Recharging Reading Success Getting Struggling Readers Back on Track
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—Graeme Sloan/Education Week Braydan Finnerty, 2nd grade, chooses letter magnets off the board while doing a spelling exercise in front of the rest of the class at Beverly Gardens Elementary in Dayton, Ohio. Recharging Reading Success Getting Struggling Readers Back on Track EDITORS NOTE How Do Kids Learn to Read? What OPINION How can educators optimize literacy the Science Says ..........................................2 education among students who struggle to Connecting Reading & Writing ‘Is a read? In this Spotlight, learn how teachers These Schools Filled Vending High-Leverage Move’ .............................12 are implementing scientific research on Machines With Books. Will It Motivate Reading? .....................................6 Why I Created Book Groups for My reading into curriculum, how schools are Students ........................................................15 helping students foster a love of reading, A Look Inside One Classroom’s and how teachers are using writing to Reading Overhaul ......................................8 How to Make Reading Instruction compliment reading instruction. Much, Much More Efficient ................16 ‘Decodable’ Books: Boring, Useful, or Both?.............................................................. 10 Recharging Reading Success Published on October 2, 2020, in Education Week’s Special Report: Getting Reading Right How Do Kids Learn to Read? What the Science Says By Sarah Schwartz and Sarah D. Sparks ow do children learn to read? For almost a century, re- searchers have argued over the question. Most of the dis- agreement has centered on Hthe very beginning stages of the reading process, when young children are first starting to figure out how to decipher words on a page. One theory is that reading is a natural process, like learning to speak. If teachers and parents sur- round children with good books, this theory goes, kids will pick up reading on their own. Another idea suggests that reading is a series of strategic guesses based on context, and that kids should be taught these guessing strategies. But research has shown that reading is not a natural process, and it’s not a guessing game. Written language is a code. Certain combina- tions of letters predictably represent certain —Video still from “ What the Science Says About How Kids Learn to Read”/Education Week sounds. And for the last few decades, the research has been clear: Teaching young kids how to crack sent spoken sounds, recognize patterns of let- Don’t children learn to read the the code—teaching systematic phonics—is the ter sounds as words, and match those to spoken way they learn to speak? most reliable way to make sure that they learn words whose meanings they know. This differs how to read words. Infants learn to speak by listening to and from Chinese, for example. It uses a tonal spo- Of course, there is more to reading than seeing repeating sounds made by adults and connect- ken language, conveying meaning with small a word on a page and pronouncing it out loud. As ing them to meanings. They don’t consciously differences in stress or pitch. Its writing system such, there is more to teaching reading than just distinguish individual sound units (called pho- is partially logographic—in which written sym- teaching phonics. Reading requires children to nemes) when hearing spoken language. Some bols correspond directly to a word or concept— make meaning out of print. They need to know the research suggests infants learn probabilisti- and also includes words that couple symbols for different sounds in spoken language and be able to cally—for example, hearing the sound “ball” at meaning and symbols for sound. Someone read- connect those sounds to written letters in order to the same time as the sight of a round, bouncy ing Chinese hanzi characters could not “sound decipher words. They need deep background and object over time makes the child associate the out” unfamiliar words character by character. vocabulary knowledge so that they understand the two—while other studies suggest children map words they read. Eventually, they need to be able meaning to a word after experiencing it just once What is systematic, explicit phonics to recognize most words automatically and read or twice. Within the first two years, typically instruction, and why is it important? connected text fluently, attending to grammar, developing toddlers’ brains focus on the most punctuation, and sentence structure. common sounds in their native languages and Connecting printed letters on a page to writ- But knowing how to decode is an essential step connect those sounds to meaning. A child devel- ten sounds isn’t intuitive. While some young chil- in becoming a reader. If children can’t decipher the ops understanding of speech through exposure dren may make those connections themselves, precise words on the page, they’ll never become to language and opportunities to practice the most do not. One set of studies from 1989-90 il- fluent readers or understand the passages they’re “serve and return” patterns of conversation, even lustrates this phenomenon well. reading. without explicit instruction. In these studies, conducted by Brian Byrne That’s why we’ve put together this overview By contrast, children do not naturally develop and Ruth Fielding-Barnsley, researchers taught of the research on early reading, in grades K-2. It reading skill through exposure to text. The way young children between ages 3 and 5 to read whole covers what’s known about how we should teach they learn to connect oral and written language words aloud, like “fat” and “bat.” These children letter-sound patterns, and what we don’t know depends on what kind of language they are learn- didn’t already know their letter names. for sure yet. It touches on what else should be part ing to read. Then, the researchers tested whether the chil- of early reading programs. And it explains why Alphabetic languages, like English or French, dren could transfer their knowledge to reading a we know that most children can’t learn to read use letters to stand for sounds that make up new word. They gave them the word “fun,” and through osmosis or guessing. spoken words. To read an alphabetic language, asked whether the word was “fun” or “bun.” Very Here’s what the evidence shows. children must learn how written letters repre- few of the students could do this successfully. 2 Recharging Reading Success They couldn’t break down the original word into accuracy for young students. phonemes and then transfer their knowledge of A systematic phonics program teaches an those phonemes to a new word. ordered progression of letter-sound correspon- But children could succeed on this task if dences. Teachers don’t only address the letter- they were first given some explicit instructions. sound connections that students stumble over. When children were taught how to recognize Instead, they address all of the combinations me- that certain letters represented certain sounds, thodically, in a sequence, moving on to the next and taught how to segment words to identify once students demonstrate mastery. Teachers those individual letters and sounds, they had explicitly tell students what sounds correspond to much greater success on the original transfer what letter patterns, rather than asking students test. Neuroscience research has since confirmed to figure it out on their own or make guesses. and helped explain these findings. When learning In one series of experiments, Stanford Uni- how to read new words in an unfamiliar made-up versity neuroscientist Bruce McCandliss and language, participants had more long-term suc- his colleagues made up a new written language cess if they were first taught which symbols cor- and taught three-letter words to students either respond to which sounds, than if they tried to re- Lack of exposure and by asking them to focus on letter sounds or on member words as wholes. Brain imaging of these whole words. Later, the students took a reading readers finds that the two teaching strategies tap practice on the part of test of both the words they were taught and new into different neural pathways in the brain. Read- the less-skilled reader words in the made-up language, while an elec- ers taught to connect print to meaning directly troencephalograph monitored their brain activ- could recall words initially more quickly, but delays the development of ity. Those who had focused on letter sounds had less accurately; readers taught to connect print more neural activity on the left side of the brain, to sound and then to meaning read aloud more automaticity and speed at which includes visual and language regions and is quickly and correctly, better recalled the correct the word recognition level. associated with more skilled reading. Those who meanings of words, and transferred their knowl- had been taught to focus on whole words had edge to new words. Slow, capacity-draining more activity on the right side of the brain, which Decades of research has shown that explicit has been characteristically associated with adults phonics instruction benefits early readers, but word-recognition processes and children who struggle with reading. More- particularly those who struggle to read. require cognitive resources over, those who had learned letter sounds were That’s because small strengths or deficits at better able to identify unfamiliar words. the start of reading compound over time. It’s what that should be allocated Early readers benefit from systematic phonics reading expert Keith Stanovich in 1986 dubbed instruction. Among students in grades K-1, pho- the “Matthew Effect in Reading,” after the Bible to comprehension. Thus, nics instruction led to improvements in decod- verse in which the rich get richer and the poor get reading for meaning is ing ability and reading comprehension across the poorer: “The combination of deficient decoding board, according to the National Reading Panel.