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What teachers can actually do in the classroom
Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia have passed laws or policies mandating that public schools ensure they are implementing the Science of Reading. One course of action is to require schools to choose from "core programs". A core reading program is a systematic approach that serves as a basis for teaching reading in all classrooms in a school; it may or may not be a commercial textbook series. The premise is that by implementing approved core programs with fidelity, schools will help more children become successful readers. But studies of the impact of core reading programs highlight flaws in this assumption. One study of comprehension instruction in the five most widely implemented core programs at the time found that:

The structure of the curricula is often incoherent so that students and teachers do not know how skills and strategies relate to one another or how acquiring these sets of skills leads to becoming a better reader... Core programs do not provide enough practice to ensure that any given skill will be learned... Finally, the core programs do not provide sufficient support or scaffolding so that students can learn to use these skills on their own (Dewitz et al., 2009).

Montessori teachers and school leaders are facing legislation and regulations which require them to adopt curriculum-centered rather than child-centered programs without clear evidence that this will improve children's reading performance. Core programs are typically structured by grade levels and come with expectations of how much time a teacher will spend on reading instruction. This impacts the culture of the multi-age classroom, the freedom of the 3-hour work period, and the potential for integrating reading and writing in the cultural curriculum.

Every Montessori teacher and school leader feels a heavy responsibility for teaching children to read. Yet in my work with schools and teachers, it is evident that they feel woefully underprepared for this task. It is beyond the scope of this article but the Montessori teacher preparation community would do well to better support reading instruction.

For schools, we must maintaining the integrity of a child-centered Montessori classroom while we ensure that children have every opportunity to become successful readers. Montessorians can do this by focusing on what we know about effective teachers of reading while being open to the research that may challenge us to think beyond our Montessori bubble. The large body of research on effective teachers of reading tells us that these teachers:

understand the development of reading

use classroom-based assessment tools

use what they learn to inform their instruction

have a deep understanding of the pedagogy of reading

create classrooms where literacy is embedded in all aspects of the curriculum

Development
Effective teachers of reading have a clear understanding of the well-documented continuum of reading development both for the on-track and off-track reader, and understand that children can go off-track at various points on the continuum from age 3 to 12. These teachers continually observe children to "mind the gap" between what the child can do and what the child should do next. They know when a child is off-track and proactively target specific instructional strategies and intervention to bring the child back on-track.
Assessment
Effective reading teachers of are not afraid of the word assessment. They enter the classroom every day wondering what they might need to learn about each child's use of reading strategies seeking opportunities for one-on-one interactions to confirm what they have observed.

Today's effective teachers of reading rely on a variety of assessment tools, including informal tests, interviews, observations, work samples, portfolios, and students' judgements of their own performance. Such assessment procedures when combined with teacher reflection provide teachers with a much more complete picture about their students reading and help them to make informed instructional decisions" (Blair, Rupley and Nichols, 2007).

These teachers don't just administer assessments because they are required to; they use classroom-based assessments to reflect on what a child is using and confusing leading to informed instructional decisions.
Pedagogy of reading
Skilled teachers of reading read research! They, or better yet their schools, subscribe to journals like such as Reading Teacher, The Reading Research Quarterly, or Reading League Journal. Just as Montessori teachers learn about various child development philosophies, exceptional reading teachers understand how arguments about reading instruction have developed over time. They appreciate that the " Simple View of Reading", first presented by Gough and Tunmer in 1986 and further developed in Scarborough's Reading Rope, expands our understanding of how children learn to read words. This view of reading emphasizes the role that strong decoding skills and knowledge of language (vocabulary, structure, background knowledge, literacy knowledge, and verbal reasoning) plays in learning to read.

This view can be interpreted to mean that we don't need to emphasize strategies to support children's comprehension. However, effective teachers of reading know that that there is a well-documented body of research demonstrating that strategy instruction in the context of reading increases children's vocabulary and their comprehension of more sophisticated text.

Schools where children learn to think critically and develop the higher order thinking skills of proficient readers have a "coherent curriculum across grades that gives priority to higher order thinking, whether text comprehension, argumentation, or reasoning and proof" (Au & Raphael, 2021).

Note, Au and Raphael are not saying that these schools have a "core program"-they have a "core curriculum ". You may be thinking we have that-the Montessori curriculum teachers learn in training! In fact, as one explores the teaching of reading one realizes that the Montessori curriculum is rich and coherent across some of the five essential strands identified by the National Reading Panel (phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension) and is quite frankly inconsistent in others; particularly supporting the child's development of reading comprehension. When I ask Montessori teachers which of the five strands the Montessori curriculum addresses, they almost always say phonics and vocabulary. Likewise, they identify phonemic awareness and comprehension as issues of concern, while fluency falls somewhere in between.

Montessori needs a model that encompasses a broader view of reading than the simple view if we are to reach the fullest potential for teaching reading in our classrooms. Duke and Cartwright (2021) present an interesting alternative to the Simple View of Reading called the Active View of Reading which has possibilities for Montessori Schools as a framework for a coherent curriculum of reading.
Embedded literacy
We know that reading instruction is best situated in the context of a rich socio-cultural classroom environment. Reading is embedded and celebrated across all aspects of the classroom within a context that makes reading meaningful and important. Because they have a strong pedagogical understanding of reading, effective teachers of reading can teach reading throughout the day. Children group and regroup for guided reading, literature circles, book clubs, and study groups. They research areas of interest, learn to question, seek answers, and to synthesize their learning to make a point or support an argument to others.

Montessori teachers know how to create this environment where children can flourish. What they need is a deeper understanding of what good readers do, what strategies work best to help all children be good readers and a school culture that is open to working both within and across program levels to create continuity and consistency.
Reading in Montessori
Teaching children to read in a child-centered Montessori classroom is complex and challenging. I believe that we know what we need to do to ensure all Montessori children become proficient readers. I also know that the Montessori community can let the question of "is that Montessori?" and a persistent desire to prove that "Montessori has it all" get in the way of opening our hearts and minds to what is known about teaching reading.

I hope that Montessori school leaders who must chose a core program can use the framework provided in this article to help your teachers adapt that core program to work in the Montessori classroom rather than adapting the classroom to the program. Some states allow us to put forth curriculum that addresses the science of reading as an alternative to a core program. Hopefully, this discussion will start you on the path to implement what we know about the teaching of reading into your Montessori classrooms providing you with the arguments you need to present your program to the policy leaders in your state. Montessori teachers have a unique opportunity to put into practice what we know are the best practices in teaching reading while maintaining the child-centered and socio-cultural nature of our classrooms serving as a model for what should and can happen for all children.
References and resources
Au, K.H. and Raphael, T.E. (2021). What matters. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1) Pp. 565-567. doi.org/10.1002/rrq.403

Blair, T. R., Rupley, W. H., & Nichols, W. D. (2007). The Effective Teacher of Reading: Considering the "What" and "How" of Instruction. The Reading Teacher, 60(5), 432-438. jstor.org/stable/20204486

Dewitz, P. and Graves, M.F. (2021). The science of reading: Four forces that modified, distorted, or Ignored the research finding on reading comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1) pp. S131-S144. doi.org/10.1002/rrq.389

Duke, N.K., Cervetti, G.N., Wise, C.N. (2017). Learning from exemplary teachers of literacy. The Reading Teacher, 71(4), pp 395-400. doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1654

Griffith, R. and Lacina, J. (2018) Teacher as decision maker: A framework to guide teaching decisions in reading. The Reading Teacher, 71(4), pp 501-507. doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1662

Petscher,Y., Cabell, S.Q. et al (2020) How the science of reading informs 21st-century education. Reading Research Quarterly 55(S1). PPS267-S282. doi.org/10.1002/rrq.352

Spear-Swerling, Louise. (2013). A Road Map for Understanding Reading Disabilities and Other Reading Problems, Redux. 10.1598/0710.16. researchgate.net/publication/300041421_A_Road_Map_for_Understanding_Reading_Disabilities_and_Other_Reading_Problems_Redux

Zankowsky, L. (2006). School-Wide Reading Assessment in a Montessori Program. Educational Position Paper. Available at the AMS Website Research page under Dissertations and Thesis amshq.org/Research/Research-Library

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Download PDF by Linda S. Zankowsky What teachers can actually do in the classroom Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia have passed laws or policies mandating that public schools ensure they are implementing the Science of Reading. One course [...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Science of Reading in the Montessori Classroom

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Science of Reading in the Montessori Classroom

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Episode 2: The Science of Reading in the Montessori classroom with Susan Zoll, Natasha Feinberg, Laura Saylor

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For the second episode in our new season focused on tackling the hard stuff, we’re taking on a question that listeners have asked: how can we apply the Science of Reading in a Montessori classroom?

