Structured Literacy and the Science of Reading
What piqued my curiosity about structured literacy
Have you heard that saying, “never be the smartest person in the room”? I’m not sure who said it but today I want to surround all of us with some uber-smart people. While I will never claim to be an expert myself, I will tell you how I got hooked on the science of reading and what piqued my curiosity about structured literacy. I was walking through the bookstore many years ago and an unusual title of a book caught my eye. Proust and the Squid so I picked the book up and read the byline - The Story and Science of the Reading Brain written by Maryanne Wolfe. I opened the book and read the first paragraph which says… “We were never born to read. Human beings invented reading only a few thousand years ago. And with this invention, we rearranged the very organization of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think, which altered the intellectual evolution of our species. Reading is one of the single most remarkable inventions in history.” Okay, are YOU hooked?
What does a squid have anything to do with the science of reading?
So why Proust and what does a squid have anything to do with the science of reading? Maryanne Wolfe, a cognitive neuroscientist, introduces the French novelist Marcel Proust as a metaphor and the squid as an analogy for two different aspects of reading. Dr Wolfe says this about Marcel, “Proust saw reading as a kind of intellectual ‘sanctuary,’ where human beings have access to thousands of different realities they might never encounter or understand - these new realities are capable of transforming readers’ intellectual lives.” Wolfe then goes on to describe how scientists in the 50s “used the long central axon of the shy but cunning squid to understand how neurons fire and transmit to each other…how neurons repair and compensate when something goes awry.”
In her book, Dr Wolfe outlines 3 principles of organization that she refers to as “the evolutionary perspective on the reading brain” - this occurs across all written languages.
Plasticity (neuroplasticity) - the brain can rearrange old structures into new learning circuits
Specialization - capacity for specialization in working groups of neurons within these structures for representing information - specialized for a new task
Automaticity - capacity of neuronal groups and learning circuits to retrieve and connect this information at nearly automatic rates
This book is not necessarily an easy read, so I have had to come back to it time and time again to digest smaller pieces in more meaningful ways. Reading isn’t natural so should it be easy? The Science of Reading includes a vast body of researchers in various fields who study the brain - developmental psychologists, educational psychologists, and cognitive neuroscientists. The brain is complex, so expecting a quick and easy book to share how the brain learns to read is like expecting someone to show you how to build a house in just 6 hours.
So, what’s the best way to help kids read?
What’s the most efficient way to help kids read? Well, let’s start with the second fact that changed the way I provide reading instruction. Professor of Education, Dr Martin Kozloff wrote -
“If a child memorizes ten words, the child can read only ten words, but if the child learns the sounds of ten letters, the child will be able to read 350 three-sound words, 4,320 four-sound words and 21,650 five-sound words.” That is a total of 26,320 words! (Dr Martin Kozloff, 2002).
I think it’s pretty safe to say that means we should stop giving lists of words to memorize as homework, right? Oooooh, did that make you squirm a little? Yup, the first time I heard that I squirmed a lot!
The science of reading has highlighted 3 specific components that are necessary for successful reading instruction:
explicit instruction - specific skills must be taught
systematic instruction - there needs to be a scope and sequence
cumulative instruction - skills need to build upon previously mastered skills
The goal, after all, is automaticity and accuracy which leads to a deeper understanding of the text. Those two quotes grounded me and set me on my journey to finding the best resources and the best research-based practices in order to provide quality reading and spelling instruction for my students.
Scarborough’s Reading Rope
The third person that has hugely impacted my reading instruction is Dr. Hollis Scarborough. Have you heard of Scarborough’s Rope or the Reading Rope? Dr Hollis Scarborough is a leading researcher of early language development and its connection to later literacy. In her analogy of a rope, she used pipe cleaners to illustrate the interconnectedness and interdependence of all of the components involved in learning to read.
The Reading Rope consists of 3 lower and 5 upper strands. So, imagine that I have 8 pipe cleaners on the table in front of me. The upper strand is language comprehension and includes 5 key concepts - the first strand (I am choosing the red pipe cleaner) represents background knowledge - facts and concepts. I add a yellow pipe cleaner which represents vocabulary - multiple meanings, tier I, tier II, tier III vocabulary, then I add an orange pipe cleaner for language structures - the syntax, semantics, etc of our language. I am adding a green pipe cleaner to represent verbal reasoning such as inference and metaphors, and finally, I’m adding a blue pipe cleaner which represents literacy knowledge - print concepts and genre, etc. All 5 of these concepts - background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge are woven together to create strong language comprehension. I am now twisting all 5 of these pipe cleaners together to create a larger strand of rope.
The lower strand in The Reading Rope is Word Recognition. Now I’m picking up a purple pipe cleaner that represents phonological awareness - rhyming, alliteration, syllables, etc. Second, I pick up a pink pipe cleaner to represent decoding skills - alphabetic principle, spelling-sound correspondence, and finally a white pipe cleaner to represent sight recognition of familiar words. At this point, I think it’s critical to understand the definition of a sight word. A sight word is a word we already know by sight, we can retrieve it automatically and effortlessly without having to read the word sound-by-sound. In his book, Equipped for Reading Success, David Kilpatrick talks about orthographic mapping - this is the process we use to store words into long-term memory. Okay, so back to our pipe cleaners. I twist all 3 of the pipe cleaners together - phonological awareness, decoding skills, and sight recognition, these create the lower strand of rope.
Now imagine that I take all 8 pipe cleaners - made up of the 5 language comprehension strands and the 3 word recognition strands and I twist all 8 pipe cleaners together to make 1 solid, 8 strand rope - it is strong and robust. Each strand is increasingly strategic, increasingly automatic, and shows that fluent execution and coordination of word recognition and text comprehension make a skilled reader. That analogy is powerful and explicitly demonstrates the content that needs to be included in our instruction.
How did we get here?
You may have heard of ‘the reading wars’, for years the great debate on the best practices for reading instruction has been between whole word and phonics? The whole word approach, which began sometime in the 1950s, began looking at the whole word, even the shape of it, rather than each phonetic piece. This is where sight word flashcards became super popular, but rote memorization is highly problematic. It is estimated that the English language now contains 1 million words, I can’t imagine how long that would take to memorize that many words, that’s impossible, there has got to be a better way to teach reading.
Balanced literacy
Next came balanced literacy, which at first glance looked far superior to the whole word approach. The popular 3-cueing system took root in many classrooms around the world. The headings MSV are included on most running records - M is for using meaning to figure out a word, S is for sentence structure and V is using visual information. This 3-cueing system IS the whole language approach and scientific research has shown us that it is possible to read words without relying on context, or the visual cues. The whole word method encourages children to guess a word and guessing is not reading. Strategies such as using the picture for a clue, skipping the tricky word, reading to the end of the sentence then coming back and seeing what makes sense (context), and getting your mouth to make the first sound and predict what word could fit there are all examples of the 3-cueing system.
I’m currently going through the book “Reading for Life - High Quality Literacy Instruction for All” by Lyn Stone and she references an article by Marilyn Jager Adams. She writes, “The three-cueing system is a perfect example of a coinage gone crazy. No one can trace its source, and it has no experimental data to support it, yet it is repeated, adopted, and defended the world over.”
Here’s an example someone shared with me recently…the child is given a level E text to read. There is a photo of a smiling dog with a straw hat and it is sitting on the grass with a butterfly net and a glass jar at its feet. The text reads, “I look at insects. I am a scientist. I am an entomologist.” Now level E has been charted to be approximately November of grade 1. In what universe are 6-year-old children expected to read the word ‘entomologist?’ How would a child even make a good guess about how to read vocabulary like that? The picture here doesn’t even support the text, so how on earth do we expect a child to get 100% on this level? I can feel my blood pressure going up just thinking of one of my students being given text like this, it doesn’t make sense! So, why are we still using leveled text knowing it contains words they can’t decode yet? The predictable text promotes memorization and the responsibility is on the child to “figure it out” and hope for the best. THIS is why so many of our readers get stuck at those blasted levels and children become discouraged and frustrated and many are labeled struggling readers. Many leveled books also use predictable text, while predictable text builds oral language it does not build reading skills.
It is also the responsibility of the child to hold that word in memory for spelling not just reading. They have to be able to retrieve the ‘image’ of that word and put down the letters on paper. How does this method expect children to become proficient at spelling if no spelling rules are taught? A child wouldn’t even be able to use a dictionary to check for spelling because they wouldn’t have the necessary information for approximating the spelling to check the spelling.
The evidence is clear
Evidence continues to show us that the whole word and balanced literacy approaches are inefficient and even detrimental, the research is out there. We can no longer ignore the evidence that outlines the most important skills needed. Now that we know better, we need to do better and that means we need to not be afraid to make a shift in our literacy instruction. Don’t lose hope friends, the good news is that the Science of Reading research is continuously showing us that structured literacy is the best way to support our learners. Continue to join me as we unpack specific content to ensure that our instruction is explicit, systematic, and cumulative.
Resources mentioned in this post:
Dr. Martin Kozlov
Dr. Hollis Scarborough
Reading for Life, High Quality Literacy Instruction for All by Lynn Stone
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