For many, the “science of reading” has become synonymous with phonics instruction.
Politicians on both sides of the aisle have said the movement to align reading instruction with what the research says is bringing schools “back to basics,” focusing on teaching kids how to decode words. In surveys, some educators define the term similarly.
The idea that the “science” in reading instruction only supports phonics instruction has been “hard to dislodge,” said Maria Murray, the founder and CEO of the Reading League, an organization that advocates for evidence-based reading instruction, at its annual summit here this week.
The group has been one of the loudest voices pushing schools to align their approaches to teaching beginning reading with the research base in how students learn to decode words. But at this and other recent events, the Reading League is intentionally bringing in panelists to discuss language development, reading comprehension, and the various social and cultural factors that influence students’ ability to learn to read well.
The shift is one example of a broader evolution in messaging unfolding in the science of reading movement. The movement began as a response to the widespread popularity of flawed methods for teaching beginning readers how to identify words, but advocates hope it can turn into a comprehensive approach for infusing evidence-based practices throughout all facets of reading instruction.
“It is not uncommon for us to hear, ‘We are doing the science of reading because the schools have adopted a phonics or phonemic awareness curriculum,’” said Katie Sojewicz, a professional development director at the Reading League, at the summit.
But focusing on discrete elements of reading, without helping students apply those skills to new texts and developing a system that will build on them year after year, won’t lead to kids becoming better readers, Sojewicz said.
Buying a program can’t substitute for teacher know-how
Buying a program to check a box is “not a new occurrence in education,” she said. “We saw it when the National Reading Panel came out—everyone checked the big five,” she said, referencing the five components of reading identified in the federally commissioned report released in 2000: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. “We even saw it when the common-core standards came out,” Sojewicz said.
Experts have warned that the science of reading movement won’t lead to better student outcomes if schools simply buy new programs without attention to the specific needs of their student population, and without investing in deepening teacher knowledge.
Even so, in some states and districts, rushed, large-scale overhauls of curriculum materials accompanied by only a few hours or days of training have left teachers overwhelmed and confused. In some cases, such as in New York City, educators, students, and parents have said mandated programs—chosen in part for their systematic approach to word-reading—have introduced new problems in other areas of reading instruction.
Getting large-scale instructional change right is hard, but the stakes are high.
“We are in a unique moment in education history when science of reading has entered the zeitgeist,” said Jessica Pasik, a professional development director at the Reading League. “It would be an incredible shame if we wasted this moment.”
As states have mandated training in evidence-based approaches, learning new methods for foundational skills instruction has proved a huge mental shift for some teachers. For some educators at the summit, thinking about applying research across every element of reading class—in listening and speaking instruction, comprehension, syntax—feels like another sea change.
“I feel like, OK, I have a lot to think about now,” said Tracy Stronsky, an elementary reading specialist in Chicago public schools.
Presenters at the summit talked at length about the importance of closing the theory-to-practice gap, said Katherine Lawson, the executive director of special programs in North Kansas City Schools in Missouri. “How do we then bridge that for our teachers?” she asked.
Read on for three takeaways from the summit about what research suggests reading instruction should include—beyond phonics.
1. Students need ‘serious and intentional’ teaching about the structure of language.
Students’ language comprehension—their ability to understand spoken words—has a direct relationship to their reading ability.
But even though children pick up language naturally, they still need explicit instruction to apply that knowledge to reading, said Julie Van Dyke, an associate research professor at the Yale-University of Connecticut Haskins Literacy Hub.
Many of the language structures that are common in written text aren’t that common in spoken conversation, such as subordinate clauses. Students need to be taught how to interpret and use those structures, she said.
“We need to get serious and intentional about teaching and assessing language structures,” Van Dyke said. “There are just as many students with syntactic processing difficulties as there are with word-recognition difficulties.”
One way to do this is through read-alouds, specifically books that are above students’ reading level, she said. It’s a way of exposing students to “complex structures as much as possible.”
Schools should probe how they’re creating systems that support evidence-based approaches to language comprehension, said Tiffany Hogan, a professor in the department of communication sciences and disorders at the Mass General Brigham Institute of Health Professions in Boston.
For instance, she said, kindergartners who struggle with understanding both the written code of language and processing spoken language should have opportunities to work on both goals, not just those focused on decoding print. “We need to change the ecosystem,” she said.
2. Acknowledging students’ home languages and dialects is essential to supporting their reading development.
Understanding how other languages differ from English, and how English dialects differ from standard English, can guide teachers in helping their students, panelists said.
That doesn’t mean that teachers need to be fluent in all of the languages their students speak. But it can be helpful to learn about these languages’ structures, said Van Dyke.
For example, she said, Slavic languages don’t differentiate between a definite article (“the” in English) and an indefinite article (“a” in English). Instead, this distinction is marked by the position of a word in a sentence, Van Dyke said. Teachers who know this could make the comparison for students, which could help them better understand how to use articles in English, she said.
There are similar considerations for dialects. In African American Vernacular English, some words have a different number of phonemes—spoken sounds—than they do in standard English, said Ramona Pittman, an associate professor in the department of Teaching, Learning, and Culture at Texas A&M University.
Most assessments of students’ phonemic awareness—the ability to identify individual sounds in words—instruct teachers not to deduct points for cultural variation. “But if you don’t know about AAVE, you’re going to take off,” she said.
“If you have African American students in your classroom, you really need to be familiar with the phonology that they use,” Pittman said, so teachers can honor students’ home dialect while still helping them read and write in the standard English they’ll need to be successful in school.
3. ‘Skill of the week’ instruction isn’t effective. But that doesn’t mean teachers should abandon comprehension strategies.
It’s common for reading programs to work on comprehension skills sequentially, spending a week or two giving students practice with identifying text structure or finding the main idea before moving on to another skill.
Routines like these “have failed us miserably,” said Kay Wijekumar, a professor in the College of Education and Human Development at Texas A&M University. They don’t give students a framework for identifying which are the most important pieces of information in a text—those that can help them determine what it’s about at its core.
Wijekumar presented a research-tested tool, the Knowledge Acquisition and Transformation framework, that she developed with colleagues. Students using the KAT first identify the overall structure of the text, then use a sentence stem based on that structure to extract relevant details that help them form their own understanding of the gist of the text.
Studies have shown that students who learned with this model performed better on reading comprehension assessments than a control group.
Simply asking students to find the main idea doesn’t produce the same results. But understanding a text’s main idea—the argument it’s trying to make, or the evidence it’s presenting—is essential to comprehension, Wijekumar said. “Nothing is going to happen if you don’t fix that.”