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Montessori Literacy and the Science of Reading

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Montessori Literacy and the Science of Reading

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There is a whole world of research available to educators about the science of reading, and ideas on how to apply it to Montessori literacy principles. This week on the podcast, we are talking about ways to reframe our thinking when it comes to literacy, how to help our students who don't have a strong foundation in literacy, as well as some old ideas that we may need to finally let go of.

by Letty Rising

Follow the Trillium Montessori Talks podcast

(This article is a condensed version of a podcast transcript. For the complete experience, you are encouraged to listen to the entire podcast episode.)
Zil Jaeger is an experienced Montessori teacher, consultant, and coach, with a passion for Montessori literacy and a steadfast commitment to anti-bias, antiracist education. They are AMI Montessori trained at the 3-6 and 6-12 ages, with multiple literacy certifications. They believe that classrooms should be spaces of joy, critical engagement, and community-minded learning. An advocate for the Science of Reading, Zil is devoted to translating the latest research into effective classroom strategies. They love supporting teachers, caregivers, and schools to empower children in their learning. You can find out more information about their work at https://www.ziljaeger.com/ and on Instagram at @ziljaeger.
Letty: Welcome to Montessori Talks, where we discuss all things related to the Montessori elementary environment and other Montessori-related topics. Today's guest is Zil Jaeger, an experienced Montessori teacher, consultant, and coach with a passion for literacy.

Zil: Thank you for having me on, Letty.

What Montessorians Can Learn from the Science of Reading

Letty: I'm so excited to talk to you about the science of reading, especially in relation to Montessori. I noticed on your Instagram that you wrote, "Montessori teachers should be teaching letter names too." This intrigued me, and I think our listeners will be very interested, especially elementary teachers who might have less training on teaching reading. So, my first question is, what can Montessorians learn from the growing body of science about how we learn to read?

Zil: Historically, Montessori education is in an unusual place when it comes to teaching reading. Dr. Montessori developed her ideas in Italian, a phonetic language, so there's already a translation barrier when teaching how to read in English. However, neuroscientifically, all human brains learn to read in the same way. There have been shifts in the United States about teaching reading methods over time, ranging from a more structured phonics approach to a whole language approach. Montessori education has kind of been in this middle ground. But I think there's much we can learn from the growing body of work known as the science of reading. For instance, teaching both letter names and sounds can be highly beneficial. If you think about it, it's just another piece of nomenclature, and the children are absorbing all kinds of nomenclature as we name things for them in a Montessori environment.

Letty: It seems so straightforward, yet groundbreaking. I've often heard that you don't need to know the name of a letter to read a word, which is true, but it doesn't hurt to know it either. As you said, it's just another piece of nomenclature.

Zil: Exactly, it's a simple shift. Knowing the letter names can support younger learners in coming to elementary education with a solid foundation in letter sounds and basic reading. Optimal brain plasticity for learning to read is between ages three and seven or eight.

Letty: It's going to be revolutionary for some to hear that knowing the actual name of a letter along with its sound is beneficial for children.

Zil: Absolutely. It aids in orthographic processing, which is essentially the ability to map letter symbols to their sounds. This begins with accurately identifying and discriminating individual letters, which can be easier if you attach a label to it.

Letty: An extra piece of context for them.

Letty: Another question that comes to mind here is, how do we empower learners to understand how human brains learn how to read?

Zil: Yes, I'm so glad you asked this. If you are familiar with our elementary approach in Montessori, we start with these five great lessons. We're really setting the context and opening up this huge cosmic world for children. We're inviting them to understand how they, as individual humans, are situated within the great scope and span of the universe's existence. One thing I've done is write a story and encourage teachers to share it. This story explains how humans came to learn to read. When children understand how their brains are developing, it can help remove some of the stigma associated with struggling to learn how to read, especially compared to their peers.

Letty: You've written a story about this? Is it available on your website?

Zil: Yes, it is, and it's free for the next two weeks. So, hopefully, it'll be available by the time this podcast goes up.

Letty: That sounds exciting. People can find the link to your website in the article attached to this podcast, so they can learn more.

Zil: Absolutely. And there's another piece of empowering learners when it comes to literacy: the idea of multiple literacies. Reading is not the only way to access information, and writing is not the only way to express ourselves. We need to encourage children to express themselves in ways that align with their own identities.

Letty: I've seen firsthand how students develop diverse skills when they struggle with reading. It really highlights the Montessori environment's flexibility in enabling children to express themselves uniquely. For instance, I had an 8-year-old who was still honing her reading and writing skills but blossomed into an exceptional oral presenter. This gave her an alternative avenue to contribute and share her acquired knowledge while she continued to work on her literacy. Montessori's approach really supports students in finding their own unique ways to engage with and disseminate information.

Zil: That's right. In Montessori settings, we focus on providing meaningful experiences first, thereby enriching children's vocabulary and comprehension. This allows for a multifaceted approach to learning that can meet children where they are.

Empowering Early Readers

Letty: That brings me to my next question: How can educators best support learners who enter a younger elementary classroom without these foundational literacy skills?

Zil: This is a big question and one that can't be fully answered in a single podcast session. What drove me towards this work was encountering children without the necessary skills and feeling ill-equipped to teach them. One thing educators shouldn't fear is assessment. It's simply gathering data to understand where the child is at. It doesn't have to be scary; it can be friendly and valuable.

Letty: That's an interesting perspective, especially in Montessori settings where assessments are often viewed skeptically.

Zil: Exactly. But as I've delved deeper into this world of literacy, I've realized that assessment is just science. It's all about the way you frame it and how the child receives it.

Zil: Exactly. So I think you know, you have six-year-olds coming into your classroom starting by just doing letter card drills and seeing what letter names and sounds they know. If they know all their letter names and sounds, great, move on to consonant-vowel-consonant or CVC words. See what they've got there. Move on then to maybe some simple decodable readers, and see how they're doing there. And from there, you're going to develop your list of what they know, what they don't know, and what you need to teach. There are more standardized assessments; there's a universal screener called DIBELS, but there are also others like I-Ready. A universal screener is a really great way to make sure that all the children in a school, between hopefully kindergarten and third grade at the very least, are being screened for reading risk. Jen Hasbrouck, who's a literacy researcher and helps develop the oral reading fluency norms, equates DIBELS to a thermometer. She asks, "Does this child have a reading fever? Or do they not have a reading fever?" It's quick, it's accurate, and it's normed to a benchmark standard. It just tells you whether or not there's a risk; it doesn't diagnose a disease. It just tells you, do we need to be paying attention or are things okay?

Individual teachers shouldn't be afraid to stray outside of their norms. When I was a younger elementary teacher, I felt I needed to adhere strictly to my albums. But as I've grown in my career, I've realized that if they don't know how to read, you've got to teach them. And I'll do whatever it takes to ensure they become independent and autonomous learners. For instance, if you identify a group of children struggling with phonetics, don't hesitate to work with them for 20 minutes daily until you see improvement.

Letty: So what if you're a new teacher and you have a large group of children from diverse backgrounds who are not reading? Would 10 minutes a day be sufficient?

