Although phonics, decoding, and spelling are addressed in word study, they are not explicitly or systematically taught. Although no one would argue that the use of context clues is a beneficial strategy in reading, Dr. David Kilpatrick reminds us that context helps identify the meaning of words, but should not be promoted as an effective strategy for word identification As the whole language approach took root in elementary classrooms across the country, the use of phonics instruction faded away.
Over time, students did not become more reliable. They either became more reliant on compensatory strategies or they relied more on compensatory strategies. Decades of reading research has shown that reading is not an innate ability. Unlike learning to speak, children must receive instruction and exposure to learn how to read.
Students continued to rely on the cueing system, while Balanced Literacy focused on opportunities for shared, guided, and independent reading. While this approach emphasized the use of leveled readers for independent reading practice, struggling readers who were unable to decode the words, slipped through the cracks.
Structured Literacy is an umbrella term that was adopted by the International Dyslexia Association to refer to the many programs like Orton Gillingham that teach reading by following the evidence and research behind the Science of Reading.
Programs that exemplify the components and methods that are outlined in the term, Structured Literacy, have been found to be beneficial for all students and essential for students who struggle with reading. Statistics like these have prompted the International Dyslexia Association and other advocates of reading intervention to take a closer look at what defines effective instruction.
Structured Literacy is an approach that provides a framework to include both the principles how we should teach and the elements what we should teach. During explicit instruction, the teacher gives a direct and clear explanation for each new concept. Introduction is followed by modeling and student application of the new concept.
While the student is applying the new knowledge, the teacher provides guidance and specific feedback to promote errorless learning. The delivery of instruction follows a well-defined scope and sequence, which provides a logical progression of skills that move from simple to more complex. Newly introduced concepts are layered upon previously learned concepts.
The foundation of knowledge for phoneme-grapheme relationships, reliable spelling patterns, and generalization of rules is frequently reviewed to build automaticity.
In an Education Week survey of early reading instruction published in January , only 22 percent of kindergarten, first and second grade teachers said they believed phonics should be taught explicitly and systematically. But a whopping 68 percent said they subscribe to an approach to reading instruction called balanced literacy. The concept now called balanced literacy arose in the s as a compromise between the two prevailing camps of reading instruction: phonics and what is known as whole language.
Whole language instruction is based on the philosophy that kids will learn to read naturally if you expose them to a lot of books. At the time, the idea of balanced literacy seemed likely to stop the debate by taking the best from each approach. No research supports this teaching technique.
Independent reading time. During independent time, teachers typically allow students to select their own books so that the student is motivated to read something that he or she wants to read.
But research shows larger learning gains — especially improved reading comprehension — when teachers are involved in book selection, hold students accountable for getting the reading done, guide a discussion about the narrative or end the book with a writing assignment. Leveled reading.
A common feature in U. Stronger readers get harder texts and weaker readers get easier texts. Teacher time may be better spent helping students build their vocabularies and content knowledge so that students can tackle and understand texts that are appropriate for their grade level.
A big question is the number of sight words. When phonics is tested head-to-head against word memorization, phonics wins. But word memorization programs that also teach phonics do well too. Related: Mining online data on struggling readers who catch up. Many young children struggle to memorize. It takes a lot of repetition and the words are quickly forgotten.
Shanahan argues that once kids have a solid idea of decoding through phonics, they learn words very quickly. Teachers should try to minimize the number of sight words to be memorized. If you want kids to become great readers, the kind who score well on comprehension tests in fourth grade and beyond, the most important things to teach may not be taught in reading class at all. For years, educators have felt pressure to cut time for science, social studies and the arts in order to carve more time for the basics: reading, writing and math.
That was misguided. Many children need explicit reading instruction to decode the letter symbols and read fluently but reading comprehension can be developed throughout the school day. Related: Evidence increases for reading on paper instead of screens. But you can ask if the teacher is using a set phonics curriculum in kindergarten through second grade. Shanahan also advises looking for a school that protects time for students to learn about science, social studies and the arts.
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I believe this difference can be explained by the explicit teaching of phonics. I use the Phonics First program. Thank you so much for continuing to write about the Reading wars and making sure to include the research. It is unbelievable that something so important is ignored by so many. Thank you again for keeping this very important topic front and center! Not only logical, the points are, indeed, scientifically based. There are years and years of debate, research, publications, and outcomes from which to draw, which, for the purpose of this article need not be repeated.
