# data[].attributes.body
Hi everyone!

In this post I want to share a few resources that I have found which can be helpful for educators who are dedicated to and striving to help students learn reading. Becoming their best reader self! These resources are especially helpful in helping older students (secondary education) who may be delayed readers or reading below grade level standards.

Louisa C. Moats and Susan L. Hall “Straight Talk About Reading: How Parents Can Make A Difference During The Early Years.”

Louisa Moats “When Older Students Can’t Read”

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Reading Skills for kids with disabilities

# data[].attributes.body
Kenny: As we explored the science of reading for kids in general, I think it is also important to explore how kids with disabilities could easily learn and master their reading as well. As the science of reading touches neurological and psychological relationship, we need to explore ways to better support kids with reading and/or learning disabilities. This article does just that.

# data[].attributes.body
Jaquin Johnson- In this article by Joseph K. Torgesen, published by the American Federation of Teachers, discusses the critical importance of early reading interventions to prevent long-term reading failure. Torgesen outlines the science behind effective reading instruction, emphasizing the need for systematic and explicit teaching of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension strategies.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Children who are destined to be poor readers in fourth grade almost invariably have difficulties in kindergarten and first grade with critical phonological skills: their knowledge of letter names, their phonemic awareness (ability to hear, distinguish, and blend individual sounds), their ability to match sound to print, and their other skills in using the alphabetic principle are weak. These weak phonological skills, in turn, mean it is difficult for these children to identify (decode) unknown words, and their efforts to do so produce many errors. Naturally, these children find it difficult, even unpleasant, to read independently.

Their problems then spiral. Their ability to become fluent readers is compromised because the development of fluent word reading depends heavily on learning to identify large numbers of words by sight (Schwanenflugel, Hamilton, Kuhn, Wisenbaker, and Stahl, 2004; Torgesen, Rashotte, and Alexander, 2001). Because words do not become sight words until they are read accurately a number of times, both inaccurate reading and diminished reading practice cause slow growth of fluent word-identification skills. Furthermore, the strongest current theories of reading growth link together phonemic and sight word-reading skills by showing how good phonemic decoding skills are necessary in the formation of accurate memory for the spelling patterns that are the basis of sight word recognition (Ehri, 1998).

The terrible spiral then spins even more strongly. We know, for example, that delayed development of reading skills affects vocabulary growth (Cunningham and Stanovich, 1998), alters children's attitudes and motivation to read (Oka and Paris, 1986), and leads to missed opportunities to develop comprehension strategies (Brown, Palincsar, and Purcell, 1986). If children fall seriously behind in the growth of critical early reading skills, they have fewer opportunities to practice reading. Recent evidence (Torgesen, Rashotte, and Alexander, 2001) suggests that these lost practice opportunities make it extremely difficult for children who remain poor readers during the first three years of elementary school to ever acquire average levels of reading fluency. All of this explains the very sobering fact obtained from several longitudinal studies: Children who are poor readers at the end of first grade almost never acquire average-level reading skills by the end of elementary school (Francis, Shaywitz, Stuebing, Shaywitz, and Fletcher, 1996; Juel, 1988; Shaywitz et al., 1999; Torgesen and Burgess, 1998). (See the sidebar " Waiting Rarely Works")

That's the bad news. The good news is we now have tools to reliably identify the children who are likely destined for this early reading failure. (See " Early Screening Is at the Heart of Prevention"). Most importantly, given the results of a number of intervention studies, we can say with confidence that if we intervene early, intensively, and appropriately, we can provide these children with the early reading skills that can prevent almost all of them from ever entering the nasty downward spiral just described.

In this article, I want to lay out two sets of findings: (1) what we know about the kind of instruction that weak readers need in kindergarten through second grade to prevent them from ever entering the downward spiral, and (2) what we know about the effectiveness of interventions that make use of this knowledge.

Before setting forth the case for early intervention, an important point needs to be clarified. Most children who enter school at risk for reading difficulties fall into one of two broad groups. Children in the first group enter school with adequate oral language ability but have weaknesses in the phonological domain. Their primary problem in learning to read involves learning to read words accurately and fluently (Torgesen, 1999). In contrast, the second group of children, coming largely from families of lower socioeconomic or minority status, enters school with significant weaknesses in a much broader range of prereading skills (Whitehurst and Lonigan, 1998; Hart and Risley, 1995; Hecht, Burgess, Torgesen, Wagner, and Rashotte, 2000). Not only are their phonological skills and print-related knowledge weak, they have weaker vocabularies, less experience with complicated syntax, and less general background knowledge-all of which are vital for strong reading comprehension at third grade and beyond. Children with these general oral language weaknesses on top of phonological weaknesses require a broader range of instructional support and interventions than those who come to school with impairments only in phonological ability. However, both groups require special support in the growth of early word-reading skills if they are to make adequate progress in learning to read; and, with that support, both can achieve word-reading skills within the average range.*

It is these early word-reading skills-and specifically how to help our weakest readers attain them-that are the focus of this article. Why make word-reading skills the focus when the ultimate goal is reading for comprehension and enjoyment? For several reasons: First, new discoveries about reading have produced a consensus belief that strong word-reading skills are central to fluent, accurate reading (Rayner, Foorman, Perfetti, Pesetsky, and Seidenberg 2001). Second, there is very strong evidence, as common sense would suggest, of both an empirical (Good, Simmons, and Kame'enui, 2001) and theoretical (Chall, 1996; Rayner, et al, 2001) nature that accurate and fluent word-reading skills are important for good reading comprehension. Third, we know how to prevent the emergence of early word-reading difficulties. Thus, if our end goal is strong comprehension, one important goal of early intervention should be to prevent the emergence of early word-reading difficulties. While strong word-reading skills don't fully equip students for advanced comprehension of texts beyond a third-grade level, they are absolutely necessary for it. (For a lengthy discussion of how to build the broader language skills and knowledge that are vital to later reading comprehension, see the Spring 2003 issue of American Educator.

