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Finding the Right Starting Point for Reading Intervention

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Finding the Right Starting Point for Reading Intervention

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EXCELLENT resource with diagnostic reading screeners and lesson ideas for "where to go next" with instruction.

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Excellent resources for getting started from the Mississippi Dept. of Ed

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Instructional Routines for Teaching Kindergarten

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Instructional Routines for Teaching Kindergarten

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Wonderful resource from the Mississippi Dept. of Ed.

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Reading Buddies- Free program on youtube developed by the Reading League

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Reading Buddies- Free program on youtube developed by the Reading League

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kids reading literacy preschool kindergarden "first grade" dusty dott alphabott pbs

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What do a dog, a girl, and a robot have in common? First and foremost, Dusty, Dott, and Alphabott are best friends. But they are also reading buddies! Dusty loves to talk, but learning to read is a new skill. With the help of Dott and Alphabott, he discovers that it can be so much fun!

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Language at the Speed of Sight by Mark Seidenberg

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Language at the Speed of Sight by Mark Seidenberg

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If teachers could figure out how reading works just by observation and experience...what we can learn about reading from observation is limited.  Most of what we do when we read is subconscious.  You cannot inspect what happens in your brain while you’re reading.  All you know is the result! People’s intuitions about reading are limited, biased, and often misleading.  They are affected by what they observe and believe (Seidenberg, 2013, p. 11).

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

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

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

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

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

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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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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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This is a GREAT place to start on your journey!

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Assessing, Preventing and Overcoming Reading Difficulties by David A. Kilpatrick

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Assessing, Preventing and Overcoming Reading Difficulties by David A. Kilpatrick

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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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Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene

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Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene

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READING IN THE BRAIN

Praise for Reading in the Brain

- The Wall Street Journal

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

-Jonah Lehrer

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

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

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

"Richly rewarding."

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

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

-A.V. Club.com

-Oliver Sacks, M.D.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading in the Brain

The New Science
of How We Read

STANISLAS DEHAENE

INTRODUCTION

The New Science of Reading

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

-FRANCISCO DE QUEVEDO

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

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

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

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

From Neurons to Education

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

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

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

Putting Neurons into Culture

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

The Mystery of the Reading Ape

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

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

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

Biological Unity and Cultural Diversity

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

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

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

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

A Reader's Guide

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Do We Read?

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

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

-ALBERTO MANGUEL, THE HISTORY OF READING

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

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

The Eye: A Poor Scanner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Search for Invariants

Can you read, Lubin?

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

-MOLIÈRE, GEORGES DANDIN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amplifying Differences

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

Every Word Is a Tree

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Silent Voice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh dear!" replied the president.25

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

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

The Limits of Sound

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

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

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

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

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

The Hidden Logic of Our Spelling System

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

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

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

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

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

The Impossible Dream of Transparent Spelling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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Proust and the Squid- The story and science of the reading brain by Maryanne Wolf

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Proust and the Squid- The story and science of the reading brain by Maryanne Wolf

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"Wolf restores our awe of the human brain-its adaptability, its creativity, and its ability to connect with other minds through a procession of silly squiggles." - San Francisco Chronicle

How do people learn to read and write-and how has the development of these skills transformed the brain and the world itself ? Neuropsychologist and child development expert Maryann Wolf answers these questions in this ambitious and provocative book that chronicles the remarkable journey of written language not only throughout our evolution but also over the course of a single child's life, showing why a growing percentage have difficulty mastering these abilities.

With fascinating down-to-earth examples and lively personal anecdotes, Wolf asserts that the brain that examined the tiny clay tablets of the Sumerians is a very different brain from the one that is immersed in today's technology-driven literacy, in which visual images on the screen are paving the way for a reduced need for written language-with potentially profound consequences for our future.

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Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

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Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain [Wolf, Maryanne] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

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Teaching Reading is Rocket Science (2020)

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Teaching Reading is Rocket Science (2020)

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

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

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Reader, Come Home- the reading brain in a digital world by Mayranne Wolf

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Reader, Come Home- the reading brain in a digital world by Mayranne Wolf

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"Wolf offers a persuasive catalog of the cognitive and social good created by deep reading.... She's right that digital media doesn't automatically doom deep reading and can even enhance it. She's also correct that we have a lot to lose if we don't pay attention to what we're doing with technology and what it's doing to us." - Washington Post

"[A] gentle manifesto.... [Wolf] affirms and celebrates the power of reading for the formation of our moral imaginations, and a lifetime of bookish devotion bubbles to the surface of her lovely prose in allusion and quotation." - Washington Free Beacon

"Maryanne Wolf has done it again. She has written another seminal book destined to become a dog-eared, well-thumbed, often-referenced treasure on your bookshelf.... Reader Come Home conveys a cautionary message, but it also will rekindle your heart and help illuminate promising paths ahead." - International Dyslexia Association

"This rich study by cognitive scientist Maryanne Wolf tackles an urgent question: how do digital devices affect the reading brain? Wolf explores the "cognitive strata below the surface of words", the demotivation of children saturated in on-screen stimulation, and the power of 'deep reading' and challenging texts in building nous and ethical responses such as empathy.... An antidote for today's critical-thinking deficit." - Nature

"[T]imely and important.... if you love reading and the ways it has enriched your life and our world, Reader, Come Home is essential, arriving at a crucial juncture in history." - BookPage

"Wolf wields her pen with equal parts wisdom and wonder. The result is a joy to read and reread, a love letter to literature, literacy, and progress." - Shelf Awareness

"Wolf stays firmly grounded in reality when presenting suggestions... for how to teach young children to be competent, curious, and contemplative in a world awash in digital stimulus. [ Reader, Come Home ] is a clarion call for parents, educators, and technology developers to work to retain the benefits of reading independent of digital media." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Wolf is a lovely prose writer who draws not only on research but also on a broad range of literary references, historical examples, and personal anecdotes. The strongest parts of Reader, Come Home are her moving accounts of why reading matters, and her deeply detailed exploration of how the reading brain is being changed by screens.... Wolf makes a strong case for what we lose when we lose reading." - San Francisco Chronicle

"A love song to the written word, a brilliant introduction to the science of the reading brain and a powerful call to action. With each page, Wolf shows us why we must preserve deep reading for ourselves and sow desire for it within our kids. Otherwise we risk losing the critical benefits for humanity that come with reading deeply to understand our world." - Lisa Guernsey, co-author of Tap, Click, Read: Growing Readers in A World of Screens

"Scholar, storyteller, and humanist, Wolf brings her laser sharp eye to the science of reading in a seminal book about what it means to be literate in our digital and global age. Informed by a review of research from neuroscience to Socratic philosophy, and wittily crafted with true affection for her audience, Reader Come Home charts a compelling case for a new approach to lifelong literacy that could truly affect the course of human history." - Michael H. Levine, co-author of Tap, Click, Read: Growing Readers in A World of Screens

"In this profound and well-researched study of our changing reading patterns, Wolf presents lucid arguments for teaching our brain to become all-embracing in the age of electronic technology. If you call yourself a reader and want to keep on being one, this extraordinary book is for you." - Alberto Manguel, author of A History of Reading

"Wolf (Tufts, Proust and the Squid) provides a mix of reassurance and caution in this latest look at how we read today. . . . A hopeful look at the future of reading that will resonate with those who worry that we are losing our ability to think in the digital age. Accessible to general readers and experts alike." - Library Journal (starred review)

"An accessible, well-researched analysis of the impact of literacy." - Kirkus

"Wolf has a profound respect for the beauty and power of the reading brain as well as a great curiosity about the digital brain that may soon displace it." - Boston Globe

"[ Reader, Come Home ] is an elegant and insightful analysis of how deep reading is under threat, and of how this particular form of attention is being eroded by the digital universe in which we now live. For an English teacher, the book is essential reading. For me, it is one of the most important books of recent years. Wolf expresses with increasing forcefulness what is by now a common anxiety: that digital devices are challenging all of us (certainly not just children) in entirely new ways." - Julian Girdham, teacher at the English Department of St. Columbia's College

"A tour de force." - Claremont Review of Books

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Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

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Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World [Wolf, Maryanne] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

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If this is a characteristic of your literacy program...do this instead (CORE)

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If this is a characteristic of your literacy program...do this instead (CORE)

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This is an amazing document to use for self-reflection. What am I already doing a good job with? What instructional strategies do I need to tweak or replace ?

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Science of Reading Core Curriculum Review Guide- The Reading League

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How to Locate Reading Science in Core ELA Materials

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How to Locate Reading Science in Core ELA Materials

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Free teacher courses and resources= excellent resource

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Free teacher courses and resources= excellent resource

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

Lexia ® LETRS ® Professional Learning

The Lexia LETRS® (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling) Suite is comprehensive professional learning designed to provide early childhood and elementary educators and administrators with deep knowledge to be literacy and language experts in the science of reading. Developed by Dr. Louisa Moats and leaders in the field of literacy, Lexia LETRS teaches the skills needed to master the foundational and fundamentals of reading and writing instruction-phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and written language.
Download brochure

Why LETRS?

Research shows that only 35% of students are reading proficiently, but 95% of students CAN learn to read. And while teachers are the most essential factor in student success, only about half of teaching institutions effectively prepare teachers for literacy instruction. Teaching reading requires a deep understanding of the processes and science behind it. LETRS is the professional learning program rooted in the science of reading that empowers teachers.

