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What Is the Science of Reading? | Really Great Reading

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[row][oneThird]Attend a complimentary Science of Reading Virtual Workshop: Register Now[/oneThird] [twoThird]What Is the Science of Reading?The science of reading is a body of research that incorporates insights and research from disciplines that include developmental psychology, educational psychol…

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Use your school email to sign up for free access to Sharon Walpole's ELA K-5 curriculum.

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Bookworms Reading and Writing Beta | Curriculum Access

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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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Article: The Science of Reading By: Laura Stewart

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zaner-blozer.com is your first and best source for all of the information you're looking for. From general topics to more of what you would expect to find here, zaner-blozer.com has it all. We hope you find what you are searching for!

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How to Plan Differentiated Reading Instruction for K-3

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How to Plan Differentiated Reading Instruction for K-3

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By Sharon Walpole-provides detailed lessons and instruction for groups during reading block.

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"This is an ideal resource for primary-grade educators who know the importance of differentiated instruction but are still resorting to the one-size-fits-all approach to teaching, due to time constraints and other demands. How to Plan Differentiated Instruction provides a plethora of lesson plans, reproducibles, and assessments so that teachers can begin meeting their students' needs immediately. Readers will feel confident creating their own differentiated lessons after using these teacher-friendly model plans as guided practice."--Jodi Nichols, MEd, Instructional Leader and Reading Specialist, Garrett County (Maryland) Public Schools

"Many of us struggle to put the literacy puzzle together. Even with a knowledge of best practices, it's a challenge to plan instruction that meets the needs of all our students. How to Plan Differentiated Reading Instruction is a comprehensive resource that clarifies the planning process and shows teachers how to use assessments to plan for differentiated instruction."--Jennifer Allen, MEd, literacy specialist, Waterville (Maine) Public Schools

"Walpole and McKenna have expertly responded to concerns of educators from the field to create this indispensable guide. Teachers will be refreshed by its user-friendly, common-sense approach. The strength of the book lies in its power to 'unpack' the authors' thinking about lesson planning, thus serving as a practical springboard for teachers as they provide for the literacy needs of every student."--Sonia Q. Cabell, MEd, research staff, Preschool Language and Literacy Lab, University of Virginia; former second-grade teacher and reading coach

"Based on their extensive experience in the design of early reading instruction and in professional development, Walpole and McKenna explain how to organize reading instruction in the primary grades to provide grade-level instruction in vocabulary and comprehension together with differentiated instruction in word recognition and fluency. To make this system work, teachers need systematic routines for word recognition instruction, and the book provides those routines with clear explanations. The book is a terrific resource in my literacy course focused on children with special needs; my students implement the lessons in the field as tier 2 instruction."--Charles A. MacArthur, PhD, School of Education, University of Delaware

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how to plan differentiated reading instruction

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first edition: resources for grades k-3 (solving problems in the teaching of literacy)

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education / early childhood (incl. preschool & kindergarten)

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education / teaching methods & materials / general

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education / teaching methods & materials / reading & phonics

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education/early childhood (incl. preschool & kindergarten)

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language arts & disciplines / reading skills

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teaching methods & materials - reading & phonics

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education / early childhood (incl. preschool & kindergarten)

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education / teaching methods & materials / general

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education / teaching methods & materials / reading & phonics

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education/early childhood (incl. preschool & kindergarten)

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language arts & disciplines / reading skills

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teaching methods & materials - reading & phonics

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instructional strategies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monitoring brain waves

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Structured Literacy vs Balanced Literacy

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Structured Literacy vs Balanced Literacy

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Helping Students Read Better and Learn More

The Iowa Reading Research Center strives to improve the literacy skills of all students through research with students, professional learning for educators, and technical assistance for school districts.

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Iowa Reading Research Center | The University of Iowa

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Striving to improve the literacy skills of all students.

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Jack Silva didn't know anything about how children learn to read. What he did know is that a lot of students in his district were struggling.

Silva is the chief academic officer for Bethlehem, Pa., public schools. In 2015, only 56 percent of third-graders were scoring proficient on the state reading test. That year, he set out to do something about that.

"It was really looking yourself in the mirror and saying, 'Which 4 in 10 students don't deserve to learn to read?' " he recalls.

Bethlehem is not an outlier. Across the country, millions of kids are struggling. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 32 percent of fourth-graders and 24 percent of eighth-graders aren't reading at a basic level. Fewer than 40 percent are proficient or advanced.

One excuse that educators have long offered to explain poor reading performance is poverty. In Bethlehem, a small city in Eastern Pennsylvania that was once a booming steel town, there are plenty of poor families. But there are fancy homes in Bethlehem, too, and when Silva examined the reading scores he saw that many students at the wealthier schools weren't reading very well either.

Silva didn't know what to do. To begin with, he didn't know how students in his district were being taught to read. So, he assigned his new director of literacy, Kim Harper, to find out.
The theory is wrong
Harper attended a professional-development day at one of the district's lowest-performing elementary schools. The teachers were talking about how students should attack words in a story. When a child came to a word she didn't know, the teacher would tell her to look at the picture and guess.

The most important thing was for the child to understand the meaning of the story, not the exact words on the page. So, if a kid came to the word "horse" and said "house," the teacher would say, that's wrong. But, Harper recalls, "if the kid said 'pony,' it'd be right because pony and horse mean the same thing."

Harper was shocked. First of all, pony and horse don't mean the same thing. And what does a kid do when there aren't any pictures?

This advice to a beginning reader is based on an influential theory about reading that basically says people use things like context and visual clues to read words. The theory assumes learning to read is a natural process and that with enough exposure to text, kids will figure out how words work.

Yet scientists from around the world have done thousands of studies on how people learn to read and have concluded that theory is wrong.

One big takeaway from all that research is that reading is not natural; we are not wired to read from birth. People become skilled readers by learning that written text is a code for speech sounds. The primary task for a beginning reader is to crack the code. Even skilled readers rely on decoding.

So when a child comes to a word she doesn't know, her teacher should tell her to look at all the letters in the word and decode it, based on what that child has been taught about how letters and combinations of letters represent speech sounds. There should be no guessing, no "getting the gist of it."

And yet, "this ill-conceived contextual guessing approach to word recognition is enshrined in materials and handbooks used by teachers," wrote Louisa Moats, a prominent reading expert, in a 2017 article.

The contextual guessing approach is what a lot of teachers in Bethlehem had learned in their teacher preparation programs. What they hadn't learned is the science that shows how kids actually learn to read.

"We never looked at brain research," said Jodi Frankelli, Bethlehem's supervisor of early learning. "We had never, ever looked at it. Never."

The educators needed education.
Learning the science of reading

On a wintry day in early March 2018, a group of mostly first- and second-grade teachers was sitting in rows in a conference room at the Bethlehem school district headquarters. Mary Doe Donecker, an educational consultant from an organization called Step-by-Step Learning, stood at the front of the room, calling out words:

"Tell me the first sound you hear in 'Eunice'?"

"Youuu ... " the teachers responded.

Nope. "/Y/, /y/, before you get to the /oo/," Donecker explained. "How about "Charlotte?"

This was a class on the science of reading. The Bethlehem district has invested approximately $3 million since 2015 on training, materials and support to help its early elementary teachers and principals learn the science of how reading works and how children should be taught.

In the class, teachers spent a lot of time going over the sound structure of the English language.

Since the starting point for reading is sound, it's critical for teachers to have a deep understanding of this. But research shows they don't. Michelle Bosak, who teaches English as a second language in Bethlehem, said that when she was in college learning to be a teacher, she was taught almost nothing about how kids learn to read.

"It was very broad classes, vague classes and like a children's literature class," she said. "I did not feel prepared to teach children how to read."

Bosak was among the first group of teachers in Bethlehem to attend the new, science-based classes, which were presented as a series over the course of a year. For many teachers, the classes were as much about unlearning old ideas about reading - like that contextual-guessing idea - as they were about learning new things.

First-grade teacher Candy Maldonado thought she was teaching her students what they needed to know about letters and sounds.

"We did a letter a week," she remembers. "So, if the letter was 'A,' we read books about 'A,' we ate things with 'A,' we found things with 'A.' "

But that was pretty much it. She didn't think getting into the details of how words are made up of sounds, and how letters represent those sounds, mattered that much.

The main goal was to expose kids to lots of text and get them excited about reading. She had no idea how kids learn to read. It was just that - somehow - they do: "Almost like it's automatic."

Maldonado had been a teacher for more than a decade. Her first reaction after learning about the reading science was shock: Why wasn't I taught this? Then guilt: What about all the kids I've been teaching all these years?

Bethlehem school leaders adopted a motto to help with those feelings: "When we know better, we do better."
"My kids are successful, and happy, and believe in themselves"

In a kindergarten class at Bethlehem's Calypso Elementary School in March 2018, veteran teacher Lyn Venable gathered a group of six students at a small, U-shaped table.

"We're going to start doing something today that we have not done before," she told the children. "This is brand spanking new."

The children were writing a report about a pet they wanted. They had to write down three things that pet could do.

A little boy named Quinn spelled the word "bark" incorrectly. He wrote "boc." Spelling errors are like a window into what's going on in a child's brain when he is learning to read. Venable prompted him to sound out the entire word.

"What's the first sound?" Venable asked him.

"Buh," said Quinn.

"We got that one. That's 'b.' Now what's the next sound?"

Quinn knew the meaning of "bark." What he needed to figure out was how each sound in the word is represented by letters.

Venable, who has been teaching elementary school for more than two decades, says she used to think reading would just kind of "fall together" for kids if they were exposed to enough print. Now, because of the science of reading training, she knows better.

"My kids are successful, and happy, and believe in themselves," she said. "I don't have a single child in my room that has that look on their face like, 'I can't do this.' "

At the end of each school year, the Bethlehem school district gives kindergartners a test to assess early reading skills.

