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Many children with literacy difficulties find it hard to blend phonemes together. Word Chains games allow a child to focus on sounds without the distraction of graphemes, as each sound is represented by a counter. A single phoneme is changed and the child 're-blends' to make a new word. The Word Chain lists progress from simple CVC words, like 'dog' and 'cat', to more complex words with initial and final blends, like 'stand' and 'crisp'. This allows targeted practice of a very specific skill in just a few minutes.

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Blending Phonemes - Word Chains - Dyslexic Logic

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Resources and word-chains (also called word ladders or word chains) to support teaching blending skills for children with poor phonological awareness, from basic CVC blends to CCVCC words with long and short medial vowels.

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Google Drive
UFLI Website Resources (blending app, home learning, slide decks)
Progress Monitoring Tool

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UFLI
CKLA
LETRS
The Measured Mom

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Epic Book: pg 18-21, 24-25

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UFLI Passages
The Measured Mom-Fiction  Nonfiction
Core Knowledge Student Readers
Beyond Decodables
Speld Phonic Books
Open Source Phonics (Passages)
Flyleaf Publishing
Starfall

Other decodable books to purchase

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Real Students
Learning A-Z
Measured Mom

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Please include your grade level/subject as the title

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Please include your grade level/subject as the title

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(each teacher can do their own when possible--doesn't need to be done as a grade level)

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Decodable Text Linda Farrell  Michael Hunter Oct 2021

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Prealphabetic
Early Alphabetic
Consolidated Alphabetic

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K-Syntax Example
G1-Sentence Expansion
G1-Subordinating Conjunctions
G2-Student Paragraph Example

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Cortex in the Classroom: Advancing the Science of Reading in the Early Years

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Cortex in the Classroom: Advancing the Science of Reading in the Early Years

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Advancing Science of Reading in the Early Years - K–5 Literacy Program & Curriculum | Amplify CKLA

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K-2
3-5
Stamford Teachers: Sunflower Time

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Literacy Consultants & Consulting Services | Erin Kent Consulting

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Literacy Consultants & Consulting Services | Erin Kent Consulting

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EKC provides literacy consultants, consulting services, and literacy professional learning for schools.

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Reading 101: Self-Paced Learning Modules

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Core knowledge about reading is a key to effective literacy instruction. Our free, self-paced learning modules can help you deepen your understanding of the building blocks of reading and writing.

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Log into Facebook to start sharing and connecting with your friends, family, and people you know.

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"Finally, a book that has the power to stop the literacy pendulum swings! In Shifting the Balance, Burkins and Yates skillfully explore 'balanced literacy' and 'the science of reading' to find the sweet spots where they overlap, connect, and actually complement one another. The result is a resource that raises our level of instruction while helping children discover and reap the joyful rewards of reading."

"What are the research-based, critical elements for teaching reading? In Shifting the Balance, Jan and Kari give you the information, classroom examples, and tools to help you make the best decisions around six key shifts for instruction. After reviewing the misunderstandings, the science, and the needs of your students, you will be able to audit your current practices (individually, in a PLC, or system-wide) to provide responsive and effective literacy learning for all your students."

"In Shifting the Balance, Jan and Kari invite us to reflect and reexamine our beliefs about teaching reading. They gently nudge us to rethink and possibly adjust our early literacy practices. Jan and Kari have taken on this controversial topic by embracing vulnerability and modeling what it means to be truly reflective practitioners. This book is a must read for new and veteran teachers!"

"In Shifting the Balance, Kari and Jan have masterfully dispelled many of the myths and misunderstandings associated with reading instruction. Additionally, they offer classroom teachers and coaches six simple, practical shifts that have the power to transform the way we teach children how to read. Indeed, balanced literacy and science do exist in harmony, and we practitioners can offer our children both concurrently. Thank you, Kari and Jan, for this important work that is sure to change lives!"

"In Shifting the Balance, Jan Burkins and Kari Yates provide a safe space for teachers to courageously examine some long-held balanced literacy practices and turn a critical eye to where those practices have gotten out of balance. If you're willing to be vulnerable and move towards resolving the gap between research and practice, this book provides actionable steps you can take to shift your thinking and bring instruction into alignment with the scientific evidence."

"Shifting the Balance is a welcoming opportunity to reexamine our familiar teaching practices. Without judgment, Burkins and Yates invigorate these practices by inviting educators to make scientific shifts in the systems that have been in place for years. This book will revolutionize reading instruction and in turn, the lives of countless students."

"This book speaks to teachers. It is overwhelmingly clear that Jan Burkins and Kari Yates have been and are immersed in the world of today's classrooms. Shifting the Balance will help many rethink instruction in ways that will support all students. In the current version of the Reading Wars, it is difficult for any of us to say we were wrong about some of our beliefs or practices. And thus, few do. However, Jan Burkins and Kari Yates have done just that. This is as commendable as it is unusual."

"This book found me at just the right time! Shifting the Balance gives voice to the questions I've had in my mind about Balanced Literacy and the Science of Reading and provides clear insights on how to connect the best parts of both to benefit early readers. Throughout the book, Jan and Kari confirm practices worth holding onto while providing actionable next steps I can't wait to implement with students to strengthen my reading instruction."

Dr. Jan Burkins was an elementary classroom teacher for seven years and a literacy coach for seven years. She has worked as a part-time assistant professor, a district literacy leader, and is currently a fulltime writer and consultant.

Kari Yates is an author, speaker, consultant and staff developer with a passion for helping busy literacy educators thrive. Her experiences include classroom teacher, special education, Reading Recovery teacher, elementary principal and district literacy coordinator.

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Shifting the Balance: 6 Ways to Bring the Science of Reading into the Balanced Literacy Classroom

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Shifting the Balance: 6 Ways to Bring the Science of Reading into the Balanced Literacy Classroom

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Certification in Elementary Ed, Special Ed, Bilingual Ed, and TESOL

Migrant Educational Outreach Teacher

Bilingual ICOT (Integrated Co-taught SPED, Spanish/English)

Literacy Coordinator

Head of Student Support Services

English as a New Language (ENL)

New York/China

Cheese-maker
Traveler
Pun-lover

Email: hmburl@gmail.com

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When I was in my second year of teaching Kindergarten, I tried something new.

A few times a week, I started having my students practice writing sounds on whiteboards. For example, I might say the /m/ sound and students would write the letter m.

Eventually, they began writing words - at first, with lots of help from me.

After that, they began writing sentences. (Again, with lots of help at first.)

I noticed that this several-times-weekly practice seemed to be really helpful. It appeared to be improving their letter sound knowledge, their decoding, and their overall phonics knowledge.

A year or two later, I learned that I was not the first teacher to have discovered this practice.

This instructional practice - the one I thought I'd "invented" - had a name. It was called a dictation.

And - good news - it WAS an effective practice!

But the funny thing about a dictation is that it seems SO simple...and yet there are lots of nuances.

So we're going to cover all of this in this post:

What is a dictation?

How do you give a dictation?

How do you support students who need extra help? (Or a challenge?)

