Category Archives: Science of Reading

Science of Reading is MORE than Systematic Phonics

Image of two parents reading a book about dinosaurs to help their child build background knowledge

Last year I moved from fifth grade to kindergarten. Since I had taught kindergarten before (and every grade between the two), I started the year teaching what I knew. But it wasn’t long before I was reading books, research articles and blogs about the Science of Reading. I even listened to some podcasts. And I knew that I had to add my voice into the conversation. In this post, I’m going to continue my exploration of the Science of Reading. You may want to start at the beginning of my journey with these blog posts: What IS Science of Reading Anyway?, What is Science of Reading? , Part 2, and The Knowledge Gap Book Review.

In this post, my journey continues, and I will explain:

How the Reading League Defines Science of Reading

The Reading League is the major organization behind the idea that Reading instruction should be based on Science. In 2021, they published the Science of Reading Defining Guide. You can download a free e-book or purchase a bound copy on their website. According to the Guide, scientific research from varied fields such as linguistics, neuroscience, psychology and education has come together to form a “vast, interdisciplinary body of scientifically-based research about reading and issues related to reading and writing”. In addition to explaining that instruction should be based on verified Science, the guide also explains:

What the Science of Reading is NOT

  • an ideology or philosophy
  • a fad, trend, new idea, or pendulum swing
  • a political agenda
  • a one-size-fits-all approach
  • a program of instruction
  • a single, specific component of instruction such as phonics

Wait, what? Science of Reading is not just phonics? You could have fooled me! When I searched for “Science of Reading Curriculum”, most of the hits on the first page led to decodables. I checked TPT, and there are even decodables for 4th and 5th graders! (Surely most upper grade students have moved beyond decoding practice???)

My district bought me a Reading Curriculum for kindergarten that calls for 30 minutes of direct instruction in phonics and phonemic awareness each day. The lessons in the upper grades are even longer. This time committment is going to make it difficult to fit in other academic instruction. I am very concerned that teachers, administrators and school districts are jumping on the phonics only bandwagon, and students will be the losers. I lived through the Reading Wars, and I know what it is like to teach 4th and 5th graders who are terrific word callers, but can’t tell you a thing about the text they just read. To be clear, I am in favor of systematic phonics instruction. I am also in favor of pairing it appropriately with systematic instruction in the other pillars of reading: phonemic awareness, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. And this is exactly what Science tells us we should be doing.

The Simple View of Reading

Two cognitive scientists, Philip Gough and William Tunmer, proposed this idea in 1986, and it has been transformational to the field of reading research. They proposed that “reading was the product of two broad skills: the ability to read the words off the page and the ability to understand the oral language in which the material was written. Both of these skills together were necessary for skilled reading comprehension – neither alone could result in skilled reading.” (Quote from the Reading League.) The Reading League has turned this idea into a simple formula.

WR x LC = RC

WR is Word Recognition.

LC is Language Comprehension.

RC is Reading Comprehension.

As you can see, goal of Reading instruction is comprehension. Reading comprehension is the complex result of two equal components, Word Recognition and Language Comprehension. Both are equally important.

Scarbourogh’s Reading Rope

The two components, Word Recognition and Language Comprehension, are more clearly defined when you look at Scarborough’s Reading Rope. In 2001, Dr. Hollis Scarborough created a rope out of pipe cleaners to explore the complex interweavings that lead to skilled reading. As you can see in this graphic, there is a lot more to reading than phonics. Certainly, fluent decoding is necessary. But so is a deep and precise vocabulary. Wide background knowledge is also necessary. Knowledge of language structures is a key component, as is general literacy knowledge. Students also need to understand word parts and syllables, and have a bank of words that they recognize by sight. All of these components have been scientifically studied and are research-based components of reading instruction that leads to skilled reading.

Let me just repeat that. ALL of these components are key to skilled reading.

