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2022-2023 Orientation and Professional Development  

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2022-2023 Orientation and Professional Development  

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Being a proficient reader has an impact on a student's entire education. Teaching students to read is the work of educators. While some educators are well-equipped to take on such a significant task, others wish they were better prepared and supported to make an impact that could change a child's life. IMSE makes it easy for teachers to access and understand the core principles of Structured Literacy and the Science of Reading (SoR) through their professional development trainings and programs. IMSE programs are delivered by experienced teachers, all with a master's degree, who know how to ensure that teachers feel knowledgeable and supported in their ability to teach literacy.

Notably, over the past years, the Science of Reading has compiled information that holds important implications for empowering teachers with the knowledge to help students succeed in reading. In addition, intervention research estimates that the use of evidence-based prevention and intervention approaches in literacy, such as what IMSE offers, could decrease the number of below-level readers from 30% to 5%.

The Science of Reading: What it is

The Science of Reading is a comprehensive body of research that encompasses years of scientific knowledge, spans across many languages, and shares the contributions of experts from relevant disciplines such as education, special education, literacy, psychology, neurology, and more. The Science of Reading has evolved from a wide span of research designs, experimental methods, participants, and statistical analyses. This conclusive, empirically supported research provides us with the information we need to gain a deeper understanding of how we learn to read, what skills are involved, how they work together, and which parts of the brain are responsible for reading development. From this research, we can identify an evidence-based best practice approach for teaching foundational literacy skills called Structured Literacy.

David Kilpatrick stated, "We teach reading in different ways; they [students] learn to read proficiently in only one way." The Science of Reading (SoR) has demystified any wonder of how we learn to read and offers evidence backed by science to confirm that there is one right way to teach reading. In addition to this, the SoR provides vital information to drive IMSE's approach to instruction and to reach all learners.

The Science of Reading: What we know

The SoR helps us to understand the cognitive processes that are essential for reading proficiency. It describes the development of reading skills for both typical and atypical readers.

The SoR has debunked various methods used over the years to teach reading that were not based on scientific evidence.

Most reading difficulties can be prevented in young, at-risk students. In other grades, studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of intensive phonemic awareness training, intensive phonic decoding training, and opportunities for repeated practice with reading controlled text. Intervention in these skills leads to efficient orthographic mapping and the highest degree of success.

Teaching whole word memorization is limited, and learning phonics empowers students with an exponential effect.
If a child memorizes ten words, then the child can read ten words. But, if the child can learn the sounds of ten letters, the child can read...

350 three-sound words

4,320 four-sound words

21,650 five-sound words

Reading development can be divided into three stages:

Letters and sounds: Letter-sound knowledge is essential for both phonic decoding and sight-word learning.

Phonic decoding: Early phonological awareness skills enable the development of letter-sound knowledge and should be targeted for direct instruction through first grade. Advanced phonological awareness skills should continue to be assessed and practiced through third grade to ensure that a solid orthographic lexicon is established.

Orthographic mapping: Understanding orthographic mapping allows for teachers to support students who struggle to read. Orthographic mapping is the process that occurs when unfamiliar words become automatic sight words. The research on orthographic mapping explains how students develop this vast sight word bank for accurate and automatic word retrieval and also why students with reading problems struggle to develop this skill.

Phonics and phonemic manipulation must be proficient to allow for students to build a sight word bank or orthographic lexicon. To support this, students need sufficient practice and review in decoding and encoding, knowledge and application of concept skills, and exposure to decodable text.

Comprehension is the ultimate goal for reading. It is driven by two broad skill sets that are identified in the Simple View of Reading (SVoR).

The Simple View of Reading (SVoR) is further detailed in Scarborough's Reading Rope, which highlights the essential components of reading.

Phonics is an important component in early, effective literacy-based instruction.

Learning to spell is far more complex than just memorizing words. Encoding (spelling) is a developmental process that impacts fluency, writing, pronunciation, and vocabulary.

Most teachers have received little knowledge about language structures that are used in reading, speaking, and writing. The SoR has compounded information but has yet to make it into the professional development of all teachers.

Students with reading difficulties present on a continuum of severity and require highly skilled teachers who have the knowledge and expertise to provide intervention based on the SoR.

The findings of the SoR translate into practices called Structured Literacy™. Structured Literacy is an approach to teach reading that is based on the Science of Reading.

Structured Literacy: How we teach

Through Structured Literacy (SL), teachers implement methods that are appropriate for all students and particularly necessary for students with learning differences.

Orton-Gillingham is an evidence-based SL approach that uses research from the SoR and incorporates recommended multi-sensory instructional techniques. SL supports instruction that is explicit, sequential, systematic, prescriptive, diagnostic, and cumulative.

Instruction is assessment-driven. The diagnostic aspect of SL requires continued progress monitoring to measure outcomes and guide differentiation.

Students are provided repeated opportunities with decodable text that have ample representations of the phonetic elements for code-emphasis.

Through regular dictation of words and sentences containing the phonetic concept, students become skilled in spelling words within and outside of the text.