Sound Dictation

As I mentioned, I began by having my Kindergarten students write sounds (or rather, the letter for a sound).

But hold on! Even if you teach 1st grade, 2nd grade, or above, you will still want to include sounds on some of your dictations.

For example, you might say the sound /ō/ (long o, as in "oatmeal") - and then your students would need to write all of the following:

You would have them write as many ways as they've learned to spell the sound. So if they only know "o" and "oa," for example, they would only be responsible for writing those two spellings.

Sound dictations aren't just for Kindergarteners! ?

Here are the steps I follow when I do a sound dictation:

Teacher: "The sound is /ch/. Repeat."

Students: "/ch/"

Students write "ch" on their whiteboards / paper.

Teacher: "What says /ch/?"

Students: (pointing to the letters) "C-h says /ch/." (They're naming the letters and giving the sound.)

Teacher writes "ch" on the board and students fix their work if needed. (Note: If you see many students spelling the sound incorrectly, you can do this step before asking "What says /ch/?". Either way, the kids get almost immediate feedback on their work and make changes if needed.)

Notice how I have them repeat the sound before they write it - and after they write it.

Word Dictation

Except for the first few weeks of Kindergarten, I always include individual words in my dictations.

I choose words that have our target phonics patterns PLUS some review patterns from previous weeks. Kids are only asked to spell sounds / patterns that they've already been taught.

(However, they might be asked to spell unfamiliar words, so that I can see if they can apply their sound knowledge to spell a new word.)

This is what it might look like in practice:

Teacher: "The word is flip. Repeat."

Students: "Flip"

Teacher: "She can do a flip on the monkey bars. Let's say the sounds in 'flip.'"

Teacher + Students: /f/ /l/ /ĭ/ /p/

Teacher: "Write 'flip.'"

Students write "flip" on their whiteboards / paper.

Once students are finished, the teacher writes "flip" on the board and students fix their work (if necessary).

You can then do some quick work with the word. For example:

Teacher: "Let's say the sounds in flip and touch the letters as we say them. Ready?"

Students + Teacher: "/f/ /l/ /ĭ/ /p/" (all pointing to each letter as they say the sounds)

Teacher: "What's the blend in this word?"

Students: "F-L"

Teacher: "What's the vowel sound in this word?"

Students: "/ĭ/"

Teacher: "Which letter says /ĭ/?"

Students: "i"

You don't need to go through all that for EVERY word, but I usually do discuss 1-2 of the words in depth in each dictation.

If you're thinking right now, "Well, some (or all) of my kids wouldn't be able to do that" - no worries! I've got you covered!
Ways to Provide More Support with Word Dictation

Tell students each sound in the word. (Like "/f/ /l/ /ĭ/ /p/," in the example above.) Have them repeat the sounds after you finish.

Tell them each sound, one at a time. After you say the sound, students write the corresponding letter(s). (Only do this if students truly need a lot of support.)

Ways to Provide Less Support with Word Dictation

Have students say the sounds in the word without your help.

Don't say the sounds in the word as a group - require students to say the sounds and write the word on their own.

You can provide more (or less) support if needed.

Sentence Dictation

Last but not least, my dictations usually include at least one (sometimes two) sentences.

High frequency words that I've taught

Words with sounds / spelling patterns that I've taught

The sentences only include:

In other words, students are practicing concepts they've already been introduced to (just like the sound and word dictations).

Have students repeat the sentence twice.

For younger students (Kinder and early 1st grade), consider drawing a line for each word to help students space correctly and develop concept of word. As they repeat the sentence a second or third time, they can touch each line as they say each corresponding word.

Keep the sentences shorter for younger students.

Incorporate high frequency words from previous weeks for review.

After you dictate the sentence, write it correctly so students get immediate feedback. Younger students do better with re-writing the entire sentence (as opposed to fixing their mistakes in their original work) - erasing can cause paper tears and other drama.

Use this opportunity to remind students about capitalizing the first letter in the sentence and ending the sentence with a punctuation mark.

Here are some tips for success with the sentence dictation:

Putting It All Together

Many times, I'll dictate sounds, words, AND sentences for students to write. We do this in a 7-10 minute dictation.

If it sounds like a lot to fit into 10 minutes...it is! Earlier in the school year, we don't do very many words. Once students get in the routine, things do move more quickly!

As I mentioned, dictations can be done on whiteboards.

But I also like to do them on paper. In mid-Kindergarten and up, at least one weekly dictation is done on paper like this:

This dictation paper comes from my phonics program, From Sounds to Spelling. The lessons tell you exactly what sounds, words, and sentences to dictate to students - so that you cover your weekly patterns AND review previous patterns.

Notice that there are 2 columns for the sounds and words ("My letters" and "Copied letters;" "My words" and "Copied words"). This gives students a place to write the correct sounds and words after they see the teacher's version. ALL students re-copy, even if they were correct the first time. They leave their original work as-is, so that you can see their mistakes.

You may also have noticed that the "My words" column has sound boxes. These can be used to guide students in writing words. One sound goes in each box. The larger box in #5 is for a digraph, like "ch" or "sh."

Here's another version of a dictation paper. Notice how we aren't practicing sounds during this particular dictation. There are no sound boxes, and there are no individual word lines in the sentence:

As you can see, there are tons of minor variations and adaptations that you can make to the dictation process! It's all about meeting the needs of your students. You want to provide them with enough support so that they can be successful - but not too much support so that the tasks are easy.

Do you use dictations in the classroom? Or do you plan on giving them a try? Let me know in the comments!

And if you need a ready-to-use program to guide you in using dictations and other phonics teaching practices, check out From Sounds to Spelling. The program includes professional development videos to help you understand the "why" behind many phonics concepts - plus ALL the materials you need to teach phonics, phonological awareness, and spelling to Kindergarten, 1st grade, and 2nd grade students.

Happy teaching!

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What Is a Dictation and Why Is It Valuable? - Learning at the Primary Pond

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Dictations are amazing for teaching phonics. But what is a dictation? How can it be used with K-2 students?

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

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

Component

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

Subcomponent

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

Activity Name

Activity Number

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

Student Icon

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

Objective

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

Materials

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

Activity Statement

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

Activity Steps

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

Example

A visual of the activity and key materials.

Extensions and Adaptations

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

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

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

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Online Resources - The Writing Revolution

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Additional resources to support the implementation of The Hochman Method Ⓡ Book Resources Free access to The Writing Revolution (Hochman & Wexler, 2017) Book Resources for all educators. Which includes: Customizable Templates Activities for Students Tips with TWR Webinars And more! Resource Library Access is only for TWR-trained educators. Includes everything in our free Book Resources and

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-Many members
-Everyone is at a different point in their study of the SoR so some conflicts can arise

I prefer not to engage but read what piques my interest for my particular learners and colleagues.

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Log into Facebook to start sharing and connecting with your friends, family, and people you know.

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Most popular: Heggerty
One-Minute Exercises: Equipped for Reading Success (Kilpatrick)
Free: Reading Done Right

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Rethinking Instruction in Phonological Awareness: Focus on What Matters!

