Research on How Children Learn to Read
Molly Woodworth was a kid who seemed to practise well at everything: good grades, in the gifted and talented plan. But she couldn't read very well.
"There was no rhyme or reason to reading for me," she said. "When a instructor would dictate a word and say, 'Tell me how you recollect y'all can spell it,' I sat there with my oral fissure open while other kids gave spellings, and I thought, 'How practice they even know where to begin?' I was totally lost."
Woodworth went to public school in Owosso, Michigan, in the 1990s. She says sounds and letters just didn't make sense to her, and she doesn't recollect anyone teaching her how to read. So she came upwardly with her own strategies to go through text.
Strategy ane: Memorize equally many words equally possible. "Words were like pictures to me," she said. "I had a really expert retention."
Strategy 2: Guess the words based on context. If she came beyond a word she didn't have in her visual retention bank, she'd look at the first letter of the alphabet and come upwards with a discussion that seemed to make sense. Reading was kind of like a game of 20 Questions: What give-and-take could this be?
Strategy 3: If all else failed, she'd skip the words she didn't know.
Nigh of the time, she could get the gist of what she was reading. Only getting through text took forever. "I hated reading considering it was taxing," she said. "I'd become through a chapter and my brain hurt past the end of it. I wasn't excited to learn."
No one knew how much she struggled, not fifty-fifty her parents. Her reading strategies were her "dirty picayune secrets."
Woodworth, who at present works in accounting,ane says she's still not a very good reader and tears up when she talks about information technology. Reading "influences every attribute of your life," she said. She'south adamant to brand sure her ain kids get off to a better start than she did.
That'south why she was so alarmed to come across how her oldest child, Claire, was beingness taught to read in school.
A couple of years ago, Woodworth was volunteering in Claire's kindergarten classroom. The class was reading a volume together and the teacher was telling the children to exercise the strategies that good readers apply.
The instructor said, "If you don't know the give-and-take, just look at this picture up hither," Woodworth recalled. "There was a play tricks and a acquit in the motion-picture show. And the word was bear, and she said, 'Await at the first alphabetic character. It's a "b." Is information technology fox or bear?'"
Woodworth was stunned. "I thought, 'Oh my God, those are my strategies.' Those are the things I taught myself to expect like a good reader, non the things that good readers do," she said. "These kids were existence taught my dirty fiddling secrets."
She went to the teacher and expressed her concerns. The instructor told her she was teaching reading the way the curriculum told her to.
Woodworth had stumbled on to American instruction'southward own little secret about reading: Simple schools across the country are teaching children to be poor readers — and educators may non fifty-fifty know information technology.
For decades, reading instruction in American schools has been rooted in a flawed theory about how reading works, a theory that was debunked decades ago by cognitive scientists, yet remains deeply embedded in teaching practices and curriculum materials. As a upshot, the strategies that struggling readers utilize to get by — memorizing words, using context to guess words, skipping words they don't know — are the strategies that many outset readers are taught in school. This makes it harder for many kids to acquire how to read, and children who don't get off to a skillful start in reading find it difficult to always main the process.2
A shocking number of kids in the Us can't read very well. A tertiary of all quaternary-graders tin can't read at a basic level, and most students are nevertheless not practiced readers past the time they finish loftier schoolhouse.
Percentage of U.South. fourth-graders beneath basic level in reading
When kids struggle to learn how to read, it can lead to a downward screw in which behavior, vocabulary, knowledge and other cognitive skills are eventually affected past slow reading development.iii A disproportionate number of poor readers become high schoolhouse dropouts and end up in the criminal justice arrangement.iv
The fact that a disproven theory near how reading works is even so driving the way many children are taught to read is role of the trouble. School districts spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on curriculum materials that include this theory. Teachers are taught the theory in their teacher preparation programs and on the task. As long as this disproven theory remains part of American didactics, many kids volition likely struggle to acquire how to read.
Percentage of U.S. 12th-graders proficient in reading
The origins
The theory is known as "three cueing." The name comes from the notion that readers use 3 dissimilar kinds of data — or "cues" — to identify words as they are reading.