LETRS®

Lexia LETRS provides a professional learning course of study based in the science of reading for elementary educators. The course teaches the how, what, and why of literacy acquisition to improve instructional practice and achieve long-term systemic change in literacy instruction.

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

LETRS® for Early Childhood Educators

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

LETRS® for Administrators

Lexia LETRS® for Administrators is a professional development course designed specifically for school leadership, coaches, principals, and district administrators. The course defines the systems and infrastructures required to successfully implement a literacy initiative aligned to scientifically based research. Built from the research in implementation science and sustainability, school improvement, and shared leadership, the course provides numerous tools-including an analysis of the current systems required for improved literacy outcomes-for guiding an implementation through various stages.

Learn More

Engaged Students

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

Empowered Educators

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

Why even trained teachers need support:

Learn More about Empowered Educators

Improved Outcomes

Lexia LETRS empowers educators by going beyond the essential components of literacy. Lexia LETRS gives teachers the skills they need to master how to teach the five essential components of literacy, plus writing, spelling, and oral language.

Lexia LETRS includes five essential elements for literacy success:

Science of reading based

Teaches the content of explicit instruction

Converts research to practice

Enhances educator and leader effectiveness

Transforms instruction

A Cambium Learning® Group Brand

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

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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

We give educators the tools they need to implement and ensure the consistent use of high-quality ELA materials and evidence-based instructional strategies rooted in the science of reading.

CORE's model transforms mathematics programs so that all students have the understanding, skills, and reasoning abilities to succeed and thrive.

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Teacher Professional Learning | Literacy, Math

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CORE provides comprehensive math and reading professional learning services to educators so that all students receive high-quality instruction.

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Short video on how the brain learns to read:

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Short video on how the brain learns to read:

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The Brain Prize Presents: Stanislas Dehaene

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Deepen your understanding of the science of reading through 10 self-paced, easy-to-use, and comprehensive modules, so you can deliver more effective instruction across every tier, at every grade level.

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Professional Learning Courses | 95 Percent Group

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Expand your knowledge and master effective literacy instruction with virtual and in-person courses.

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Orthographic Mapping- "The" phonics instruction. :)

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Orthographic Mapping- "The" phonics instruction. :)

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Orthographic Mapping: What it Is and Why It's So Important

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Science of Reading: The Podcast, hosted by Susan Lambert, delivers the latest insights from researchers and practitioners in early reading. Listen today!

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WWC | Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade

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This practice guide provides four recommendations for teaching foundational reading skills to students in kindergarten through 3rd grade. Each recommendation includes implementation steps and solutions for common obstacles. The recommendations also summarize and rate supporting evidence. This guide is geared towards teachers, administrators, and other educators who want to improve their students’ foundational reading skills, and is a companion to the practice guide, Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade.

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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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The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System-and How to Fix it [Wexler, Natalie] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System-and How to Fix it

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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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Southern NV RPDP Science of Reading Website

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Southern NV RPDP Science of Reading Website

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NV- Regional Support Information on the Science of Reading

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NV- Regional Support Information on the Science of Reading

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How to Tell when "Scientifically-Based Reading Instruction" isn't

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How to Tell when "Scientifically-Based Reading Instruction" isn't

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ILA NEWS

ILA News | November 9, 2023
Submitted students' perspectives on diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice for a chance to be included in the 2024 AERA Annual Meeting.

Research Advisory | Oct 2, 2023
Additional resources, including webinars, available now.

Digital Events | Sept 19, 2023
Free ILA Webinar About Dyslexia
Registration is now open for a new, free ILA Webinar: Dyslexia: What We Know and What We Want to Know.

Free New Resources for JAAL
First set of the new JAAL Literacy Insights available for download.

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ILA is a global advocacy and membership organization of more than 300,000 literacy educators, researchers, and experts across 86 countries.

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Research and Reason in Education- Stanovich

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Research and Reason in Education- Stanovich

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Why teachers MUST know how to read and understand reading research.

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Teaching, Reading & Learning: The Podcast elevates important contributions to the educational community, with the goal of inspiring teachers, informing practice, and celebrating people in the community who have influenced teaching and literacy to the betterment of children. The podcast features guests whose life stories are compelling and rich in ways that are instructive to us all. The podcast focuses on literacy as we know it (reading and writing) but will also connect to other "literacies" that impact children's learning; for example, emotional, physical, and social literacies as they apply to teachers and children.

Teaching, Reading & Learning: The Podcast elevates important contributions to the educational community, with the goal of inspiring teachers, informing practice, and celebrating people in the community who have influenced teaching and literacy to the betterment of children. The podcast features guests whose life stories are compelling and rich in ways that are instructive to us all. The podcast focuses on literacy as we know it (reading and writing) but will also connect to other "literacies" that impact children's learning; for example, emotional, physical, and social literacies as they apply to teachers and children.

Love this podcast

This is so great for my endeavors to really help my fellow co-workers learn about the science of reading and adopt some new practices to help our readers.
Thanks for always sharing such good information and keeping me motivated to fight the good fight.

Reading Interventions

Love love these interviews!! I teach and train teachers to support students with dyslexia. These podcasts are included in my trainings to our teachers. I come here for inspiration and more resources. As an educator I would love to see the Nebraska Dyslexia Association highlighted or a representative interviewed to promote advocacy here. Thank you!
Ms.Schutte
Teacher

I love this podcast!

I am an Orton-Gillingham Fellow who trains teachers and works in public schools. I love Laura's warm interview style, and I always learn something new from these wonderful episodes. Every teacher, school leader, parent, and policy maker who cares about bringing the science of reading to all children will enjoy this podcast. My all-time favorite interview is with Dr. Shawn Anthony Robinson. Thank you, Laura!

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and learning: the reading league podcast

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‎Teaching, Reading, and Learning: The Reading League Podcast on Apple Podcasts

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Teaching, Reading & Learning: The Podcast elevates important contributions to the educational community, with the goal of inspiring teachers, informing practice, and celebrating people in the community who have influenced teaching and literacy to the betterment of children. The podcast features gues...

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Professor Stanislas Dehaene
View the section 12:17-:14:13 for specifics related to this padlet.
I encourage you to watch the entire video as well.

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How the Brain Learns to Read - Prof. Stanislas Dehaene

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Dyslexia Awareness with Dr. Jan Hasbrouck

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The Brain's Challenge: Processing: What Eye Movements During Reading Reveal About Processing Speed

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Free Word Reading Intervention Upper Elementary School/MS

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Free Word Reading Intervention Upper Elementary School/MS

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Through the University of Texas, Austin. Open source amazing resource for upper elementary school.

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This reading intervention was developed and tested by Dr. Jessica Toste and colleagues at The University of Texas at Austin. The program materials were redesigned for open access by the Toste Team in October 2022. We are excited for you to use the Word Connections program! We look forward to continued feedback from teachers and students.

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EdReport's Application of Scarborough's Rope

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EdReport's Application of Scarborough's Rope

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© 2023 Equipped for Reading Success - WordPress Theme by Kadence WP

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Great strategy for teaching high frequency words.

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Heart Word Magic - Read and Spell High Frequency Words | Really Great Reading

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Heart Word Magic - Help Students Learn to Read and Spell High-Frequency and Sight WordsHeart Word Magic is a complimentary teaching tool designed to help students learn to read and spell high-frequency words and sight words, particularly those that aren’t very decodable. Show your students the animations, then try these fun, hands-on free Student Practice

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A bilingual site for educators and families for English Language Learners

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A bilingual site for educators and families for English Language Learners

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Fortunately for Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs), there are many similarities between English and Spanish.

First of all, both languages use the Roman alphabet. That knowledge helps build a phonemic and phonological foundation.

Secondly, 30% to 40% of all words in English have a related word in Spanish. With similar sound, appearance, and meaning, these cognates help students transfer that word knowledge into their second language.

Thirdly, except for a couple of word order exceptions (adjective before noun in English and noun before adjective in Spanish), sentences in both languages have the same basic structures (as compared to English and Chinese or other non-Latin derived languages).

And fourth, learning to read and write uses the same basic processes (phonemic awareness, decoding, fluency, comprehension, writing mechanics).

When teachers and students know these basic similarities between the two languages, it saves time and guess work as students transfer their knowledge of Spanish literacy into English literacy.

Phonemic and phonological differences between Spanish and English

There are also some differences between the two languages that may interfere with English pronunciation (phonemic differences) and with decoding or spelling (phonological differences).

Perhaps the greatest difference between English and Spanish is that Spanish has only five vowel sounds while English has more than 14, depending on regional dialects. This is the reason Spanish speakers have difficulty differentiating between vowel phonemes in words like seat and sit. Both phonemes are pronounced differently from the Spanish sí ( yes), which is pronounced somewhere between those two English phonemes. These differences also affect students' spelling. Here are some other examples of possible interference from Spanish:

Here are a few differences between Spanish and English:

Combinations in Spanish that are pronounced differently: que, qui, güe, güi. For example: the u is not pronounced unless it is written as ü; therefore, students may not be sure how to pronounce words like queen, quiet, or quick

Quotation marks vs. dashes: "Come here," he said. -Ven aquí-le dijo.

Spanish does not have the following sounds (listed by category):

Strategies for Spanish-speaking ELLs

Point out differences when you introduce phonemic awareness activities (distinguishing sounds) by showing students how to make those sounds.