In 2015, before the new training began, more than half of the kindergartners in the district tested below the benchmark score, meaning most of them were heading into first grade at risk of reading failure. At the end of the 2018 school year, after the science-based training, 84 percent of kindergartners met or exceeded the benchmark score. At three schools, it was 100 percent.

Silva says he is thrilled with the results, but cautious. He is eager to see how the kindergartners do when they get to the state reading test in third grade.

"We may have hit a home run in the first inning. But there's a lot of game left here," he says.

Emily Hanford is a senior correspondent for APM Reports, the documentary and investigative reporting group at American Public Media. She is the producer of the audio documentaryHard Words, from which this story is adapted.

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Why Millions Of Kids Can't Read And What Better Teaching Can Do About It

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Jack Silva didn't know anything about how children learn to read. What he did know is that a lot of students in his district were struggling. Silva is the chief academic officer for Bethlehem, Pa., public schools. In 2015, only 56 percent of third-graders were scoring proficient on the state reading test.

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By: Laura Stewart

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The Science of Reading: Evidence for a New Era of Instruction

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Research evidence shows how the brain develops, what to teach, and how to teach so that all children learn to read.

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By Denise Eide-provides the rules and logic of how our language functions. She also offers curriculum

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Uncovering the Logic of English helps educators break the complex code of English with simple rules.

Award-winning author Denise Eide demonstrates the effectiveness of systematic phonics to develop a transformed understanding of high-frequency words, sight words, decodable words and irregular words.

Written in an engaging and easy-to-follow style, Uncovering the Logic of English sheds light on our society's literacy crisis and provides a wealth of reading and spelling tools to help any student succeed.

This book is suitable for teachers looking to expand their reading curriculum, adults struggling with spelling, English Language Learners who want to improve their pronunciation and parents teaching their children at home.

Uncovering the Logic of English challenges the notion that English is illogical by revealing the logical patterns underlying 98% of English words and explaining:

75 phonograms and 31 spelling rules that can be used to explain 98% of English words

How English words are formed and how this knowledge can revolutionize vocabulary development

That understanding the reasons behind English spelling prevents students from needing to guess

Grounded in the latest linguistic and reading research, Uncovering the Logic of English demonstrates why the phonogram approach, with accurate spelling rules, should be as foundational to our education system as 1 + 1 = 2.

What if the problem is not the language itself, but the rules we were taught? What if we could see the complexity of English as a powerful tool rather than a hindrance? - Denise Eide

Uncovering the Logic of English introduces the phonograms and rules that are taught in the Logic of English Foundations and Essentials series.

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This book helps educators have a better grasp of how to teach English and provide learners with an in-depth understanding of the English language.

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Skip to content The Science of Reading Implementation Guide

Ideas and tools for integrating scientifically based strategies into early reading instruction

This toolkit offers a variety of resources, templates, and discussion guides to help districts develop and sustain expertise in science-based reading instruction.

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The Science of Reading Implementation Guide | EAB

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This toolkit offers a variety of resources, templates, and discussion guides to help districts develop and sustain expertise in science-based reading instruction.

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offers free resources for their curriculum

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We offer unique online reading, spelling, & handwriting courses that empower students, parents, and teachers to combine the Science of Reading with the Joy of Learning.

Essentials 1-7 Lite

Learn the sounds of A-Z and 18 multi-letter phonograms. While learning new spelling rules, analyze 210 words and discover the logic of English spelling!

Essentials 1-7 Online

The first of four volumes! With three levels in one, Essentials offers differentiated instruction for teaching students with varying levels of skill.

Online courses that engage students and are less time-intensive for teachers!

Engaging videos provide core content instruction for students or for teachers who want to use them as a model. Additional videos are being dripped into courses as they are created. New content now includes interactive video!

Practice core content with online games and activities. These are an excellent supplement to workbook activities, independent student practice, or demonstrations on a smartboard.

The full online courses include PDFs of all the teacher and student materials. These courses are an alternative to purchase printed sets, and they are ideal for hybrid schools and online learning classes with parent instruction at home.

What our users say about us

The LOE Master Teacher Training helps instill confidence not only in teaching LOE, but in teaching children how to read. It is a powerful opportunity to learn about reading instruction and develop a framework for teaching reading that provides context for other literacy practices, materials, and ideas.

Primary Grades Pedagogy Expert BASIS Charter Schools

I know that I look at reading differently after the LOE training, and now I feel like I have the knowledge and motivation to bring that feeling to my students.

This training has been extremely valuable as I look forward to sharing the fascinating information that Logic of English is Foundational and Essential to Reading!

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We offer unique online reading, spelling, & handwriting courses that empower students, parents, and teachers to combine the Science of Reading with the Joy of Learning. Learn the sounds of A-Z and 18 multi-letter phonograms. While learning new spelling rules, analyze 210 words and discover the logic of English spelling!

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Bridging the gap between Science and poor readers

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For nearly two decades, there has been a huge gap between the science of reading and instructional practices in America's classrooms. Reading scientists such as Mark Seidenberg, a researcher in cognitive psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, correctly attributes the problem to the failure of educators to pay attention to reading science (Seidenberg, 2017). With two decades of groundbreaking research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience and an explosion of new understandings about the architecture of the reading brain and how children learn to read, how is it that two-thirds of American fourth and eighth graders still read below grade level proficiency?

The answer harkens back to scientifically debunked practices indelibly planted more than three decades ago by the language movement. I was part of that movement, so I take the liberty to write about it! These same misunderstandings in reading education can also be traced back to the National Reading Panel report that came out during that same period when whole language dominated reading education. We now know what science says needs to be fixed.

The Missing Link

Mark Seidenberg touched on what's missing in an interview entitled "The Ignored Science That Could Help Close the Achievement Gap" in The Atlantic (Glatter, 2016). He's quoted as saying reading education is misdirected and ignores the science of how to teach children to read in the first place.

He's right. In schools that are failing, children are often not being taught to read in kindergarten and first grade. In Seidenberg's words, "That leaves all the stuff about how kids actually go from not reading to beginning reading to skilled reading out of the curriculum. So they [educators] emphasize 'literacy' and we [scientists] emphasize, I would say, the prerequisite: being able to read quickly and accurately with some basic skills under your belt." As Seidenberg puts it, "They focus on a high-level notion of literacy and assume that just being able to pick up the mechanics is easy."

What we've learned from brain science is that "picking up the mechanics" isn't easy. Humans are born with circuitry already in place for picking up spoken language; no one is born with reading circuity. Reading has to be taught.

Getting children to reading proficiency by the end of first grade and supporting the reading brain's continued development with ongoing foundational skills such as grade-by-grade growth in spelling is the missing link. With a few exceptions, all students should have the basic reading circuitry for proficient reading in place by the end of first grade-that is to say, they should independently read easy chapter books with comprehension and fluency. This is achievable under the care of teachers who have been well trained to teach reading even in high-poverty area schools.

Once children can read, they build their spoken language vocabularies and gain new concepts principally by reading and by exposure to an academic curriculum supported by good teaching. In addition to making sure that all kindergarten and first-grade teachers are trained to teach reading, how can science help us fix the few remaining whole language myths that continue to plague the teaching of reading?

Tracing the Missing Links in Reading Education to Whole Language Myths

Understanding where myths come from helps debunk them. Yet there is no need to denigrate whole language. Positive transformational changes in education advanced by whole language include the use of invented spelling, expectations for classrooms filled with good children's literature, efforts to motivate children to read, use of thematic units, the writing process approach, more time for reading in school, plus integrating reading and writing across the curriculum. These contributions to reading education notwithstanding, too many of today's educators hang on to five core principles of whole language that have been incontrovertibly debunked by science.

5 (Debunked) Whole Language Principles that Are Still in Use
Debunked Principle #1: Learning to read is as natural as learning to speak.
This principle, at the very core of whole language theory, has been debunked. The truth is that learning to read is not as natural as learning to speak. We all are born with built-in circuitry for speaking language but no one is born with built-in circuitry for reading. Brain science has proven that reading circuitry and spoken language circuity do not develop in the same way. We now know that speaking and reading share many processing domains and brain areas, but the actual brain development for speaking and reading is inherently different; the development of reading brain circuitry requires explicit instruction. Students do not simply "pick up mechanics" from reading and writing for their own purposes. For most kids, the foundational skills of reading have to be taught. Weighing in from a scientific perspective, renowned French cognitive neuroscientist Stanislis Dehaene did not mince words in his highly touted book, Reading In the Brain. He asserted that whole language "does not fit with the architecture of our visual brain" (2009, p. 195). Dehaene went on to say "Cognitive psychology directly refutes any notion of teaching via a "global" or "whole language method" (2009, p. 219).

Debunked Principle #2: Meaning always comes first in language (Goodman, 1986).

Some current classroom practices still reflect the whole language notion that meaning always comes first. As it turns out, word reading comes first in reading. A deep level of word knowledge-including having spelling representations in the brain-has to be taught. As you read this passage you can see the word dosseret in this sentence; you can read it in context as in "The dosseret is milky white." But unless you have the spelling in the word form area of your brain, which maps the visual image of dosseret on this page to the same word in your spoken language system that you know the meaning of, you can't comprehend dosseret. With "meaning comes first" theory, whole language gave meaning and syntax precedence in a three-cueing system; however, brain science flips that notion on its head. Given meaning, syntactic, or graphophonic cueing, it's the graphophonic cue that ignites the reading brain, that is to say, it is word reading-ability to read and write a word correctly and automatically-that comes first. Meaning clues and syntax clues are secondary at best.

If you hear the word dosseret and understand it, if you say dosseret correctly, if you know dosseret's meaning and, importantly, if you have the correct spelling representation of dosseret in memory, you will indeed comprehend it when you see it either isolated in print or in context. The fact that word reading comes first is supported in hundreds of published peer-reviewed studies that show skilled readers are able to rapidly recognize and read printed words, regardless of whether the words are presented in context or in isolation. When new or difficult words are encountered in context it is still the letter-sound associations that provide the first and most efficient route to reading, not the meaning or syntax from context.

