be 30 to 45 minutes, a few times a week - at best. Add to this the fact that kids who are struggling with reading are often pulled out of class during science and social studies for extra reading help.

When schools don't put enough focus on general knowledge, it can be particularly harmful to the reading development of kids from low-income families. Consider two children.

One starts school with lots of knowledge and vocabulary. Her parents are college graduates who chat with her about lots of things. She attends summer camps, goes on vacations, takes trips to the science museum.

Another child hasn't had the same opportunities: he rarely leaves his neighborhood, his parents work late, there may be few bedtime stories.

You can teach both of these kids how to decode, but the girl will likely have an edge when it comes to reading comprehension because of the knowledge she is acquiring outside of school. If a goal of education is equity, schools have to pay attention to building knowledge and vocabulary, exposing kids to lots of content, helping them access a wide range of information and experiences. And schools need to encourage kids to read a lot. Because reading is one of the best ways to learn.

That's why teaching kids how to read words is so important. A child who comes to school weak on the language comprehension side of the equation will never catch up if he doesn't get good at decoding. But if a child is taught to decode in the early grades, he has just been given his best shot.

'I ain't none a yo' mama!'

Making sure that children get off to a good start with reading is critical because of the downward spiral that can begin as soon as kids begin to struggle. This means recognizing the factors that can make learning to read more challenging for some kids.

One of the big challenges for many children is when the language they speak at home is different from the language they use at school. English language learners, for example. Kids who speak Spanish or Korean or Arabic at home. But this can be native English speakers, too.

Julie Washington is a speech-language pathologist at Georgia State University who studies language and reading development in African American children. She's specifically interested in the role of African American English. 32

African American English is a dialect of English. Every language has dialects. They're rule-governed variations of a parent language that can affect not just the pronunciation of words but also vocabulary and grammar.

"An example of African American English is, 'One day, me and my mom was at home,'" Washington explained. "That is completely acceptable in African American English."

There was a moment early in her career when she realized that children who come to school speaking African American English might have a harder time learning how to read.

She was reading "Are You My Mother?" by P.D. Eastman with a 4-year-old girl. The book is about a baby bird who is looking for his mother. He approaches different animals and objects and asks, "Are you my mother?"

When Washington was done reading the book, she asked the girl to retell the story.

"Is you my mama?" the girl exclaimed. "I ain't none a yo' mama!"

"We've decided as a country that if you are having trouble reading and you're poor, you're having trouble with reading because you're poor. Because our policy does not allow you to be both learning disabled and poor."
Julie Washington

When she went back to her office, Washington thought about how much work that girl had to do. She listened, recoded the story into her own language, and then retold it. "That takes a lot of working memory," Washington said. "It takes a pretty good vocabulary."

That little girl had to do a lot of work because there was a difference between the language she knew and the language of the book.

"The kid who comes to school whose language system mirrors the book doesn't have that work to do," she said. "He can go straight for decoding and not have to do all of those other steps in between."

Washington says schools need to understand that children who are heavy dialect users may need more time, and more help, to be successful with reading. 33 She says almost all low-income African American children speak African American English at home. Middle- and upper-income kids are more likely to either not use dialect at all, or to be able to code switch. "They've had more access outside of the community," Washington said. "They go to schools where there are more kids using mainstream English."

Who gets help?

Think of family income as a kind of buffer when it comes to the risk of being a struggling reader.

But it's not just your family's income that can tilt things in your favor when it comes to learning how to read; it's the income level of the school you attend too. Research shows that schools where the majority of kids are from poor families are less effective on average at promoting reading achievement. 34 Who goes to high-poverty schools? 35 According to the U.S. Department of Education, nearly half of all Black and Hispanic students in the United States attend high-poverty schools but only 8 percent of white students do.

When children from low-income families are concentrated in the same schools, it can be difficult to identify the children with reading disabilities such as dyslexia because so many of the kids are struggling. "I go into poor schools - nobody has dyslexia in a poor school," Washington said. "In the face of a population where eight and a half out of ten are struggling with reading, who has a reading disability? The answer is, we have no idea."

She says part of the problem is the way federal law defines learning disabilities. The law says a child cannot qualify for a learning disability if that child's learning problems are primarily the result of economic disadvantage. 36 "We've decided as a country that if you are having trouble reading and you're poor, you're having trouble with reading because you're poor," she said. "Because our policy does not allow you to be both learning disabled and poor."

The purpose of the policy was to prevent low-income children of color from being overidentified for special education. 37 But the policy has had unintended consequences, according to Paul Morgan.

"We hear from teachers that they have been told not to refer any more children of color," he said. "That they're already at their threshold."

Research by Morgan and his colleagues shows that white children in the United States who are struggling the most with reading are significantly more likely than children of color to get special education services. 38
Who gets special education?
Among children whose reading achievement placed them in the lowest 10 percent of all scores, white children were more likely to be receiving special education services.

This data suggests that more than half the children of color in this country who are struggling the most with reading are not getting the help they need and are entitled to by federal law. It also suggests that many white children are not getting help, either. Morgan says getting special education services for a student with a reading disability can be difficult no matter who you are or what kind of school your child goes to. "Too often parents have to fight for their children to be provided the services," he said. "And when the school says 'no,' there's not much of a recourse for the parent to engage in, short of legal action, which is very costly."

It's a system that favors people with money. I've interviewed parents who have spent thousands of dollars on attorneys to try to get their children into special ed, because in many schools, special education is the only way for struggling readers to get the kind of explicit instruction they need. 39

Kids who don't get into special ed, or don't have families that can pay for tutors or private school, may never get what they need to become good readers. Like the kids at the juvenile detention facility in Houston.

'Why isn't everybody in this country angry like me?'

When Sonya Thomas was told her seventh grade son was on a second-grade reading level, it changed her life.

The next month, in October 2018, she helped found a parent advocacy group called Nashville PROPEL. 40 The name stands for "parents requiring our public education system to lead." It's a group of mostly Black parents whose children are zoned to some of the lowest-performing schools in the entire state.

Sonya says many parents don't know how far behind their kids are. "They don't know until it costs them." Like it cost her and her son C.J.

Sonya wanted to figure out what happened to C.J. Why has he had such a hard time learning to read? Does he have a learning disability the school system missed?

She requested all of C.J.'s school records, and APM Reports hired Zack Barnes, an assistant professor of special education at Austin Peay State University, to review them. 41 Barnes used to teach in the Nashville schools, so he was familiar with the forms and records in C.J.'s file. He went over them with Sonya and me.

The records show C.J. started off behind. A reading assessment in kindergarten shows he was "below benchmark." But it doesn't say what he was behind in.

At the beginning of first grade, C.J. took a reading test that placed him at the 24th percentile nationally. That means more than three quarters of first graders in the country were doing better than he was. There's a form in the file that says C.J. had no problem understanding and using vocabulary but that he spoke slowly and sometimes had a hard time asking and answering questions.

"I do remember having some concerns about his speech," Sonya said. "Like not talking a lot, being really shy." She says she sometimes had a hard time understanding what he was saying.

There's no indication in the records that C.J. was evaluated for a speech issue or a reading problem. There is the handwritten note from Sonya when C.J. was in first grade, asking the school to test him for a learning disability.

"I am very concerned," the note says. "Please assist me." But he wasn't tested.

At the end of first grade, C.J. scored at the 12th percentile on the same test he had taken at the beginning of the year. The gap between C.J. and his peers had grown even wider. Sonya teared up when Barnes pointed this out. "This tears me all to pieces," she said.

We spent nearly two hours going over C.J.'s entire school file, grade by grade. There are nearly 200 pages of records, and Barnes noticed a pattern. Some years C.J. got pulled out of the classroom for extra help with reading. His test scores went up. Then the help stopped. Barnes likened it to a lifeguard saving someone and then allowing them to drown a few minutes later. "I don't think what we are seeing is uncommon, across the country," he wrote me later in an email.

