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What we got wrong (and right) with balanced literacy – a conversation with Dr. Nathaniel Swain

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TRT Podcast #114: What we got wrong (and right) with balanced literacy

Today we hear from Dr. Nathaniel Swain, a researcher and speech-language pathologist interested in language, literacy, and learning. In this episode we discuss the problems with balanced literacy … and where to go from here. This was such a fun conversation!��

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Hello, Anna Geiger here from The Measured Mom, and today I'm sharing a really fun interview with Dr. Nathaniel Swain. He's a teacher, instructional coach, researcher, writer, speech language pathologist, he's a young dad, and he's from Australia. I found him when I listened to a really interesting and entertaining webinar he gave about what we need to change when we move forward from balanced literacy, and it was just so interesting. I knew that you would love to hear from him, so he very kindly agreed to be on the podcast. We had a great conversation. I think you're going to really get a lot out of today's episode.

Anna Geiger: Welcome, Dr. Swain!

Nathaniel Swain: Thank you for having me, Anna. It's such a pleasure to be here.

Anna Geiger: I really, really enjoyed the presentation I saw on your website about what we have backwards with balanced literacy, and I resonated with so much of it because I was a balanced literacy teacher during the heyday of balanced literacy, really when it really became a thing. You're quite a bit younger than I am, so you maybe have different experiences with it.

Can you talk to us about how you got into education, and how you learned about balanced literacy and all that?

Nathaniel Swain: Sure. I think I'm a product of balanced literacy in my own schooling. The schooling that I had in the '90s was very much informed by whole language. There was a big focus on student-led learning, and grammar and things weren't taught. I don't ever remember being taught how to read. I think I was probably one of those lucky students that came and was probably reading before I started school.

So I actually didn't come to teaching pretty directly. My mom always said that I should be a teacher, but I resisted it for a really long time. I initially went and studied linguistics. I was really interested in language and learning a second language. I was fascinated by how language works, and it actually made me reflect on my own language in a way that explicit teaching and grammar back in the early years would've actually sparked that interest earlier.

After studying linguistics, I was thinking, "What do I do with this degree?" I actually looked to speech language pathology, and I studied that first as my masters and started working with young people with language and literacy difficulties in mainstream primary schools and secondary schools, but also in youth justice.

The kids in juvenile detention was the big group that I was working with. I got to see what educational disengagement looks like and what reading failure and writing failure looks like. That was a big eye-opener for me. I think I didn't realize just how much work there was for people who are passionate about language and literacy to try and turn things around because when you see kids who've had a really tough experience in their schooling, and can't do basic things like read at a first grade or a second grade level, and they're young adults working with you, it's pretty eye-opening.

That really piqued my interest, and through that process, even after finishing my PhD, I went back and trained as a teacher. Now my sole passion is working as a teacher and working with teachers to optimize the classroom environment to make it as beneficial for the teacher, managing their workload and their well-being, but also getting the most out of opportunities to work with students.

So my passion is now literacy, and it's also classroom practice in general, so what that looks like in numeracy, but also in the other elements of the curriculum like science and history. I'm trying to support teachers to make that transition from what we've got now, which is a whole-language-balanced-literacy status quo, into what we hope we might get to in the future where everyone gets an education that is aligning with the best knowledge that we have from the science of learning and the science of reading.

Anna Geiger: So would you say that overall Australia is still very balanced literacy and whole language?

Nathaniel Swain: Yeah, it is definitely. I think it's the water that we're swimming in. People don't even realize that balanced literacy is a thing, but then you start talking about what it looks like and people reflect on their own pre-service training as teachers and they think, "Oh yeah, that's what I got." And in general, if you go into any run-of-the-mill, regular mainstream or private sort of school in Australia, you're going to see balanced literacy activities and structures and resources as well. So anything that goes against the grain with that in terms of the explicit teaching of phonemic awareness or phonics or vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension, that's going to be quite unfamiliar for a lot of people. It's quite similar to the states in that way.

Anna Geiger: So in your workshop you talked about how we started with whole language and then it switched to balanced literacy. And I don't remember if it was you or someone who said, "I didn't notice a whole lot of a difference. It just kind of got a new name."

Can you talk a little bit about how those two things are related?

Nathaniel Swain: Yeah, so whole language I think grew out of the work of Ken Goodman and Frank Smith in the US, it also aligned with a lot of the work that Marie Clay was doing in New Zealand, which then was brought over to the US in the Reading Recovery program. It tapped into this whole progressive education movement where the teacher was taking a step back from holding the space in the classroom and really trying to put a love of literacy and a love of learning at the very forefront. The explicit teaching of things probably was really unfashionable at the time. It was all about getting kids excited about reading and getting them interested and motivated.

Balanced literacy sort of came in after the National Reading Panel in the US and similar reports in the UK and Australia which basically said that you really need to teach phonics, and you need to teach phonemic awareness, and the other elements of the Big Five.

I think it was an accidental sort of attempt by one of the phonics people who said, "Well, we do value literature and we do value all these other parts as well. It's not just about phonics, and so why don't we have more of a balance?" That was really picked up by the probably people more on the whole language side of things and packaged into this whole approach, and that's where Fountas and Pinnell became really big. People like Lucy Calkins sort of became really prominent as well.

So the pure whole language stuff disappeared in many ways. It sort of still exists in some forms, but the balanced literacy approach where it's a bit of a mix of lots of different things and a bit of phonics sprinkled in there is definitely the status quo at the moment.

Anna Geiger: So I remember when I first became a teacher, I read a lot of Regie Routman's stuff. Unfortunately I got rid of those books because I wish I could refer to them. So I got one from the library today, Invitations, and that was a very whole language book.

Nathaniel Swain: Yes.

Anna Geiger: So I think I started a little bit from whole language, but I also knew that that was bad because, I mean, pure whole language doesn't even teach letters! I was reading a book by Frank Smith and he said it was useless to know the alphabet!

Nathaniel Swain: He's really against it. Yeah.

Anna Geiger: I think we felt good about what we were doing because we had this great new name for it, balanced literacy.

Nathaniel Swain: And it's got the bits and pieces that you like and that works, but it's still really child-centered and it's really all about teaching them at their right level and everything like that. So it did feel good, and I think that's why it really took off in the early 2000's

Anna Geiger: In the book that Regie Routman wrote, she has the graphic for the three cues that we assumed that kids were using to read. And I know that they really haven't been able to nail down where that came from exactly, but it's been floating around for a long time.

Nathaniel Swain: I think the three-cueing approach is really a way to explain how it is that students manage to become fluent readers and to recognize words when, from the outside looking in, it doesn't look like they're actually reading letter by letter. They make guesses at words or students will attempt to sort of guess what the rest of the word might be if they look at the first letter. So those cues of, what is the sentence context and the syntax? What is the meaning that could be there? What's something that makes sense to put in that sentence, that the word might be? And then the last resort being the sound-letter correspondence, or the graphophonic, as they call it in the model.

It does have an intuitive appeal. It's like, oh yeah, students can sort of guess their way through things. And the wording from Goodman is that they sample elements of the letters and words, but they don't actually read each letter and each word.

And that's what they thought in the 70s and 80s when this was in its prime, and unfortunately it is appealing and it hasn't gone away because it's an easy thing that you can teach.

If you believe that three-queuing works, all you have to do is do those lessons where teachers are encouraged to cover words up with post-it notes and talk through these different strategies, picture power and things like that. It's an easy thing for teachers to implement because they have to give those three cues of does it look right, does it sound right, does it make sense? Those three ones, and you don't actually then have to know anything about the word and how it's structured, its etymology, where it's come from in terms of morphemes, and whether it's got any tricky spelling patterns in there. You don't really need to know that because you just answer those three questions.

So I think it's not going away because there hasn't been enough opportunity for teachers to learn that there's an alternative because it has that intuitive appeal. The actual teaching of the structure of English is actually a lot harder and requires a bigger effort from the teacher, but also from the school district and being able to give high quality resources that help teachers understand what they're teaching, really knowing what it's about and why they're explaining it that way.

I hope that sort of hints at that a little bit. But yeah, the million dollar question is why won't this thing go away?

Anna Geiger: Yeah. I think part of it is because most of us that are using it are primary teachers using leveled books that were written for kids to be able to use the cues to solve the words.

I know when I taught with balanced literacy, people would tell me it doesn't work, but I was like, well, my kids are reading. I thought they were reading. I didn't understand the Simple View of Reading then. To me, it looked liked they were arriving at the words, they were getting what the text meant, and that was reading. And I thought that all of them would, through this little separate phonics that I was teaching, both embedded and also a little bit separately, I thought they were just gradually going to put it all together and some of them did.

But I think a lot of us don't follow them up to see, well, how are you doing in third or fourth grade when you're reading these harder books? Have I equipped you to solve those big words or read those big words?

Then also I think like you said, I did not know all the phonics patterns. I mean, I learned to read with phonics, but I hadn't thought much about it. I didn't really know much about-

Nathaniel Swain: It's a lot to get your head around. Yeah.

Anna Geiger: Yeah.

Nathaniel Swain: I'm very lucky that I'm at La Trobe University in Melbourne in Australia where the whole undergrad and master's course has been revamped to put the science of reading at the forefront. We're very excited to be bringing our first cohort through now. Part of that work is with the SOLAR Lab, which is a group of researchers with Pamela Snow and Tanya Serry at La Trobe Uni. We are very excited to prepare teachers in this new way, and to help them connect with the research around how reading used to be taught, and what is balanced literacy because that's the schools that they're going to go out into and they're going to see that.

Then also how can we use the science of reading to improve that practice? And as I talk about in my article to sort of flip it around that what we need to emphasize early is emphasized really well, and then what we can embed more contextually can be contextualized later.

Anna Geiger: So what would you say to somebody who said, "Well, I'm a balanced literacy teacher because meaning is most important and that's what I'm focusing on. When you start with phonics, you basically produce word callers and kids who don't really understand what they're reading."

Nathaniel Swain: So look, it's that critique of phonics being like barking at print, and that's the thing that Frank Smith and Marie Clay and Ken Goodman really had a big problem with. They don't want kids sitting there and looking like they're being drilled in sounds and letters.

I think the selling point for me in terms of seeing it work is that for some kids, this opportunity to learn how the speech system maps with the orthography or the spelling system of English is the only way that they're going to become fluent readers.

Other kids, maybe the top 50% or top 40%, will learn either way and they're going to be fine. They're not going to read any less well, they're actually potentially going to read better, but also have a more explicit awareness of how words fit together, and their spelling is going to improve as a result.

They might have always been a great reader, but we've got a whole generation of kids that aren't great spellers because they've taken to reading like water, but they haven't had that explicit awareness of how words are structured and the morphology and the parts of words and how they fit together and all the spelling rules that you can really go into. In grade one and grade two, it really becomes important to not just understand the sounds but also the way that the words fit together in terms of spelling.

So the selling point is that for the bottom 60%, this is make or break! If you don't teach the early phonics piece and phonemic awareness piece really well, and give them opportunities to practice those skills in decodable text, which is accessible and which does target those sound-letter patterns that they've learned, then some of them won't actually become fluent readers at all.

They'll become like the teenagers that I've worked with who are using those three-queuing strategies still at age 16 and 17, and not realizing that they're guessing at words and substituting and leaving words out, and they don't even know that there's another way that they could read. They think that reading is a guessing game. As Emily Hanford highlighted so well in her podcast, Sold a Story, it's really exhausting to read in that way.

A lot of adults who have been taught in this way and would've benefited from more explicit instruction, they find reading really hard. It's this horrible process of trying to make it work, and trying to guess what it might be, and trying and you feel like to get through a paragraph is so tiresome.

Whereas fluent reading, when it's done really well, when you teach phonics and phonemic awareness in a really clear and sequential way, and in a way that's responsive to what your students need from you, it actually makes reading really fluent and easy.

The whole point of the Simple View of Reading is that you get the decoding working really well so that you can focus on comprehension. The whole point is that it opens up this whole world of text for students because by the time they get to year two and year three, you're wanting them to be very fluent so that you're basically not thinking about decoding much anymore, except for really complicated multisyllabic words where you might attack them using your morpheme knowledge, based on how the word's structured. So basic decoding shouldn't really be a thing if you're doing this really well once you get to those middle years.

Anna Geiger: I've told this story in the podcast before, but with my youngest, that's when I learned about structured literacy and the science of reading, and I like to teach my kids to read before they go to school because I think I should get to do it.

Nathaniel Swain: Yeah.

Anna Geiger: So I did that with him and I had just learned about all this and I thought, okay, I get it. I need to be using decodables, but I wasn't quite ready to let go of my leveled books. So the first day I did both, and right away it was like the light bulb, finally all these years later, went off. This is so inefficient for me to try to say, "Well, what would make sense? Well, oh, now you can't sound this book out, but let's look at the picture." Then whereas with the other book, I mean it was very hard to watch him have to slow down and sound out every single word. It was a little bit painful. I was used to my kids just breezing through these patterned books, but he picked it up pretty quickly and once he did, everything was unlocked.

Nathaniel Swain: He cracked the code. Exactly. And that's the hard work that the whole language and balanced literacy hard line researchers have said, "Well, we don't want kids to be put through that struggle phase of figuring it out sound by sound."

It looks painful and it looks annoying, but that's the work of cracking the code. English isn't a simple one-to-one relationship, there's going to be tricky words in there, but when you break it down and you give them text that is at their level of what they can decode, then you see kids being able to focus on the mainstay of what decoding should be about in the early stages, which is identifying the correct letter sound for that particular pattern and then blending it together.

That process of blending can take six months for some kids, so they need that specific practice again and again and again until they actually get what blending is about and how it works.

Then it's like it goes off by itself and the self-teaching hypothesis, which is David Share's theory, takes over. They start teaching themselves new patterns because their brain is cued into knowing that words can be broken down into their sounds and into bigger chunks like morphemes, and then you can't stop them from figuring out new words. I think that's the sweet spot that you get to once you put in the hard yards. But initially for some kids it can be really hard going.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, and we expect a lot of our kindergarten and first grade teachers to really be the ones to do this hard work, but once kids realize that they're the ones doing it, that's where all the excitement comes from and then they start to really enjoy reading.