Structured Literacy: What we teach

The SoR identifies five essential components that make up the Simple View of Reading. Structured Literacy incorporates all five:

Phonemic Awareness

Phonics

Fluency

Vocabulary

Comprehension

Students who have difficulty decoding need a focus on phoneme-grapheme and blending automaticity for both real and nonsense words. Teachers are skilled at differentiating instruction based on assessment results.

Orthography helps students to understand why words are spelled the way they are spelled. Students learn to identify the overlapping features of words including word origin, phoneme-grapheme correspondence, position constraints, and patterns and conventions. This helps them to acquire the alphabetic principle.

Phonemic awareness is emphasized as a necessary pre-reading skill and teachers recognize and target the sequence of skills to build phonological awareness from early to advanced skill levels.

Regular words are taught according to phonetic patterns and irregular words are analyzed for their irregularities. When proficient readers encounter new words, they phonemically analyze the word for the regular grapheme-phoneme patterns and are able to identify the irregular element(s) with ease. Teaching weak readers to activate this process allows them to align the letters to the phonemes in their memory.

Morphology is the study of meaningful units within words. Students are able to expand their vocabulary when they are directly exposed to the study of root words, prefixes, and suffixes.

The Science of Reading has proven that a Structured Literacy approach is a necessary foundation for reading success. As teachers, we make a commitment to continue our education to support the learning of every student. IMSE's Orton-Gillingham training and programs make it possible for teachers to integrate evidence-based and research-based reading instruction and intervention strategies into Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) to empower all students in every classroom.

Sign up for our LIVE virtual Orton-Gillingham training! We are now offering half-day, evening, and weekend options to best fit your schedule.

To learn more about the Science of Reading and Structured Literacy, check out the following great reads:

IMSE's approach allows teachers to incorporate the five components essential to an effective reading program into their daily lessons: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.

The approach is based on the Orton-Gillingham methodology and focuses on explicit, direct instruction that is sequential, structured, and multi-sensory.

It is IMSE's mission that all children must have the ability to read to fully realize their potential. We are committed to providing teachers with the knowledge and tools to deliver proven literacy education to students of all ages and abilities.

About The Author

Dr. Kirstina Ordetx is a Level 4 Master Instructor with The Institute for Multi-Sensory Education (IMSE). She holds a doctorate in Counseling Psychology with a concentration in pediatric neurology. Dr. Ordetx is an educational specialist with over 25 years of clinical experience, research, and consultation. She is a certified Structured Literacy Dyslexia Interventionist through the Center for Effective Reading Instruction, a Certified Nutrition and Wellness Consultant, Executive Functions Coach, and a registered Licensed Mental Health Intern. Dr. Ordetx has published two books that compile her research and practice in Theory of Mind. She has served on accreditation committees for the Florida Council of Independent Schools, is a university adjunct professor in developmental and child psychology, and presents at various national and international conferences. Dr. Ordetx is head of school for a private academy in Lakewood Ranch, Florida specializing in the multi-sensory education of students who have language and learning-based differences. She is the Executive Director of the Pinnacle Pediatric Therapy Group, a multi-disciplinary, pediatric therapy clinic.
Please connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest to get tips and tricks from your peers and us. Read the IMSE Journal to hear success stories from other schools and districts, and be sure to read the OG Weekly email series for refreshers and tips.

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Being a proficient reader has an impact on a student's entire education. Teaching students to read is the work of educators. While some educators are well-equipped to take on such a significant task, others wish they were better prepared and supported to make an impact that could change a child's life.

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

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

Download: Science of Reading Primer, Part One

Download: Science of Reading Primer, Part Two

Download: Science of Reading: Making the shift eBook

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

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The Science of Reading and Dyslexia Support

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The Science of Reading and Dyslexia Support

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The Science of Reading and Dyslexia Support

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The Science of Reading and Dyslexia Support 

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The Science of Reading and Dyslexia Support 

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The Science of Reading and Middle School: The Other End of the Rope

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The Science of Reading and Middle School: The Other End of the Rope

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The Science of Reading and Middle School: The Other End of the Rope

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The Latest on the Science of Reading: Beyond the Knowledge Gap

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The Latest on the Science of Reading: Beyond the Knowledge Gap

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The Knowledge Gap—K–5 Reading Curriculum and CKLA | Amplify

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The Science of Reading and Middle School

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The Science of Reading and Middle School

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The Science of Reading
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From Learning to Read to Reading to Learn: Building Confident Learners 

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From Learning to Read to Reading to Learn: Building Confident Learners 

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Summary: Children learn more and remember better when writing by hand, a new study reports. The brains of children are more active when handwriting than typing on a computer keyboard. Professor Audrey van der Meer at NTNU believes that national guidelines should be put into place to ensure that children receive at least a minimum of handwriting training.
Results from several studies have shown that both children and adults learn more and remember better when writing by hand.

Now another study confirms the same: choosing handwriting over keyboard use yields the best learning and memory.