Having Shanahan as a clear voice in the article was an excellent, most respected professional. I especially appreciated the historical and current view brought together in clear style. Thank you. However, your first point about the limited benefit of phonics is somewhat misleading. You do note that a large subset of students is helped by explicit phonics instruction; however, the bigger point is that many of these students may never learn to read effectively without it.
In particular, poor students and English language learners are less likely to be exposed to the vocabulary, dialogue and questioning, and content knowledge that helps many other students learn to read even in the absence of systematic explicit phonics instruction. However, I discovered that this program is designed to be implemented 30 minutes daily, but teachers pick and choose what to use only about three days per week.
This was an excellent, accurate, informative, well-researched, well-written, well-balanced article. However, for some children who have difficulty with phonemic awareness identifying and manipulating individual sounds within words , a sight word approach may be more effective than a phonics approach for them. Good independent reading is structured, it is designed by good teachers and librarians — it involves reading communities made up of students, teachers, and parents in dialogue about their reading and reading choices.
However, its structure is both ambitious and ambiguous and thus more difficult to measure. In both of our studies we simply ran book fairs in schools serving children from low-income families. We did not require that the children write book reports or take quizzes on the books they chose. Instead, we simply hoped that these poor children would be attracted to reading the books they had selected.
In both experimental studies the children who were randomly selected to receive summer books outperformed their classmates who had not been selected to receive summer books. Eliminated nearly a full year reading achievement gap over three summers. The average reading growth of the books children equaled or exceeded the growth made by children attending summer school and for a lot less money per child. We can teach all children to read and to read well. But the latest evidence that our children from ages 9 to 24 read less today than adults in every older age group.
The fact that entering college freshman today voluntarily read less than other adults is shocking but that they read less than any other group of young people have read for the past 50 years! That is, no improvement in reading achievement over the past 40 years!
I will close by noting that for at least 50 years more phonics has been on the federal agenda. For 50 years that agenda has failed to improve reading achievement of children. What would happen if all children engaged in one-hour of self-selected reading every school day? The way you are explaining the three cuing systems is inaccurate. It is not guessing. The cueing systems tell how a reader is thinking about text while reading and can show a skilled teacher how to coach the thinking for self monitoring.
I know that I desperately want to teach the students letters and the sounds they make, blends, etc. We are forbidden to teach letters in isolation. I for one, as do many other educators, feel that phonics really is the very first building block that is necessary to teach our students.
They will learn how to say and read words correctly. Now, I know that phonics is not going to work all the time, that is why we must memorize our sight words, but it starts off the groundwork and it allows for us to build upon their knowledge and experiences.
So many schools have bought into this concept and they have spent so much money on materials and trainings that I do not see this ever leaving the schools. The older teachers love the fact that it is almost scripted for them and they have little work to do. They feel that if they follow along exactly as it says, everyone will do a great job and learn. However, we know this to not be the case. Many of us are forced to differentiate our lessons, one mold does not fit all!
This works very well for our students. We provide readings that have the same content but at their reading levels. We are wanting to encourage our students and not break them down. This blog does a fantastic job at pointing out all the bad, but I would like to see more of the good. Tell us what works and how do we implement it. How do we buy into a new program? How do we convince the powers that be that we need a change?
After reading your post, I believe that much of your points portray an accurate depiction of reading within the classrooms and issues that many are facing. You mention that many benefit from phonics. However, you state that many people overstate the effectiveness of phonics instruction and that there is not a vast difference between test scores with students who have or have not received phonics instruction.
However, I have to disagree. Not only did students begin struggling with reading, but I also saw a huge deficit in their ability to spell and write. In the third and fourth grade classroom, we were having the majority of students unable to read or write fluently due to a lack of a phonics program for much of their education. These students were then expected to learn other reading skills but were not able, considering they had not even mastered the foundations of reading.
It was very frustrating to see these students struggle so greatly when much of this could have been avoided if they had had phonics instruction from the beginning of their education. With that being said, our county now has a reading curriculum that includes phonics. It has been implemented for two years now, and teachers are seeing huge improvements and gaps closing as students can truly understand what they are reading.