Nathaniel Swain: I think so. Exactly.

Anna Geiger: Some people in the science of reading community really talk about balanced literacy with a lot of vitriol. They just really, really hate it, I think, because they've seen how some kids reacted to it, but I know that there are still things worth keeping. Can you talk to us about the good of balanced literacy and maybe some things that were good that we can twist a little bit to meet our goals?

Nathaniel Swain: Certainly! I think even from the first year of school, there should be opportunities for students to hear and to enjoy rich literature. I think that the emphasis doesn't have to be on students independently reading those books because to get rich literature at their decodable level is going to be very tricky. That's where the importance of read alouds, and acting out stories, and students hearing stories read to them by adults and by older peers is really valuable.

Having a classroom that has that mix of text that is for the purpose of learning how to read, and text that's for the purpose of reading to learn, I think is really important. That can start right from the beginning of school, so teachers reading texts to them, whether they're nursery rhymes, or fairy tales, or folk tales, or picture books of various kinds, it should be a part of every single day. I think that's something that balanced literacy has done a good job of, saying that literature should be at the heart of what we're doing.

Where it's gone wrong is on it's emphasis that you expect students to be able to read that literature by themselves to begin with Even if that book isn't formatted in the right way, or if it doesn't have a really captivating story, it can still serve a purpose. Don't get me wrong, some decodable books are written really well now. There's some really great stories out there and great illustrations that make those books really fantastic.

But initially, the goal isn't to make the best book in the world, the goal is to have a text that's there for an instructional purpose, and until they become proficient or at a certain intermediate level of decoding, some of the books are going to be less rich than we want them to be.

But then that's where the teacher comes in, and the parents at home as well, if they can, where they read great books to them and that should never stop. Giving them opportunities to hear literature, and to hear stories, and to hear informational texts about interesting topics, and to see fantastic illustrations, and all of those things. I think that's probably the biggest thing that we can learn from the movement in the last forty years is that we should always give students access to rich meanings and texts.

That's where they build their oral language as well, not just from conversation and from play, but also from hearing and engaging in shared book reading. That starts right from birth, but definitely in the early years of age three and four and then the start of school as well.

Anna Geiger: I think when you talk about shared book reading, are you referring to the teacher reading aloud to the students? Is that what you mean by that?

Nathaniel Swain: Yeah, exactly. Especially in those early stages of their reading development where the students can't independently read. It's teachers reading to students, but parents reading at home as well, other family members, older peers, reading to younger peers I think is really helpful as well. In my classroom, in the first year of school, we also have a big focus on paired reading as well. That's reading decodable books to each other at a similar level so that we've got a similar level of proficiency in their decoding skills, of where they're up to in the phonics sequence, and they get to hear fluent text read by a peer and have an opportunity to jump in and provide feedback and also enjoy the text together. Because as they progress through, as they're halfway through the decodable sort of scheme, the books start becoming much more interesting.

It's not just about getting the words right, even though the focus is on decoding. It's also about the fluency and the prosody and also the meanings that you're learning along the way as well. Because the meaning that we get from text is ultimately what we are wanting students to do. That's the whole point of teaching them how to decode is so that they get to reading comprehension.

For many students in the way that it's been taught in the last forty years, there's been a barrier for them ever being able to access that meaning independently. They might be able to do it in really predictable texts where the words can be guessed, but as soon as those pictures disappear, or as soon as the sentence structures become more complicated and less predictable, then you see those students fall down, and ultimately they never get to the meanings of those rich texts because they don't have the decoding skills that unlocks that door.

Anna Geiger: Back to shared reading a little bit. So I know when I read Christopher Such's book, The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading, he also described shared reading as a read aloud, but for a lot of us that came from balanced literacy, shared reading was the big text that you read with your students.

Nathaniel Swain: Yes.

Anna Geiger: When I did that, I think that was how we thought we were teaching them to read because they were getting access to all these high frequency words and they would see the words enough. But I know that many people are talking about shared reading in a proper context, in a science of reading based classroom, where the text you read together may be more complex. So it's more like a knowledge building and it helps them feel what oral language or what fluency sounds like. I think that all makes sense. I'm still trying to figure it out in my head because I think well, fluency is automaticity, so can you really call it fluency? Is it just knowledge building? What would you say about that?

Nathaniel Swain: I think it depends on what the purpose of that sort of shared reading is. If you have set it up so that the text is deliberately more complicated than the students could decode by themselves or read fluently by themselves, then the purpose should be about building vocabulary, and knowledge, and richness of story, and character, and things like that, and that's a really valid use of that opportunity to read together.

I think in years two and three, there's a bigger role for reading texts together, whether it's in things like choral reading or the modeled reading by the teacher and students tracking along, where there's a dual benefit for fluency and hearing fluent reading and being an opportunity to practice that fluent reading as well. At the same time, you might be learning vocabulary and elements of narrative or informational texts and knowledge as well.

So I think depending on the year level, what that shared reading looks like and the benefits you would get from it are a little bit different. But I think certainly moving away from that pure balanced literacy approach of saying this is modeled reading, versus shared reading, versus guided reading, and independent reading. I think there's a bit of a misconception in the way that's structured saying that the only thing that's going to improve students' fluency is hearing fluent reading.

In fact, what might improve their fluency the most in the early years is actually getting good at recognizing and figuring out words, their word-attack skills. That's going to be their phonics knowledge, their phonemic awareness skills, tapping into that orthographic sort of learning about how words are structured and how they pull together, and then also that fluency practice.

So when I said paired fluency reading before, it's really about two peers reading together on a decodable text and giving them an opportunity to practice fluent reading and hear fluent reading from a peer. There's some meaning making and some vocabulary building going on because you can't stop the brain from doing that. So much of that is natural to the brain to make sense of text, and it's good to cue students into the text. But in that fluency exercise of maybe ten minutes a day, it's an opportunity really to build that prosody and that ability to read words in the context of a whole sentence or a whole text. So there's those multiple purposes there.

If you feel in a balanced literacy classroom that the only way to give them opportunities to learn how to decode words, or to read words in general, is to see shared reading in context, that's where we get caught up because it's impossible to give students the kinds of exposure to the various words and how they're structured and the sound-letter patterns if we're always looking for just the right book to show that.

Sometimes you just need to have those single words up there and read them together on cards, or on paper, or on the screen, and giving them opportunities to decode as a group and also in small groups as well. Those individual, single word reading opportunities strip away all of the complexity and allow them to focus on that skill that they're building. It might be to get double consonant blends before the vowel, those TR and SL sort of words. That might be the thing that they're struggling with because they're constantly leaving out one of those consonants while they're reading.

So, depending on what the goal is, those single words that you put up or that you read together will have that really strong purpose and it's an orthographic or a phonological purpose, and you are basically getting that ready so that when they attack words like that in their decodable books and they're practicing for fluency, they've got those tools in their toolkit. They're not having to guess the word because they know what to do when they approach a word like this. They have to sound out each consonant, then the vowel and any other consonants afterwards and then blend it back together. That's going to be hard for some because it's five sounds they have to blend into one syllable, but that's the skill that we are building.

Once they have some fluency with the basic CVC words, that's the real work that happens. Then there's long vowels and then there's multisyllabic words and suffixes and things like that. And all of that might be a potential bump in the road for some students, which is where having a structured scope and sequence allows those gaps to be filled before the gap sort of widens in students that get it versus students that don't get it independently.

Anna Geiger: Why do you think it is that so many balanced literacy experts are afraid of encouraging us to do anything out of context? Because I know that was something I didn't want to do, and you just touched on that just now quite a bit. But why are so many teachers afraid of that?

Nathaniel Swain: I think because it's a reaction. The whole language movement was a reaction to what was seen as contextualized and potentially boring looking drills where teachers say, "This is A. Everyone, say, /��/, /��/, /��/. And then this is B and say /b/, /b/, /b/." And sort of forcing them to do these drills that back in the 60s and 50s might have been quite boring, and it might have been quite repetitive, and might not have made the connections that we know now between being able to recognize sounds and also blend them and put them into words and spell those words themselves. From the last thirty years of scientific research, we've known that it's important to actually get those sounds into words and help students to both read them and spell them and have that reciprocal process.

I think whole language and balanced literacy was a push away from all of that and saying, I've seen kids learn to read without all of that so it mustn't be necessary. When Marie Clay and Ken Goodman did their work observing student reading and student errors, they made the assumption that it wasn't just sounding out that was going on, there were other cues that the students were using.

As you said, if they were reading a predictable book, they may well have been using other cues because that was maybe the only way they could have predicted what that word might be. A student can't independently read the word photosynthesis in a book about butterflies when their decoding is at a year one level. They don't know those sound-letter patterns. They don't know how to attack a multisyllabic word sound by sound. So if they've got some background knowledge and they've heard that word before, then they could accurately predict what that word might be. But is it decoding? Not necessarily.

That's where, for some students, that lack of practice on actual word attack skills doesn't set them up for success later on when the words get really hard and they've never heard them before in their oral language.

So to go back to your point, I really think it was an honest attempt by whole language and balanced literacy advocates to say, "Well, there's more to reading than just sitting there and drilling," and it doesn't feel as nice as sitting in a circle and reading a book together and making meaning. That's something really important to feel like you have that time with your students, but in terms of getting some opportunities for sound-letter and phonics and the teaching of phonemic awareness back in there, not necessarily wrapped up in a book, is that it gives the students the number of exposures that they're going to need sometimes to make these representations.

Some students beginning school with low-level literacy or who are at risk for things like dyslexia, they might need two hundred exposures to get a particular sound-letter pattern in their head of this is a letter and it makes this sound. Two hundred exposures of that particular pattern is really hard to get if you haven't got a structured sequence that allows them to practice it over and over and over and allow mastery to occur. Because maybe they've only encountered that /b/ sound in the letter of the week back in the first week of term or something like that where that there's a whole lot of books with B in it, and they might have remembered it, but they're still making errors between B and P or E and I. You see a lot with the /��/ and /��/ sound where the students just can't get the difference between those two sounds.

Wrapping it up in a book sometimes is lovely, but it doesn't allow for the number of practices and number of exposures that actually builds the fluency which, ironically, they need in order to read those lovely books later down the track. And there's nothing stopping them enjoying those books now with the teacher reading it for them.

Anna Geiger: So we've talked a lot about how foundational skills teaching is going to look different. Can you talk a little bit about comprehension? I know in balanced literacy we thought we had that down because we were all about the book. I know I've talked a lot about how comprehension strategies have their place, but they should be in service of the book and not driving the book choice, right?

Nathaniel Swain: Yeah.

Anna Geiger: Can you talk a little bit about that and any other comprehension things?

Nathaniel Swain: I think so. In terms of the role of comprehension strategies, they were really one of the shining lights of the balanced literacy movement. Comprehension strategies weren't a thing in whole language. It wasn't as explicit and clear about that. But in the early 2000s, there was this growing body of research about these comprehension strategies like summarizing, finding the main idea, inferring, visualizing, and things like that. As it was in the National Reading Panel report, there was a bit of a remit for people to build a whole curriculum around that, and Fountas and Pinnell did just that, and so did Lucy Calkins, and other reading schemes made it all about choosing a comprehension strategy of the week, or you might work it on for a few weeks.

I think what was the misinterpretation of how that was implemented was that comprehension strategies as a thing in terms of cueing students into the fact that you can summarize, and that you can make inferences, and that you can visualize while you're reading. There is some benefit for that, but most of the studies don't last any longer than six weeks. So as far as the actual intervention benefits of doing conversations and cueing students into those things, there isn't much benefit after doing it once or twice a week for six weeks, and they haven't actually established it, let alone six years, of comprehensive strategies day in day out.

I think the other thing that you had mentioned there is that there was a misinterpretation of the role of comprehension strategies in building meaning, by working on a generic strategy like summarizing, and not being conscious of what the topic is and what the texts are about. Say you've got a mini lesson, as F&P like to do, and you've got everyone together and they're talking about summarizing and how it works, and you model it, and you show how it works in a particular mentor text, and then students go off and they practice summarizing in their own leveled text.

The topic potentially has no consistency between students or between the teacher and what the students are reading. Everyone could be reading about completely different things. The thing that in the balanced literacy classroom that holds it together is that strategy of summarizing, and it's based on that belief that this is what good readers do, they know how to summarize. So if we just get them summarizing, then they'll be able to do that with any book.

Unfortunately, comprehension is so tied to knowledge and to vocabulary, that you can't actually build comprehension strategies without a background knowledge about the text. You might be the best summarizer in the world, but if I give you a journal article on rheumatoid arthritis and you are not a rheumatologist, you're going to really struggle to summarize that text in any sort of fruitful or meaningful way.

It's the same for other students. If they've seen some summarizing, and then if they go off and practice summarizing with another text on a different topic, there's not going to be that continuity that you want in students when they're making meaning from text to actually build up their schemas and build up their knowledge of how different information fits together.

So the way that you would flip it and make it work in a classroom that's informed by the science of reading, is that the comprehension strategies would sit there in the background and be things that you draw upon as you model how to read text and share text together, and when you go off and you see how students are reading texts independently or in small groups, but really the focus is what is this text about and what's the knowledge that we need in order to understand the text?

We want to be really trying to model how you build up an understanding of the whole text and how it fits together. Cueing students into key vocabulary they might not be familiar with, or linking this text with previous texts that they've looked at before, whether it's narrative or informational or otherwise. That's really the thing that's been missing in the balanced literacy classroom in that we can build knowledge at the same time that we build comprehension skills because those two things can't really be separated.

They're still going to summarize, they're still going to find the main idea, but like I said, you only need a little bit of exposure into those strategies to then start using them.

What they really need is practice making meaning from text, and not just texts that they're already familiar with, texts on topics that they're actually learning about for the first time. So that's that reading to learn piece, which I think is really missing in the balanced literacy classroom.

For me, it's about bringing the text to life and the comprehension strategies are always going to be there, but they don't have to be the focus so much. They can sit in the background and put the text and the knowledge that sits behind the text at the foreground. I think that's one of the main messages of that piece that I put together.

Anna Geiger: Yeah. Well, we could just talk forever. I could talk forever about this, but this has been wonderful. And I know you mentioned, Questioning the Author. I think Isabel Beck just put out a book, a revised book of that.