Debunked Principle #3: Do not teach handwriting explicitly. Money for handwriting programs should instead be spent on children's literature (Goodman, 1986).

Research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience supports teaching handwriting in elementary school. For example, a number of brain scanning studies demonstrated how handwriting aids preschoolers in learning their letters (James & Englehardt, 2012; Longcamp, Anron, & Velay, 2005). Learning to write in manuscript sets up neural systems that underlie reading. Gimenez and others found higher handwriting quality correlating with gray matter volume and density signaling more efficient neural processing and higher skills and ability (Gimenez et al., 2014).

Debunked Principle #4: There is no pathology such as dyslexia (Goodman, 1986).

Dyslexia is certainly not a disease. But any idea advanced by whole language advocates and others who claim that there is no such thing as dyslexia have been debunked by science. Brain imaging irrefutably shows differences in processing in the reading circuity of children who are dyslexic versus normal readers. Some researchers even posit that dyslexia can be a gift with cognitive benefits. But in terms of learning to read and spell, there is no longer any doubt that this learning disability exists.

Debunked Principle #5: "There should be no special spelling curriculum or regular lesson sequences" (Goodman, Smith, Meredith, & Goodman, 1987, pp. 300-301).

Perhaps the most universally misunderstood aspect of the brain's reading architecture is the importance of correct spelling representations in the word form area of the brain. We now know that the word form area where representations of spelling are stored is critical to proficient reading. It also plays an important role in detecting students at risk from dyslexia. Yet the destructive clarion call of whole language advocates three decades ago to not use spelling books or not teach spelling explicitly and systematically is still resounding in many school districts and schools. Here are three scientifically unsound practices with spelling instruction still in use today.

1. No Spelling Instruction. As I travel across the country working with teachers in scores of districts or speaking at conferences, I hear the refrain over and over-"We don't really teach spelling." The weekly spelling unit of study has been replaced with test prep with no realization that the students would be better readers if we taught them to spell. "We don't have time for spelling" is scientifically unsound; reading circuitry is optimized with automatic word reading for fluency, which greatly benefits from retrieving knowledge of correctly spelled words from the brain's word form area. Compelling new research supports that teaching kids to spell in kindergarten and first grade, using techniques that support the use of invented spelling, not only increases end-of-first grade reading but also results in better conventional spellers (Ouellette & Sénéchal, 2017). A meta-analysis (Graham & Hebert, 2010), highlights connections between orthographic representations in the brain, spelling accuracy, and reading, all of which support the notion that spelling instruction is a way to improve reading in elementary school.

2. Haphazard Spelling Instruction. Haphazard "hit or miss" spelling instruction is found in hundreds of schools across North America that have no plan for teaching spelling, no specific grade-by-grade curriculum, or random and disorderly instruction within a school. In some schools teachers choose their own words pulling them from the internet while other teachers rarely get around to teaching spelling at all. Spelling components of mammoth reading programs are always hit or miss. They present the wrong words for the grade level and no grade-by-grade curriculum. Beyond that, they subordinate weekly spelling lessons by mixing them in with too much other stuff to cover in a week. The spelling component may compete with each of the following for the teachers time: a vocabulary and oral language component, a phonemic awareness component, a phonics and fluency component, a sight words component, a text-based comprehension component, and a grammar and writing component. Remarkably, these components all focus on different words with no integration, leaving students floundering as spellers.

3. Word Sorting Alone with Hypothesis Testing. Many teachers who continue to use commercial word sorting programs for spelling may not realize that they are using a 20-year-old whole language methodology that lacks support from today's science. This spelling methodology exhibits many inadequacies such as no grade-by-grade curriculum. Moreover, it is scientifically problematic when word sorting is utilized as a single strategy system (Sharp, Sinatra & Reynolds, 2008) as opposed to a multi-strategy system that mixes up instructional strategies over time and distributes practice in ways that are supported by cognitive psychology (Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan, & Willingham, 2013).

5 Science-Based Ways to Bridge the Gap

Fixing the gap between the science of reading and how we teach it is not rocket science-it's based on research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Here are five ways to bridge the missing link.

1. Assure that all kindergarten and first-grade teachers have been properly trained to teach beginning reading with an emphasis on the student's ability to read quickly and accurately.

2. Replace whole language practices with science-based practices such as an early focus on word reading.

3. Teach handwriting (i.e., manuscript beginning in kindergarten and cursive beginning in grade two or three).

4. Provide extra support for children with learning disabilities such as dyslexia.

5. Teach spelling with research-based methodology in a grade-by-grade curriculum.

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Bridging the Gap Between Science and Poor Reading in America

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For nearly two decades, there has been a huge gap between the science of reading and instructional practices in America's classrooms. Reading scientists such as Mark Seidenberg, a researcher in cognitive psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, correctly attributes the problem to the failure of educators to pay attention to reading science (Seidenberg, 2017).

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Open Up Resources is a non-profit increasing equity in education by making excellent, top-rated K-12 curricula freely available to districts.

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K‐2 principal knowledge (not leadership) matters for dyslexia intervention

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Kindergarten through second-grade elementary schools that best serve students with dyslexia have principals who are knowledgeable about dyslexia and understand the best practices for providing interv...

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Comparing Reading Research to Program Design: An Examination of Teachers College Units of Study

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Comparing Reading Research to Program Design: An Examination of Teachers College Units of Study

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This report examines a program widely used in schools: Units of Study from the Teachers College Reading & Writing Project. Seven literacy experts conducted independent reviews of the program focused on their individual areas of expertise: phonics and fluency, text complexity, building knowledge and vocabulary, and English learner supports. Each of the reviews is a detailed, research-based discussion of how the components, features, and structures of Units of Study compare to what is called for by existing research on literacy instruction.
This report is licensed under CC BY-ND, and may not be redistributed if the original content is altered.

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Comparing Reading Research to Program Design: An Examination of Teachers College Units of Study

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This report examines a program widely used in schools: Units of Study from the Teachers College Reading & Writing Project. Seven literacy experts conducted independent reviews of the program focused on their individual areas of expertise: phonics and fluency, text complexity, building knowledge and vocabulary, and English learner supports.

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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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Listen to this story on the Educate podcast. Subscribe now:

APM Reports correspondent Emily Hanford started wondering about how kids learn to read a few years ago while she was reporting on the large number of college students who aren't academically ready. She was surprised to learn that 40 percent of college students have to take remedial or developmental classes before they even get into a college-level class. Many of the students she talked with told her they had dyslexia, but it had gone unaddressed for years.

"Dyslexia opened up this Pandora's box about reading that's kept me going now for the better part of the last three years," Hanford says.

She's since produced three audio documentaries about the way reading is taught in schools, including one about dyslexia, one about why so many kids in the U.S. struggle to read and one about a flawed idea in reading instruction that's taken hold in many classrooms. Hanford's documentaries have ignited a national conversation about how schools teach reading. We asked readers and listeners to send in questions so we could talk with Emily about her reporting on the reading science, what's being taught in classrooms and what's next.

If you're interested in learning more about the science of reading, Hanford recommends Ending the Reading Wars: From Novice to Expert as well as What Research Tells Us About Reading Instruction. In this episode, she mentions a report by Australian researcher Kevin Wheldall on the efficacy of some instructional reading programs and whether they are "conceptually consistent." You can read the full report by Wheldall here.

For more, check out the resources page for our documentaries Hard to Read and Hard Words. Also, be sure to check out the footnotes with links embedded in the web story of At a Loss for Words.

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A conversation with Emily Hanford on reading instruction in the U.S.

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Listen to this story on the Educate podcast. Subscribe now: APM Reports correspondent Emily Hanford started wondering about how kids learn to read a few years ago while she was reporting on the large number of college students who aren't academically ready.

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Large-scale remote learning is settling into what is, for now, the new normal. We're hearing from educators who want actionable resources to support their ongoing professional development, especially as they explore and deliver new ways of teaching and engaging. We've pulled a first batch together here and will be adding more in the weeks ahead. Our "Learn - Listen - Lead" routine will help you turn research into results for your students and your colleagues.

Download: Science of Reading Primer, Part One

Download: Science of Reading Primer, Part Two

Download: Science of Reading: Making the shift eBook

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Large-scale remote learning is settling into what is, for now, the new normal. We're hearing from educators who want actionable resources to support their ongoing professional development, especially as they explore and deliver new ways of teaching and engaging. We've pulled a first batch together here and will be adding more in the weeks ahead.

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Educators have been discussing the "right" way to teach reading for decades. While "balance" was called for nearly 20 years ago, dissension has reared its head again and arguments are breaking out among educators on social media. At the heart of the disagreement is the dichotomy between phonics instruction (the explicit teaching of letters and sounds) and a whole language approach (a focus on discovery and making meaning). While "whole language" as a term is not often used now, there are many who believe the term "balanced literacy" is simply a substitute for whole language.

In spite of the current discussions, the science on this instructional issue is settled. Castles, Rastle, & Nation (2018) lay out that there is a clear progression to effective literacy instruction. First and foremost, children need to understand the principles of spelling-sound correspondences and to solidify a store of high-frequency words to read words and phrases fluently. Most children need explicit teaching to build this knowledge. After decoding and high-frequency words are established, more attention can be devoted to comprehension with a focus on making meaning. Castles et al. (2018) offer a logical and research-based model. In spite of this research, educators remain without consensus about what is most important-phonics instruction or a focus on comprehension.

Another current topic of discussion is the part knowledge plays in learning to read. While the importance of knowledge has been clear for over 40 years (see Cervetti & Wright, in press), current curriculum conversations have included demands to "build a body of knowledge." In this discussion, often only one way to build that knowledge is acknowledged: using connected text sets around specific topics. Research tells us, however, that there are many ways to build a body of knowledge and connected text sets is only one.

