This is the reading instruction show.
I'm your host as always, Dr. Andy Johnson.
Today's podcast is related to the first part of a webinar
I'm doing on the science of reading.
This one is about comprehensive reading instruction.
Now, when I mentioned online that I was doing a webinar
related to the science of reading,
one person responded by telling me to make sure
I present both sides,
both sides of the science of reading.
As we will see in future podcasts,
real science doesn't have sides,
just a lot of round corners.
And this isn't Fox News.
Although some science of reading advocates seem
to be making this a political
and an ideological issue for some reason,
usually based on lack of knowledge.
Fair and balanced means providing an accurate representation
of all the research related to a particular question.
Now, another person said, quote,
I hope your session accurately reflects
why advocates continue to push
for comprehensive literacy instruction
that is grounded in science
to do otherwise does not serve children well.
And I thought to myself, oh my goodness,
there's some buzzwords there.
Comprehensive literacy instruction.
Yes, we all believe in this.
And this is what I'll be covering today.
Grounded in science.
Yes, of course.
Serve children well.
Yes, of course.
So let's unpack some of these, shall we?
First, comprehensive literacy instruction.
It sounds so good when it comes out of the mouth.
But what exactly do you mean
by comprehensive literacy instruction?
I'll tell you what the science
of reading Clown Club thinks it to be.
A whole lot of decontextualized skills instruction
at the expense of many other necessary parts
of literacy instruction.
However, when you overemphasize one aspect
of literacy instruction and ignore others,
that is not comprehensive literacy instruction.
And I'll be describing what this is in a minute.
Instead, that's non-comprehensive literacy instruction
or narrow literacy instruction
or incomplete literacy instruction
or incomprehensible literacy instruction.
What the science of reading Clown Club is asking for
is not comprehensive literacy instruction at all.
They're asking for partial literacy instruction.
Now, let me explain.
Comprehension in this sense means total or plead,
comprehensive, comprehensive, not comprehension,
total or complete.
In defining comprehensive reading instruction,
I'm going to rely heavily on data
from the National Reading Panel report.
And I would encourage everybody to read this,
not the executive summary,
not what someone else says about it,
but read the report.
The five big pillars is usually attributed to this report.
And again, I will say upfront,
everyone believes in the explicit teaching of phonics
for emergent and beginning readers.
National Reading Panel recommends this.
I recommend it.
Balanced literacy includes this.
However, phonics instruction,
according both to the National Reading Panel report
in Rankina 2023,
and I'll put this citation in this podcast,
phonics instruction has been shown
to be more effective when embedded
within a comprehensive literacy program.
So let's look at the parts
of a comprehensive literacy program.
It should contain five elements or five pillars.
The National Reading Panel identified five,
they were five short.
It should include 10 pillars, 10 pillars.
The first one is phonemic awareness.
Absolutely.
Phoneme means sound.
Phonemic awareness has to do with the ability
to identify and manipulate sounds within words.
For example, what's the middle sound
you hear in the word dog?
What's the same about bed, pad, mud?
What do you get if you put these sounds together?
Buh, eh, duh.
These are phonemic awareness activities,
manipulating sounds, identifying
and manipulating sounds within words.
At the pre-K level, and maybe early first grade,
teachers should definitely include
developmentally appropriate activities
to develop phonemic awareness.
Definitely.
But not much after first grade.
And here's the thing about scientific reading research.
Research could show something to be effective
for one group at one grade level for a certain purpose,
but this doesn't mean that it applies universally
to all students at all levels.
And this is one mistake the science
of reading clown club makes.
They use a simplistic understanding
of educational research
to make universal claims.
Also, according to the NRP report,
the relationship between phonemic awareness
and later reading achievement is correlational,
not causal.
Correlation means one thing is related,
correlated to another.
Correlation does not infer causation.
Just because the two are related,
we cannot assume that one thing caused the other to occur.
Now, students who have spent hours
with books and conversations and writing
before entering preschool in kindergarten
are going to score higher on scores
of phonemic awareness tests.