Nathaniel Swain: Yes. Yeah, 15 Years Smarter, the second edition is really, really good. I'd definitely recommend that.

Anna Geiger: Anything else? Any other books or references that you can recommend to people that are trying to get into this, especially the comprehension piece? I know Nancy Hennessy has written a book and Oakhill and Cane, I think those are both tough.

Nathaniel Swain: Yeah, they're quite dense actually.

Anna Geiger: I do recommend them, but they're hard.

Nathaniel Swain: But they are very good. I think something that really made this issue of comprehension and knowledge click for me is Natalie Wexler's, The Knowledge Gap.

Anna Geiger: Yes. Yeah.

Nathaniel Swain: You might have talked about that on your show already. I think even if you just read the first chapter, because the first chapter is basically an introduction to the entire premise of the book, and then the different chapters go into the history and how it's gotten to this situation. Once you're hooked, you sort of keep going. Even as basis of trying to question why we have this focus on comprehension strategies, I think she really does it really well.

As a therapist and as a teacher, I was prey to thinking that comprehension strategies were the focus as well. It's only in the last five years that I've started to understand the true picture of how complex comprehension is and how it's not about just drilling strategies, it's really about cueing students into the meanings behind text and helping them to uncover and unlock the meanings that are locked inside.

Obviously they need proficient decoding skills to do that, but once you've got some fluency, the focus really needs to shift on to what is this text about and what's this exciting topic? It's that knowledge piece that's really been missing for so long.

I'd also recommend, in terms of instructional routines, I think Christopher Such's book that you've talked about, it's a nice introduction. It's a really accessible way to think about how could I make this work in my classroom? How could I structure my literacy block differently? Because it's not going to look like Reader's Workshop and Writer's Workshop. It's going to have a pretty different feel.

I'd also recommend there's some great webinars out there that show examples of practice. The Reading League is a great resource in Australia. We've got a charity called Think Forward Educators, which I started a few years ago, and we've got experts coming on and talking about how they do this in their classroom, and really practical examples that teachers can use. There's freely available content on there that people can engage with.

I think the other thing is to lean on your colleagues that are doing this and just ask to go and visit. I think there's nothing like going and seeing how people are doing it in their own classroom, especially if they're a year or two down the road or more of doing it.

I know that when people came and saw my own school last year, or other schools around my part of Melbourne, seeing is believing and you're like, "Oh, I never knew I could get kids doing that. You fit so much into your sixty minutes of the literacy skills part of the block. I can't believe now you've got all this time that you can go into comprehension, you can do rich texts and you can do a whole writing lesson essentially." So seeing is believing in that way and trying to source those pieces of information to make it work for you in your classroom.

Anna Geiger: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much. You're going to make editing really easy because you just had all these great things to say. I won't have to cut anything out.

Nathaniel Swain: Fantastic.

Anna Geiger: Is there anything else you want to add before we sign off?

Nathaniel Swain: I would say that another resource that people should look into in terms of their knowledge-rich curriculum is the Core Knowledge Foundation. They've got incredible resources that build knowledge and have really rich text for you to use in your read alouds and also in your geography and history lessons. There's a fantastic set of resources there.

We've got a project in Australia where we've been combining aspects of the Core Knowledge curriculum with explicit teaching and building lessons into things like PowerPoint to make it really easy for teachers to pick it up because it is quite dense to get your head around. That project is called Read to Learn, and we're really passionate about making that available to as many people as possible. We're lucky that Core Knowledge makes their work free to adapt and use for non-commercial purposes.

It's an attempt to bring those resources alive in a way that we've tried to do at our school, and we've done all this work behind the scenes, we might as well share it with as many teachers as possible.

The feedback we've gotten from that is that some schools that haven't done anything on science of reading have started with some of these knowledge-rich units and taught comprehension in this way, and they've suddenly got an energized group of teachers who are saying, "Why was I not teaching in this way? My kids are suddenly loving reading, and they're loving learning about these fascinating topics," and it's an entry point to seeing reading not just as an opportunity to practice skills, but as a way to open up the world to students. I think that's what's really powerful about the knowledge-rich curriculum and looking at literature in a really rich way as well.

Anna Geiger: Wonderful. I will provide links to all these things in the show notes, and thank you so much for taking time out of your day to talk to me.

Nathaniel Swain: It's my absolute pleasure, Anna. Thank you for having me.

Anna Geiger: I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. I really encourage you to head to the show notes today. There's a lot of great links there, including a link to a free primary word, reading, spelling, and learning curriculum, plus all the other things that Dr. Swain mentioned. You can find the show notes at themeasuredmom.com/episode114. Talk to you next time!

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Resources mentioned in this episode

Inverting the Legacy of Balanced Literacy (the fantastic webinar I watched before inviting Dr. Swain to be on the podcast)
Dr. Swain’s blog
Write to Learn materials and resources from Dr. Swain
Think Forward – high quality and free PL and support��
The SOLAR Lab

Other useful links

PhOrMeS (free phonics spelling and morphology curriculum materials):��https://www.phormes.com/
Free Core Knowledge curriculum

Get on the waitlist for my course, Teaching Every Reader

Join the waitlist for Teaching Every Reader

The post What we got wrong (and right) with balanced literacy – a conversation with Dr. Nathaniel Swain appeared first on The Measured Mom.

How to build oral language fluency – with Martha Kovack

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TRT Podcast #113: How to build oral language fluency – with Martha Kovack

We talk a lot about phonemic awareness and phonics – but what about oral language? In this episode we talk about how we can recycle old balanced literacy practices to build oral language fluency.

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Welcome back to Triple R Teaching. Anna Geiger here from The Measured Mom. This week is a continuation of last week's episode in which I talked with Martha Kovack.

Last week, we talked about developmental language disorder (DLD). This week we're talking about how teachers can build oral language fluency routines into their school day and how those routines can help all students, including those with DLD.

Anna Geiger: I know in your presentation you gave for The Dyslexia Association, you talked about some specific classroom routines that would build oral language. Can you talk a little bit about those?

Martha Kovack: Number one is to build knowledge. As you said, reading comprehension is very comprehensive. Hugh Catts tells us that you cannot measure or remediate or teach comprehension. You can only bring about the conditions that will allow children to understand. One of the first things we want to do in terms of routines is build knowledge. With balanced literacy, I might do a language experience chart. Remember those?

Anna Geiger: Mm-hmm.

Martha Kovack: Then I would just have my chart paper, and I would write a little, like about what we did. I used to write what field trip we went on, who's in our family, what we did on the weekend, maybe a little fun poem, children's interests, and maybe I'd talk about who can find the C, who find the comma, who can find the period. It wasn't a very rich experience, but it was okay.

Now I will do the same balanced literacy type of activity, like a language experience poem or chart, but I will base it off of the knowledge that we're learning in our science and social studies.

For example, if we're learning about water and the three states of water, I might do a poem on my language experience chart that goes something like this. This is by Amy Ludwig VanDerwater, I just found it online, "Water is clearly a mystery to me. A solid? A liquid? A gas? It's all three. Freeze it. Warm it. Boil it. You'll see. Water is clearly a mystery to me."

That's an example of how my practice would change. You're going to have your poems and the things that you're reading as a large group together, not just for the purpose of decoding and learning about how to read those words, but for knowledge. That's number one. You're going to build knowledge, and you're going to choose the reading passages built off knowledge.

The thing about knowledge is that it has to, like a snowball, be built year upon year upon year.

What I love about Core Knowledge is, and some other programs do this, too, and I bet you we're going to have a lot more, in kindergarten, they learn about the five senses. In grade one, we're going to learn about human body systems. In grade two, we're going to learn about human cells and digestion, so we're getting more complex, and by the time they get to grade nine, that knowledge has been built instead of just haphazard knowledge about many different things.

Knowledge doesn't work that way. Comprehension depends on what we know.

Anything we go to write, if we want our students to write, we can use it to build that knowledge. In balanced literacy, I would have them write about their pets, and their siblings, and their trips, and their summer holidays. That's not building knowledge and that doesn't give them a whole lot to write about.

What I've learned is that we need to get right in there and give them more deep knowledge consistently because then they're going to have more to write about. They're going to have far more vocabulary to use. Their writing is going to be richer. Does that all make sense?

Anna Geiger: It does, and I would just like to say something quick. I remember, I went to a conference years ago, so it was probably early 2000s when I was a teacher, and they had language experience charts, like what you're talking about that you would write with your students. Then she recommended having this long calculator tape, like we used to have, taped to the wall next to it and that's where you would list all the things that you taught.

For them, the purpose of doing this language experience thing was to have an opportunity to teach the skills we knew they needed, but we didn't want to drill. That was the place to teach phonics and the place to teach punctuation and things like that. But that was one of the only places.

I think what you're telling us is that the activity itself is valuable, but we have to think about what the point of it is. You can certainly draw attention to those things, but this is not explicit instruction in sound-spelling correspondences. But it is teaching knowledge, which is important for oral language.

Martha Kovack: Right. That is a huge difference. It's the biggest difference, really.

My point number two is that I do reinforce spelling, grammar, and punctuation with the language experience charts. However, I let those students know, "Oh, I haven't taught you this yet." That's what I say all the time, "Oh, I haven't taught you this yet, but when we see this dash, it means that the author is going to tell us more." Or, "I haven't taught you this yet, but the double E together says E."

I'm just really honest with children, "This is why I'm doing this with you. This is why I'm having you trace letters. This is where we tap the sounds and then say the letter names and then write in our words, write our five to ten words in our books. This is why we write sentences. Now we're over here, we're learning about water."

I make it very clear that there's a place for learning how to read and write this, and that I'm going to get there and we're going to learn how to do it all, but if you don't know how to read this, that's okay, and you're not supposed to know how to read this yet because I haven't taught you all how to spell "water." If you know how to do it, that's okay, too.

It's really, to me, about honesty with the children. Just be honest with them.

Anna Geiger: I appreciate that so much. Just today, I did a little reel on Instagram about the problem with the early guided reading books, level A and B. When I'd used them initially as a balanced literacy teacher, when I taught them to use the pattern and the context, I told them they were reading. I told them that's what they were doing.

I talked about in the reel how we're really giving them the ILLUSION of reading, and we're really not being honest. I didn't say this there, but it is dishonest, and it's confusing for them to think that's what reading is. They're going to think that, "Well, to read, I need the teacher to teach me the pattern. I need the picture to help me. I only have to use the first letter of a word."

But like you said, to use that chart and say, "I haven't taught all this to you yet, and that's fine." I think it's also great because some of the kids will actually be able to read that, and to have that opportunity for everyone is great.

I think sometimes we get afraid of showing something they haven't seen. I remember when I did have to use a very structured phonics program one year of teaching, and they wouldn't put directions on the phonics worksheets because they said the kids might see patterns that they haven't been taught yet. Which was a little bit silly because the same program made our math worksheets, which had the directions on them. But yeah, it was so silly.

Martha Kovack: It's illogical.

Anna Geiger: It's obviously not that we're going to blindfold our students as they go through life, protecting them from any exposure, but just understanding that we teach that over here, and we apply as much as we know over here.

Martha Kovack: Beautifully said!

Now, that brings us to fluency. This is what the language experience chart is going to be perfect for. Tim Rasinski is all about fluency, that's his whole thing, and he has this thing called Fluency Fridays. This is where you would have a poem, and again, it would be like a water poem.

On Monday, YOU would read the poem because, again, you haven't taught them everything. Or it could be in grade one, or kindergarten, you might be doing a nursery rhyme, something really simple, really familiar. On Monday, you're going to introduce it, and you read it and model the fluency and reread it.

On Tuesday, you're going to all read it together and, you know, model for the children how to read, and then they copy you.

On Wednesday, they're actually going to get that poem in their hands in large print, and they're all going to get copies and go into small groups and read that poem together as a small group. You're going to be, again, very clear with the children, "I haven't taught you how to read all these words yet. It's okay if you don't know them, but it's also okay if you memorize them and read along with your group. That's okay."

Then on Thursday, we're going to have a rehearsal where we are all up at the front of the room getting ready for the Friday performance.

Then on Friday, you're going to invite the principal to listen to your poem or invite some parents in to listen. That's it. It's very short. It doesn't have to take up a lot of your day, but it does give children a sense of what reading is supposed to sound like.

Here's my favorite thing. You have to go on to YouTube and look up Tim Rasinski's, I think it's called The Fluent Reader: Part 2. Yeah, that's what it's called, The Fluent Reader: Part 2. I loved this because there was an example where the students were learning about the food chain. What they did was they came up with a much more engaging way to talk about the food chain and they wrote poems. Now this was a junior grade, so they were more capable of this, but the students on the left were in the competition group and then the students on the right were in the symbiosis group. The students on the left were reading with the tone and body language that was tough and loud and strong. They had all these facial expressions and they were reading with this beautiful expression. The students on the right were all soft and smiling and reading with more flow.

It was just a perfect example of how you would do fluency with students maybe who do struggle with the decoding piece, but that's a separate issue. They absolutely shine when it came to being able to perform. He talks a lot about using the science in artful ways, and I just thought that that was a perfect example.

Anna Geiger: I'm going to play devil's advocate here because I know this is such a sticky, difficult topic in science of reading circles.

I know I have a lot of people that ask me to create decodable partner plays. I've tried. As of this recording, I have not released any because I have a hard time making them interesting. I feel like if you're going to be doing something and performing it and there's no pictures, it's got to be able to tell a story, and it's got to be interesting, and I am just really struggling to get that figured out for a limited number of words.

However, I get where people are coming from because we know Jan Hasbrouck talks about fluency being automaticity. So are we creating the illusion of fluency when we have kids "read" these texts? Because if they can't read the words in isolation, we would maybe say they're not actually reading, or are we saying that what we're doing here is teaching an element of fluency, the element of speaking in phrases? Is this more of an oral language versus a reading activity? How would you explain that?

Martha Kovack: Yes. I would say balanced literacy versus what I know now is that my fluency is more of an oral language, knowledge, vocabulary, and bringing the art into it, it's so much more.

Whereas fluency before was just so that they could make sure their voice goes down at the period. Make sure their voice goes up at a comma. It was just really about how fast they could read, and Tim Rasinski calls this "fake fluency."