Say to students, for example:

To make the sound for /sh/ in ship, pronounce it like the Spanish /sh/ by letting air out between your teeth. Notice how you can stretch the /sh/ sound until you run out of air. But, to make the sound /ch/ in chip, you touch the top of your mouth with your tongue and let the air out with a little explosion. Notice how you cannot stretch that sound.

Spanish speakers have difficulty distinguishing the ways to pronounce the final -s in plurals and third person.

Give students examples for each as follows:

Spanish speakers have difficulty distinguishing the ways to pronounce the -ed in past-tense verbs.

Give students examples for each as follows:

"We pronounce it /d/ when the word ends with..."

"We pronounce it /t/ when the word ends with..."

"When the word ends with t, it sounds like /tid/ as in patted."

"When the word ends with d, it sounds like /did/ as in added."

Spanish speakers may leave out word endings when saying or spelling a word.

For example: restauran instead of restaurant; end instead of ended. They may also have problems spelling words that contain the consonant blends, initial sounds, and final sounds listed in the box above.

Additionally, students might substitute:

ll for y (because ll is the nearest sound in Spanish. For example: llelow instead of yellow.)

j for h (because h is silent in Spanish, they might use j. For example: jope instead of hope.)

There are also some differences in question and sentence structures between both languages.

Question markers

Do you want to go to the movies tonight?
¿Quieres ir al cine esta noche?
(Spanish speakers will likely leave out do)

Adjective-Nouns

white horse
caballo blanco (horse white)
(Spanish speakers will often use the adjective after the noun)

With these similarities and differences in mind, pay close attention to your Spanish-speaking ELLs' written and spoken "errors." When you recognize a student saying horse white, for example, point out that in English the noun and adjective are reversed: white horse, brown cow, etc. Once ELLs understand these patterns, they will begin to apply them on their own to new situations.

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Capitalizing on Similarities and Differences between Spanish and English

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Fortunately for Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs), there are many similarities between English and Spanish. First of all, both languages use the Roman alphabet. That knowledge helps build a phonemic and phonological foundation. Secondly, 30% to 40% of all words in English have a related word in Spanish.

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Phonics and Spelling through Phoneme Grapheme Mapping

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Phonics and Spelling through Phoneme Grapheme Mapping

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http://store.voyagersopris.com/phonics-and-spelling-through-phoneme-grapheme-mapping/

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Dr. Katie Pace Miles- Free phonemic awareness, phonics, high frequency word instruction lessons

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Dr. Katie Pace Miles- Free phonemic awareness, phonics, high frequency word instruction lessons

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Reading Ready, a word reading curriculum for educators and manual for parents/caregivers, is now available. Be sure to check out the website.

Coming this fall!

Explicit and highly engaging activities to support Phonemic Awareness. Please click the pictures or buttons to access the resources.

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Developed by Brooke Diviak

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Activity Mat for Grapheme-Phoneme Mapping

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For more information on explicit mapping instruction see Grace, K. (2006). Phonics and Spelling through Phoneme-Grapheme Mapping. Sopris West.

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Reading Ready, a word reading curriculum for educators and manual for parents/caregivers, is now available. Be sure to check out the website. Coming this fall! Explicit and highly engaging activities to support Phonemic Awareness. Please click the pictures or buttons to access the resources.

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TONS of great free lesson materials for reading instruction.

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TONS of great free lesson materials for reading instruction.

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Downloadable student center activities for phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension.

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From 2004 to 2010, a team of researchers and teachers at FCRR collected ideas and created Student Center Activities for use in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade classrooms. The activities are designed for students to practice, demonstrate, and extend their learning of what has already been taught, sometimes with teacher assistance and sometimes independently. Students can complete the activities in small groups, pairs, or individually.

Accompanying these Student Center Activities is a Teacher Resource Guide that offers important insights on differentiated instruction and how to use the Student Center materials.

Component

Name of the reading component: Phonological Awareness (PA), Phonics (P), Fluency (F), Vocabulary (V), or Comprehension (C). Each component is color coded: PA is purple, P is orange, F is red, V is green, C is blue.

Subcomponent

Name of the reading subcomponent, which is a subskill of the component.

Activity Name

Activity Number

The letters correspond with the reading component (PA, P, F, V, or C). The numbers are listed in ascending order within each component. The activities are sequenced from simple to more complex within each component and subcomponent.

Student Icon

The suggested number of students for the activity. One student icon indicates that students may work independently or with a small group. Two student icons indicate that the activity requires students to work in pairs. Two student icons with a plus sign indicate that the activity requires two or more students.

Objective

States the goal of the activity, which is aligned with the subcomponent.

Materials

Materials are located on the pages that follow the Activity Plan. Most materials are non-consumable to be prepared and used repeatedly (e.g., word cards can be laminated). Some materials are consumable and will need to be duplicated for each student doing the activity. Other materials, such as counters, are commonly found in most classrooms.

Activity Statement

One sentence explanation of the purpose of the activity and what students do to complete the activity.

Activity Steps

The first step describes how to setup the center. The second step begins with: The student, Students, Working in pairs, or Taking turns depending on the number of students needed to complete the activity. The second step also starts the series of steps to complete the activity. The next steps explain what the student does to complete the activity. The last step lists one of three accountability methods: Self-check, Peer evaluation, or Teacher evaluation.

Example

A visual of the activity and key materials.

Extensions and Adaptations

Suggestions that extend or provide an adaptation for additional practice on the skill addressed in the activity. Materials for the extensions and adaptations are included after the pages that align to the Activity Plan.

Users may use the FCRR Student Center Activities resources as long as modifications are not made, the resources will only be used for non-profit educational purposes, and the copyright belong jointly to the Florida Department of Education and the Florida Center for Reading Research. These resources may not be used for any commercial purposes. These resources on our site may be linked to but not reposted, reproduced, modified, or copied to other sites. For questions about the use of these resources, please contact The Florida Center for Reading Research at fcrr@fcrr.org.

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From 2004 to 2010, a team of researchers and teachers at FCRR collected ideas and created Student Center Activities for use in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade classrooms. The activities are designed for students to practice, demonstrate, and extend their learning of what has already been taught, sometimes with teacher assistance and sometimes independently.

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Kid Lips

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The Reading Comprehension Blueprint by Nancy Hennessey

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The Reading Comprehension Blueprint by Nancy Hennessey

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Nancy Hennessy M.Ed. (Author), Louisa Cook Moats Ed.D. (Foreword)

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The Reading Comprehension Blueprint: Helping Students Make Meaning from Text

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The Reading Comprehension Blueprint: Helping Students Make Meaning from Text [Hennessy M.Ed., Nancy, Moats Ed.D., Louisa Cook] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Reading Comprehension Blueprint: Helping Students Make Meaning from Text

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Structured: Literacy Interventions: Teaching Students with Reading Difficulties, Grades K-6 (The Guilford Series on Intensive Instruction

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Structured: Literacy Interventions: Teaching Students with Reading Difficulties, Grades K-6 (The Guilford Series on Intensive Instruction [Heather Navarro] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Structured: Literacy Interventions: Teaching Students with Reading Difficulties, Grades K-6 (The Guilford Series on Intensive Instruction

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EDVIEW360 | Voyager Sopris Learning Webinars, Blogs, and Podcasts

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Keep on top of the latest trends in education and hear from leading literacy experts through the EDVIEW360 series of blogs, webinars, and podcasts.

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

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Literacy Education | Shanahan on Literacy

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Literacy Education, Tim Shanahan is a premier literacy educator in reading instruction and comprehension. He is a Public Speaker and Advocate for Literacy.

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At A Loss For Words  What's Wrong With How Schools Teach Reading Podcast Version by Emily Hanford

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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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Why aren't kids being taught to read?

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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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Unpacking the Science of Reading so All Kids Can Learn

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Unpacking the Science of Reading so All Kids Can Learn

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Unpacking the Science of Reading So All Kids Can Learn

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Welcome to our Free Literacy Resources Pages

We do our best to include articles, links and templates that we feel are of value to educators interested in advancing their literacy knowledge, district/building strategies, and classroom practice. Please note that these files are copyright protected - contact us for permission to reproduce or distribute any of this content.
Videos & Webinars Templates & Printables Websites & Organizations

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Articles, links and templates for educators interested in advancing their literacy knowledge, district/building strategies, and classroom practice

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Join us on Wednesday, September 13, at 6:30 p.m. CT, when Laura Stewart, Chief Academic Officer and Anella Wetter, Chief Sales Officer, will showcase a different approach to assessment and intervention instruction that eliminates the 'now what'.

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Literacy Webinars for Teachers and Educators | 95 Percent Group

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Our literacy webinars for teachers and educators can help drive change in your school or district. Dive into our recorded literacy webinars here.

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Cracking the code with the science of reading

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Thirty Million Words Initiative - Parenting Language to Build Children's Brain, Dana Suskind

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Definition of Dyslexia - International Dyslexia Association

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“Dyslexia is a specific learning disability that is neurobiological in origin. It is characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word

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Visualizing the Reading Brain.April 2021

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Importance of Structured Literacy for students with Dyslexia

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Importance of Structured Literacy for students with Dyslexia

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This is part one of a six-part series revolving around how to improve the classroom experience for students with dyslexia.
The history of reading instruction in the United States is surprisingly well-documented. This history includes the various theories and practices for teaching reading that have existed over the last century.