I. What Weak Readers Need to Diminish Early Reading Failure

Too many children are leaving elementary school with reading skills inadequate for the next level of instruction. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NCES, 2003), 37 percent of fourth-graders have "below basic" reading skills. Once this was inevitable, but no more. We now have the knowledge and the tools to bring this percentage down to a single digit.

To accomplish this, we must change the way we teach reading in three ways. First, we must ensure that core classroom instruction in kindergarten through grade three is skillfully delivered with a balanced emphasis on word-level skills (phonemic awareness, decoding, etc.) and reading comprehension (including the intensive build-up of content knowledge). Second, we must have procedures in place to accurately identify children who fall behind in early reading growth, even when they are provided strong classroom instruction. Third, we must provide these children who are behind with reading instruction that is more intensive, more explicit, and more supportive than can be provided by one teacher with a class of 20 or 30 children-and we should provide that extra support early, preferably in kindergarten and first grade.
A. Strong Core Classroom Instruction
Six years ago, in a major national consensus report, the National Research Council (Snow et al., 1998) concluded that the most efficient way to prevent reading difficulties from developing was to ensure that every child received appropriate high-quality reading instruction in grades K-3. That report and the more recent report of the National Reading Panel (2000) identified the critical components of early reading instruction as including explicit teaching to build: phonemic awareness and phonemic decoding skills, fluency in word recognition and text processing, reading comprehension strategies, oral language vocabulary, spelling, and writing skills. Instruction that includes these elements and is delivered in a consistent and skillful way is consistently more effective than instruction that does not contain these components.

Since the speed and ease with which students attain these different skills will vary, good classroom instruction needs to make regular use of small instructional groups composed of children with comparable skill levels and needs. Many children enter school with excellent phonological processing skills and a strong beginning understanding of the alphabetic principle. These children can discover, during interactions with print, most of the knowledge that must be acquired to become a skilled reader.

One frequent argument against increasing the amount and explicitness of phonics instruction in early elementary school classrooms is that not all children need the same level of instruction in this area. This is true. But, by making use of small groups within the classroom, weak readers can receive the explicit phonics instruction they need, while other readers can focus on other elements of language arts. Keep in mind, however, that research suggests that initial explicit instruction in phonics is useful for all children (Snow, Burns, and Griffin, 1998; Foorman, Francis, Fletcher, Schatschneider, and Mehta, 1998).

For children who enter first grade with less than average ability or reading readiness, explicit instruction in, and practice with, phonemic awareness and decoding skills are particularly important. Both Foorman et al. (1998) and Juel and Minden-Cupp (2000) found that explicit instruction and opportunities for extended practice with phonemically decodable texts were particularly beneficial for children at risk for reading failure. In the former study, the most phonemically explicit instruction produced the strongest reading growth for all children, but the effects were particularly striking for children whose phonological skills were weakest when they entered first grade.

Phonemic awareness tasks require children to identify or manipulate the phonemes in words that are presented orally. For example, a simple task in this domain would ask children to say which of three words ( bat, car, fork) begins with the same sound as bike. A more difficult task might ask the child to pronounce the first sound in the work bike, and a still more difficult task might ask the child to say what word was left when the word card was pronounced without saying the / d/ sound. Both conscious awareness of the phonemes in words and the ability to accurately identify them within words are necessary in learning to phonemically decode words in print (Ehri, 2002; Ehri, et al., 2001; Wagner et al., 1997). Children who are delayed in the development of phonemic awareness have a very difficult time making sense out of "phonics" instruction, and they certainly have little chance to notice the phonemic patterns in written words on their own. A simple way to say this is that for individual children, phonemic awareness is what makes phonics instruction meaningful. If a child has little awareness that even simple words like cat and car are composed of small "chunks" that are combined in different ways to make words, our alphabetic way of writing makes no sense.
B. Screening to Identify Children at Risk of Reading Failure
In recent years, a "technology" of early screening has developed that allows teachers, with a very brief assessment, to identify which children in their classes are at risk of failing to develop their early reading skills on time. In the beginning, the assessment covers such early reading skills as letter-name knowledge, phonemic awareness, letter-sound knowledge, and vocabulary. After reading instruction begins in first grade, the best way to identify children who are falling behind in the ability to read words accurately and fluently is to measure that skill directly. Therefore, by the end of first grade, the assessments should also be measuring oral reading fluency.

In second and third grade, the development of word-level reading ability should continue to be monitored using direct assessments to identify children who are falling behind their peers. At this point, group- or individually-administered measures of reading comprehension may prove useful in identifying children who can continue to profit from more intensive work to build vocabulary and reading comprehension strategies.

These screening assessments are administered individually and should not be confused with group-administered standardized tests, to which they bear no likeness. Screening assessments are typically very brief, often just 5-10 minutes per child and, with proper training, can be administered by the teacher, aides, or specialists in reading or special education, with one or more adults screening the children while the teacher or others conduct the class. These screening and progress-monitoring measures are usually administered several times a year, beginning in kindergarten and going through third grade. Because they identify who needs special help, these screens enable teachers and schools to target extra resources to the small group of children that needs the most help. They can also aid teachers in forming small instructional groups of children with similar skill development needs. For a fuller discussion of these assessments, see " Early Screening Is at the Heart of Prevention." For an account of how one school made use of such assessments to provide appropriate, effective instruction to its weakest readers, see " Practicing Prevention."

C. Appropriate-and Extra-Instruction that Matches At-Risk Students' Needs

Kindergarten through third-grade classrooms typically include children with widely different preparation and talent for learning to read. For example, Hart and Risley (1995) documented enormous differences in opportunities to acquire oral language vocabulary at home among toddlers from different socioeconomic strata. We also know that there are very significant differences among entering school children in their knowledge about letters, print conventions, and phonological sensitivity (Whitehurst and Lonigan, 1998). For schools and teachers, one of the biggest challenges is to provide, within the regular classroom, a range of instructional opportunities in reading that matches this huge diversity in children's talent and preparation for learning to read. As noted, this inevitably requires that a great deal of reading instruction be provided in small groups comprised of children working to develop similar skills. For those children at risk of reading failure, the instruction must be more explicit, more intensive, and more supportive than instruction typically is.