Barnes says things might have been different if C.J. had been in special education. He would have had an Individualized Education Program and rights to services protected by federal law. But to get into special ed, you need to be identified with a disability. To determine if C.J. has a disability, he'd need a full evaluation from a school psychologist. C.J. never got one of those. Barnes says he should have. "He's this kind of student that we really need to dig deep on to figure out, how can we help C.J.?"

Barnes offered to help Sonya get C.J. an evaluation. She was grateful, but angry. C.J. just finished eighth grade. She had asked for him to be tested for a learning disability in first grade. She wonders how many other kids needed help and didn't get it. "There is this heavy feeling that I have," she said, pausing for a long sigh. "I don't know how to fix it. Except to keep telling parents to question everything and everybody, so they don't have to go all of these years like I did, to try to get down to the bottom of it."

I contacted the Nashville Public Schools to see if someone could answer questions about what happened with C.J. A spokesperson declined to comment.

When reading instruction is based on the flawed assumption that reading will come pretty easily to most kids as long as they're in the right environment, reading instruction is tilted in favor of the few. The few who don't need much instruction. The few from families who can pay to get their kids what they need.

The bottom line is that learning to read is not easy for many kids. Reading difficulty is natural. 42

Cognitive scientists have known this for a long time. In 1980, Phil Gough wrote this: "The statistically average child, normally endowed and normally taught, learns to read only with considerable difficulty. He does not learn to read naturally." 43

Sonya Thomas wants everyone to know about what she and C.J. have gone through. And she wants to help other parents get what they need for their kids. She's now executive director of PROPEL, the parent group she helped to found. It's her full-time job. She wants to see a movement of parents across the country demanding better reading instruction.

"Why isn't everyone in this country angry like me? Why are they not losing sleep?" she said. "It's unacceptable for children to not have a chance right off the bat. And we are not going to let anybody sleep until we have changed for the better for all children."

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Many kids struggle with reading - and children of color are far less likely to get the help they need

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A false assumption about what it takes to be a skilled reader has created deep inequalities among U.S. children, putting many on a difficult path in life.

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Ed week: What Teachers Should Know about The Science of Reading w/ Emily Hanford

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Ed week: What Teachers Should Know about The Science of Reading w/ Emily Hanford

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Kids aren't being taught to read, says senior education correspondent Emily Hanford of APM Reports, and that's because many teachers haven't learned how reading works.

Hanford's hard-charging radio documentary, published last fall, has reinflamed decades-old debates about early reading. Her message is clear: The science has shown that systematic, explicit phonics instruction is the necessary foundation for successful reading. But that's not what teachers are learning in their training, and it's not what's happening in schools.

We recently invited Hanford to the Education Week studio for a live conversation on what teachers should know about reading science. Below is the transcript of that discussion, which first aired on Facebook Live. (The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)

Liana Loewus: I'm here with Emily Hanford. She is a senior education correspondent for APM Reports, which is the documentary and investigative reporting group at American Public Media. She, in the fall, published a radio documentary titled "Hard Words: Why Aren't Our Kids Being Taught to Read?" So we're going to talk about reading today-reading research and the science of reading. As Emily says in the documentary, decades of research have shown that reading doesn't come naturally. The human brain is not hard-wired to read. It is hard-wired to learn to speak, but not to read. So kids have to be taught explicitly how to connect letters and [sounds]. So we're going to talk about that.
She also found in her reporting that that kind of instruction is not happening in a lot of classrooms across the country, so I'm going to ask her about that. My background is actually, I began as a reading teacher. I've taught in a few different settings. So this topic is of particular interest to me, so I'm really excited to have you here today. And yeah, I mean let's just kick things off and maybe you can tell us a little bit about, why did you decide to tackle early reading?
Emily Hanford: That's a good question. So it started, it's probably about two and a half years ago and I was really kind of a blank slate on this topic at this point. I had already been an education reporter for almost a decade but I had done very little about elementary education. I had done some work on early education and I got interested in dyslexia, in particular. So about two and a half years ago, I spent several months working on this documentary about kids who really struggled to read and what is going on for them and why many of them are having a hard time getting what they need in school, getting their dyslexia identified and getting the help they need.

And what I learned through that reporting is that a big part of the problem for kids with dyslexia is that there is a core instruction problem going on. Kids with dyslexia are often not being identified and given the help they need because there's not as much of an understanding about how reading works, how skilled reading works, and what happens when kids are having trouble reading, as there could be in schools. We actually know a lot about that but the knowledge base sort of generally in schools on that topic is not real strong, so what I really discovered through the moms of kids with dyslexia, who themselves have gotten really dug into the research to try to figure out what's going on, they are the ones that really clued me in, like, we think we have a core instruction problem here. We think that the way that we're teaching all kids to read is a little off because kids with dyslexia don't need some different or other kind of reading instruction from everyone else. They often need more of it, they need it more intensely, but what they need to learn how to read is the same thing that everyone needs to learn how to read.

So in some ways, dyslexia is sort of treated as kind of like a special ed. problem and really, it's not so much for a lot of kids. It's about getting good core instruction. Many of the kids who were being identified with dyslexia may not need that special education if they were getting the right kind of instruction in their classroom.
So then you decided to look into all learners, not just students with dyslexia and reading there. And you did a lot of research on the science of reading, on reading science. Talk a little about what that means.
Right, so what is the science of reading? It's kind of a loaded term but, how do skilled readers read words and how do kids learn how to do it? These are fascinating questions. As human beings, we've been reading for thousands of years. We did not know the answers to those questions. So we had theories about it and we created ways to teach kids how to read, kind of based on those ideas about how reading works and we fought about that. We fought about it pretty viciously in the '80s and '90s but we've actually fought about it over history. You can go back a couple hundred years and find that we were fighting about how does reading work and what does that mean about how kids should be taught? So what's happened, there's that whole history, and then over the past like 50 years or so, scientists from all over the world have done thousands of studies about how we learn to read. And these are people in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, linguists, many different fields. There's not like one field of reading science.

And they've done all this research and they've pretty much figured it out. They figured out, how do we read? How do we learn to read? What does that mean about how we should be taught? So we've been fighting about it but at the same time, in the last 50 years, there's this huge body of research. It's not like a few studies or a few scientists. It's like hundreds of scientists and thousands of studies that have really established an evidence base for the way reading works that is not disputed among scientists.
And talk a little bit about how does reading work? What is the most important thing you learned about how the brain learns to read?
So I think there's two really kind of important concepts or ideas that I think teachers in particular really need to know, that come out of this vast body of research. So one is this model that's actually been around since 1986 and it's called the Simple View of Reading. And it was really proposed to try to understand actually some of these things we fight about, which is like, how does reading comprehension happen? What's the role of phonics in decoding and all of that? So the Simple View of Reading is a model that is now been backed up by lots and lots more research. It has a solid scientific base behind it and it essentially says, reading comprehension is the product of your language comprehension-the words you know how to say, the words you can hear-and your decoding ability.

So if you multiply those two things together, you get reading comprehension. So what's going on for a child who's entering school is, they already know how to say a lot of words. They already know what a lot of words mean in their spoken vocabulary and their task, and it's not a small task for a lot of people, is to figure out how the words they know how to say are represented by written language. Now kids certainly come into school at different levels with this, in terms of the pre-literacy experiences they have, and some kids are actually reading some words, but it really is the primary task for most kids in kindergarten to figure this out, to understand how their spoken language is represented in writing.

The other big idea that I think teachers really need to understand is ... even when phonics was sort of developed as an idea, that was kind of invented before we really knew how people learned to read also. So phonics isn't 100 percent right. It turns out that the people who are advocating a phonics approach, which is paying attention to helping kids understand the way that the sounds in their language map onto letters and combinations of letters, that they're sort of more right than some of the other models we've had for reading. But it's not 100 percent right. And one of the things that phonics kind of failed to explain completely is ... phonics is about decoding words, but when we're skilled readers, what the research has figured out is we don't decode words as we go. We do eventually sort of store words in our mind, not as whole words, but we store them so that they are automatically known to us when we read.

The hallmark of skilled reading is you very, very quickly and very accurately know exactly what a word is when it's flashed in front of you. In fact, scientists have done these studies which have showed that if you flash in front of a skilled reader the word chair and the picture of a chair, your brain actually processes the meaning of the word chair quicker than the picture chair.