But I would also say, yeah, I can see your point that some people would say that it's fake fluency to just memorize, but again, it just boils down to awareness. It's okay to provide text that's more difficult so that it flows, so that it makes sense, so that it's engaging.

The caveat is that they have to be getting good quality decoding instruction over here. Where they're getting 95% success, and they're moving along tickety-boo, and they're going through the short vowels and the long vowels, and they're moving through all the syllable structures. If they're getting that, then you can morph the two together. But if they're not getting that, of course it's going to be fake fluency.

Anna Geiger: More devil's advocate. Someone could say, "Okay, you're teaching phonics over here, but then to say, 'Over here, we're doing something different,' that sounds to me like old balanced literacy where it was, 'I'm teaching you phonics, but now I'm going to give you these leveled books where you can't really use it.'" How would you respond to that?

Martha Kovack: Teaching reading is more than teaching phonics adequately. I would go back to oral language. How about this? How about it helps children with a sense of belonging? I think the difference still is the awareness that we didn't have before about how decoding can be taught so much more effectively and efficiently. That was non-existent, and then you match that with the memorizing and the three-queuing system. That's a disaster. That's harmful.

I think awareness is the only answer here. You have to be a very aware teacher with lots of knowledge about decoding, and then, like yourself, you can build these reading passages that have more to do with fluency and oral language and knowledge. They're based on knowledge and learning about knowledge. I don't know. I don't think there's an easy answer to that.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, it is such a complicated thing to work through. I think it's very hard because we don't want to make the same mistakes we used to make where we thought that these fluency exercises were actually teaching decoding. They can support decoding, but they're not the explicit instruction that students need.

Yet, at the same time, like you said, we don't have to be afraid to tell them something we haven't taught. Some kids will get it when you just tell it to them that one time.

I did a podcast episode a while back with Dr. Chase Young about Reader's Theater, and he had a routine that he does with his second grade. The first day, I can't remember what it was exactly, but I think the first day was you read it to them. The second day, they read it in groups and he's moving around, and if they can't read a word, they circle it. He comes there and explains that this is how you sound out this word. He teaches it to them. It's not guessing. He will help.

Now can all of them read all those words in isolation? No. That's where we get uncomfortable a little bit, trying to figure out exactly where this fits. But I think learning more about the research about Reader's Theater and how that's successful with kids of all different levels, and how it actually does improve comprehension and decoding, even though it's above their independent level. I think it's really important to remember that we're scaffolding. This is not independent work, so that's something else to keep in mind.

For me, I'm still struggling in terms of understanding exactly how it fits in K, 1, and 2, but thank you. This has given me a lot to think about, and I'm going to look into some resources that you share with me later so I can learn more about it.

I think this tension between decodable and nondecodable text is hard to understand exactly how it all fits, but I think we can know that research does not say the only text they should have access to is decodable. It doesn't actually say that. We don't have anything to verify that. So we need to remember the purpose of decodable, and that it is the primary teaching tool, but think about other things with teacher support. We need to keep thinking about that and figuring out how it all fits.

I would love for you to talk a little bit about what you're doing now and what you share. I know you've got your website and then some things that you sell. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Martha Kovack: Yeah, those card games I made back in the late '90s are still kicking around. I tried to shut it down, but the teachers kept asking and asking for them, so I made them again. They're at soundreaders.com. You can find out about that there.

The other thing I have is letsgetreadingright.com. I really like this website because it's just a place where I put everything that I've ever known and all of my favorite things. I put them into this website, letsgetreadingright.com. I do some blogs. There's a resources page. Now for that resources page you have to be on, unfortunately, your laptop or desktop, but if you click there, I have decodable suggestions. You're on there, Anna. I've got lots of resources available there.

One of my favorite things on there right now is if you go to reading programs and you scroll down, you will see a video by Matt Burns, who talks about partner reading. This is also really great. Then Lindsay Kemeny does a video with PaTTAN. She explains... Have you seen it?

Anna Geiger: Yes! I was just talking to some teachers about both of those videos this morning. They're amazing!

Martha Kovack: Well, they're right there. If you want links to them, if you go under resources, letsgetreadingright.program, the two links are there. I just love them because Lindsay Kemeny shows us how to do it. They're finding a lot of success with partner reading, even with text that's nondecodable. We've just got to make sure we're getting decoding right, and then we can just keep open-minded and reduce the tension. I don't feel any tension here with you, even though we don't know what's exactly the right answer, but these are the conversations that need to continue.

Anna Geiger: Well, thank you very much. I'm looking forward to sharing links to your website and your products as well as any articles that we talk about after I turn the recording off. We'll add anything that we can share to help people dig deeper into this themselves.

Martha Kovack: Awesome. Thank you so much for having me! I really, really enjoyed this conversation. I am a big fan of everything you do, Anna, and it's such a pleasure to speak with you today!

Anna Geiger: Thank you! The pleasure was mine.

Well, I hope this episode has given you a lot to think about. I'd love to hear your thoughts. You can leave them in the show notes where you'll find links to the things we discussed today at themeasuredmom.com/episode113.

Talk to you next time!

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Mentioned in this episode

Free Core Knowledge curriculum
Water – poem by Amy Ludwig VanDerwater
Tim Rasinski: The Fluent Reader Part 2 (YouTube)

Martha Kovack’s resources

Structured literacy webinar for the International Dyslexia Association Ontario Branch
Let’s Get Reading Right website
Soundreaders – structured literacy tools for teachers

Get on the waitlist for my course, Teaching Every Reader

Join the waitlist for Teaching Every Reader

The post How to build oral language fluency – with Martha Kovack appeared first on The Measured Mom.

What teachers need to know about DLD – with Martha Kovack

TRT Podcast #112: What teachers need to know about DLD – with Martha Kovack

We talk a lot about dyslexia. But what about DLD? DLD, or developmental language disorder, interferes with learning, understanding, and using oral language at the sentence level. It’s time for teachers to get to know this disorder so they know how to help!

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When I heard Martha Kovack give an incredible presentation on a webinar all about structuring a structured literacy first grade classroom, I knew we had to have her on the podcast, in particular to talk about oral language. As you'll be able to tell, Martha is an expert in many areas, but we haven't talked a lot about oral language on this podcast, in particular, DLD, developmental language disorder.

Dyslexia is a word reading disorder, but DLD is a brain difference that makes talking and listening difficult. According to the DLD and Me website, it affects about two children out of every classroom, so it's really important that we as teachers understand what it is and learn what we can do to help all of our students with oral language.

At the beginning of this episode, Martha shares her background and how she came out of balanced literacy, and then she talks more about DLD and what we can do as teachers to support all of our students.

Welcome, Martha!

Martha Kovack: Thank you!

Anna Geiger: In looking at your bio, it is very long. You've had so much experience in education. Could you talk to us a little bit about how you got into education, how your understandings of how to teach reading have morphed over time, and what you're doing now?

Martha Kovack: Yes. So back in 1990, I just came out of teacher's college where whole language was all the rage, and I started teaching. My first classroom was grade two, and I was so excited about the high quality children's literature, helping children express themselves through their writing, creating themes, engaging children, and just basically making a love of reading. I mean, I spent literally $2,000 that summer - how I did that, I don't know. I was looking out and seeking out the best high quality children's literature I could find. I set up my classroom with language experience charts, calendar routines, journals, pencils, crayons.

I was excited, but within six weeks I knew that something was wrong. I had five out of twenty of my grade two students who still did not have a grasp of the alphabet. So that made me really curious right from the start.

I did what I could. I made up spelling lists because that's what I remember doing when I was little, only my spelling lists were astronaut, space, spaceship, martian - nothing anybody could really decode. I didn't know what decoding was because I just wasn't taught that, and it just was mind-boggling. How on earth do I get these students to read and write? I was not given any information on that.

So I asked about this, and the response I got was really typical, "They'll catch on, don't worry. They'll catch on. The parents don't read to them. The parents don't buy them books. They're stubborn. It's just their personality. They're not trying. They have poor visual memories. They're not developmentally ready." You name it, there was an excuse, but I just couldn't buy those excuses. I didn't see that.

So then my next stage was when I moved to a new school with a new principal who offered us a couple of different programs. She was just a fabulous, organized, progressive principal, and she offered us a systematic and explicit phonics program. That is where I learned the structure of English, that double E says /��/ and EA says /��/. I had just never seen that before.

Then I started teaching my grade one class and by the end that year, over 80% of my students were reading fluently, which was HUGE because it was a very needy, high poverty area, yet I had them reading!

So just like a snowball - when you build a snowball in the perfect snow and then you roll it and you get a success - you just want to keep rolling that snowball. You just want to keep pushing that snowball, making it bigger and bigger. So the more I learned, the more curious I became, and my whole entire career has been about this. I'm curious about how all of this works.

In fact, I then drove myself to the University of Toronto to OISE, to the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, and I went to the library with my little photocopy card, and I found the research myself. I pulled it off, and I photocopied it. I still have it! It was so exciting because it was talking all about phonemic awareness and the structure of spelling patterns, and I was really excited!

As soon as I mentioned anything to do with this, though, there was tension. I couldn't understand the tension. The people were worried that this was going to be boring kids, and this was going to kill their love of reading. We've heard all the stories.

My solution to this tension was to make games. So I made card games in sort of the late 90s, early 2000s, and I thought let's make it playful, and that will solve all the problems. Still, no.

I got really excited! I ended up doing parent workshops, reading buddy programs in schools, I had the older students in grade seven and eight read with the K and ones and do phonemic awareness, I even got a contract to teach all of my kindergarten teachers in my school board about phonemic awareness.

But anytime I mentioned systematic and explicit phonics, that was the end of the conversation. So I knew that I was not going to be successful going back to school. I had to leave the system. So I left and I started tutoring and researching and learning as much as I could.

In fact, that principal who provided us with that program, when I came back from maternity leave, she had been removed from the school and put into a two-room schoolhouse out in the country, and the whole program was dismantled.

Anna Geiger: Oh my goodness. That's very sad.

Martha Kovack: That's how resistant and how much tension there was around all of this at that time.

Anna Geiger: So this was the 90s when this was happening?

Martha Kovack: It was decade number one, that was the 90s for me.

Then balanced literacy sort of started, and I did not notice a change. Balanced literacy came along and it almost fortified the systems against any kind of formal, systematic, and explicit teaching of anything, let alone phonics. Yeah, we do phonics, and we'll do it over here on a worksheet, but then texts that we were giving children to read didn't match up. Three-queuing took hold, and for twenty years, that was that.

If I tried to speak up about the research that I'd read or the experience I had, I was literally put down, humiliated, spoken to with condescension, and definitely ignored.

I just left the system. I left the system, and I thought "I'm going to go where I'm wanted." I started tutoring so that I could practice what I was reading about in the research, and I continued to do parent workshops, and I was making these card games and trying to make it hands on, trying to make it playful, trying to make it fun.

I became an early literacy specialist with the Ontario Earlier System, and I did that for sixteen years. It was here that I learned all about the critical nature of oral language. So this is where I learned about receptive language - taking in information and words, and expressive language - being able to talk and speak, and vocabulary, and background knowledge, and all of those things in the top half of Scarborough's Reading Rope.

I spent my days, for sixteen years, talking to parents and families and working with children directly from birth to age five. I spent a lot of time with birth to age three where oral language begins, and I worked with a lot of speech language pathologists. And so I learned about asking good questions, just getting conversations going, knowing just how critical pretend play is to oral language, because that's how we get children having conversations with each other and learning to initiate conversation. I learned so much over those years.

But anyway, over the years I ended up teaching English language arts. Now I teach English language arts for a community college early childhood education program, and I teach English language arts at university, a university here in Canada, at the teacher's college level.

One of the major assignments I have my students do is three interactive story charts so that they can practice nurturing oral language. The first thing they have to do is locate and understand what high quality children's literature is.

The second thing they have to demonstrate is how to nurture receptive language. So they would learn to do things like use their body language to explain what they're talking about, use eye contact, use sound effects, point to the visuals, point to the pictures. They're really simple things, but things we don't think are that important. You can't just hold up a book and read it and expect children to get it. Just because you've read a book doesn't mean they've taken it in. Just because you've said something to a child doesn't mean they're able to understand what you're saying. So we learn how to use real photos and build background knowledge, and we learn how to relate the story to the children's lives and what's important to them and so on.

And then the third thing is nurturing children's expressive language. Some people do all of that well, body language and enthusiasm in the voice and pointing to the pictures, but we also need children to express themselves through pretend play, using props, by answering questions, by thinking and wondering together. Even leaving off the last words is a way to get them to express themselves.

Children express themselves with their words, and their bodies, and materials. So we have to understand that children express themselves in these three ways, and some children have a very difficult time with oral language.

I learned about something called DLD, developmental language disorder, which incidentally my son has, but I was told he had a specific language impairment, and I was given a 1.5 page report, but it didn't explain what that was or what to do about it other than sit close to the teacher and all the usual things. It was 1.5 pages, but that didn't help me at all.

Just like dyslexia is a brain-based difficulty with reading and spelling at the word level, DLD is a brain-based difficulty with understanding and using language at the sentence or paragraph or story level or discourse.

It's a new term, it just started in 2017, so that's why you haven't heard about it. Up until then it's been called developmental aphasia, dysphasia, specific language impairment, primary language impairment, language impairment, language learning impairment, language disorder, specific learning disorder, developmental delay, speech language impairment, specific learning disability. I mean, it was ridiculous that we had all these different terms and nobody knew what they were!

One of the reasons no one knew about it is that we had too many terms for it. Now, like dyslexia is like an umbrella term, DLD is an umbrella term for all of these struggles with language at the sentence paragraph level.

Think that if you can catch it in the first year or two of life, then you can make a profound difference. In the same way that with dyslexia, if you can catch it in kindergarten, you can make a profound difference to the point where they wouldn't even know. But with DLD, by the time that you reach kindergarten, they've had five years of oral language experiences that have formed their brains. We need more emphasis on that zero to three age range, which is hard because there's no school there to sort of systematically do this. It really depends on families and what's happening with childcare.