Van der Meer and her colleagues have investigated this several times, first in 2017 and now in 2020.

In 2017, she examined the brain activity of 20 students. She has now published a study in which she examined brain activity in twelve young adults and twelve children.

This is the first time that children have participated in such a study.

Both studies were conducted using an EEG to track and record brain wave activity. The participants wore a hood with over 250 electrodes attached.

The brain produces electrical impulses when it is active. The sensors in the electrodes are very sensitive and pick up the electrical activity that takes place in the brain.

Handwriting gives the brain more hooks to hang memories on

Each examination took 45 minutes per person, and the researchers received 500 data points per second.

The results showed that the brain in both young adults and children is much more active when writing by hand than when typing on a keyboard.

"The use of pen and paper gives the brain more 'hooks' to hang your memories on. Writing by hand creates much more activity in the sensorimotor parts of the brain. A lot of senses are activated by pressing the pen on paper, seeing the letters you write and hearing the sound you make while writing. These sense experiences create contact between different parts of the brain and open the brain up for learning. We both learn better and remember better," says Van der Meer.

She believes that her own and others' studies emphasize the importance of children being challenged to draw and write at an early age, especially at school.

Today's digital reality is that typing, tapping and screen time are a big part of children's and adolescents' everyday lives.

A survey of 19 countries in the EU shows that Norwegian children and teens spend the most time online. The smartphone is a constant companion, followed closely by the PC and tablet.

The survey shows that Norwegian children ages 9 to16 spend almost four hours online every day, double the amount since 2010.

Kids' leisure time spent in front of a screen is now amplified by schools' increasing emphasis on digital learning.

Van der Meer thinks digital learning has many positive aspects, but urges handwriting training.

"Given the development of the last several years, we risk having one or more generations lose the ability to write by hand. Our research and that of others show that this would be a very unfortunate consequence" of increased digital activity, says Meer.

Typing, clicking and watching occupy an increasing number of hours in the average child's day. But brain research shows that writing by hand helps people remember better and learn more. The photo shows a EEG Geodesic Sensor Net with 256 evenly distributed sensors that was used to record EEG activity from the participant's scalp during the research. Image is credited to NTNU/Microsoft.

She believes that national guidelines should be put in place that ensure children receive at least a minimum of handwriting training.

"Some schools in Norway have become completely digital and skip handwriting training altogether. Finnish schools are even more digitized than in Norway. Very few schools offer any handwriting training at all," says Van der Meer.

In the debate about handwriting or keyboard use in school, some teachers believe that keyboards create less frustration for children. They point out that children can write longer texts earlier, and are more motivated to write because they experience greater mastery with a keyboard.

"Learning to write by hand is a bit slower process, but it's important for children to go through the tiring phase of learning to write by hand. The intricate hand movements and the shaping of letters are beneficial in several ways. If you use a keyboard, you use the same movement for each letter. Writing by hand requires control of your fine motor skills and senses. It's important to put the brain in a learning state as often as possible. I would use a keyboard to write an essay, but I'd take notes by hand during a lecture," says Van der Meer.

"The brain has evolved over thousands of years. It has evolved to be able to take action and navigate appropriate behaviour. In order for the brain to develop in the best possible way, we need to use it for what it's best at. We need to live an authentic life. We have to use all our senses, be outside, experience all kinds of weather and meet other people. If we don't challenge our brain, it can't reach its full potential. And that can impact school performance," says Van der Meer.
About this neurodevelopment research article
Source:
Garvan Institute of Medical Research
Contacts:
Audrey van der Meer - NTNU
Image Source:
The image is credited to NTNU/Microsoft.

Original Research: Open access
"The Importance of Cursive Handwriting Over Typewriting for Learning in the Classroom: A High-Density EEG Study of 12-Year-Old Children and Young Adults" by Eva Ose Askvik, F. R. (Ruud) van der Weel and Audrey L. H. van der Meer. Frontiers in Psychology.
Abstract The Importance of Cursive Handwriting Over Typewriting for Learning in the Classroom: A High-Density EEG Study of 12-Year-Old Children and Young Adults
To write by hand, to type, or to draw - which of these strategies is the most efficient for optimal learning in the classroom? As digital devices are increasingly replacing traditional writing by hand, it is crucial to examine the long-term implications of this practice. High-density electroencephalogram (HD EEG) was used in 12 young adults and 12, 12-year-old children to study brain electrical activity as they were writing in cursive by hand, typewriting, or drawing visually presented words that were varying in difficulty. Analyses of temporal spectral evolution (TSE, i.e., time-dependent amplitude changes) were performed on EEG data recorded with a 256-channel sensor array. For young adults, we found that when writing by hand using a digital pen on a touchscreen, brain areas in the parietal and central regions showed event-related synchronized activity in the theta range. Existing literature suggests that such oscillatory neuronal activity in these particular brain areas is important for memory and for the encoding of new information and, therefore, provides the brain with optimal conditions for learning. When drawing, we found similar activation patterns in the parietal areas, in addition to event-related desynchronization in the alpha/beta range, suggesting both similarities but also slight differences in activation patterns when drawing and writing by hand. When typewriting on a keyboard, we found event-related desynchronized activity in the theta range and, to a lesser extent, in the alpha range in parietal and central brain regions. However, as this activity was desynchronized and differed from when writing by hand and drawing, its relation to learning remains unclear. For 12-year-old children, the same activation patterns were found, but to a lesser extent. We suggest that children, from an early age, must be exposed to handwriting and drawing activities in school to establish the neuronal oscillation patterns that are beneficial for learning. We conclude that because of the benefits of sensory-motor integration due to the larger involvement of the senses as well as fine and precisely controlled hand movements when writing by hand and when drawing, it is vital to maintain both activities in a learning environment to facilitate and optimize learning.