The theory was first proposed in 1967, when an instruction professor named Ken Goodman presented a paper at the almanac meeting of the American Educational Enquiry Association in New York City.
In the newspaper,5 Goodman rejected the idea that reading is a precise process that involves exact or detailed perception of letters or words. Instead, he argued that as people read, they make predictions well-nigh the words on the page using these three cues:
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graphic cues (what exercise the messages tell you about what the word might exist?)
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syntactic cues (what kind of word could it be, for instance, a substantive or a verb?)
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semantic cues (what word would brand sense here, based on the context?)
Goodman ended that:
Skill in reading involves not greater precision, only more accurate first guesses based on better sampling techniques, greater control over language structure, broadened experiences and increased conceptual development. As the kid develops reading skill and speed, he uses increasingly fewer graphic cues.
Goodman's proposal became the theoretical basis for a new approach to teaching reading that would presently take hold in American schools.
Previously, the question of how to teach reading had focused on one of two basic ideas.
One idea is that reading is a visual memory process. The teaching method associated with this idea is known as "whole discussion." The whole discussion approach was perhaps all-time embodied in the "Dick and Jane" books that first appeared in the 1930s. The books rely on word repetition, and pictures to support the meaning of the text. The idea is that if you see words enough, you somewhen store them in your retentivity as visual images.
The other idea is that reading requires knowledge of the relationships between sounds and letters. Children larn to read by sounding out words. This approach is known as phonics. It goes fashion back, popularized in the 1800s with the McGuffey readers.
These two ideas — whole give-and-take and phonics — had been taking turns as the favored way to teach reading until Goodman came along with what came to exist known amongst educators as the "3-cueing system."
In the cueing theory of how reading works, when a child comes to a give-and-take she doesn't know, the teacher encourages her to call up of a give-and-take that makes sense and asks: Does it expect right? Does information technology sound right? If a discussion checks out on the footing of those questions, the kid is getting it. She'southward on the path to skilled reading.
Teachers may not know the term "three cueing," but they're probably familiar with "MSV." M stands for using meaning to effigy out what a word is, Southward for using sentence structure and Five for using visual data (i.e., the messages in the words). MSV is a cueing thought that can exist traced dorsum to the late Marie Clay, a developmental psychologist from New Zealand who first laid out her theories about reading in a dissertation in the 1960s.vi
Clay adult her cueing theory independently of Goodman, merely they met several times and had similar ideas about the reading procedure. Their theories were based on observational research. They would listen to children read, note the kinds of errors they made, and utilize that information to identify a child's reading difficulties. For example, a child who says "equus caballus" when the discussion was "house" is probably relying too much on visual, or graphic, cues. A teacher in this case would encourage the kid to pay more attention to what word would make sense in the sentence.
Goodman and Clay believed that letters were the least reliable of the three cues, and that as people became better readers, they no longer needed to pay attention to all the letters in words. "In efficient word perception the reader relies mostly on the sentence and its meaning and some selected features of the forms of words," Dirt wrote.7 For Goodman, authentic word recognition was not necessarily the goal of reading. The goal was to comprehend text.8 If the sentences were making sense, the reader must be getting the words right, or correct plenty.
These ideas soon became the foundation for how reading was taught in many schools. Goodman's 3-cueing idea formed the theoretical basis of an arroyo known as "whole language" that by the late 1980s had taken hold throughout America.9 Clay congenital her cueing ideas into a reading intervention programme for struggling kickoff-graders called Reading Recovery. It was implemented beyond New Zealand in the 1980s and went on to become ane of the world's most widely used reading intervention programs.x
But while cueing was taking hold in schools, scientists were decorated studying the cognitive processes involved in reading words. And they came to unlike conclusions about how people read.eleven
Scientists accept on three cueing
It was the early on 1970s, and Keith Stanovich was working on his doctorate in psychology at the University of Michigan. He thought the reading field was ready for an infusion of knowledge from the "cognitive revolution" that was underway in psychology. Stanovich had a background in experimental science and an involvement in learning and cognition due in part to the influence of his wife, Paula, who was a special education instructor.