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The importance of phoneme awareness for acquiring the alphabetic principle and for learning to read has been documented since the 1970s, gaining broad recognition when the National Reading Panel Report was published in 2000. Since then, instruction to foster phonological awareness has become routinely recommended for the early grades.

However, the widespread practice in schools is to target awareness of larger phonological structures such as words, syllables, and onset-rimes before focusing on phonemes, with attention to the phoneme not occurring until well into kindergarten or first grade.

During this hour-long webinar, Dr. Susan Brady will examine studies that raise questions regarding whether following this "continuum" is necessary and/or beneficial for students. She also discusses:
- The developmental sequence of phoneme awareness
- The importance of conducting phoneme awareness activities with letter knowledge and handwriting
- The benefits of this approach for all students

Watch this webinar to deepen your understanding of how and when to teach phonemic awareness to set students up for reading success.

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For each of these seven must haves, Wiley shares lessons, routines, word lists, tips for ELL and advanced learners, and advice on pitfalls to avoid regarding pacing, decodable texts, transition time, and more.

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A Fresh Look at Phonics, Grades K-2: Common Causes of Failure and 7 Ingredients for Success (Corwin Literacy)

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A Fresh Look at Phonics, Grades K-2: Common Causes of Failure and 7 Ingredients for Success (Corwin Literacy)

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Ecology/Environment
Viewing Multilingualism as a Resource

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Well, hello! If you are watching with me on Facebook, you are seeing the video recording of Episode 34 of the Triple R Teaching podcast, where we help educators reflect, refine, and recharge so they're excited for the next day in the classroom. My name is Anna Geiger and I am your host. You may know me from my website, The Measured Mom, as well as my online courses, and my membership site.

Today, I want to start the podcast by telling you a little bit of a story. A few months ago, I had joined a Facebook group to learn more about teaching reading. It was actually a science of reading Facebook group. After spending a half an hour in the group, reading through comments, reading discussions, checking out resources, I was starting to feel not so good. I was getting sort of a tightness in my chest. I was starting to feel scared, my stomach hurt, and I had to get out of that group because it was starting to bring up a whole bunch of feelings in me that just didn't feel good. I actually opened Slack, which is a communication tool I use for my team, and this is what I wrote, "I just need to talk to someone. I am so scared. I've been doing a lot of research about the science of reading and it's completely overwhelming. It feels like everything I believed in is wrong, but it worked for so many kids and it worked for my own kids. Can't be 100% wrong, right? Now I feel like I have to completely rethink everything. I'm so confused. Please. I'm really worried and upset inside. I know this sounds over the top, but I feel so much responsibility to get this right!"

The fact is that what I had read in the group was concerning to me. There was a lot of heated discussion back and forth. There was a lot of judgment. There were a lot of big discussions, a lot of black and white thinking, it HAS to be THIS way! It scared me, and so I had to be careful about how often I was in the group so that it wasn't causing this visceral reaction inside of me. I needed to slowly get used to the group.

Now it's a couple of months later and I actually go there multiple times a day and love the things that I'm learning. But when we first hear something that feels different than what we've thought in the past, it can feel scary! It's true that a lot of what I was reading in there did not align with the things I learned in undergrad, graduate school, and the things that I've taught teachers to do.

Here's the good news though! What I've learned over the last few months- everything I believed and taught is NOT wrong! Even if you're in a shift in your teaching, the same is true for you. It's not completely black and white, but there are so many exciting things that we have to learn these days about how kids learn to read. Making shifts in the way that we teach can reach even more students, which at the end of the day is what we're all excited to do.

It has kind of felt like Christmas around here lately because I have been getting new professional books about teaching reading every day. So, if you can see, here's just one stack of books that I've gotten in the past few weeks. Then I'll move my chair, and now you can see behind me a whole stack of books and all that paper. The first couple inches of that are papers that I've printed from online journals so I can study more about how our brains learn to read and what implications that has for how we teach reading in the classroom. I'm looking particularly at kindergarten, first, and second grade.

So yes, I was really scared at first and really doubting myself. But the more I studied, the more I realized that there are so many wonderful things we were doing and so many more wonderful things we can do as we make shifts in our thinking and our practice!

This episode is actually launching a series on the podcast all about the science of reading, in particular, how it relates to how we teach reading in kindergarten, first, and second grade. I am so excited to be doing this series with you!

I recently sent an email out to my newsletter list and I told my people that in college I had an all nighter once. I stayed up all night so I could study for a really hard test, and I had two papers the next day. It was a failure. I did not get a happy grade in the test, even though I thought I was well prepared, because I needed a lot more sleep. Ever since then, I don't do all nighters, but I still love studying and researching.

This is just such a great time to be learning about teaching reading because lots and lots of stuff is becoming available to us. Just in the last couple of years a lot of new books have been written about the science of reading and the implications that it has for our classrooms. I cannot wait to start sharing that information with you.

Here's a little bit of a glimpse of what's coming. We're going to be starting next week, talking about The Reading Wars in America, how those started in the 1800s and where we're at today and what that means for us. We're going to talk about some of the basics when it comes to the science of reading. If you've done any study in that at all, you've probably heard of things like the simple view of reading, orthographic mapping, and Scarborough's Reading Rope. We're going to talk about all those things, but in a really simple, easy to access way. We're going to talk about phonics and the primary role, the BIG role this has, and why it's always the front seat of all of these discussions. It's certainly not all that the science of reading is about, but it's a big deal! We're going to talk about how to teach phonics, ideas for making it interesting in your classroom, and what kind of books our students should be using as we teach them to read. We'll review phonological and phonemic awareness a little bit, but as you know, we've already been doing that on the podcast for the last few weeks. We're going to talk also about comprehension, vocabulary, fluency, and we're going to get really practical about what all of this means for how you teach every day.

So not only have I been reading a lot of books and papers, but I've also had a lot of conversations. In the evenings after my kids went to bed, I've talked to a reading psychologist, a school principal, a few reading specialists, some classroom teachers, and I have more conversations scheduled. This has been a really exciting time for me to learn more about how we can improve how we teach to reach even more kids, and I hope that you're going to join me for the ride!

Starting next week, we'll be here again with the first episode in our series, "All About the Science of Reading".

I want to let you know one more thing before I go. And that is, I've got a survey that I would love to invite you to take. Particularly if you teach any kids in kindergarten, first, or second grade. You can find the survey at themeasuredmom.com/readingsurvey. You can tell me what questions you have about the science of reading, or what challenges you're facing right now as you teach reading so we can address some of those things in this series. Thanks again for joining me and I look forward to seeing you next week here on Triple R Teaching.

