THE SCIENCE OF READING

What is “The Science of Reading”?

The Science of Reading is the culmination of an extensive body of scientifically-based research that spans more than 50 years. It illuminates how the brain learns to read and the best practices for instruction. The research stems from thousands of studies in multiple disciplines, such as cognitive psychology, communication sciences, developmental psychology, education, linguistics, neuroscience, and school psychology. The findings provide information needed to gain a deeper understanding of how we learn to read, what skills are involved, how they work together, which parts of the brain are responsible for reading development, and why some students experience more difficulty than others. The cumulative research of over five decades supports evidence-based best practices for the systematic and explicit instruction of foundational literacy skills.

Bingo Bang-O, What’s the Lang-O?

It is widely known that education is full of a bunch of confusing lingo, complex jargon, and ever-changing acronyms that make our heads spin! Terms that describe early foundational skills are especially confusing because they have similar sounds and meaning that all fit into the same puzzle. As educators work diligently toward improvements in the teaching of reading, it's helpful to know and use the same language. Before we dive into what the research says, let’s explore some key terms.

What Did the Research Find?

The extensive research examined by the National Reading Panel is supported by the findings of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NELP). NELP confirms that alphabet knowledge, oral language, and phonological awareness provide the foundation for reading success. With a strong foundation, other essential reading skills such as fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary become more accessible for students to acquire.

Phonemic awareness is essential to reading and the National Reading Panel confirmed that:

• Phonemic awareness can be taught. Children learn to hear, think about, and work with the sounds they hear in words.
• Phonemic awareness is required for reading. It enables children to read words rapidly and accurately, freeing up brain space for comprehension.
• Phonemic awareness helps children learn to spell. Students learn to connect sounds to letters in predictable patterns.

The report of the National Reading Panel confirmed the benefits of phonics instruction and clearly found that:

• Students who receive explicit phonics instruction become better readers than students who do not receive phonics instruction, or who receive spotty phonics instruction.
• The most effective phonics instruction is:
• Systematic - it teaches a clearly defined sequence of the major sound-spelling relationships of consonants and vowels.
• Explicit - the teacher provides precise and direct instruction.
• Systematic phonics instruction has the greatest benefits when it begins in kindergarten or first grade.
• Systematic phonics instruction improves reading comprehension, as the ability to read words accurately and quickly is correlated to reading comprehension.
• All students, regardless of their backgrounds, make greater gains in their reading when they receive systematic phonics instruction. Even students who learn phonics quickly and easily gain vocabulary, increase their reading fluency and build critical thinking skills when they receive systematic phonics instruction.

The National Reading Panel identified vocabulary instruction as an essential skill that students need to improve reading performance (NICHHD, 2000).

• Research conducted after the NRP report confirms that expanding the size and depth of a student’s vocabulary is linked to higher levels of reading comprehension (Adolf & Perfetti, 2014; Kamil et al., 2008; Rasinski et al., 2011).

Who Benefits from Explicit and Systematic Instruction?

Overwhelming evidence has shown that explicit and systematic phonics instruction can benefit all learners, not just the struggling ones. Some learners can acquire the necessary decoding skills easily and independently, but they are typically already equipped with experiences, background knowledge, and vocabulary acquisition to help them do so.

What Do the Experts Say?

• “A significant proportion, close to 40%, of children manage to learn to read without explicit and systematic phonics instruction (or with phonics instruction of variable impact) due to a confluence of biological and environmental advantages. The remaining 60% of children taught in this way are highly vulnerable to falling behind as readers. And the proportion of vulnerability increases with the level of disadvantage.”
• https://theconversation.com/why-every-child-needs-explicit-phonics-instruction-to-learn-to-read-125065
• “Systematic, explicit phonics instruction helps children to make the neurological connections between the areas of the brain that are devoted to visual (writing), phonological (sound), and semantic (meaning) processing. Some children form these neurological connections quickly, while others require more intensive instruction and repeated exposures. A very small number of fortunate children are able to make the connections on their own, without explicit teaching.
• https://www.teachermagazine.com/au_en/articles/learning-to-read-and-explicit-teaching
• “Explicit instruction is helpful not only when discovery is impossible, but when discovery may be inaccurate, inadequate, incomplete, or inefficient.”
• https://explicitinstruction.org/
• “Although it is possible for kids to read without the help of phonics, the research is overwhelming that they do better in learning to read when they receive such teaching (Adams, 1991; Bond & Dykstra, 1965; Chall, 1968; NELP, 2008; NICHD, 2000). In such cases, teaching usually provides a boost—and according to dozens of experimental studies in this case, this boost improves students’ abilities to read words, to read fluently, to comprehend what they are reading, and so on. And, while phonics may only be helpful rather than essential for most kids, there are a group of kids for whom phonics seems to be absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, we can’t easily identify who can thrive without phonics and who can’t—just like we can’t tell which kids will get the measles or other horrible diseases. Phonics is essential to some, useful to most, and does no harm to anyone, and that’s why it is so valuable.”
• https://shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/the-great-american-phonics-instruction-test-part-i