Stanovich wanted to empathise how people read words.12 He knew most Goodman's work and thought he was probably right that every bit people become better readers, they relied more on their knowledge of vocabulary and language construction to read words and didn't need to pay every bit much attending to the letters.
And then, in 1975, Stanovich and a swain graduate student set out to test the idea in their lab. They recruited readers of various ages and abilities and gave them a series of word-reading tasks. Their hypothesis was that skilled readers rely more on contextual cues to recognize words than poor readers, who probably weren't as skilful at using context.
They couldn't take been more incorrect.
"To our surprise, all of our inquiry results pointed in the opposite management," Stanovich wrote. "It was the poorer readers, not the more than skilled readers, who were more reliant on context to facilitate word recognition."13
The skilled readers could instantly recognize words without relying on context. Other researchers have confirmed these findings with like experiments. Information technology turns out that the power to read words in isolation quickly and accurately is the hallmark of being a skilled reader. This is now one of the most consistent and well-replicated findings in all of reading enquiry.14
Other studies revealed further problems with the cueing theory:15
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Skilled readers don't browse words and sample from the graphic cues in an incidental way; instead, they very quickly recognize a discussion as a sequence of messages. That's how expert readers instantly know the deviation between "firm" and "equus caballus," for example.
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Experiments that force people to utilize context to predict words bear witness that even skilled readers tin correctly guess merely a fraction of the words; this is one reason people who rely on context to identify words are poor readers.
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Weak word recognition skills are the nearly common and debilitating source of reading bug.sixteen
The results of these studies are not controversial or contested among scientists who study reading. The findings take been incorporated into every major scientific model of how reading works.
Merely cueing is still alive and well in schools.
Picture Power!
It'south not hard to discover examples of the cueing organisation. A quick search on Google, Pinterest or Teachers Pay Teachers turns up plenty of lesson plans, teaching guides and classroom posters. One popular poster has cute cartoon characters to remind children they have lots of strategies to utilise when they're stuck on a discussion, including looking at the picture show (Eagle Center), getting their lips ready to try the first sound (Lips the Fish), or just skipping the discussion altogether (Skippy Frog).
In that location are videos online where you tin can encounter cueing in action. In one video posted on The Teaching Channel,17 a kindergarten teacher in Oakland, California, instructs her students to use "moving picture ability" to identify the words on the page. The goal of the lesson, according to the teacher, is for the students to "use the picture and a first sound to determine an unknown word in their book."
The form reads a volume together called "In the Garden." On each page, in that location's a picture of something you might discover in a garden. It's what's known every bit a predictable book; the sentences are nevertheless except for the last give-and-take.
The children take been taught to memorize the words "expect," "at," and "the." The challenge is getting the last give-and-take in the judgement. The lesson program tells the instructor to cover up the word with a sticky annotation.
In the video, the wiggly kindergarteners sitting cantankerous-legged on the flooring come to a page with a motion-picture show of a butterfly. The teacher tells the kids that she's guessing the word is going to be butterfly. She uncovers the word to cheque on the accuracy of her gauge.
"Look at that," she tells the children, pointing to the first letter of the discussion. "It starts with the /b/ /b/ /b/." The class reads the judgement together as the teacher points to the words. "Look at the butterfly!" they yell out excitedly.
This lesson comes from "Units of Study for Teaching Reading," more commonly known as "reader'south workshop."eighteen According to the lesson plan, this lesson teaches children to "know and apply course-level phonics and word assay skills in decoding words."19
Simply the children were not taught to decode words in this lesson. They were taught to guess words using pictures and patterns — hallmarks of the 3-cueing organisation.
The author of Units of Report for Teaching Reading, Lucy Calkins, often refers to cueing in her published work.20 She uses the term MSV — the meaning, structure and visual idea that originally came from Clay in New Zealand.
And so there is Fountas and Pinnell Literacy, started by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, teachers who learned the MSV concept from Clay in the 1980s.21
Fountas and Pinnell have written several books about teaching reading, including a best-seller nearly a widely used instructional arroyo chosen "Guided Reading." They also created a reading assessment organization that uses what are called "leveled books."22 Children start with predictable books like "In the Garden" and move up levels as they're able to "read" the words. But many of the words in those books — butterfly, caterpillar — are words that outset readers oasis't been taught to decode yet. One purpose of the books is to teach children that when they go to a discussion they don't know, they tin can use context to figure it out.