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Introduction to the science of reading podcast series

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TRT Podcast#34: Introducing our science of reading podcast series I've been pouring over the science of reading research, and I'm making shifts in how I approach teaching reading. You're invited to join me on this exciting

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

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The Lexia LETRS® (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling) Suite is comprehensive professional learning designed to provide early childhood and elementary educators and administrators with deep knowledge to be literacy and language experts in the science of reading. Developed by Dr. Louisa Moats and leaders in the field of literacy, Lexia LETRS teaches the skills needed to master the foundational and fundamentals of reading and writing instruction-phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and written language.
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Research shows that only 35% of students are reading proficiently, but 95% of students CAN learn to read. And while teachers are the most essential factor in student success, only about half of teaching institutions effectively prepare teachers for literacy instruction. Teaching reading requires a deep understanding of the processes and science behind it. LETRS is the professional learning program rooted in the science of reading that empowers teachers.

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

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

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

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

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How to Plan Differentiated Reading Instruction

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How to Plan Differentiated Reading Instruction

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Tens of thousands of K-3 teachers have relied on this book--now revised and expanded with more than 50% new material--to plan and deliver effective literacy instruction tailored to each student's needs. The authors provide a detailed framework for implementing differentiated small-group instruction over multiweek cycles. Each component of the beginning reading program is addressed--phonological awareness, word recognition, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. In a large-size format for easy photocopying, the book includes dozens of reproducible lesson plans, instructional activities, assessment forms, and other tools. Purchasers get access to a webpage where they can download and print the reproducible materials.

New to This Edition
*Differentiation 2.0: the approach has been fine-tuned based on field testing, new research findings, and current standards and response-to-intervention frameworks.
*Many additional reproducible tools, such as coaching templates and the Informal Decoding Inventory.
*Beyond lesson plans and materials, the second edition offers more guidance for designing instruction and grouping students, making it a one-stop resource.
*Reproducible tools now available to download and print.

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How to Plan Differentiated Reading Instruction: Resources for Grades K-3

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Tens of thousands of K-3 teachers have relied on this book--now revised and expanded with more than 50% new material--to plan and deliver effective literacy instruction tailored to each student's needs. The authors provide a detailed framework for implementing differentiated small-group instructi...

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40 pg Presentation--user friendly!

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(1 minutes PA drills)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Amazon.com: Language at the Speed of Sight: 9781541617155: Seidenberg, Mark: Books

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Small Group Planning Template (Reading Rope)

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Small Group Planning Template (Reading Rope)

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READING IN THE BRAIN

Praise for Reading in the Brain

- The Wall Street Journal

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

-Jonah Lehrer

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

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

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

"Richly rewarding."

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

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

-A.V. Club.com

-Oliver Sacks, M.D.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading in the Brain

The New Science
of How We Read

STANISLAS DEHAENE

INTRODUCTION

The New Science of Reading

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

-FRANCISCO DE QUEVEDO

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

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

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

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

From Neurons to Education

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

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

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

Putting Neurons into Culture

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

The Mystery of the Reading Ape

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

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

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

Biological Unity and Cultural Diversity

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

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

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

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

A Reader's Guide

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Do We Read?

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

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

-ALBERTO MANGUEL, THE HISTORY OF READING

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

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

The Eye: A Poor Scanner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Search for Invariants

Can you read, Lubin?

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

-MOLIÈRE, GEORGES DANDIN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amplifying Differences

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

Every Word Is a Tree

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Silent Voice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh dear!" replied the president.25

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

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

The Limits of Sound

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

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

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

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

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

The Hidden Logic of Our Spelling System

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

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

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

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

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

The Impossible Dream of Transparent Spelling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read

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Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read [Dehaene, Stanislas] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read

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For more detailed information about Richard Gentry, visit his website, www.JRichardGentry.com.

J. Richard Gentry, PhD is an internationally acclaimed author, researcher, and educational consultant known for his ground-breaking work in education on topics such as early literacy; best-practices for reading, writing, and spelling; and dyslexia. In addition to authoring 16 books, 2 textbook series, and numerous journal and magazine articles, he blogs for the prestigious Psychology Today magazine offering commentary on a range of topics including education and policy, reading and the brain, baby/toddler reading, and educational standards.

Recent books and textbooks include:

Brain Words: How the Science of Reading Informs Teaching

by J. Richard Gentry (Author), Dr. Gene Ouellette (Author)

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Stenhouse Publishers (February 7, 2019)

Kid Writing in the 21st Century with Eileen Feldgus and Isabell Cardonick (Hameray Publishing Group, 2017),

Strategies for Writing Workshop (Shell Education, 2016),

Raising Confident Readers: How to Teach Your Child to Read and Write-From Baby to Age 7 (Da Capo Press, 2010),

Spelling Connections (Zaner-Bloser, 2016), a popular evidence-based spelling series for grades K-8.

Dr. Gentry earned his Elementary Education degree from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and a Ph.D. in Reading Education from the University of Virginia in 1977. For sixteen years he taught Reading Education at Western Carolina University where he directed the Reading Center. He is well known for his research and writing in literacy education and is currently an independent researcher, author, and educational consultant. A frequent keynoter and featured speaker at conferences for teachers both nationally and internationally, Gentry continues to write and speak widely on literacy development and spelling. His depth of knowledge and breakthrough thinking about the importance of teaching spelling for reading and writing development has resulted in a number of books including Spel... Is a Four-Letter Word, The Literacy Map: Guiding Children to Where They Need to Be, and My Kid Can't Spell as well as numerous articles in academic journals and textbooks for school-age children.

J. Richard Gentry's ground breaking book, Breaking the Code: The New Science of Beginning Reading and Writing (Heinemann) was released in February of 2006. Writing with the same clarity and teacher-friendly approach as in his best-selling The Science of Spelling (Heinemann, 2004), Richard Gentry shows you how scientific thinking and student-centered teaching can work together to create powerful literacy instructional practices. His staff development sessions open a window for teachers and parents into the minds of young readers, so that they can open a window for them into a world of literate possibilities.

His books Breakthrough in Beginning Reading and Writing, released by Scholastic in late in 2007 and Step-by-Step Assessment Guide to Code Breaking released in 2009 are popular for teachers of beginning reading and writing and along with his other books have established Richard as one of the foremost national experts on teaching beginning reading and writing. Richard is the author of Zaner-Bloser's new Spelling Connections is one of the nation's top selling spelling programs for grades K-8.

In, Raising Confident Readers, How to teach your child to Read and Write, from Baby to Age 7, released by Da Capo Press in July, 2010, Dr. Gentry has created a template for parents who are looking for guidance with their child's literacy path. We all know the importance of reading aloud to our children, but beyond that, how do kids really learn to read? Why should you jump-start the process before formal instruction in school begins? How do drawing and early writing fit into the literacy picture, and what can you do to encourage them? How can you recognize and intervene if your child's literacy skills are not developing normally?

In this empowering guide, Dr. J. Richard Gentry describes how to teach reading before your child enters kindergarten and how to monitor progress once your child is in school. He offers parents an easy-to-understand program outlining the five phases of kids' literacy development, with age- and stage-appropriate activities that make reading and writing fun. Raising Confident Readers is essential reading for every parent who wants their child to succeed in school and be a lifelong learner.