It's really complex. It's a little more complex than dyslexia. Dyslexia is reading, spelling, here's the structure of the language, and then it's done, right? There's an end to it. Here's the morphology, here is the Latin, here are the Greek combining forms. Done. Whereas DLD is conversation, it's vocabulary, it's knowledge, it's all of these things that are never done.

Another reason why people haven't heard of it or focused on it is that it's completely hidden. Dyslexia at least shows up in the reading and writing. But with DLD, you could actually be okay with words, reading and spelling at the word level, and still have DLD.

These students talk like this, "Um, like, well, actually, well, sort of like, um, well, okay, actually, right?" They do all of these things.

I have one little guy, he used to say "basically" all the time. "Well, basically, basically, well, basically I think the E, but basically..."

They're not stuttering. Stuttering is different. Stuttering is on the first sound, like "I l-l-l-like..." It is a sign when children are struggling to speak in coherent sentences, gather their thoughts, and put them out together.

It's not that they don't understand the material, it's that they struggle to get it out, to express themselves. And sometimes it IS that they don't understand the material because they need so much repetition. They need us to slow down.

It's full of shame and doubt for these students because they don't understand why they can't say what they know.

I have a little one I'm working with now who knows the vowels, and he knows open and closed syllables, but do you think he could tell me that in his own words? No. All he can do is say "/��/, that says /��/." I know that he knows why because he can demonstrate his knowledge by reading the correct sound, but he cannot formulate sentences that would easily explain what he knows.

It's really, really hard when you have this. 7% of all people have DLD, adults included. One out of ten kids in every class.

The other reason it doesn't get enough traction in the field is because we have things like dyslexia, which is in the realm of education, and then we have ADHD, which is in the realm of medicine. Then when you put those two together, there's something in the middle called DLD, and it sort of falls to both sides. It's a bit educational and it's a bit medical. Do you see? So all of the funding slips through the cracks, and DLD affecting these children has not had as much research.

As a mom, it's heartbreaking because I didn't know any of this, and I see my adult son now, he's doing okay, but I see that any struggles he does have come from this, it's really hard.

Anna Geiger: Well I think you hit the nail on the head when you talked earlier about how with phonics and the structure of language, there's an end point, and I think that's very comforting.

I was just talking to some teachers earlier this morning about how when we have an older reader who's struggling, if we can pin that down, if it's the phonics part, that's a lot easier to remediate than the comprehension, because comprehension is so complex. There's so many things that go into it, and we know that it's something that keeps growing your whole life. It never ends, so it can feel very overwhelming to teachers. They wonder, "What do I do?"

And then, especially when it comes to teaching oral language or including oral language in their classroom, particularly let's say kindergarten through second grade, you might not even know where to start just because it's such a huge thing.

I've looked for books about teaching oral language and there's just really not a lot out there. What would you say would be some good routines that primary teachers should have that will benefit everyone, including kids who have DLD, and just everyone in general, because we know that oral language is so important. It's the top of Scarborough's Rope, the Simple View of Reading, the language comprehension piece has to do with understanding oral language. So how do we even begin?

Forgive me, that's a little bit of an awkward place to stop, but I wanted to break the podcast episode up here because next week we're going to talk a lot more about the practical ways to build oral language and fluency in the primary classroom. So come back next week for that one.

You can find the show notes for this episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode112. See you then!

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Learn more about DLD

DLD and Me website
The DLD Project

Martha Kovack’s resources

Structured literacy webinar for the International Dyslexia Association Ontario Branch
Let’s Get Reading Right website
Soundreaders – structured literacy tools for teachers

Get on the waitlist for my course, Teaching Every Reader

Join the waitlist for Teaching Every Reader

The post What teachers need to know about DLD – with Martha Kovack appeared first on The Measured Mom.

Why teachers need to know about DLD – with Martha Kovack

TRT Podcast #112: What teachers need to know about DLD – with Martha Kovack

We talk a lot about dyslexia. But what about DLD? DLD, or developmental language disorder, interferes with learning, understanding, and using oral language at the sentence level. It’s time for teachers to get to know this disorder so they know how to help!

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When I heard Martha Kovack give an incredible presentation on a webinar all about structuring a structured literacy first grade classroom, I knew we had to have her on the podcast, in particular to talk about oral language. As you'll be able to tell, Martha is an expert in many areas, but we haven't talked a lot about oral language on this podcast, in particular, DLD, developmental language disorder.

Dyslexia is a word reading disorder, but DLD is a brain difference that makes talking and listening difficult. According to the DLD and Me website, it affects about two children out of every classroom, so it's really important that we as teachers understand what it is and learn what we can do to help all of our students with oral language.

At the beginning of this episode, Martha shares her background and how she came out of balanced literacy, and then she talks more about DLD and what we can do as teachers to support all of our students.

Welcome, Martha!

Martha Kovack: Thank you!

Anna Geiger: In looking at your bio, it is very long. You've had so much experience in education. Could you talk to us a little bit about how you got into education, how your understandings of how to teach reading have morphed over time, and what you're doing now?

Martha Kovack: Yes. So back in 1990, I just came out of teacher's college where whole language was all the rage, and I started teaching. My first classroom was grade two, and I was so excited about the high quality children's literature, helping children express themselves through their writing, creating themes, engaging children, and just basically making a love of reading. I mean, I spent literally $2,000 that summer - how I did that, I don't know. I was looking out and seeking out the best high quality children's literature I could find. I set up my classroom with language experience charts, calendar routines, journals, pencils, crayons.

I was excited, but within six weeks I knew that something was wrong. I had five out of twenty of my grade two students who still did not have a grasp of the alphabet. So that made me really curious right from the start.

I did what I could. I made up spelling lists because that's what I remember doing when I was little, only my spelling lists were astronaut, space, spaceship, martian - nothing anybody could really decode. I didn't know what decoding was because I just wasn't taught that, and it just was mind-boggling. How on earth do I get these students to read and write? I was not given any information on that.

So I asked about this, and the response I got was really typical, "They'll catch on, don't worry. They'll catch on. The parents don't read to them. The parents don't buy them books. They're stubborn. It's just their personality. They're not trying. They have poor visual memories. They're not developmentally ready." You name it, there was an excuse, but I just couldn't buy those excuses. I didn't see that.

So then my next stage was when I moved to a new school with a new principal who offered us a couple of different programs. She was just a fabulous, organized, progressive principal, and she offered us a systematic and explicit phonics program. That is where I learned the structure of English, that double E says /��/ and EA says /��/. I had just never seen that before.

Then I started teaching my grade one class and by the end that year, over 80% of my students were reading fluently, which was HUGE because it was a very needy, high poverty area, yet I had them reading!

So just like a snowball - when you build a snowball in the perfect snow and then you roll it and you get a success - you just want to keep rolling that snowball. You just want to keep pushing that snowball, making it bigger and bigger. So the more I learned, the more curious I became, and my whole entire career has been about this. I'm curious about how all of this works.

In fact, I then drove myself to the University of Toronto to OISE, to the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, and I went to the library with my little photocopy card, and I found the research myself. I pulled it off, and I photocopied it. I still have it! It was so exciting because it was talking all about phonemic awareness and the structure of spelling patterns, and I was really excited!

As soon as I mentioned anything to do with this, though, there was tension. I couldn't understand the tension. The people were worried that this was going to be boring kids, and this was going to kill their love of reading. We've heard all the stories.

My solution to this tension was to make games. So I made card games in sort of the late 90s, early 2000s, and I thought let's make it playful, and that will solve all the problems. Still, no.

I got really excited! I ended up doing parent workshops, reading buddy programs in schools, I had the older students in grade seven and eight read with the K and ones and do phonemic awareness, I even got a contract to teach all of my kindergarten teachers in my school board about phonemic awareness.

But anytime I mentioned systematic and explicit phonics, that was the end of the conversation. So I knew that I was not going to be successful going back to school. I had to leave the system. So I left and I started tutoring and researching and learning as much as I could.

In fact, that principal who provided us with that program, when I came back from maternity leave, she had been removed from the school and put into a two-room schoolhouse out in the country, and the whole program was dismantled.

Anna Geiger: Oh my goodness. That's very sad.

Martha Kovack: That's how resistant and how much tension there was around all of this at that time.

Anna Geiger: So this was the 90s when this was happening?

Martha Kovack: It was decade number one, that was the 90s for me.

Then balanced literacy sort of started, and I did not notice a change. Balanced literacy came along and it almost fortified the systems against any kind of formal, systematic, and explicit teaching of anything, let alone phonics. Yeah, we do phonics, and we'll do it over here on a worksheet, but then texts that we were giving children to read didn't match up. Three-queuing took hold, and for twenty years, that was that.

If I tried to speak up about the research that I'd read or the experience I had, I was literally put down, humiliated, spoken to with condescension, and definitely ignored.

I just left the system. I left the system, and I thought "I'm going to go where I'm wanted." I started tutoring so that I could practice what I was reading about in the research, and I continued to do parent workshops, and I was making these card games and trying to make it hands on, trying to make it playful, trying to make it fun.

I became an early literacy specialist with the Ontario Earlier System, and I did that for sixteen years. It was here that I learned all about the critical nature of oral language. So this is where I learned about receptive language - taking in information and words, and expressive language - being able to talk and speak, and vocabulary, and background knowledge, and all of those things in the top half of Scarborough's Reading Rope.

I spent my days, for sixteen years, talking to parents and families and working with children directly from birth to age five. I spent a lot of time with birth to age three where oral language begins, and I worked with a lot of speech language pathologists. And so I learned about asking good questions, just getting conversations going, knowing just how critical pretend play is to oral language, because that's how we get children having conversations with each other and learning to initiate conversation. I learned so much over those years.

But anyway, over the years I ended up teaching English language arts. Now I teach English language arts for a community college early childhood education program, and I teach English language arts at university, a university here in Canada, at the teacher's college level.

One of the major assignments I have my students do is three interactive story charts so that they can practice nurturing oral language. The first thing they have to do is locate and understand what high quality children's literature is.

The second thing they have to demonstrate is how to nurture receptive language. So they would learn to do things like use their body language to explain what they're talking about, use eye contact, use sound effects, point to the visuals, point to the pictures. They're really simple things, but things we don't think are that important. You can't just hold up a book and read it and expect children to get it. Just because you've read a book doesn't mean they've taken it in. Just because you've said something to a child doesn't mean they're able to understand what you're saying. So we learn how to use real photos and build background knowledge, and we learn how to relate the story to the children's lives and what's important to them and so on.

And then the third thing is nurturing children's expressive language. Some people do all of that well, body language and enthusiasm in the voice and pointing to the pictures, but we also need children to express themselves through pretend play, using props, by answering questions, by thinking and wondering together. Even leaving off the last words is a way to get them to express themselves.

Children express themselves with their words, and their bodies, and materials. So we have to understand that children express themselves in these three ways, and some children have a very difficult time with oral language.

I learned about something called DLD, developmental language disorder, which incidentally my son has, but I was told he had a specific language impairment, and I was given a 1.5 page report, but it didn't explain what that was or what to do about it other than sit close to the teacher and all the usual things. It was 1.5 pages, but that didn't help me at all.

Just like dyslexia is a brain-based difficulty with reading and spelling at the word level, DLD is a brain-based difficulty with understanding and using language at the sentence or paragraph or story level or discourse.

It's a new term, it just started in 2017, so that's why you haven't heard about it. Up until then it's been called developmental aphasia, dysphasia, specific language impairment, primary language impairment, language impairment, language learning impairment, language disorder, specific learning disorder, developmental delay, speech language impairment, specific learning disability. I mean, it was ridiculous that we had all these different terms and nobody knew what they were!

One of the reasons no one knew about it is that we had too many terms for it. Now, like dyslexia is like an umbrella term, DLD is an umbrella term for all of these struggles with language at the sentence paragraph level.

Think that if you can catch it in the first year or two of life, then you can make a profound difference. In the same way that with dyslexia, if you can catch it in kindergarten, you can make a profound difference to the point where they wouldn't even know. But with DLD, by the time that you reach kindergarten, they've had five years of oral language experiences that have formed their brains. We need more emphasis on that zero to three age range, which is hard because there's no school there to sort of systematically do this. It really depends on families and what's happening with childcare.

It's really complex. It's a little more complex than dyslexia. Dyslexia is reading, spelling, here's the structure of the language, and then it's done, right? There's an end to it. Here's the morphology, here is the Latin, here are the Greek combining forms. Done. Whereas DLD is conversation, it's vocabulary, it's knowledge, it's all of these things that are never done.

Another reason why people haven't heard of it or focused on it is that it's completely hidden. Dyslexia at least shows up in the reading and writing. But with DLD, you could actually be okay with words, reading and spelling at the word level, and still have DLD.

These students talk like this, "Um, like, well, actually, well, sort of like, um, well, okay, actually, right?" They do all of these things.

I have one little guy, he used to say "basically" all the time. "Well, basically, basically, well, basically I think the E, but basically..."

They're not stuttering. Stuttering is different. Stuttering is on the first sound, like "I l-l-l-like..." It is a sign when children are struggling to speak in coherent sentences, gather their thoughts, and put them out together.

It's not that they don't understand the material, it's that they struggle to get it out, to express themselves. And sometimes it IS that they don't understand the material because they need so much repetition. They need us to slow down.

It's full of shame and doubt for these students because they don't understand why they can't say what they know.

I have a little one I'm working with now who knows the vowels, and he knows open and closed syllables, but do you think he could tell me that in his own words? No. All he can do is say "/��/, that says /��/." I know that he knows why because he can demonstrate his knowledge by reading the correct sound, but he cannot formulate sentences that would easily explain what he knows.

It's really, really hard when you have this. 7% of all people have DLD, adults included. One out of ten kids in every class.

The other reason it doesn't get enough traction in the field is because we have things like dyslexia, which is in the realm of education, and then we have ADHD, which is in the realm of medicine. Then when you put those two together, there's something in the middle called DLD, and it sort of falls to both sides. It's a bit educational and it's a bit medical. Do you see? So all of the funding slips through the cracks, and DLD affecting these children has not had as much research.

As a mom, it's heartbreaking because I didn't know any of this, and I see my adult son now, he's doing okay, but I see that any struggles he does have come from this, it's really hard.

Anna Geiger: Well I think you hit the nail on the head when you talked earlier about how with phonics and the structure of language, there's an end point, and I think that's very comforting.