When put into practice in the classroom, these approaches can cause problems for children when they are learning to read.
'That is not reading'
Margaret Goldberg, a teacher and literacy motorcoach in the Oakland Unified School District, remembers a moment when she realized what a problem the three-cueing arroyo was. She was with a showtime-grader named Rodney when he came to a page with a picture of a girl licking an ice cream cone and a dog licking a os.
The text said: "My piddling domestic dog likes to eat with me."
But Rodney said: "My dog likes to lick his os."
Rodney breezed correct through it, unaware that he hadn't read the sentence on the page.
Goldberg realized lots of her students couldn't actually read the words in their books; instead, they were memorizing sentence patterns and using the pictures to guess. One little boy exclaimed, "I can read this volume with my eyes shut!"
"Oh no," Goldberg thought. "That is not reading."
Goldberg had been hired past the Oakland schools in 2015 to assistance struggling readers by education a Fountas and Pinnell program called "Leveled Literacy Intervention" that uses leveled books and the cueing approach.23
Effectually the same fourth dimension, Goldberg was trained in a program that uses a different strategy for teaching children how to read words. The programme is called "Systematic Education in Phonological Awareness, Phonics, and Sight Words," or SIPPS.24 Information technology'south a phonics programme that teaches children how to audio out words and uses what are known as "decodable books." Near words in the books have spelling patterns that kids have been taught in their phonics lessons.
Goldberg decided to teach some of her students using the phonics program and some of her students using three cueing. And she began to observe differences betwixt the two groups of kids. "Not just in their abilities to read," she said, "simply in the way they approached their reading."
Goldberg and a colleague recorded first-graders talking well-nigh what makes them skillful readers.
Ane video shows Mia, on the left, who was in the phonics program. Mia says she'southward a good reader because she looks at the words and sounds them out. JaBrea, on the right, was taught the cueing organization. JaBrea says: "I look at the pictures and I read information technology."
Courtesy of Margaret Goldberg, Oakland Unified Schoolhouse District
Information technology was clear to Goldberg afterwards just a few months of teaching both approaches that the students learning phonics were doing better. "Ane of the things that I even so struggle with is a lot of guilt," she said.
She thinks the students who learned three cueing were actually harmed by the arroyo. "I did lasting damage to these kids. It was so hard to e'er go them to finish looking at a flick to estimate what a discussion would be. It was so hard to always go them to dull down and sound a word out because they had had this experience of knowing that y'all predict what yous read before you read it."
Goldberg presently discovered the decades of scientific evidence against cueing.25 She was shocked. She had never come up beyond any of this science in her teacher grooming or on the task.
And she started to wonder why non.
Balanced Literacy
People take been arguing for centuries nearly how children should be taught to read. The fight has mostly focused on whether to teach phonics.
The whole language motility of the belatedly 20th century was maybe the zenith of the anti-phonics statement.26 Phonics instruction was seen as tedious, time-consuming and ultimately unnecessary. Why? Because — according to the three-cueing theory — readers can use other, more reliable cues to figure out what the words say.27
Marilyn Adams came beyond this belief in the early 1990s. She's a cognitive and developmental psychologist who had just written a book summarizing the enquiry on how children larn to read.28 One large takeaway from the book is that becoming a skilled reader of English requires noesis of sound-spelling correspondences.29 Another large takeaway is that many kids were not being taught this in schoolhouse.
Soon after the book was published, Adams was describing her findings to a group of teachers and country teaching officials in Sacramento, California. She was sensing discomfort and confusion in the room. "And I just stopped and said, 'What is it that I'thou missing?'" she recalled. "'What is it that we need to talk about? Help me.'"
A woman raised her manus and asked: "What does this accept to do with the three-cueing arrangement?" Marilyn didn't know what the three-cueing system was. "I remember I blew all of their fuses that I did not [know what it was] since this was so primal to being an elementary reading teacher," she said. "How could I present myself to them every bit an proficient on reading and not know almost this?"
