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This is the Reading Instruction Chill. I am your genial host, Dr. Hendy Johnson.

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Today's topic is orthographic mapping.

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And let's start with this idea and the rubbish which is letters professional development.

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Orthographic mapping seems to be all the rage right now. Yes, it does.

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And the term orthographic mapping sounds also very important. Yes, it does.

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It's a big person term.

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Look, Mom, I went to college. I know a big person term.

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And using terms like orthographic mapping sounds quasi-academic,

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as if we're supposed to accept these ideas and these terms without question.

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But question, yes, I do.

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And I've noticed that the science of reading zelots tend to throw around a lot of words and terms

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without fully understanding them or knowing what they mean.

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So let's do a little unpacking with this whole thing called orthographic mapping.

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Mapping here is when they refer to the neural pathways or neural networks in our cortex.

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And think of our brain as a billion dot dot dot picture in our head.

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Each neuron is a dot and each neuron contains a bit of micro information.

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Dots that are similar to each other are connected by neural pathways.

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All your information related to particular concepts or related informations are in a dot to dot picture called a neural network.

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And these are not separate neural networks, but interconnecting and interacting neural networks.

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And we have billions of them, billions.

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Now an orthographic system, what is that?

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Orthography or orthographic has to do with letters, letter patterns and arrangements of letters.

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And our English written language is an orthographic system,

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meaning that it consists of letter symbols representing sounds.

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And it relies on arrangements of letters to represent sounds and words.

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Now a logographic system is different.

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Other systems are logographic.

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A logo is a symbol used to represent a thing.

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Think of a team logo.

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It's a symbol.

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Not a symbol to represent a sound, but a symbol used to represent an idea.

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And Chinese characters are an example of logographic systems.

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The symbol doesn't stand for sounds, but for things or ideas.

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Now orthographic mapping is based on the idea that words are memorized and stored in long-term memory based on letter patterns.

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It's based on the idea that you can create a universal cognitive map based on these letter patterns

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that are universally stored in all of human consciousness, or most of human consciousness.

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And based on this orthographic map, if letter sounds and patterns are taught in a magical sequence,

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that is aligned with cognitive mapping.

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According to this theory, students will be better able to store and retrieve these words during the process of reading.

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That's the basis of orthographic mapping.

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And it's an interesting theory, and yes, there's data to support it, absolutely.

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But there's data to support most theories, including the flat earth theory.

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Theories are neither right nor wrong, rather they are robust or weak.

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And strong theories account for a lot of data and explain a lot of phenomena.

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Weak theories leave much data unaccounted for, and are useless in explaining many phenomena.

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And orthographic mapping is based on a very, very weak theory.

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Yes, there's data to support the idea of orthographic mapping, just not a lot of data and not the right kind of data.

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Two ideas here. First, if reading were merely recognizing individual words floating in space,

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orthographic mapping might make sense.

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That is, if reading was merely pattern recognition, then a case could be made for cognitive mapping based on letter patterns.

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But we never encounter individual words floating in space outside a meaningful context, unless we're taking a Dibble's test.

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Words are always found in some context.

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They're found in the context of a sign, or a product, or a label, or a sentence.

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And the context provides just as much information about the word, perhaps more, than the simple arrangement of letters.

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That's the first idea.

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And the second idea, words are not meaningless patterns.

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Words mean something. There's a semantic element to it, meaning, meaning.

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But if reading was simply recognizing a set of meaningless patterns based on the meaningless patterns stored in your head,

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then maybe just maybe orthographic mapping would have some credibility.

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But it's not, and it doesn't.

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Now some of the spreading activation studies in 1975, Collins and Luftus put forth the spreading activation theory suggesting that semantic memory,

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memory of things, is organized by semantic distance, or the relatedness of things.

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Semantic distance, things that mean the same are more closely associated.

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The neurons in the neural networks are closer together.

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That means that things are organized in the brain by associations, by how close the related thing is to the similar thing.

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How close the thing is to a related thing or a similar thing, not by higher arches or letter patterns, by associations.

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Semantic similarities, not orthographic similarities, meaning not letters.

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But Clowden and Rommel Hart's 1981 parallel processing model demonstrates that a person can take in and understand a lot of different stimuli at the same time.

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And for reading, this means that we're using a lot of different information to create meaning, not just the code.

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Children of the code, we decode.

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That is based on a simple understanding of reading and research.

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I found an interesting study by Domacio in 1996 and found that our brain has three levels of representation for words.

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The top level is the conceptual level, that's all the semantic information about a word, meaning.

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The second level is the lexical level, this is the word form that matches the concept or matches meaning.

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And the third and lowest level is the final logical level, and that's the sound and letter information corresponding to the word.

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This means that the strongest level of word representation in long-term memory is not letter patterns, but meaning.

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Meaning that orthographic mapping may be a thing, but semantic mapping is much more of a thing.

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For example, when you hear the word cat, or see the word cat in print, you automatically associated with cat things.

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Soft, furry, paws, kitty, pet.

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These are things closely related to cat.

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The neural pathways leading to these things are activated.

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These things come to mind, these are semantic maps or relatedness.

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What is not activated when you hear the word cat?

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You don't think of short A words, or CVC pattern words, or AT phonograms, that's not what is activated.

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You don't think about letter sounds or letter patterns, you think of things.

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Clearly, we have access to semantic information when we see the word cat in print.

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Yes, there is some orthographic information on the page and some orthographic mapping is stored in the head, but it's very weak.

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Semantic information takes precedence over orthographic information, and again, orthography, orthographic, refers to letter arrangements and spelling.

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Now, if reading were purely sounding out words, then orthographic mapping might make sense.

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There is orthographic mapping, yes, this does exist, but semantic mapping has far more impact on the reading process on creating meaning with print.