Zil: Something is better than nothing. If you've got 10 kids and you can only do 10 minutes, that's what you do. Schools should also consider purchasing curricula that align with the science of reading and adapting it as needed. I've had success with the University of Florida Literacy Institute curriculum (UFLI). Schools have a responsibility to provide children with the tools they need to be successful learners.

Letty: Absolutely, especially after the challenges brought by the pandemic. Many teachers feel frustrated because children are not where they usually would be developmentally.

Zil: Yes, and that's why we should be open to having more resources, like a literacy intervention program in schools. It can relieve teachers from the burden of daily 20-minute sessions and allow a specialized role to handle these assessments and interventions. This approach becomes even more crucial when we consider the setbacks that pandemic learning has brought to many students.

Letty: I agree, the kids need a lot of help, especially now. It's been a challenging period for everyone involved in education, and we must adapt to meet these needs.

Letty: Do you have any other resources that you could recommend, besides UFLI, that you think teachers might benefit from? There's so much information out there, and people are always looking for trusted resources.

Zil: Absolutely. On my website, there's a link to my bookshop where you can find my recommended books. One recent standout is "Powerful Literacy in the Montessori Classroom" by Susan Zoll, Natasha Feinberg, and Laura Saylor. It aligns Scarborough's Rope model for understanding reading with Montessori approaches. Another foundational resource is "Speech to Print" by Louisa Moats. She, along with Carol Tolman, developed the LETRS training, which is incredibly helpful. Additionally, Emily Gibbons at The Literacy Nest offers excellent Orton-Gillingham resources. There's also a book called "Uncovering the Logic of English" by Denise Eide that's fantastic for spelling.

Letty: That's a lot of great resources. Now, here's another important question. Is there anything that teachers should avoid doing?

Zil: Memorizing sight words isn't aligned with the science of reading.

Letty: What do you suggest instead?

Zil: Instead, you could use the Heart Word method to teach 'puzzle words.' (Described in the podcast episode)

You can highlight the tricky parts of the word to make it 'sticky,' so to speak. Any part of a word can be tricky until the rule is explicitly introduced to the child.

Letty: That's intriguing. Regarding 'puzzle' or sight words, this method would be a departure for many.

Zil: Definitely. Another thing to avoid is leveled readers. Instead, opt for decodable readers like Monarch Readers or Flyleaf Readers, which help children read at their current level and focus on specific patterns.

Letty: Are there enough decodable readers out there, or do we need more?

Zil: There's never enough. I'm actually considering writing some myself.

Montessori Educators and the Importance of Data Collection

Letty: Interesting. Lastly, why should Montessori educators embrace collecting data?

Zil: Collecting data helps us understand individual learning patterns and can be instrumental in improving educational approaches. It serves as a valuable tool for teachers to tailor instruction and assessment.

Zil: In elementary school, you've got six and seven-year-olds. The window of opportunity for teaching reading is getting narrower and narrower, right? Any human can learn how to read; it's just that the ease with which they can learn becomes more limited over time. By collecting data, you're identifying who needs help. By assessing with something like the 'Core Phonics Survey' or the 'Quick Phonics Screener,' you can figure out what that child needs. And then, as you're teaching them how to read, you're hopefully doing some progress monitoring, maybe once a month or every two to three weeks. Is this approach effective in identifying who needs help, what kind of help they need, and whether your teaching approach is working?

Letty: Absolutely. This brings to mind another question. Some people say, "Let's wait it out a bit; they might just need more time to develop." What's your response to that?

Zil: As a teacher, I'm waving a giant red flag saying, "Do not wait." To caregivers, I'm lovingly saying, "Please don't wait." The solution often comes down to repetition. Waiting won't offer that. So, what are the earliest ages at which you might see warning signs related to a child's reading ability?

Zil: If you're a guide for ages 3-6 and you've been working with a child on sandpaper letters for six months without significant progress, that's a red flag. It might not mean the child needs a diagnosis, but it suggests that I need to pay more attention, offer more repetitions, and possibly change my instruction method.

Letty: So, how would you approach elementary students who are already in first grade?

Zil: I'd use a universal screener. If it shows low reading skills, I'd contact the caregivers right away. I'd then initiate 20-minute daily lessons or work with an interventionist. If there's no progress by January, it might be time to consider outside tutoring or additional home exercises.

Letty: The earlier the intervention, the better, right?

Zil: Exactly. Early intervention can change the trajectory of their academic career.

Letty: Thank you for sharing your expertise, Zil. People can find you at ziljaeger.com and on Instagram. To all the listeners, I look forward to having you join us in our next podcast episode.

Zil: Thanks for having me, Letty.

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Montessori Literacy and the Science of Reading: Insights from Zil Jaeger

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A conversation about Montessori Literacy exploring strategies and resources that blend Montessori methods with the science of reading.

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Reading is a relatively new cultural development. While there were some people who could read dating back to the invention of writing during the 4th millennium BC, it was not until after the Industrial Revolution in the 1800's that large numbers of the population in many countries learned to read. The human brain did not evolve to be able to read the way it did for spoken language. In order to read, the brain has to learn to re-purpose brain functions that were developed over thousands of years for other, more basic needs. Dehaene (2009) describes it this way:

"The brain circuitry inherited from our primate evolution is co-opted to the task of recognizing printed words - the brain's existing neural networks are "recycled" for reading. Because of something called brain plasticity, during brain development a range of brain circuits can adapt for new uses. When we learn a new skill such as reading, we recycle some of our old brain circuits."
What parts of the brain are involved in reading?
There is no specific place in the brain that we use to read. Reading involves multiple processes that tap into different regions of the brain. Advances in neuroscience since the 1980's have enabled scientists to unravel the principles underlying the brain's reading circuits. Brain imaging using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI) enables researchers to create images that reveal information about brain anatomy and activity while reading. It reveals the parts of the brain that activate when we read.

People who become experienced readers use and integrate several regions of their brain, primarily in the left hemisphere including (Cunningham & Rose; Eden; Hudson et al., 2016):

The parietal-temporal region (towards the back) which does the job of breaking a written word into its sounds (i.e., word analysis, sounding out words).

The occipital-temporal region (at the back) where the brain stores the appearance and meaning of words (i.e., letter-word recognition, automaticity, and language comprehension). This is critical for automatic, fluent reading so that a reader can quickly identify words without having to sound each one out.

The frontal region (at the front) which allows a person to speak (i.e., processing speech sounds as we listen and speak).

It is important to remember that while different regions can be identified in terms of playing certain roles in the reading process, multiple parts of the brain during reading are in constant collaboration. Seidenberg (2018) notes that some scientists hold the view that "each major type of information during reading is supported by a network of brain structures rather than localized to a single area and that each brain area is responsive to and participates in the processing of multiple types of information." (p. 204)
The Brain Changes as We Learn to Read
Every child's brain has to change the way it functions as the child learns to read. For most students, instruction and practice during the primary grades is sufficient to "train" the regions in the brain to learn to read. Brain imaging research has revealed anatomical and functional changes in typically developing readers as they learn to read (Turkeltaub et al., 2003 as cited in Eden). Cunningham and Rose note that activation patterns in areas of the brain will be different depending on a student's reading ability.

"For example, beginning readers show more activity in the parietal-temporal (word analysis) region while more experienced readers become increasingly active in the occipital-temporal (word recognition) region. Rich language experiences early in life contribute to making the brain more receptive to the acquisition of reading skills (skills such as phonemic awareness, decoding and word recognition)."
What does brain imaging reveal about struggling readers?
Cunningham and Rose point out that the brain scans of struggling readers show that the patterns of activity are notably different (more scattered than those of strong readers). The pathways for language and cognition are not as efficient and established, so the work of reading is harder for the child even though he or she is trying just as hard.