Revisiting and Rethinking the "Fab Five"

Let's start by revisiting the "fab five." The National Reading Panel (NRP) report in 2000 identified the "fab five" of reading. The NRP identified instruction in the following five elements as necessary for proficient reading:

Unfortunately, the NRP did not prioritize the elements. While each of the five is essential, they are not equal. Comprehension is always the ultimate goal of reading and all of the other elements are in service of making meaning from text. Perhaps, instead, the "fab five" should read more like this:

Phonics + Phonological Awareness + Fluency + Vocabulary → Comprehension

Explicit and systematic instruction in decoding (phonics, phonological awareness, and fluency) and vocabulary building are critical in achieving comprehension. Inherently misunderstood in the NRP report is that the purpose of instruction in phonological awareness, phonics, and fluency is to ensure that these processes become so automatic, students will not need to devote significant amounts of cognitive energy to them while reading. This automaticity leaves the cognitive energy for making meaning from the text.

While reading the words on the page has been a goal of early elementary instruction for some time, the role of vocabulary and comprehension has often been minimized in the early grades. Teachers are often told to teach kindergarten, first-, and second-grade students to "learn to read," and after third grade, students "read to learn." In fact, research tells us that children should be reading to learn from the very beginning of their school career (Houck & Ross, 2012). Building knowledge and an expansive and rich vocabulary are critical elements of comprehending text.

Our goal in this blog series is to wade through the soundbites, Tweets, and blog posts, and outline the settled science of teaching reading. While the arguments rage on, students are impacted (both negatively and positively) and teachers are often left unsure as to how best to teach. We hope to shed light on the issues and offer guidance and instructional considerations-all based on research. While we certainly won't address all the issues, we will tackle two topics in particular that have surfaced recently-explicit and systematic phonics instruction and building a body of knowledge.

How have you been thinking about the current debates in reading instruction? What is the conversation like in your district or school? Our next installment, Part 2, tackles explicit and systematic instruction in decoding. We look forward to continuing the conversation with you!
The full article, "The Settled Science of Teaching Reading," was written by Marisa Ramirez Stukey, Gina Fugnitto, Valerie Fraser, and Isabel Sawyer.
References
Castles, A., Rastle, K., & Nation, K. (2018). Ending the reading wars: Reading acquisition from novice to expert. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 19, 5-51.

Cervetti, G.N. & Wright, T.S. (in press). The role of knowledge in understanding and learning from text. In E.B. Moje, P. Afflerbach, P. Enciso & N.K. Lesaux (Eds.), Handbook of Reading Research (Vol. 5). New York, NY: Routledge.

Houck, B. D. & Ross, K. (2012). Dismantling the myth of learning to read and reading to learn. ASCD Express, 7(11). Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/ascd-express/vol7/711-houck.aspx.

National Reading Panel. (2000) Report of the National Reading Panel-Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction. Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

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The Settled Science of Teaching Reading - Part 1 | Center for the Collaborative Classroom

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Educators have been discussing the "right" way to teach reading for decades. While "balance" was called for nearly 20 years ago, dissension has reared its head again and arguments are breaking out among educators on social media. At the heart of the disagreement is the dichotomy between phonics instruction (the explicit teaching of letters and ...

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Educators have been discussing the "right" way to teach reading for decades. While "balance" was called for nearly 20 years ago, dissension has reared its head again and arguments are breaking out among educators on social media. At the heart of the disagreement is the dichotomy between phonics instruction (the explicit teaching of letters and sounds) and a whole language approach (a focus on discovery and making meaning). While "whole language" as a term is not often used now, there are many who believe the term "balanced literacy" is simply a substitute for whole language.

In spite of the current discussions, the science on this instructional issue is settled. Castles, Rastle, & Nation (2018) lay out that there is a clear progression to effective literacy instruction. First and foremost, children need to understand the principles of spelling-sound correspondences and to solidify a store of high-frequency words to read words and phrases fluently. Most children need explicit teaching to build this knowledge. After decoding and high-frequency words are established, more attention can be devoted to comprehension with a focus on making meaning. Castles et al. (2018) offer a logical and research-based model. In spite of this research, educators remain without consensus about what is most important-phonics instruction or a focus on comprehension.

Another current topic of discussion is the part knowledge plays in learning to read. While the importance of knowledge has been clear for over 40 years (see Cervetti & Wright, in press), current curriculum conversations have included demands to "build a body of knowledge." In this discussion, often only one way to build that knowledge is acknowledged: using connected text sets around specific topics. Research tells us, however, that there are many ways to build a body of knowledge and connected text sets is only one.

Revisiting and Rethinking the "Fab Five"

Let's start by revisiting the "fab five." The National Reading Panel (NRP) report in 2000 identified the "fab five" of reading. The NRP identified instruction in the following five elements as necessary for proficient reading:

Unfortunately, the NRP did not prioritize the elements. While each of the five is essential, they are not equal. Comprehension is always the ultimate goal of reading and all of the other elements are in service of making meaning from text. Perhaps, instead, the "fab five" should read more like this:

Phonics + Phonological Awareness + Fluency + Vocabulary → Comprehension

Explicit and systematic instruction in decoding (phonics, phonological awareness, and fluency) and vocabulary building are critical in achieving comprehension. Inherently misunderstood in the NRP report is that the purpose of instruction in phonological awareness, phonics, and fluency is to ensure that these processes become so automatic, students will not need to devote significant amounts of cognitive energy to them while reading. This automaticity leaves the cognitive energy for making meaning from the text.

While reading the words on the page has been a goal of early elementary instruction for some time, the role of vocabulary and comprehension has often been minimized in the early grades. Teachers are often told to teach kindergarten, first-, and second-grade students to "learn to read," and after third grade, students "read to learn." In fact, research tells us that children should be reading to learn from the very beginning of their school career (Houck & Ross, 2012). Building knowledge and an expansive and rich vocabulary are critical elements of comprehending text.

Our goal in this blog series is to wade through the soundbites, Tweets, and blog posts, and outline the settled science of teaching reading. While the arguments rage on, students are impacted (both negatively and positively) and teachers are often left unsure as to how best to teach. We hope to shed light on the issues and offer guidance and instructional considerations-all based on research. While we certainly won't address all the issues, we will tackle two topics in particular that have surfaced recently-explicit and systematic phonics instruction and building a body of knowledge.

How have you been thinking about the current debates in reading instruction? What is the conversation like in your district or school? Our next installment, Part 2, tackles explicit and systematic instruction in decoding. We look forward to continuing the conversation with you!
The full article, "The Settled Science of Teaching Reading," was written by Marisa Ramirez Stukey, Gina Fugnitto, Valerie Fraser, and Isabel Sawyer.
References
Castles, A., Rastle, K., & Nation, K. (2018). Ending the reading wars: Reading acquisition from novice to expert. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 19, 5-51.

Cervetti, G.N. & Wright, T.S. (in press). The role of knowledge in understanding and learning from text. In E.B. Moje, P. Afflerbach, P. Enciso & N.K. Lesaux (Eds.), Handbook of Reading Research (Vol. 5). New York, NY: Routledge.

Houck, B. D. & Ross, K. (2012). Dismantling the myth of learning to read and reading to learn. ASCD Express, 7(11). Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/ascd-express/vol7/711-houck.aspx.

National Reading Panel. (2000) Report of the National Reading Panel-Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction. Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

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The Settled Science of Teaching Reading - Part 1 | Center for the Collaborative Classroom

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Educators have been discussing the "right" way to teach reading for decades. While "balance" was called for nearly 20 years ago, dissension has reared its head again and arguments are breaking out among educators on social media. At the heart of the disagreement is the dichotomy between phonics instruction (the explicit teaching of letters and ...

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Common Core Learning Standards for Mathematics

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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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The state's reliance on cognitive science explains why.

Credit... Celia Krampien

Ms. Hanford is the senior education correspondent for APM Reports.

"Thank God for Mississippi."

That's a phrase people would use when national education rankings came out because no matter how poorly your state performed, you could be sure things were worse in Mississippi.

Not anymore. New results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a standardized test given every two years to measure fourth- and eighth-grade achievement in reading and math, show that Mississippi made more progress than any other state.

The state's performance in reading was especially notable. Mississippi was the only state in the nation to post significant gains on the fourth-grade reading test. Fourth graders in Mississippi are now on par with the national average, reading as well or better than pupils in California, Texas, Michigan and 18 other states.

What's up in Mississippi? There's no way to know for sure what causes increases in test scores, but Mississippi has been doing something notable: making sure all of its teachers understand the science of reading.

Yes, there is a science to how people read. For the past several decades, in labs and classrooms all over the world, scientists have been studying how skilled reading works, what children need to learn to become skilled readers, and what's going on when students struggle. Reading is probably the most studied aspect of human learning.

But a lot of teachers don't know this science. In 2013, legislators in Mississippi provided funding to start training the state's teachers in the science of reading.

To understand what the science says, a good place to start is with something called the "simple view of reading." It's a model that was first proposed by researchers in 1986 to clarify the role of decoding in reading comprehension. Everyone agrees the goal of reading is to comprehend text, but back in the 1980s there was a big fight going on over whether children should be taught how to decode words - in other words, phonics.

The simple view says that reading comprehension is the product of two things. One is your ability to decode words: Can you identify the word a string of letters represents? For example, you see the letter string "l-a-s-s" and you are able to sound it out and say the word.

You may have no idea what "lass" means. This is where language comprehension comes in. Language comprehension is your ability to understand spoken language. So, when someone says to you, "Let's have all the lads and lasses line up at the door," you know that's what all the boys and girls are supposed to do.

The simple view is an equation that looks like this:
decoding ability x language comprehension = reading comprehension
Notice that reading comprehension is the product of decoding ability and language comprehension; it's not the sum. In other words, if you have good language comprehension skills but zero decoding skills, your reading comprehension will be zero, because zero times anything is zero. The simple view also says that if you have good decoding skills but poor language comprehension skills, your reading comprehension isn't going to be very good either.

