A paper from the American Educational Research Association synthesizes three decades of research on teaching children to read and write.
Intended for practitioners, policymakers, and the general public, the report makes the case that teaching reading is more than a matter of teaching children how to “decode” letters and form spoken words. It makes a pitch for paying more attention to children’s oral-language development, encouraging students to do a lot of reading, and moving beyond decoding skills in 3rd grade to focus instruction on comprehension, writing, and continued language development.
The paper is the 12th in the Washington-based associations “Research Points” publication series through which scholars in the field share their consensus views on what research says about key topics in education.