For children with dyslexia, their brains often do not develop in a way that makes them efficient readers. Brain imaging studies have found that the reading process works differently in the brains of dyslexics because there is a neurological cause of dyslexia. Dyslexic readers show under-activation in areas where they are weaker and over-activation in other areas in order to compensate. Instead of using the parts of the brain in the left hemisphere (which is designed to process language), dyslexics who struggle to read use different parts of the right hemisphere which is not efficient (Hudson, High, Otaiba, 2007; Eden, 2016).

Shaywitz et al. (2002) found that children who were good decoders had more activation in the areas important for reading in the left hemisphere and less in the right hemisphere than children with dyslexia. Furthermore, many people with dyslexia often show greater activation in the lower frontal areas of the brain, possibly because their frontal regions may compensate for problems in the regions in the back of the brain (Shaywitz, 2003). The visual above illustrates how the dyslexic brain is activated more in the frontal region, while the non-dyslexic brain is activated in several parts of the left hemisphere.
Can we rewire the brain through instruction?
The good news for people with dyslexia is that their brains will "rewire" themselves if reading instruction is provided that explicitly teaches phonological awareness and decoding skills. The brain has plasticity through our lifetime which means our brains are able to change in order to learn new things. Cunningham and Rose suggest that two variables contribute to strengthening neural pathways that allow students to become strong and successful readers:

Deliberate practice. Students need to hear and read many different kinds of texts as often as possible.

Intense instruction. In order to prepare the brain for the increasingly complex texts they will encounter in school, most students need intense instruction toward early mastery of core reading skills - like phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension.

Brain imaging studies have shown that when dyslexics are taught to read (and given sufficient practice to become automatic with decoding), their brains create new circuits that connect the language processing parts of the brain with the visual processing part - the same as brains of non-dyslexics. Neuroscientist Guinevere Eden (2016) notes that difficulty mapping language to print is at the heart of dyslexia, and if that skill is addressed through intervention, it gives students the key they need to read. She notes that imaging studies have shown a change in the brain after intervention that targets these skills has occurred and reading is improved. This is not only true for young students, but also for adult dyslexic non-readers. Brain plasticity allows the brain to learn and change even as we get older. The big difference is that the older the student, the more intense the instruction and practice needs to be. The sooner that intervention can be provided, the better.

References

Cunningham, A. & Rose, D. This is your brain on reading. Retrieved from https://www.hmhco.com/products/iread/pdfs/EdWeek_OpEd5_brain_on_reading.pdf

Dehaene, S. (2009). Reading in the brain. New York, Penguin Group.

Eden, G.F. Dyslexia and the brain. International Dyslexia Society. Retrieved from https://app.box.com/s/q2cjihwikwncohy3vmv747h04md6eevn

Eden, G.F. (2016). Dyslexia and the brain. YouTube video. Posted by Understood, Oct 14, 2016. Retrieve from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrF6m1mRsCQ

Hudson,
N., Scheff, J., Tarsha, M., & Cutting, L.E. (2016). Reading comprehension
and executive function: Neurobiological findings. Perspectives on Language
and Literacy, Spring 2016.

Hudson, R.F., High, L. Al Otaiba, S. (2007). Dyslexia and the brain: What does current research tell us? The Reading Teacher, 60(6), 506-515.

Seidenberg, M. (2018). Language at the speed of sight. New
York: Basic Books.

Shaywitz, S. (2003). Overcoming
dyslexia. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Shaywitz, B.A., Shaywitz,
S.E., Pugh, K.R., Mencl, W.E., Fulbright, R.K., Skudlarksi, P., et al. (2002).
Disruption of posterior brain systems for reading in children with
developmental dyslexia. Biological
Psychiatry, 52, 101-110.

Joan Sedita

Joan Sedita is the founder of Keys to Literacy and author of the Keys to Literacy professional development programs. She is an experienced educator, nationally recognized speaker and teacher trainer. She has worked for over 35 years in the literacy education field and has presented to thousands of teachers and related professionals at schools, colleges, clinics, and professional conferences.

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How the Brain Learns to Read - Keys to Literacy

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Reading is a relatively new cultural development. While there were some people who could read dating back to the invention of writing during the 4th millennium BC, it was not until after the Industrial Revolution in the 1800's that large numbers of the population in many countries learned to read.

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FREE Systematic, Cumulative Decodable Passages

I have learned that many teachers and librarians do not have access to decodable books or even lists of decodable passages, words, or sentences as they are teaching their students to read. As a mom, and especially as a mom to a child with dyslexia, this frustrates me.

This page was created to provide free decodable passages to anyone who needs them in the teaching of reading and writing.

I have created lists of decodable words and selected about five sentences from each of my DOG ON A LOG decodable chapter books and included them in two FREE printables. You may use these with your students so they can practice decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling.) You may also send home copies of these so your students can practice their new skills with their families. You may NOT charge for any of these printables.

The words and sentences are grouped together by each Step of my Phonics Progression (aka Scope and Sequence.) This means you can provide your students with numerous words and about 25 sentences per phonics grouping. As they master those skills, you can introduce the next Step of phonics and use the next grouping of words and sentences. This will allow you to have decodable materials that are systematic and cumulative.

For many children who have no other access to decodable passages, this may be enough to help them master the presented skills. As the mother to a child with severe dyslexia, I can assure you that for many children this is NOT enough material. They will do best with actual decodable chapter books. The books they are given MUST be aligned with the phonics they are being taught.

There are two versions of this printable. The For Reading printable is formatted with larger letters to make it easier for students to read the decodable text. The DICTATION printable is available with average-sized letters for teachers who want to dictate the words and sentences to their students using less paper. The actual content of each printable is identical.

Also available on this page are the printables with the decodable words and sentences from my book The Squiggle Code. These decodables start with just six letters and the first sentences have just two sight words. These would be used to help kids master the skills they need to start my Step 1 materials.

Additionally, you can download five of my decodable books to use for evaluation purposes. They are towards the bottom of the page.

I want to add that many libraries would like to carry decodable books as a service to their patrons. However, most libraries are restricted to acquiring books from one or two vendors. These vendors have terms that are challenging for small, indie-publishers (which is what most decodable publishers are.) Teach My Kid To Read is a 501(C)(3) nonprofit with a mission to empower librarians, parents, and caregivers with the tools to help all kids, including those with dyslexia, learn to read. Teach My Kid to Read is the first nonprofit to initiate a widespread movement to work with libraries to learn about ways to help all kids learn to read, and to stock literacy resources like decodable books. Teach My Kid to Read will work with libraries to help with access and creating collections of decodable books. Please ask your library to carry decodable books and/or to reach out to Teach My Kid To Read.

FREE Systematic, Cumulative Decodable Passages

Please email me at read@dogonalogbooks.com if you have any trouble downloading the printables.

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FREE Systematic, Cumulative Decodable Passages

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These FREE Systematic, Cumulative Decodable Passages are for both Reading and Dictation. Help your students master their phonics and reading skills.

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Decodables e-Library | Just Right Reader

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Decodable books reflecting the diversity in our schools, delighting readers with laugh-out-loud stories, including interactive reading lessons, and following a rigorous phonics progression.

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Free Decodable Texts | Right to Read Initiative

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Right to Read Inquiry in an EFI Special Ed Classroom

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Free Decodable Books for Kids | Beyond Decodables | Teacher Resources

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Beyond Decodables provides access to free kids books online with a focus on phonics and diversity. Kids books include decodable words related to CVC words, consonant diagraphs, CVCe Words, Multisyllabic Words, Consonant Blends, and Long Vowel Patterns.

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ReadWorks | Award-Winning, EdTech Nonprofit Organization

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ReadWorks is an edtech nonprofit organization that is committed to helping to solve America’s reading comprehension crisis.

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This post may contain affiliate links. As an Amazon affiliate, we earn from qualifying purchases. See our disclosure policy.

The ultimate list of totally FREE decodable readers, books, e-books and PDFs available online in 2023, all compiled in a simple list. Included are 15 direct links for easy access to hundreds of FREE decodable texts.

