Remediation of Reading Problems for "the Whole Child"
Molly Woodworth was a child who seemed to do well at everything: practiced grades, in the gifted and talented program. Merely she couldn't read very well.
"In that location was no rhyme or reason to reading for me," she said. "When a teacher would dictate a discussion and say, 'Tell me how you think you lot can spell information technology,' I sat there with my oral cavity open while other kids gave spellings, and I thought, 'How do they even know where to brainstorm?' I was totally lost."
Woodworth went to public school in Owosso, Michigan, in the 1990s. She says sounds and messages just didn't make sense to her, and she doesn't remember anyone teaching her how to read. So she came up with her own strategies to get through text.
Strategy i: Memorize as many words as possible. "Words were like pictures to me," she said. "I had a actually good retentivity."
Strategy 2: Guess the words based on context. If she came beyond a word she didn't have in her visual retentivity bank, she'd look at the start letter of the alphabet and come up with a word that seemed to make sense. Reading was kind of similar a game of 20 Questions: What discussion could this exist?
Strategy 3: If all else failed, she'd skip the words she didn't know.
Most of the time, she could get the gist of what she was reading. Simply getting through text took forever. "I hated reading because it was taxing," she said. "I'd go through a chapter and my encephalon injure by the end of it. I wasn't excited to learn."
No one knew how much she struggled, not even her parents. Her reading strategies were her "dirty little secrets."
Woodworth, who now works in accounting,1 says she'southward even so not a very good reader and tears upward when she talks about it. Reading "influences every aspect of your life," she said. She's adamant to make sure her own kids get off to a better start than she did.
That'south why she was so alarmed to see how her oldest kid, Claire, was being taught to read in schoolhouse.
A couple of years ago, Woodworth was volunteering in Claire's kindergarten classroom. The class was reading a book together and the instructor was telling the children to practice the strategies that skilful readers use.
The teacher said, "If you don't know the discussion, simply look at this motion-picture show upwardly here," Woodworth recalled. "In that location was a flim-flam and a carry in the picture show. And the discussion was bear, and she said, 'Wait at the showtime letter. It's a "b." Is it flim-flam or bear?'"
Woodworth was stunned. "I thought, 'Oh my God, those are my strategies.' Those are the things I taught myself to look like a good reader, not the things that good readers do," she said. "These kids were being taught my dirty fiddling secrets."
She went to the teacher and expressed her concerns. The teacher told her she was education reading the fashion the curriculum told her to.
Woodworth had stumbled on to American education'due south own little secret well-nigh reading: Elementary schools across the country are pedagogy children to be poor readers — and educators may not even know it.
For decades, reading instruction in American schools has been rooted in a flawed theory about how reading works, a theory that was debunked decades ago by cognitive scientists, nevertheless remains securely embedded in teaching practices and curriculum materials. As a upshot, the strategies that struggling readers use to get past — memorizing words, using context to guess words, skipping words they don't know — are the strategies that many kickoff readers are taught in school. This makes it harder for many kids to learn how to read, and children who don't go off to a good outset in reading find it hard to ever primary the procedure.two
A shocking number of kids in the United States can't read very well. A third of all fourth-graders can't read at a basic level, and most students are still not proficient readers by the time they finish high school.
Percent of U.South. 4th-graders below bones level in reading
When kids struggle to learn how to read, it tin lead to a downward spiral in which beliefs, vocabulary, knowledge and other cognitive skills are eventually affected past slow reading development.three A disproportionate number of poor readers get high school dropouts and end up in the criminal justice system.iv
The fact that a disproven theory about how reading works is still driving the way many children are taught to read is function of the problem. School districts spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on curriculum materials that include this theory. Teachers are taught the theory in their teacher preparation programs and on the job. As long as this disproven theory remains role of American education, many kids will likely struggle to learn how to read.
Percentage of U.S. 12th-graders skillful in reading
The origins
The theory is known as "three cueing." The name comes from the notion that readers use three different kinds of information — or "cues" — to identify words every bit they are reading.