They can then learn the reading skills they need to have to read and write across the content areas. As you mention, I agree that phonics instruction can not harm any student but help students regardless of their needs, whether they are struggling or advanced.
Balanced literacy is one such example. The issues are less black and white. Teachers and reading advocates argue about how much phonics to fit in, how it should be taught, and what other skills and instructional techniques matter, too. In various forms, the debate about how best to teach reading has stretched on for nearly two centuries, and along the way, it has picked up political, philosophical and emotional baggage.
In fact, science has a lot to say about reading and how to teach it. But pitting phonics against other methods is an oversimplification of a complicated reality.
Cutting through the confusion over how to teach reading is essential, experts say, because reading is crucial to success, and many people never learn to do it well. According to U. And a third of fourth-graders and more than a quarter of 12th-graders lack the reading skills to adequately complete grade-level schoolwork, says Timothy Shanahan, a reading researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Those struggles tend to persist. As many as 44 million U. Department of Education data. Scientists and journalists share a core belief in questioning, observing and verifying to reach the truth. Science News reports on crucial research and discovery across science disciplines.
We need your financial support to make it happen — every contribution makes a difference. The vast majority of children need to be taught how to read. Even among those with no learning disabilities, only an estimated 5 percent figure out how to read with virtually no help, says Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and author of Raising Kids Who Read.
Yet educators have not reached consensus on how best to teach reading, and phonics is the part of the equation that people still argue about most. The idea behind a systematic phonics approach is that children must learn how to translate the secret code of written language into the spoken language they know.
Phonological awareness allows children, often beginning in preschool, to say that big and pig are different because of the sound at the beginning of the words. Once children can hear the differences between sounds, phonics comes next, offering explicit instruction in the connections between letters, letter combinations and sounds.
To be systematic, these skills need to be taught in an organized order of concepts that build on one another, preferably on a daily basis, says Louisa Moats, a licensed psychologist and literacy expert in Sun Valley, Idaho. Today, phonics proponents often advocate for the simple view of reading, which emphasizes decoding and comprehension, the ability to decipher meaning in sentences and passages.
Support for phonics has been around since at least the s, but critics have also long expressed concerns that rote phonics lessons are boring, prevent kids from learning to love reading and distract from the ability to understand meaning in text.
In the s, this kind of thinking led to the rise of whole language, an approach aimed at making reading joyful and immersive instead of mindless and full of effort. By the s, a more all-around and phonics-inclusive approach called balanced literacy was gaining popularity as the leading theory in competition with phonics-first approaches. In a survey of early-elementary and special education teachers from around the United States, 72 percent said their schools use a balanced literacy approach , according to the Education Week Research Center, a nonprofit organization in Bethesda, Md.
The implementation of balanced literacy, however, varies widely, especially in how much phonics is included, the survey found. That variation is probably preventing lots of kids from learning to read as well as they could, decades of research suggests. In the late s, with the reading wars in full swing, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development brought together a panel of about a dozen reading experts to evaluate the evidence for how best to teach reading. Ultimately, the group chose eight categories and conducted a meta-analysis of 38 studies involving 66 controlled experiments from through The results showed support for five components of reading instruction that helped students the most.
A meta-analysis of 38 studies found five components of reading instruction were most helpful to students. Phonemic awareness Knowing that spoken words are made of smaller segments of sound called phonemes. Phonics The knowledge that letters represent phonemes and that these sounds can combine to form words. Fluency The ability to read easily, accurately, quickly and with expression and understanding.
Comprehension The ability to show understanding, often through summarization. Two components that rose to the top were an emphasis on phonemic awareness a part of phonological awareness that involves the ability to identify and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words and phonics. Studies included in the analysis showed that higher levels of phonemic awareness in kindergarten and first grade were predictors of better reading skills later on.
Those children were also better at sounding out words, including nonsense words, Shanahan says. Vocabulary development was another essential component, as was a focus on comprehension.
The final important facet was a focus on achieving fluency — the ability to read a text quickly, accurately and with proper expression — by having children read out loud, among other strategies.
Even before the panel released its results in , numerous studies and books from as early as the s had concluded that there was value in explicit phonics instruction.
Studies since then have added yet more support for phonics. In , the National Early Literacy Panel, a government-convened group that included Shanahan, considered dozens of studies on phonological awareness including phonemic awareness plus phonics instruction in preschool and kindergarten.
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