Instruction for at-risk children must be more explicit than for other children. Children who enter first grade with weaknesses in their knowledge about letters, letter-sound correspondences, and phonological awareness require explicit and systematic instruction to help them acquire the knowledge and strategies necessary for decoding print. As Gaskins, Ehri, Cress, O'Hara, and Donnelly (1997) pointed out, "first-graders who are at risk for failure in learning to read do not discover what teachers leave unsaid about the complexities of word learning. As a result, it is important to teach them procedures for learning words" (p. 325).

Explicit instruction is instruction that does not leave anything to chance and does not make assumptions about skills and knowledge that children will acquire on their own. For example, explicit instruction requires teachers to directly make connections between the letters in print and the sounds in words, and it requires that these relationships be taught in a comprehensive fashion. Evidence for this is found in a recent study of preventive instruction given to a group of highly at-risk children during kindergarten, first grade, and second grade (Torgesen, Wagner, Rashotte, Rose, et al., 1999). Of three interventions that were tested on children with phonological weaknesses, the most phonemically explicit one produced the strongest growth in word-reading ability. In fact, of the three interventions tested, only the most explicit intervention produced a reliable increase in the growth of word-reading ability over children who were not provided any special interventions. Other studies (Brown and Felton, 1990; Hatcher, Hulme, and Ellis, 1994; Iversen and Tunmer, 1993) combine with this one to suggest that schools must be prepared to provide very explicit and systematic instruction in beginning word-reading skills to some of their students if they expect virtually all children to acquire word-reading skills at grade level by third grade.

Further, explicit instruction also requires that the meanings of words be directly taught and be explicitly practiced so that they are accessible when children are reading text (Beck, McKeown, and Kucan, 2002). Finally, it requires not only direct practice to build fluency (Mercer, Campbell, Miller, Mercer, and Lane, 2000), but also careful, sequential instruction and practice in the use of comprehension strategies to help construct meaning (Mastropieri and Scruggs, 1997).

Intervention researchers currently have a good understanding of the kinds of knowledge and skills that must be taught and they know that such instruction must be explicit and systematic. However, the exact mix of instructional activities that is most effective almost certainly varies depending on the individual needs of each struggling reader. Furthermore, the range of instructional methods that can be used to effectively teach specific skills to struggling readers may also be quite broad. For example, in one remedial study (Torgesen, Alexander et al., 2001), my colleagues and I found that two methods that both taught phonics explicitly, but that used quite different methods and distributed instructional activities quite differently, produced essentially the same long-term outcomes on reading growth for a sample of children with severe reading disabilities. Richard Olson and his colleagues at the University of Colorado (Olson, Wise, Johnson, and Ring, 1997; Wise, Ring, and Olson, 1999) also demonstrated that a variety of explicit instructional methods are equally effective in accelerating reading growth for children with reading disabilities in second through fifth grades.

Instruction for at-risk children must be more intensive than for other children. If at-risk children do not receive more teaching/learning opportunities per day than other children, it is highly likely that their reading skills will develop too slowly and thus they will be pulled into the downward spiral outlined in the beginning of this article. Some children are at risk because they learn more slowly than other children; they will thus require more repetition in order to solidly establish critical word-reading and comprehension skills. Other children are at risk because of a lack of instructional opportunities before they started school. Such children may learn at average rates, but they have much more to learn than children who come to school with typical levels of preparation (Hart and Risley, 1995) and thus must be given more learning opportunities in order to catch up to their peers.

There are essentially two ways to increase intensity of reading instruction in elementary school: either instructional time can be increased or instruction can be provided individually or in small groups. While increasing whole-class instructional time in reading helps many children with mild risk status, the most practical method for increasing instructional intensity for smaller numbers of highly at-risk students is to provide small-group instruction. There can be no question that children with reading difficulties, or children at risk for these difficulties, will learn more rapidly under conditions of greater instructional intensity than they learn in typical classroom settings. Meta-analyses consistently show positive effects of reducing instructional group size (Elbaum, Vaughn, Hughes, and Moody, 1999). Further, the intensive small group work must be frequent; in the studies my colleagues and I have reviewed, success has been produced when groups met 20 to 45 minutes per day, 4 to 5 days per week.

There are a number of practical and feasible ways to provide small group instruction to at-risk students during the school day. The most common way is for the classroom teacher to devote part of the daily reading period to work with small groups of children with similar instructional needs. While the teacher is providing intensive and focused instruction to one group of four or five children, the other children are working independently on academically engaging literacy activities. The biggest challenge for teachers in this arrangement is the development of productive activities for independent practice and management of student behavior during independent center activities. Another option is to use special education or reading resource teachers to provide intervention instruction during the small group time of the reading period. The regular classroom teacher might work with one group, the resource teacher another, while two more groups were engaged in independent literacy activities. Well-trained and supervised paraprofessionals may also be used effectively to help guide small group instructional and practice sessions (Grek, Mathes, and Torgesen, 2003).

Peer tutoring is another effective strategy for increasing instructional intensity. For example, Doug and Lynn Fuchs and others (1997) reported success in using peer assisted learning strategies to improve reading skills in mid-elementary school, and Mathes and colleagues (Mathes, Torgesen, and Allor, 2001) have reported similar success with students in early elementary school.