The theory was first proposed in 1967, when an education professor named Ken Goodman presented a newspaper at the annual meeting of the American Educational Inquiry Clan in New York Urban center.
In the paper,5 Goodman rejected the idea that reading is a precise procedure that involves exact or detailed perception of letters or words. Instead, he argued that as people read, they make predictions about the words on the page using these three cues:
-
graphic cues (what practice the letters tell yous about what the word might be?)
-
syntactic cues (what kind of word could it exist, for instance, a substantive or a verb?)
-
semantic cues (what word would brand sense hither, based on the context?)
Goodman concluded that:
Skill in reading involves non greater precision, but more authentic get-go guesses based on ameliorate sampling techniques, greater command over linguistic communication construction, broadened experiences and increased conceptual evolution. As the child develops reading skill and speed, he uses increasingly fewer graphic cues.
Goodman'due south proposal became the theoretical basis for a new approach to teaching reading that would soon accept hold in American schools.
Previously, the question of how to teach reading had focused on one of 2 bones ideas.
1 idea is that reading is a visual memory process. The education method associated with this idea is known as "whole word." The whole give-and-take arroyo was perhaps all-time embodied in the "Dick and Jane" books that first appeared in the 1930s. The books rely on word repetition, and pictures to support the pregnant of the text. The idea is that if you come across words plenty, you eventually store them in your retention as visual images.
The other idea is that reading requires knowledge of the relationships between sounds and letters. Children larn to read past sounding out words. This approach is known equally phonics. It goes way back, popularized in the 1800s with the McGuffey readers.
These 2 ideas — whole give-and-take and phonics — had been taking turns as the favored way to teach reading until Goodman came along with what came to exist known amongst educators every bit the "three-cueing system."
In the cueing theory of how reading works, when a child comes to a give-and-take she doesn't know, the teacher encourages her to think of a word that makes sense and asks: Does it wait right? Does it sound correct? If a word checks out on the basis of those questions, the child is getting it. She's on the path to skilled reading.
Teachers may not know the term "three cueing," but they're probably familiar with "MSV." M stands for using meaning to effigy out what a word is, S for using sentence structure and V for using visual information (i.due east., the messages in the words). MSV is a cueing idea that tin be traced back to the late Marie Dirt, a developmental psychologist from New Zealand who first laid out her theories almost reading in a dissertation in the 1960s.vi
Dirt developed her cueing theory independently of Goodman, but they met several times and had similar ideas virtually the reading process. Their theories were based on observational inquiry. They would mind to children read, note the kinds of errors they made, and employ that data to identify a kid's reading difficulties. For example, a child who says "horse" when the give-and-take was "house" is probably relying too much on visual, or graphic, cues. A teacher in this case would encourage the child to pay more attending to what word would make sense in the sentence.
Goodman and Clay believed that messages were the least reliable of the three cues, and that every bit people became better readers, they no longer needed to pay attention to all the letters in words. "In efficient word perception the reader relies mostly on the judgement and its meaning and some selected features of the forms of words," Dirt wrote.7 For Goodman, accurate word recognition was not necessarily the goal of reading. The goal was to comprehend text.8 If the sentences were making sense, the reader must be getting the words right, or correct enough.
These ideas soon became the foundation for how reading was taught in many schools. Goodman's three-cueing thought formed the theoretical basis of an approach known every bit "whole language" that by the late 1980s had taken concord throughout America.9 Dirt built her cueing ideas into a reading intervention program for struggling commencement-graders chosen Reading Recovery. It was implemented across New Zealand in the 1980s and went on to become one of the world's near widely used reading intervention programs.ten
But while cueing was taking agree in schools, scientists were busy studying the cognitive processes involved in reading words. And they came to different conclusions about how people read.11
Scientists have on three cueing
It was the early 1970s, and Keith Stanovich was working on his doctorate in psychology at the Academy of Michigan. He idea the reading field was ready for an infusion of knowledge from the "cognitive revolution" that was underway in psychology. Stanovich had a background in experimental science and an involvement in learning and noesis due in role to the influence of his wife, Paula, who was a special education teacher.