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Why Writing by Hand Makes Kids Smarter - Neuroscience News

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Children learn more and remember better when writing by hand, a new study reports. The brains of children are more active when handwriting than typing on a computer keyboard.

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The Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning

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While the ultimate goal of reading is what we do with the information and ideas that we take in through the written word. It is widely agreed that reading comprehension itself is the product of both word recognition and linguistic comprehension ( simple view of reading , Gough & Tunmer, 1986). Phonological awareness is purely auditory and verbal, preceding any work a young mind begins toward the interpretation of visual symbols. As such, it belongs squarely within the domain of linguistic comprehension along with articulation, pragmatic speech, dialect, and spoken syntax. We will explore this important reading pillar of instruction in this fourth article of the Reading Unraveled series endeavoring to unpack the factors that impact reading outcomes in response to real questions asked by teachers.

Why does phonological awareness matter? And what exactly can I do in my classroom to build these skills with my students?

The short answer is that phonological awareness is essential for reading because written words correspond to spoken words. Readers must have awareness of the speech sounds that letters and letter combinations represent in order to move from a printed word to a spoken word (reading), or a spoken word to a written word (spelling) (Moats, 2010).

In our first of this series, the number one response to the question, " why are my ninth graders (or any grade) not understanding what they read as well as I would expect them to?" was "limitations in phonological awareness is by far the greatest predictor of reading challenges with at least 80 percent of all poor readers estimated to demonstrate a weakness in phonological awareness and/or phonological memory. Readers with phonological processing weaknesses also tend to be the poorest spellers ( Cassar, et.al. 2005 )."

In its essence, writing is speech made visible. In an alphabetic language, it is critical that you consciously hear, connect, and speak the distinct sounds of your language in order to then interpret the collection of sounds that are represented by a series of graphemes to make a word, sentence, passage, or book. I think about this through the analogy of a forest. Some of us are innately drawn to the details of the trees, some to the intricate individuality and interweaving of fungal life, and some embrace the forest as a whole, breathing in the fullness of it all. Each of these , -to use a term I heard from Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa, PhD., instructor at Harvard University Extension School - is completely valid, and none are more or less important than the other. However, as educators, knowing the holon through which our students are accessing the world of reading is enormously helpful. Especially in an area like phonological awareness, which many of us take for granted as a natural part of language acquisition from birth.

In my analogy, a heard word as a whole is a tree, and the phonemes that collect to make the word are like the leaves, bark, reticulate vein networks, and root structures that together form the tree as a whole. For many young brains, the details of the smaller holons in a word seem unremarkable and their focus lands entirely at the level of the whole word as one nuanced sound. We should never take for granted that the children we serve are attending to the details of the individual phonemes within words. In Fact, in his 2017 book "The Reading mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads", Dan Willingham, PhD., tells us that "we are not born with the ability to hear individual speech sounds." Making these audible for our learners is the work of the teacher of phonological awareness.

Before I list some useful and fun ways to bring our students' attention to the phonemes within words, I need to clarify the relationship between phonological awareness and phonemic awareness, which are often confused as the same thing.

Phonemic awareness is only one piece of the phonological battery of skills. Phonological awareness includes the concept of spoken word, syllabication, and , as well as, phonemic awareness and manipulation. Our work is to expose our learners to each of these linguistic holons in ways that skillfully lead to "aha" moments in the minds of our young learners. The good news is that research shows this can be achieved with very reasonable time dedication over a finite period of time, perhaps due to the conceptual breakthrough nature of bringing awareness to something. There is no need to embark on a labored and repetitive approach across years. Keep it fun, and target specific skills using spaced practice to avoid lowering learner interest, which always starts out high for this work.

Possible Activities to Enjoy with Your Learners

Place square or circle carpet pieces on the floor to form a path. Say a sentence out loud (I tap my leg as I say each word as a gesture cue). Have the learner repeat the sentence and explain that they will jump to the next carpet piece every time they say a word. When they say the last word, they stop on that piece, look back and count up the mats (including the one they're on) to tell you how many words were in the sentence. You can make several carpet paths to allow multiple learners to do the task at the same time. Coach individuals who mistake syllables for words.