And in terms of later reading,
they're going to score higher as well.
But we can't say that phonemic awareness
is linked to higher reading scores.
Phonemic awareness may be the effect of something else,
which in this case is the hours spent with parents
engaging in conversation and authentic literacy experiences.
Phonemic awareness is related to reading achievement.
We cannot say it causes later reading achievement.
This means, of course,
it doesn't mean we shouldn't include it absolutely.
Pre-K kindergarten may be early first, absolutely.
It should be part of a comprehensive literacy program,
part, not whole, but part.
All right, the second element is phonics,
instruction, and word work.
I believe in balanced literacy,
a meaning-based approach.
Everybody believes that phonics instruction
should be included in emergent
and beginning-level reading programs.
Everybody believes in direct and explicit instruction.
Basal reading does this.
A skills-based program does a whole line of work.
Language approach believes in phonics
and balanced literacy does as well.
This idea that we don't teach phonics
promoted by the science of reading clown club is pure clownery.
The National Reading Panel report recommends phonics,
but, and this is why you need to read the report,
not just sound out the words,
the National Reading Panel report also recommends
that phonics not be the exclusive focus
or the central focus of a reading program.
National Reading Panel report states
that the impact of phonics instruction
for struggling readers diminishes after third grade.
That means we have to start doing other thing.
Now, as well, the National Reading Panel
didn't recommend what type of phonics instruction takes place.
There are several different approaches to instruction.
Phonics instruction, it could be synthetic phonics, synthetic.
That's what we normally think of as traditional,
putting letters and sounds together to create words.
That's called synthetic.
Analytic phonics instruction,
analyzing words you see in the text.
What's the middle sound?
What letter did that?
Embedded phonics, that's embedded within books
that students are reading.
Analogic phonics or large unit phonics,
looking at familiar parts or letter patterns,
onset rhymes and phonics through spelling.
The big three are synthetic phonics,
analytic phonics and large unit phonics.
The report does not say that one type
of phonics instruction is better than another.
And of course, I would recommend you use
all three types of instruction.
Now, what's interesting about the National Reading Panel
report and I highly recommend it,
most of the research studies conducted here
were conducted with kindergarten and first grade students.
Most of the studies compared phonics instruction
to no phonics instruction.
And again, we have to understand this.
We all agreed phonics instruction is important.
It's the form that phonics instruction should take.
That's that question here.
It's not the what, it's the how
and the how much of phonics instruction.
And again, since students are not standardized products,
I would recommend that all forms be included,
synthetic, analytic and large unit phonics.
What's also interesting about the report
and why you should read it,
most of the studies compared phonics instruction
to no phonics instruction.
Well, if one group has phonics instruction
and the other does not, which group do you think
is going to score higher
on post-treatment measures of phonics?
Hmm, phonics instruction, no phonics,
post-treatment measures of phonics?
Hmm.
Also, many of the measures that were used
to determine the impact of phonics instruction
were measures that use single words
or single pseudo words presented out of context.
That is not how we encounter words.
We never or hardly ever encounter a single word
out of context.
We always see it in the context of a sentence,
a sign, a label, an experience, very rarely,
not once in my life have I seen a word floating in space
not connected to something.
And the NRP, now I should re-panel report,
they looked at phonics and instruction
and our phonics and comprehension.
And that's a bit misleading here
because as the NRP report said,
the majority of students came from a K one population
where the focus is on individual words.
So comprehension at most would be at the sentence level
but usually it's about words.
So this is not an accurate or valid measure of comprehension
and it's not what comprehension looks like
in the older grades.
Now, I'm not discrediting the national reading panel report
absolutely not,
but hopefully you're seeing that science
and the science of reading is not a settled issue.
Nothing has been proven for all time.
It's not black and white.
That's just the way real science works.
It's continuing to evolve.
Okay, the third element of comprehensive literacy instruction
and some people's heads are gonna blow up here
but just listen to me.
Activities and instructions to develop
all three killing systems used for word recognition.
Listen carefully.