There are podcasts, radio, and print pieces on what have been called the "reading wars," an ongoing debate among educators, researchers, politicians, and more about the best way students should be taught to read. Much of the debate centers on the teaching of phonics-connecting the sounds of speech to the letters that represent them in order to decode words that are unfamiliar-versus a whole language approach that relies on exposure to text rather than teaching the components of the language.

Mark Seidenberg's book Reading at the Speed of Sight offers a drop-the-mic description of the reading wars. He explains that while educators shouldn't be blamed for implementing the whole language approach over the last several decades, continuing to make the claim that whole language is the best way to teach reading should be faulted because research has contradicted this assertion beyond a reasonable doubt. Educators have a responsibility to know and practice the reading instruction approaches that are best for their students.

With all of the confusion surrounding the science of reading and what we have learned about how we learn to read, a unifying term has finally been born to explain the best practice in reading instruction for students with dyslexia. Here's why Structured Literacy is the most effective approach to reading instruction for students with dyslexia and how you can implement it in your classroom.

Why Structured Literacy?

Structured Literacy is a trademarked term used by the International Dyslexia Association to describe the best approach for reading instruction. This approach is based on the science of how the brain learns to read and supports the methods of instruction known as Orton-Gillingham. Many research-based reading programs are based on the principles of Structured Literacy. The guiding principles of this approach are:

Phonology: The sound structure of spoken words

Sound-symbol association: The mapping of letter sounds to symbols

Syllable instruction: A unit of oral or written language with a vowel sound

Morphology: Teaching the meaning of words by breaking them down

Syntax: Appropriate order and use of words

Semantics: Making meaning from language

Once we understand what students with dyslexia must be taught to be successful readers, we need to be equally attentive to how it is taught. Structured Literacy instruction is systematic and cumulative, explicitly taught with constant assessment to guide instruction.

Stanislas Dehaene, a French cognitive neuroscientist, is conducting some groundbreaking research into how humans learn language. His latest book, How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine...for Now, includes recent fMRI data providing insight into just how innate language is for most people.

In fact, Dehaene says babies prefer listening to their native language rather than a foreign one right from birth. He goes on to say that babies can tell the difference between most vowels and consonants in every language in the world-also right from birth.

This insight into the infant brain and the ability to distinguish spoken language should provide the direction we need to improve reading instruction and dispel once and for all the erroneous idea that reading remediation is a game of wait and see. Rather, armed with the science of how we learn, educators can be prepared to provide appropriate and systematic instruction in the critical sound development needed as a foundation for reading instruction-as soon as possible.

Building Phonemic Awareness

As Dehaene has pointed out, infants are "hardwired" with the ability to acquire language. Since a person with dyslexia may display a weakness in phonemic awareness and rapid automatized naming, covering all of the areas from phonemic awareness to semantics will help them gain the skills they need to be competent readers. Because sound is so vital to learning language, phonemic awareness taught to the advanced level is critical for students with dyslexia.

Perhaps the greatest example of how important it is to understand the components of Structured Literacy, as well the science of how we learn, is when an adult student, who has struggled for most of his life, is able to hear the different sounds within a word for the first time. I watched one adult student in particular as he worked to gain advanced phonemic awareness skills as part of a Structured Literacy program called Reading Horizons.

After working for several months, he was finally able to distinguish the individual units of sound within a word, dropping and adding sounds as instructed. This was a revelation for him. "Imagine what I could have done with reading and spelling if I had been able to hear and work with the sounds," he stated at the end of a tutoring session. He had been drowning in sounds his entire life, and now he was finally swimming.

Making the Switch to Structured Literacy

Making sure that your literacy program aligns with the components of Structured Literacy begins by reviewing the components of Structured Literacy carefully in order to understand each element and its role in instruction. Then confirm that your program teaches all of those elements, with a special emphasis on phonemic awareness to help students with dyslexia.

Since there is evidence that Structured Literacy not only benefits students with dyslexia but every student, it makes sense to closely examine reading instruction for all students, regardless of age. The clear message is it's never too late to intervene when it comes to reading. We know it's much easier to improve reading the earlier we intervene, but we shouldn't dismiss intervention for older students and adults. As educators, our responsibility is to build a strong foundation in reading for all of our students.
Donell Pons is a reading and dyslexia specialist in Salt Lake City, Utah, with a master's degree in education and teaching from Westminster College, along with a certification in special education. She started her career in education when her youngest son was diagnosed with dyslexia. She uses Reading Horizons in her one-on-one work with students. Connect with her at dbpons@gmail.com.
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Students with dyslexia need structured reading instruction

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This is part one of a six-part series revolving around how to improve the classroom experience for students with dyslexia. The history of reading instruction in the United States is surprisingly well-documented. This history includes the various theories and practices for teaching reading that have existed over the last century.

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Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teachers of Reading

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Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teachers of Reading

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Updated: April 3, 2018

The International Dyslexia Association's Educator Training Initiatives (ETI) Committee has refined the Knowledge and Practice Standards (KPS) to bring greater specificity to how knowledge of the standards could be assessed in the context of coursework and how practice applications of Structured Literacy could be demonstrated in supervised practicum contexts.
Overview of the KPS
The KPS define the knowledge and skills that all teachers of reading should possess to teach all students to read proficiently. To view the Knowledge and Practice Standards, (Also available in Spanish: click here.)

In the summer of 2018, IDA will begin aligning educator preparation resources, including publications, webinars, and information briefs, with the KPS to support their use in pre-service and in-service educator preparation contexts.
KPS and Program Accreditation
IDA Accredits pre-service and in-service educator preparation programs on the basis of their ability to document alignment with the KPS, as articulated in the IDA Accreditation Handbook (under development). Programs interested in learning more about IDA Accreditation are encouraged to complete this inquiry form. A representative from the ETI Leadership Team will be in touch within one week of receipt. To reach a member of the ETI Leadership Team with specific questions related to the accreditation process, please click

For a list of Accredited Educator Preparation Programs: Higher Education, click HERE.

For a list of Accredited Educator Preparation Programs: Independent, click HERE.
KPS and Educator Certification
The Center for Effective Reading Instruction (CERI) requires candidates to present evidence of their having mastered the content of the KPS by earning a passing score on the Knowledge and Practice Examination of Effective Reading Instruction (K-PEERI) and for select certifications, passing scores or ratings on supervised practicum requirements. For more information about CERI certification, please click HERE.

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Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teachers of Reading - International Dyslexia Association

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L. Moats- Knowledge and Practice Standards of Teaching Reading

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L. Moats- Knowledge and Practice Standards of Teaching Reading

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Webinar - Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teaching Reading - Dr. Louisa Moats 15May2019

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ILA- How SOR informs 21st Century Education

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ILA- How SOR informs 21st Century Education

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Make Tricky Words Sticky: https://bit.ly/2Rf9KZb

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Literacy Foundations for English Learners

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Literacy Foundations for English Learners

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More than 5 million English learners attend U.S. public schools-and yet fewer than 3% of teachers are certified to work with them. Fill that gap in teacher education with this practical and comprehensive textbook, an evidence-based guide to providing English learners in Pre-K-Grade 6 with explicit, systematic instruction on language and literacy fundamentals.

Aligned with IDA's Knowledge and Practice Standards, this book prepares current and future educators to teach English learners the key components of language and literacy, as first described in the National Literacy Panel report. For each component, teachers will get a dedicated chapter with research-based insights on how to teach English learners, guidance on making connections across languages when teaching that component, and ready-to-use principles and strategies for instruction. Learning objectives, study questions, and extended application activities help educators grow their knowledge and apply it in their classrooms.

An essential text for courses on literacy foundations and biliteracy-and an ideal in-service professional development resource-this accessible book will give teachers the knowledge base they need to help English learners develop strong literacy skills and achieve academic success.

PREPARE TEACHERS TO:

Enter their classroom with a full understanding of the language and literacy development of English learners

Teach English learners the key components of language and literacy: phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, spelling, and writing skills

Apply insights from current, reliable research on how best to teach English learners

Use specific, evidence-based principles, strategies, activities, and sample teacherâ€"student dialogues to guide and strengthen instruction

Leverage technology to adapt and enhance instruction for English learners

ONLINE COMPANION MATERIALS INCLUDED: Faculty will get helpful PowerPoint slides for each chapter, plus a sample syllabus that shows you how to use this book in your course.

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

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Literacy Foundations for English Learners: A Comprehensive Guide to Evidence-Based Instruction [Cardenas-Hagan Ed.D. CCC/SLP CDT CALT, Elsa, Vaughn Ph.D., Sharon] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Literacy Foundations for English Learners: A Comprehensive Guide to Evidence-Based Instruction

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Teaching Reading to African American Children

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Teaching Reading to African American Children

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Reading depends on spoken language.* This is a simple statement with profound consequences for children whose spoken language differs from the language they are expected to read. For most children, the language skills they bring to school will support learning to read, which is mainly learning to understand their spoken language in a new form: print. However, some children's language skills differ in important ways from the classroom language variety, and teachers rarely receive sound guidance on how to enhance their literacy instruction to meet these children's needs.