Stanovich wanted to sympathise how people read words.12 He knew near Goodman'southward work and thought he was probably right that every bit people get amend readers, they relied more on their cognition of vocabulary and linguistic communication structure to read words and didn't demand to pay as much attending to the letters.
So, in 1975, Stanovich and a beau graduate student set out to examination the idea in their lab. They recruited readers of various ages and abilities and gave them a series of discussion-reading tasks. Their hypothesis was that skilled readers rely more than on contextual cues to recognize words than poor readers, who probably weren't every bit skillful at using context.
They couldn't have been more wrong.
"To our surprise, all of our research results pointed in the opposite management," Stanovich wrote. "It was the poorer readers, not the more skilled readers, who were more than reliant on context to facilitate word recognition."13
The skilled readers could instantly recognize words without relying on context. Other researchers accept confirmed these findings with similar experiments. It turns out that the ability to read words in isolation quickly and accurately is the authentication of being a skilled reader. This is now one of the virtually consistent and well-replicated findings in all of reading research.14
Other studies revealed further issues with the cueing theory:15
-
Skilled readers don't browse words and sample from the graphic cues in an incidental way; instead, they very quickly recognize a give-and-take as a sequence of letters. That'south how proficient readers instantly know the difference between "house" and "horse," for case.
-
Experiments that strength people to utilise context to predict words prove that even skilled readers tin correctly guess merely a fraction of the words; this is one reason people who rely on context to place words are poor readers.
-
Weak give-and-take recognition skills are the most mutual and debilitating source of reading problems.16
The results of these studies are non controversial or contested among scientists who study reading. The findings have been incorporated into every major scientific model of how reading works.
Only cueing is nevertheless alive and well in schools.
Picture Power!
It's not difficult to find examples of the cueing arrangement. A quick search on Google, Pinterest or Teachers Pay Teachers turns up enough of lesson plans, instruction guides and classroom posters. One popular poster has cute cartoon characters to remind children they have lots of strategies to utilize when they're stuck on a word, including looking at the picture (Hawkeye Eye), getting their lips set up to endeavour the outset sound (Lips the Fish), or merely skipping the word altogether (Skippy Frog).
In that location are videos online where yous can see cueing in action. In one video posted on The Education Channel,17 a kindergarten teacher in Oakland, California, instructs her students to use "flick power" to identify the words on the folio. The goal of the lesson, co-ordinate to the instructor, is for the students to "use the moving-picture show and a kickoff audio to decide an unknown word in their book."
The class reads a book together called "In the Garden." On each page, there's a picture of something you might find in a garden. It's what's known every bit a predictable volume; the sentences are all the same except for the concluding word.
The children have been taught to memorize the words "look," "at," and "the." The challenge is getting the last word in the sentence. The lesson plan tells the teacher to cover upwardly the word with a mucilaginous note.
In the video, the wiggly kindergarteners sitting cantankerous-legged on the floor come to a folio with a picture of a butterfly. The teacher tells the kids that she's guessing the give-and-take is going to be butterfly. She uncovers the word to check on the accuracy of her approximate.
"Look at that," she tells the children, pointing to the kickoff letter of the discussion. "It starts with the /b/ /b/ /b/." The course reads the sentence together equally the teacher points to the words. "Expect at the butterfly!" they yell out excitedly.
This lesson comes from "Units of Written report for Teaching Reading," more normally known as "reader's workshop."18 According to the lesson programme, this lesson teaches children to "know and apply grade-level phonics and discussion analysis skills in decoding words."19
Just the children were not taught to decode words in this lesson. They were taught to gauge words using pictures and patterns — hallmarks of the three-cueing organization.
The author of Units of Study for Teaching Reading, Lucy Calkins, often refers to cueing in her published work.xx She uses the term MSV — the pregnant, structure and visual idea that originally came from Clay in New Zealand.
Then there is Fountas and Pinnell Literacy, started by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, teachers who learned the MSV concept from Dirt in the 1980s.21
Fountas and Pinnell have written several books about instruction reading, including a best-seller about a widely used instructional approach called "Guided Reading." They besides created a reading cess arrangement that uses what are chosen "leveled books."22 Children start with predictable books similar "In the Garden" and motility up levels as they're able to "read" the words. But many of the words in those books — butterfly, caterpillar — are words that beginning readers oasis't been taught to decode all the same. One purpose of the books is to teach children that when they get to a word they don't know, they can use context to effigy information technology out.
