Young children listen to the teacher as she read a book aloud.  Photo credit: Yan Krukov

Staffroom podcast episode 105: Setting Up a Culture of Reading

Last week, I listened to the latest Staffroom Podcast episode with Chey Cheyney and Pav Wander. Their posts on Twitter about the episode immediately caught my attention because of my experience in Kuwait teaching English language learners. I have strong opinions about how children learn how to read based on my teaching experience with third-grade English learners. When I began teaching, I needed to know more about teaching English language learners, so I read the current research. I also know what worked and didn’t work for my own children and for me when I was learning to read.

As I listened to Chey and Pav’s lively discussion that included topics such as a culture of reading or a reading program, a balanced literacy approach, and the science of reading, I remembered something that happened to my son. Chey mentioned whether being astutely proficient or having been taught all of the reading skills was necessary for every student. That is, do we have to know every reading skill to read at a proficient level? And where does a love of reading fit in? Pav responded that reading doesn’t come naturally according to the research. This topic resonated with me deeply and I have a personal story about my son’s experience in middle school. I will share his story and then some of the most recent science about learning how to read. 

7th grade   

By the time my son started 7th grade, he was a prolific reader. The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings Trilogy, any new book by Brian Jacques; all of them over 300 pages. Although his father’s first language is Arabic and we live in Kuwait, my son has always been more fluent in English and speaks, writes, and reads like a native speaker. Or, so I thought until he came home in November of that year with a “D” on his most recent essay. My philosophy about supporting my children with their homework was hands-off once they were in middle school and could ask me for help if they needed it, so this was the first time I’d seen his essay. It was also the first time he’d received such a poor grade on any of his school work. Once I read through his essay, I knew what the problem was. He had only a superficial understanding of the book he had read. This was definitely a revelation for me. I had always assumed that my son understood at a high level of comprehension and now I found out he didn’t. 

I sat down to discuss the problem with my son and we looked at a few passages from the book. I asked him some deeper questions about the characters and plot which he struggled to answer! I told him I wanted to call his school and meet with his teacher. My son agreed that it was a good idea. When I sat down with his English teacher, she told me that my son was a very good student overall. I asked her how a native speaker like my son could reach 7th grade with such a poor level of comprehension. She told me that the majority of the students in his grade level were weak in their English skills and she was teaching to the majority of the class. She blamed it on the lack of English language support staff in the middle school. Of course, that was not the answer I wanted to hear, nor was it acceptable as far as I was concerned. I arranged a meeting with the middle school principal and he repeated what the teacher had told me. I could see I wasn’t going to get anywhere with the school and realized I needed to get involved with my son’s schoolwork, especially in the area of reading comprehension. His level of vocabulary was way above his classmates, but he was only reading superficially. 

From that time, and until he entered high school, I would ask him questions about what he was reading in various subjects. We started with the basics such as plot, characters, and themes. In subjects other than English, he used his prior knowledge to inform, analyze, and synthesize his new learning. If he was interested in discussing his pleasure reading with me, I was happy to chat with him about it; however, I didn’t want to make it seem like another task. If you’re familiar with  Bloom’s taxonomy, you will recognize how I prompted my son to think at higher cognitive levels than understanding which is one of the lowest forms of cognition. My son’s responses to my questions over time showed me that his reading comprehension had improved by leaps and bounds. In fact, his verbal scores on the SAT were in one of the highest percentiles. He is now in his early 30s and working in a job that requires him to think strategically and creatively. His love of reading has not abated and you rarely see him without his Kindle. 

Mother reading and showing a book to her baby daughter. Photo credit: William Fortunato

Explicit instruction, pleasure reading, and creating a culture of reading

Reading instruction that is developmentally appropriate has been studied for many years. However, it is only recently that we have the fMRI technology of brain scans to understand how the brain learns to read. Speaking comes naturally to us, but reading must be taught. How it is taught is very important. According to research cited in a 2019 article in Education Week, “Decades of research have shown that explicit phonics instruction benefits early readers, but particularly those who struggle to read.” It goes on to say that children who are not explicitly taught sound/letter recognition (in an alphabetically-based language like English or Spanish), will struggle with comprehension later on due to the lack of automaticity in decoding text. This is something that I learned in relation to struggling English language learners in Kuwait and is supported by the research. The slower you read and the longer it takes you to decode a sentence, the more likely you are to struggle with comprehension of what you read. 