The Matthew Effect

You’ve heard it said. “First students learn to read, and then they read to learn.” But Scarborough’s Reading Rope makes it clear that all of these components are key for developing skilled readers. We can’t spend 2-3 years “teaching students to read”, and then expect them to read to learn, because knowledge is a component of reading, right from the start. Anyone who has ever taught upper elementary knows that the gap is already too big if we wait until third grade to begin building background knowledge and vocabulary. This was described by reading researcher Keith Stanovich as the Matthew Effect, after the verse in Matthew that states, “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” In other words, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Stanovich uses the term Matthew Effect to refer to vocabulary knowledge and the causal relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension. He states, “The very children who are reading well and who have good vocabularies will read more, learn more word meanings, and hence read even better. Children with inadequate vocabularies – who read slowly and without enjoyment – read less and as a result have slower development of vocabulary knowledge, which inhibits further growth in reading ability.”

Our Challenge as Teachers

So, when I’m looking my kindergarten students in the eyes this week, I’m going to be thinking about a lot of things. It’s still September, so we have a lot to learn about letters and sounds. We have barely introduced the idea of syllables, so we have lots of work to do with phonemic awarness. And I’m also thinking about content and vocabulary. We are getting ready for the Teddy Bear Picnic, so I have some ideas about teaching my students about bears and hibernation.

Check back next week, and I’ll tell you how I did!

The Knowledge Gap – a Book Review

Click to jump right to these sections in this post.

What is the Knowledge Gap?

Many years ago, I sat in a meeting with my fourth grade colleagues and we analyzed the scores from the previous years’ standardized test. To everyone’s surprise, my class had far surpassed the other classes on the fiction reading portion of the text. When we anaylzed it even further, we realized that my classes’ high scores were mostly attributable to one passage – an excerpt from Gary Soto’s The Skirt. When my colleagues asked how I had achieved such high scores, I was at a loss. I didn’t know. Now I know.

In her book, The Knowledge Gap, Natalie Wexler explores the importance of background knowledge and vocabulary in comprehension. My experience with that standardized test mirrors some of the education research that she cites in the book. First, Gary Soto is a poet that I admire, and my students and I had read and analyzed some of the poems in his book, A Fire in My Hands. That experience probably gave them familiarity with his themes, symbolism and style, which helped them understand the text on the test. Second, because I speak Spanish, Hispanic students were generally put into my classroom. The Skirt is written in English, but the main character is from Mexico, and the text is sprinkled with Spanish words. My students had the relevant Spanish vocabulary to understand that text. Even my English speakers, because of their exposure to his poetry, had strategies for using context to decipher Spanish words. Even though many of my students’ reading levels were below grade level, their background knowledge and vocabulary compensated, and resulted in high comprehension of that text, and therefore, higher scores on the test.

Early in the book (Chapter 2), Natalie Wexler cites two studies that directly relate to my experience. One, The Baseball Study by Recht and Leslie, showed that middle school students with high knowledge of baseball, but a low reading level had higher comprehension of a baseball text than students with a high reading level but a low knowledge of baseball. Click here to read the study, published in 1988 in the Journal of Educational Psychology. Natalie Wexler also cites a study of preschoolers’ comprehension. In this study, published in 2014 in Reading Psychology, scientists found no difference between the comprehension of students from low socio-economic familes and students from wealthier families when background knowledge and vocabulary were the same. The two studies, when taken together, form the backbone of Nataile Wexler’s thesis – we are creating the achievement gap by focusing too much time on reading instruction that does not include knowlege building. In other words, the knowledge gap IS the achievement gap.

The Knowledge Gap IS the Achievement Gap.

But what about Reading Strategy Instruction?

Most of us have spent years learning about reading strategies and how to teach them in the hopes that a thorough grounding in reading strategies would result in higher comprehension. We have seen studies that show strategy instruction boosts scores on comprehension tests. So, where does that fit into this picture? Wexler addresses this question in Chapter 3. According to Daniel Willingham, one of the cognitive psychologists she cites frequently, strategies help students understand that the goal of reading is comprehension, not decoding. Strategy instruction can also remind students to check for understanding. So, strategy instruction can be beneficial, but it is not sufficient. According to Willingham and Wexler, elementary schools today have gotten the balance wrong. We are spending too much time on strategy instruction, and not enough time building vocabulary and background knowledge.