Instruction for at-risk children must be more supportive than for other children. The needs of at-risk children for more positive emotional support in the form of encouragement, feedback, and positive reinforcement are widely understood. However, their potential need for more cognitive support, in the form of carefully "scaffolded" instruction, is less widely appreciated. Instruction for at-risk children should involve two types of scaffolding. One type of scaffolding involves careful sequencing so that skills build very gradually: The child is always systematically taught and given opportunities to practice the skills required for any task he/she is asked to do (Swanson, 1999). This type of scaffolding is typically provided in well-designed, systematic instructional programs for students with learning disabilities. Another type of scaffolding involves teacher-student dialogue that directly shows the child what kind of processing or thinking needs to be done in order to complete the task successfully. This type of scaffolding in instruction usually involves four elements: (1) the student is presented with a task such as reading or spelling a word (i.e., tries to spell the word "flat"); (2) the student makes a response that is incorrect in some way, or indicates that he/she doesn't know how to proceed (i.e., spells it "fat"); (3) the teacher asks a question that focuses the child's attention on a first step in the solution process, or that draws attention to a required piece of information ("If you read that word, what does it say?" Child responds, "fat." "So, what do you need to add to make it say flat?" No answer. "When you say flat, what do you hear coming right after the beginning sound / f/?"); and (4) another response from the child ("I hear the / l/ sound."). This kind of interaction between teacher and child continues until the child had been led to successfully accomplish the task. The point of this type of instructional interaction is that the child is led to discover the information or strategies that are critical to accomplishing the task, rather than simply being told what to do. As Juel (1996) showed, the ability to offer scaffolded support while children are acquiring reading skills may have increasing importance as the severity of the child's disability increases.

* * *

I have described three broad ways in which instruction for children who are at risk for reading failure needs to be different from the instruction that is typically provided to all children in the classroom. Ensuring that all three of these elements are part of the instruction for our most at-risk children represents an enormous challenge for our schools. The requirement for more explicit and supportive instruction demands a higher level of training and skill for teachers than is usually provided at present (Moats, 1994). The requirement for more intensive instruction for at-risk children must involve a reallocation of resources to make more teacher time available for preventive instruction and, in many cases, will probably require entirely new resources to adequately meet the instructional needs of all children who are at risk for reading failure.

II. How Effective Is Early Intervention in Preventing Early Reading Failure?

The obvious questions are: Will all these changes, as sketched above, be worth it? Is instruction that makes use of the ideas above actually effective in preventing reading difficulties in most children?

In order to answer questions about effectiveness, we must first decide what outcome measure should be used to measure success, and what level of performance constitutes success for a preventive intervention. As a nation, we have (through many state laws and the No Child Left Behind Act) identified the end of third grade as the point at which all students should be reading adequately. Although we do not have a universal performance standard in place at this point, states have typically adopted group administered measures of reading comprehension as the most efficient and thorough way to assess whether students have met their standards for reading proficiency.

The use of reading comprehension measures to assess third-grade standards is appropriate, since the ultimate goal of all reading instruction is to ensure that students have the knowledge and skills they need to gain meaning from text. However, most studies that have focused on the prevention of early reading difficulties do not report scores for their participants on third-grade reading comprehension measures. More typically, they report student growth in early word-level reading skills and, as noted earlier, those skills are a necessary, though not sufficient, ingredient for strong comprehension. Thus, in this discussion of effectiveness, I have also adopted word-reading ability as the primary outcome measure. As a reasonable goal for early intervention, I have adopted as the performance standard that children should not fall below the 30th percentile (which is the low end of the average range) on critical word-reading skills at any time during their early elementary years. While this cannot be considered the ultimate standard for the effectiveness of early preventive instruction (which should involve proficient performance on a reliable and valid measure of reading comprehension at the end of third grade), it is one that can be examined in current research. Further, it does represent one important goal of early intervention, which is to establish a firm foundation for future reading growth through mastery of the alphabetic principle and attainment of high levels of accuracy in reading text. I also recognize, as noted earlier, that any standard involving a percentile score is unstable in an environment in which reading scores are generally improving. The data provided in Table 1 (below) are only meant to show what can be accomplished relative to current norms for reading achievement. If reading achievement in this country gradually improves, then achievement at the 30th percentile would obviously mean something different, in terms of absolute level of performance, than it does at this time.

Table 1 provides data from six early intervention studies in which it was possible to identify the percentage of children who obtained scores above or below the 30th percentile on measures of word-reading ability at the end of the intervention. The children who received the preventive instruction were selected because they were at risk for reading failure on the basis of either weak phonological processing skills or weak development of early word-reading ability. In most of the studies, the children had to have IQ scores of 75 or above to be included, though in some cases there was no IQ cut-off, and in one case, the cut-off was 85. The preventive instruction was provided at some point during kindergarten, first grade, or second grade. The number of hours of special instruction varied between 340 hours of first- and second-grade instruction delivered to groups of eight (Brown and Felton, 1990), and 35-65 hours of one-on-one instruction delivered in the second semester of first grade and the first semester of second grade (Vellutino et al., 1996). These studies all contained at least one instructional condition that offered skilled delivery of explicit and systematic instruction in phonemic awareness, phonemic decoding, and fluent text reading.

Table 1: How Many Children
Remain Below Average Readers after Intervention?

Using six early intervention studies with good instructional practices,
this chart shows the percentage of intervention students who fail
to reach the 30th percentile in word-reading ability and estimates
the percentage of all students who would fail to reach the 30th
percentile if the early intervention was universally provided to
weak readers. Source: Torgesen, 2004.

As Table 1 shows, while the exact effects of the interventions varied, they all were successful in bringing most students (56 percent to 92 percent) to well within the average range of reading ability. Nonetheless, from eight percent to 44 percent of the children in these studies still had word-reading skills below the 30th percentile, even after the intervention. In reflecting on these numbers, keep in mind that the children in these studies represented the 12 percent to 18 percent of children most at risk for reading failure-they were not a random sample of all children.

* * *

So what if the instructional approaches used in these six studies were implemented across the country? How many students would still be struggling with reading? To use each study's failure rate to estimate a failure rate for the whole population, we can multiply the percentage of students who failed to reach the 30th percentile by the percentage of at-risk students they represent. Taking the first study in Table 1 (Foorman et al., 1998) as an example, the students who received the intervention came from the 18 percent most at risk for reading failure. At the conclusion of the intervention, 35 percent of this bottom 18 percent remained weak readers. Multiplying .18 by .35 yields a population failure rate of six percent. In Table 1, these population failure estimates are reported in the column on the far right.