When put into practice in the classroom, these approaches can cause problems for children when they are learning to read.
'That is not reading'
Margaret Goldberg, a instructor and literacy coach in the Oakland Unified School District, remembers a moment when she realized what a problem the three-cueing approach was. She was with a first-grader named Rodney when he came to a page with a picture of a daughter licking an ice cream cone and a dog licking a bone.
The text said: "My little domestic dog likes to eat with me."
Only Rodney said: "My dog likes to lick his bone."
Rodney breezed correct through it, unaware that he hadn't read the sentence on the page.
Goldberg realized lots of her students couldn't really read the words in their books; instead, they were memorizing sentence patterns and using the pictures to judge. One little boy exclaimed, "I tin read this volume with my eyes shut!"
"Oh no," Goldberg thought. "That is not reading."
Goldberg had been hired past the Oakland schools in 2015 to help struggling readers by instruction a Fountas and Pinnell plan chosen "Leveled Literacy Intervention" that uses leveled books and the cueing approach.23
Around the same time, Goldberg was trained in a programme that uses a dissimilar strategy for instruction children how to read words. The programme is called "Systematic Instruction in Phonological Sensation, Phonics, and Sight Words," or SIPPS.24 It'south a phonics programme that teaches children how to sound out words and uses what are known as "decodable books." Nigh words in the books have spelling patterns that kids have been taught in their phonics lessons.
Goldberg decided to teach some of her students using the phonics program and some of her students using three cueing. And she began to notice differences between the two groups of kids. "Not just in their abilities to read," she said, "only in the way they approached their reading."
Goldberg and a colleague recorded start-graders talking about what makes them expert readers.
One video shows Mia, on the left, who was in the phonics program. Mia says she's a good reader because she looks at the words and sounds them out. JaBrea, on the right, was taught the cueing system. JaBrea says: "I expect at the pictures and I read it."
Courtesy of Margaret Goldberg, Oakland Unified School District
Information technology was articulate to Goldberg afterward just a few months of teaching both approaches that the students learning phonics were doing better. "One of the things that I still struggle with is a lot of guilt," she said.
She thinks the students who learned three cueing were actually harmed by the arroyo. "I did lasting impairment to these kids. Information technology was so hard to ever get them to stop looking at a picture show to gauge what a word would be. Information technology was and so hard to always get them to dull downwards and sound a word out considering they had had this experience of knowing that y'all predict what you read earlier yous read information technology."
Goldberg soon discovered the decades of scientific show against cueing.25 She was shocked. She had never come beyond whatsoever of this science in her teacher preparation or on the job.
And she started to wonder why not.
Balanced Literacy
People take been arguing for centuries about how children should be taught to read. The fight has mostly focused on whether to teach phonics.
The whole language movement of the late 20th century was perhaps the zenith of the anti-phonics argument.26 Phonics instruction was seen as tedious, time-consuming and ultimately unnecessary. Why? Because — co-ordinate to the three-cueing theory — readers can use other, more reliable cues to effigy out what the words say.27
Marilyn Adams came across this conventionalities in the early 1990s. She'south a cognitive and developmental psychologist who had just written a book summarizing the enquiry on how children learn to read.28 One big takeaway from the book is that becoming a skilled reader of English requires cognition of sound-spelling correspondences.29 Another big takeaway is that many kids were not being taught this in schoolhouse.
Soon subsequently the book was published, Adams was describing her findings to a group of teachers and state didactics officials in Sacramento, California. She was sensing discomfort and confusion in the room. "And I just stopped and said, 'What is information technology that I'one thousand missing?'" she recalled. "'What is it that we need to talk about? Help me.'"
A adult female raised her hand and asked: "What does this have to do with the three-cueing system?" Marilyn didn't know what the three-cueing organization was. "I think I blew all of their fuses that I did non [know what information technology was] since this was so key to being an elementary reading teacher," she said. "How could I present myself to them as an proficient on reading and not know almost this?"