So we become super good at reading and, like you said in the beginning, our brains weren't meant to do this but when you become a skilled reader, you get really, really good at it. So one thing I think that teachers really need to understand about all this is that the goal is automatic recognition of words, but we do not recognize them as wholes. When you and I are reading words, we are very quickly processing every single sound, every single letter in that word. So that is a hallmark of being a good reader and ... scientists have figured out, how do people do that? How does stuff get stored in your brain? Well it gets stored in your brain through processing a word several times through its phonology and through its orthography. So the way it sounds and the way it's spelled.

So a typically developing reader, once they've been taught the basics of the alphabetic principle, like phonics, how their language is represented by letters and combinations of letters, once you give kids a good grounding in that, most typically developing readers, starting in like 1st or 2nd grade, need just a few exposures to a word through its phonology and its orthography. So through not memorizing the word as a whole but looking at all the letters in the word, going through the word from left to right, processing the whole thing-you do that a few times and it's mapped into your memory as a word that you know on sight in the future. So those two things, the Simple View of Reading and this concept called orthographic mapping, both reinforce the idea of how critical phonology and orthography, how critical it is to have kids pay attention to the sounds in words and to have them really understand the letters that represent those sounds.
Yeah, you explained it to me recently by saying, the way we know the difference between house and horse is because we've orthographically mapped them both and each letter is important in that mapping, right?
And every time we see those words, we quickly see every letter. That's how we know the difference between horse and house. And we do it really, really fast. Yeah.
So we started to talk a little bit about the reading wars, but let's sort of just give a little ... a brief history of the reading wars and sort of talk about where we are now. So you say that they actually go back a hundred years.
They do. Hundreds actually.
But they became pretty vicious in the '80s and '90s, so we can start there if you want.
So there are these different ideas about how reading works that we've been fighting about for a long time, so one is kind of phonics and that's the idea that you need to pay attention to the sounds. It's kind of a bottom up approach, so you begin to teach kids to read by helping them understand the letters, the combinations of letters, and you build up to whole words and to sentences and to paragraphs and to full texts. And then the other approaches were whole word, which is a little bit different than whole language. So whole word was kind of the Dick and Jane books of the early 20th century. That was the look-say model. Like look at a word, say it, and the idea there was that we ... they thought that we read words by wholes, so we should teach kids words by wholes and the way that you become a skilled reader is you basically memorize a whole bunch of words. You're exposed to them enough that you just know them on sight.

And then the whole language iteration of reading was more, came about in more of the 1960s and '70s, shared some ideas with the whole-word approach but had some differences. And one of the key kind of beliefs of or tenets of whole language is that learning to read a language and write a language is very similar to learning to speak a language, that it is essentially a natural thing and that through exposure to lots of text, kids will learn to read. So we fought about that for a very, very long time and we're still fighting about it. But like I said, we have all this research that shows that in fact, phonics is critical to becoming a reader. It is essential. It is not the only thing you need, but all good readers have good phonics skills. So some kids learn a lot of that without getting a lot of instruction in school, but most kids need instruction. So if all kids need phonics skills, we can either hope that they get it somewhere or we can teach it to them.

You say in your documentary ... you quote Mark Seidenberg. He's a cognitive neuroscientist. He said, "The reading wars are over and science lost." What are your thoughts on that? Where do you think we are right now? And the debate does continue in a lot of places, like why is that still happening?

Well what you will find in a lot of schools in the United States and in other parts of the English-speaking world is this term balanced literacy. And balanced literacy is a term that really was sort of introduced during ... in the midst of and in the wake of the reading wars. And the idea of balance is great. I mean, you want balanced instruction sort of in all things, so it's a hard term to bicker with, and it's also a hard term to fully understand because it kind of means different things to different people. But I've been spending a lot of time talking to people, looking at the research, looking at curriculum materials, and there are some things that you ... I think what's happened in the name of balanced literacy is what you find in a lot of classrooms that are doing balanced literacy is sort of a little bit of everything all at once. And what the research shows is that's not actually what kids need. They don't need a little bit of everything all at once. What you really want to see in early reading instruction, when kids are first coming to school-and remember, the task ahead of them is not to learn a whole bunch of words, they already have this advantage, they speak a language. Now they have to learn the written code.

So you want to see a pretty heavy emphasis on that, not entirely, but you want to see a really heavy emphasis on that. I think what you find in a lot of balanced literacy classrooms that I've been in and that I've talked to people about, is kind of putting it all, in the name of doing everything, putting it all together at once. And I think a lot of the important skills that kids really need to master to get from here to here with reading are kind of being missed.

Another observation I have about balanced literacy is that in some ways, when you kind of look at what is going on in the name of balanced literacy, there's a little bit of an idea that to become an expert reader, you mimic what experts do rather than you go along a series of steps to become an expert. So there's a lot of this research just in learning in general, and I think there's a kind of resistance to breaking reading into its parts, but we really need to do that for kids, to break it into its parts, to build it up so that kids then have all the skills that go together.

There's all these different skills that go together to become a proficient reader and it's like there's this foundation of phonics and phonemic awareness knowledge, which really is kind of one of the first tasks in school, and so much research, including the National Reading Panel and since the National Reading Panel, reiterates the critical role of really focusing on the alphabetic principle and the alphabetic code, sort of emphasizing the written code in early learning.
Just to talk a little bit about what the National Reading Panel was, it was published in the year 2000. Congress mandated that a group of experts come together and decide, sort of to settle the reading wars, and they looked at 100,000 studies, and a lot of those studies they dismissed. And the end result of that was that they said phonics is very important. It has to be systematic and explicit, right? This is now 19 years ago, and you're saying we're not seeing phonics in all our classrooms. But I've talked to teachers and in our reporting we talk to teachers who are using balanced literacy and they say, we are doing phonics. And they get very ... there's a lot of emotion behind this ... because some people will say it's a euphemism for whole language and others will say, no, we're doing balanced literacy and we're doing phonics. What do you see as the issue there though?
Well I think what balanced literacy is is whole language with a little bit of phonics in it. And the question is whether or not, if you really know the research base on reading, would you design reading instruction that way? And one really important thing to point out to people is, among the people who study how the brain reads and how people learn to do it, there's not controversy about phonics. There's no controversy that this is an essential building block, right?
At K-2 though, right?
At K-2.
We're talking very early.
And older if you haven't learned how to decode words. There's a resistance ... There's a lot of people out there who will say, if a kid's not a good reader in 5th or 6th grade, they're beyond phonics. They're not beyond phonics if they haven't mastered that. They really need to learn that. So I think there is ... Yes, I think in most schools ... You can still find some schools that really don't do much about foundational skills at all, but yes, in my reporting, I found and I said in the documentary that most balanced literacy classrooms do do some phonics. The question is, are they doing enough of it? Are they emphasizing it?

It's kind of like an opportunity cost question, is one of the ways that I've come to see a balanced literacy classroom. If you really look at the science, what would you want to emphasize first? What's the sequence you would want to go in to build all the things that you would need to become a proficient reader? And I think what happens in a balanced literacy classroom is there's potentially a lot of time lost, like a lot of stuff sort of left on the table because there's not enough time being devoted to the phonics and phonemic awareness, the alphabetical principle, the written code. And it's also really important to understand what we mean by explicit and systematic, because what's happening in a lot of classrooms is that the phonics is being taught kind of incidentally, like it comes up as kids struggle with words. There's a particular letter pattern that they're struggling with, so the teacher will teach a mini lesson on that, and a lot of stuff kind of gets lost because you don't necessarily know all ... unless you're listening to every single kid read everything out loud, you're not going to know all the different patterns that kids are struggling with.

People can fight and there's no agreement on what particular order you teach the written language to children in, but you kind of need to have a system. You need to have an order so that you cover it all. And again, kids are in different places, but you need to make sure that there's not holes in their knowledge. I've interviewed many children and parents who are older, who have huge holes in their knowledge when they're taught in this kind of incidental way. The teacher notices they struggle with one thing, they focus on that, but they may miss that there's a lot of other things that these kids don't understand.
There are actual sounds they don't know or digraphs or some part ...
Exactly.