The teachers drew her a Venn diagram of the three-cueing system. It looked something similar this:
Adams thought this diagram made perfect sense. The research clearly shows that readers employ all of these cues to sympathise what they're reading.
But Adams shortly figured out the disconnect. Teachers understood these cues not merely equally the way readers construct meaning from text, merely equally the fashion readers actually identify the words on the page. And they thought that pedagogy kids to decode or sound out words was not necessary.
"The most important thing was for the children to empathise and enjoy the text," Adams said. "And from that understanding and joy of reading, the words on the page would just pop out at them."
She would explain to teachers at every opportunity that explicitly teaching children almost the relationships between sounds and letters is essential to ensure all kids become off to a expert kickoff in reading. Simply she got tons of pushback from teachers. "They didn't want to teach phonics!" she recalled in frustration.
In 1998, Adams wrote a book affiliate almost how the 3-cueing arrangement conflicts with what researchers have figured out nigh reading. She hoped it would help put three cueing to rest.thirty
By this fourth dimension, the scientific research on reading was gaining traction. In 2000, a national console convened by Congress to review the evidence on how to teach reading came out with a written report.31 It identified several essential components of reading instruction, including vocabulary, comprehension and phonics. The evidence that phonics education enhances children'due south success in learning how to read was clear and compelling. National reports on reading a few years later in the United Kingdom and Australia came to the same determination.32
Somewhen, many whole linguistic communication supporters accepted the weight of the scientific show about the importance of phonics instruction. They started adding phonics to their books and materials and renamed their approach "balanced literacy."
But they didn't get rid of the three-cueing system.
Balanced literacy proponents will tell y'all their arroyo is a mix of phonics instruction with enough of fourth dimension for kids to read and enjoy books. But wait carefully at the materials and you'll see that's non actually what balanced literacy is mixing. Instead, it's mixing a agglomeration of different ideas about how kids learn to read. It's a little scrap of whole give-and-take didactics with long lists of words for kids to memorize. Information technology's a footling scrap of phonics. And fundamentally, information technology's the idea that children should be taught to read using the 3-cueing arrangement.
And information technology turns out cueing may actually forestall kids from focusing on words in the style they demand to become skilled readers.
Mapping the words
To understand why cueing can get in the way of children's reading development, it's essential to sympathise how our brains process the words we see.
Reading scientists have known for decades that the authentication of existence a skilled reader is the power to instantly and accurately recognize words.33 If you're a skilled reader, your brain has gotten so good at reading words that you procedure the give-and-take "chair" faster than you procedure a picture show of a chair.34 Yous know tens of thousands of words instantly, on sight. How did you learn to practise that?
Information technology happens through a process chosen "orthographic mapping."35 This occurs when you lot pay attention to the details of a written discussion and link the give-and-take'southward pronunciation and meaning with its sequence of messages.36 A child knows the meaning and pronunciation of "pony." The give-and-take gets mapped to his memory when he links the sounds /p/ /o/ /northward/ /y/ to the written word "pony."
That requires an awareness of the speech sounds in words and an understanding of how those sounds are represented by letters.37 In other words, y'all demand phonics skills.
Here's what happens when a reader who has adept phonics skills comes to a word she doesn't recognize in impress. She stops at the word and sounds information technology out. If it's a word she knows the meaning of, she has now linked the spelling of the word with its pronunciation. If she doesn't know the meaning of the word, she tin can use context to try to figure it out.
By nearly second grade, a typically developing reader needs just a few exposures to a give-and-take through understanding both the pronunciation and the spelling for that word to be stored in her memory.38 She doesn't know that word because she memorized it equally a visual epitome. She knows that discussion because at some point she successfully sounded information technology out.
The more than words she stores in her memory this way, the more she can focus on the meaning of what she'south reading; she'll eventually be using less encephalon power to identify words and will be able to devote more than encephalon power to comprehending what she's reading.39
Only when children don't have proficient phonics skills, the process is dissimilar.