The simple view model was proposed more than 30 years ago and has been confirmed over and over again by research. But a study in Mississippi several years ago showed that teachers were not being trained to use this model and that many professors and deans in colleges of education had never even heard of it. Now, through workshops and coaching paid for by state taxpayers, teachers in Mississippi are learning about the simple view and other key takeaways from the science of reading.

The simple view is critical for understanding how children learn to read. Most children entering school have very little decoding skill. They know the meaning of lots of words, but they don't know how to decode those words. If the goal is to get to reading comprehension, children have to learn how to decode. That's why people who know the science of reading call for an emphasis on phonics instruction in the early grades.

Now, the simple view clearly shows that focusing only on decoding would be a mistake because that's only half the equation. Reading instruction has to include language comprehension, too. This means lessons and activities that expand children's oral vocabularies and knowledge, so they know the meaning of the words they can decode.

In my reporting on the debates about reading, I've found there's a lot of confusion in schools about the role of decoding in learning how to read. Teachers want their students to love reading, and phonics has a reputation for being rote and boring.

So, reading instruction tends to begin with having children focus on making meaning from text while giving short shrift to helping them develop the skills involved in reading words. Some children develop good word reading skills anyway. Research suggests that about 40 percent of children will learn to read no matter how inadequate the instruction.

What about the other 60 percent? The lack of skills instruction can be a disaster for them, especially for pupils from low-income families. When children from higher-income homes struggle to read, their parents will often pay for tutoring or specialized private school. But children from poor families tend to have no backup if schools don't teach them how to read words.

And while children from poor families often enter school at a disadvantage when it comes to language comprehension, if they're taught how to decode they've just been given their best shot at catching up because now they have the means to gain knowledge and expand their vocabulary through reading.

For years, everyone assumed Mississippi was at the bottom in reading because it was the poorest state in the nation. Mississippi is still the poorest state, but fourth graders there now read at the national average. While every other state's fourth graders made no significant progress in reading on this year's test, or lost ground, Mississippi's fourth-grade reading scores are up by 10 points since 2013, when the state began the effort to train its teachers in the science of reading. Correlation isn't causation, but Mississippi has made a huge investment in helping teachers learn the science behind reading.

And when children are taught in ways that line up with the science, they can learn.

Emily Hanford (@ehanford) is the senior education correspondent for APM Reports and the producer of several podcasts and articles about the science of reading.
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Opinion | There Is a Right Way to Teach Reading, and Mississippi Knows It (Published 2019)

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The state's reliance on cognitive science explains why. Ms. Hanford is the senior education correspondent for APM Reports. "Thank God for Mississippi." That's a phrase people would use when national education rankings came out because no matter how poorly your state performed, you could be sure things were worse in Mississippi.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goodman concluded that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scientists take on three cueing

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

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

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

They couldn't have been more wrong.

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

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

Other studies revealed further problems with the cueing theory: 15

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

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

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

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

But cueing is still alive and well in schools.

Picture Power!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'That is not reading'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of Margaret Goldberg, Oakland Unified School District

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

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

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

And she started to wonder why not.

Balanced Literacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mapping the words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'So what if they use the picture?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I am a farm here," Belinda read.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'My science is different'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He dismissed my question.

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

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

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

"My science is different," Goodman said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Most Americans have likely never heard of Lucy Calkins, but their children's teachers probably have. Calkins, a professor of education at Columbia University, has created one of the nation's most widely used reading instruction programs, and, according to a groundbreaking new report, the program is deeply flawed.

Calkins' Units of Study series, which thousands of American teachers are using to teach children to read, "would be unlikely to lead to literacy success for all of America's public schoolchildren," the report concluded. "Children who arrive at school already reading or primed to read ... may integrate seamlessly into the routines of the Units of Study model and maintain a successful reading trajectory. However, children who need additional practice opportunities in a specific area of reading or language development likely would not."

Listen to the latest episode of the Educate podcast to hear reviewers talk about the report's findings.

The report was released by the nonprofit educational consulting group Student Achievement Partners (SAP). The group asked prominent reading researchers to review Calkins' Units of Study, more commonly known as "reading workshop." It appears to be the first time a group of reading researchers has reviewed a curriculum and determined whether the lessons reflect more than 40 years of scientific research on how reading skill develops.

"As far as I know, [this review] is new and different and necessary," said Sue Pimentel, a founding partner of SAP.

The United States has a serious reading problem. Recent test scores show more than a third of the nation's fourth-graders can't read at a basic level. That's despite the fact that scientists have discovered so much about how the brain learns to read and what children need to be taught. "I think there's frustration out there," Pimentel said. "It was time to take a close look. Is there a mismatch happening between what the research is saying and what publishers are producing?"

Calkins' Units of Study is the third most widely used set of core materials to teach reading, according to a survey by Education Week. But, as APM Reports has shown, the Units of Study lessons and materials frequently assert an idea about how people read that has been proven wrong by cognitive scientists. The idea, known as three cueing, encourages children to look at pictures and use contextual clues to identify words as they are reading. Scientific research shows that skilled readers do not use cues to read words and that instructing children to use these cues teaches them the habits of struggling readers.

The SAP reviewers identified cueing as a major flaw in Calkins' program.

"The program strongly recommends use of the three-cueing system as a valid procedure for assessing and diagnosing a student's reading needs," noted David Paige, an associate professor at Bellarmine University and one of seven researchers who conducted the review. "This is in direct opposition to an enormous body of settled research and even runs contrary to the Units of Study foundational skills materials that support the teaching of phonics."

In 2018, Calkins developed a Units of Study for teaching phonics. Before that, her instructional materials had largely ignored phonics.

Calkins did not respond to an interview request from APM Reports. She sent a statement through her publisher, Heinemann, in which she said that she and her team will "learn from this review as we have learned from everything else."

Research shows that beginning readers who focus on letter-sound relationships increase activity in the area of the brain best wired for reading and that phonics instruction improves children's reading success.

Paige reviewed the new phonics curriculum and other Units of Study materials and found they don't provide children with the kind of explicit instruction and practice time that research has shown is needed for all students to develop good reading skills. "The materials are contradictory," Paige said in an interview. "The materials do talk about phonics, they do teach some phonics, but then it's all just contradicted with the infusion of this [cueing] stuff throughout the curriculum."

In December, Calkins denied that her method for teaching reading is based on the cueing system. But reviewers found numerous instances of it in her curriculum materials. "The three-cueing system is baked into this program," said reviewer Claude Goldenberg, an emeritus professor at Stanford University.

Goldenberg called Calkins "dishonest" for denying that she advises teachers to use a cueing approach. "Anyone who uses her program is using [cueing], whether they call it that or they call it something else," he said.

Reviewers were also asked to look at how well Calkins' materials cover other essential aspects of reading proficiency such as building vocabulary and knowledge. Calkins has long maintained that her approach supports the development of oral language and reading comprehension skills.

However, the reviewers found her materials lacking in these areas too.

Reviewers concluded that the program's approach to knowledge-building and language development is "too unsystematic to ensure that all students would encounter adequate challenge or receive sufficient supports for successful progress, particularly in grades K-2."

For students who come from homes where they're exposed to sophisticated oral language and who acquire knowledge from well-educated parents, the lack of explicit instruction in these areas might not be a problem. But other students may be left behind, according to reviewer Marilyn Adams, a prominent reading researcher who is a visiting scholar at Brown University. "Students who enter school having had fewer opportunities to grow academic knowledge and vocabulary depend critically on such opportunities to catch up and move forward," Adams wrote.

And even students who develop vocabulary and knowledge at home could be learning more than what Units of Study provides. "All students are short-changed when knowledge-building opportunities are missed," Adams wrote.

Reviewer Tim Shanahan, an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, agreed. "One suspects that students who are already on or above grade level in reading may do fine [in Units of Study] ... though they may not learn as much as they possibly could."

Reviewers did have positive things to say about Units of Study. They noted that the lessons are engaging and "beautifully crafted," and that the materials are organized "above all on the value of loving to read and the encouragement of reading and writing as lifelong habits."

"That's really important," Paige said. "Kids have to see a value in being able to read, and if they don't see a value, then they learn it as just something that they can do."

Research shows that motivation matters. But in interviews, reviewers noted that an assumption that seems to underlie Units of Study is that if children are motivated to read, they will learn how to do it. This doesn't align with scientific evidence that shows reading skill does not develop naturally through exposure to text. Children have to learn how written language works, and for most children, this requires explicit instruction.

In her statement, Calkins cited an analysis by her organization at Columbia, the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, that showed students in New York City schools that have been using her materials and professional development for an average of 10 years outperformed students in other New York City Schools by 30 percentage points on the 2019 state reading test. She declined, through a representative, to provide a list of those schools.

It's important to note that curriculum is only one part of what leads to better reading outcomes for students, and that it's unlikely any one curriculum would lead to success for all students. "The most important tool in the classroom is a really knowledgeable teacher," Paige said.

But he noted that one of his concerns after reviewing Units of Study is that teachers may be picking up from the curriculum materials incorrect ideas about how skilled reading develops.

"Teachers have not received the best training in how to teach reading," Paige said. As a result, when they get into the classroom, "they really don't understand what to do. So they quite often rely on a curriculum to guide them. And unfortunately, so much of [ Units of Study] is flawed."

Listen to Emily Hanford and Stephen Smith discuss these events and more in the latest episode of Educate.
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Experts say widely used reading curriculum is failing kids

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Most Americans have likely never heard of Lucy Calkins, but their children's teachers probably have. Calkins, a professor of education at Columbia University, has created one of the nation's most widely used reading instruction programs, and, according to a groundbreaking new report, the program is deeply flawed.

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Beth Rivera felt like a rock star. She was interviewing for a teaching position in Union County Public Schools, where the district was focused on a "balanced literacy" approach to teaching young kids to read.

Rivera was fresh off a master's degree in literacy from the Teachers College at Columbia University, where her professor was Lucy Calkins, whom Rivera calls the queen of balanced literacy.

"My school district was nothing short of thrilled to have a real-life, in-the-flesh Teachers College reading and writing expert in their midst," Rivera said. "What a boost to my self-esteem."