I'm going to ask you one more thing and then we'll go to audience questions and if you're just tuning in right now, I'm here with Emily Hanford. She is of AMP Reports. She did a radio documentary called Hard Words. It's about reading science and why kids aren't learning to read.
But I did want to ask, teacher prep comes up in your radio documentary. What did you find that teachers are learning in their preparation programs? As they're studying to become teachers, what are they learning about reading?
Well, first I want to say that there's actually a decent amount that we know about this. So there have been a number of surveys of teachers. There have been reviews of syllabi and textbooks by a number of different groups and researchers. There have been some really good research in a couple of states, where they've gone in and done some reporting, where they really interviewed teacher candidates, interviewed teachers after they went to the classroom, interviewed professors, interviewed deans, went and observed what was happening. So it's not such a black box. Some people are like, we don't really know what's happening. We have a decent amount of research that shows us what's happening in teacher prep and I have talked to, at this point, talked to and interacted with hundreds of teachers.

And what I am hearing is that the basics of the reading science, like the Simple View of Reading that I just described, most teachers aren't learning that in their teacher-preparation programs.So they're not learning the basics of all of this stuff that researchers have learned about how the brain learns to read, which is very, very relevant to how you would design reading instruction.

The other thing I think that we pay less attention to, but there's been some good research on this, too, is that teachers are not learning very much about the structure of the English language themselves. And this gets back to what you asked about in terms of balanced literacy. Teachers are saying, well I teach phonics. I think one of the things that we know and that teachers have told me is that they themselves don't know that much about how the English language works. I mean, many of us don't. Many of us who become readers don't necessarily know all the rules and you don't need to, like, learn them. I don't even want to call them rules because that's not a good way to talk about what phonics is. But there's a decent amount, that if you were going to be a kindergarten, 1st, or 2nd grade teacher, or even a teacher for older kids because we've got a lot of struggling readers in older grades, there's a lot of stuff you need to understand about how the English language works to be able to teach it well to little kids. And that is not a focus, according to the teachers I've talked to and the surveys that I've seen in teacher preparation.

So we have this wide gap between research and practice, along the research itself and the knowledge of the English language.

And one of the things that I want to say here is that I think it's unfair to teachers that they're not being taught this, and teachers want to know it. I mean teachers want to be able to effectively teach their kids how to read. It's not like we have any silver bullets out there but we know so ... I mean this was really surprising to me as a reporter, and I'm still learning stuff, but there are dozens of books, so many papers, tons of videos, I mean it is a voluminous amount of stuff that we know about how reading works. And the fact that that is just over there and is not, for the most part, making its way to teachers when they're being prepared or making its way to them when they're getting professional development is unfair to teachers and unfair to kids.
So somebody is asking, what's the best response to the argument that structured literacy instruction would be boring to some advanced students. I assume that they mean sort of a, an explicit program by structured literacy. I mean what's your response to that.
So I think that's one of the misunderstandings about phonics out there. I'll tell you this, I just took ... audited a class, an online class, in the psychology of reading and the last half of the class was just all about the structure of the English language and about phonics and phonemic awareness. It's fascinating. I mean completely fascinating. This is one of the reasons we have a problem in the United States, is English is a complex language. We have many layers of our language. There's many influences. We're a kind of melting pot language. So our spelling patterns, we have many different ways to explain our spelling patterns. We don't have one clear set of rules that this is the way things are spelled in English. We take stuff from the French, the Germans, the Anglo-Saxons, Latin and Greek.
But that becomes an argument not to teach phonics, right? It's too hard. There are too many things to learn. Our language is too irregular, so we can't teach all the rules.
That's one of the myths too because there's ... Linguists will debate this but between 80 and 95 percent of English words can be explained. Sometimes there's not just one rule to explain it all, so you have to teach many things to children, but this gets to the idea that it's not boring at all. If it's taught well, it's completely fascinating and so I think this is one of the things that kind of hangs us up. I think some people have this idea that phonics is just worksheets and boring. But, number one, if it's taught well, it's not at all, and I've been into many classrooms where it is not boring at all. And if you describe to kids like, this is from Greek, and why is was spelled that way?, and all these very common words we have that are the most irregular words are Anglo-Saxon words and we used to pronounce them differently-you can tell that to kids and it's fascinating to them.

So I think we're kind of stuck. I think one of the things that keeps us stuck is some ideas about phonics that I don't think are really true. And I'll say number two, phonics is so ... if you know the research, you know how absolutely critical it is to have phonics skills. I mean you cannot be a really good reader without phonics skills. Again, we can hope kids just learn that somehow or we can teach it to them. So even if it were ... I'm not advocating for boring instruction, but boring phonics is better than no phonics. Kids are going to become better readers and the research, the evidence base I think shows you that. So it is a non-negotiable to teach phonics, and there's no reason it should be boring. And if teachers themselves understood why phonics was so important and had a really good understanding of the English language, I'd want to go to kindergarten again. The stuff you would learn about language in a good kindergarten class, and I've seen some of it, is just mind-blowingly interesting.
Yeah and great teachers can make anything interesting. I've definitely seen that in reporting and in the classroom.
Absolutely.
So here's a question that kind of goes back to your dyslexia documentary. Somebody says, if a kid has dyslexia and learns how to read, do they still have dyslexia?
That's a really good question. So what the researchers have found ... I mean dyslexia is caused by a phonological weakness. So the reason people with dyslexia have a hard time learning how to read is it's hard for them to not hear necessarily but sort of discern and manipulate the individual sounds in words. So their brain just processes these speech sounds kind of differently and they need more explicit kind of awareness of what's going on. They need more kind of training and practice to hear the different sounds of words. So dyslexia is something that's based in neurology. There's something in your brain. But the definition of dyslexia is an inability, a hard time reading words, even if you've had good instruction. So technically, if you have a phonological weakness but you're taught how to read really well and you become a very good reader, it's kind of one of those ... Are you still dyslexic? In some ways, it doesn't really matter.
Because you can read.
Yeah, so you just happen to be someone who becomes really good at ... I don't know a good analogy. I mean you become good at math even though you have a weakness like you're not one of those kids who can do multiplication tables in their head. I have two boys and one of them could multiply three-digit numbers by three-digit numbers in his head and I was like, whoa. I can't do that. But you don't have to be able to ... you don't have to be strong at that to become a good mathematician. ... That's probably a terrible analogy because I don't know anything about math, but anyway, what I'm just trying to say is that what we know is that people with dyslexia can become very good readers if they're taught. We also know that people who don't have dyslexia, they don't become good readers if they're not taught really well because there can be a lot of other factors that put you at risk for reading that aren't having a phonological core deficit, if that makes sense.
I'm going to ask one more question. If parents, teachers, and policy makers could do one thing to help shift the thinking and bring about needed change in teacher-prep programs, what do you think they should do?
I think that teachers need to speak up, honestly. Because I really think that in some ways, we've gotten stuck in the reading wars because this debate about reading has gotten attached to a whole bunch of other things. And one of them is sort of this idea of teacher autonomy. And so when people start talking about what the research says about reading and bringing in phonics programs or whatever, there's this kind of backlash like, you're encroaching on my space and my professional autonomy and I know how to teach my kids. And this is true. Teachers are the ones who need to get up everyday and teach kids how to read. And when the teachers that I have talked to, who have written about this and who have spoken up about this, I mean so many of them when they discover how much is known about reading, they go, oh my god. Why didn't I know that? Why didn't I know these basic things?

So I really think the key is for teachers to be like, we want this information. You are not coming in here telling me what to do. I want to know what to do and I don't want to be hammered over the head and told what to do, I mean ... teachers need to be given this knowledge and they need to be given good materials and good programs so that they can go in and be teachers. They can put their own spin on it. They put their own personality in it. I have seen teachers who didn't know this stuff, learn this stuff, started teaching in a very different way. They say, this is very different than the way I used to teach reading. And they love it. And the class is fun and it's their personality and they're really into it.