Tap, stomp, or clap syllables starting with a learner's name, extending that to their classmates' names, and then to familiar multi and single syllable words. Just as you've been doing for years. Body position can also help the separation with a child turning 180 or 90 degrees before saying the next part of the word out loud.

Create fun couplets that could be ended using familiar rhyming words and have your learners play the "completing the rhyme" game when lining up, waiting for carpool to begin, or just starting the day together. There are endless moments across a school day when this could be embedded and remain fun.

Model saying a word and then splitting apart the beginning sound and the remaining sounds using several different words. I do this standing and use gestures to emphasize the initial sound and the remainder of the word. I always make gestures match the way they would actually eventually write - left to right from their perspective.

Eye spy (ear hear) with words that begin with /b/. Each child who comes up with a word says the beginning sound and then the full word: /b/ bat.Reverse engineer this by giving a word and asking for the beginning sound. It's so simple, and fun to do as an energizer during a long lesson. Use a similar strategy for the ending sounds. Note: Young learners find these more challenging to distinguish and will need modeling for a while before they become fluent with the end sound identification.

There is no end of fun when practicing this skill. Young learners are delighted when words change into something else and they perceive the change of meaning carried with that process. Replacing beginning, ending, and even vowel sounds in the middle becomes a joyful moment in the day when you play Find the ___ game; for example, find the mat, but replace /m/ with /b/.

Building the skills of phonological awareness truly is fun for the learner and for the adults engaging in wordplay with them. It is not hard, but it does need to be intentional, with no assumptions about a child's level of awareness of the small details within words. Formative assessment for these specific skills is the key to discover what each child can and cannot yet distinguish as a listener and speaker. Once you know what is missing, the remedy is fun and uncomplicated. Enjoy yourself and know that taking care of these pre-reading skills will set your learners up to reach their full capacity as literate people.

Milankov V, et. al. (2021) Phonological Awareness as the Foundation of Reading Acquisition in Students Reading in Transparent Orthography . Int J Environ Res Public Health.

Moats, L. C. (2010). Speech to print: Language essentials for teachers. Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes Pub.

Willingham, D. T. (2017). The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads. United Kingdom: Wiley.

Zgonc, Y. (2010). Phonological Awareness: assessment tools and strategies. United States of America: Stenhouse.

Phonological Awareness by the National Center on Improving Literacy

Phoneme vs. Phonological Awareness by the Reading League

What is Phonological Awareness? by Understood

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Reading Unraveled: Phonological Awareness Matters - The Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning

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While the ultimate goal of reading is what we do with the information and ideas that we take in through the written word. It is widely agreed that reading comprehension itself is the product of both word recognition and linguistic comprehension ( simple view of reading , Gough & Tunmer, 1986).

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Power of Print: What and How Should Students Read by Dr. Louisa Moats

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Power of Print: What and How Should Students Read by Dr. Louisa Moats

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Selecting reading material for instructional purposes has always been a job I have enjoyed. In professional development with teachers (e.g., in LETRS ®), the text readings we have preferred for analysis are linguistically challenging, thematically engaging, and somewhat provocative. Otherwise, there's not much to say about them, and thus, not much to demonstrate about how to support students' reading comprehension.

Likewise, in choosing texts for middle school students to read in our program, LANGUAGE! Live®, we chose texts that would promote classroom discussion and motivation for writing, even though the program is for students who are still learning foundational language skills. We searched for texts that would pique the genuine interest of adolescents. We wanted readings that would support debate because they expressed a point of view about human relationships, social issues, historical events, scientific discoveries, or fictional worlds. Lessons built around texts had to have worthwhile takeaways or enduring understandings-the rewards of deep, reflective, shared reading. The teacher's role, in our view, is to lead students through the text, first ensuring literal or surface comprehension, and then, deeper reflection in response to multiple queries.

This approach, in retrospect, carries risks that have become more obvious, and more concerning, than they were even a few years ago.

Recently, the legislature in my state advanced a proposal to criminally prosecute librarians if they let students check out books parents deemed inappropriate for their children to read ( https://idahocapitalsun.com/2022/03/07/idaho-house-passes-bill-that-could-lead-to-prosecution-of-librarians-for-harmful-material/). Fortunately, the proposal met resistance and has not been signed into law. Nevertheless, community members have mounted aggressive attacks on curriculum content, textbooks, and library books that discuss sensitive or controversial topics and have sought to guard students from exposure to information that might make them uncomfortable or expose them to ideas that run counter to their religious or political beliefs.

A different, and more subtle effort at censorship is alive and well within the publishing industry ( https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/24/opinion/book-banning-censorship.html). Ostensibly motivated by concern for readers' sensitivities, especially those regarding hot-button issues of race, class, and gender, publishers are striving not to offend anyone. I was advised to remove a sample passage from Sarah, Plain and Tall-winner of the 1986 Newbery Medal, the 1986 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, and the 1986 Golden Kite Award-from LETRS because the topic of "mail-order brides" was "unsavory." Never mind that the story is an exceptionally well written, moving tale of a blended family experiencing frontier life. Authors like Rudyard Kipling with questionable personal qualities or toxic personal beliefs have been put on the reject list, even though the literature they produced decades ago won multiple literary prizes, including the Nobel.

