One of the most influential names in the “science of reading” movement has issued a surprising warning: After years of neglecting to systematically teach students foundational reading skills, he says, some schools may now have moved too far in the other direction.
Phonics—how letters represent sounds—is critical to reading. But once students have mastered its rules, the bulk of their time should be spent working with authentic texts, experts say.
“There are indications, circumstantial indications, that what’s happening is a lot of overteaching,” said Mark Seidenberg, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, at the March 2 annual symposium of the AIM Institute for Learning and Research, a literacy professional development group.
Seidenberg, who studies the cognitive and neurological science behind how students learn to read, is the author of Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can’t, And What Can Be Done About It.
The book, published in 2017, has become something of a Bible in the movement to align reading instruction with research, featuring prominently on recommended lists from states and professional organizations. It explains the science behind how children learn to connect spoken sounds to written language, and why explicitly teaching these connections helps students become readers.
Now, more than 40 states have passed laws mandating schools use evidence-based approaches in reading instruction, which include the explicit lessons in phonics that help students make these sound-letter connections.
“That’s a given, and it is definitely an appropriate correction to what was going on before,” Seidenberg said in his presentation. But while this explicit instruction is a necessary foundation, it is possible to have too much of it, he said.
Phonics is a constrained skill. Once students crack the code of written language, they can and should apply those skills in other reading. Some kids, like those with dyslexia, need lots of explicit teaching and repeated practice with all of the phonics patterns they might encounter to crack the code, Seidenberg said. But most typically developing children don’t need as much.
“It isn’t essential that they need to have three years of instruction about phonics in 128 sessions,” he offered by way of an example in an interview with Education Week. “There’s opportunity costs, and if you do it too much, it’s going to take away from other things that kids need to learn.”
It’s important to talk about these nuances, said Marisa Ramirez Stuckey, the chief academic officer at the Reading League, an organization that promotes evidence-based reading instruction. Still, she worries that suggesting educators are spending too much time on phonics could prompt schools to abandon research-tested practices that are only just now securing a foothold in districts.
“There’s a sense that schools are spending 90 minutes on teaching phonics, and that the proportion of reading instruction is out of whack. And what I’m saying is that on the ground, I have yet to see that to be true,” said Ramirez Stuckey, who also attended the AIM conference.
“We’re still, in some cases, trying to see practices start.”
How can schools support kids at different skill levels?
Exactly how many minutes to spend on foundational skills has become a point of discussion in the science of reading movement. Time is a finite resource in the school day, and every decision about how to spend it comes with tradeoffs.
There are few national surveys on what schools are doing. EdWeek Research Center data from 2022 found that educators say their schools spend on average about half an hour a day teaching phonics to students learning to read, which is in line with recommendations from literacy experts.
Studies don’t definitively conclude that there’s a “best” amount of time to allocate to phonics. But the science of reading movement can be understood as a “direct reaction” to the approach that schools took in earlier decades, which frequently didn’t include much explicit phonics instruction at all, Seidenberg said.
This approach was especially problematic for kids with reading disabilities like dyslexia.
It isn’t essential that they need to have three years of instruction about phonics in 128 sessions. There’s opportunity costs, and if you do it too much, it’s going to take away from other things that kids need to learn.
“There was a sense that we have so many students that are not having the word-identification skills they need, we have to put a full-court press on this,” said Ramirez Stuckey.
Some schools used reading programs and approaches designed for dyslexic students, which broke down the rules of language into discrete lessons, for their general student population, Seidenberg said in his presentation. The idea, he said, was that “what works for dyslexics works for everyone.”
“I actually take issue with that conclusion,” he said. “I don’t think it’s really sensitive enough to differences among kids.”
Extended explicit teaching can have “extraordinary” results for dyslexic children, he said. But typically developing kids, once they have been taught foundational phonics, can pick up some of the nuances of language through what’s called statistical learning—the ability to generalize rules from lots of exposure to text.
Applying the insights to everyday lessons
So what does this mean for how schools structure their phonics lessons?
For one, it raises questions about how to allocate classroom time, which has become a hot topic in the science of reading movement.
While studies can point to which instructional practices are most effective, they don’t provide clear road maps about how to weight and sequence them in a 90- or 120-minute literacy block. And some research has found that, after a certain point, foundational skills practice offers diminishing returns.
Seidenberg’s remarks may also prompt schools to think about how they’re differentiating instruction.
“To me, the answer is that it depends on the degree to which students need this,” said Devin Kearns, a professor of early literacy at North Carolina State University at Raleigh, and the chair of the scientific advisory board for the International Dyslexia Association.
“You’re not going to find many students who need almost zero structured literacy, or kids who need structured literacy in all things that they do.”
Kearns cited research from the late Carol Connor, a professor of education at the University of California Irvine who studied language and literacy development.
Connor’s work found that 1st graders who started the year with low scores in word decoding benefited the most from explicit, teacher-led lessons that focused on those decoding skills. But students who started 1st grade with high decoding skills and strong vocabulary made more progress when they did more independent reading and writing.
Most 1st grade classrooms, though, aren’t composed of only one of these groups of students or the other. Teachers usually have children with a wide range of abilities.
There are reading-instruction models that can address this, Kearns said. One is often referred to as “walk to read.”
In a school with three 1st grade teachers, walk to read might look like this: All students receive grade-level English/language arts instruction in reading comprehension and writing with their classroom teacher. But for their foundational skills block, students are grouped based on performance data that identifies their specific phonics needs, with each group assigned to one of the three 1st grade teachers.
“It basically allows you to differentiate instruction,” Kearns said, “without the teacher having to do it all in their classroom.”