So I really do think that teachers need to speak up about the knowledge that they don't have. And the teacher preparation programs need to listen to that and then the schools need to listen to that. We do have a really big challenge ahead because there's quite a big gap here between knowledge and practice. So it's going to take a lot of time and resources in terms of money and know-how to bring this knowledge to teachers. But like I said before, I think it's unfair to teachers and unfair to kids if we don't commit to doing that.
Well I could talk about this all day ...
So could I.
And you probably could, too, but we have to stop somewhere. This has been fascinating. Thank you so much for coming and chatting with us, and thank you to everyone who is chiming in and sending questions. And if you want to continue the conversation, find us on Twitter. You can find Emily on Twitter. We have a new Facebook group if you're interested in joining. We do some more in-depth conversation. It's called the EdWeek Homeroom. Find us there, ask for an invite. And then head to the website, edweek.org, we have plenty of articles on reading. Thanks for being here, Emily. This was fun.
Yeah, you're welcome. Thanks.

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What Teachers Should Know About the Science of Reading (Video and Transcript)

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Education correspondent Emily Hanford of APM Reports spoke with Education Week about her radio documentary on early reading and what teachers should know about reading science.

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What I Should Have Learned in College

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Log into Facebook to start sharing and connecting with your friends, family, and people you know.

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The What is the Science of Reading website was maintained by a coalition of educators dedicated to a firm definition of what the science of reading is, what it is not, and how all stakeholders can understand its potential to transform reading instruction.

The Reading League is proud to now provide administrative support and resources to continue the Defining Movement Coalition's mission to provide a firm definition of the term science of reading.

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The What is the Science of Reading website was maintained by a coalition of educators dedicated to a firm definition of what the science of reading is, what it is not, and how all stakeholders can understand its potential to transform reading instruction.

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The Science of Reading Basics, Part 3: Scarborough’s Reading Rope

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From Logic of English. Full of information! (29 MIN.)

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Simple View of Reading for Early Childhood

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Explanation of the 4 Part Processor of Word Recognition (Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989)

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Explanation of the 4 Part Processor of Word Recognition (Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989)

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Dr. Keith Rayner - What Eye Movements Tell Us About the Processing Involved In Reading

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Dr. Rayner’s study of eye movements during reading is an important cornerstone of today’s reading science.

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Science of Reading Resource Library from CORE

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Science of Reading Resource Library from CORE

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Teacher Professional Learning | Literacy, Math | MTSS

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Curriculum Adoption

Curriculum Implementation

Literacy Coaching & Site Implementation Support

Early Literacy Planning & Implementation Collaboration

Online Language & Literacy Academy

Publisher-Approved Professional Learning

Elementary Reading Academy

Adolescent Literacy Solutions

Curriculum Adoption

Curriculum Implementation

Rise in Math

Math Coaching

Online Math Academies + Coaching

Onsite Math Academies

Teaching Reading Sourcebook 3rd Edition

Curriculum Adoption

Curriculum Implementation

Literacy Coaching & Site Implementation Support

Early Literacy Planning & Implementation Collaboration

Online Language & Literacy Academy

Publisher-Approved Professional Learning

Elementary Reading Academy

Adolescent Literacy Solutions

Curriculum Adoption

Curriculum Implementation

Rise in Math

Math Coaching

Online Math Academies + Coaching

Onsite Math Academies

Teaching Reading Sourcebook 3rd Edition

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Science of Reading Resource Library - Teacher Professional Learning | Literacy, Math | MTSS

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Free resources to help you develop your knowledge of the science of reading and how to teach all students to be strong readers.

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ILA Content Area and Disciplinary Literacy Strategies and Frameworks

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ILA Content Area and Disciplinary Literacy Strategies and Frameworks

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Teaching Reading is Rocket Science - Louisa Moats

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Teaching Reading is Rocket Science - Louisa Moats

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ILA: Literacy Practices That Adolescents Deserve

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ILA: Literacy Practices That Adolescents Deserve

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C. Shanahan D.L. Strategies from ILA (1)

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Ohio Science of Reading-What I Should Have Learned in College

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Ohio-Science of Reading is a private group that allows educators from around Ohio to learn more about the Science of Reading and how to improve reading skills for the students in Ohio.

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Structured Literacy vs. Typical Literacy

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Structured Literacy vs. Typical Literacy

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IES Practice Guide for Adolescent Literacy

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IES Practice Guide for Adolescent Literacy

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Three Directions for Disciplinary Literacy

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Three Directions for Disciplinary Literacy

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Three Directions for Disciplinary Literacy

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How Our Brains Learn to Read inforgraphic

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How Our Brains Learn to Read inforgraphic

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University of Florida Virtual Resource Hub

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University of Florida Virtual Resource Hub

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Aouad, J. and Savage, R. (2009). The component structure of preliteracy skills: Further evidence for the simple view of reading. Canadian Journal of School Psychology, 24 (2), 183-200.

Catts, H., Adlof, S., and Weismer, S. (2006). Language deficits in poor comprehenders: A case for the simple view of reading. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 49, 278-293.

Gough, P., Hoover, W., and Patterson, C. (1996). Some observations on a simple view of reading. In C. Cornoldi and J. Oakhill (eds.), Reading comprehension difficulties: Processes and intervention (pp. 1-13). Mahway, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

*Gough, P. and Tunmer, W. (1986). Decoding, reading, and reading disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7, 6-10.

Hoover, W. and Gough, P. (1990). The simple view of reading. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2, 127-160.

*Kamhi, A. (2007). Knowledge deficits: the true crisis in education. ASHA Leader, 12 (7), 28-29.

*These articles are short and easy to read.

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The Simple View of Reading is a formula demonstrating the widely accepted view that reading has two basic components: word recognition (decoding) and language comprehension. Research studies show that a student's reading comprehension score can be predicted if decoding skills and language comprehension abilities are known.

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RISE Arkansas The Science of Reading resources

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RISE Arkansas The Science of Reading resources

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R.I.S.E Arkansas Science of Reading Resources - The Science of Reading

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In this "important and alarming" book, see why so many American students are falling behind in their reading skills while others around the world excel (New York Times).

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, 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

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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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Stanislas Dehaene (Author), Kaleo Griffith (Narrator), Penguin Audio (Publisher) & 0 more

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How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine...for Now

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Amazon.com: How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine...for Now (Audible Audio Edition): Stanislas Dehaene, Kaleo Griffith, Penguin Audio: Audible Books & Originals

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Multiple award-winning book on reading and spelling education that will transform how you think about English! Discover this revolutionary method that Dr. Temple Grandin called "really helpful for teaching reading to children who are mathematical pattern thinkers..." eliminates the need to guess and provides a logical solution to English spelling.As the rules unfold it becomes apparent how this knowledge is vital to reversing the educational crisis that is plaguing America. This slim volume is easy to read and accessible to parents and classroom teachers. A thorough appendix summarizes the most important concepts for quick reference.

Do you know a student who is good at math or science but struggles with reading or spelling?

Has a student ever asked you a question about English spelling to which you replied, "That's an exception"?

Have you ever abandoned a word while writing because spell check didn't recognize it?

Predominant reading methods require students to break the complex code of English without help. This has resulted in low literacy rates and explains why many highly educated professionals cannot spell. By revealing the logical patterns underlying 98% of English words, Uncovering the Logic of English

Simple answers are given for questions such as:

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

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

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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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In recent years, scientists have made great strides in understanding how children learn to read, as well as how to prevent and correct most reading difficulties. However, the American Federation for Teachers, the Journal of Learning Disabilities, and School Psychology Review have all highlighted the fact that these findings have not become widely known or used in our schools. Equipped for Reading Success is designed to summarize these research results in a clear and easy-to-read manner, bringing teachers up-to-date on these exciting findings.