How should we handle historical context, the personal failings of authors of great literature, or material that, to our 21st century eyes, might be offensive? I think we should take our cues from Annette Gordon Reed, author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. I recently took a historical tour in Paris with Professor Reed, an African American scholar, whose knowledge of Thomas Jefferson's life and his relationships with his enslaved family is unequaled. (Fact: Sally Hemings, enslaved by Jefferson, bore him six children.) When asked how teachers should present those historical realities to middle school students, she calmly said, "Tell them exactly what happened. It was history. They can handle it." She did not say that the Jefferson Memorial should be torn down, that the Declaration of Independence should no longer be studied, or that Jefferson's name should be erased from our streets and schools.

So, what should children read? Is it dangerous to expose students to controversial issues, historical contradictions, or views that differ from their own? My take is that it is more dangerous to a free society if we do not allow students access to all kinds of books and all points of view. They should have more than access; we should be teaching students to question, discuss, and consider views that are outside of those to which they already subscribe, including those of their peers. And this purpose can be achieved in classrooms that are civil, respectful of difference, and open to exploration of ideas-that are genuinely educational.

And how should students read? Is processing of text the same regardless of the medium by which it is consumed? Is the experience of reading on a digital device equivalent to reading a printed book? Increasingly, the differences, costs, and benefits of each modality are being teased out by research, with old-fashioned printed books holding the advantage for deeper, enduring reading comprehension.

Maryanne Wolf, a scholar, teacher, and advocate for children and literacy around the world, has reviewed this research. Reading with a three-dimensional object in hand allows us to look backward, look ahead, and know where we are in the whole text. It adds a spatial dimension to our memories for the words-the page where the words provoked a reaction, or where the story took a turn. It conveys the permanence of the author's creation, thus stamping it with significance. After reading, the physical book has presence and value. (Full disclosure: I still own and will never relinquish the first books I treasured in childhood. They are old friends.)

So how best to ensure students come to know the power of print? Lead them into books and read fearlessly together. Experience other worlds and other lives through books.
Wolf, M. (2018). Reader come home: The reading brain in a digital world. NY: Harper Collins.

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The Power of Print: What-and How-Should Students Read?

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Selecting reading material for instructional purposes has always been a job I have enjoyed. In professional development with teachers (e.g., in LETRS ®), the text readings we have preferred for analysis are linguistically challenging, thematically engaging, and somewhat provocative. Otherwise, there's not much to say about them, and thus, not much to demonstrate about how to support students' reading comprehension.

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The Science of Reading meets Core Instruction: Bringing Research Based Instruction to Life

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The Science of Reading meets Core Instruction: Bringing Research Based Instruction to Life

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Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: The Science of Reading Meets Core Instruction: Bringing Research-Based Instruction to Life. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar.

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A high-quality core literacy program is explicit, systematic, content-rich, and intentional, with a clear emphasis on building foundational skills, background knowledge, and vocabulary. In this webinar, learn how to bring research-based core instruction to life in your classroom and the key Science of Reading principles you can adopt today.

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Defining Dyslexia: How Elementary Educators Can Help Students Succeed

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Defining Dyslexia: How Elementary Educators Can Help Students Succeed

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Webinar-Archive-Video_Defining Dyslexia: How Elementary Educators Can Help Students Succeed | Heggerty

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These downloadable alphabet chart PDFs-available in English and Spanish-display unique illustrations for each letter and sound, including the multiple sounds letters can make. Charts can be printed on 8.5x11 paper and displayed in your classroom, and matches the ABC Letter Cards in our shop that can be used when teaching the Letter Naming activities.

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Using the Science of Reading to Support Students with Dyslexia

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Using the Science of Reading to Support Students with Dyslexia

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Dyslexia Awareness Month: Using the Science of Reading to Support Students with Dyslexia - Zoom

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How a Flawed Idea is Teaching Millions of Kids to be poor readers

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How a Flawed Idea is Teaching Millions of Kids to be poor readers

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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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Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: Getting At-Risk Readers Back on Track with Research-Based Intervention. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar.

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Decoding Multi-syllabic words (syllable types)

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Decoding Multi-syllabic words (syllable types)

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| | Filed Under: Advanced Word Study, Reading

There are two specific core memories I have from my teaching career when I needed syllable type instruction to help my students with decoding multisyllabic words... and I didn't know it.

1. During my first teaching observation, I presented a student with the word "udder." He said he couldn't read it because it had two ds. I had no idea what to do to guide him. Now, I know I needed syllable instruction.

2. During my fifth year of teaching, I had 11 students reading on a 1st/2nd grade level in 5th grade. I administered basic phonics assessments, and they knew all of their sounds. I was stumped. I remember asking the 1st grade teachers and the literacy coach for strategies or even books I could read to learn how to help them. I didn't know it then, but teaching syllable types as a strategy for decoding multisyllabic words would have been the perfect first step.