Teaching reading to children whose language differs from the oral language of the classroom and from the linguistic structure of academic text adds an additional layer of complexity to reading instruction. There is a large and growing body of evidence indicating that language variation impacts reading, ¹ spelling, ² and writing ³ in predictable ways. In particular, it has been demonstrated that mismatches between the language variety spoken by many African American children in their homes and communities and the written language variety encountered in books and other text can slow the development of reading and writing. ⁴

The focus of this article is the impact of one language variety, African American English (AAE), on literacy development and on teaching, assessing, and learning. Our goal is to describe aspects of instruction, curricula, and assessment that may create obstacles to literacy for African American children (compounding the effects of other factors, such as growing up in systemically under-resourced neighborhoods) and to share ways to modify instructional practices to benefit AAE speakers in significant ways.

African American English

Many African American children are bidialectal speakers of English. That is, they speak two varieties of English: African American English and General American English (GAE). Whereas AAE is frequently spoken in the child's home and community, GAE is used in reading, writing, educational contexts, commerce, and the media. One of the major educational linguistic tasks for school-aged African American children who speak AAE is to bridge the two varieties in order to develop strong literacy skills. Importantly, for many African American children, particularly those growing up in communities enduring chronic poverty, though GAE may be encountered through media, such as television, it becomes prominent upon entry into school. GAE is the medium of instruction, and in school it is learned through exposure and modeling in the classroom. Also important, not every African American child speaks AAE, although most do. ⁵

The history of AAE has been fraught with social, educational, and political judgments about AAE's legitimacy and value. ⁶ AAE is a systematic, rule-governed variety of American English spoken by a community of speakers connected by race, culture, identity, and language. That fits the linguistic definition of a "dialect," but the term is problematic for other reasons. (See the "Changing Language About Language Variation" sidebar on the right; although we support a transition from dialect to language variety in colloquial usage because of misconceptions about dialects, we also use dialect occasionally in keeping with how it is defined in linguistics.) AAE has been referred to as "bad English," "poor grammar," and "ghetto" by people outside of its community of speakers. As a result, attempts to introduce AAE into classrooms or to leverage it to teach children who speak it how to read have been met with great resistance. ⁷ Unfortunately, these negative views of AAE sometimes become conflated with the children who speak it, and expectations for them are lowered. It is important that teachers understand that language varieties are linguistically equal, even when they are not socially equal. The social stigma surrounding varieties spoken by linguistic minorities can be compounded by race and class, but they are as linguistically valid as other dialects and highly valued by the people who speak them.

When a child who is learning English as their second (or third) language lags behind in reading English, we recognize that the learning curve is steeper because the child is learning to both speak and read a second language. We have not given this same consideration to children who use two dialects. Although AAE and GAE overlap more than two distinct languages, research has demonstrated that using two varieties can complicate learning new, language-influenced skills (i.e., reading and writing) as much as using two languages. In fact, the subtle transformations between the cultural and the general varieties of a single language may be even more difficult for young children to detect and resolve than the more obvious differences between two languages. ⁸ By design, curricula and instructional activities for children who are learning English take their dual language status into account. Extending these same benefits and considerations to dual variety speakers could have comparable, positive consequences for African American children.

By far the most studied variety of American English, AAE's characteristics in the five primary domains of language (morphology, phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics) have been well-documented in adults and are becoming better documented in children. ⁹ These investigations have demonstrated that as used by young children, AAE primarily involves variation in verb morphology, syntax, and phonology (see "Key Features of African American English" below). Because reading depends on spoken language, AAE is significantly implicated in learning to read.

Impact on Reading

The influence of AAE on reading has been a particular emphasis for research focused on school-aged African American children. Because reading depends on spoken language, AAE is an obvious candidate for understanding disparities in reading achievement between African American children and their white and Asian peers. Having documented these disparities for more than 50 years, perhaps it is time to examine potential solutions-such as materials and practices that are sufficiently sensitive to the needs of AAE speakers. ¹⁰

One key issue is the amount of dialect present in a child's language, which is referred to as dialect density. Dialect occurs on a continuum from low to high use. For example, children for whom dialect influences less than 10 percent of their oral language are said to have low dialect density; those for whom dialect influences 50 percent or more of their oral language have high dialect density.* Differences in density impact reading and writing in important ways. ¹¹ The higher the dialect density, the further the child's speech is from the language used in reading and writing. Simply put, linguistic distance influences how much instruction and practice a child is likely to need to bridge the differences between oral language at home, oral language spoken by the teacher, and the written language of books and other texts. ¹² The more AAE that a child uses, the more likely that reading, writing, and spelling growth may be slowed, ¹³ contributing to the reading struggles of African American children in later elementary school and adolescence. ¹⁴ Challenges in learning to read are not inevitable for children who speak AAE, but greater attention to the impact of their language on reading and writing development is critical.

The culture of education demands that AAE speakers engage in additional language learning compared with GAE speakers. Requiring AAE-speaking children to switch to GAE without using their linguistic strengths in AAE to bridge the two varieties represents a significant encumbrance. Children are required to demonstrate linguistic flexibility ¹⁵ at the same time that their cognitive resources are being allocated to learning the language of the classroom along with a wide array of new academic and social skills.

Some children manage these additional linguistic and social demands, but many do not. For example, AAE speakers already know how to conjugate verbs but must also learn a second set of rules for conjugation in GAE. Learning the second dialect involves discovering what is different in GAE, compared with what the child already knows in AAE. Although progress in reading is related to facility with GAE, providing the additional time and relevant opportunities to acquire knowledge of AAE and GAE differences tends not to be a priority in most schools or curricula. At school entry, AAE speakers' exposure to GAE varies and typically lags behind monodialectal GAE speakers simply because their language experiences prior to school entry do not always include GAE. Analogous effects are seen in bilingual children, who need extra time and support to become fully proficient in both their home language and English. Importantly, given that both bilingual and bidialectal speakers are typically stronger in one language or variety than the other, achieving parity between the two can take considerable time.

Nonlanguage Factors

In addition to the differences between AAE and GAE, other factors contribute to the difficulty many African American children experience with academic achievement in general and reading in particular. Some factors are related to the child's immediate environment, such as socioeconomic status and family factors; other factors are related to the broader social, economic, and political context, especially educational opportunity and quality, housing security, and access to adequate nutrition and healthcare. Of these, socioeconomic status (SES) has received the most attention. The impact of reading difficulties on many aspects of emotional health and well-being have also been examined, albeit to a lesser extent.

Socioeconomic Status

Income inequality and educational inequality have been linked historically. ¹⁶ Recent analyses suggest that disparities in students' academic achievement by race and socioeconomic status have remained virtually unchanged for the past half century. ¹⁷ In the United States, income, wealth, and access to higher education are unequally distributed. Although policymakers, researchers, and others have long talked about "achievement gaps," differences in academic performance between high- and low-SES students are more accurately referred to as opportunity gaps. For students from lower-SES backgrounds, their achievement often does not represent their potential to learn, but it does reflect the inequality in opportunity to learn resulting from lower-quality and less-abundant educational, social, and material resources that often plague children in both urban and rural environments.

The opportunity gap has been calculated as a 1.0 standard deviation disparity in achievement between children in the highest- and lowest-SES ends of the distribution. ¹⁸ This difference represents a disparity of approximately four years' worth of learning in both math and reading, and it persists through high school. Notably, among AAE speakers, nearly 100 percent of high-density dialect users are from low-income families and communities. ¹⁹ Thus, high density of dialect seems to reflect the social isolation characteristic of neighborhood poverty ²⁰ that limits experience with and exposure to GAE. In the classroom, this frequently translates into poor reading performance.

Emotional Health and Well-Being

The persistence of reading difficulties among most African American children, and the challenges it presents for other learning that depends on reading, often has negative effects on confidence, self-image, and willingness to engage in school. ²¹ Struggles with reading become aversive and can promote avoidance of the activity. Unsuccessful educational outcomes are associated with numerous negative consequences, many of which have lifelong impacts. Because these are well known, we turn to a less discussed concern.

For individuals who succeed at becoming bidialectal and managing the associated educational demands, there are other personal costs to consider. Biases surrounding the use of AAE can be very harmful to children, negatively affecting not only their motivation in the classroom but also their linguistic identities. Usage of GAE is expected and valued in educational and other institutional contexts. Effective use of GAE in such contexts involves not only learning and using GAE but also inhibition of AAE, which requires cognitive effort. Similar to bilingual speakers, bidialectal speakers engage in monitoring their own speech to evaluate its appropriateness and self-correct as needed. They may actively avoid speaking in fear of producing non-GAE expressions. They may consciously engage in mental translation from AAE to GAE before speaking, and they may compose utterances to conform to linguistic expectations rather than speaking freely. Anecdotally, African American college students for whom switching from AAE to GAE does not occur automatically report great concern about participating in discussions in the college classroom for fear of "saying it wrong." When AAE is the speaker's culturally and personally authentic code, using GAE is an adaptation to external constraints, including pressure to assimilate. Corrections of AAE as "bad English" convey to the speaker that their cultural language (and therefore their culture) is inadequate or defective. As a result, the use of GAE may be performative rather than authentic.