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Equipped for Reading Success [David A. Kilpatrick] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Equipped for Reading Success

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Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties

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Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties

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Practical, effective, evidence-based reading interventions that change students' lives

Essentials of Understanding and Assessing Reading Difficulties is a practical, accessible, in-depth guide to reading assessment and intervention. It provides a detailed discussion of the nature and causes of reading difficulties, which will help develop the knowledge and confidence needed to accurately assess why a student is struggling. Readers will learn a framework for organizing testing results from current assessment batteries such as the WJ-IV, KTEA-3, and CTOPP-2. Case studies illustrate each of the concepts covered. A thorough discussion is provided on the assessment of phonics skills, phonological awareness, word recognition, reading fluency, and reading comprehension. Formatted for easy reading as well as quick reference, the text includes bullet points, icons, callout boxes, and other design elements to call attention to important information.

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Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties (Essentials of Psychological Assessment)

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Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties (Essentials of Psychological Assessment) [Kilpatrick, David A.] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties (Essentials of Psychological Assessment)

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The untold story of the root cause of America's education crisis--and the seemingly endless cycle of multigenerational poverty.

It was only after years within the education reform movement that Natalie Wexler stumbled across a hidden explanation for our country's frustrating lack of progress when it comes to providing every child with a quality education. The problem wasn't one of the usual scapegoats: lazy teachers, shoddy facilities, lack of accountability. It was something no one was talking about: the elementary school curriculum's intense focus on decontextualized reading comprehension "skills" at the expense of actual knowledge. In the tradition of Dale Russakoff's The Prize and Dana Goldstein's The Teacher Wars, Wexler brings together history, research, and compelling characters to pull back the curtain on this fundamental flaw in our education system--one that fellow reformers, journalists, and policymakers have long overlooked, and of which the general public, including many parents, remains unaware.

But The Knowledge Gap isn't just a story of what schools have gotten so wrong--it also follows innovative educators who are in the process of shedding their deeply ingrained habits, and describes the rewards that have come along: students who are not only excited to learn but are also acquiring the knowledge and vocabulary that will enable them to succeed. If we truly want to fix our education system and unlock the potential of our neediest children, we have no choice but to pay attention.

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The Knowledge Gap: The hidden cause of America's broken education system--and how to fix it

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Buy The Knowledge Gap: The hidden cause of America's broken education system--and how to fix it: Read Kindle Store Reviews - Amazon.com

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Why is it that more people can't read and write? Why are there still so many vastly different methods of teaching literacy? Why do people still argue about it?

Reading for Life examines these three questions, addressing the less evidence supported ideas about teaching reading and writing which are still alive and well in schools all over the world. This accessible guide bridges the gap between research and practice, translating academic findings into practical suggestions and ready-to-use techniques.

Written in an approachable style and with informative graphics, vignettes and interviews woven throughout, this book covers:

the components of literacy, including phonics, vocabulary and fluency

the history of approaches to literacy teaching and an overview of the key figures

government-level inquiries into the provision of reading and writing teaching

the mindset which leads to acceptance of poor practice

the essential components of an effective literacy program with practical advice on selecting resources to get the job done well

Reading for Life helps educational practitioners make informed decisions about which teaching methods to reject and select, and empowers parents to ask the right questions of professionals and policy makers. This book is a timely exploration of poor teaching methods and is an innovative, fresh assessment of how high quality literacy teaching can be provided for all.

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Reading for Life: High Quality Literacy Instruction for All

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Reading for Life: High Quality Literacy Instruction for All [Stone, Lyn] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Reading for Life: High Quality Literacy Instruction for All

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Ohio Department of Education and Workforce

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Literacy Academy 2020: The Reading Brain - Michelle Elia

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The Neuroscience of Learning - Bruce McCandliss

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Beginning readers who focus on letter-sound relationships, or phonics, instead of trying to learn whole words, increase activity in the area of their brains best wired for reading, according to new Stanford research investigating how the brain responds to different types of reading instruction.

In other words, to develop reading skills, teaching students to sound out "C-A-T" sparks more optimal brain circuitry than instructing them to memorize the word "cat." And, the study found, these teaching-induced differences show up even on future encounters with the word.

The study, co-authored by Stanford Professor Bruce McCandliss of the Graduate School of Education and the Stanford Neuroscience Institute, provides some of the first evidence that a specific teaching strategy for reading has direct neural impact. The research could eventually lead to better-designed interventions to help struggling readers.

"This research is exciting because it takes cognitive neuroscience and connects it to questions that have deep meaning and history in educational research," said McCandliss, who wrote the study with Yuliya Yoncheva, a researcher at New York University, and Jessica Wise, a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin.

Instructional strategies

Theories on reading development have long supported the importance of a phonics foundation, especially for early learners and struggling readers, yet investigating the way in which brain mechanisms are influenced by the choices a teacher makes is a fairly recent endeavor, according to McCandliss.

As the field of educational neuroscience grows, however, both brain researchers and educational researchers can improve their understanding of how instructional strategies can best be harnessed to support the brain changes that underlie the development of learning, he added.

In the study, released this month in the journal Brain and Language, the researchers devised a new written language and contrasted whether words were taught using a letter-to-sound instruction method or a whole-word association method. After learning multiple words under both approaches, the newly learned words were presented in a reading test while brainwaves were monitored.

McCandliss's team used a brain mapping technique that allowed them to capture brain responses to the newly learned words that are literally faster than the blink of an eye.

Remarkably, the researchers said, these very rapid brain responses to the newly learned words were influenced by how they were learned.

Words learned through the letter-sound instruction elicited neural activity biased toward the left side of the brain, which encompasses visual and language regions. In contrast, words learned via whole-word association showed activity biased toward right hemisphere processing.

McCandliss noted that this strong left hemisphere engagement during early word recognition is a hallmark of skilled readers, and is characteristically lacking in children and adults who are struggling with reading.

In addition, the study's participants were subsequently able to read new words they had never seen before, as long as they followed the same letter-sound patterns they were taught to focus on. Within a split second, the process of deciphering a new word triggered the left hemisphere processes.

"Ideally, that is the brain circuitry we are hoping to activate in beginner readers," McCandliss said.

By comparison, when the same participants memorized whole-word associations, the study found that they learned sufficiently to recognize those particular words on the reading test, but the underlying brain circuitry differed, eliciting electrophysiological responses that were biased toward right hemisphere processes.

"These contrasting teaching approaches are likely having such different impact on early brain responses because they encourage the learner to focus their attention in different ways," McCandliss said. "It's like shifting the gears of the mind - when you focus your attention on different information associated with a word, you amplify different brain circuits."

While many teachers are now using phonics to teach reading, some may be doing it more effectively than others, McCandliss said.

"If children are struggling, even if they're receiving phonics instruction, perhaps it's because of the way they are being asked to focus their attention on the sounds within spoken words and links between those sounds and the letters within visual words," he said.

"We can direct attention to a larger grain size or a smaller grain size, and it can have a big impact on how well you learn."

Monitoring brain waves

The study involved 16 literate adult participants, yet, according to McCandliss, gained its statistical power by teaching all participants in two different ways, much like what a typical student may experience when learning from different teachers or trying to master irregular words that don't conform to letter-to-sound mapping, such as "yacht."

The new written language was based on line features that formed symbols representing different letters of a new alphabet. The symbols were joined to represent a distinct visual word.

Each participant was trained to read two sets of three-letter words under identical conditions that provided practice viewing words and listening to corresponding spoken words. The only difference between the two training conditions was a set of instructions at the beginning that encouraged the readers to approach learning the words in one of two ways.

One instruction asked learners to approach the task of learning each word by picking out each of the three-letter symbols and matching each to the corresponding sound in the spoken word. The other focused on teaching the association between whole printed and spoken words.

After training was completed, participants were hooked up to an electroencephalograph, or EEG, that monitored brain waves while they took a reading test on word-figures they had already learned. Following the letter-sound style of training, participants were also tested on their ability to read new words composed of the same letters.

"When we looked under the hood, we found that the participants could learn to read under both forms of instruction but the brain activation showed that learning happened in very different ways," McCandliss said.

He said the results underscore the idea that the way a learner focuses their attention during learning has a profound impact on what is learned. It also highlights the importance of skilled teachers in helping children focus their attention on precisely the most useful information.

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Stanford brain wave study shows how different teaching methods affect reading development

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Beginning readers who focus on letter-sound relationships, or phonics, instead of trying to learn whole words, increase activity in the area of their brains best wired for reading, according to new Stanford research investigating how the brain responds to different types of reading instruction.