Although there are a number of important caveats to the estimation of population failure rates reported in Table 1 (Torgesen, 2000), one point is well established. Intervention research has not yet discovered the conditions that need to be in place to enable every child to acquire adequate word-level reading skills in early elementary school. However, research has clearly shown how to sharply reduce the number of children who leave first and second grades with weak skills. Most of the estimates reported in Table 1 suggest that between four and six percent of those children with general learning ability in the broadly normal range (above an IQ of 75) would still have weak word reading skills even if they were exposed to the effective interventions reported here.

As a counterpoint to this estimate of population failure rates, Scanlon, Vellutino, Small, and Fanuele (2000) recently reported a study in which the failure rate was essentially zero in the most effective condition. This condition involved a combination of small group intervention in kindergarten and one-on-one instruction in first grade, and it suggests that it may be possible to improve on past results with multilayered interventions in the early grades.

On the other hand, my colleagues and I have some data from one study reported in Table 1 (Torgesen, Rashotte, Mathes, et al., 2003) that these estimates of 94-98 percent success may be a bit optimistic in projecting the percentage of children who would reach grade level on a group-administered reading comprehension test at the end of third grade. In this study, we provided intensive instruction to the 20 percent of first-grade children most at risk for reading failure from five suburban schools in which effective classroom instruction was also provided to all children. Children received systematic and highly explicit supplemental instruction in groups of three or five for 45 minutes a day from October through May. Whereas all children in the intervention groups began the intervention with scores on a word-reading accuracy measure below the 25th percentile, only 8 percent had scores below the 30th percentile on the same measure at the end of first grade. Using the same technique as before, we can estimate the population failure rate for word-level reading skills in this study at 1.6 percent (.2 x .08).

These same children were then followed through to the end of second grade (with no further intervention from us), and our estimation of the population failure rate for the word-reading measure was the same for second grade as for first grade (Torgesen, Rashotte, Mathes, et al., 2003). However, when the outcome measure was a group-administered measure of silent reading comprehension at the end of second grade, the population failure rate (the estimated percentage of the total population remaining below the 30th percentile) was 4.1 percent rather than 1.6 percent. I project that this failure rate will be even higher for a comprehensive measure of reading comprehension at the end of third grade for the simple reason that as reading material becomes more complex (with increasing vocabulary demands and more difficult concepts), the role of broad verbal ability and knowledge in accounting for reading comprehension difficulties becomes larger (Adams, 1990; Hirsch, 2003).

How effective is intervention with older students? It works-but not as well or as efficiently as when we intervene with younger students. I've also reviewed the results of interventions conducted with older children (ages 9-12) who were provided 50-100 hours of relatively intense (one-to-one or small group), phonemically explicit, systematic instruction. In some ways the results are promising: These older students made substantial progress in the essential skills of phonemic decoding, reading accuracy, and reading comprehension. But only students with very mild reading problems made any real progress in fluency. Table 2 shows the results of intensive, remedial interventions conducted with five samples of nine- to 12-year-olds who had mild, moderate, or severe reading impairments. Even an intervention that made use of the most effective strategy known to increase fluency (repeated reading of words, phrases, and passages) had very little impact on the relative reading fluency of students with severe impairments (Torgesen, Rashotte, Alexander, Alexander, and MacPhee, 2003). It is important to understand that all of these older students in the studies in Table 2 increased in reading fluency in absolute terms (they were able to read passages of equivalent difficulty more fluently after the intervention than prior to the intervention). However, for students with moderate to severe problems with word-level fluency, their increased fluency on low-level passages did not produce a significant "closing of the gap" in fluency compared to peers who were reading at average levels for their age.

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"wysiwyg","fid":"945","link_text":null,"field_deltas":{},"attributes":{"alt":"Table 2: How Effective Are Interventions With Older Students","height":"211","width":"375","style":"height: 211px; width: 375px;","class":"media-image media-element file-wysiwyg","data-delta":"1"},"fields":{}}]]

These studies reflect one of the consistent findings in our research on interventions with late elementary children: If children's impairments in word-reading ability have reached moderate or severe levels, our current interventions cannot typically bring their reading fluency rates to the average range. Although the gap in reading accuracy and comprehension can be substantially or completely closed by current interventions even with these older children, the gap in fluency has remained much less tractable to intervention for moderately and seriously impaired older children. (Fortunately, preventive studies with younger children have not found such problems with later fluency.)

My colleagues and I have proposed elsewhere (Torgesen, Rashotte et al., 2001) several possible explanations for this troubling fact. The most important factor appears to be the difficulty in making up for the huge deficits in reading practice the older children have accumulated by the time they reach late elementary school. These differences in reading practice emerge during the earliest stages of reading instruction (Allington, 1984; Beimiller, 1977-1978) and they become more pronounced as the children advance across the grades in elementary school. For example, in "What Reading Does for the Mind" in the Spring/Summer 1998 issue of American Educator, Cunningham and Stanovich (1998) reported evidence suggesting enormous differences in the amount of reading done by good and poor fifth-grade readers outside of school. A child at the 90th percentile of reading ability may read as many words in two days as a child at the 10th percentile reads in an entire year outside of school. Reading practice varies directly with the severity of a child's reading disability, so children with severe reading disabilities receive only a very small fraction of the total reading practice obtained by children with typical reading skills. Nevertheless, research to refine and increase the effectiveness of remedial interventions continues. An ongoing study of four different remedial programs for third- and fifth-grade students in 50 schools is designed to figure out which strategies work best with which students and which programs are most cost effective for schools to implement. Preliminary results will be available in January 2005.

* * *

The results of intervention research have several important implications for education practice. First, schools must focus powerfully on preventing the emergence of early reading weaknesses-and the enormous reading practice deficits that result from prolonged reading failure-through excellent core classroom instruction and intensive, explicit interventions for children who are identified through reliable indicators as at risk of failure. One of the most important goals of preventive instruction should be to maintain fundamental word-reading skills for at-risk children within the average range so that they can read independently and accurately-and with enjoyment. If they do, it is likely that they will experience roughly typical rates of growth in their sight word vocabularies and thus be able to maintain more nearly average levels of reading fluency as they progress through the elementary school years.