Assuming different personas in differing contexts, in this case school and home, creates the "double consciousness" described by sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois. ²² Monitoring the presentation of self, which includes language, carries cognitive and emotional costs. Cognitively, it is an additional task to be performed while engaged in other activities (such as reading). Emotionally, it involves continuous self-evaluation, criticism, and correction. Research on this topic is almost nonexistent, but it is a part of the bidialectal experience that needs close attention. ²³

Recommendations for Teaching

Speaking AAE is not inherently an obstacle to becoming a reader, but it becomes one when children's specific needs are not recognized or addressed. The issues we have reviewed suggest many supportive steps school systems and educators could take. We offer six recommendations below to help school systems and educators begin reconsidering how they engage African American children who are becoming bidialectal and learning to read. Collectively, the essential supports mainly involve (a) providing sufficient opportunities to learn; (b) using materials and practices that are effective given the students' backgrounds; and (c) eliminating the unwarranted stigma associated with using AAE and instead focusing on effectively addressing the educational needs of AAE speakers in ways that build on their knowledge rather than disparaging it.

1. Expand teachers' knowledge of language variation.

As part of their professional training, prospective teachers usually are made aware of a number of cultural differences that may affect education. However, language variation and its impact on reading and instruction are rarely emphasized. Teachers who gain this background will know that language variation is a universal linguistic phenomenon and that AAE, like other dialects, differs from the codified, more general version of American English used in education but is otherwise linguistically unremarkable-it is a "standard" example of dialectal variation, so to speak. They could also gain greater understanding of how such variation affects educational goals and practices, as discussed below.

2. Expand children's knowledge of language and the world prior to school entry.

Many AAE-speaking children are less ready than their peers to benefit from reading instruction on the first day of kindergarten because they are not familiar with the school dialect. But young children are exceptionally good language learners; AAE speakers could gain greater facility with GAE in a language-intensive pre-K environment that provided rich and abundant access to both oral and written language. In 2018, only 38 percent of Black 3- to 5-year-olds were enrolled in preschool, compared with 43 percent of their white peers. ²⁴ This disparity in early childhood education should not only be eliminated-we should invest in greatly expanding access to high-quality, language-focused preschools throughout our most under-resourced neighborhoods.

Children learn language via exposure and use, not explicit instruction. In the course of a school year, teachers whose own language backgrounds vary would provide thousands of examples of utterances in each variety and would model the ways that people who speak somewhat differently successfully communicate. Children can learn pronunciations of words and ways to conjugate verbs that differ from their own language use if given sufficient opportunities to learn them. Children can also gain greater awareness of conditions that govern movement between codes (e.g., their use in different settings or with different individuals), a critical skill for any child who speaks two languages or two varieties. Learning more about GAE does not require extinguishing knowledge of AAE, any more than learning a second language requires unlearning the first. Rather, it places AAE speakers on a more equal footing with children who have learned GAE in the home, while still honoring the need, and desire, to communicate with their families, communities, and friends who also use AAE.

Parents and other caregivers can also be encouraged to create additional language-learning opportunities for children outside of school. Efforts to gain families' participation will be more successful if their role in helping their children thrive is emphasized; parents and caregivers are committed to the success of their children but often do not know how to help. Reading books to children may provide a vehicle for introducing linguistic expressions and aspects of the world beyond their immediate experiences. The language in books for children includes vocabulary and grammatical constructions that differ from those in everyday speech, and thus are not available anywhere else except books. ²⁵ "In the light of the moon a little egg lay on a leaf" is the first line of an enormously popular book for very young children, ²⁶ but few people talk that way. Shared reading can provide a context for expanding children's world knowledge and giving them additional practice in using language. For parents who do not read well themselves or are uncomfortable with reading, educators (as well as librarians and others who engage with families) can help caregivers find books paired with audiobooks that parents and children can listen to together. The audiobooks do not take the place of books but allow parents and children to interact around the book, listening to the story together, and prompt parents when to turn the page.

Parents can also provide language-learning opportunities simply by having conversations with their children. Parents are often encouraged to talk to their children, but it is important to stress having conversations that are, by definition, interactive. This kind of talk encourages turn-taking, requiring input from both the caregiver and child. If teachers are concerned about how much conversation is happening outside of school, it might be helpful to send children home with conversation starters, encouraging them to be the catalysts for sparking family conversations. For example, educators could: teach or make a game at school, then send it home with children and encourage them to teach it to their families; encourage the class to ask a parent or caregiver to teach them how to make their favorite food and write down the recipe to share at school; or read a book to the class several times and then send it home with students to share. In each case, children rehearse the skill or activity at school first, making them eager to show what they have learned when they get home. Both parents and children get very excited about this kind of sharing; it removes the burden from both to figure out how to do or initiate what the teacher has instructed and makes children proud to share what they have learned.

3. Use classroom materials and practices that are effective with AAE speakers.

The curricula and support materials produced by major educational publishers assume that GAE is the language of the child and the classroom. With rare exceptions, these materials do not accommodate differences in language background or provide clear guidance about appropriate practices for children who need support to become bidialectal. Unfortunately, this means that it is left to classroom teachers to develop materials and practices on their own. The table on the right provides a list of the major features of AAE likely to be present in young children's language use. It is not an exhaustive list but provides some guidance regarding the language structures that children use and what they will need to learn to speak, read, and write in GAE. Especially in the case of phonology, the table highlights places where children may need extra time to learn a new phonological form because it differs significantly from their own sound system. Here, we note several key implications for instruction.

Phonological awareness: It is commonly assumed that spoken word play, such as rhyming, develops phonological awareness (knowledge of the structure of spoken words), which facilitates later reading acquisition. The activity emphasizes perfect rhymes such as bear-care, which share the same rime (pronounced air). Perfect rhymes are less prominent in AAE word play than other types of phonological overlap, however. ²⁷ Indeed, for any child whose language variety impacts the vowel system, the words that rhyme will differ. For example, for an African American child in the southern United States, the word thing may rhyme with either king or rang, depending upon how it is pronounced. Moreover, even perfect rhymes work differently because AAE phonology allows optional deletion of final consonants in some cases. For example, cold and hole can rhyme in AAE because of deletion of the final /d/. The net effect is that these activities do not always function in the same way as for GAE speakers.

Phonemic awareness: Tasks such as deciding if two words begin or end with the same sounds bring attention to phonemic structure, which is a key to learning spelling-sound correspondences. The validity of the exercise can again be vitiated by differences in pronunciation. When the task involves comparisons of initial phonemes (e.g., ball, book), AAE and GAE speakers perform comparably. In contrast, some AAE speakers may perform poorly on comparisons involving final consonants, because they are variably included in AAE. It may take AAE-speaking children as much as a year longer to master phonemic awareness in the final position of words. 28 Deciding that cold and hole do not end in the same sound may be difficult if cold is usually pronounced cole. When children take longer to acquire such knowledge, we should not assume that they are less capable learners. We should realize that AAE speakers are learning both a new oral language variety and to identify final consonants (whereas GAE speakers only have to learn the latter).

Phonics: Learning the correspondences between the spellings of words and their pronunciations is an important step in learning to read. Instruction typically assumes that words are pronounced as in GAE. What happens if the child's pronunciations are different, as occurs for many words in AAE? For example, a teacher might write the word gold on the board, pronounce each of the component sounds, and model how they are blended to form gold. For a GAE speaker, the lesson is about the correspondences between four letters and four sounds. The lesson is different for an AAE speaker who pronounces it gole. AAE speakers may be able to figure out the correspondence between the teacher's pronunciation and their own, but translating between the two involves extra effort and a single spelling now corresponds to two pronunciations. Then, in a future phonics lesson, AAE-speaking children may be confused as they learn to spell the homophonic word goal.

We have investigated these conditions using computational models that learn phonics (i.e., spelling-sound correspondences). ²⁹ The models first learned the GAE pronunciations of a large set of monosyllabic words. In the AAE condition, half the words had different pronunciations than in the GAE condition because of final consonant deletions. The models were then taught the correspondences between the spellings of the words and their GAE pronunciations. Although both models could learn the correspondences with sufficient experience, the AAE model took much longer because it was learning the alternative pronunciations of half the words at the same time. This model provided an explicit, mechanistic account of the impact of mismatches between the oral and written language system that children who are becoming bidialectal invariably encounter.

Reading aloud: Reading aloud is an important, widely used learning activity. Children's accuracy and fluency as they read aloud is an indicator of their progress and provides opportunities for feedback-but learning two varieties can make the task more difficult. A child who knows the AAE and GAE pronunciations of cold needs to produce one and suppress the other. The child may be able to generate the "correct" (for the school setting) pronunciation, but may do so more slowly, giving the appearance of lack of fluency. Researchers have found a tradeoff between rate and accuracy when African American children read aloud, such that they achieved a lower score on fluency because they slowed down their reading in order to improve the grammatical accuracy of their oral reading. ³⁰ In this same study, as the complexity of reading passages increased, students appeared to sacrifice reading accuracy in an effort to manage the lexical and syntactic complexity of passages. These outcomes provide evidence of the active decision making that can constrain the cognitive resources that bidialectal readers are able to apply to oral reading. In addition to reducing fluency while reading aloud, this may impact reading comprehension. (Similar results are found among children who are becoming bilingual, but their challenges with reading aloud in English tend to be better understood.) When reading aloud occurs in front of other students, the appearance of lower proficiency can be deeply embarrassing and can create aversion to reading.