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Browse our library of evidence-based teaching strategies, learn more about using classroom texts, find out what whole-child literacy instruction looks like, and dive deeper into comprehension, content area literacy, writing, and social-emotional learning.

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Embedding Vocabulary and Comprehension Instruction in All Subjects 4-12 (Keys to Literacy)

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Embedding Vocabulary and Comprehension Instruction in All Subjects 4-12 (Keys to Literacy)

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Reading and Writing in the Content Areas (ADLit)

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Reading and Writing in the Content Areas (ADLit)

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Currently, few middle or high school educators ever receive more than a token amount of training in literacy instruction, and few see themselves as teachers of reading and writing at all.

Instead, at the secondary level, most teachers tend to regard themselves as teachers of subject areas, such as biology, American history, or algebra. Even English teachers - who might be assumed to be responsible for reading and writing instruction - tend to define themselves primarily as teachers of literature, or writing, while not addressing the more basic literacy skills that many of their students lack.

Since 2009, the Common Core standards (and their counterparts in non-Common Core states), have required literacy skills be taught in all content areas. However, in practice many teachers have struggled to implement explicit reading and writing instruction, and the data have not shown Common Core to have had the impact on adolescent literacy that many had hoped for. Teachers generally continue to rely on textbooks, brief readings, and short, formulaic writing assignments rather than primary sources and writing assignments that promote critical thinking and writing.

To help our students reach their potential, we as educators should be more than teachers of facts, figures, dates, and procedures. We should be more even than teachers of mathematical, historical, scientific, and literary ways of thinking about and seeing the world. We also need to help our students to read and write and communicate like mathematicians, historians, scientists, literary critics ... and educated citizens. And while not every teacher can do the job of a reading specialist, we can all become better grounded in the essentials of literacy instruction, and we can collectively support students' overall literacy development through content literacy.

Specifically, we as teachers can:

Content literacy versus disciplinary literacy

In recent years, researchers have differentiated content and discipline-focused literacy. Content literacy focuses on reading and writing processes that are common to all content areas. Disciplinary literacy focuses on reading and writing skills specific to a subject area. Students get the opportunity to use their skills to read and write like a mathematician, scientist, or historian. For more, see ILA's Brief on Content Area and Disciplinary Literacy.

Content area literacy: the basics

Everyone can contribute to literacy instruction.

If math, science, and history teachers assume that the English department bears full responsibility for teaching reading and writing, they'll be missing an opportunity to support literacy development in their classrooms as well. Content-area teachers can have a big impact in promoting discipline-specific reading and writing skills.

If the school needs reading specialists, the school should hire reading specialists.

Math, science, history, and English teachers are sometimes apprehensive when people start talking about basic literacy instruction. "I've never learned how to teach reading!" they might say. "I don't know how to help kids sound out words or read more fluently." They're right. Schools ideally should have reading specialists available to work with children who need extra help, leaving content area teachers to focus on the kinds of reading and writing that go on in their disciplines. But whether or not schools have reading specialists, it's important for teachers across the board to learn enough about literacy instruction to work constructively with students they already know.

Meet with colleagues from your department to define the specific kinds of reading and writing that you want students to practice in your classes.

Within each content area, teachers should have a clear and consistent understanding of what it means for students to read and write proficiently in that domain. Biology teachers shouldn't be in the business of telling history teachers how to guide students in the analysis of early American political tracts, and history teachers shouldn't weigh in on how best to teach the writing of lab reports. If secondary schools are to take seriously the teaching of literacy in the content areas, they should allow the content areas to develop their own expertise and to exercise their own professional judgment as to the kinds of reading and writing that are most important to teach in their classes.

More resources

Visit our library of essential articles on teaching literacy in the content areas.

Take a close look at the Standards for the Preparation of Literacy Professionals, published in 2017 by the International Literacy Association, along with the professional associations for teachers of English, social studies, mathematics, and science. While this document was prepared with literacy coaches in mind, it includes detailed descriptions of the many reading and writing skills that are distinct to each subject area, and it can help get content area teachers started on a discussion about their own priorities for literacy instruction.

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Reading and Writing in the Content Areas

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Content area teachers need training in the essentials of literacy instruction - how to provide effective vocabulary instruction in their subject areas and instruction in reading comprehension strategies to help students make sense of content-area texts. In addition, they should be able to teach students to read and write in the ways that are distinct to their own content areas.

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Reading and Writing in the Disciplines (Annenberg)

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Reading and Writing in the Disciplines (Annenberg)

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Am I Teaching Disciplinary Literacy? Shanahan

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Am I Teaching Disciplinary Literacy? Shanahan

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Are My Students Doing Disciplinary Literacy?

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Are My Students Doing Disciplinary Literacy?

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Are My Students Doing  DL self assessment checklist (1)

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Disciplinary Literacy in Action: How to Create and Sustain a School-Wide Culture of Deep Reading, Writing, and Thinking (Corwin Literacy)

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Disciplinary Literacy in Action: How to Create and Sustain a School-Wide Culture of Deep Reading, Writing, and Thinking (Corwin Literacy): Lent, ReLeah Cossett, Voigt, Marsha McCracken: 9781544317472: Books

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Think you understand Disciplinary Literacy? Think again.

In this important reference, content teachers and other educators explore why students need to understand how historians, novelists, mathematicians, and scientists use literacy in their respective fields. ReLeah shows how to teach students to:

Evaluate and question evidence (Science)

Compare sources and interpret events (History)

Favor accuracy over elaboration (Math)

Attune to voice and fi gurative language (ELA)

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This Is Disciplinary Literacy: Reading, Writing, Thinking, and Doing . . . Content Area by Content Area (Corwin Literacy)

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This Is Disciplinary Literacy: Reading, Writing, Thinking, and Doing . . . Content Area by Content Area (Corwin Literacy) [Lent, ReLeah Cossett] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. This Is Disciplinary Literacy: Reading, Writing, Thinking, and Doing . . . Content Area by Content Area (Corwin Literacy)

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Taking the Lead on Adolescent Literacy: Action Steps for Schoolwide Success

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Buy Taking the Lead on Adolescent Literacy: Action Steps for Schoolwide Success: Read Kindle Store Reviews - Amazon.com

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50 Instructional Routines to Develop Content Literacy

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50 Instructional Routines to Develop Content Literacy

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50 Instructional Routines to Develop Content Literacy (Teaching Strategies Series)

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Amazon - 50 Instructional Routines to Develop Content Literacy (Teaching Strategies Series): Fisher, Douglas, Brozo, William, Frey, Nancy, Ivey, Gay: 9780133347968: Books

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Disciplinary Literacy Inquiry & Instruction

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Disciplinary Literacy Inquiry & Instruction

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What do you get when a high school English teacher, a middle school literacy coach, and an elementary school teacher realize that the old adage of "every teacher is a teacher of reading" misses the bigger picture?
Jacy Ippolito, Christina Dobbs, and Megin Charner-Laird have spent the last decade trying to answer that question, working with teachers across grade levels, conducting studies, and analyzing research in order to build a more comprehensive instructional framework that engages students in every content area. The answer they came to is disciplinary literacy.
Disciplinary Literacy doesn't ask all teachers to be general reading teachers; it asks all educators to empower students to adopt and eventually adapt the language, genres, and modalities prized by each discipline -- to give students the tools to take on professional identities. By combining the RAND model for reading comprehension with collaborative cycles of inquiry, Ippolito, Dobbs, and Charner-Laird connect effective professional learning to shifts in classroom practice. The resulting framework supports teachers and leaders in designing the disciplinary literacy teaching and learning experiences that students need to succeed within and beyond school.
This book provides research-based frameworks, guiding questions and examples, and lots of stories from teachers who have already walked the path of Disciplinary Literacy Inquiry and Instruction -- it's for educators who want to take ownership of their own learning alongside like-minded colleagues, and raise the achievement of all their students.