Second, schools must find a way to provide interventions for older children with reading disabilities that are appropriately focused and sufficiently intensive. The evidence presented here shows that with such instruction older students can make substantial gains. Simultaneously, our expectations about what constitutes reasonable progress in reading for older children with reading disabilities needs to be adjusted; until our methods are greatly improved, fluency is not likely to rise to average levels over any reasonable intervention period.

Providing the instruction that children at risk of reading failure need will require a great deal of staff development. As an AFT publication is titled, Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science-and most teachers have not been provided with the training necessary. It will also require that schools incorporate into their regular life the use of early reading screening and progress-monitoring assessments on a regular basis beginning in kindergarten. And it will require both a reallocation of staffing resources and new resources to assure that children who need an intervention get it-immediately. It will take work and it will be expensive. But we know it can be done. And we know it works.

Joseph K. Torgesen is professor of psychology and education at Florida State University and director of the Florida Center for Reading Research. He is author of roughly 100 research articles and several books, including A Basic Guide to Understanding, Assessing, and Teaching Phonological Awareness.

*In this article, the average range is defined as the 30th percentile or above and refers to current national norms. Once strong core curricula and early interventions are widespread, average levels of achievement will increase. Eventually, we will have to stop relying on percentile ranking and establish a benchmark for adequate reading ability that virtually all students ought to meet. ( back to article)

†In Table 1 and Table 2, information on the amount of instruction and teacher-student ratio is provided as a glimpse of each intervention, not as an indication of which type of intervention might be most effective. Comparing the effectiveness of the various interventions would require a meta-analysis of a much larger set of studies. ( back to article)

‡Forty-six percent of the children in our intervention sample had estimated verbal intelligence below the 30th percentile. Thus, although our intervention students were doing better on a measure of reading comprehension in second grade than would be predicted by an estimate of their broad verbal abillity, we would expect verbal ability to play an increasingly important role as reading material becomes more complex. Although research has shown how to prevent word-level reading difficulties for almost all children, specific methods fro substantially and permantenly incresing relative verbal ability (i.e., verbal intelligence) once children enter elementary school remain to be discovered (Lee, Brookes-Gunn, Schnur, and Liaw, 1990). ( back to article)

References

Adams, M.J. (1990). Beginning to read. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Allington, R.L. (1984). Content coverage and contextual reading in reading groups. Journal of Reading Behavior, 16, 85-96.

Beck, I.L., McKeown, M.G., and Kucan, L. (2002). Bringing words to life: Robust vocabulary instruction. New York: The Guilford Press.

Beimiller, A. (1977-1978). Relationships between oral reading rates for letters, words, and simple text in the development of reading achievement. Reading Research Quarterly, 13, 223-253.

Brown, A.L., Palincsar, A.S. and Purcell, L. (1986). Poor readers: Teach, don't label. In U. Neisser (Ed.). The school achievement of minority children: New perspectives (pp. 105-143). Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.

Brown, I.S., and Felton R.H. (1990). Effects of instruction on beginning reading skills in children at risk for reading disability. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2, 223-241.

Chall, J.S. (1996). Stages of reading development (2nd Ed.). Fort Worth, Texas: Harcourt Brace.

Cunningham, A.E. and Stanovich, K.E. (1998). What reading does for the mind. American Educator, 22 (Spring/Summer), 8-15.

Ehri, L. (2002). Phases of acquisition in learning to read words and implications for teaching. In R. Stainthorp and P. Tomlinson (Eds.) Learning and teaching reading. London: British Journal of Educational Psychology Monograph Series II.

Ehri, L.C. (1998). Grapheme-phoneme knowledge is essential for learning to read words in English. In J. Metsala & L. Ehri (Eds.), Word recognition in beginning reading (pp. 3-40), Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.

Ehri, L.C., Nunes, S.R., Willows, D.M., Schuster, B.V., Yaghoub-Zadeh, Z., and Shanahan, T. (2001). Phonemic awareness instruction helps children learn to read: Evidence from the National Reading Panel's meta-analysis. Reading Research Quarterly, 36, 250-287.

Elbaum, B., Vaughn, S., Hughes, M.T., and Moody, S.W. (1999). Grouping practices and reading outcomes for students with disabilities. Exceptional Children, 65, 399-415.

Foorman, B.R., Francis, D.J., Fletcher, J.M., Schatschneider, C., and Mehta, P. (1998). The role of instruction in learning to read: Preventing reading failure in at-risk children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 90, 37-55.

Foorman, B.R., Francis, D.J., Shaywitz, S.E., Shaywitz, B.A., and Fletcher, J.M. (1997). The case for early intervention. In. B. Blachman (Ed.) Foundations of reading acquisition and dyslexia (pp. 243-264). Mahway, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Francis, D.J., Shaywitz, S.E., Stuebing, K.K., Shaywitz, B.A., and Fletcher, J.M. (1996). Developmental lag versus deficit models of reading disability: A longitudinal, individual growth curves analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 88(1), 3-17.

Fuchs, D., Fuchs, L.S., Mathes, P.G., & Simmons, D.C. (1997). Peer-assisted learning strategies: Making classrooms more responsive to academic diversity. American Educational Research Journal, 34, 174-206.

Gaskins, I.W., Ehri, L.C., Cress, C., O'Hara, C., and Donnelly, K. (1997). Procedures for word learning: Making discoveries about words. The Reading Teacher, 50, 312-327.

Good, R.H., Simmons, D.C., and Kame´enui, E. (2001). The importance and decision-making utility of a continuum of fluency-based indicators of foundational reading skills for third-grade high-stakes outcomes. Scientific Studies of Reading, 5, 257-288.

Grek, M.L., Mathes, P.G., and Torgesen, J.K. (2003). Similarities and differences between experienced teachers and trained paraprofessionals: An observational analysis. In S. Vaughn and K. Briggs (Eds.) Reading in the Classroom: Systems for the Observation of Teaching and Learning. Princeton, N.J.: Brookes.

Hart, B. and Risley, T.R. (1995). Meaningful differences. Baltimore, Md.: Brookes.

Hatcher, P., Hulme, C., and Ellis, A.W. (1994). Ameliorating early reading failure by integrating the teaching of reading and phonological skills: The phonological linkage hypothesis. Child Development, 65, 41-57.