This is where the science of reading clown club
seems to have inadequate or faulty knowledge.
They're against something they really don't know about
or understand.
If you're going to be against something,
at least you should try to understand what that something is.
Otherwise you just look silly.
The killing systems or the three killing systems
is not an approach to teaching.
It is not an approach.
It's not a strategy.
It's an understanding that the brain uses three
interacting and interconnected systems
to recognize words during reading.
Cuing system is not an approach.
It's not a strategy.
It's used to recognize.
Recognizing words is different from identifying words.
You must understand that.
Science of Reading Clown Club.
Recognizing words is when you see a word in print
and you automatically know what it is.
It's in your lexicon or the dictionary in your head.
You encounter it and you say,
ah, I recognize you, you're in search word.
To identify a word different than recognizing,
it's in your lexicon,
but when you see it, you don't know what it is.
You don't recognize it.
So students must then apply some strategy,
consciously apply a strategy.
And we'll address word identification strategies next.
Word identification strategies you consciously apply
to in order to recognize a word.
Back to the three queuing systems.
They work together.
And the queuing systems are the phonetic queuing system,
phonics, the semantic queuing system,
and the syntactic queuing system.
And again, I'm not talking about word identification.
I'm talking about systems working together
to recognize words.
Now let's look at three systems.
Phynex or the Phyna-logical queuing systems.
You recognize a word based on the letters
or letter patterns.
Now this uses the most space in short-term memory
and generally takes more time.
If we had to look at and process every single letter,
this would take an enormous amount of space
in short-term memory.
However, brain imaging research,
along with eye movement research,
shows that we only look at approximately 60%
of the words on the page.
Our brain tricks us into thinking that we see each word.
It's filling in the blanks.
Our brain fills in the blanks.
Of these words, we focus on and look,
we usually only land on the first and middle letters.
And our eye, our foveal, has a very small space
that comes in clearly.
We can only clearly see what the eye lands on.
Ciccades, regressions, fixations,
is where the eyeball actually lands.
The second queuing system is semantics
or the semantic queuing system.
You use the context of what you're reading
to recognize words.
Context is important.
Context is found within the sentence
as well as within the context of the book
or topic you're reading.
For example, the monkey ate a bop.
Most people will know that the word is banana
based on monkeys and eating things in the first letter.
If I were to say to you,
twinkle, twinkle, little,
your brain is filling in the blank, star.
That's just a real rough example of semantics or context,
but we're filling in the blanks.
We're not teaching this alone, but we're developing all three.
And the last one is the syntactic queuing system.
This is using grammar in word order to recognize words.
Now, writing and writing types of activities
where you deal with grammar in word order
is the best way to develop this queuing system.
And this is why writing should be a part of every
comprehensive literacy program.
More on that in a minute,
but these interacting interdependent systems
have been shown to exist.
The evidence is irrefutable.
You can find evidence and research related
to brain imaging, eye movement, miscue analysis
or an interesting new type of research,
eye movement, miscue analysis, all done at the same time.
Cognitive psychology, linguistic, psycholinguistics,
cognitive neuroscience and reading instruction.
These are all fields which have shown
that these three queuing systems exists
and they're used together.
Now, you know, some of you still don't believe me.
You still think I'm trying to trick you.
You still think I'm a bald headed liberal
trying to bring about economic and political chaos?
All well and fair, okay,
but let me give you a little demonstration.
This is a demonstration, not proof, but it demonstrates.
Now, if you could see me now,
you would see a paragraph with 110 words in it.
And if you attend my webinar,
you'll see this actual paragraph.
And I will ask you to read them as quickly as you can
and I would time you.
And the sentence, the paragraph goes like this
and I'll just read the first two sentences.
Billy was traveling from Minnesota to California.
As he was driving through South Dakota,
he stopped at a rest stop to stretch his legs
and buy a can of pop, all right?
That's just the first two sentences.
I'd have you read the whole paragraph.
Then I would tell you, okay,
I'm gonna have you read the same 10 words
and I'm gonna time you, all right?