The teachers drew her a Venn diagram of the three-cueing system. It looked something like this:
Adams idea this diagram fabricated perfect sense. The inquiry conspicuously shows that readers utilize all of these cues to understand what they're reading.
But Adams shortly figured out the disconnect. Teachers understood these cues not just as the mode readers construct significant from text, but as the way readers actually identify the words on the page. And they thought that teaching kids to decode or audio out words was not necessary.
"The most important thing was for the children to understand and enjoy the text," Adams said. "And from that understanding and joy of reading, the words on the page would just pop out at them."
She would explain to teachers at every opportunity that explicitly educational activity children about the relationships between sounds and letters is essential to ensure all kids go off to a proficient offset in reading. But she got tons of pushback from teachers. "They didn't want to teach phonics!" she recalled in frustration.
In 1998, Adams wrote a book chapter about how the three-cueing system conflicts with what researchers have figured out nigh reading. She hoped it would assist put three cueing to balance.30
Past this fourth dimension, the scientific inquiry on reading was gaining traction. In 2000, a national panel convened by Congress to review the show on how to teach reading came out with a report.31 It identified several essential components of reading instruction, including vocabulary, comprehension and phonics. The evidence that phonics education enhances children's success in learning how to read was clear and compelling. National reports on reading a few years subsequently in the United Kingdom and Australia came to the same conclusion.32
Eventually, many whole linguistic communication supporters accustomed the weight of the scientific evidence most the importance of phonics instruction. They started adding phonics to their books and materials and renamed their approach "balanced literacy."
But they didn't go rid of the 3-cueing arrangement.
Balanced literacy proponents volition tell you their approach is a mix of phonics teaching with plenty of time for kids to read and savor books. But wait carefully at the materials and you'll see that's not actually what balanced literacy is mixing. Instead, information technology'due south mixing a bunch of different ideas well-nigh how kids acquire to read. It's a little bit of whole word instruction with long lists of words for kids to memorize. Information technology's a little bit of phonics. And fundamentally, information technology's the idea that children should exist taught to read using the three-cueing organization.
And it turns out cueing may really prevent kids from focusing on words in the way they need to become skilled readers.
Mapping the words
To understand why cueing tin go far the style of children's reading evolution, it'southward essential to understand how our brains procedure the words we encounter.
Reading scientists accept known for decades that the hallmark of beingness a skilled reader is the power to instantly and accurately recognize words.33 If y'all're a skilled reader, your brain has gotten and so good at reading words that y'all procedure the discussion "chair" faster than you lot process a picture of a chair.34 You lot know tens of thousands of words instantly, on sight. How did yous learn to exercise that?
It happens through a process called "orthographic mapping."35 This occurs when y'all pay attention to the details of a written word and link the give-and-take's pronunciation and meaning with its sequence of letters.36 A child knows the meaning and pronunciation of "pony." The give-and-take gets mapped to his memory when he links the sounds /p/ /o/ /n/ /y/ to the written word "pony."
That requires an awareness of the speech communication sounds in words and an agreement of how those sounds are represented by messages.37 In other words, y'all need phonics skills.
Here'southward what happens when a reader who has good phonics skills comes to a word she doesn't recognize in impress. She stops at the give-and-take and sounds information technology out. If it's a discussion she knows the meaning of, she has now linked the spelling of the give-and-take with its pronunciation. If she doesn't know the significant of the word, she can utilize context to try to figure it out.
Past virtually second grade, a typically developing reader needs only a few exposures to a give-and-take through understanding both the pronunciation and the spelling for that word to be stored in her memory.38 She doesn't know that word because she memorized information technology as a visual image. She knows that give-and-take because at some bespeak she successfully sounded information technology out.
The more words she stores in her memory this mode, the more she tin can focus on the pregnant of what she's reading; she'll eventually exist using less brain ability to place words and will be able to devote more brain ability to comprehending what she's reading.39
But when children don't have expert phonics skills, the process is different.