Attention and effort: Children who are still learning the school dialect have to focus greater attention and effort on understanding the teacher's speech, which can detract from being able to focus on the content. In a busy classroom setting where the teacher is harder to hear or see, the impact will be greater. These difficulties can be lessened for children by providing in writing any important information that has been presented orally, as well as providing visual supports whenever possible. In addition, we encourage teachers to become more familiar with AAE in order to better comprehend and communicate with children and families who are high-density AAE speakers. ³¹

4. Provide enough time on task.

Sensitivity to the time a child who is becoming bidialectal may need to master a new language skill is critically important. A child who has more to learn to reach a goal needs more time to get there. ³² It takes ample learning opportunities, sufficient practice, and, for many children, additional instruction. This requires rethinking our views about what constitutes "typical" developmental trajectories. Instead, teachers should offer as much learning time in early childhood and throughout the elementary grades as needed for African American children to enter the middle grades as confident readers and writers.

Bidialectal children may take more time to gain the knowledge that supports skilled reading, but that is a byproduct of acquiring more knowledge to connect with the knowledge that they already have. ³³ Educational outcomes for these children are modulated by numerous factors, including educational quality, amount of experience using each language variety, and availability of educational resources in the home and community. Successfully addressing these initial challenges-and doing so in a way that values the home language variety-can eventually yield the many personal, social, and economic benefits of being bidialectal.

5. Respond constructively to AAE use in the classroom.

Teachers face difficult choices when students use AAE in the classroom. If AAE is viewed as "bad English," the response may be to provide a GAE correction, which conveys to children that their home language is bad. It should be possible to help children learn the classroom language variety without negative messages about AAE. With very young children, in preschool through first grade, simply providing full-form models of classroom language is helpful. For example, if a child is deleting the copula, a teacher can cheerfully produce the same utterance, making the copula salient and lengthening the child's production slightly.

Child: "This my backpack."
Teacher: "Yes, this IS your backpack. Let's put it away."

After several such opportunities to learn, children who were once deleting the structure will begin to include it. This is a common, effective technique used in interactions designed to enhance language development that can be easily applied in a classroom.

Based on a classroom observation, a researcher ³⁴ provided an example of a teacher who corrects Joey, a third-grade boy, who pronounces the word street as skreet (which is a common cultural and regional variant). When Joey says Orange Skreet rather than Orange Street, his teacher replies by saying, "Not skreet. Say street." Joey responds, "Skreet." His teacher makes him read the sentence again, but Joey continues to say skreet. The classroom teacher corrects him again in front of the class. When the teacher finally leaves him alone, he continues to read aloud, but this time haltingly, mumbling and fearful of saying the wrong thing and being further embarrassed by the teacher. This is a great example of what not to do. By treating the phonological variation in the child's reading as an error, the teacher eroded Joey's self-confidence, making him likely to be more resistant to reading aloud in the future. It is an experience he will likely never forget! A more helpful approach would be for Joey's teacher to make a note of the skr/str pronunciation and include it in a whole-class language lesson without singling out Joey or any other child. This is typically a regional variant. Since Joey is doing it, there are likely others who are as well, and everyone would benefit from spending time learning the sound-phoneme mapping for this consonant cluster.

At the other extreme, many teachers are averse to commenting on children's use of their home language variety, concerned that it is not their role to encourage becoming bidialectal. The philosopher Jennifer M. Morton discusses issues of justice and ethics associated with dialect differences. ³⁵ She acknowledges the perceived need to accommodate GAE given its importance for health, education, and employment under existing circumstances but also the threats to personal and cultural integrity that adopting GAE entails. The need for one group to adapt to the language and culture of another in order to thrive is an intrinsic form of inequality. She concludes that gaining knowledge of both GAE and AAE is nonetheless the most favorable accommodation to non-ideal circumstances.

Teachers need additional guidance and opportunities to engage in professional dialogue on this issue. Not responding to use of the home variety is an instructional choice that conveys information about linguistic expectations. The challenge is to balance the need to respect children's language and culture, while helping them gain additional facility with the classroom language variety because it serves other functions (as in learning to read).

6. Recognize the impact of bidialectal experience on comprehending and producing language.

Becoming fluent in using two languages or dialects is a positive achievement, but there are bumps along the way, such as the interference between codes that often occurs in comprehension and speaking or reading aloud. Slower responses, dysfluencies, and other "errors" occur because the child's knowledge of the two codes and how to use them is still developing, not because the child lacks the ability to learn. Many studies have demonstrated that children who speak AAE also understand GAE. They may be slowed down in some areas where the two dialects contrast, as we noted above. With few exceptions, AAE and GAE are mutually intelligible. Given sufficient time and relevant experience, bidialectal speakers, like bilinguals, will learn to navigate the two codes in both oral language and print.

Final Takeaways

Most languages have several within-language varieties. An inclusive way to think about language varieties is that they occur along a continuum from those that differ little from the general variety to those that are more distant. This framing includes all communication practices across all speakers ³⁶ and does not consider one variety to be superior. It allows us to put languages and speakers in their proper perspective as equally valued, especially as we support children learning to read and write. All children need to have the skills to make linguistic choices across contexts: formal, informal, home, school, speaking, reading, or writing. Even within these contexts, there are choices that require varied skills, such as writing a report for school, writing a thank-you card for a birthday gift, or writing a text to meet up with friends.

Above all, our shared goal should be for all children to become good readers; this requires practice with reading. For children who speak more than one language variety, learning to read requires learning the differences between their oral language and print, in addition to the inconsistencies of English orthography, making supportive instruction and abundant practice even more critical for mastering reading. The burden placed on the child can be tremendous, but it can be mitigated by effective, culturally responsive instruction and through being given the time needed to master new skills.

Finally, teaching children who are becoming bidialectal to read does not require an entirely new, separate theory of reading instruction. The same elements that have been identified for all developing readers to break the code are necessary for children who speak AAE as well. What differs is the delivery of these elements. Reading is a language-based task; introducing language variation affects the efficacy of many standard instructional practices and reading-related activities. The impact of language variation on reading is not an intractable issue. Adapting instruction and materials to encompass and embrace such variation reduces the load for both teachers and students, allowing them to reach their respective goals.

Julie A. Washington is a professor in the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine. A speech-language pathologist and fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, she directs a Learning Disabilities Research Innovation Hub and the Dialect, Poverty, and Academic Success Lab. Mark S. Seidenberg is the Vilas Research Professor and Donald O. Hebb Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also codirects the Language and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab. Seidenberg's work is supported by the Deinlein Language and Literacy Fund.

*The exception is the case of deaf children who use a visual-gestural, rather than spoken, language. ( return to article)
†Although this assertion is anecdotal, it is based on our combined 70 years of experience. ( return to article)