Have you read the same 10 words?
Except this time, I would put the words in the paragraph
in reverse order, starting with the last.
And you're reading, and I'd ask you to read them
and I'd time you, you're reading
what's out in something like this.
Away drove and car, his in jumped,
could he as fast as ran.
Billy, Billy toward stampede to started,
buffalo's the.
Your time would be slower.
Your reading would be very stilted
without prosody or expression.
In other words, you would sound very much
like a struggling reader.
But the point is this, if reading was just sounding out words,
fluency and rate would not be impacted here.
This isn't proof, rather it's a demonstration
that three interacting systems
are used to cue the brain as to what the word is
to help you recognize it.
It only appears that we're looking at every letter
because our brain is filling in the blanks.
Neuroimaging shows that almost 10 times more information
is flowing from the cortex down
than from the thalamus up during the act of reading.
We're using what's in our head.
Gestalt psychology and cognitive psychology
shows that the brain's natural function
is to recognize patterns based on partial data
to fill in the blanks.
This enabled our survival, our brain to evolve.
We don't need the complete data to recognize the picture.
We're able to process things quickly
and more easily using partial data.
The fourth part of comprehensive literacy instruction
would be the activities and instruction
for word identification strategies.
As mentioned previously, word recognition
is different from word identification
and both of these are different from decoding.
Again, word recognition, you see a word in instant,
know what it is, you recognize it.
Decoding is using letters to identify the word,
to break it down.
Word identification is when you see a word in print,
it's in your lexicon, but you don't recognize it.
You have to consciously employ a strategy
in order to recognize it.
And there are four basic word identification strategies.
The first one is analogy.
This is word families or large unit phonics.
This is using patterns to try to recognize the word.
The second one is morphemic awareness.
This is a form of large unit phonics
based on prefix, suffix, affix, and root.
The third one is using context clues or semantics.
And the fourth one is using phonics
or decoding techniques.
The fourth one is using phonics or decoding the word,
using the code.
All four of these strategies should be included
in a comprehensive literacy curriculum.
All four of these strategies should be taught
using very direct and very explicit instruction.
Now, you could teach just one of these strategies
as the science of reading clown club advocates,
advocates, or you can teach all four.
Also, a skill is something you implement
automatically without thinking.
That's what we think of as a skill in education.
However, we teach the strategy to develop the skill.
A strategy is something you have to consciously apply.
I don't know what you are.
I think I will utilize some strategy to identify you, Mr. Word.
We teach the strategy so that over time,
students implement it without thinking
and it becomes a natural part of their cognitive process.
Now, here's a true story.
I was working with Sally.
She was a third grade girl who was struggling with her reading.
She had been over-faneticized.
She would come to a word she did not recognize and stop.
Then she began the process of sounding out
all the letters in order, front to back.
Then she would put the letters together
and make a guess as to what the word might be
and pause to see if the word made sense in the sentence.
This would take her about 10 seconds.
I taught her another strategy.
I said, say blank and let your eyes bounce on both sides of the words.
Look for clues and move on.
When she did this, she usually would identify the word within two seconds.
10 seconds versus two seconds.
I taught this strategy along with decoding
to enable her to process text information more effectively.
And again, this is one strategy to teach.
The fifth element, daily reading practice.
All students at all levels need to practice reading books
that they have selected.
Like any skill, one needs to practice in order to get better.
Would you expect to learn the piano if you'd ever practice?
Could you learn the piano if you didn't have good music to play?
Could you learn to play the piano if all the music given to you was too hard?
So it is with reading.
And by the way, the National Reading Panel report recommends independent reading
of authentic texts as a way to practice skills learned.
So this isn't just Andy.
Andy using scientific research to support his declarative statements.
Reading widely is one of the best methods to use to enhance students' comprehension.
Word identification and fluency as well as vocabulary and conceptual knowledge.
Both Allenton and Crescent has found that.
Also, reading practice enables students to practice newly learned skills
in authentic reading contexts.