"They sample from the messages because they're not practiced at sounding them out," said David Kilpatrick, a psychology professor at SUNY Cortland and the author of a book about preventing reading difficulties.40 "And they utilize context."
In other words, when people don't accept adept phonics skills, they use the cueing system.
"The three-cueing arrangement is the style poor readers read," said Kilpatrick.
And if teachers utilize the cueing system to teach reading, Kilpatrick says they're non merely teaching children the habits of poor readers, they are really impeding the orthographic mapping procedure.41
"The minute you enquire them just to pay attending to the first letter or look at the picture, wait at the context, you're drawing their attention away from the very matter that they need to interact with in order for them to read the word [and] retrieve the discussion," Kilpatrick said. In this manner, he said, iii cueing can actually prevent the critical learning that's necessary for a child to become a skilled reader.
In many counterbalanced literacy classrooms, children are taught phonics and the cueing system. Some kids who are taught both approaches realize pretty quickly that sounding out a discussion is the virtually efficient and reliable manner to know what it is. Those kids tend to have an easier fourth dimension understanding the ways that sounds and letters relate. They'll drop the cueing strategies and brainstorm edifice that big bank of instantly known words that is so necessary for skilled reading.
But some children volition skip the sounding out if they're taught they have other options. Phonics is challenging for many kids. The cueing strategies seem quicker and easier at first. And by using context and memorizing a agglomeration of words, many children can look like good readers — until they go to about third grade, when their books brainstorm to have more words, longer words, and fewer pictures. So they're stuck. They haven't developed their sounding-out skills. Their bank of known words is limited. Reading is ho-hum and laborious and they don't like it, so they don't exercise it if they don't have to. While their peers who mastered decoding early are reading and teaching themselves new words every 24-hour interval, the kids who clung to the cueing approach are falling further and further behind.42
These poor reading habits, once ingrained at a young age, can follow kids into high school. Some kids who were taught the cueing arroyo never become good readers. Non because they're incapable of learning to read well only because they were taught the strategies of struggling readers.
'Then what if they use the film?'
Once Margaret Goldberg discovered the cognitive science show confronting cueing, she wanted her colleagues in the Oakland school district to know about it likewise.
Over the by ii years, Goldberg and a fellow literacy coach named Lani Mednick take been leading a grant-funded pilot projection to ameliorate reading achievement in the Oakland schools.43
They have their work cut out for them. Near half the district's tertiary-graders are beneath grade level in reading. Goldberg and Mednick want to enhance questions almost how kids in Oakland are existence taught to read.
They meet every couple weeks with literacy coaches from the 10 elementary schools in the pilot program. They read and discuss articles about the scientific research on reading. At a coming together in March, the coaches watched the video of the "moving picture ability" lesson.
"This instructor meant well," Mednick said to the coaches after they watched the lesson. "Information technology seemed like she believed this lesson would ensure her students would be on the road toward reading."
Mednick wanted the coaches to consider the beliefs about reading that would lead to the cosmos of a lesson similar "moving picture ability." The Oakland schools purchased the Units of Report for Teaching Reading serial, which includes the "motion picture power" lesson, as part of a balanced literacy initiative the district began nearly x years ago. The district also bought the Fountas and Pinnell assessment system.
The coaches saw right away that "picture power" was designed to teach kids the cueing system. Only they said many teachers don't see whatever trouble with cueing. After all, one of the cues is to look at the letters in the word. What's incorrect with pedagogy kids lots of different strategies to figure out unknown words?44
"I remember before nosotros started looking at the scientific discipline and everything, I thought to myself, 'Reading is and so difficult for kids, then what if they use the moving picture?'" said Soraya Sajous-Brooks, the early literacy autobus at Prescott Elementary School in Westward Oakland. "Like, use everything you lot've got."
But she's come to understand that cueing sends the message to kids that they don't need to sound out words. Her students would become phonics instruction in 1 function of the day. So they'd go reader's workshop and be taught that when they come to a discussion they don't know, they take lots of strategies. They tin sound it out. They can besides check the kickoff letter, await at the picture, think of a word that makes sense.
Teaching cueing and phonics doesn't work, Sajous-Brooks said. "One negates the other."