Endnotes

1. M. Brown et al., "Impact of Dialect Use on a Basic Component of Learning to Read," Frontiers in Psychology 6, no. 196 (2015); and J. Washington et al., "The Impact of Dialect Density on the Growth of Language and Reading in African American Children," Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 49, no. 2 (2018): 232-47.
2. C. Kohler et al., "African American English Dialect and Performance on Nonword Spelling and Phonemic Awareness Tasks," American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 16, no. 2 (May 2007): 157-68; and N. Terry, "Relations Between Dialect Variation, Grammar, and Early Spelling Skills," Reading and Writing 19, no. 9 (2006): 907-31.
3. Brown et al., "Impact of Dialect Use"; and C. Puranik, L. Branum-Martin, and J. Washington, "The Relation Between Dialect Density and the Codevelopment of Writing and Reading in African American Children," Child Development 91, no. 4 (2020): e866-e882.
4. Brown et al., "Impact of Dialect Use"; and Washington et al., "The Impact of Dialect Density."
5. H. Craig and J. Washington, "Oral Language Expectations for African American Preschoolers and Kindergartners," American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 11, no. 1 (2002): 59-70; J. Washington and H. Craig, "Morphosyntactic Forms of African American English Used by Young Children and Their Caregivers," Applied Psycholinguistics 23, no. 2 (2002): 209-31; and C. Connor and H. Craig, "African American Preschoolers' Language, Emergent Literacy Skills, and Use of African American English: A Complex Relation," Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 49, no. 4 (2006): 771-92.
6. J. Baugh, Out of the Mouths of Slaves: African American Language and Educational Malpractice (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999).
7. J. Baugh, Beyond Ebonics: Linguistic Pride and Racial Prejudice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
8. J. Siegel, Second Dialect Acquisition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
9. R. Fasold and W. Wolfram, "Some Linguistic Features of Negro Dialect," Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 3, no. 4 (1972): 16-49; and W. Wolfram, C. Adger, and D. Christian, Dialects in Schools and Communities (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999).
10. E. Ferrer et al., "Achievement Gap in Reading Is Present as Early as First Grade and Persists Through Adolescence," Journal of Pediatrics 167, no. 5 (2015): 1121-5, e1-e2; and W. Teale, K. Paciga, and J. Hoffman, "Beginning Reading Instruction in Urban Schools: The Curriculum Gap Ensures a Continuing Achievement Gap," Reading Teacher 61, no. 4 (2007): 344-48.
11. Washington et al., "The Impact of Dialect Density"; Puranik, Branum-Martin, and Washington, "The Relation Between Dialect Density"; and J. McDonald and J. Oetting, "Nonword Repetition Across Two Dialects of English: Effects of Specific Language Impairment and Nonmainstream Form Density," Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 62, no. 5 (2019): 1381-91.
12. Brown et al., "Impact of Dialect Use."
13. Brown et al., "Impact of Dialect Use"; Washington et al., "The Impact of Dialect Density"; and Puranik, Branum-Martin, and Washington, "The Relation Between Dialect Density."
14. A. Tatum, Teaching Reading to Black Adolescent Males: Closing the Achievement Gap (Portland, ME: Stenhouse, 2005); and A. Tatum, "Breaking Down Barriers That Disenfranchise African American Adolescent Readers in Low-Level Tracks," Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 44, no. 1 (2000): 52-64.
15. L. Makalela, "Moving Out of Linguistic Boxes: The Effects of Translanguaging Strategies for Multilingual Classrooms," Language and Education 29, no. 3 (2015): 200-17.
16. E. Hanushek et al., The Unwavering SES Achievement Gap: Trends in U.S. Student Performance, working paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, March 2019; and E. Hanushek et al., "The Achievement Gap Fails to Close," Education Next 19, no. 3 (2019): 8-17.
17. Hanushek et al., The Unwavering SES Achievement Gap; and S. Reardon, "The Widening Income Achievement Gap," Educational Leadership 70, no. 8 (2013): 10-16.
18. Hanushek et al., The Unwavering SES Achievement Gap; and Hanushek et al., "The Achievement Gap."
19. Washington et al., "The Impact of Dialect Density"; and Puranik, Branum-Martin, and Washington, "The Relation Between Dialect Density."
20. B. Rankin and J. Quane, "Neighborhood Poverty and the Social Isolation of Inner-City African American Families," Social Forces 79, no. 1 (2000): 139-64.
21. S. Rowley et al., "Framing Black Boys: Parent, Teacher, and Student Narratives of the Academic Lives of Black Boys," Advances in Child Development and Behavior 47 (2014): 301-32.
22. W. Du Bois, "Double-Consciousness and the Veil," in Social Class and Stratification: Classic Statements and Theoretical Debates, ed. R. Levine (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 203; and W. Du Bois, "Strivings of the Negro People," The Atlantic, August 1897.
23. L. Delpit and J. Dowdy, eds., The Skin That We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in the Classroom (New York: New York Press, 2002).
24. National Center for Education Statistics, "Preschool and Kindergarten Enrollment," in The Condition of Education (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, 2020).
25. J. Montag, M. Jones, and L. Smith, "The Words Children Hear: Picture Books and the Statistics for Language Learning," Psychological Science 26, no. 9 (2015): 1489-96.
26. E. Carle, The Very Hungry Caterpillar (New York: World Publishing Company, 1969).
27. A. Shollenbarger et al., "How African American English-Speaking First Graders Segment and Rhyme Words and Nonwords with Final Consonant Clusters," Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 48, no. 4 (2017): 273-85.
28. S. Thomas-Tate, J. Washington, and J. Edwards, "Standardized Assessment of Phonological Awareness Skills in Low-Income African American First Graders," American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 13, no. 2 (2004): 182-90.
29. Brown et al., "Impact of Dialect Use."
30. H. Craig et al., "Performance of Elementary-Grade African American Students on the Gray Oral Reading Tests," Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 35, no. 2 (2004): 141-54; and C. Thompson, H. Craig, and J. Washington, "Variable Production of African American English Across Oracy and Literacy Contexts," Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 35, no. 3 (2004): 269-82.
31. T. Beyer, K. Edwards, and C. Fuller, "Misinterpretation of African American English BIN by Adult Speakers of Standard American English," Language & Communication 45 (2015): 59-69.
32. M. Seidenberg and M. MacDonald, "The Impact of Language Experience on Language and Reading," Topics in Language Disorders 38, no. 1 (2018): 66-83.
33. Thomas-Tate, Washington, and Edwards, "Standardized Assessment."
34. B. Wright, The Brilliance of Black Boys: Cultivating School Success in the Early Grades (New York: Teachers College Press, 2018).
35. J. Morton, "Cultural Code-Switching: Straddling the Achievement Gap," Journal of Political Philosophy 22, no. 3 (2014): 259-81.
36. Makalela, "Moving Out of Linguistic Boxes"; and O. García and C. Sylvan, "Pedagogies and Practices in Multilingual Classrooms: Singularities in Pluralities," Modern Language Journal 95, no. 3 (2011): 385-400.

[illustrations by Ojima Abalaka]

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Teaching Reading to African American Children

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Reading depends on spoken language.* This is a simple statement with profound consequences for children whose spoken language differs from the language they are expected to read. For most children, the language skills they bring to school will support learning to read, which is mainly learning to understand their spoken language in a new form: print.

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Reading Wars, Reading Science, and English Learners

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Reading Wars, Reading Science, and English Learners

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Learning and developing as a reader are more complicated in a language the reader is simultaneously learning to speak and understand. This challenge is faced by millions of English learners (ELs) who...

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Effectiveness of an English Intervention

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Effectiveness of an English Intervention

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

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

How Can I Use This Information?

Speech-language pathologists can use this information to:

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

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

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

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

Audiologists can use this information to:

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

Recognize and respond to amplification needs.

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

Modify materials and procedures during speech audiometry assessment.

Phonemic Inventories and Cultural and Linguistic Information

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

Amharic

Arabic

Bosnian

Burmese

Chinese

English

English Phonemic Inventory [PDF]
Dialect
Haitian Creole

Hindi/Urdu

Hmong

Japanese

Korean

Navajo

Pashto and Persian

Polish

Russian

Spanish

Somali

Tagalog

Turkish

Vietnamese

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

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

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Phonemic Inventories and Cultural and Linguistic Information Across Languages

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A list of phonemic inventories across multiple languages

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The Role of Phonology and Language in Learning to Read

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The Role of Phonology and Language in Learning to Read

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Summer Edition 2020 PERSPECTIVES on Language and Literacy A Quarterly Publication of the International Dyslexia Association Volume 46, No. 3 MISSION The International Dyslexia Association (IDA) is committed to creating a future for all individuals who struggle with dyslexia and other related reading differences so that they may have richer, more robust lives and access to the tools and resources they need. The Role of Phonology and Language in Learning to Read Theme Editors' Introduction Margie B. Gillis and Louisa Moats How the Phonology of Speech Is Foundational for Instant Word Recognition David A. Kilpatrick Encoding as a Route to Phoneme Awareness and Phonics: A Shift in Literacy Instruction Jeannine Herron and Margie B. Gillis 7 11 17 The views and opinions expressed in Perspectives on Language and Literacy (Perspectives) are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the International Dyslexia Association (IDA). IDA and the editors of Perspectives assume no responsibility for statements and opinions advanced by its contributors. The information provided in Perspectives is for informational and educational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment by a healthcare professional. Educators and other professionals, families, and individuals with dyslexia who read Perspectives should rely on their own judgment or seek the advice of a qualified professional before taking any action based upon the information provided in these articles. The contributors are invited to share their perspectives on various themes related to dyslexia and instructional strategies based on their experience and research on the topic. Although IDA has carefully considered and reviewed the information provided, it can make no guaranty or warranty as to its accuracy or completeness and shall not be held responsible for any errors, omissions, or claims for damages, including exemplary damages, arising out of use, inability to use, or with regard to the accuracy or sufficiency of the information contained in Perspectives . References made to specific products and services are for the purpose of example only. IDA has not tested, and does not endorse, the use of any products or services contained within its publications, unless specified otherwise. Information in this publication is current as of the date of publication. Linguistic Differences and Learning to Read for Nonmainstream Dialect Speakers Brandy Gatlin-Nash, Lakeisha Johnson, and Ryan Lee-James Preschool Language Precursors to Later Reading Problems Rouzana Komesidou and Tiffany P. Hogan 26 35 ON THE COVER: "Untitled" by Spencer Haas. The International Dyslexia Association (IDA) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit, scientific and educational organization dedicated exclusively to the study and treatment of the specific language disability known as dyslexia. We have been serving individuals with dyslexia, their families, and professionals in the field for over 70 years. IDA was first established to continue the pioneering work of Samuel T. Orton, M.D., in the study and treatment of dyslexia. IDA members include people with dyslexia and their families, educators, diagnosticians, physicians, and other professionals in the field. IDA's home office, 43 branches in the United States and Canada, and 12 Global Partners provide educator training, publications, information, and support to help struggling readers around the world. IDA's Annual Conference attracts thousands of outstanding researchers, clinicians, parents, teachers, psychologists, educational therapists, and people with dyslexia.

Issue List

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Perspectives on Language Summer 2020 Page3

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Summer Edition 2020 PERSPECTIVES on Language and Literacy A Quarterly Publication of the International Dyslexia Association Volume 46, No. 3 MISSION The International Dyslexia Association (IDA) is committed to creating a future for all individuals who struggle with dyslexia and other related reading differences so that they may have richer, more robust lives and access to the tools and resources they need.

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David Kilpatrick

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Findings of the National Reading Panel, 2000

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Findings of the National Reading Panel, 2000

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According to research, some instructional methods for teaching reading are more effective than others. Find out what the National Reading Panel’s review of the research revealed about best practices in reading instruction.

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The National Reading Panel Report 20 years later

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The National Reading Panel Report 20 years later

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NWEA e-book

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Excellent resources for parents of students who do not speak English as their primary language.

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A bilingual site for educators and families of English language learners