Free Decodable Resources

Current research supporting the Science of Reading (SOR) shows that decodable texts are needed to establish effective reading skills to reinforce the phonics skills taught. So we've been searching high and low to compile a list of totally free resources and want to share with you.

In recent years, many companies saw the need to release free resources to educators to help us do our jobs with research-based best practices in place. Many companies have continued (at least for now) sharing these resources, including decodable books, readers, passages, and e-books.

As educators, we spend so much of our own money purchasing items for our classrooms to use with our students. But some of those resources are just so expensive!

A motto our grandpa loved to share with us that we now greatly appreciate and value is: "If it's free, it's for me!"

SPELD SA

SPELD SA Decodable Readers are the top choice from the list below. And the best part is that they have released their sets of decodable readers online for free!

❤ Why We Love It

Each book can be used online in an HTML version OR downloaded as a free PDF that can be printed as an actual book. This resource is the most comprehensive and includes various formats, including special versions for ipads or tablets.

Worksheets and fluency charts accompany each book! There are ten total sets of readers with many books included in each set.

This is an excellent resource within the classroom or to share with parents for effective at-home learning! If you want to learn more about decodable readers, watch this webinar from SPELD SA to find out all you need to know.

Tips & Information

Remember that decodables are a valuable tool in your toolbox...but they're not the only tool. And if you're new to Science of Reading (SOR), you may be staring at your bookshelves filled with leveled readers and wondering what to do next.

If you're interested in learning about using decodable AND leveled readers appropriately, watch this informative webinar. Be assured, there is a place both types of texts within your classroom for your students!

The Free Resources

Below is the list of resources that include free decodable readers. We listed them in order of personal preference, but be sure to check them all out! Click the links for direct access to the free resources.

1. SPELD-SA (New Series)

2. SPELD-SA (Old Series)

3. Flyleaf (Available again for 2022-2023 school year)

4. Beyond Decodables

5. TN Dept. of Education

6. UFLI Decodable Passages

7. Teach My Kid To Read

8. Half-Pint Readers

9. Auburn University Free Decodable Books

10. Academic Success for All Learners

11. Core Knowledge

12. Success for All

13. Printable and Online Decodable Books

14. Sounds-Write (Requires you to create a free account to access)

15. Moon At Home Series (10 free books)

A big THANK YOU to all of the publishers and organizations listed above. You saw a great need to help teachers make the switch to practices that support the Science of Reading, and you stepped up to meet it.

We appreciate your hard work and dedication to ensuring literacy for ALL!

More Decoding Resources

We'd love to hear about your experience with decodable readers, especially those online! If you have any other suggestions, we'd love to hear from you. Please leave a comment below or tag us on Instagram @literacylearn.

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Hundreds of Free Decodable Readers, Books, PDFs, & eBooks (2023)

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The ultimate list of FREE decodable readers, books, e-books & PDFs available online in 2022, compiled in a list with direct links for access.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The kids left behind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A proposal for understanding reading difficulty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stumped by the words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Surround him with books'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The importance of language comprehension

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who gets help?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Berninger, V., & Graham, S. (1998). Language by hand: A synthesis of a decade of research on handwriting. Handwriting Review, 12, 11-25.

Connelly, V., Dockrell, J., & Barnett, J. (2005). The slow handwriting of undergraduate students constrains overall performance in exam essays. Educational Psychology, 25, 99-107.

Edwards, L. (2003). Writing instruction in kindergarten: Examining an emerging area of research for children with writing and reading difficulties. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 36, 136.

Graham, S., Harris, K. R., & Fink, B. (2000). Is handwriting causally related to learning to write? Treatment of handwriting problems in beginning writers. Journal of Educational Psychology, 92, 620-633.

Graham, S., Struck, M., Richardson, J.,& Berninger, V. (2006). Dimensions of good and poor handwriting legibility in first and second graders. Developmental Neuropsychology, 29, 43-60.

Graham, S., Weinstein, N., & Berninger, V. (2001). Which manuscript letters do primary grade children write legibly? Journal of Educational Psychology, 93, 488-497.

Other helpful sources

Berninger, V. (2004). Understanding the graphia in dysgraphia. In D. Dewey & D. Tupper (Eds.), Developmental motor disorders: A neuropsychological perspective (pp. 328-350). New York: Guilford.

Berninger, V. W., & Amtmann, D. (2003). Preventing written expression disabilities through early and continuing assessment and intervention for handwriting and/or spelling problems: Research into practice. In H. L. Swanson, K. R. Harris, & S. Graham (Eds.), Handbook of Learning Disabilities (pp. 345-363). New York: Guilford.

Troia, G.A. (2006). Writing instruction for students with learning disabilities. In C.A. MacArthur, S. Graham, & J. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Handbook of writing research. New York: Guilford.

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Berninger, V., & Graham, S. (1998). Language by hand: A synthesis of a decade of research on handwriting. Handwriting Review, 12, 11-25. Connelly, V., Dockrell, J., & Barnett, J. (2005). The slow handwriting of undergraduate students constrains overall performance in exam essays. Educational Psychology, 25, 99-107. Edwards, L. (2003).

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The Science of Reading: Unlocking America’s Literacy Crisis

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Is My Kid Learning to Read?  The Purple Challenge Part 1

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Is My Kid Learning to Read?  The Purple Challenge Part 1

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

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The Reading Brain | How We Learn To Read

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Can we Afford to Ignore the Science of Reading? | Melissa Hostetter | TEDxUofISpringfield

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Reading Universe: All About Reading and Writing

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Explore ready-to-use teaching strategies, resources, and concrete answers to common questions about teaching reading and writing -- developed by experts.

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Editor's note: Usually our blog posts are only about 2,000 or so words. This month's guest post is much lengthier - but we feel it's worth it! Grab a cuppa and get comfy, as our guest writer, Marnie Ginsberg, gives a longer but very easy-to-follow overview of the science behind how children learn to read.
Imagine the confusion of neurologists in China in the 30s who were caring for a businessman who suffered a severe stroke. This man was bilingual in Chinese and English, yet after the stroke, he was no longer able to read...Chinese.
However, he could still read English!
What could explain the loss of reading in one language, but not another?

Reading researcher Maryann Wolf details this story in her book Proust and the Squid: The Story of Science of the Reading Brain, as she reveals that this seeming mystery is quite understandable-given what we now know from brain imaging.

First, a little bit of background: The Chinese written language is a logographic language, meaning that Chinese characters represent words or smaller units of meaning.

English, on the other hand, is an alphabetic language, meaning that English characters, or letters, represent sounds in words. Letters themselves do not represent meaningful words.

How does this relate to the stroke victim who could read English but no longer Chinese?

This is where it gets interesting, in light of the vast numbers of studies of the last 100+ years on how children learn to read!

Alphabetic languages, such as English, Spanish, and Greek, rely mostly on the left hemisphere of the brain to read words. Chinese, in contrast, also utilises much of the right hemisphere of the brain as well in order to translate the picture-like logographs into meaningful words.

It is likely the businessman suffered a stroke on his right posterior hemisphere, but not his left. Thus, Chinese reading was lost, but English reading was retained.

What does this story of a Chinese businessman, brain hemispheres, and modern imaging have to do with how children learn to read English?

Reading by Sound

Common sense tells us that we read by sight. That learning to read is mostly a visual process, right?

Indeed, good adult readers recognise words by sight so rapidly that they recognise words faster than even letter names. As a result of this accomplishment of our adult reading abilities, a lot of confusion has settled in the land about how we read and how we should teach reading. However, when we only look at what we can observe on the outside (of the brain) and at what we do as mature readers, we miss the real story of how our reading brain develops-at least for alphabetic languages such as English.

Thousands of brain imaging, psychological, and other types of reading research studies have built a mountain of evidence to demonstrate that young readers of alphabetic languages learn to read via sound. Yes, of course, our eyes and visual system are involved. But the heavy lifting in cracking our written code-learning how to convert letters on the page into sounds in words that make meaningful words-is done by our sound processing system, or phonological system.

