Teaching Reading is Rocket Science - Early Literacy Instruction

“Phonics is critical. However, there is so much to literacy: reading cultural-affirming literature, building vocabulary, developing comprehension skills, writing, spelling, practicing phonological awareness, and more. Material in other content areas also enhances literacy, exposing students to a variety of types of text and growing their background knowledge. “

The following video summarized the reading crisis in the US. This is the complete recording of the Jan. 11, 2022 webinar presented by the League of Women Voters of Winnetka-Northfield-Kenilworth of Illinois. Panelists included Superintendent Kaine Osburn of Avoca District 37, Jessica Handy, Policy Director of Stand for Children, and Kristin Paxton, CALT and founder of Dyslexia Buddy Network.

A few important points:

• Read-aloud stories, phonics curriculumm and vocabulary development align with evidence-based reading instruction.

• Levelled reading have repeated text with a few words that change, which children guess by looking at the picture. Using decodable books instead gives children practice in the specific phonics skills they have learned.

• 95% of children can learn to read if evidence-based methods are used. source: National Institutes of Health

• 84% of English words have predictable spelling patterns. If the structure of English is taught, then reading proficiency increases. Structured Literacy is important.

2020, Louisa C. Moat Published the article “Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science, 2020”

Louisa C. Moats, Ed.D., has been a teacher, psychologist, researcher, graduate school faculty member, and author of many influential scientific journal articles, books, and policy papers on the topics of reading, spelling, language, and teacher preparation. Dr. Moats spent 15 years in private practice as a licensed psychologist in Vermont, specializing in evaluation and consultation with individuals of all ages and walks of life who experienced reading, writing, and language difficulties. She has also served as a site director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development’s Early Interventions Project and research advisor and consultant with Sopris Learning. Dr. Moats is most well known for her research and writing about the need for improvements in teacher education. Her more recent publications have focused on helping teachers understand the language basis for reading and writing. They include LETRS Professional Development (Voyager Sopris), LANGUAGE! Live blended literacy intervention (Voyager Sopris), and Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers (Brookes Publishing).

From the article on American Federation of Teachers:

“What drives the mind of the reader is neither self-evident nor easy to grasp. Consequently, many years of interdisciplinary scientific inquiry have been necessary to expose the mechanisms of reading acquisition. On the surface, reading appears to be a visually based learning activity, when in fact it is primarily a language-based learning activity. Proficient reading requires unconscious and rapid association of spoken language with written alphabetic symbols.

For adults who are skilled readers and who learned to read long ago, relying on introspection, intuition, or logic to understand how reading is taking place can be misleading. Reading requires sufficient visual acuity to see the print, but the act of translating alphabetic symbols into meaning is only incidentally visual. Rather, the recognition of printed words depends first on awareness of the speech sounds (phonemes) that the alphabetic symbols represent and then on the brain’s ability to map sounds to letters and letter combinations (graphemes). As reading develops, the mapping of speech to print includes recognition of letter sequences, including syllable patterns and meaningful units (morphemes). The reading brain gradually builds neural networks that facilitate rapid processing of symbol-sound and sound-symbol connections. Once these networks for mapping speech to print are developed, the brain can recognize and store images of new printed words with little conscious effort.”

You can find the complete article here released by AFT: https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/moats.pdf