The balanced literacy approach combines a little language instruction with whole-group, small-group and independent reading exploration. While there isn't one balanced literacy method, a common example involves demonstrating three ways of cueing readers to guess words through meaning, syntactical and visual information. Calkins' curriculum is widely used throughout the nation, and, as of last year, balanced literacy instruction was in a majority of North Carolina school districts.

Rivera was overjoyed, and more than a little surprised, when the district asked her to go into other grade-level classrooms to model balanced literacy instruction for her peers.

But the joy didn't last long.

She noticed some students in her class every year that she couldn't reach. The reading light bulb wasn't turning on for them, and she couldn't figure out why. Although puzzled, she pressed forward. A few years later, the problem took root in her own home when her son, Brendan, started coming home talking about his "bad brain."

"Mommy, my brain just doesn't do what I want it to," he told her.

After a mini-lesson from the teacher in his class, students would return to their desks to read by themselves. Brendan would just sit there.

"He had no idea what he was supposed to do," she said.

The school said he was young. Give him time. Even her husband thought he'd catch up eventually. But Rivera wasn't satisfied.

"As a teacher, I was seeing signs I couldn't ignore," she said. "He'd recognize the word 'what' on page 2 of his book, and then that same word would appear on page 6 and he'd tell me he didn't know that word."

One day, the word "flashlight" came up. Brendan said he didn't know that word. Rivera looked at him and, reaching for her training in balanced literacy, started prompting him to guess based on pictures and the context of the story. But he was stumped.

"I realized that I had spent nearly $40,000 on a piece of paper that declared that I was a master of children's literacy," she said. "How am I a master if I can't help my own son? I started to question everything."

The questions led Rivera to the science of reading. This is a body of research from psychologists, linguists, and neuroscientists - all dating back more than 30 years and detailing how cognitive science says kids learn to read. It led her to the conclusion that balanced literacy is not right for many students and that an explicit, systematic approach with a phonics-foundation could work for nearly everyone.

She also came across a 2018 audio documentary by a journalist named Emily Hanford, whose work has made the science of reading accessible. Her reporting has prompted a resurgence of support behind using scientifically proven methods to teach literacy - including in North Carolina, where balanced literacy dominates while reading scores disappoint.

A growing coalition of North Carolina leaders wants to reform literacy instruction to align with the science of reading. A movement, which started as whispers when reporting for this story began in March, is growing louder through discussions and action plans shared at the General Assembly, State Board of Education, and the Department of Public Instruction.

Proponents say the right instructional practices will help more North Carolina children learn how to read and also turn around the Read to Achieve law, which has failed to produce improvement despite its $150 million price tag.

"We're moving toward that science, and you'll see it in our budget requests for the short session" in 2020, State Board member JB Buxton said. "You're going to see requests around reading coaches that the state will hire. You're going to see requests for appropriations that would allow us to do training for teachers, principals, and assistant principals on the science of reading. We're going to need some support from the General Assembly when it comes to resources that go beyond what's in the Read To Achieve, but given their strong support for that, we're going to be able to build a strong case."

This group of education leaders back their case with a carefully crafted State Board literacy framework and cross-divisional DPI steering committee, both of which took shape and sharpened in focus over the several months EdNC reported this story. And that framework cuts ties with ineffective reading strategies and moves toward both the science of reading and comprehensive policies implemented by states that built successful literacy reform - like Mississippi.

Does instruction based on the science of reading actually work?

Read to Achieve was passed in North Carolina in 2012. Mississippi's reading law, the Literacy-Based Promotion Act, was passed one year later. But while North Carolina's reading scores are stuck, Mississippi's are rising. A lot.

Since October, Mississippi has garnered headlines for making more progress than any other state on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. In fact, Mississippi was the only state to show significant gains in fourth-grade reading scores.

And Mississippi is doing it with much less money than North Carolina. In seven years, Mississippi has spent less than $100 million under the law. Reading proficiency began showing marked improvement after its second year - just $24 million into the experiment.

In 2015, 92% of third graders passed the state's reading exam. In 2016, the state significantly raised its standards for a passing grade. Still, last year nearly 83% passed.

In the first year of North Carolina's Read to Achieve legislation, the passing rate on third-grade reading exams was 60.2%. Last year, it was 55.9%. A report produced by N.C. State University's Friday Institute showed that in some grades the reading scores were stagnant, while in other grades they were falling.

What makes Mississippi's law so much more effective? Kymyona Burk points to the science of reading, and she should know. Mississippi's rise happened under Burk's leadership as director of literacy at Mississippi's Department of Education.

"The thing about our law is that it was specific enough to name the science of reading," she said. "There are states that passed their law and then they waited, in effect, for it to have any teeth in it. But what happened to the money that you all pumped into it?"

The Mississippi law gave its Department of Education the ability to train teachers in programs aligned with the science of reading and to provide literacy coaches, hired by the state, to sit in residence at schools for an entire year.

"When people ask me what programs did we use, I tell them we invest in people - not programs," Burk said. "When you increase their knowledge about the science of reading and what it takes to teach reading to children, then they begin to adopt programs aligned with that."

The state provided training, using a significant portion of the budget. Mississippi provided early literacy professional development to teachers, principals, and ed prep professors using the science-based Language Essentials for Teaching Reading and Spelling (LETRS) program designed by Louisa Moats and Carol Tolman. Since 2014, more than 14,000 educators have received LETRS professional development.

"And then you go back to the coaches who are on site and say, 'OK, now that you've had this LETRS training, let's transfer that into practice with your students,'" Burk said.

The state hired 22 coaches that first year, training them in science-aligned practices, observing their ability to work with others, and sending them into the lowest-performing schools. That was seven years ago. Now, the number of state-hired literacy coaches is 82.

The ability to make decisions at the state level, Burk said, was crucial. And she credits other state leaders for supporting her. She was in constant contact with her state's superintendent, as well as the Republican governor, Phil Bryant.

"And to say I'm a Democrat - I'm a black girl leading literacy in Mississippi, OK," Burk said through a laugh. "But this isn't a partisan issue. To have a sit-down with the governor several times, for him to keep asking me what do I need. We worked together, and they empowered us."

Beyond the governor, Burk pointed to the department's chief academic officer - whom she called an idea fairy who made all her ideas come true. She also said support from her state superintendent "was everything."

In contrast, unity seems fractured around Read to Achieve among North Carolina's officials - between the State Board and Superintendent of Public Instruction Mark Johnson, specifically. Just last week, Johnson accused the State Board of "aggressively" undermining Read to Achieve's directives. He sent a memorandum calling out the board for promoting 70,000 students who hadn't passed third-grade reading exams to fourth grade.

"The NC State Board of Education was tasked with implementing the Read to Achieve legislation," he wrote. "Read to Achieve specifically directed the State Board of Education to end social promotion of 3rd graders - promoting students from one grade level to the next on the basis of age rather than academic ability. Sadly, the State Board's policy aggressively avoided that directive."

Burk agrees that holding to performance-based promotion helped Mississippi's students, but she doesn't think that's the main reason reading scores have skyrocketed.

"If you're going to hold them back, we had to make sure we had instruction in place that would help them learn to read," she said.

And that assurance, she says, lies in the reading science.

Why does the science behind reading matter?

For more than a century, researchers have argued over how people learn to read. Most of the disagreement has centered on children figuring out how to decipher words on a page.

Phonics was popular for decades. The approach teaches children that words are made up of parts and focuses on how different letters and combinations of letters connect to the speech sounds in words. Phonics was tagged with a reputation for being mechanical and boring, though, and another theory - called whole language - gained popularity.

People soak up spoken language like a sponge from the time they are babies. We learn to talk through exposure to conversations. Whole language assumed that reading would work the same way. So if children are exposed to good books, kids should pick up reading on their own. It was designed to foster a love for reading and encourage kids to reach for the meaning of passages rather than focusing on words.

But phonics proponents - and the scientific research - said that reading is not natural. Our brains are not wired to read. We have to be taught to decode words. In the 1990s, the debate over the best approach became intense. One article referred to it as the Reading Wars.

Congress convened a national reading panel in 2000 to study the best ways to teach reading. That panel concluded that there was a lot of science to back up an approach emphasizing word decoding, and none validating whole language.

In response, the whole language community tried to move toward middle ground. They called the new approach "balanced literacy." The idea was to introduce a little bit of phonics instruction to the whole language approach, but not so much that it would bore kids or distract from finding meaning and connection.

"In balanced literacy, phonics is treated a bit like salt on a meal," Hanford says in her audio documentary, , "A little here and there, but not too much, because it could be bad for you."

In April, EdNC got a first-hand look at a balanced literacy instruction.

A first-grade teacher began her reading period with a mini-lesson for the entire class. She used an overhead projector and let students "walk the book" - looking at all of the pictures and guessing what was happening in the story. Next, they read the book together, page-by-page. On each page, they returned to the picture first and then tackled the sentences.

The students came against the sentence, Everything outside is cold in winter.

"Would I see snow in the summertime?" the teacher asked before a chorus of no.

"When would I usually see snow? What time of year?"

"Winter," a young girl said.

"Let's do a double check on that word," the teacher said. "What does 'winter' start with?" She paused while the kids connected "winter" with the letter "w," then said the letter aloud in a chorus.

The teacher then broke up the word and highlighted the sounds. "I also see another part of the word that I know," she said. "I'm going to show you. What does -er say?" The students answered, and the teacher then covered the -ter, asking, "What word do you see?" The students shouted, "Win!"

The students seemed engaged and happy. And teachers at the school spoke excitedly about the their Calkins-based approach, which they implemented years ago in hopes of providing the best instruction for their kids. But this was the same approach that wouldn't work for Rivera's son, Brendan, or for the students each year she couldn't reach.

"What happens if they come across reading where there aren't any pictures, or the pictures don't cue them on a word they are struggling with?" Rivera asked. "What if that happens on a reading exam?"