Nancy Atwell recommended that 70 to 80% of reading class be used for reading practice,
self-selected reading.
And 20 to 30% be used for skills work.
And in most classrooms, these percentages are just the opposite.
Students are asked to find a book to read only when they finish their quote work.
Instead, finding a good book to read should be the main work occurring during reading class.
And I posit that we call it reading practice versus reading class.
The sixth element of a comprehensive literacy program is social interaction
and conversation around good books.
Literacy is a social process.
In reading, you're interacting with authors through their words and ideas.
In writing, you're using your words to interact with others.
Social interaction around books and writing enhances high-level thinking,
enhances literacy learning, and enables students to learn content to process things at a deeper level.
And it's fun.
It's motivating to talk with others about books and about their writing.
Social interaction could involve a variety of activities in a comprehensive literacy program.
Book talks, literature circles, book clubs, book evaluations, and critiques.
Top 10 list journal entries and responses, planned discussion.
And these experiences need not be long, but they should be planned and purposeful.
The seventh element in comprehensive literacy instruction is authentic writing experiences.
An authentic writing experience is one in which students are asked to use writing
to describe, express, and share their ideas and experiences.
Now, the reading-writing connection has been firmly established.
And like social interaction, these writing activities do not need to be long.
They can be as short as three to ten minutes.
But writing could also be used as a pre- and post-reading activity
or designed to reinforce target letter patterns.
If you're teaching the short A sound, you might have students write about a time when they were
ma-ad, ma-ad, that reinforces a letter sound or a skill that you're trying to teach.
It's not either or it's all of these.
The eighth element is comprehension instruction.
There are two parts to comprehension instruction.
The first one is related to Scarborough's rope and verbal reasoning.
Here, you're developing the cognitive processes expert readers use to create meaning with texts.
These cognitive processes or operations include things like predicting, inferring, cause-effect, summarizing.
Comprehension instruction also refers to the study skills students use to create meaning with text books or expository text.
We must teach students how to read expository text.
And this is one of the most under-instructed elements in most reading programs.
Direct instruction is needed to teach these skills along with the cognitive operations students use with narrative texts.
The ninth element of comprehensive literacy instruction is our activities to develop word knowledge or vocabulary.
Word knowledge and vocabulary.
Of course, wide reading is the most efficient and effective way to develop students vocabulary as well as immersing them in good conversation where you insert words.
But there are a variety of pedagogical strategies that Canon should be used to add depth and dimension to students' word knowledge.
The last of the 10 essential elements of a comprehensive literacy program is the effective with an A element, affect.
That deals with emotion and motivation.
Motivation, getting students to fall in love with books.
That's a teacher's number one job because after that much of reading instruction takes care of itself.
But what happens?
We seem to pound all the joy of reading out of students by second grade.
Reading volume, the amount has been attributed to gains on word identification, comprehension, fluency and conceptual knowledge.
So we must have good books available to children that they want to read.
And these texts should be available at students' independent level and below.
There's nothing wrong with reading easy books.
We do it all the time.
It's the amount of words that get poured over their head.
And the other effective element is emotion.
Here we realize that we cannot frustrate or humiliate our students.
We stay within the zone of proximal development when introducing new skills.
And we don't use a boring one size fits all curriculum.
Rather, we differentiate to meet the individual needs of students and we expect and encourage students.
We expect them to be at different levels.
That's called being a human being.
And we establish different goals for each student.
So the National Reading Panel identified five pillars.
Phonemic awareness, phonics, comprehension and vocabulary.
They were five pillars short.
The ten pillars should be phonemic awareness, phonics instruction and word work,
activities to develop all three queuing systems for word recognition,
four activities and instruction for word identification strategies,
five daily reading practice, six social interaction and conversation around good books,
seven authentic writing experiences, eight comprehension instruction for study skill strategies and cognitive processes,
nine activities to develop word knowledge or vocabulary,
and ten the effective element.
That, my friends, is a comprehensive literacy program.
This has been the Reading Instruction Show.
I'm your host, as always, Dr. Andy Johnson.