"They sample from the letters because they're not good at sounding them out," said David Kilpatrick, a psychology professor at SUNY Cortland and the author of a book about preventing reading difficulties.forty "And they use context."
In other words, when people don't have proficient phonics skills, they utilize the cueing system.
"The iii-cueing organisation is the way poor readers read," said Kilpatrick.
And if teachers use the cueing system to teach reading, Kilpatrick says they're not simply didactics children the habits of poor readers, they are actually impeding the orthographic mapping process.41
"The minute you ask them just to pay attending to the commencement alphabetic character or look at the picture, look at the context, you lot're drawing their attention abroad from the very matter that they need to interact with in order for them to read the discussion [and] remember the give-and-take," Kilpatrick said. In this style, 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 give-and-take is the almost efficient and reliable way to know what it is. Those kids tend to have an easier time agreement the ways that sounds and messages relate. They'll drop the cueing strategies and begin edifice that big banking concern of instantly known words that is so necessary for skilled reading.
But some children will skip the sounding out if they're taught they take other options. Phonics is challenging for many kids. The cueing strategies seem quicker and easier at first. And by using context and memorizing a agglomeration of words, many children tin can look like adept readers — until they become to about 3rd grade, when their books begin to have more words, longer words, and fewer pictures. And so they're stuck. They oasis'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 exercise it if they don't accept to. While their peers who mastered decoding early on are reading and pedagogy themselves new words every day, the kids who clung to the cueing approach are falling further and farther behind.42
These poor reading habits, once ingrained at a young age, tin follow kids into high school. Some kids who were taught the cueing approach never become good readers. Non considering they're incapable of learning to read well but because they were taught the strategies of struggling readers.
'Then what if they employ the film?'
Once Margaret Goldberg discovered the cerebral science evidence confronting cueing, she wanted her colleagues in the Oakland schoolhouse district to know nearly it too.
Over the past two years, Goldberg and a fellow literacy coach named Lani Mednick take been leading a grant-funded pilot project to ameliorate reading achievement in the Oakland schools.43
They have their work cut out for them. Almost half the district's third-graders are beneath course level in reading. Goldberg and Mednick want to raise questions near 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 near the scientific research on reading. At a meeting in March, the coaches watched the video of the "picture power" lesson.
"This teacher meant well," Mednick said to the coaches later on they watched the lesson. "It seemed like she believed this lesson would ensure her students would exist on the road toward reading."
Mednick wanted the coaches to consider the beliefs nigh reading that would pb to the cosmos of a lesson like "moving-picture show power." The Oakland schools purchased the Units of Written report for Teaching Reading serial, which includes the "flick power" lesson, as part of a balanced literacy initiative the district began nigh 10 years ago. The district besides bought the Fountas and Pinnell assessment arrangement.
The coaches saw right abroad that "picture show ability" was designed to teach kids the cueing system. But they said many teachers don't see whatever problem with cueing. After all, one of the cues is to look at the letters in the word. What'south wrong with pedagogy kids lots of dissimilar strategies to effigy out unknown words?44
"I think before we started looking at the science and everything, I thought to myself, 'Reading is so hard for kids, so what if they use the picture?'" said Soraya Sajous-Brooks, the early literacy coach at Prescott Elementary School in West Oakland. "Like, use everything y'all've got."
But she's come up to understand that cueing sends the message to kids that they don't need to audio out words. Her students would become phonics education in one part of the day. So they'd go reader's workshop and exist taught that when they come to a word they don't know, they have lots of strategies. They can audio information technology out. They can also cheque the first alphabetic character, look at the motion picture, think of a word that makes sense.
Didactics cueing and phonics doesn't work, Sajous-Brooks said. "One negates the other."
Goldberg and Mednick want to bear witness the district there'southward a better way to teach reading. Schools in the pilot project used grant coin to buy new materials that steer articulate of the iii-cueing idea. Two charter school networks in Oakland are working on similar projects to motion their schools away from cueing.