What's the Take Away?

While the SOR research confirms that systematic and explicit phonics instruction is beneficial for all learners, that is only one component of becoming a proficient reader. Often the term ‘SOR’ gets roped in with being solely focused and consumed on teaching phonics, but that is far from what the research states. A deeper dive into the research will illuminate the multi-faceted components that work together to develop reading skills. The literature and interpretation of its findings do have a strong emphasis on the importance of teaching phonics, because without building that solid foundation first, other reading skills of fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary are much harder to acquire.

Vocabulary development is another essential factor in reading success. As texts increase in complexity, students need strategies to continue to expand their oral and written vocabulary abilities (Kamil et al., 2008; Loftus-Rattan & Coyne, 2013). The most efficient method to develop vocabulary is to understand that every word in English is composed of both units of sound (phonemes) and units of meaning (morphemes). In robust readers, the brain uses two pathways to derive meaning: the lexical and the phonological routes (Dehaene, 2009.) The lexical zones of the brain (the middle temporal lobe) are where words are understood if the word’s spelling does not reflect its pronunciation and where the brain stores the meaning of prefixes, base words, and suffixes (Dehaene, 2009; Diggory, 1992).

Conclusive research reported explicit vocabulary instruction in the early grades results in children learning more words (Graves & Silverman, 2011, citing Beck & McKeown, 2007). Morphology instruction can begin from a young age and is an effective tool for vocabulary development. When students are presented with explicit instruction in the morphemes of words, they are then able to use this information to deconstruct a word using the lexical encoding, as well as the phonemic encoding, resulting in a deeper comprehension of a text.

Want to know more? Check out these resources:

• https://www.whatisthescienceofreading.org/science-of-reading-guide A wealth of knowledge, resources, and visual aids to help understand Science of Reading research and its importance.
• https://www.readingrockets.org/blogs/shanahan-literacy/what-science-reading Shanahan clarifies a common SOR misconception, “The ‘science of reading’ includes more than phonics and phonological awareness.”
• https://www.literacyworldwide.org/docs/default-source/resource-documents/rrq-sor-executive-summary.pdf A balanced and unbiased look at the Science of Reading research that examines it through a broader, more inclusive lens. The executive summary contains 26 articles written by a total of 77 authors who represent diverse, innovative, challenging ideas, and perspectives that reframe the science of reading debate. Together, these pieces bring a supportive and critical perspective to the conversations, and identify next steps for the field.
• https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/the-science-of-reading-research Gain a better understanding of the “science” behind the Science of Reading and the importance of using scientific evidence to inform instruction.
• https://www.readingrockets.org/blogs/shanahan-literacy/what-should-morphology-instruction-look Shanahan responds to an inquiry about morphology instruction and elicits a response from a well-known expert in the field, Peter Bowers.
• https://www.uwo.ca/fhs/lwm/teaching/dld2_2017_18/Zeh_Morphological-Awareness.pdf A wealth of resources that explain in more detail the benefits of morphological instruction and provide many ideas for how to integrate into classroom practices.
• https://education.wm.edu/centers/ttac/resources/articles/teachtechnique/teachingmorphology/index.php Additional information on morphology and ideas/resources for how to incorporate it into the classroom.
• https://blog.stenhouse.com/richard-gentry-on-brain-words A podcast (with transcript) interview with Richard Brantley on his recent book, Brain Words: How the Science of Reading Informs Teaching. In the book, Richard Gentry and Gene Ouellete explain the latest research and theory on lexical representation and its relation to rapid and accurate word reading, a necessary skill to mastering literacy.