A life dedicated to literacy education, Richard Gentry also has enjoyed life to the fullest. Time with family and friends, traveling to far away exotic places, cooking, historic preservation, gardening, working out, and just relaxing while reading a good book are just some of the personal attributes that round out and center his life.

He currently resides in the 300 year plus historic city of Mobile, Alabama.

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The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System--and How to Fix it

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

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

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

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

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Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction

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

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Phonics Screener
Dictation/Spelling Screener
Phonological Awareness Screeners

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Grouping with Phases of Word Recognition

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Blank Checklist
Basic Sample
Reading Rope Sample

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Practical, effective, evidence-based reading interventions that change students' lives

Essentials of Understanding and Assessing Reading Difficulties is a practical, accessible, in-depth guide to reading assessment and intervention. It provides a detailed discussion of the nature and causes of reading difficulties, which will help develop the knowledge and confidence needed to accurately assess why a student is struggling. Readers will learn a framework for organizing testing results from current assessment batteries such as the WJ-IV, KTEA-3, and CTOPP-2. Case studies illustrate each of the concepts covered. A thorough discussion is provided on the assessment of phonics skills, phonological awareness, word recognition, reading fluency, and reading comprehension. Formatted for easy reading as well as quick reference, the text includes bullet points, icons, callout boxes, and other design elements to call attention to important information.

Although a substantial amount of research has shown that most reading difficulties can be prevented or corrected, standard reading remediation efforts have proven largely ineffective. School psychologists are routinely called upon to evaluate students with reading difficulties and to make recommendations to address such difficulties. This book provides an overview of the best assessment and intervention techniques, backed by the most current research findings.

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Reading may well be the most important thing students are taught during their school careers. It is a skill they will use every day of their lives; one that will dictate, in part, later life success. Struggling students need help now, and Essentials of Understanding and Assessing Reading Difficulties shows how to get these students on track.

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Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties

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Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties : Kilpatrick, David A.: Amazon.sg: Books

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phonics and spelling through phoneme grapheme mapping

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Phonics and Spelling Through Phoneme-Grapheme Mapping

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Phonics and Spelling Through Phoneme-Grapheme MappingWritten by Kathryn E. S.

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

Given that comprehension lessons tend to focus on "prior knowledge," vocabulary, text reading with follow-up questions, comprehension strategies, the lowly sentence gets short shrift in most programs and classrooms.

In any event, while that rant gathered some attention, it came up short.

Accordingly, I have decided to take a mulligan.

That blog articulated my opinions but neither marshalled the research evidence, nor provided much in the way of helpful instructional guidance. It called for action but was terse on specifics.

This piece should remedy those omissions.

To tell the truth, when I wrote that blog I didn't bother to search for research on sentence comprehension because, that topic never attracted much attention. There were some old studies indicating that teaching formal grammar had no impact on comprehension or writing. That seemed to settle it for most of us.

When I was working on my doctorate, a prominent reading scholar told me that "Noam Chomsky is dead." He meant it figuratively as he was trying to dissuade me from squandering my time on something as pointless as sentence comprehension.

No matter my excuses, boy was that a foolish oversight!

Over the past two decades - slowly, gradually - research on syntax and reading comprehension has accumulated. And, over the past couple of years, the numerous publications appearing in high quality psychological, educational, and linguistic journals suggests that being a sentence- comprehension researcher is now a respectable line of work, along with social media consultant or TikTok dancer.

First, the research.

These days we're all doing some handwringing over supply lines. Nevertheless, there are clearly no supply line problems to report when it comes to sentence-comprehension studies. The desert has become an oasis.

There is now a slew of rigorous studies revealing that an understanding of syntax is correlated with reading comprehension (Rand, 2002). That simply means that students who know more about how sentences are constructed do better on reading comprehension measures.

Even more persuasive is that many such studies examined that relationship AFTER controlling for differences in decoding ability, vocabulary knowledge, memory, and/or other relevant reading skills (Bowey, 1986; Bowey & Patel, 1988; Brimo, Apel, & Fountain, 2017; Brimo, Lund, & Sapp, 2018; Cain, 2007; Catts, Adlof, & Weismer, 2006; Cutting & Scarborough, 2006; Deacon & Kieffer, 2018; Gaux & Gombert, 1999; Farnia & Geva, 2013; Goodwin, Petscher, & Reynolds, 2022; Gottardo, Mirza, Koh, Ferreira, & Javier, 2018; Hagtvet, 2003; Mackay, Lynch, Duncan, & Deacon, 2021; Mokhtri & Thompson, 2006; Nation & Snowling, 2000; Nippold, 2017; Nomvete & Easterbrooks, 2019; Poulsen, Nielsen, & Vang Chrisensen, 2022; Scarborough, 1990; Scott, 2015; Shiotsu & Weir, 2007; Sorenson Duncan, Mimeau, Crowell, & Deacon, 2021; Tong & McBride, 2015).

In other words, if all students did equally well on decoding, vocabulary, and memory tests, we'd still see variations in reading comprehension ability because of syntax difference. The kids who understand syntax comprehend better than the ones who don't.

That list of studies is impressive, but not comprehensive. I didn't search carefully for these studies - combing through reference lists, using a variety of search terms and strategies, considering books and doctoral dissertations, and so on.

It is fair to point out that some such studies didn't find significant relationships between syntax and comprehension (e.g., Cain & Oakhill, 2006), though the data are sufficiently one-sided enough to conclude that any honest meta-analysis would conclude that knowledge of syntax is an essential reading skill.

That collection of studies cited above found sentence knowledge to be important to comprehension as early as 30-months old and throughout the school grades, K-12. They found that syntax mattered with regular classroom kids and those with dyslexia. They reported this pattern in English, French, Dutch, and Cantonese. They found syntax to matter with native English speakers and with English Language Learners. Syntax played a significant role in comprehension both in studies that measured those simultaneously, and in longitudinal studies which considered the role of the relationship in learning and development.

The amount of comprehension variance explained by syntax varied quite a bit from study to study (~5% to 30%). Researchers attributed some of those differences to the nature of the syntax measures, suggesting that the ability to make sense of complex sentences is more crucial than the ability to evaluate grammatical accuracy (e.g., Brimo, Lund, & Sapp, 2018). Researchers paid less attention to variations in reading comprehension measurement.

The texts included in Comprehension tests can vary a great deal in sentence complexity, and in whether the questions they ask tap into this complexity (Shanahan & Kamil, 1984).

This concern is important since syntax is a particularly important factor determining text complexity or comprehensibility (Graisser, McNamara, & Kulikowich, 2011; Stenner & Swartz, 2012). Texts with more complicated sentence structures will be a special challenge for kids who lag in sentence comprehension ability. However, at least for fifth-graders the ability to make sense of sentences with simple structures was more closely related to reading comprehension than doing so with more difficult sentences; though this may have been due to the specific demands of the particular comprehension measure used in the study (Sorenson Duncan, Mimeau, Crowell, & Deacon, 2021).