To see what information technology looks like, I visited a offset-grade classroom at a charter school in Oakland called Attain Academy.45
Ane role of the day was explicit phonics pedagogy.46 The students were divided into small groups based on their skill level. They met with their teacher, Andrea Ruiz, at a kidney-shaped tabular array in a corner of the classroom. The lowest-level group worked on identifying the speech communication sounds in words similar "skin" and "skip." The highest-level grouping learned how verbs similar "spy" and "cry" are spelled equally "spied' and 'cried" in the past tense.
There were also vocabulary lessons.47 The entire form gathered on a carpet at the front of the classroom to talk about a book Ms. Ruiz read out loud to them. One of the words in the book was "prey."
"What animals are a chameleon's prey?" Ms. Ruiz asked the children. "Or we can too ask, what animals do chameleons chase for food?"
The kids turned and talked to each other. "A chameleon's casualty are bugs and insects and other chameleons and mice and birds," a piffling boy explained to his classmate. "That's it."
Other vocabulary words these start-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 then 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 production of two things.48 Start, a child needs to be able to audio out a discussion. Second, the child needs to know the pregnant of the give-and-take she but sounded out. So, in a get-go-course 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 encounter kids practicing what they've been taught.
After their vocabulary lesson, the kids did "buddy reading." They retreated to various spots effectually the classroom to read books to each other. I establish Belinda sitting on an adult chair at the back of the classroom, her little legs swinging. Beyond from her was her buddy Steven, decked out in a xanthous and blue plaid shirt tucked neatly into his jeans. He held the book and pointed to the words while Belinda read.
"Ellen /thou/," Belinda paused, sounding out the discussion "meets." She was reading a decodable book about some kids who visit a farm. Almost all of the words in the book contain spelling patterns she'd been taught in her phonics lessons.
"I am a farm here," Belinda read.
Steven did a double-take. "A farmer here," he said gently. Steven's task as Belinda's reading buddy was to assist her if she missed a give-and-take or got stuck. Merely that didn't happen much because Belinda had been taught how to read the words. She didn't demand any help from the pictures, either. She barely glanced at them as she read.
To be clear, in that location's nada incorrect with pictures. They're great to look at and talk about, and they can help a child encompass the significant of a story. Context — including a picture if there is one — helps united states of america sympathise what we're reading all the time. But if a child is being taught to apply 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 fabricated its mode into many schools and schools of education.49
Ruiz didn't know well-nigh this research until the Oakland airplane pilot project. "I didn't actually know annihilation about how kids acquire to read when I started didactics," she said. It was a relief when she came to Oakland and the curriculum spelled out that kids utilise significant, structure and visual cues to figure out words. "Because I came from not having anything, I was like, 'Oh, there's a way we should teach this,'" she said.
I heard this from other educators. Cueing was appealing because they didn't know what else to practice.
"When I got into the classroom and someone told me to apply this do, I didn't question it," said Stacey Cherny, a former instructor who's now principal of an elementary school in Pennsylvania. She says many teachers aren't taught what they need to know about the structure of the English language to exist able to teach phonics well. She says phonics can exist intimidating; 3 cueing isn't.
Another reason cueing holds on is that it seems to work for some children. But researchers estimate at that place's a percentage of kids — perhaps well-nigh 40 percent — who volition learn to read no matter how they're taught.50 Co-ordinate to Kilpatrick, children who acquire to read with cueing are succeeding in spite of the instruction, not because of information technology.
Goldberg hopes the pilot project in Oakland volition convince the district to drop all instructional materials that include cueing.
When asked virtually this, the Oakland superintendent's office responded with a written statement that there isn't enough show from the pilot project to make curriculum changes for the unabridged 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.
"Information technology feels similar everyone's trusting somebody else to have done their due diligence," Goldberg said. "Classroom teachers are trusting that the materials they're being handed will piece of work. The people who buy 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."
'My science is different'
If cueing was debunked decades ago past cognitive scientists, why is the thought nevertheless in materials that are beingness sold to schools?
One respond to that question is that school districts still purchase the materials. Heinemann, the visitor that publishes the Fountas and Pinnell and Lucy Calkins' products that the Oakland schools use, earned somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 million in 2018, according to earnings reports.51
I wanted to know what the authors of those materials make of the cognitive science research. And I wanted to give them a take chances 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 all-encompassing research.
