We know a lot about teaching reading well.
I say this (too) frequently in my work as a literacy researcher and teacher educator. We know a lot about teaching reading well. I say it so much because I want the teachers I work with to know that there are scientific ways to help young children become literate, and aligning our teaching with the evidence is crucial for making our schools more successful.
We know that phonological awareness and phonics instruction works.
We know that spelling and writing instruction works.
We know that fluency and comprehension instruction works.
We know that vocabulary and oral language instruction works.
And yet…
Lots of children struggle to read and write. Lots of teachers struggle to help them. Lots of schools report systematic underperformance.
Kinda makes you want to quit your job and become a grumpy cat herder on an Arctic island, right?
(Or perhaps that’s just me…)
A (Not So) Simple View of Reading?
If we know so much about what works in literacy teaching, then why isn’t it actually, you know, working? I’ve built my whole career around hanging out in schools with young children learning to read and write, and I have literally never been in a building that wasn’t actively teaching literacy every single day. Moreover, these schools have been attending to both prongs of the widely accepted Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986), which tells us there’s a formula for getting kids to read well:
Teach decoding. Teach language comprehension. (Mash it all together). Reading comprehension!
And yet…
It’s Not Really That Simple, Is It?
If decoding x language comprehension = reading comprehension, then why does previous knowledge of a topic so heavily influence a child’s (or adult’s) understanding of a given passage?
I keenly recall reading a short story once that included a child being asked to grab a “buggy” for his mother, which was supposed to clue me into the fact that they were on a shopping trip at the grocery store in the Deep South.
We don’t call shopping carts “buggies” in Wyoming (where I come from). We don’t call anything a buggy.
And in Britain, a buggy is what I would call a stroller – again, not for shopping, but for carting around your baby.
This isn’t a mere function of language comprehension alone. These are sociocultural factors that influence reading comprehension.
If a British child read a passage and understood a buggy to be a stroller, thus completely changing their understanding of the text, we would not want to suggest that this child had a problem with language comprehension. The child comprehended the term buggy, but its significance was culturally informed.
The same kinds of issues also arise when we think about the many different ways that children’s experiences and identities change their learning patterns across other literacy processes. Accent and dialect will influence how children hear and process the sounds of speech, then map them to letters. Some children with autism have been found to process print through whole word recognition. Diversity is the name of the game when helping children learn to read and write successfully.
Simply Not So Simple
The Simple View of Reading is true, but we also know that building out the abilities to Decode, Comprehend Language, and Comprehend Reading is complex. Just think about how many skills it takes to decode conventionally! All the letters, all the sounds, all the experience with phonological processing, and on and on. It’s years of instructional work that is also impacted by – teacher quality, home environment, school funding, food and resource security, student identity, disability status, and on and on.
There’s too much to talk about all at once!
Keep coming back for deeper dives into early reading and writing. Throughout the year, we’re going to hit all of the literacy strands from many different perspectives, from practical teaching tips to more nuanced discussions about literacy and diversity.
Because it’s simply not that simple.
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