Tara Galloway is the director of K-3 literacy at DPI. Her arrival a year ago marked a major shift toward instruction using the science of reading.

"I saw going into the classrooms that balanced literacy was rampant in North Carolina," said Galloway, who was exposed to the science of reading in ed prep and spent 20 years using explicit instruction as a special education teacher. "They were teaching them to look at the pictures and teaching them to use cues that were ineffective. I said, 'We need to do something about this.'"

What balanced literacy left out from its phonics instruction, it turns out, is pretty important stuff.

In a recent Education Week article, reporters Sarah Schwartz and Sarah Sparks explain it well: "Written language is a code. Certain combinations of letters predictably represent certain sounds. And for the last few decades, the research has been clear: Teaching young kids how to crack the code-teaching systematic phonics-is the most reliable way to make sure that they learn how to read words."

Hanford, who bases her reporting on poring through more than 3,000 pages of research and studies and hundreds of hours talking to experts in literacy, followed Hard Words with this year's audio documentary, At a Loss for Words. In it, she talks about a literacy model published in 1986 called the Simple View of Reading. It asked questions like: How does reading comprehension happen? And what's the role of phonics and decoding in all of that?

"The Simple View of Reading is a model that is now been backed up by lots and lots more research," Hanford said. "It has a solid scientific base behind it and it essentially says, reading comprehension is the product of your language comprehension - the words you know how to say, the words you can hear - and your decoding ability."

Product. As in: Language Comprehension x Decoding Ability = Reading Comprehension. That means that a child who knows how to decode words won't become a skilled reader without exposure to a lot of books. But it also means that a child who is exposed to a lot of words and books still won't be a skilled reader unless someone teaches that child how to decode words.

It's a reminder that when experts talk about the science of reading, they're not talking about phonics only. They're talking about phonics - phonological and phonemic awareness - as a foundation, in addition to exposure to reading.

Most children begin their pursuit of reading by learning the alphabet. But while English words are made up of combinations of the 26 letters, decoding words has much more to do with something called phonemes - units of sound. There are 44 phonemes in the English language. Some words, like "a" or "oh," have only one phoneme. Others, like check (ch-e-ck) have three. If you visit the classroom of someone teaching reading according to the scientific research, you're more likely to find a "sound wall" displaying all the phonemes than a poster of the alphabet.

Learning how letters make up sounds, how those sounds make up words, and how to manipulate those sounds to form and read words is a gateway into learning to read. It's decoding. And that foundation can help readers then thrive through the vast exposure to books.

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

"Our brains weren't meant to do this, but when you become a skilled reader, you get really, really good at it. So one thing I think that teachers really need to understand about all this is that the goal is automatic recognition of words, but we do not recognize them as wholes. When you and I are reading words, we are very quickly processing every single sound, every single letter in that word. So that is a hallmark of being a good reader."

This is a process called orthographic mapping. And it could hold the key to producing better readers and, by extension, better reading scores in North Carolina.

Growing consensus in North Carolina around science of reading

Early this year, Buxton - the State Board member - started drafting a framework for literacy reform modeled after the Mississippi law. It was grounded in discussions with members of the State Board, presentations to that board, recommendations from literacy experts, what the data were showing, and consultation with DPI - particularly through Galloway.

The participants reached a consensus on nine points for the framework - which is now a State Board document called Guiding Collaborative Framework for Action on Early Reading.

On the surface, things still seemed status quo on the reading front. Quietly, though, the seeds of change were being planted and a coalition for change was forming around a common mission.

"We had to stop putting hurdles in front of kids or teaching them ways to slowly get over the hurdles," Galloway said. "We need to just start moving the hurdles out of the way. Teaching reading based on the science of reading does that."

About this time, in the spring, Buxton began working with Sen. Phil Berger, the architect of Read to Achieve, on revisions to the law and adding the "teeth" that Burk referred to earlier. It was meant to be the legislation that would align North Carolina with the reading science, expert consensus, and data.

Buxton was a high school teacher and has spent many years working in politics and education policy. Reading was always a piece of his work, but he says it was never a centerpiece agenda item the way it is now. His deep dive into science-backed literacy instruction happened this past year.

As he learned about the science, and the reforms in other states, he began putting that knowledge into work. Sen. Berger filed the legislation in August. It was stamped Senate Bill 438.

Buxton was impressed with the consultants Berger and his team brought in for help - including literacy expert Barbara Foorman, former commissioner of the National Center for Education Research at a U.S. Department of Education institute. Foorman had been invited to open North Carolina's K-3 Literacy Conference and Reading Summit in March.

"And I realized that we were all talking about the same things," Buxton said. "And we weren't having disagreements about what the high-leverage focus areas needed to be."

SB 438 was ratified in August and presented to Gov. Roy Cooper. Nine days after receiving it, though, Cooper vetoed it.

Buxton doesn't believe Gov. Cooper had a problem with the substance of the proposed legislation. The issue was whether DPI had the bandwidth to handle the implementation. This was only weeks after scrutiny over DPI's choice of Istation as the reading assessment vendor under Read to Achieve erupted.

"There was a real concern that we had a major, new set of revisions in the Read to Achieve law, a lot of which would have to be handled by the department and, at least from what I was hearing, a real concern about the capacity of the department to do it well," Buxton said. "I understood those concerns. I don't think it was disagreement by the governor with some of the specific changes to the law."

If the veto was a setback, though, it was a momentary one. Leaders including Buxton, Galloway and Galloway's boss, Deputy State Superintendent David Stegall, pressed forward - determined to find another way to launch these strategies.

"I would have loved to have seen the legislation go through because it provides the changes we need to make it effective," Buxton said. "[The veto] certainly meant we were going to have to look at some different pathways to put some things in place. It would have been nice to have some provisions in the law that now we're going to have to think about how to do through Board policy and department and administrative action."

But even if it meant a longer road, Buxton says one of his main takeaways from working on the legislation is that North Carolina is in the midst of a moment - a moment we can look back on and say something special started here.

"Having spent a lot of years in public education in North Carolina, you see issues move when it's almost like an echo chamber," he said. "Where everybody's talking about the same thing and you see much more alignment when that happens. I'm bullish on this moment."

A framework for change in North Carolina

Over the years, and even at this moment, there are multiple literacy plans floating around the DPI building on Wilmington Street - some completed, some still in draft form. The one consulted most comes from the Read to Achieve law, but that hasn't produced much focus. The Friday Institute's report on Read to Achieve said it "appears to be 115 different pilots operating under a few common parameters."

Leaders calling for change want more structure and guidance to set teachers and students up for success.

"We've got to get to an agreement on how we're going to teach reading," said Eric Davis, chair of the State Board. "And then, how we're going to prepare teachers to teach. And, if we can get that done, we have to get agreement on what curriculum we're going to use. There's no really well-defined, research-based strategy now."

Buxton said that one thing the original Read to Achieve bill did not have "was adequate teacher supports. And that's what the new [vetoed] bill was moving towards, and we've got some additional pieces that we're going to be making the case for now as well."

That case will be made through the State Board's nine-point Guiding Collaborative Framework and a B-12 Steering Committee that Galloway has been quarterbacking. The steering committee has "cross-divisional/cross-area involvement" including five different directors at DPI.

Over the next several months, and perhaps years, Galloway will present updates, action plans and recommendations to the State Board - starting in January. The framework will guide state efforts across nine initiatives.
1. Develop a statewide definition of high-quality reading instruction.
This is the subject of Galloway's first report to the Board, to be presented in about four weeks. DPI held three regional stakeholder meetings to gather feedback on a working definition of high-quality reading instruction. They talked with administrators, advocacy groups, ed prep professors at universities, teachers, parents and state leaders. Prior to the January update at the State Board, DPI is requesting feedback from the public through a survey.

"You've got to be on the same page about what good reading instruction looks like to then define what your professional development is going to look like, what your teacher preparation is going to look like, all of it," Buxton said. "That's going to be in January."
2. Improve focus on reading instruction in teacher preparation programs.
The next priority will be executed by an early literacy task force chaired by Ann Clark, former Charlotte-Mecklenburg superintendent and board member for the Belk Foundation. The task force will hold its first meeting December 20. It aims to ensure ed prep programs are providing sufficient instruction, modeling and practice in three focus areas: the science of reading; the review and selection of high-quality reading curriculum; and in working with struggling readers with diverse learning needs.

Buxton said some of the recommendations for instructional programs that districts will use, such as LETRS, will come from this group.
3. Improve summer reading camp quality.
Summer reading camps were introduced under Read to Achieve to curb summer learning loss and provide students extra instruction. Galloway and one of her regional literacy consultants, Tonia Parrish, said the camps needed more support and guidance. Last year, Parish worked on improvements, such as providing camp hosts with online modules on science-of-reading practices. She is now working on making those modules more robust.
4. Provide reading coach supports in low-performing schools and districts.
This priority is about providing reading coaches in select schools, such as turnaround schools in the bottom 5% of state performance scores, who would be hired and managed by DPI (in partnership with local schools and districts). Priority actions will include developing a budget that supports hiring and training coaches.
5. Expand partnerships to support beginning teachers.
This initiative would expand efforts with universities in select regions of the state, focusing on support for beginning teachers in grades K-3. The types of supports would include intervention and coaching on reading, ensuring high-quality curriculum, and building sustainable systems of teacher development.
6. Ensure high-quality reading curriculum and instructional materials in elementary schools.
Even as Burk says Mississippi focused on teachers more than programs, she underscores the importance of the right curriculum and programs. This priority focuses on making sure that reading curriculum, instructional materials and supports are aligned with state standards and reading science.

It's critical, Buxton said, "because if you're a second-grade teacher, especially if you're new, you can't be asked to figure out a way to put a series of lessons together or a series of modules. You shouldn't be asked to look on the Internet, Pinterest, all these places to find good stuff. You need a high-quality curriculum that supports you in meeting these standards."