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Disciplinary Literacy Inquiry and Instruction

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What do you get when a high school English teacher, a middle school literacy coach, and an elementary school teacher realize that the old adage of "every teacher is a teacher of reading" misses the bigger picture? Jacy Ippolito, Christina Dobbs, and Megin Charner-Laird have spent the la...

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Schools usually focus on teaching comprehension skills instead of general knowledge-even though education researchers know better.

Every two years, education-policy wonks gear up for what has become a time-honored ritual: the release of the Nation's Report Card. Officially known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, the data reflect the results of reading and math tests administered to a sample of students across the country. Experts generally consider the tests rigorous and highly reliable-and the scores basically stagnant.

Math scores have been flat since 2009 and reading scores since 1998, with just about a third of students performing at a level the NAEP defines as "proficient." Performance gaps between lower-income students and their more affluent peers, among other demographic discrepancies, have remained stubbornly wide.

Among the likely culprits for the stalled progress in math scores: a misalignment between what the NAEP tests and what state standards require teachers to cover at specific grade levels. But what's the reason for the utter lack of progress in reading scores?

On Tuesday, a panel of experts in Washington, D.C., convened by the federally appointed officials who oversee the NAEP, concluded that the root of the problem is the way schools teach reading. The current instructional approach, they agreed, is based on assumptions about how children learn that have been disproved by research over the past several decades-research that the education world has largely failed to heed.

The long-standing view has been that the first several years of elementary school should be devoted to basic reading skills. History, science, and the arts can wait. After all, the argument goes, if kids haven't learned to read-a task that is theoretically accomplished by third grade -how will they be able to gain knowledge about those subjects through their own reading?

The federal No Child Left Behind legislation, enacted in 2001, only intensified the focus on reading. The statute required states to administer annual reading and math tests to students in grades three through eight and once in high school, and attached hefty consequences if schools failed to boost scores. The law that replaced No Child Left Behind-the Every Student Succeeds Act, passed in 2015-has eased the consequences but has hardly weakened the emphasis on testing.

What is tested, some educators say, gets taught-and what isn't doesn't. Since 2001, the curriculum in many elementary schools has narrowed to little more than a steady diet of reading and math. And when test scores fail to rise after third grade-as they often do, especially in high-poverty schools-subjects such as history and science may continue to be relegated to the far back burner through middle school.

To some extent, it does make sense to focus on reading skills in the early years. One component of reading is, like math, primarily a set of skills: the part that involves decoding, or making connections between sounds and the letters that represent them.

But educators have also treated the other component of reading-comprehension-as a set of skills, when in fact it depends primarily on what readers already know. In countries that specify the content to be taught at each grade level, standardized tests can test students on what they've learned in school. But in the United States, where schools are all teaching different content, test designers give students passages on a variety of topics that may have nothing to do with what they've learned in school-life in the Arctic, for example, or the disappearance of Amelia Earhart. The tests then ask questions designed to assess comprehension: What's the main idea of the passage? What inferences can you make?

On a daily basis, teachers have their students practice skills and strategies such as "finding the main idea" or "making inferences." And teachers select books that match the given skill rather than because of the text's content. Rarely do the topics connect: Students might read a book about bridges one day, zebras the next, and clouds the day after that.

Cognitive scientists have known for decades that simply mastering comprehension skills doesn't ensure that a young student will be able to apply them to whatever texts they're confronted with on standardized tests and in their studies later in life.

One of those cognitive scientists spoke on the Tuesday panel: Daniel Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia who writes about the science behind reading comprehension. Willingham explained that whether or not readers understand a text depends far more on how much background knowledge and vocabulary they have relating to the topic than on how much they've practiced comprehension skills. That's because writers leave out a lot of information that they assume readers will know. If they put all the information in, their writing would be tedious.

But if readers can't supply the missing information, they have a hard time making sense of the text. If students arrive at high school without knowing who won the Civil War, they'll have a hard time understanding a textbook passage about Reconstruction.

Students from less educated families are usually the ones who are most handicapped by gaps in knowledge. Another panelist-Ian Rowe, who heads a network of charter schools serving low-income students in New York-provided a real-life example during his remarks. A sixth grader at one of his schools was frustrated that a passage on a reading test she'd taken kept repeating a word she didn't understand: roog-bye. The unfamiliar word made it hard for her to understand the passage. When Rowe asked her to spell the word, it turned out to be rugby.

The implication is clear. The best way to boost students' reading comprehension is to expand their knowledge and vocabulary by teaching them history, science, literature, and the arts, using curricula that guide kids through a logical sequence from one year to the next: for example, Native Americans and Columbus in kindergarten; the colonial era and the American Revolution in first grade; the War of 1812 and the Civil War in second grade; and so on. That approach enables children to make sense of what they're learning, and the repetition of concepts and vocabulary in different contexts makes it more likely that they'll retain information. Not to mention that learning content such as this can be a lot more engaging for both students and teachers than the endless practice of illusory skills.

Another panelist-Timothy Shanahan, an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois and the author or editor of more than 200 publications on literacy-went on to debunk a popular approach that goes hand in hand with teaching comprehension skills: To help students practice their "skills," teachers give them texts at their supposed individual reading levels, rather than the level of the grade they're in.

According to Shanahan, no evidence backs up that practice. In fact, Shanahan said, recent research indicates that students actually learn more from reading texts that are considered too difficult for them -in other words, those with more than a handful of words and concepts a student doesn't understand. What struggling students need is guidance from a teacher on how to make sense of texts designed for kids at their respective grade levels-the kinds of texts those kids may otherwise see only on standardized tests, when they have to grapple with them on their own.

That view was endorsed by Marilyn Jager Adams, a cognitive and developmental psychologist who is a visiting scholar at Brown University. "Giving children easier texts when they're weaker readers," she said during the panel discussion, "serves to deny them the very language and information they need to catch up and move on."

The failure to build children's knowledge in elementary school helps explain the gap between the reading scores of students from wealthier families and those of their lower-income peers-a gap that has been expanding. More affluent students may not learn much in elementary school, but compared to their disadvantaged peers, their parents tend to be more educated and have the money to provide knowledge-boosting perks such as tutoring and trips to Europe. As a result, those wealthy children are far more likely to acquire knowledge outside of school. Poorer kids with less educated parents tend to rely on school to acquire the kind of knowledge that is needed to succeed academically-and because their schools typically focus exclusively on reading and math, in an effort to raise low test scores, they're less likely to acquire it there.

The bottom line is that policy makers and advocates who have pushed for more testing in part as a way to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor have undermined their own efforts. They have created a system that incentivizes teachers to withhold the very thing that could accomplish both objectives: knowledge. All students suffer under this system, but the neediest suffer the most.

The NAEP is a valuable educational barometer, but it's important to understand that while standardized tests can identify a problem, they can't provide the answer to it.

Although some elementary teachers have embraced the approach advocated by the NAEP panel, it's clear that most have been trained to teach in methods that aren't supported by research, and that many are resistant to change. Shanahan, at the University of Illinois, noted that when he speaks to teachers around the country, they're aghast at the idea of giving struggling readers grade-level books-even when their state's literacy standards call for doing so.

Still, schools in some parts of the country are embracing the kinds of insights offered by the panelists. Louisiana has not only created its own curriculum but has also asked the federal government for permission to give tests based on that curriculum rather than passages on a variety of randomly selected topics. If that movement spreads, the NAEP may finally live up to its name, and the American education system may at last be able to unlock the untold potential of millions of students.

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national assessment of educational progress

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endless practice of illusory skills.another panelist

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Why American Students Haven't Gotten Better at Reading in 20 Years

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Schools usually focus on teaching comprehension skills instead of general knowledge-even though education researchers know better. Every two years, education-policy wonks gear up for what has become a time-honored ritual: the release of the Nation's Report Card.

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Power of RTI & Reading Profiles,A Blueprint for Solving Reading Problems,The Power of RTI and Reading Profiles,978-1-59857-315-2,Education,none,Spear-Swerling, Louise

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Shanahan on Literacy has a variety of literacy blogs in one place. Find out here the information that can use by teachers and parents in teaching and assessing reading, writing, and literacy. Read more here!

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Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

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

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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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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.