“Nearly all teachers have come to see comprehension not as something that arises naturally with sufficient information, as cognitive scientists have concluded, but rather as a set of strategies that need to be taught explicitly. Many dedicated and well-intentioned teachers have worked their tails off trying to teach reading, but because they’ve been given the wrong information about how to do it, or in some cases none at all, the results have been disastrous, both for their students and for society as a whole.”

Natalie Wexler in The Knowledge Gap, chapter 3

This great video from Daniel Willingham illustrates that point beautifully.

Does The Knowledge Gap correlate with Science of Reading?

The short answer is, yes, totally. The Knowledge Gap is based on scientific research done by cognitive psychologists like Daniel Willingham as well as instructional research done by education professionals like Timothy Shanahan. In my last blog post, I let you know that one of my filters is making sure that any changes I make in my classroom are based on brain research AND research on effective instruction. This book definitely draws on a wide variety of scientific research as Wexler explores her thesis.

The Science of Reading is a broad effort to bring together science and instruction. It is often equated with systematic phonics, and that is a component of reading instruction that has been well validated through a lot of research. But there is research that shows that systematic phonics isn’t enough. In The Knowledge Gap, Wexler explores how knowledge and vocabulary are critical to comprehension. In chapter 4 she endorses systematic phonics, but argues that it isn’t sufficient.

“Reading, it is generally agreed, is all about making meaning. Cognitive scientists would say that decoding – the part of reading for which phonemic awareness and phonics skills are essential – is a necessary stepping-stone in the process of making meaning from written text…. It’s true that some children will learn to read without systematic phonics instruction – probably somewhere between half and a third, according to reading experts. But all children can benefit from it, and many won’t learn to decode well without it.”

-The Knowledge Gap, chapter 4

So, What Does This Mean for My Classroom?

The last part of the book focuses on Wexler’s thoughts on reform. This is where the book fell down for me. The recommendations are fairly generic. She has a high regard for curricula like Core Knowledge and Engage NY, both open source and availabe for free. She would like to see fewer district initiatives and more sustained focus on system-wide shifts over time toward content-rich curricula. She recommends close reading of text and anlytical writing. And she mentions an effort in Lousiana to require certain texts each year, and then base the state test on those texts, ensuring that all Lousiana students share a common curriculum. All of these are interesting ideas, but not particularly useful when I face my kindergarteners tomorrow.

Of course, Wexler is an education journalist. Her degrees are in history and the law, not instruction. So it’s probably reasonable for her to use her journalist expertise to gather all of the sources together in one book, and then allow education experts to turn those insights into classroom practice. She is the co-author of The Writing Revolution, which is currently waiting for me on my bedside table, and seems like it will be more practical than theoretical.

Who Should Read This Book?

I recommend this book for every elementary teacher and administrator who wants to understand how to raise reading achievement in their school. I think the book is especially important for primary teachers. Most primary classrooms in the United States spend the majority of the day teaching reading (62% of the day according to some estimates), and it seems to be working just fine. When primary teachers give reading tests like the DRA and BAS, most students do well. But, without a focus on building knowledge in the primary grades, comprehension slows down and reading achievement decreases in upper grades. That’s when the cracks start to appear. But because the kids are out of our classrooms by that point, we primary teachers don’t notice the change.

I’ve spent the past 4 years teaching fifth grade, and this year I moved to kindergarten, in part because I wanted to figure out why reading achievement shifted so dramatically from primary grades to intermediate grades in my school. I think this is a huge part of the reason, so as a primary teacher, I am working to bring systematic phonics AND content learning to my kindergarteners. I think any primary teacher who reads The Knowledge Gap will be ready to come along on that journey with me, as we work to help our readers succeed today AND tomorrow.

I give The Knowledge Gap five stars, and it’s on the top shelf of my book case. I have already reread many parts of the book, and I am sure that I will be reaching for it often as I figure out how to shift my classroom and help my students become proficient readers.