Reason 1: Gives students a strategy for all the vowel sounds.
Why Teach Syllable Types?
Reason 2: Teaching through syllables is a "mature" way to reteach necessary phonics to struggling older readers.
Consonants are pretty easy for students to figure out, but the trickiest sounds in English are definitely the vowels. Students need a strategy to help them determine what sounds the vowels make in words. If students understand the syllable type, they will have a better understanding of whether a vowel is going to be short, long, or work with another vowel or letter (vowel team, r-controlled, or silent e, for example).
Reason 3: Gives students a strategy to decode longer words using their known phonics skills.
Students know when they are behind and can be discouraged by doing "babyish" phonics work. Using syllable types and patterns to reteach phonics is a great way to reach those older students and engage them in necessary phonics skills.
Reason 4: Helps students begin to recognize chunks and patterns between known and unknown words.
Teaching students the syllable types will help them access longer words and apply the phonics skills they learned in the primary grades to those words. Many students skip words or mumble when presented with larger words. Teaching them a systematic way of breaking words into decodable syllables will help them build their skills and confidence.

The purpose of teaching students syllable types is not to require students to identify the types or even necessarily label them (although that is great in the beginning) but to know how to pronounce those chunks and patterns as they see them in words they are reading. This will help them begin to orthographically map word patterns and chunks and connect them to unknown words as they are reading.

A Word of Caution when Teaching Syllables

Syllable types are not an exact science. There are always exceptions. However, when you are first introducing a syllable type to your students, it is important to use words that follow the type you are teaching. Try to avoid using exception words when first teaching a type.

Also, some students only need a brief introduction and practice with syllable types. Others need more explicit, systematic instruction. The goal is to have students eventually move to automaticity with reading multisyllabic words, and the time and support it takes will vary.

Finally, for a student to successfully decode a word, the word has to be in their speaking and listening vocabulary. This will allow them to self-correct and flex the sounds to get to the correct pronunciation.

What are the Syllable Types?

There are six to seven syllable types, depending on which program you use. These syllable types are based on phonics patterns used in the majority of the words in the English language.

1. Closed Syllables

2. Open Syllables

3. Silent E Syllables

4. Vowel Team Syllables

5. R-Controlled Syllables

6. Consonant + le Syllable

A 7th type would be a diphthong. Some programs split up vowel teams and diphthongs. Also, some programs teach Consonant + le as a Final Stable Syllable (the umbrella type) and include other syllables such as -tion and -ture.

Let's Look Closely at Each Syllable Type with Examples:
A closed syllable has a vowel followed by a consonant. Consonants can "close in" the vowel (win) or follow the vowel (in). The vowel usually makes the short vowel sound.
Closed Syllables

Examples:

bus, him, shed - all closed syllable 1-syllable words

rab/bit and mit/ten - both syllables closed

mag/net/ic and vol/can/ic - three closed syllables
An open syllable ends with a single vowel. The vowel is "open and free." The vowel usually makes a long vowel sound.
Open Syllables

Examples:

go, so, no - all open syllable 1-syllable words

ex/po - first syllable closed, second syllable open

o/pen - first syllable open, second syllable closed
The silent e syllable uses a VCe (vowel - consonant - e) pattern. The e is silent. It usually makes the other vowel have a long sound.
Silent E/Magic E Syllables (VCe)

hope, save, gene - all silent e syllable 1-syllable words

es/cape - first syllable closed, second syllable silent e

pri/mate - first syllable open, second syllable silent e

life/less - first syllable silent e, second syllable closed
A vowel team syllable is when letters work together or make a team to form one vowel sound.
Vowel Team Syllables

boat, great, rain - all vowel team syllable 1-syllable words

pay/check - first syllable vowel team, second syllable closed

coast/line - first syllable vowel team, second syllable silent e
A diphthong syllable is a specific type of vowel team that forms a new vowel sound that is not long or short.
Diphthong Vowel Team Syllables

soup, new, drool - all diphthong vowel team syllable 1-syllable words

ig/loo - first syllable closed, second syllable diphthong

sham/poo - first syllable closed, second syllable diphthong

au/thor - first syllable diphthong, second syllable r-controlled
An r-controlled syllable has a vowel followed by an "r". The "r" controls the vowel and changes the sound it makes.
R-Controlled Syllables (V + r)

germ, barn, bird - all r-controlled syllable 1-syllable words

part/ner - both syllables r-controlled
A C + le syllables are not found in one syllable words. C + le syllable has a consonant followed by "le." The final "e" is silent. It creates a schwa sound (uh) which makes the "le" sound like "ul."
hi/ber/nate - first syllable open, second syllable r-controlled syllable, third syllable silent e

bum/ble - first syllable closed, second syllable C + le

sta/ple - first syllable open, second syllable C + le

can/dle/stick- first syllable closed, second syllable C + le, third syllable closed

Key Understandings Students Need Before Teaching Syllable Types:

Here are some important understandings that students need to know before teaching the syllable types:

Students need to know what syllables are and how to determine how many there are in spoken words.