Another relevant collection of studies is those focused on oral reading fluency or text reading fluency. Such research has long shown that oral sentence reading requires skills beyond those required to read word lists - even when the words in the lists and sentences are identical (Jenkins, Fuchs, van den Broek, Espin, & Deno, 2003). That study found sentence reading to be more predictive of reading comprehension than was word list reading. Students with specific reading comprehension deficits read word lists as well as comparison students but perform more poorly than controls on text reading fluency (Cutting, Matterek, Cole, Levine, & Mahone, 2009). Research also has reported that syntax and text prosody are related to each other and to reading comprehension (Veenendaal, Groen, & Vehoeven, 2015).

If that provocative but incomplete review of the research isn't enough to convince you that sentence comprehension is a thing, then you likely can't be convinced. Your lifetime membership in the Flat Earth Society is safe and secure for the time being.

For those of you who are more open minded, let's turn to what we know about teaching sentence comprehension.

I'd love to present an equally impressive array of studies showing that if you teach sentences your state test scores will reach levels just this side of Nirvana. Unfortunately, I can't do that.

A thoughtful review (MacKay, Lynch, Duncan, & Deacon, 2021; Stoddard, Valcante, Sindelar, O'Shea, & Algozzine, 1993) recently concluded that this research is so severely limited and insufficient that it would be unwise yet to proceed pedagogically. The reasoning of these researchers is admirable and consistent with what I usually espouse - don't try to apply basic research to classroom practice. Wait for the instructional studies!

MacKay and company rightly point out that some interventions aimed at improving sentence comprehension haven't worked (e.g., Balthazar & Scott, 2018), and that interventions aimed at sentence comprehension have been hopelessly confounded (e.g., Morris, et al., 2012; Proctor, Silverman, Harring, Jones, & Hartranft, 2000; Reynolds, 2021). Although these studies reported significant reading comprehension improvement, they didn't focus on syntactic work alone but also taught morphology, vocabulary, or text structure; perhaps the gains were due to one or another of them.

The same point could be made about paraphrasing studies (Stevens, Vaughn, House, & Stillman-Spisak, 2020). Although such teaching must include some attention to translating sentences into one's own words - for the most part, these studies have emphasized paragraph paraphrases which would likely include skills that go beyond sentence interpretation. Though this approach has been successful at improving reading comprehension, it would be inappropriate to conclude from this alone that sentence instruction is a good idea.

Despite these problems, in this case, I'm going to suggest the appropriateness of cautiously proceeding with sentence comprehension teaching.

First, I believe studies that show a close connection between text reading fluency and reading comprehension to be persuasive. (I cited a few such studies but could include many more; see Breznitz, 2005 for a more rigorous treatment of these issues). MacKay and her colleagues didn't credit this dimension of the work, but if you do then the many studies showing that oral reading guidance and chunking instruction can improve reading comprehension need to be considered (NICHD, 2000; Stevens, 1981). They suggest that teaching students how to read sentences aloud with proper prosody is effective, and I believe those practices to be examples of effective sentence instruction.

Also, I know researchers differ in the weight they accord to sentence manipulation instruction. I tend to be persuaded that sentence combining and reduction improves reading comprehension (Neville & Searls, 1985; O'Hare, 1973; Wilkinson & Patty, 1993), and that provides another body of supportive instructional data - though I admit the quality of some of these studies is dubious, it is also fair to point out that the results were just as good in the best designed and implemented studies.

Finally, I identified a couple of studies that were beyond the purview of the MacKay review. One of these studies taught 9- and 10-year-olds to read fables and to identify complex sentences, constituent clauses, and subordinate conjunctions in those texts, and then to revise the fables to make them more readable. This results in significant gains in both oral and written language.

I also recently discovered a doctoral dissertation that evaluated the impact of an intriguing sentence comprehension intervention that improved reading achievement for high school students - grades 9 and 11 (Rozen, 2005). That study had teachers guiding students to analyze difficult texts sentence-by-sentence, discussing main ideas, author's purpose, inferences, and styles of passage as expressed or revealed in those sentences. They also taught students to break down difficult sentences, simplifying them, and determining the primary function of the various phrases (e.g., who does what to whom?).

The comparison groups received all the business-as-usual reading instruction - including vocabulary, strategies, and practice reading of the texts. The 15-minutes per day of sentence work was accomplished by reducing the time accorded to the other skills. The classes were taught by the same teacher and control and experimental students read the same texts.

My advice to teachers?

1. Teach oral reading fluency either with grade level classroom texts, including the texts for social studies and science. In the upper grades focus specifically on prosody issues. If the students are not reading the sentences properly - attending to punctuation and pausing in the appropriate places in terms of meaning, then the sentences will make no sense. (Although I know of no research on the practice, but I wouldn't hesitate with older students to focus this fluency work on the reading of specific complicated sentences drawn from appropriate texts).

2. I think it also makes sense to engage students in sentence combining and reduction - combining simple sentences to make complex ones and breaking more complicated sentences down into their constituent parts. For examples of this kind of work, along with a wealth of other practical syntax teaching approaches, I recommend downloading the document, "Syntactic Awareness: Teaching Sentence Structure" by Joan Sedita. I found it by typing 'Syntactic Awareness" into the search box at the Mass Literacy Website ( https://www.doe.mass.edu/massliteracy/)

3. Lots of times teachers tell me they aren't too sure whether a sentence may seem complex to the students. A good readable source that can provide guidance for identifying sentences that may be barriers to comprehension can be found for free online; an article by Cheryl M. Scott and Catherine Balthazar provides great advice regarding sentence length, subordination, relative clauses, passive voice, and other syntactic issues. ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4373700/) However, remember that even more basic sentences may pose challenges for elementary students. However, no matter how complex a sentence may be, it is only worth breaking down if it poses some impediment to comprehension. Scott and Balthazar's guidance may help you to notice whether a sentence poses a particular kind of problem (like a passive sentence seemingly confusing actor and acted upon), but an exercise aimed at comprehending such a structure, should start with a question to determine whether or not students could understand it. If understood, move on. If not understood, it would be a great basis for a lesson.

4. I think that idea of replacing some typical "guided reading" with the kind of reading intervention described earlier - guiding students to read each sentence, to paraphrase what they mean, and to break the sentences down when they have trouble paraphrasing. That strikes me as a very intelligent and supportive way to teach these skills - going faster when the kids are having no problem with a sentence and digging in to solve the problem when they do.

5. Although I've emphasized sentences heavily here, it is important to remember that individual words play an important role in sentence interpretation and syntactic understanding (Adlof & Catts, 2015; Goodwin, Petscher, & Reynolds, 2022). Meaning will often turn on coordinating conjunctions (e.g., and, but, so) or subordinating conjunctions (e.g., because, when, if). Likewise, verb tenses (e.g., swim and swam) reveal when actions took place or are taking place or will take place in time. Sentence work requires some attention to word meanings and morphology.