I was just talking to some teachers earlier this morning about how when we have an older reader who's struggling, if we can pin that down, if it's the phonics part, that's a lot easier to remediate than the comprehension, because comprehension is so complex. There's so many things that go into it, and we know that it's something that keeps growing your whole life. It never ends, so it can feel very overwhelming to teachers. They wonder, "What do I do?"

And then, especially when it comes to teaching oral language or including oral language in their classroom, particularly let's say kindergarten through second grade, you might not even know where to start just because it's such a huge thing.

I've looked for books about teaching oral language and there's just really not a lot out there. What would you say would be some good routines that primary teachers should have that will benefit everyone, including kids who have DLD, and just everyone in general, because we know that oral language is so important. It's the top of Scarborough's Rope, the Simple View of Reading, the language comprehension piece has to do with understanding oral language. So how do we even begin?

Forgive me, that's a little bit of an awkward place to stop, but I wanted to break the podcast episode up here because next week we're going to talk a lot more about the practical ways to build oral language and fluency in the primary classroom. So come back next week for that one.

You can find the show notes for this episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode112. See you then!

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Sign up to receive email updates

Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast.

powered by






Learn more about DLD

DLD and Me website
The DLD Project

Martha Kovack’s resources

Structured literacy webinar for the International Dyslexia Association Ontario Branch
Let’s Get Reading Right website
Soundreaders – structured literacy tools for teachers

Get on the waitlist for my course, Teaching Every Reader

Join the waitlist for Teaching Every Reader

The post Why teachers need to know about DLD – with Martha Kovack appeared first on The Measured Mom.

My response to Jan Richardson and Michele Dufresne, Part 3

��
TRT Podcast #111: My response to Jan Richardson & Michele Dufresne, Part 3

111: Jan Richardson is still defending three-cueing. Here’s my response.

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Hello, Anna Geiger here. Today in Episode 111, I'm responding to Jan Richardson and Mich��le Dufresne. They recently shared a webinar called Getting the Facts Straight on Guided Reading. Buckle up because this week, the first thing we're going to do is listen to Jan Richardson's defense of three-cueing.

Dr. Jan Richardson: So now I get to talk about the sources of information, and some of you have probably heard the term three-cueing systems. Now this is a tricky topic to explain because instructional practice has basically twisted it out of shape.

First of all, the three-cueing system is not a program for teaching reading. MSV is a simplified theory of the complex process of reading. In Reading Recovery circles, meaning, structure, and visual are better described as sources of information that students use when they try to figure out an unknown word in connected text.

On page 13 of the Science of Reading: Defining Guide, it says, "In recent years, our knowledge of how the brain acquires the skill of reading has evolved. We now have a deeper understanding of how the brain processes multiple sources of information while reading."

Anna Geiger: She says, "It's not a program." People who are criticizing three-cueing do not think it's a program. We know that it's exactly what she just said it was - when kids are using multiple sources of information to land on a word.

And nice try quoting from the page in the Reading League's Science of Reading: Defining Guide. Her quote is actually from the page about how reading is processed in the brain, so she's taken it out of context. She didn't bother reading the quote on page 22, which says, "Examples of instructional practices not supported by scientific evidence: implicit and incidental instruction in word reading, visual memorization of whole words, guessing from context, and picture cues.

Dr. Jan Richardson: So what's the problem? I wish we could just end the conversation here and go home, but the cueing systems have been attacked and even banned, not because anyone disagrees that students need to use these multiple sources of information, but because of misinformation and misunderstandings.

Anna Geiger: Hang on a second. We know that students use multiple sources of information to check their reading, right? If you read it and it didn't sound right or didn't make sense, you'll go back and fix it, but that's not how we IDENTIFY the word. We identify the word by actually reading it - looking at the word, sounding it out. She's being very tricky here.

Dr. Jan Richardson: See, these three points on this slide is why the MSV is under fire. I'm going to explain about the misinformation of the V, and about how the teachers are misunderstanding how to use MSV, and then the confusion that has aroused about the guessing versus the processing.

So a few months ago, actually it was last month, I watched a recording of the Virginia Education Summit and during the meeting, a senior policy fellow was asked to enlighten the group on MSV. Now, this first quote is what she actually said. I transcribed it for you. She said, "Children are being asked to rely on visual cues, to look at the picture to determine what the word is." She continued by saying, "None of the cueing systems require students to look at the word and decode it."

Now my friends, that is just flat out wrong. That is not true, but unfortunately, this is a common misunderstanding among science of reading cognitive psychologists. Just yesterday, I received an email from an expert, a science of reading expert who I respect, but she said, "With MSV, children are encouraged to use those three cues as the way to recognize a word without decoding it. They are taught to guess at the word based on its possible meaning."

If that's what people think V is, no wonder some departments of education are banning reading programs that mention MSV. They don't understand that the V is about decoding the word. I wish we could rename the acronym from MSV to MSP where the P is representing phonics. That would be a much more accurate description.

But another confusion is about the meaning. So a lot of people think the meaning is just about the meaning of the word, and that's incorrect as well. Meaning includes the knowledge of the word, your sentence structure, and the context of the word in the sentence. Children naturally bring meaning to the process of reading text. This component, though, this meaning, isn't relevant if the children are reading nonsense words or if they are reading just a list of words.

So this is just to clarify that the visual is letters and sounds. It is phonics, it is decoding. Meaning is context of the sentence of the story, and the structure is, of course, the grammatical feature of a word that's in the sentence.

Anna Geiger: Okay. So first of all, when I was the balanced literacy teacher, I had no confusion about what the V meant. I knew that it meant I was supposed to use phonics to some extent. However, the professional reading that I did from Regie Routman and Lucy Calkins, Fountas and Pinnell, and others like them, did not elevate the visual cue. In fact, sometimes I read that I should use it as a last resort; sound it out was a last resort because it took the focus away from meaning.

I don't like it that she starts this with some misunderstandings by a speaker at an event. I don't think that's representative of most teachers. I don't know for sure, but that seems to be a stretch for me.

Dr. Jan Richardson: So, what's my point? My point is that I think there's this misunderstanding that the visual is the picture. It's not the picture. The visual is all these things that are listed on this slide, and we need to help them get the facts straight.

Anna Geiger: Again, I really don't think this is the issue. I don't think people think that visual stands for picture. I think they know it stands for looking at the letters and sounding out the word. The issue is that we're also combining these other cues when really, we only need one to identify a word. Can we use other clues to confirm a word? Yes, but it's not how we read a word.

Dr. Jan Richardson: Multiple sources of information a child uses to decode unknown words and construct meaning; they're sources of information. And that MSV is grounded in an integrated, theoretical model of reading derived from observational and experimental research. And teachers, please, do not ever prompt a student to guess at the word.

Anna Geiger: You notice that she mentions observational research? I really think that's where three-cueing came from; watching people read. It looks like that's what they're doing, but now we know that that's not how we read words. It's not how efficient readers read words.

I really don't like it when people defend their program by saying that "research says" without putting any research up on the screen. It wouldn't be hard. If she really believes research proves that three-cueing is what we're supposed to be doing, she should pop up some studies right there, but there's nothing.

Her next slide tells that we should prompt readers for visual information, then meaning, then structure. In other words, have them sound out first. That's all well and good, but when you give them these books where they can't sound out the word, I'm not sure how that's going to work.

She says, "Avoid patterned text once kids know letters and sounds." Yeah. That's what they say, that's not what they do.

She says, "Teach emergent readers to crosscheck. Teach early readers to attend to every letter." It's just not true when they talk about in their material how you're supposed to cover the picture so that they look at the word and then try to read it, but then if they can't get it, then look at the picture. How are they attending to every letter? It just doesn't add up.

Here's a little video where she's teaching students who are reading a Level B text. Remember what they said about Level B and Level A? You move out of those when kids know letters and sounds. That's really important to remember. So, here you go.

Dr. Jan Richardson: I'm going to show you just a quick little video, less than a minute, of an activity that I do. I did it today. Actually, I did it several times today in kindergarten classrooms. That demonstrates, it's explicit modeling, of what crosschecking looks like for these kids that are reading actually at a Level B.

Children: Look at me. I am jumping.

Dr. Jan Richardson: Jumping. Are you right?

Children: Yeah.

Dr. Jan Richardson: Yes. Very good! Let's try this page, boys and girls.

Children: Look at me. I am walking.

Dr. Jan Richardson: You're walking. Now, let's do one more. Boy, you guys are really good at this. Okay.

Children: Look at me. I am sitting.

Dr. Jan Richardson: Sitting or swimming? What do you think?

Children: Sitting.

Dr. Jan Richardson: How do you know?

Boy: Because it doesn't have a W.

Dr. Jan Richardson: Wow, you are so smart! Very good.

Girl: It's because it swimmING, but it's doesn't have ING in it.

Dr. Jan Richardson: It does have an ING, let me show you. There's your ING part. So, every one of these words has an ING at the end of it, doesn't it?

Boy: 'Cause it's an action.

Dr. Jan Richardson: It is an action.

Anna Geiger: Okay. They said kids should not be using Level A and B if they know letters and sounds. That one very smart little boy knew that sitting could not be swimming because it's missing the W. Hello! He knows a lot about letters and sounds. Why is he not reading decodable books? And then you have that little girl who's really confused and who doesn't think the word has I-N-G. So, what is she really learning from this? This just seems very messed up to me.

I should note that after that lesson, she teaches them about I-N-G very quickly. We're talking maybe fifteen seconds, kind of as an afterthought, because that little girl got confused. But clearly, they're not following a scope and sequence for teaching their phonics skills, and they're not teaching in a systematic way.

Dr. Jan Richardson: Now in the last couple slides, I just have a couple prompts that will help you guide children so that they're not guessing.

If they do say a response that's not correct, you cannot let it go. You have to provide corrective feedback, but you don't want to tell them the word. If you tell them the word, you're actually making it harder for children to read the next word.

And then the other one, my go-to strategy, is always check the word. That means I'm making sure that they are using the letters and sounds.

Just yesterday, I watched a first grade classroom and two girls came to the word wants. Both girls sounded it out with the short A, /w/ /��/ /n/ /t/ /s/, and I'm thinking to myself, "There is no way they're going to get that." One of the girls self-corrected, one of them did not.

You see, that's the role meaning has to play. When we try to reduce reading to a merely sounding out letter by letter, not prompting kids to use the meaning of the passage and think about what would make sense, we're actually making it harder for children to learn.

Anna Geiger: That example she gave there with the two girls who were reading and they sounded out wants as /w/ /��/ /n/ /t/ /s/, and then one of them corrected it, that's exactly what we want kids to do in, quote, "the science of reading." Though that's not really the correct use of the term because as we know, the science of reading is a body of research.

It's called set for variability, where you read and then you realize it doesn't quite sound right, that's not how we say it. Then she fixed it, and sure, she used context to do that. That's great! If you know anything about the four-part processor by Seidenberg and McClelland, we know that we use these different processing systems, but that's not how we read a word. We read a word by decoding it and then we can check it.

But I think she's conveniently leaving out the fact that in many, many, many, many, many classrooms, because we've been taught to do this, we teach students to "read" the word by using context. It's very different than correcting it based on context.

In the next section, Dr. Richardson shares some of the phonics activities they do during their word study, which is part of their guided reading lessons. I don't see anything problematic with those. I think it just feels like an add-on, and that's the problem. It really should be what you start with, and then you can apply it in your reading. They've got it backwards because it's tacked onto the end of their lesson.

I think that these great activities that they have included can be confusing for people and they think, "Well, this must be the right program."

You need to make sure that the people whose programs you're buying have the big picture correct. Do they understand how students read words? Do they understand orthographic mapping or just use the phrase? Do they understand that three-cueing is not how we read words? Do they understand how best to teach high frequency words rather than memorizing sight words? I think that's what you really need to look at when choosing a program. Can you trust these authors?

We're going to continue on with the conclusion here, where Dr. Dufresne shares some general thoughts about research.

Dr. Jan Richardson: I hope what we send you away with today is really examining the science of reading, and when we claim something is settled science, we need to look and see if the study is referenced. Some of the stuff that I've been reading, when I try and find the reference to it, it's really almost like a circular thing. It's some other person that said this, that said there was research on this, but I can't find actually the research to read that shows that this is the settled science.

So we want to be asking, has the study been peer-reviewed and published? Was it just some little study of three kids somewhere that doesn't have any kind of peer review? Have the claims been over-generalized? Sometimes they will say things like, "95% of the children will be successful with this." Well, what's the evidence for that? Are there studies that dispute the results?

Recently there's been a lot about Reading Recovery, and one study showed some slight difference from massive amounts of other studies. We really want to make sure that we're really looking at all of the studies.

And really, do the results include the population you are teaching? We've seen some stuff that uses research on how adults decode words and it's being transferred to how we should be teaching emergent readers. We need to make sure that what we're looking at really makes sense for the population that we're teaching.

Unfortunately, I know we're all busy, we're in our classrooms, we're teaching. We say, "We don't have time to read the research," but our kids are really worth it. We need to make sure that we don't have a journalist that doesn't have the background, or sometimes it's legislators that are making decisions for what you're going to teach. We have to be aware of the research, and we have to be asking for it and looking for it and demanding that our administrators are really looking at the research.

There's a lot being said about what the National Panel had, and this was a very comprehensive look at certain amounts of research that was out there, and of course, it's pretty old right now. But I've seen things being said that the report said that it actually doesn't say.

So here's a few things. "Systematic phonics instruction should be integrated with other reading instruction to create a balanced reading program." That's what the National Panel found from looking at all the research.

"Phonics instruction is never a total reading program. Phonics should not become the dominant component in a reading program, neither in the amount of time devoted to it, nor in the significance that is attached to it." This is right in the National Panel, from looking at all this experimental research that was done.

And very little research has attempted to determine the contribution of decodable books to the effectiveness of phonics instruction. So there's a lot of people that are demanding that we use only decodable text. Ask them for the research. Ask them for the research because we need to make sure that we're doing the best kind of teaching that we can and not being swayed by people that sometimes have different agendas than what's best for our kids.