Students need to know that every syllable includes only one vowel sound.

Students need to know that a syllable can have multiple vowel letters that work together or with consonants to produce one vowel sound.

Make sure students understand and know the language of instruction. They need to understand and be able to identify consonants, vowels, short sounds, and long sounds.

Students need a basic understanding of how to divide words into syllables. Some programs use specific syllable patterns to teach students to break words into syllables. However, in order to lighten students' mental load, a more flexible strategy is often used in the upper elementary grades.

1. Find the vowels. Are they together, apart, or working with a consonant letter?

2. Use the vowels to help you divide the word into syllables.

3. Read the word syllable by syllable...blending the syllables into the next as you read without pausing or stopping.

4. Repeat the word and "flex" the sounds as needed. Ask: Does this sound like a word I know?

Note: With students who struggle, you will need to explicitly teach students how to flex consonants and vowel sounds and to be flexible when decoding words. Flexing means being flexible and knowing that letters can and do make different sounds. Flexing a sound is trying out another sound the letter(s) make or even replacing a vowel with a schwa sound.

What About Schwa?

A schwa is a vowel sound in an unstressed syllable. It is commonly pronounced with the "uh" sound. It is important to understand the schwa sound because it causes there to be some exceptions to syllable types.

Banana (ba/nan/a) is pronounced buh/nan/uh. The first and last syllables do not follow the open syllable rules. They make the "uh" sound, which is the schwa.

Bottom (bot/tom) reads as bot/tuhm. The o is an unaccented syllable and does not follow the closed syllable rule. The "o" makes the "uh" sound, making it the schwa.

Sequence and Steps to Teaching Syllable Types

1. Review the basics of syllables with your students. Practice counting syllables in spoken words if needed.

2. Explicitly teach each syllable type in a systematic sequence where they build on one another. Here is the sequence I recommend:

1. Closed Syllables

2. Open Syllables

3. Silent E Syllable (VCe)

4. Vowel Teams (and Diphthongs) - I like to separate these out and teach predictable vowel teams, unpredictable vowel teams, and diphthongs. Students often struggle with all the vowel sounds, so splitting them into chunks (and then reviewing) helps.

5. R-Controlled (V+R)

6. Consonant + le

This may take days, weeks, or even go into a couple of months with some students. Regular monitoring and informal assessment is key to ensuring students have mastered a syllable type before moving on to others.

3. When introducing a new syllable type, review the previously learned types and build on from those. Include words in your instruction that not only introduce the new type in its purest form (no schwa or exceptions) but also include the other syllable types. This ensures the instruction is both systematic and cumulative.

4. Model how to find and read the syllable types in words that don't fit the pattern and/or words that contain the schwa. Even though we want to use pure examples during initial instruction, the reality is that the words students see in reading will not always be pure examples. Modeling how to use the syllable types with these words will help bridge the gap from instruction to practice. Make sure students understand that the final word may be an approximation of its syllables. This is because unaccented syllables typically make the schwa sound.

5. Continue reviewing the syllable types in authentic text.

1. Pull out the multisyllabic words from stories that students are about to read. Scoop the syllables and discuss the syllable types.

2. When students are reading, remind them to look for known syllable types to help them decode the words.

3. Remember to scaffold the supports - take away supports when you are able as the main goal is to have the students visually breaking apart and analyzing words as they are reading.

Next Steps After Syllable Type Instruction

The next steps after students have mastered syllable type instruction could be:

1. Morphology Instruction - Morphology is a great way to connect decoding skills with vocabulary and making meaning. Since affixes are also syllables, being familiar with affixes and how to identify them can help students when reading multisyllabic words. Click here to read a post with more details about teaching morphology in grades 4-5!

2. Flexing Sounds - Increase students practice with flexing sounds as they are reading. Flexing from short to long vowel sounds, flexing vowel team sounds, and flexing vowels to the schwa sound.

3. Vocabulary Knowledge - Continue increasing students' speaking and listening vocabulary so they will have better success at decoding multisyllabic words and tweaking the pronunciation to fit known words.

Need Resources and Activities for Teaching Syllable Types?

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Decoding Multisyllabic Words: Using Syllable Types (Free Posters)

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Filed Under: Advanced Word Study, Reading There are two specific core memories I have from my teaching career when I needed syllable type instruction to help my students with decoding multisyllabic words... and I didn't know it. During my first teaching observation, I presented a student with the word "udder."

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Syllable types: A strategy for reading multisyllabic words

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Syllable types: A strategy for reading multisyllabic words

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Discover Heggerty’s curated collection of free tools, materials, and learning opportunities designed to support educators at all experience levels in teaching reading and writing.

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Leveraging the Science of Reading to Boost Biliteracy

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Leveraging the Science of Reading to Boost K–8 Biliteracy Instruction and Learning | Amplify

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