However, not all phonics instruction is equally successful. It must be systematic, according to the National Reading Panel (2000), and supported by other research reviews: 

A systematic phonics program teaches an ordered progression of letter-sound correspondences. Teachers don’t only address the letter-sound connections that students stumble over. Instead, they address all of the combinations methodically, in a sequence, moving on to the next once students demonstrate mastery. Teachers explicitly tell students what sounds correspond to what letter patterns, rather than asking students to figure it out on their own or make guesses.

An experiment by a neuroscientist at Stanford (2015) with a made-up language supports the systematic approach of teaching phonics rather than expecting students to guess at the words after being instructed using sight words. English learners and students with disabilities benefit from systematic phonics instruction at the kindergarten and grade 1 levels. The association between phonics instruction and reading comprehension is clear. 

In terms of balanced literacy which was another topic mentioned by Chey and Pav during the episode, the research has shown that using context clues or other cues to decode a word slows the reader down. I’m not sure this is totally the case since there are times when students, especially language learners, need extra help from the text to determine meaning, thus supporting their comprehension. It’s also another way for them to engage with the text because they have to focus all the time on what they’re reading. 

The Education Week article (2019) relies heavily on the National Reading Panel Executive Summary (2000) that underlines the importance of teaching phonemes and graphemes (systematic phonics) in grade 1 and other reading skills that support automaticity of decoding and comprehension. For more detail, a link to the article is in the references below. However, Bowers (2020) has done a meta-analysis of numerous studies over a period of 20 years that showed studies noted, “Nevertheless, despite this strong consensus, I will show that there is little or no evidence that systematic phonics is better than the main alternative methods used in schools, including whole language and balanced literacy”.  Hence, something known as the “reading wars”. 

In support of systematic phonics instruction, one meta-analysis of reading intervention studies finds that phonics-focused interventions were most effective through grade 1; in older grades—when most students will have mastered phonics—interventions that targeted comprehension or a mix of reading skills showed bigger effects on students’ reading skills. (Suggate, 2010) Another study, however, has looked at the three main approaches to teaching reading: systematics phonics instruction, whole language, and balanced literacy which is a combination of whole language and non-systematic phonics instruction, and Bowers (2020) concluded it “should not be that we should be satisfied with either systematic phonics or whole language, but rather teachers and researchers should consider alternative methods of reading instruction”.  

All in all, the science of reading supports the need for explicit instruction at an early age at the appropriate stage of development. My experience, although non-scientific, supports a combination of systematic instruction along with reading for meaning within the context and using how words are formed. So for early years including preschool and kindergarten, “the National Early Literacy Panel found that both reading books to young children and engaging in activities aimed at improving their language development improved their oral language skills (2008).” 

Spoken language is also important in the very early years and research shows that the more vocabulary young children are exposed to and the more able they are to communicate verbally, the better they are at reading and comprehending. When books are read aloud or print is pointed out to them (such as signage, labels, etc.), they begin to associate sounds with letters and how the printed word works. They also begin to learn about books and print which increases their ability to learn grammar and syntax faster as they develop more skills in higher grades.  

The weekly Staffroom episodes discuss a variety of topics and always challenge my thinking. I really appreciate and enjoy the interaction by Chey and Pav during the show and the conversations on social media by other educators who are listening. 

Link to the show: https://www.cheyandpav.com

Link to Episode 105: https://www.cheyandpav.com and at https://voiced.ca/podcast_episode_post/203-chey-pav-and-the-staffroom-podcast 

References 

Bowers, J.S. (8 January 2020). Reconsidering the evidence that systematic phonics is more effective than alternative methods of reading instruction. Educational Psychology Review. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-019-09515-y

Early Literacy Panel. (2008). Developing early literacy: Report of the national early literacy panel. https://lincs.ed.gov/publications/pdf/NELPReport09.pdf

National Reading Panel. (2000). Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction [Executive summary]

Schwartz, S. & Sparks, S.D. (2019). How do kids learn to read: What the science says. Education Week.https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/how-do-kids-learn-to-read-what-the-scence-says/2019/10

Suggate, S. P. (2010). Why what we teach depends on when: grade and reading intervention modality moderate effect size. Developmental Psychology. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20873927

Youncheva, Y., Wise, J. & McCandliss, B. (16 May 2015). Hemispheric specialization for visual words Is shaped by attention to sublexical units during initial learning. Brain Language. 

For an interesting opinion piece on the science of reading and so-called reading wars: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/01/26/readingwars-scienceofreading-teaching​​