Anna Geiger: Okay. There's a lot to unpack there. I think when she talks about her basic caveats for looking at research, I think a lot of that is very worth looking at. When she talks about the National Reading Panel and some things that were shared there, yes, the National Reading Panel does say that phonics instruction is never a total reading program, but guess what? That's not what science of reading advocates are saying.

We're saying that phonics is important for the word recognition strand of Scarborough's Reading Rope, for the word recognition domain of The Simple View of Reading, and that we can't try to bypass that by having kids use context to identify words. We are certainly also advocating the teaching of vocabulary and the building of fluency and comprehension.

Phonics should not become the dominant component in a reading program? I think we have to think about what kids need when they need it. When kids are first learning to read, they have to learn the code, so yes, they need a lot of phonics. Is that going to be the main thing for all their years through school? Definitely not. It's a focus at the very beginning, and as they get proficient, then their cognitive load is freed up and they can focus on other things; more specifically, comprehending the text they're reading. But automaticity has to occur first, and we can't get there without attention to phonics. A lot of attention to phonics.

She talks about very little research determined the contributions of decodable books. That is absolutely true; however, we recommend the use of decodables based on research that shows us how kids learn to read words. If she's going to go ahead on that line and tell people to show the research, I would like to see her research that says that leveled books are best for beginning readers or even that a combination is best, because I don't know of any of that research either.

My final response to this webinar is that there are some things that are true, and there are some things that are meant to distract you from the big issues. There is a false representation of what people in the science of reading community are saying. I think this webinar is unfortunate because it confuses people and makes them believe that these authors really are in line with the science of reading, when, in my opinion, it looks like they're just trying to defend what they've always done.

Those are my thoughts. If you'd like to share yours, please leave them in the show notes for this episode, themeasuredmom.com/111. We'll be back next week for something different. I'll see you then!

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This episode is in response to:

Getting the Facts Straight on Guided Reading , with Jan Richardson & Michele Dufresne

Research

The Simple View of Reading , by Wesley Hoover & Philip Gough
Orthographic Mapping in the Acquisition of Sight Word Reading, Spelling Memory, and Vocabulary Learning , by Linnea Ehri
Systematic Phonics Instruction Helps Children Learn to Read: Evidence from the National Reading Panel’s Meta-Analysis , by Linnea Ehri, Simon Nunes, Steven Stahl, & Dale Willows

Get on the waitlist for my course, Teaching Every Reader

Join the waitlist for Teaching Every Reader

The post My response to Jan Richardson and Michele Dufresne, Part 3 appeared first on The Measured Mom.

My response to Jan Richardson & Michele Dufresne, Part 2

 
TRT Podcast #110: My response to Jan Richardson & Michele Dufresne, Part 2

In this episode, I respond to Michele Dufresne’s defense of using leveled A and B texts in guided reading lessons.

 

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Hello, Anna Geiger here from The Measured Mom. This week we're going to continue a reaction that I started last week to a webinar given by Pioneer Valley Books with Dr. Jan Richardson and Dr. Michèle Dufresne, who are both very big in the guided reading world.

The point of their webinar was basically to refute what they feel are incorrect beliefs or assumptions about guided reading and how they want to show that guided reading really does align with the research.

Today, we're going to start with a quote that Dr. Dufresne shares from Marie Clay. Now I really would like to dig up this quote myself to see the context to see if there's any kind of referencing of research, but I'm not sure where it comes from. It says "BL page 197." So if you have any insight into where that is from, go ahead and leave a comment on the show notes.

I do want to say that Marie Clay is a bit concerning when it comes to quoting from her for supporting what you're doing. As you may know, Marie Clay created Reading Recovery, which is concerning for a lot of reasons. I know a lot of people really love it, especially Reading Recovery teachers, but there's concern about the use of leveled text and three-cueing within Reading Recovery.

I'm not going to open that can of worms here, but I just want to put this a little bit into perspective about who Marie Clay is. My understanding of Marie Clay is that she came up with a lot of her theories based on observation. As we know now, because reading is so complex, that's not a good way to draw conclusions about how reading works or how best to teach it. I just wanted to put that in there real quick. Let's go ahead and listen to the quote.

Dr. Michèle Dufresne: ..actually telling us that it is not a bad thing to use both kinds of text. She says,

"Changing a child from one type of text to another, natural language story to a contrived text with regular phoneme-grapheme relationships, will force the child to attend to new features previously neglected. This could make the child's reading more flexible for, according to Bruner's argument, such changes might stimulate the child to formulate more generic rules about the nature of written language."

So Jan and I are very comfortable with the idea of moving back and forth between some decodable text and some more natural language written leveled text to support building a good strong processing system.

Anna Geiger: Okay, let's unpack that. The quote from Dr. Marie Clay, which as I said is really not where I would go to get research-based opinions, but regardless, the quote says that switching a child from one type of text to another will force that child to attend to new features previously neglected.

I don't really know what that means. I really don't. I don't know what that means unless you believe in three-cueing, where you're supposed to use different types of cues to "solve words," context, cues from syntax, cues from phonics. Really what they need to be doing is sounding out the word.

Mark Seidenberg has said something famous recently in a response to Fountas and Pinnell. He said, "The only cue to a word is the word itself."

I don't understand why switching between different kinds of texts is going to be important. As long as you're using quality decodable texts that actually make sense, that's all you need for beginning readers. Is that what they should be using forever? No. But when they're first learning the code, that's the kind of text they need.

If you're switching back and forth, you're confusing children because with this one book you're saying, "You need to sound out these words to read them," and in this book you're saying, "Well, think about what I talked to you about before we read, or think about what's in the picture, or use just the first letter in the picture, or what would make sense." That's confusing. We need to be consistent when we teach them how to read.

After this endorsement for using a combination of decodable and leveled text, Dr. Dufresne goes on to share their decodable books. They're certainly very beautiful. I'm guessing a lot of them are good. There may be a higher percentage of non-decodable words than some of us would prefer, but I have no reason not to think that those are good enough decodable books.

Here's what gets me though, and maybe it gets you too. It really frustrates me when people seem to be getting on board with the science of reading, at least in some areas, but they don't acknowledge that they had it wrong before. They're making it sound like they've always been believers in a combination of leveled and decodable books. But if you go to Pioneer Valley Books, which publishes Dr. Dufresne's books (possibly she publishes elsewhere too), but from what I'm looking at there, they've got complete sets of guided reading books for all the levels but have just started their phonics decodable books section, and I know that because they're still publishing the next set. You can pre-order it. It's not complete. And yet they had all that time to create the full set of leveled books?

I don't know for sure, but my guess is that both of these ladies have promoted the use of leveled books to the exclusion of decodable books and now are trying to get on the train because they know this is what people are talking about and they want to keep selling. Now that's my personal opinion. I don't want to make judgements, but that is the impression that I get. I wish they could just be more honest and clear and say, "Hey, we had this wrong in the past, but now we know that decodable books have their place too."

Dr. Michèle Dufresne: All right. Level A and B books I think are causing a lot of trouble out there. We really need to help everybody understand why we use them, what their purpose is, and we also need to make sure that we don't use them too long.

Here's an example of a Level A, Dad is Driving. In this story it's very patterned, "Dad is driving. Dad is cooking," and so on, and then this little Bella story, "Look at me. I am running. Look at me. I am sitting." Again, these are patterned text.

Why are we using them? Is this kind of text teaching kids to look at the picture and guess what the word is? No, that's not their purpose.

Let's call them our pre-decodable books because these children that have come to school, they bring their experiences hopefully with storybooks. They understand that storybooks should be meaningful, and they also bring their oral language. Most of these kids do not come in knowing their letters and sounds. Now you may have some, but a lot of these children may only know some letters in their name or a few random letters and a few random sounds. We need these books to help children learn concepts of print, what direction does print go in, how to match your finger up to the print. These little books help them see the repetition of high frequency words.

Don't use a Level A or B book that doesn't have a useful high frequency word. I see them out there. There's no reason. They're cute, but don't use them unless they have a good high frequency word that you want your kids to be seeing.

These books expose children to simple English sentence structures that are going to be more and more complex as they move up the levels, and we have a lot of children that are just learning English that come into our kindergartens. These really can be helpful for those students. They support oral language. They expand vocabulary.

The other thing that they do is they help children crosscheck known letters and meaning. As they're just learning their consonant sounds, they use that initial letter and the picture and they're checking one against the other. They're understanding. They're learning that there is a relationship between the letter that's on the page and the picture, which is helping them understand. It's not just a random thing. It's not something you're just guessing at, but we need to do that explicit teaching.

Anna Geiger: Oh boy! I feel like this is just trying to save all those beautiful Level A and B books that have been written and published, like an excuse for keeping them around. Yes, children come to school not knowing letters and sounds, so guess what? We should spend our time teaching them their letters and sounds instead of wasting time in these little books that are teaching bad habits.

Now, if you want to teach concepts of print, do that. Do that as a whole class activity or a small group activity with a shared text, but don't give them these little books and tell them they're reading. They're not reading. It's confusing.

For many kids, trying to figure out words by using pictures, which I know people hate to hear it, but yes, that is guessing. If you can't know for sure because you can't sound it out, you are guessing. Many kids are going to hold onto that habit because it's easier than attending to all the letters in a word. It's much easier.

Yes, teaching concepts of print, oral language, yes, all important, but we don't have to do that with these expensive little books that also teach bad habits. We need to find a different way to teach concepts of print that does not involve teaching kids to use three-cueing, which is exactly what these little books do.

One more thing, she talked a lot about using these books with high frequency words to help kids get exposure to those words over and over. If you've done some study into the science of reading, you know that simply seeing the words over and over is not what teaches us to read them. It's actually sounding them out. We want to teach high frequency words in the context of phonics lessons. When we do teach irregular words, we can explicitly look at those letters and talk about the sounds they represent, not just see them over and over in a book. Will some kids memorize words that way? Yes, but memorizing words is not a good long-term strategy.

Dr. Michèle Dufresne: When should you move students beyond Level A and B? When they have voice-print match. That's an important skill that they pick up. They should pick it up very quickly at Level A and B. You want them to have a small core of sight words, these words that become little islands of certainty for them as they read, the, my, is, like, see, can. Jan and I both have a list of words that we think are really useful. Choose Level A books that have those words. Make sure they see them in multiple different books. Help them learn them so that you can move out of this patterned text.

The other thing that you want to be looking for is some letter and sound recognition. You really can't move into Level C if they don't have some letters and sounds under their belt, but what Jan and I both see over and over again is places where teachers are keeping children at these levels too long. You do not need perfection. You really need to get them into that Level C, because I think some of this criticism is coming from months and months at Level A and B.

If you're a kindergarten teacher out there and you still have children at Level A and B at this point of the year, ask some people to help you. Think about how to get the children out of those levels. Ask your reading specialists to come in and look at those children. They really should not spend the whole first half of kindergarten there. We really want to move them into those Level Cs and Ds. There are some easy Cs. Look for the little places where they can just jump up a little bit and give them a little more support during your guided reading lessons to try and move them out of this really highly repetitive text.

Anna Geiger: I think the best way for me to respond to this is to read for you what Jan Richardson wrote in her book, The Next Step Forward in Guided Reading for the Early Reading Levels, she actually calls it A, B, and C. For these early levels, she says that "kids should be able to match one-to-one, go left to right, discuss a story with teacher prompting, and read and write about thirty sight words."

Read and write about thirty sight words as they're still learning the alphabet? That really doesn't make any sense to me at all.

I find this very interesting too. It says, "Once children recognize the sentence structure in the story, they might read the entire text accurately, but not really attend to the print."

Then they're not reading! They're not reading if they're not looking at the words.

I'm looking at the back of Jan Richardson's book and she has charts - sight word charts - for monitoring progress. Let's take a look at the words that students are expected to know for Level A: am, at, can, go, is, like, me, see, the, to. Then in level B we're going on to: dad, he, in, it, look, mom, my, on, up, we.

Why are we putting so many decodable words into a sight word list that kids have to memorize? Am, at, can, dad, mom, on, up, those are words that we just sound out. There's a lot of confusion here about what it means to bring kids to automaticity with words.

If you go on to Level C, there are, again, more words that are simply decodable. You can just teach them within your phonics lessons.

Now I've said before, I do believe it's useful to have kids memorize a very small set of words at the beginning, such as the word "the" so they can read decodable books. But that's all. That's the only purpose. This long list of "sight words" is definitely concerning.

The book goes on to explain how to choose a text for your emergent readers. You want to choose a text that matches your focus, which could be, as they write, identifying sight words, matching one-to-one, using meaning, using first letters and crosschecking.

Now matching one-to-one, making sure what you read makes sense, those are important things to teach, but we don't have to do that with these little books that will also simultaneously teach bad habits. We want to save this differentiated learning time for things that really make the difference at this stage of the journey, and that is teaching letters and sounds and teaching kids to sound out words, VC words and CVC words.

Let me read you the emergent lesson procedure in Jan Richardson's book. The first thing you do is sight word review, so they write three sight words you've taught them. That sounds a little crazy to me for kids who don't even know concepts of print yet, but they're supposed to be writing sight words.

You're supposed to introduce the book, read and discuss the book, make a teaching point, and that's going to be probably something like use the first letter and the picture to help you "read the word."

Then a word study activity, which includes teaching a new sight word and developing phonemic awareness, and then do guided writing where students write a sentence that is crafted and dictated by the teacher.

Now, for sure, dictation is really important, but I'm not seeing any instruction here that's going to equip them to do dictation. There's nothing in here about explicitly teaching letters and sounds, not in the guided reading lesson.

This is really funny. On page 75, Jan Richardson wrote this, "The patterned books at Levels A to C help children experience success, but they can be memorized. If children are reading quickly, they probably aren't looking at the words. One child told me he could read the book with his eyes closed." Duh! "Insist that students use their finger or a pointer to point under each word. This will foster attention to print and support one-to-one matching."

You would hope that as she wrote that, she would get an epiphany that maybe this isn't the best reading material for teaching beginning readers, but alas, that conclusion was not reached. Teaching points for this level include this one, crosscheck letters and sounds with meaning. Richardson writes that you "should cover the picture and have students read the text. When they come to the challenging word, point to the first letter and say, 'Make the first sound.' Then reveal the picture. This action demonstrates the importance of checking one source of information, visual, that is phonics," (even though you're only looking at one letter) "with another, meaning."