This blog post will explain the most compelling, and well-researched theory of how learners acquire the ability to read English words. It's not just what we "see" on the surface!

How the Brain Learns to Read Words

There are many brains which 'get by' in learning to read in English, but these readers struggle as they rely on parts of their brains that are poorly adapted (the right hemisphere, like our Chinese businessman who also read a logographic script) to meet the needs of an alphabetic writing system. Instead, I am going to look at brains that are efficient and accurate at learning to read in an alphabetic system. In the English reading world, there are different types of reading brains, but only one type of brain is highly successful at reading in an alphabetic system.

We'll examine how to build that type of brain.

When readers like them of all ages receive training on how to read like successful readers, they do learn to read well and their brain changes! ( See this research example). This is good news for readers who struggle!

Let's travel along with a hypothetical five-year-old, Jonah, as he goes about becoming a reader.

Jonah has already spent the first five years of his life learning much of the English language and he's good at both listening and speaking (for his age). This has been accomplished through many one-on-one conversational turns between his primary caregivers and him. He also learned more advanced words through listening along to storybooks.

This pivotal oral language experience and skill, however, has given him marginal benefit at knowing how to translate specifically the 26 letters of our alphabet into meaningful words that make up sentences and meaningful lines of thought. In other words, if his teacher reads to aloud him Dr. Seuss' famous The Cat and the Hat , Jonah has no trouble understanding, or comprehending, just what havoc the cat caused for poor Sally and her brother that one rainy day.

On the other hand, if Jonah's teacher hands him The Cat and the Hat without having read it to him previously, he is stumped.

He has learned several letter-sounds so he recognises some of the squiggles on the page as having to do with letters and sounds. But he can't yet translate, or decode, any of them into words that make sense to him.

How can he take a word like 'sun' or 'shine' and decode those letter strings into meaningful words and concepts?

The 3 Ingredients for Beginning Word Acquisition

Given age appropriate oral language abilities, Jonah requires three new key ingredients in order to begin to translate the letters in 'sun' into the meaningful word itself. He needs to develop:

a concept of the alphabetic principle,

letter-sound (or phonics) knowledge.

The Concept of the Alphabetic Principle

The concept of the alphabetic principle means that our written language is a code for sounds. For example the 's' represents the /s/ in 'sun'. Similarly, the 'i_e' represents the /ie/ sound in 'shine'.

This insight of the alphabetic principle isn't self-evident to non-readers. Some beginning readers think long words are for words like 'snake' because snakes are long. Others create other curious explanations for how to attack, or decode, unfamiliar words. It's the adult readers job to reveal to the child how our code works.

If a child has never seen a door get unlocked, how will giving her the key to the lock help unless you reveal to her how the lock works? Similarly, advanced readers in the child's life need to reveal how our written code works. How the words are lifted from the page. Very few children deduce how our written language works on their own.

Helping the young child discover the alphabetic principle can be quite simple. Here's one way: just drag a pencil or finger along the letter-sounds in a word as you drag out the sounds in the word, like below.

At this point, Jonah, indeed, may not be "reading." He may just be repeating the word he heard the adult speak aloud. However, he's beginning to understand how our code works....The squiggles on the page are a code for sounds in words; that's the alphabetic principle.

It's an "aha!" that every beginning reader should be taught. The two skills that follow help the alphabetic principle move beyond just a concept to rapid facility with decoding-the alphabetic principle in action.

Watch this short example of a young student in one of her first encounters with the alphabetic principle. As she goes through this word building activity, she'll also be gaining knowledge in the 2 upcoming ingredients: letter-sound knowledge (phonics) and phonemic awareness.

Letter-Sound, or Phonics, Knowledge and the Reading Wars

The second much-needed skill is letter-sound knowledge. Jonah needs to know that when he sees the letter 's', he's likely going to say "/s/". Not "/m/". Not "/oy/". Not "sit".

This information is also called phonics knowledge. For instance, in The Cat and the Hat's first sentence, Jonah will need to learn various phonics information, such as:

In order to know that 'shine' consists of the sounds /sh/ /ie/ /n/, Jonah will need to deconstruct 'shine'. He'll need to convert 'sh' into /sh/ and the other letter combinations (or graphemes) into their relevant sounds (or phonemes).

To move from beginning reader to advanced reader, Jonah will need to learn which phonemes are tied to over 240 graphemes, such 't,' 'm,' 'er', 'oa', 'ck', or 'gn'.
Much more than just the 26 alphabet sounds, right?
It IS a lot to learn in the early years of learning to read, and it's made more complicated by the fact that some graphemes can represent more than one phoneme (i.e., 'ow' = /oa/ or /ow/ in 'snow' or 'cow').

But that's not all!

Many phonemes represent more than one grapheme, as in the /oa/ sound: 'go', 'home', 'show', 'boat', 'toe', etc. Learning these grapheme-phoneme correspondences takes practice reading and doing word work activities, which is why computerised games that teach all of these phonics spellings, such as Phonics Hero, can be so beneficial (get access to the free resources with Phonics Hero Teacher Account or a 7-day trial as a parent).

Phonics Hero offers Jonah the possibility of fun while his brain makes links (paired-associate learning) between the 240+ graphemes he will need to learn in order to become a strong adult reader and recognise words like 'infantile', 'prevaricate', and 'gregariousness'.

If you're new to thinking about how children learn to read, you may not be aware that the reading education field has been susceptible to philosophical debates that have become so heated as to be termed the "reading wars." These debates mostly center on the place of phonics instruction in a beginning readers' classroom.

Some (the "phonics" side) claim that phonics information needs to be explicitly and systematically taught. Others (the "whole word" or "whole language" side) purport that this information is better deduced through the reading of authentic texts and whole word learning. A more recent version of the whole-word line of thought emphasises that reading instruction which centers on levelled texts, contextual guessing, understanding of the whole text, and occasional phonics lessons, will result in better outcomes.

These arguments have fuelled little good and mostly chaos for classroom teachers and, even worse, low performance for those students most in need of systematic phonics instruction. [See, for instance, over 60% of U.S. fourth-graders are not proficient according to federal assessments.]

The winds are turning, however.

The evidence-base on the essential need for systematic phonics instruction has reached such a mountain's height that more and more leaders, teachers, and parents are aware of the research. Tellingly, the U.S. based International Literacy Association (ILA) has just released a nuanced position paper validating the importance of explicit and systematic phonics despite previously endorsing some leaders and texts that have historically thumbed their noses at the contemporary research base on how children learn to read words.

Phonemic Awareness and Phonemic Proficiency

Finally, the concept of the alphabetic principle and knowledge of phonics information are insufficient alone to learn to read words. The developing reader also needs to perceive the individual sounds in words; we call this oral language ability, phonemic awareness.

For instance, Jonah needs to be able to recognise that the word 'play' can be segmented into the sounds /p/ /l/ and /ay/. Or, he might be able to hear three segmented sounds, such as /w/ /e/ /t/ and blend those sounds together to hear the word, "wet." These are just two types of phonemic awareness. See this little girl demonstrate:

Phonemic awareness allows the child to utilise our written code. It's the engine that allows the phonics knowledge to be put into play.

When Jonah encounters the word, 'shine', he has to:

1. Recognise the individual spellings, 'sh' 'i_e' and 'n' for their respective sounds, but it also has to

2. Phonemically blend those sounds together to "hear" a real word -"shine."

Many young beginning readers cannot do this without support! They lack phonemic blending ability.

In addition, Jonah also needs to be able to quickly separate, or phonemically segment, the sounds in words. If he can perceive that 'sun' is three sounds: /s/ /u/ and /n/, he can connect each of those sounds to their respective spellings. He may already have memorised how to read and spell the word; he's cracked the code for the word 'sun'.

Phonemic blending and segmenting were emphasised in recent decades in research syntheses, such as the U.S. National Reading Panel Report and the so-nicknamed Rose Report from the U.K., as the main phonemic awareness vehicles to learning to decode. Indeed, they are essential.