This initiative would develop a budget to provide resources for districts that need help buying curriculum and instructional materials, as well as for training and coaching.
7. Explore a statewide system of training in reading for teachers, principals and reading coaches on the science of reading.
Having the right curriculum and graduating new teachers trained in reading science won't help, Galloway said, without continued support. The B-12 Literacy Team and State Board are exploring a statewide system for training on the science of reading, high-quality curriculum and evidence-based interventions for principals, teachers, and reading coaches. It will also look at how a system of training would address non-native English speakers and consider culturally responsive approaches.

The North Carolina State Improvement Project (NC SIP) currently offers some training in the science of reading, and the priority is to build on that training.
8. Provide flexibility in state funding to support district action on reading.
This would provide districts with flexibility to take unused summer reading camp money and put it toward evidence-based supports such as reading coaches, reading tutors, high-quality reading curriculum, or professional development focused on the science of reading for K-3 teachers. Districts also could transfer funding between allotments for K-3 teachers, teacher assistants, and textbooks to support high-quality plans for reading.
9. Ensure access to high-quality PreK and strong early learning environments and transitions to kindergarten.
Under this priority, the state would look to support local planning for expanding access to high-quality Pre-K, support community partnerships and family engagement and focus on transitions to kindergarten.

High stakes riding on reform, from equity to basic human rights

"Literacy is a crucial part of the foundation of a thriving and prosperous community," said Kris Cox, who was a public school teacher before becoming executive director at READWS, or Read⋅Write⋅Spell in Winston-Salem. READWS is a nonprofit that tutors students and consults with schools on structured literacy - which is a term the International Dyslexia Association uses for reading approaches rooted in the science of reading.

"The right to read is a basic, fundamental human right," Cox said. "The perpetuation of illiteracy leads to heavy and often tragic consequences via lower earnings, poor health outcomes and higher rates of incarceration."

In other words, this is an equity issue.

As Rivera tells it, it's a matter of using reading instruction that reaches the most students - because not every family can afford to spend money outside of public schooling to learn the keys for unlocking reading. Nor should they need to, as Mississippi exemplifies. It's turning out the nation's best reading results on NAEP despite having the highest poverty rate of the 50 states.

After she devoured piles of research on the science of reading, she enrolled her son at a private school in Charlotte. There, she watched him go from a struggling to thriving reader. She was grateful, but her gratitude was clouded by regret and anger. She couldn't shake the thought of how many students she had been unable to reach through balanced literacy. And she was angry at her master's program, and particularly at Calkins - her advisor and instructor.

With hands shaking, she penned a note to Calkins asking why - why didn't Calkins ever tell her about the scientific research?

"I never heard anything back," she said.

Calkins did not grant an interview for this story, but she did respond by e-mail referencing a recent webinar that she did saying, "I think getting this right for the sake of kids is important." The webinar is hosted on Education Week's site but sponsored by Calkins's publisher, Heinemann. Calkins also posted an article this month, entitled " No One Gets to Own the Term 'The Science of Reading.'" It has since garnered a lot responses, such as this open letter, from those in the science of reading community.

Meanwhile, Rivera moved on from waiting to hear from her former advisor. And she was fed up with choosing between private school tuition and a public school that used balanced literacy. Her family moved to Upper Arlington, Ohio, where the district's reading curriculum is aligned with reading science.

"Today, my son knows more about the rules of the English language than most of the reading and writing teachers out there do," Rivera said. "He can tell you why we double the consonant in "babble." He can tell you why we learn how to divide words into their syllables, so you know what the vowel says and can then decode the word. He knows that the sound /k/ at the end of a word is always going to be spelled with a "ck," because "ck" comes at the end of a one-syllable word after a short vowel.

"These are the keys to our language. Brendan may not read as quickly or as fluently as his peers, but he can read. He can decode. He can encode. Everyone should have that opportunity."
This article originally attributed a quote to journalist Emily Hanford. The quote is now properly attributed to this Education Week article. This article originally contained the statement: "The B-12 Steering Committee will also be looking to find a more robust and ongoing training than NC SIP can offer." This information did not come from anyone on the B-12 Steering Committee.
Rupen Fofaria

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Can science knock down barriers to reading proficiency and rescue Read to Achieve?

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Most NC schools use balanced literacy. State leaders have a nine-point framework to adopt the science of reading and improve reading scores.

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How the Brain Learns to Read - Prof. Stanislas Dehaene

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How the Brain Learns to Read - Prof. Stanislas Dehaene

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How the Brain Learns to Read - Prof. Stanislas Dehaene

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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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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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"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

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"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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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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A love of reading starts with a solid foundation A love of reading starts with a solid foundation The Heggerty Way Bridge to Reading Our...

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Tools 4 Reading provides great resoures for your classroom such as Phoneme/Grapheme Card and Kid Lips.

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Where was Scarborough's Reading Rope back when I started teaching? After going through college as an education major in the 90s, the complexities of reading, including how one learns to read and comprehend text, were still baffling to me.

I began my teaching career in 1995, where I taught high school English and later moved to grade 8 language arts. For the most part, I thought I could tell whether my students were skilled readers or not. If they did struggle, the culprit was either fluency or comprehension, or so I thought.

During this time in education, formal assessments used to evaluate students for reading struggles or potential reading disabilities were not available unless one was an educational psychologist. And even then, the word dyslexia seemed foreign. Instead, our assessments were either informal, based on observations, or student work. So, could I say that my students were all skilled readers? Could I prove this with data supported by evidence-based assessments?

But then something happened: Scarborough's Reading Rope had lassoed the world of education by visually organizing the complexities of reading.

History of Scarborough's Reading Rope

This year marks the 20th anniversary of when Scarborough's Reading Rope was first published in the Handbook of Early Literacy Research written by Susan B. Neuman and David K. Dickinson. Since 1992, even before this Reading Rope was published, Dr. Hollis Scarborough, the creator, used this visual metaphor to explain to educators the reading processes that needed to co-occur when becoming a proficient reader.

Scarborough's Rope is divided into two strands. The lower strand, Word Recognition, consists of phonological awareness, decoding, and word recognition; when these skills are frequently practiced, automaticity, accuracy, and fluency are achieved. Meanwhile, the upper strand, Language Comprehension, is developing and integrating background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge. Together, with a great deal of practice time and explicit instruction, these two strands are woven into the outcome: a skilled reader who can fully comprehend a myriad of texts.

Though the Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) had concluded that if either oral language comprehension and/or word reading/decoding was missing, then reading comprehension could not be achieved. On the other hand, Scarborough's Rope (2001) expands this fundamental view of reading and lists explicitly what a proficient reader needs.

The Meaning Behind the Rope

In 2018, Dr. Hollis Scarborough completed a meta-analysis of 61 studies and identified that the top five "start-of-grade K" predictors, indicating reading proficiency in grade 2, were found in either the upper or lower strands of the Reading Rope.

My Personal Connection

Over the years, I have worked with my share of literacy curriculums. And although there is no perfect "teach my child to read" curriculum, many of these seemed to address either the Language Comprehension strand or the Word Recognition one. During my secondary literacy experiences, there was more focus on Language Comprehension (upper strand). Then, at the elementary level, the "basics" found in Word Recognition (lower strand) were taught.

My literacy perspective, along with many others in the education field, was incorrect as the above strands should not be seen as the rungs of a ladder where one climbs up or "masters" one step at a time. Since learning to read is not natural and takes years of practice, the above skills should not be taught in isolation or as separate entities. Instead, these individual strands, found in Scarborough's Rope, need to be taught concurrently.

Education in the Present

We now have an RTI process and curriculum-based measures (CBM) based on the science of reading research such as Dibels and Aimsweb. These measures align with the top five "start-of-grade K" predictors found in Scarborough's Reading Rope and help educators be proactive by identifying at-risk readers very early. To close the gap of a potential "at-risk" reader, teachers and specialists should choose the correct intervention based on formal assessments, CBM's, and teacher observations.

In conclusion, the more I study reading, the more I am convinced that learning to read is very similar to an orchestra successfully playing a music composition. Just as each instrument has a part to play in a song, reading also has its own set of tools that need to play together in harmony.

Resources

AIM Institute for Learning & Research: The Animated Reading Rope: https://institute.aimpa.org/resources/readingrope

IDA: The Science of Reading

IDA: Scarborough's Reading Rope: A Groundbreaking Infographic

Science of Teaching Reading: http://www.literacysanantonio.com/science-of-reading

Part 1: The Science of Reading Basics: The Reading Brain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWWCmuAEBB4

Part 2: The Science of Reading Basics: The Simple View of Reading https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtDEMHMRd8E

Part 3: The Science of Reading Basics: Reading Brain: Scarborough's Reading Rope https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR7GbAHntQ4

Pattan: Celebrating 20 Years of Scarborough's Rope (Video)
https://institute.aimpa.org/resources/readingrope https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWWCmuAEBB4
Written by Jennifer L. Padgett, M. Ed.

Jennifer is a Structured Literacy Specialist, K-12 in Mexico, Maine.

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The Orchestra of the Reading Rope Harmony - Orton-Gillingham Weekly

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Where was Scarborough's Reading Rope back when I started teaching? After going through college as an education major in the 90s, the complexities of reading, including how one learns to read and comprehend text, were still baffling to me.

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

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

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

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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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Awhile back, I posted an opinion piece calling for the explicit teaching of sentence comprehension. With schools aiming to expose kids to complex text, it would seem that such instruction would be de rigueur. Texts are often complex because they include complicated sentences and experience tells me that students often fail to grasp the meaning of individual sentences - undermining their ability to identify main ideas, make inferences, draw conclusions, or answer any of the other question types. Given that comprehension lessons tend to focus on "prior knowledge," vocab...

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Literacy Education | Shanahan on Literacy

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Awhile back, I posted an opinion piece calling for the explicit teaching of sentence comprehension. With schools aiming to expose kids to complex text, it would seem that such instruction would be de rigueur.

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

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https://www.themeasuredmom.com/category/podcast/

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