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So, the science of reading zealots insists that we not include activities to develop these other ways of recognizing and using information.

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And they are so wretchedly misinformed.

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Focusing only on decoding will result in better scores on decoding tests.

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Yes, science of reading zealots, I'll agree with you there.

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Students will be able to identify a list of nonsense words faster on a Dibbles test, yes,

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and they may even be able to decode a list of CVC words faster. Okay, fine, no argument.

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If you teach something, you get higher measures of that something. But is that something? Anything.

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Meaning, are they better able to create meaning with print? That's what reading is.

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Not sounding out words, but creating meaning.

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Now, Letters is a teacher professional development program based on the concept of orthographic mapping.

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And Education Week, which is a biased sort of thing, this is what they said about it.

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The program is long, intensive, and expensive, can take upward to 160 hours to complete over the course of two years.

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But it's also become one of the most frequently used options for reading professional development, and that is a scary, scary thing.

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What does the website say about letters? It says, and I'm going to break this down, I'm going to use more than sounding out words,

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I'm going to use semantic and syntactic information.

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The website said that letters is a training course developed by Louisa Mott's in Perotolin, both literacy experts and consultants.

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So let's unpack that. Mott's, she may be a consultant, and I'll agree with you there, but it's only because people are silly enough to pay her.

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But a critical read of the research and scholarly work written by the good Dr. Mott provides research based evidence that she is not a literacy expert.

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Based on the research she conducts, the research she cites, and how she interprets and insights that research.

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I don't know which is scary, that she thinks she's appropriately using and interpreting and citing research to make her case,

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or that she knows she's not and she's doing it anyway. Both of these are very scary propositions.

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The next thing on the website says this. The first part of the course explains why learning to read can be difficult and how the reading brain works.

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Well, it can be difficult because people use these bottom-up skills-based reading programs that really are not very effective.

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But this thing, how the reading brain works, that is interesting. Reading brain, reading brain.

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A 2013 analysis of neurocognitive studies by Bishop found that many of these brain imaging studies have serious methodological concerns, many flaws.

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But people tend to give credence to studies and articles that use the word brain, are referred to brain images, or use brain words.

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And people include that to give themselves more credence. And this is a long way of saying that when Dr. Mott talks about the reading brain,

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she doesn't know what in the hell she's talking about. Again, she's using words to try to sound smart, and she's trying to sound smart to sell product.

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And I can guarantee you, a bit of research will show that the good Dr. Mott's is not driving a rusted-out 1996 Chevy Malibu.

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She's making good money. So of course, she's not going to change her view on things.

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The site goes on to say, it, meaning letters, introduces the simple view of reading, a research-tested model that holds that

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skilled reading is a product of two factors, word recognition, decoding the letters on the page, and language comprehension,

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which allows students to make meaning from the words on the page they read.

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Sounds good. Makes sense, doesn't it? But let's do a little unpacking here.

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And again, Dr. Mott, I don't know which is scarier, that you think this makes sense, or that you know that it doesn't,

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and you're using these words anyway. Tell me which one, please.

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But a research-tested model. Okay, very good. It sounds, it makes sense. We want research-tested models.

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But in an academic setting, models are demonstrations of how theories work in reality.

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And theories in an academic setting are based on many research studies, and theories are used to explain research-based facts

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and to understand phenomena. And all theories, by definition, are research-tested.

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And all theoretical models are, by definition, research-tested.

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The question to ask is whether the research-tested model is based on a weak theory or a robust theory.

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And the simple view of reading is based on a simple view of science, which is a weak theory.

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The simple view of reading, this theory states that skilled reading is a product of decoding letters on the page,

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sounding out words, and she incorrectly calls this word recognition, and that's not what it is.

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And listening to the decoding in your head, which she refers to as language comprehension.

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And again, there's some data to support this theory, absolutely, but it leaves far more data unaccounted for.

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A much more robust theory is the interactive theory of reading or the neurocognitive model of reading.

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So, it's fairly clear to see that an approach to reading instruction based on orthographic mapping is really based on ignorance mapping.

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But sadly, this ignorance-based idea has real-life research-based consequences.

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The results of this theory is that schools are being forced to purchase expensive, code-oriented, one-size-fits-all reading programs

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that have no basis and legitimate literacy research.

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And as my dear listeners know, it is incumbent on us to become good, responsible consumers of educational research.

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And in doing so, we must ask for questions when claims are made that research proves something,

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that research proves these expensive, code-oriented, one-size-fits-all reading programs are effective.

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Research proves that, okay? So, these are the four questions we must ask when someone makes that research-based claim.

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One, are the results of these code-oriented reading programs persistent?

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That means, do the effects last after the code-oriented instruction has been discontinued?

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Is it a little short-term blip?

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Two, do the skills learned in these code-oriented reading programs transfer to real life?

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What good is it to learn something in one context, a school context, if that's the only context in which it has any use,

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if it has no use outside that context? In the real world, what good is it?

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We're preparing students not to exist in a school world, but in a real world.

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And three, third question, do these code-oriented programs enhance students' ability to create meaning with print?

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And that's what reading is.

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There's a difference between scores on a Dibble's test and creating meaning with print.

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And fourth, are these expensive, mind-numbing, code-oriented reading programs more effective than balanced literacy instruction?

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Are they more effective than reading and talking about good books and writing and sharing stories and writing and sharing students' authentic writing and stories?

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Are they more effective than falling in love with books and adjoining literacy?

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Those are the questions that must be asked.

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If you're making a comparison between structured literacy, whatever that is, and balanced literacy,

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has there been a legitimate comparative research comparing alike populations with all the variables controlled,

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showing that one has a greater impact on the other in creating meaning with print?

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Just some questions to ask.

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This has been the Reading Instruction Show. I am your host, Dr. Andy Johnson.