But further research has revealed that one more phonemic awareness skill is still needed - phonemic manipulation.

Phonemic manipulation is the ability to add, delete, or change phonemes in words. For example, ask a beginning reader orally "what is 'slip' without the /l/ " and you'll likely receive little more than a blank stare. However, ask any skilled 4th-grade reader and they'll be able to do the task easily.

This higher level phonemic awareness skill is harder than blending and segmenting and is a better predictor of reading achievement than just blending segmenting. David Kilpatrick makes the case that phonemic proficiency - rather than phonemic awareness - better describes the skill that sets apart the strong from the weaker reader. "Proficiency" draws out the concept of speed of processing, which appears to be essential for both decoding and automatic word identification.

How does playing around with sounds in words relate to decoding and word learning?

All the mechanisms for why phonemic proficiency makes such a difference are not yet fleshed out by research, but here are two partial explanations. First, when Jonah encounters a word for the first time and he tries to decode it, he's likely to make an error in his first guess. However, if he deletes an attempted vowel sound and adds another option to test out another possible word, he's relying on advanced phonemic awareness skills (i.e., phonemic proficiency).

For example, take the word 'shine' again. Jonah may or may not have been explicitly taught the spelling pattern of 'i_e' for /ie/. Even if he had been taught it, he may not notice the 'e' at the end of the word when he first observes the 'i' spelling in 'shine'.

As a result, his first attempt to read 'shine' sounds like "shin", which is a reasonable choice if the 'e' ending is ignored. Have no fear, though.

Jonah is searching for meaning as he reads. He realises that, "The sun did not shin," makes no sense. He attempts to correct his mis-reading by dropping the /i/ sound in "shin" and replaces it with another common "i" sound -/ie/.

Now the word sounds like "shine" and that fits the sentence. He is pleased with his second attempt and moves on. Thus phonemic proficiency has served him well in his decoding process.

The Self-Teaching Theory of Word Learning

Jonah's reading of "shine" can be used to describe the theory of how word learning occurs - the self-teaching hypothesis (popularised by Share, 1995). Jonah's teacher or parent likely provided Jonah with the ingredients to be able to decode some words himself: the alphabetic principle, phonics knowledge, and phonemic awareness.

But Jonah deduced that 'i_e' must be /ie/ in 'shine'. Through attacking most of the word correctly but getting stuck with the vowel sound, he figured out the information he was lacking that must be needed to make a meaningful word in the sentence, "The sun did not shine."

In that "positive learning trial" (Jorm and Share, 1983), he may have learned consciously or subconsciously that 'i_e' is likely the sound /ie/. He may have also learned that 'shine' is the correct spelling of the word. He may have even learned a spelling pattern of the two sounds in 'ine' to more quickly read 'twine', 'mine','fine', or 'spine' in the future.

This spelling and reading-word-parts information may have become part of his orthographic learning. Orthographic learning, or orthographic mapping, is the correct knowledge of our spelling system: that the spelling 'i_e' is the /ie/ in 'shine' and 'like' and that 'whose' is spelled with a 'wh' 'o_e' and 's'. The reading brain "orthographically maps" the concept of 'wh' to 'whose' for future reference.

A typically developing reader can decode a word for the first time, such as 'shine' and recall the way it looks for automatic future reading with as few as one to four exposures of the word. Readers develop an abstract concept of the word and its interior parts so that they might recognise the same word in their very next exposure even if the word is written:

This process of decoding → orthographic mapping → automatic word recognition is not just a one-way street, however.

As the developing reader orthographically maps more and more words in our language, she develops deeper phonemic awareness. The very print itself fixes the abstract phoneme representations into a concrete visual form - letters! This helps explain how reading itself has been demonstrated to reciprocally interact with phonemic development. This bi-directional relationship between decoding and phonemic awareness is yet another explanation for why strong readers have phonemic proficiency. The act of reading accurately, and then orthographically mapping so many words and letter combinations, has developed their processing of sounds in words. The phonemes in words have become inextricably linked with print.

Thus, we've come full circle with phonemic awareness. A rudimentary amount of it is necessary to really understand the alphabetic principle and to begin to decode unfamiliar words. But correct reading itself also trains the reader in stronger and stronger phonemic awareness. This is the other route in which we understand that phonemic proficiency is developed as students move from beginning to advanced reading.

Good readers develop it through the process of accurately decoding words by sound. Poor readers who rely on mostly visual-only information to recall a word (in other words ignoring some or all of the phonetic cues in the spelling of the word) are not able to orthographically map the words in their brain. They don't have tight sound-symbol (or phoneme-grapheme) connections on which to hang the information they may have just read in a word.

A Test of the Self-Teaching Theory of Word Learning

Jonah is not the only one who is still learning to read words. Even you, mature reader, may be learning to recognise rapidly new words, such as new medical terms, foreign names, or high falutin vocabulary. 😉

Let's experiment with this, shall we? Try to read this text with some made-up words:

Did you deduce how to pronounce 'murks' and 'yez'? Did it take much time?

For most good readers, these words were likely phonologically decoded in very little time. Your brain quickly cracked the code on the spelling of "murks" and translated them into phonemes, to then be pronounced accurately.

You likely broke it down into...

....and blended them together and arrived at /merks/ as a reasonable pronunciation for 'murks'.

That's the process that a beginning reader goes through every time she reads an unknown word-the early words, such as 'pen' and the later words such as 'stupendous'.

Let's test your ability to do the same as Jonah, shall we?

Choose the correct word for the blank:

Which did you choose?

They are all viable spelling options for the sound /er/!

And, if you've just read this text one time through, you've only seen the proposed pronunciation for the 'ants' substitute 4 times in your entire life.

But, if you're a good reader, you probably can recall which spelling is the "correct" one:

How?

You didn't deduce it alone from sound-based cues. All the choices are reasonable options for the /er/ sound. The 'i' spelling is often the /er/ sound as in 'bird', 'shirt', 'skirt', 'girl', or 'quirky', for instance.

And, although less common, 'ear' is the /er/ sound in many common words, such as 'earth', 'learn' and 'earn'. (There are even several other possibilities for the /er/ sound.)

You likely chose 'murk' because your amazing brain had already orthographically mapped the /er/ sound to 'ur' and 'murk' as yet another letter string to tie to a specific group of sounds and a specific semantic concept (i.e., an ant).

Researchers have even tested how long this memory trace could last. At least 30 days! Possibly much, much more ( Share, 2004).

But this would have been much harder for you to orthographically map if you didn't have good code-cracking ability and speed (phonemic proficiency). OR, it would be harder if the word had no code, no logic, to cue you.

Consider, what if I had written this:

Would you remember after 5 minutes whether 'ants' was:

Without a meaningful code, and without a system for cracking it, you're left to process this new word with other systems of the brain. And that visual-only system has not proven able to allow readers to learn the 40 to 70 thousand words mature readers recognise at a glance.

Phonological decoding, or sound-based decoding, draws the reader's attention to the orthographic elements of each new word. I call it noticing the "inside parts" of words. That 'ur' is the /er/ sound we use in 'murks'.

You got it now, right? 😉

Orthographic learning is item-based, not stage-based. Even though you are likely capable of reading thousands of words, and might be considered at the most "advanced" stage of a reader, you still had to go through the same process to mentally pronounce 'murks' that any 5-year-old would have to do to pronounce 'bird'.

Are you not at an advanced stage of reading?

Certainly!

You didn't recognize 'murks' by sight because it was your first exposure. It was a new item in your mental orthographic system.

Whether we are a beginning or advanced reader, we're all pioneers on the frontier of learning new words, or new orthographic patterns - for our own reading brain.

Today may be the day that you learn, not only to read 'murks' but also:

Each novel word is a new item to be decoded. Yet another code to be cracked. And, within just a handful of exposures, that word will likely be orthographically encoded, able to be recognised and pronounced in a split second. But perhaps you may have to check with a dictionary if you don't know how to pronounce the above words.