Goldberg and Mednick want to show the district there's a better way to teach reading. Schools in the pilot project used grant money to buy new materials that steer clear of the iii-cueing idea. Two charter school networks in Oakland are working on similar projects to motion their schools abroad from cueing.
To see what it looks like, I visited a outset-class classroom at a lease school in Oakland called Reach University.45
One role of the 24-hour interval was explicit phonics education.46 The students were divided into small groups based on their skill level. They met with their instructor, Andrea Ruiz, at a kidney-shaped tabular array in a corner of the classroom. The lowest-level group worked on identifying the speech sounds in words similar "skin" and "skip." The highest-level group learned how verbs like "spy" and "cry" are spelled as "spied' and 'cried" in the past tense.
There were also vocabulary lessons.47 The entire class gathered on a carpet at the front end of the classroom to talk most a book Ms. Ruiz read out loud to them. One of the words in the volume was "prey."
"What animals are a chameleon's prey?" Ms. Ruiz asked the children. "Or we can as well inquire, what animals exercise chameleons hunt for food?"
The kids turned and talked to each other. "A chameleon's prey are bugs and insects and other chameleons and mice and birds," a little male child explained to his classmate. "That's it."
Other vocabulary words these offset-graders had learned were posted on cards around the classroom. They included: wander, persevere, squint and scrumptious. The kids weren't expected to read those words yet. The thought is to build their oral vocabulary so that when they can read those words, they know what the words mean.
This comes direct from the scientific enquiry, which shows that reading comprehension is the product of two things.48 Get-go, a kid needs to exist able to sound out a discussion. Second, the kid needs to know the meaning of the give-and-take she just sounded out. Then, in a first-grade classroom that's following the research, you lot will see explicit phonics instruction and also lessons that build oral vocabulary and groundwork knowledge. And you lot volition see kids practicing what they've been taught.
Subsequently their vocabulary lesson, the kids did "buddy reading." They retreated to various spots around the classroom to read books to each other. I found Belinda sitting on an developed chair at the back of the classroom, her little legs swinging. Across from her was her buddy Steven, decked out in a yellowish and blue plaid shirt tucked neatly into his jeans. He held the book and pointed to the words while Belinda read.
"Ellen /thousand/," Belinda paused, sounding out the word "meets." She was reading a decodable book about some kids who visit a farm. Almost all of the words in the book incorporate spelling patterns she'd been taught in her phonics lessons.
"I am a subcontract here," Belinda read.
Steven did a double-take. "A farmer here," he said gently. Steven's job as Belinda'southward reading buddy was to help her if she missed a word or got stuck. Just that didn't happen much considering Belinda had been taught how to read the words. She didn't demand any assistance from the pictures, either. She barely glanced at them as she read.
To be articulate, there's zip wrong with pictures. They're keen to look at and talk about, and they can help a child comprehend the meaning of a story. Context — including a picture if there is ane — helps us empathise what we're reading all the fourth dimension. Merely if a child is being taught to utilise context to identify words, she's being taught to read like a poor reader.
Many educators don't know this because the cognitive science research has not fabricated its way into many schools and schools of education.49
Ruiz didn't know about this research until the Oakland pilot projection. "I didn't really know anything about how kids learn to read when I started didactics," she said. It was a relief when she came to Oakland and the curriculum spelled out that kids utilise meaning, structure and visual cues to figure out words. "Because I came from not having anything, I was similar, 'Oh, in that location's a way we should teach this,'" she said.
I heard this from other educators. Cueing was appealing because they didn't know what else to do.
"When I got into the classroom and someone told me to utilise this practice, I didn't question it," said Stacey Cherny, a former teacher who's now main of an elementary school in Pennsylvania. She says many teachers aren't taught what they need to know almost the structure of the English language to be able to teach phonics well. She says phonics can be intimidating; three cueing isn't.
Some other reason cueing holds on is that it seems to work for some children. Just researchers judge at that place'due south a percentage of kids — maybe about 40 percent — who will learn to read no matter how they're taught.l According to Kilpatrick, children who larn to read with cueing are succeeding in spite of the instruction, not considering of it.