6. There have been several successful reading interventions that included sentence work. Those studies aren't sufficient to determine the effectiveness of the sentence comprehension part of the instruction. Nevertheless, we can take some direction from such studies - including sentence work while still teaching vocabulary, morphology, text structure, and so on. These days vocabulary instruction seems to be getting a lot of play, though the contribution of syntax to reading comprehension is similar in magnitude (Deacon & Kieffer, 2018; Shiotsu & Weir, 2007). Perhaps 15 minutes per day on sentence comprehension would be a good use of reading instruction time.
References
Adlof, S. M., & Catts, H. W. (2015). Morphosyntax in poor comprehenders. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 28(7), 1051-1070.

Balthazar, C. H., & Scott, C. M. (2007). Syntax-morphology. In A. G. Kamhi, J. J. Masterson & K. Apel (Eds.), Clinical decision making in developmental language disorders; clinical decision making in developmental language disorders (pp. 143-163). Baltimore, MD: Paul H Brookes.

Bowey, J. A. (1986). Syntactic awareness and verbal performance from preschool to fifth grade. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 15(4), 285-308.

Bowey, J. A., & Patel, R. K. (1988). Metalinguistic ability and early reading achievement. Applied Psycholinguistics, 9(4), 367-383.

Breznitz, Z. (2005). Fluency in reading: Synchronization of processes. New York: Routledge.

Brimo, D., Apel, K., & Fountain, T. (2017). Examining the contributions of syntactic awareness and syntactic knowledge to reading comprehension. Journal of Research in Reading, 40(1), 57-74.

Brimo, D., Lund, E., & Sapp, A. (2018). Syntax and reading comprehension: A meta?analysis of different spoken?syntax assessments. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 53(3), 431-445.

Cain, K. (2007). Syntactic awareness and reading ability: Is there any evidence for a special relationship? Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 679-694.

Cain, K., & Oakhill, J. (2006). Profiles of children with specific reading comprehension difficulties. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 76(4), 683-696.

Catts, H. W., Adlof, S. M., & Weismer, S. E. (2006). Language deficits in poor comprehenders: A case for the simple view of reading. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 49(2), 278-293.

Cutting, L. E., Materek, A., Cole, C. A. S., Levine, T. M., & Mahone, E. M. (2009). Effects of fluency, oral language, and executive function on reading comprehension performance. Annals of Dyslexia, 59(1), 34-54.

Cutting, L. E., & Scarborough, H. S. (2006). Prediction of reading comprehension: Relative contributions of word recognition, language proficiency, and other cognitive skills can depend on how comprehension is measured. Scientific Studies of Reading, 10(3), 277-299.

Deacon, S. H., & Kieffer, M. (2018). Understanding how syntactic awareness contributes to reading comprehension: Evidence from mediation and longitudinal models. Journal of Educational Psychology, 110(1), 72-86.

Farnia, F., & Geva, E. (2013). Growth and predictors of change in English language learners' reading comprehension. Journal of Research in Reading, 36(4), 389-421.

Gaux, C., & Gombert, J. (1999). La conscience syntaxique chez les préadolescents: Question de méthodes. L'Année Psychologique, 99(1), 45-74.

Goodwin, A. P., Petscher, Y., & Reynolds, D. (2021). Unraveling adolescent language & reading comprehension: The monster's data. Scientific Studies of Reading.

Gottardo, A., Mirza, A., Koh, P. W., Ferreira, A., & Javier, C. (2018). Unpacking listening comprehension: The role of vocabulary, morphological awareness, and syntactic knowledge in reading comprehension. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 31(8), 1741-1764.

Graesser, A.C., McNamara, D.S., & Kulikowich, J.M. (2011). Coh-Metrix providing multilevel analyses of text characteristics. Educational Researcher, 40(5), 223-234.

Hagtvet, B. E. (2003). Listening comprehension and reading comprehension in poor decoders: Evidence for the importance of syntactic and semantic skills as well as phonological skills. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 16(6), 505-539.

Hirschman, M. (2000). Language repair via metalinguistic means. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 35(2), 251-268.

Jenkins, J. R., Fuchs, L. S., van den Broek, P., Espin, C., & Deno, S. L. (2003). Sources of individual differences in reading comprehension and reading fluency. Journal of Educational Psychology, 95(4), 719-729.

Lauterbach, S. L., & Bender, W. N. (1995). Cognitive strategy instruction for reading comprehension: A success for high school freshmen. High School Journal, 79(1), 58-64.

MacKay, E., Lynch, E., Sorenson Duncan, T., & Deacon, S. H. (2021). Informing the science of reading: Students' awareness of sentence?level information is important for reading comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly.

Mokhtari, K., & Thompson, H. B. (2006). How problems of reading fluency and comprehension are related to difficulties in syntactic awareness skills among fifth-graders. Reading Research and Instruction, 46(1), 73-94.

Morris, R.D., Lovett, M.W., Wolf, M., Sevcik, R.A., Steinbach, K.A., Frijters, J.C., & Shapiro, M.B. (2012). Multiple component remediation for developmental reading disabilities: IQ, socioeconomic status, and race as factors in remedial outcome. Journal of Learning Disabilities,

Nation, K., & Snowling, M. J. (2000). Factors influencing syntactic awareness skills in normal readers and poor comprehenders. Applied Psycholinguistics, 21(2), 229-241.

Neville, D. D., & Searls, E. F. (1991). A meta-analytic review of the effect of sentence-combining on reading comprehension. Reading Research and Instruction, 31(1), 63-76.

Nippold, M.A. (2017). Reading comprehension deficits in adolescents: Addressing underlying language abilities. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 48(2), 125-131

Nomvete, P., & Easterbrooks, S. R. (2020). Phrase-reading mediates between words and syntax in struggling adolescent readers. Communication Disorders Quarterly, 41(3), 162-175.

Poulsen, M., Nielsen, J. L., & Vang Christensen, R. (2022). Remembering sentences is not all about memory: Convergent and discriminant validity of syntactic knowledge and its relationship with reading comprehension. Journal of Child Language, 49(2), 349-365.

Proctor, C. P., Silverman, R. D., Harring, J. R., Jones, R. L., & Hartranft, A. M. (2020). Teaching bilingual learners: Effects of a language?based reading intervention on academic language and reading comprehension in grades 4 and 5. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(1), 95-122.

RAND Reading Study Group (2002). Reading for understanding, toward an R&D Program in reading comprehension. Santa Monica, CA: RAND.

Rozen, S.D. (2005). Sentence disambiguation using syntactic awareness as a reading comprehension strategy for high school students. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Boston University.

Scarborough, H. S. (1990). Index of productive syntax. Applied Psycholinguistics, 11(1), 1-22.

Scott, C. M., & Balthazar, C. H. (2010). The grammar of information: Challenges for older students with language impairments. Topics in Language Disorders, 30(4), 288-307.

Scott, C.M., & Balthazar, C. (2013). The role of complex sentence knowledge in children with reading and writing difficulties. Perspectives on Literacy and Language, 39(3), 18-30.

Shanahan, T., & Kamil, M. L. (1984). The relationship of the concurrent and construct validities of cloze. In J. A. Niles, & L. A. Harris (Eds.), Changing perspectives on research in reading/language processing and instruction. (Thirty-third Yearbook of the National Reading Conference, pp. 252-256). Rochester, NY: National Reading Conference.