Reading by Sound and Sight

Now we've journeyed from China to analysing Jonah's process of reading simple words such as 'sun' and 'shine'. Hopefully, you understand a bit better the route that Jonah takes to move from beginner reader, who slowly decodes one word at a time, to that of an advanced reader who can recognise in milliseconds, literally, thousands upon thousands of words.

The brain's amazing system for learning to read words takes Jonah from matching sound (phoneme) to symbol (grapheme) over and over again till the words become memorised (orthographically mapped). Words that are easily recognized. Now they are read by sight in the blink of an eye.

The Self-Teaching Theory helps explain a number of confusing issues in the teaching of reading and reading research. For example, how can it be that research so convincingly demonstrates that students benefit from being taught phonics information explicitly AND children rapidly learn way more phonics information than they could possibly be explicitly taught?

In Kindergarten or Year One, the average child might know 25-100 words. By first grade perhaps they can read about 500-600. By fourth grade, the number has jumped to 4,000. By 12th grade, a good reader may know as many as 30,000 to 70,000. That's exponential growth.

Could teachers have explicitly taught (and students learned) that many spellings and words? Over 18 words a day if one assumes 40,000 words by the end of high school. It is hard to imagine that many words could be covered, and learned, through explicit teaching in school.

No worries. A better understanding of how children learn to read is that they benefit from a sufficient amount of:

1. Insight about the code

2. Letter-sound (phonics) knowledge

3. Phonemic awareness

Bundle that together with accurate reading practice, and many students will begin to infer more and more about our code and learn more and more spellings and words...on their own.
How can this happen with all the unexpected spellings that we have in English?

1. That 'certain' and 'curtain' aren't the same word.

2. That 'pteranodon' starts with a /t/.

3. That 'gh' in 'ghost' is /g/.

4. That 'February' is pronounced /feb yoo air ee/.

The good reader's brain adjusts to the occasional quirk because she's drawing from her sound decoding brain and her meaning making brain. She hits upon a word and within a few exposures she has bound those sounds and symbols together. And that work helps not only with the word at hand, but also with other spelling patterns and words in words she'll uncover in the future.

Share explains it this way:

Because neither contextual guessing nor direct instruction, in and of themselves, are likely to contribute substantially to printed word learning, the ability to translate printed words independently into their spoken equivalents assumes a central role in reading acquisition. According to the self-teaching hypothesis, each successful decoding encounter with an unfamiliar word provides an opportunity to acquire the word-specific orthographic information that is the foundation of skilled word recognition. A relatively small number of (successful) exposures appear to be sufficient for acquiring orthographic representations, both for adult skilled readers (Brooks, 1977) and young children (Manis, 1985; Reitsma, 1983a, 1983b). In this way, phonological recoding ["decoding"] acts as a self-teaching mechanism or built-in teacher enabling a child to independently develop both (word)-specific and general orthographic knowledge. Although it may not be crucial in skilled word recognition, phonological recoding may be the principal means by which the reader attains word reading proficiency..."
(1995, p. 155).

Most of those who struggle with this process often don't have:

1. An instructional environment that points out clearly enough how our code works

2. The necessary initial phonics information pieces

3. Teaching in developing phonemic awareness.

Better dissemination of the what research suggests about how to teach reading would likely dramatically change reading achievement for upwards of 50% of children in English-speaking countries.

A smaller minority of learners can have good instruction in these three key word-learning instructional elements and still struggle with learning to read. They may have weaker abilities in the phonemic processing domain. They may also have weaker abilities to make orthographic representations with just a few exposures. This type of reader could be identified as "dyslexic" and benefit from more intensive instruction and practice in learning about the code. But that brings us to a topic for another day.

How Children Learn to Read - What Does This Mean for Instruction?

In describing the process that the good reader undergoes in order to become a fluent reader, I didn't discuss many specifics for instruction itself. The above is more a description of the processes that a developing reader's brain goes through. There are actually many instructional routes that would provide these key ingredients for good word reading acquisition.

But research has given us a nearly slam-dunk case on the critical features that we should look for when we consider reading instruction:

Does the instruction make the alphabetic principle clear?

Does the instruction help the student learn and apply essential phonics information?

Does the instruction develop advanced phonemic proficiency, in concert with print?

Does the child have sufficient amount of accurate word reading practice in order to orthographically map thousands of words?

Ideally, these key features of instruction are present for the child from the beginning of her reading journey so that she gets an early, strong start to reading. Then she'll be much more likely to enjoy reading, read more, and continue to develop her reading comprehension through a lifetime of wide reading (Stanovich, 1986).

If one or several of these important elements are missing, most children will struggle to become fluent. Consider these four elements for your child or your class of students and ensure that all ingredients are in the mix.

Finally, I leave you with a test - do you remember how to spell our made-up word for 'ants'?

To explore the Phonics Hero resources, sign up for a Teacher Account or Parent Account. To learn about how children learn to read with Marnie, visit Reading Simplified.

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How Children Learn to Read - the Science of Reading by Sound | Phonics Hero

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As adults it 'feels' like we learn to read by sight, but how children learn to read is a lot more complex. We explain the science.

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We've been telling students that doing well in school creates opportunities-that showing up, doing the work, and meeting teachers' expectations will prepare them for their futures. Unfortunately, that's a myth.

Far too many students graduate from high school still unprepared for the lives they want to lead. They enroll in college and land in remedial courses, or start jobs and discover they're missing skills they need. We wanted to understand why.

To do this, we followed nearly 4,000 students in five diverse school systems to learn more about their experiences. What we found was unnerving: classroom after classroom filled with A and B students whose big goals for their lives are slipping further away each day, unbeknownst to them and their families-not because they can't master challenging material, but because they're rarely given a real chance to try.

In fact, most students-and especially students of color, those from low-income families, those with mild to moderate disabilities, and English language learners-spent the vast majority of their school days missing out on four crucial resources: grade-appropriate assignments, strong instruction, deep engagement, and teachers with high expectations. Students spent more than 500 hours per school year on assignments that weren't appropriate for their grade and with instruction that didn't ask enough of them-the equivalent of six months of wasted class time in each core subject. And middle and high school students reported that their school experiences were engaging less than half the time. In classrooms with more access to these resources, students did better-particularly if they started the school year behind their peers.

This lack of access isn't random. It's the result of choices adults make at every level of our educational system. We're asking all adults whose choices affect students' experiences to commit to unraveling the opportunity myth.

Citation: TNTP. (2018). The Opportunity Myth: What Students Can Show Us About How School Is Letting Them Down-and How to Fix It. {filedir_4}TNTP_The-Opportunity-Myth_Web.pdf

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Explore our publications shaping America's PK-12 education conversations. We couple decades of experience with deep research-driven insights. Download now.

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Timothy Rasinski is a professor of literacy education at Kent State University. He has written over 150 articles and has authored, co-authored or edited over 15 books or curriculum programs on reading education.

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Teachers Won’t Embrace Research Until It Embraces Them

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Teachers Won’t Embrace Research Until It Embraces Them

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I understand why advocates, researchers, and policymakers who feel the urgency of our literacy crisis are frustrated when teachers don’t embrace reading science. But my entry into the world of read…

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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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SoR- What I Should Have Learned in College

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SoR- What I Should Have Learned in College

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Science of Reading-What I Should Have Learned in College | Facebook

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Science of Reading-What I Should Have Learned in College Mission Statement "Researchers now estimate that 95 percent of all children can be taught to read by the end of first grade...." Dr....

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Really Great Reading | Specialists in Reading Education

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Phinder | A Resource for Phonics Lessons

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This is a free website that allows teachers and researchers to find words that match certain letter-sound patterns. Teachers can create word lists for phonics lessons, and researchers can find words for word recognition research.

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

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

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

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Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction

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

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Listen to Reading/Watch while Writing Protocol

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Listen to Reading/Watch while Writing Protocol

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Listening to Reading—WWW Protocol | nellkduke.org

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