Hecht, S.A., Burgess, S.R., Torgesen, J.K., Wagner, R.K., and Rashotte, C.A. (2000). Explaining social class differences in growth of reading skills from beginning kindergarten through fourth grade: The role of phonological awareness, rate of access, and print knowledge. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 12, 99-127.

Hirsch, E.D. (2003). Reading comprehension requires knowledge-of words and the world: Scientific insights into the fourth-grade slump and the nations stagnant reading comprehension scores. American Educator, 27(1), 10-22, 28-29, 48.

Iversen, S. and Tunmer, W.E. (1993). Phonological processing skills and the reading recovery program. Journal of Educational Psychology, 85, 112-126.

Juel, C. (1988). Learning to read and write: A longitudinal study of 54 children from first through fourth grades. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80, 437-447.

Juel, C. (1996). What makes literacy tutoring effective? Reading Research Quarterly, 31, 268-289.

Juel, C. and Minden-Cupp, C. (2000). Learning to read words: Linguistic units and instructional strategies. Reading Research Quarterly, 35, 458-492.

Lee, V., Brookes-Gunn, J., Schnur, E. and Liaw, F. (1990). Are Head Start effects sustained? A longitudinal follow-up comparison of disadvantaged children attending Head Start, no preschool, and other preschool programs. Child Development, 61, 495-507.

Mastropieri, M.A. and Scruggs, T.E. (1997). Best practices in promoting reading comprehension in students with learning disabilities: 1976-1996. Remedial and Special Education, 18, 197-213.

Mathes, P.G., Torgesen, J.K., and Allor, J.H. (2001). The effects of Peer-Assisted Literary Strategies for first-grade readers with and without additional computer-assisted instruction in phonological awareness. American Educational Research Journal, 38, 371-410.

Mercer, C.D., Campbell, K.U., Miller, M.D., Mercer, K.D., and Lane, H.B. (2000). Effects of a reading fluency intervention for middle-schoolers with specific learning disabilities. Learning Disabilities Research and Practice, 15(4), 179-189.

Moats, L.C. (1994). The missing foundation in teacher education: Knowledge of the structure of spoken and written language. Annals of Dyslexia, 44, 81-102.

NCES (2003). The Nation's Report Card: Reading Highlights 2003. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics.

National Reading Panel (2000). Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Oka, E. and Paris, S. (1986). Patterns of motivation and reading skills in underachieving children. In S. Ceci (Ed.), Handbook of cognitive, social, and neuropsychological aspects of learning disabilities (Vol. 2). Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.

Olson, R.K., Wise, B., Johnson, M., and Ring, J. (1997). The etiology and remediation of phonologically based word recognition and spelling disabilities: Are phonolgical deficits the "hole" story? In B. Blachman (Ed.), Foundations of reading acquisition and dyslexia: Implications for early intervention. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Rayner, K., Foorman, B.R., Perfetti, C.A., Pesetsky, D., and Seidenberg, M.S. (2001). How psychological science informs the teaching of reading. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 2, 31-73.

Scanlon, D.M., Vellutino, F.R., Small, S.G., & Fanuele, D.P. (2000). Severe reading difficulties-Can they be prevented? A comparison of prevention and intervention approaches. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, La., April.

Schwanenflugel P.J., Hamilton, A.M., Kuhn, M.R., Wisenbaker, J.M. and Stahl, S.A. (2004). Becoming a fluent reader: Reading skill and prosodic features in the oral reading of young readers. Journal of Educational Psychology, 96, 119-129.

Shaywitz, S.E., Fletcher, J.M., Holahan, J.M., Schneider, A.E., Marchione, K.E., Stuebing, K.K., Francis, D.J., Pugh, K.R., and Shaywitz, B.A. (1999). Persistence of dyslexia: The Connecticut longitudinal study at adolescence. Pediatrics, 104(6), 1351-1359.

Snow, C.E., Burns, M.S., and Griffin, P. (Eds.). (1998). Preventing reading difficulties in young children. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

Swanson, H.L. (1999). Reading research for students with LD: A meta-analysis of intervention outcomes. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 32, 504-532.

Torgesen, J.K. (1999). Phonologically based reading disabilities: Toward a coherent theory of one kind of learning disability. In R.J. Sternberg & L. Spear-Swerling (Eds.), Perspectives on learning disabilities (pp. 231-262). New Haven: Westview Press.

Torgesen, J.K. (2000). Individual differences in response to early interventions in reading: The lingering problem of treatment resisters. Learning Disabilities Research and Practice, 15, 55-64.

Torgesen, J.K. (2004). Lessons learned from research on interventions for students who have difficulty learning to read. In McCardle, P. and Chhabra, V. (Eds.), The Voice of Evidence in Reading Research. Baltimore, Md.: Paul H. Brookes.

Torgesen, J.K., Alexander, A.W., Wagner, R.K., Rashotte, C.A., Voeller, K., Conway, T., and Rose, E. (2001). Intensive remedial instruction for children with severe reading disabilities: Immediate and long-term outcomes from two instructional approaches. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 34, 33-58.

Torgesen, J.K. and Burgess, S.R. (1998). Consistency of reading-related phonological processes throughout early childhood: Evidence from longitudinal, correlational, and instructional studies. In J. Metsala & L. Ehri (Eds.), Word recognition in beginning reading (pp. 161-188). Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.

Torgesen, J.K., Rashotte, C.A., and Alexander, A. (2001). Principles of fluency instruction in reading: Relationships with established empirical outcomes. In M. Wolf (Ed.), Dyslexia, fluency, and the brain (pp. 333-355). Parkton, Md.: York Press.

Torgesen, J.K., Rashotte, C.A., Alexander, A., Alexander, J., and MacPhee, K. (2003). Progress toward understanding the instructional conditions necessary for remediating reading difficulties in older children. In B.R. Foreman (Ed.), Interventions for Children at Risk for Reading Difficulties or Identified with Reading Difficulties (p. 275-298). Timonium, Md.: York Press.