I also asked Ken Goodman for an interview. It's been more than 50 years since he offset laid out the three-cueing theory in that 1967 paper. I wanted to know what he thinks of the cognitive science research. Of the major proponents of iii cueing I reached out to, he was the but one who agreed to an interview.
I visited Goodman at his home in Tucson, Arizona. He's 91. He uses a scooter to get around, but he'due south withal working. He just finished a new edition of 1 of his books.
When I asked him what he makes of the cognitive science enquiry, he told me he thinks scientists focus as well much on give-and-take recognition. He still doesn't believe accurate discussion recognition is necessary for reading comprehension.
"Word recognition is a preoccupation," he said. "I don't teach word recognition. I teach people to make sense of linguistic communication. And learning the words is incidental to that."
He brought upwardly the case of a kid who comes to the word "equus caballus" and says "pony" instead. His argument is that a child will still understand the meaning of the story because horse and pony are the aforementioned concept.
I pressed him on this. First of all, a pony isn't the aforementioned thing as a horse. Second, don't you desire to brand sure that when a child is learning to read, he understands that /p/ /o/ /north/ /y/ says "pony"? And different letters say "horse"?
He dismissed my question.
"The purpose is non to learn words," he said. "The purpose is to make sense."
Cognitive scientists don't dispute that the purpose of reading is to make sense of the text. Merely the question is: How can you understand what yous are reading if you can't accurately read the words? And if quick and accurate word recognition is the hallmark of beingness a skilled reader, how does a piddling kid go at that place?
Goodman rejected the idea that you tin make a stardom between skilled readers and unskilled readers; he doesn't like the value judgment that implies. He said dyslexia does not be — despite lots of evidence that it does.52 And he said the three-cueing theory is based on years of observational research. In his view, three cueing is perfectly valid, drawn from a different kind of testify than what scientists collect in their labs.
"My scientific discipline is unlike," Goodman said.
This idea that there are different kinds of evidence that pb to different conclusions about how reading works is one reason people continue to disagree most how children should be taught to read. It's of import for educators to understand that three cueing is based on theory and observational enquiry and that at that place'southward decades of scientific bear witness from labs all over the world that converges on a very unlike idea well-nigh skilled reading.
The cerebral science does not provide all the answers about how to teach children to read, but on the question of how skilled readers read words, scientists take amassed a huge body of prove.
Goldberg thinks information technology'southward time for educators across the state to take a close look at all the materials they use to teach reading.
"We should await through the materials and search for testify of cueing," she said. "And if it's at that place, don't impact it. Don't let it get near our kids, don't let it get near our classrooms, our teachers."
At a Loss for Words is one of iii audio documentaries this season from the Educate podcast — stories nigh education, opportunity, and how people larn.
Share and discuss on Facebook
EXECUTIVE EDITOR
Stephen Smith
EDITOR
Catherine Winter
Associate PRODUCER
Alex Baumhardt
PRODUCTION HELP
John Hernandez
Spider web EDITORS
Andy Kruse
Dave Mann
Audio MIX
Craig Thorson
Chris Julin
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Chris Worthington
Project COORDINATOR
Shelly Langford
THEME MUSIC
Gary Meister
FACT CHECKER
Betsy Towner Levine
COPY EDITOR
Sherri Hildebrandt
SPECIAL THANKS
Sasha Aslanian
Heena Srivastava
Support for this program comes from the Spencer Foundation and Lumina Foundation.
Feedback
We're interested in hearing what bear upon APM Reports programs have on yous. Has i of our documentaries or podcasts inverse how you remember well-nigh an issue? Has it led you to do something, like start a conversation or try to do something new in your community? Share your impact story.
Resources
- Printable version of this story
- Full documentary transcript
Sign up for electronic mail notifications
Enter your address below and we'll let you know when we publish new stories.
kennedybobjection.blogspot.com
Source: https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading
0 Response to "Remediation of Reading Problems for "the Whole Child""
Post a Comment