Shiotsu, T., & Weir, C. J. (2007). The relative significance of syntactic knowledge and vocabulary breadth in the prediction of reading comprehension test performance. Language Testing, 24(1), 99-128.

Sorenson Duncan, T., Mimeau, C., Crowell, N., & Deacon, S. H. (2021). Not all sentences are created equal: Evaluating the relation between children's understanding of basic and difficult sentences and their reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 113(2), 268-278.

Stevens, E. A., Vaughn, S., House, L., & Stillman-Spisak, S. (2020). The effects of a paraphrasing and text structure intervention on the main idea generation and reading comprehension of students with reading disabilities in grades 4 and 5. Scientific Studies of Reading, 24(5), 365-379.

Stevens, K. (1981). Chunking material as an aid to reading comprehension. Journal of Reading, 25, 126-129.

Stoddard, K., Valcante, G., Sindelar, P., O'Shea, L., & al, e. (1993). Increasing reading rate and comprehension: The effects of repeated readings, sentence segmentation, and intonation training. Reading Research and Instruction, 32(4), 53-65

Tong, X., & McBride, C. (2015). A reciprocal relationship between syntactic awareness and reading comprehension. Learning and Individual Differences, 57, 33-44.

Veenendaal, N. J., Groen, M. A., & Verhoeven, L. (2015). What oral text reading fluency can reveal about reading comprehension. Journal of Research in Reading, 38(3), 213-225.

Wilkinson, P.A., & Patty, D. (1993). The effects of sentence combining on the reading comprehension of fourth-grade students. Research in the Teaching of English, 27(1), 104-125.

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what teachers need to know about sentence comprehension

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what do teachers need to know about sentence comrehension

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what should teachers know about reading comprehension

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What Teachers Need to Know about Sentence Comprehension | Shanahan on Literacy

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This blog entry provides an overview of the research that reveals the importance of syntax knowledge and sentence comprehension.

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About the 2022 Symposium

The 2022 PaTTAN Literacy Symposium will provide educators in all capacities with the opportunity to deepen their knowledge and skills pertaining to evidence-based practices in reading instruction in grades K-12.

Target Audience

Elementary Educators, Secondary Educators, Special Education Teachers, Speech Language Practitioners, School Leaders/Administrators, Reading Specialists, Teachers of English Language Learners, Literacy Coaches, Instructional Support Team Members, School Psychologists, Pre-Service Teachers, Higher Education Instructors, Paraprofessionals, and Families.

View the PaTTAN Literacy Symposium '22 schedule & directory.

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The 2022 PaTTAN Literacy Symposium will provide educators in all capacities with the opportunity to deepen their knowledge and skills pertaining to evidence-based practices in reading instruction in grades K-12. Target Audience Elementary Educators, Secondary Educators, Special Education Teachers, Speech Language Practitioners, School Leaders/Administrators, Reading Specialists, Teachers of English Language Learners, Literacy Coaches, Instructional Support Team Members, School Psychologists, Pre-Service Teachers, Higher Education Instructors, Paraprofessionals, and Families.

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Blending  Syllables App (mainly for dyslexia)

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Blending  Syllables App (mainly for dyslexia)

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Video explaining
Blending app copy

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Determining whether a student's speech and language errors result from influences from their native language or whether they are indicative of speech or language impairment is a challenge many educators face. One in every five children in the United States comes from a home in which English is not the primary language. In this book, we compare and contrast English with 12 other languages and African-American English. The information is laid out in charts and diagrams to facilitate the decision-making process about student needs.

Our goals are to:

Help teachers know when a referral is needed

Equip speech-language pathologists with information they need to accurately analyze speech and language samples

Get students the support they need

Reduce disproportionate referrals of culturally and linguistically diverse students for special education services

The development of this book stemmed from the needs of a group of speech‐language pathologists evaluating the speech and language skills of children from many different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The framework used to distinguish language differences from language disorders is beneficial for all educators, and the use of this framework will result in improved instructional targets for culturally and linguistically diverse students in the general education classroom, as well as more appropriate referrals for special education evaluations.

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Difference or Disorder? Understanding Speech and Language Patterns in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

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Rapidly identify speech-language patterns related to second language acquisition to distinguish differences from disorders. 12 languages and AAE included!

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Please title with your GL/subject area

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What might a 20 minute whole class phonics lesson look like and include? We're still exploring small group structures as well, but we're looking for more consistency as a team in phonics lesson structures for when we are teaching new content to the whole group. This would be outside of workshop time. Thank you!

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As we are gathering more data (CORE phonics), we are noticing many gaps. Everything from letter-sound recognition to short vowels to vowel teams, etc. It's all over the map. How much do we teach at once? If students are missing many letters/sounds, which ones do we start with? What would a small group with this focus look like in upper grades? Kind of like: we have this data now, so where do we start? Where does this live in our days/weeks?

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How many 'pieces' of the rope should we be layering into lessons and small groups?

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- Strategies for supporting AA readers, EAL and children with speech sound issues.
- Examples for teaching sight words.
- An example of guided reading assessment and conferring

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When do reading activities start?
What might a reading activity look like in KG1?

What is the next step after exploring phonemic awareness activities?

How do we assess them? How do we determine when we can move on to the next step?

How do we use the reading comprehension assessment?

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SAMPLE Phonics Weekly Lesson Plan: short vowels + blends

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Lesson Resources

The UFLI Foundations Toolbox contains all the lesson resources to accompany the lesson plans provided in the UFLI Foundations manual. (Don't have a manual yet? Click here to order one) Every lesson has companion resources that will help you implement the lessons efficiently, effectively, and consistently.

Some of the companion lesson resources you will find below include:

Lesson slide decks (in PowerPoint and Google Slide formats)

Decodable passages

Homework sheets

Games and activities for additional practice

We have grouped the lessons into smaller units so you can access these resources more easily. Scroll down to use the buttons below to find the resources for each lesson or groups of lessons.

Please note that we are still building out these free resources, and we will be editing this page over the next few weeks. We wanted you to be able to access some materials as soon as possible, but be sure to come back later to see the rest!
New to UFLI Foundations? Learn about its development, check out a sample lesson plan, view the scope and sequence, and more.

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The UFLI Foundations Toolbox contains all the lesson resources to accompany the lesson plans provided in the UFLI Foundations manual. (Don't have a manual yet? Click here to order one) Every lesson has companion resources that will help you implement the lessons efficiently, effectively, and consistently.

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SAIS K-2 Checking In & Next Steps (1) (1)

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It was really helpful to see some different way we could intentionally plan for knowledge building and vocabulary. We are looking forward to experimenting with this more in the future and linking content focused reading lessons with our units of inquiry.

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Gots... We will try to teach expanding the sentences, so,  but, because...

Gots... We are experimenting with the Ufli lessons

Wants... it would be great if we could have the PDF/Powerpoints for the higher level lessons (full access to the resources, vocabulary match, web etc)