Goldberg hopes the pilot project in Oakland volition convince the district to drop all instructional materials that include cueing.
When asked about this, the Oakland superintendent's office responded with a written statement that there isn't plenty bear witness from the pilot project to make curriculum changes for the entire district and that the Oakland schools remain committed to balanced literacy.
Oakland'south situation is no different from many other districts across the country that have invested millions of dollars in materials that include cueing.
"Information technology feels like everyone's trusting somebody else to accept washed their due diligence," Goldberg said. "Classroom teachers are trusting that the materials they're being handed will work. The people who purchase the materials are trusting if they were on the market place, that they will work. We're all trusting, and it's a arrangement that is broken."
'My science is unlike'
If cueing was debunked decades ago by cerebral scientists, why is the thought still in materials that are being sold to schools?
One reply to that question is that school districts notwithstanding buy the materials. Heinemann, the company that publishes the Fountas and Pinnell and Lucy Calkins' products that the Oakland schools use, earned somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 one thousand thousand in 2018, according to earnings reports.51
I wanted to know what the authors of those materials brand of the cerebral science research. And I wanted to give them a chance to explicate the ideas behind their work. I wrote to Calkins, Fountas and Pinnell and asked for interviews. They all declined. Heinemann sent a statement that said every product the company sells is informed past all-encompassing enquiry.
I also asked Ken Goodman for an interview. It's been more than 50 years since he first laid out the iii-cueing theory in that 1967 newspaper. I wanted to know what he thinks of the cognitive science research. Of the major proponents of three cueing I reached out to, he was the merely one who agreed to an interview.
I visited Goodman at his domicile in Tucson, Arizona. He'southward 91. He uses a scooter to get around, but he'south still working. He just finished a new edition of one of his books.
When I asked him what he makes of the cerebral science research, he told me he thinks scientists focus too much on word recognition. He still doesn't believe accurate word recognition is necessary for reading comprehension.
"Word recognition is a preoccupation," he said. "I don't teach give-and-take recognition. I teach people to make sense of language. And learning the words is incidental to that."
He brought upwards the example of a child who comes to the word "horse" and says "pony" instead. His argument is that a child will withal understand the meaning of the story because equus caballus and pony are the same concept.
I pressed him on this. Outset of all, a pony isn't the aforementioned matter as a horse. Second, don't y'all want to make sure that when a child is learning to read, he understands that /p/ /o/ /n/ /y/ says "pony"? And different messages say "horse"?
He dismissed my question.
"The purpose is not to learn words," he said. "The purpose is to make sense."
Cerebral scientists don't dispute that the purpose of reading is to brand sense of the text. But the question is: How can you sympathise what you are reading if you can't accurately read the words? And if quick and accurate give-and-take recognition is the hallmark of existence a skilled reader, how does a piddling child get in that location?
Goodman rejected the idea that you lot tin can make a stardom between skilled readers and unskilled readers; he doesn't like the value judgment that implies. He said dyslexia does not exist — despite lots of evidence that it does.52 And he said the three-cueing theory is based on years of observational inquiry. In his view, three cueing is perfectly valid, drawn from a dissimilar kind of testify than what scientists collect in their labs.
"My science is different," Goodman said.
This thought that there are different kinds of evidence that atomic number 82 to different conclusions about how reading works is i reason people continue to disagree about how children should be taught to read. It'due south of import for educators to sympathize that iii cueing is based on theory and observational research and that at that place'south decades of scientific evidence from labs all over the world that converges on a very different thought about skilled reading.
The cognitive scientific discipline does not provide all the answers nearly how to teach children to read, just on the question of how skilled readers read words, scientists accept amassed a huge torso of bear witness.
Goldberg thinks information technology's time for educators across the country to take a shut look at all the materials they use to teach reading.
"We should look through the materials and search for prove of cueing," she said. "And if it'south there, don't bear upon it. Don't let it become near our kids, don't allow it get nigh our classrooms, our teachers."
At a Loss for Words is one of three audio documentaries this season from the Educate podcast — stories about educational activity, opportunity, and how people learn.
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Research on How Children Learn to Read
Source: https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading