Some children learn decoding quickly with minimal instruction. Others need a lot more help. But good phonics instruction is beneficial for all kids, even those who learn to decode easily; research shows they become better spellers. There is no debate at this point among scientists that reading is a skill that needs to be explicitly taught by showing children the ways that sounds and letters correspond. According to all the research, what you should see in every school is a heavy emphasis on explicit phonics instruction in the early grades.
There is no evidence this turns kids off to reading or makes reading harder. If you do a good job teaching phonics in the early grades, kids get off to a quicker start.
American prisons are full of people who grew up in poor families, and according to a study of the Texas prison population, nearly half of all inmates have dyslexia. They struggled to read as kids and probably never got the help they needed. For Butler, the main problem at this point is ignorance. Seidenberg is less optimistic. He makes a comparison to climate change research. The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers.
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Would it be possible for the author to include a complete reference page to align with this article that supports the research and studies cited within the article. Why, why, why are you finally finding this out? Their brains work differently. You could try teaching them.
Phonics is not, it is not, it is not worksheets. Any decent teacher teaches skills in order to get someone to the point where they can use the skills to do interesting and exciting things. Like reading. I know. I taught that student to read when she was 24 because no one had ever bothered to teach her how to read.
Not guess. Not play silly games. So she could read an accounting textbook. I should never, ever, have to teach an adult to read. They should have learned when they were in first grade. NOT kindergarden. First grade. Rita Shapiro was the best reading teacher I ever met. She could have taught a blind baboon to read—it would have taken her a year instead of six months. Including books kids wanted to read, like Goosebumps. But they had to read them. And in case anyone cares, reading Goosebumps comes under whole language.
I am a certified Orton-Gillingham teacher. I teach adults to read. And they read books they want—James Patterson one short declarative sentence after another , or Dan Ladd, an Adirondack writer on hunting. But they had to read. Not sidetrack on what they already knew. Not draw cute pictures instead of writing answers.
Why should kids learn to read instead of having a good time playing with pictures? Thank you for this article. It is exactly where I am with my 8 year old son. Nothing with phonics as my 22 year old son had been. No idea how you have a yr old proficent on words as large as: Because by the end of the year. It seemed completely insane as parents.
So we fell further behind. Now in 2nd grade, he has evaluated, positive, for Dyslexia. This is the child who paniced when I walked to close to the library shelf in his bedroom — that we might be about to read. This article supports everything I was thinking. Thanks again. I really enjoyed your article. I have 10 grandchildren whose reading ranges just like their ages.
My grandson who is in 5th grade can read and translate the old testament, as as well as, if not better than many adults. What is phonics? Phonics research So, what does the science tell us? Clare Sealy is head of curriculum and standards for Guernsey This article was amended on 9 August to replace " systematic synthetic phonics" with "systemic phonics".
Register to continue reading for free It only takes a moment and you'll get access to more news, plus courses, jobs and teaching resources tailored to you Register. Clare Sealy. Latest stories. Spike in online teacher abuse sparks hotline surge Bullying on social media platforms such as TikTok is pushing some teachers over the edge, warn heads. Matilda Martin 12 Nov Ofsted warns schools over 'unbroken' KS3 music teaching Inspectorate's expert says subject should not be put on a carousel in secondary schools.
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Phonemic awareness is the understanding that words are made up of sounds. Phonemic awareness is not the same thing as phonics. Phonemic awareness deals with sounds in spoken words, whereas phonics involves the relationship between sounds and written symbols. Therefore, phonics deals with learning sound-spelling relationships and is associated with print.
Most phonemic awareness tasks, however, are purely oral. Question 3: The goal of reading is making meaning from text. So, how is phonics related to comprehension?
Phonics instruction plays a key role in helping children comprehend text. You see, phonics instruction helps the child to map sounds onto spellings.
This ability enables children to decode words. Decoding words aids in the development and improvement in word recognition. The more words a reader recognizes, the easier the reading task. Therefore, phonics instruction aids in the development of word recognition by providing children with an important and useful way to figure out unfamiliar words while reading.
When children begin to be able to recognize a large number of words quickly and accurately, reading fluency improves. Reading fluency refers to the ease with which children can read a text. As more and more words become firmly stored in a child's memory that is, the child recognizes more and more words on sight , he or she gains fluency and automaticity in word recognition. To learn words by sight, it's critical that students have many opportunities to decode words in text.
The more times a reader encounters a word in text, the more likely he or she is to recognize it by sight and to avoid making a reading error. Reading fluency improves reading comprehension. She knows that word because at some point she successfully sounded it out. The more words she stores in her memory this way, the more she can focus on the meaning of what she's reading; she'll eventually be using less brain power to identify words and will be able to devote more brain power to comprehending what she's reading.
And if teachers use the cueing system to teach reading, Kilpatrick says they're not just teaching children the habits of poor readers, they are actually impeding the orthographic mapping process. In this way, he said, three cueing can actually prevent the critical learning that's necessary for a child to become a skilled reader.
In many balanced literacy classrooms, children are taught phonics and the cueing system. Some kids who are taught both approaches realize pretty quickly that sounding out a word is the most efficient and reliable way to know what it is. Those kids tend to have an easier time understanding the ways that sounds and letters relate. They'll drop the cueing strategies and begin building that big bank of instantly known words that is so necessary for skilled reading.
But some children will 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 bunch of words, many children can look like good readers — until they get to about third grade, when their books begin to have more words, longer words, and fewer pictures. Then they're stuck. They haven't developed their sounding-out skills.
Their bank of known words is limited. Reading is slow and laborious and they don't like it, so they don't do it if they don't have to. While their peers who mastered decoding early are reading and teaching themselves new words every day, the kids who clung to the cueing approach are falling further and further behind.
These poor reading habits, once ingrained at a young age, can follow kids into high school. Some kids who were taught the cueing approach never become good readers.
Not because they're incapable of learning to read well but because they were taught the strategies of struggling readers. Once Margaret Goldberg discovered the cognitive science evidence against cueing, she wanted her colleagues in the Oakland school district to know about it too. Over the past two years, Goldberg and a fellow literacy coach named Lani Mednick have been leading a grant-funded pilot project to improve reading achievement in the Oakland schools.
They have their work cut out for them. Nearly half the district's third-graders are below grade level in reading. Goldberg and Mednick want to raise questions about how kids in Oakland are being 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 meeting in March, the coaches watched the video of the "picture power" lesson.
Mednick wanted the coaches to consider the beliefs about reading that would lead to the creation of a lesson like "picture power. 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. But they said many teachers don't see any problem with cueing. After all, one of the cues is to look at the letters in the word.
What's wrong with teaching kids lots of different strategies to figure out unknown words? 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 get phonics instruction in one part of the day. Then they'd go reader's workshop and be taught that when they come to a word they don't know, they have lots of strategies.
They can sound it out. They can also check the first letter, look at the picture, think of a word that makes sense. Teaching cueing and phonics doesn't work, Sajous-Brooks said.
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 three-cueing idea. Two charter school networks in Oakland are working on similar projects to move their schools away from cueing. To see what it looks like, I visited a first-grade classroom at a charter school in Oakland called Achieve Academy.
One part of the day was explicit phonics instruction. They met with their teacher, Andrea Ruiz, at a kidney-shaped table in a corner of the classroom. The lowest-level group worked on identifying the speech sounds in words like "skin" and "skip.
There were also vocabulary lessons. Ruiz read out loud to them. One of the words in the book was "prey. Ruiz asked the children. The kids turned and talked to each other. Other vocabulary words these first-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 idea is to build their oral vocabulary so that when they can read those words, they know what the words mean. This comes straight from the scientific research, which shows that reading comprehension is the product of two things. Second, the child needs to know the meaning of the word she just sounded out.
So, in a first-grade classroom that's following the research, you will see explicit phonics instruction and also lessons that build oral vocabulary and background knowledge. And you will see kids practicing what they've been taught. After their vocabulary lesson, the kids did "buddy reading. I found Belinda sitting on an adult chair at the back of the classroom, her little legs swinging. Across from her was her buddy Steven, decked out in a yellow and blue plaid shirt tucked neatly into his jeans.
He held the book and pointed to the words while Belinda read. Almost all of the words in the book contain spelling patterns she'd been taught in her phonics lessons. Steven did a double-take. Steven's job as Belinda's reading buddy was to help her if she missed a word or got stuck. But that didn't happen much because Belinda had been taught how to read the words.
She didn't need any help from the pictures, either. She barely glanced at them as she read. To be clear, there's nothing wrong with pictures. They're great 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 one — helps us understand what we're reading all the time. But if a child is being taught to use 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 made its way into many schools and schools of education. Ruiz didn't know about this research until the Oakland pilot project. It was a relief when she came to Oakland and the curriculum spelled out that kids use meaning, structure and visual cues to figure out words. I heard this from other educators.
Cueing was appealing because they didn't know what else to do. She says many teachers aren't taught what they need to know about the structure of the English language to be able to teach phonics well. She says phonics can be intimidating; three cueing isn't.
Another reason cueing holds on is that it seems to work for some children. But researchers estimate there's a percentage of kids — perhaps about 40 percent — who will learn to read no matter how they're taught. Goldberg hopes the pilot project in Oakland will 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 enough evidence from the pilot project to make curriculum changes for the entire district and that the Oakland schools remain committed to balanced literacy.
Oakland's situation is no different from many other districts across the country that have invested millions of dollars in materials that include cueing. The people who purchase the materials are trusting if they were on the market, that they will work. We're all trusting, and it's a system that is broken. If cueing was debunked decades ago by cognitive scientists, why is the idea still in materials that are being sold to schools? One answer to that question is that school districts still buy the materials.
I wanted to know what the authors of those materials make of the cognitive science research. And I wanted to give them a chance to explain 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 by extensive research.
I also asked Ken Goodman for an interview. It's been more than 50 years since he first laid out the three-cueing theory in that paper. 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 only one who agreed to an interview.
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