Torgesen, J.K., Rashotte, C.A., Mathes, P.G., Menchetti, J.C., Grek, M.L., Robinson, C.S., et al. (2003). Effects of teacher training and group size on reading outcomes for first-grade children at-risk for reading difficulties. Unpublished manuscript. Florida State University, Tallahassee.

Torgesen, J.K., Rashotte, C.A., Wagner, R.K., Herron, J. and Lindamood, P. (2003). A comparison of two computer assisted approaches to the prevention of reading disabilities in young children. Unpublished manuscript, Florida State University, Tallahassee.

Torgesen, J.K., Wagner, R.K., and Rashotte, C.A. (1999). Test of word reading efficiency. Austin, Tex.: PRO-ED.

Torgesen, J.K., Wagner, R.K., Rashotte, C.A., Rose, E., Lindamood, P., Conway, T., et al. (1999). Preventing reading failure in young children with phonological processing disabilities: Group and individual responses to instruction. Journal of Educational Psychology, 91, 579-593.

Vellutino, F.R., Scanlon, D.M., Sipay, E.R., Small, S.G., Pratt, A., Chen, R., and Denckla, M.B. (1996). Cognitive profiles of difficult-to-remediate and readily remediated poor readers: Early intervention as a vehicle for distinguishing between cognitive and experiential deficits as basic causes of specific reading disability. Journal of Educational Psychology, 88, 601-638.

Wagner, R.K., Torgesen, J.K., Rashotte, C.A., Hecht, S.A., Barker, T.A., Burgess, S.R., Donahue, J., and Garon, T. (1997). Chaning causal relations between phonological processing abilities and word-level reading as children develop from beginning to fluent readers: A five-year longitudinal study. Developmental Psychology, 33, 468-479.

Whitehurst, G.J. and Lonigan, C.J. (1998). Child development and emergent literacy. Child Development, 69, 335-357.

Wise, B.W., Ring, J., and Olson, R.K. (1999). Training phonological awareness with and without explicit attentions to articulation. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 72, 271-304.

Related Articles
Preventing Early Reading Failure
Avoiding the Devastating Downward Spiral
The Evidence That Early Intervention Prevents Reading Failure
By Joseph K. Torgesen
Waiting Rarely Works: "Late Boomers" Usually Just Wilt
Early Screening Is at the Heart of Prevention (PDF)
Best Bets: Core Reading Programs and Interventions
Practicing Prevention
How One School District Helps Students Avoid Reading Failure
By Catherine Paglin

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Avoiding the Devastating Downward Spiral

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Children who are destined to be poor readers in fourth grade almost invariably have difficulties in kindergarten and first grade with critical phonological skills: their knowledge of letter names, their phonemic awareness (ability to hear, distinguish, and blend individual sounds), their ability to match sound to print, and their other skills in using the alphabetic principle are weak.

# data[].attributes.body
Alyx Fletcher- this is my one-page summary of The Science of Reading. What else would you add?

# data[].attributes.body
Alyx Fletcher- I think this handout does a good job of explaining the different vocabulary tiers.

# data[].attributes.body
By the beginning of Session 3, you need to be able to explain each of the terms from the Session 1 Slides and in your 2025 SELA Immersion Note Tracker. Each one of these terms will likely show up on your certification exams and will show up many times in coursework, at your clinical placement, and other places ELA teachers gather.

Use the Padlet below to watch a video or read text about these terms. Post a comment on at least 3 items. You can also gain points for responding to each other’s posts.

MAKE SURE YOUR POST INCLUDES YOUR NAME

# data[].attributes.body
Podcast- Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

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

# data[].attributes.body
Podcast: A false assumption about what it takes to be a skilled reader has created deep inequalities among U.S. children, putting many on a difficult path in life.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Listen to this audio documentary on the Educate podcast. Subscribe now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The kids left behind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A proposal for understanding reading difficulty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stumped by the words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Surround him with books'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The importance of language comprehension

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who gets help?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Share and discuss on Facebook
Support for this program comes from The Spencer Foundation, Lumina Foundation, and The Hollyhock Foundation.
Don't miss our next investigation
Enter your email below to receive notifications of new stories.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Many kids struggle with reading - and children of color are far less likely to get the help they need

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

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The acronyms BICS and CALP refer to the length of time required by immigrant children to develop conversational skills in the target language and grade appropriate academic proficiency in that language. Understanding the difference between social language and academic language acquisition is an important concept for teachers working with non-native students. Learn more in our academic language resource section.
BICS = social language
Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS) refer to linguistic skills needed in everyday, social face-to-face interactions. For instance, the language used in the playground, on the phone, or to interact socially with other people is part of BICS. The language used in these social interactions is context embedded. That is, it is meaningful, cognitively undemanding, and non-specialized. It takes the learner from six months to two years to develop BICS.
CALP = academic language
Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP) focuses on proficiency in academic language or language used in the classroom in the various content areas. Academic language is characterized by being abstract, context reduced, and specialized. In addition to acquiring the language, learners need to develop skills such as comparing, classifying, synthesizing, evaluating, and inferring when developing academic competence. It takes learners at least five years to develop CALP. Research from Collier and Thomas (1995) has shown that it may take children with no prior instruction or no support in native language development at least seven years to develop CALP.

The distinction between BICS and CALP was made by Professor Jim Cummins.

Learn more in Explaining BICS and CALP from EverythingESL.

Video: BICS and CALP

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The acronyms BICS and CALP refer to the length of time required by immigrant children to develop conversational skills in the target language and grade appropriate academic proficiency in that language. Understanding the difference between social language and academic language acquisition is an important concept for teachers working with non-native students.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Race Against Time: The Key to Reading Fluency | Danielle Costa | TEDxRoseburg

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Can we Afford to Ignore the Science of Reading? | Melissa Hostetter | TEDxUofISpringfield

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Reading Brain | How We Learn To Read

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Science of Reading Basics, Part 3: Scarborough’s Reading Rope

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Science of Reading Basics, Part 2: The Simple View of Reading

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Science of Reading Basics, Part 1: The Reading Brain