It also is promoting guessing, and it's also promoting sloppy reading because they're not actually reading through the whole word!

You can teach them to read decodable words and sentences if you're actually teaching them letters and sounds explicitly and how to blend them into words.

As I'm looking in the word study book by Dr. Richardson and Dr. Dufresne, which, of course, came after the guided reading book, it's just very confusing as to how all this is supposed to come together. In the end of the book, I see a summary of word study skills and activities for Levels A to Z. Blends are taught in Level E, initial blends, like fl, sl, sw. But when I look into the book and I look at the pre-A lesson plan, I see one that's been filled out and the dictated sentence is, "I can swim."

Now I know you're going to be doing that with the students, it's called interactive writing, but really? Why would we be introducing blends here at the beginning when apparently students don't even know other letters and sounds in pre-A? They probably hardly know any. Why are we wasting our time with dictation of something you haven't taught?

I think they like to have this idea that their program is all structured and explicit, but it's just very scattered. That's what I see when I look at the book. It's a beautiful book, but it's very scattered.

Today, we reacted to Dr. Dufresne's discussion about the use of Level A and B texts. Next week, we're going to react to Dr. Richardson's defense of three-cueing. Join me next week for that one.

You can find the show notes for this episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode110. Talk to you next time!

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This episode is in response to:

Getting the Facts Straight on Guided Reading , with Jan Richardson & Michele Dufresne

Quotes were shared from these books:

The Next Step Forward in Guided Reading, by Jan Richardson
The Next Step Forward in Word Study and Phonics, by Jan Richardson & Michele Dufresne

Research

The Simple View of Reading , by Wesley Hoover & Philip Gough
Orthographic Mapping in the Acquisition of Sight Word Reading, Spelling Memory, and Vocabulary Learning , by Linnea Ehri
Systematic Phonics Instruction Helps Children Learn to Read: Evidence from the National Reading Panel’s Meta-Analysis , by Linnea Ehri, Simon Nunes, Steven Stahl, & Dale Willows

Get on the waitlist for my course, Teaching Every Reader

Join the waitlist for Teaching Every Reader

The post My response to Jan Richardson & Michele Dufresne, Part 2 appeared first on The Measured Mom.

My response to Jan Richardson & Michele Dufresne, Part 1

��
TRT Podcast #109: My response to Jan Richardson & Michele Dufresne, Part 1

Jan Richardson and Michele Dufresne, guided reading gurus, recently shared a presentation in which they stated that the media is misinterpreting the science of reading and giving guided reading a bad rap. Were they correct? Is traditional guided reading worth saving? Here’s my reaction to their presentation.

��

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Hello! Anna Geiger here from The Measured Mom. If you're new to the podcast, I just want to give you a brief introduction to myself. I am a former classroom teacher, I've been sharing education resources on my website for ten years now, I'm Orton-Gillingham certified, I have a science of reading grad certificate, and I have a master's degree from quite a long time ago.

I was a balanced literacy teacher during my classroom teaching days, when I taught my oldest five kids to read, and for much of the time that I've been sharing online. It's only been in the past few years that I learned that a lot of things I thought were true were actually not aligned with the research.

So I come from a balanced literacy background, and because of that, I think I have a unique perspective. When I hear people from the balanced literacy community defend things or word things a certain way, I can kind of see where they're coming from, but now that I have learned quite a bit, I can also see where the holes are.

Because of that background that I have, I want to share today my reaction to a video that recently came out. It was sponsored by Pioneer Valley Books. It was an interview with Dr. Jan Richardson and Dr. Michele Dufresne. If you're at all familiar with guided reading, you know that Jan Richardson is way up there. She has a very popular book called The Next Step Forward in Guided Reading. It's this beautiful spiral-bound guide to teaching guided reading. Honestly, it's a lovely book. In fact, I used to give it away, when I was a balanced literacy teacher, in some of my giveaways on my website! Now, though, I understand that there are many issues with this approach.

She's also the co-author with Dr. Dufresne of The Next Step Forward in Word Study and Phonics. Just an interesting aside here, the first book to be published was about guided reading, and the phonics book didn't come until a few years later, which I always think is really interesting to think about that sequence. This happens a lot with our guided reading gurus.

I want today to respond to some things that they share in that webinar. I think this could be a rather long episode, so we'll probably break it up into several. But as you might imagine, the webinar is about refuting some of the things that people are saying, in the science of reading community, about the problems with guided reading. Here we go. Here's my reaction to this interview.

Dr. Michele Dufresne: One of the things going on is a lot of talk about the science of reading from the media. I think that we have to be really careful about what we're seeing from people that are not actually experts in literacy. They are journalists that have read a lot about literacy, and thought about literacy, but they're not necessarily bringing all the background and understanding all the research.

The media is telling us that science has proven there's just one way of teaching reading effectively, and that's systematic, highly structured phonics. But truthfully, the research does not actually back that up. We're not sitting here saying... we think phonics is very, very important, but there is no research that's proven there's just one way to do it.

Anna Geiger: Oh, boy. That gives us a lot to talk about right out of the gate. That was Dr. Michele Dufresne.

I've got to say, from the very beginning, I get it. That's what I said. When I first read Emily Hanford's article, At a Loss for Words, which debunks three-cueing, I thought, "What does she know? She's a journalist."

Since then I've come around because after I did all my research, I went back to her article, and sure enough, she had quoted all the major players. She knew her stuff. She had clearly studied this.

When I think about it now, it kind of makes sense to me. When a journalist studies it, they're not going to come into it with the same defensiveness that a teacher will, right? Because when you've been doing something for a long time, to hear that it's not backed by research is like a gut punch. You feel kind of sick if you actually believe they're right, because that means there are things you've been doing that weren't in the best interests of all your readers. I get it. I've totally been there.

I'm going to quote something here from Timothy Shanahan's blog. Here's what he wrote,

"The idea that reporters can't report on education unless they've taught school or possess a PhD in education strikes me as loony. It is akin to the idea that Woodford and Bernstein couldn't cover Watergate since they'd never been elected president. Rejections of accurate reporting because the source isn't a professional educator is fallacious. The issue shouldn't be who the sources are, but whether the reports are accurate."

Let's address the next point she made. She said that the media tells us that the science has proven there's just one way of teaching reading effectively - systematic, highly structured phonics - and she says that is not true.

First of all, I think we should be clear that the media and the science of reading are two different things. The media is reporting the science of reading, and they may or may not be doing that accurately so we need to NOT get our science of reading information from big articles.

I mean, there's some good stuff out there. Emily Hanford certainly opened my eyes, but even she would tell you she's not the research, she's reporting the research. So I think they're trying to debunk some of what people are saying about the science of reading by using the oversimplification that the media does.

We have to be really careful, right? We know the Simple View of Reading tells us that word recognition times language comprehension equals reading comprehension. Therefore, decoding HAS to occur. Now it's not the only thing. You also have to understand the words, right? That's why there's another part before you get to the equals.

But she, I feel, is trying to oversimplify it to get our eyes off the whole picture, and that's a little concerning. Also when she says there's no research to back that up, she doesn't share any research about why this is not true.

That's something to always watch for. If people tell you that research doesn't say, or they try to tell you that something is simply not true, but they offer nothing to back it up, that's a little bit of a warning sign.

Dr. Michele Dufresne: The media is also spending a lot of time saying that teachers do very little phonics and that teachers are teaching children to guess at words. Now, I'm probably sure that there are some teachers that aren't doing much phonics, and there's probably some teachers that may be misinterpreting how to prompt students, and it may look like they're teaching children to guess at words, but this is not the majority of teachers. Most teachers - a highly, high statistic number of teachers - are teaching phonics, and they are not teaching children to guess at words.

Anna Geiger: So how do you back up your opinion that, for the most part, teachers are teaching phonics appropriately and are not teaching kids to guess at words? She offers no data.

Dr. Michele Dufresne: The other thing that media has been saying, the journalists, is that balanced literacy is at fault for our large number of children not learning to read. It's not a simple answer why we have children that are struggling, but it certainly is not the fault of balanced literacy.

Anna Geiger: Again, it feels like she's just sharing her opinions. She's not backing this up with anything. She's not even telling you why the claims that balanced literacy is hurting kids is wrong. She doesn't even have any explanation for that.

Here's the reason why many people are saying that balanced literacy hurts kids. It doesn't hurt ALL kids. If you take a look at Nancy Young's Ladder of Reading and Writing, you'll see that a large percentage of kids, maybe up to 40% or so, are going to learn to read no matter what type of instruction you give them. That's why so many of us have seen so much success with guided reading. Particularly if we have students coming to us with strong vocabulary and background knowledge, which are really important to get through those guided reading leveled books, especially at the beginning when you can't sound out the words.

The problem is, for many children, this doesn't work. They need a structured approach to learning to read, which includes systematic explicit phonics instruction. She doesn't talk about any of this. All she does is say, "Nope, they're wrong."

Next Dr. Richardson talks about how we have to be careful about listening to the media versus actually studying the research because they're two different things, and that is true. She takes the definition of the science of reading from The Reading League's definition, which is great. Then she talks about how Dr. Jan Hasbrouck has added in there how it's vast, it's changing, it's evolving, all of which I agree with. But anyway, her point here is that we need to remember that the science of reading is not a program, it's not a one-size-fits-all, it is the body of research, and she's correct on that one hundred percent.

Dr. Jan Richardson: Just as there are confusions about the science of reading, there are major confusions about guided reading. One reason for the confusion is there's not an agreed upon definition of guided reading. You could watch a guided reading lesson in one school and see something markedly different in another.

I'll be straight with you, I've personally witnessed some ineffective guided reading lessons. I wrote my first book on guided reading because I felt there wasn't enough systematic explicit teaching of phonics and writing. So my bottom line here is not all guided reading lessons contain the same elements.

So here's my definition of guided reading, and it's one I think most of you will probably agree with, that during guided reading, a teacher meets with a small group of students and differentiates instruction by targeting specific learning needs, providing appropriate scaffolding, and gradually reducing support to promote independence.

Anna Geiger: I don't know about you, but to me that definition sounds pretty good! The teacher meets with a small group of students and differentiates. Love it. Targets specific learning needs. That's important. Provides appropriate scaffolding. We need that. Gradually reducing support to promote independence. That could be the I Do, We Do, You Do model. Sounds good. Let's keep listening.

Dr. Jan Richardson: What is guided reading NOT? Let's look at that.

Guided reading is not a group for every level. You'll drive yourself nuts if you try to do a group for every level. Plus, grouping should be based on common needs, not just on text level. You could use a phonics assessment, a writing sample, a running record, or even a fluency assessment to form small groups of students who have similar needs. These groups will change as the children will progress at different rates and require different instruction. I recommend that teachers at least think about regrouping about every two to three weeks.

Guided reading is not reading an easy book, and we're going to talk a little bit about that later. If the book is easy, and the children don't need any help, then you just wasted time. So you really want to think about an appropriate book.

It's not a one-size-fits-all, no matter what reading program you're using right now. This is true for children at every single grade level, that these children have varying levels of reading proficiency so they need to be taught different skills and strategies, and guided reading allows you to do that.

Finally, it's not an invitation to guess at words. Now I'm really going to go into this a little bit later, but I need to say upfront that children should never be encouraged to guess at words. Will beginning readers make mistakes? Of course they will. Should we encourage them to guess at words? Never. "We need to draw the child's attention to the letters and sounds, spelling patterns, words within words, and syllabic chunks, because reading is not a guessing game. Reading remains a problem solving task in which the reader must get the precise message of the author." That, my friends, is a direct quote from Dr. Marie Clay, Becoming Literate, page 137.

Anna Geiger: Okay. First of all, I really don't think there are a lot of teachers out there who think they need to have a group for every level in their classroom. Only because, from my experience, when I would use running records to figure out my students' reading levels, they were all over the place. I might have eighteen kids and have nine reading levels, and that's impossible, right? You can't have that many groups. So I'm thinking most teachers aren't really actually doing that.

Also, the process that she talks through, which is very muddy as far as I can tell, about regrouping students every two to three weeks with all those assessments sounds a little bit like a nightmare.

I appreciate that she mentions that guided reading groups should be using challenging texts because that is definitely important.

Then she also talks about how we're not teaching guessing, and then she uses all the phonics words about how we're going to have kids read those words, and then she also says that reading is problem solving. That's exactly what I used to say when I was a balanced literacy teacher. That is a little concerning to me because that makes me think about three-cueing, that there's all these different cues you have to use to solve a word instead of just reading it.

The fact is, if we're giving our students early reading material, which includes words they can't possibly sound out, in fact that's primarily what the book consists of, there's going to be some guessing involved, but I'll save more discussion of that until later.

Dr. Jan Richardson: Some science of reading advocates are militantly against guided reading, but it's mostly about these three things: the type of books that are being used, the three-cueing systems, and the lack of phonics instruction. These are the topics we're going to cover today, and Michele's going to talk about books.

Anna Geiger: Next, Dr. Dufresne talks about the difference between decodable and leveled books. She shares Heidi Anne Mesmer's definition about decodables, which basically is that they are books that mostly contain sound spellings that have already been taught.

Then she talks about how leveled books have a gradual increase in complexity. That can be in different ways. It can be the word choice, it can be sentence structure, and so on.

Next she shares a leveled book that she has written. In the opening pages this is what it says, "Little dinosaur is hungry. 'I am hungry,' said little dinosaur. 'Here is a flower. Yum, yum! Here is a bug,' said little dinosaur, 'Yum, yum!'"

She's going to break this down, but I just want to address really quickly which words on these two pages are very easily decodable for a beginner because this is only a level C book. Well, let's see, "is" isn't too hard, and "I, am, sad, yum, bug." Those are the words that they could sound out.

Here are the words they probably cannot sound out, "little, dinosaur, hungry, said, here, flower." Okay, that's quite a few. Let's see how she approaches the use of this book.

Dr. Michele Dufresne: Here's a level C text from Pioneer Valley Books. I wrote this very long ago. You can see, if you're thinking about the decodability, there are opportunities for decoding, but there are some words in here that we would not expect children at level C to decode, like "little dinosaur" or "hungry" or "flower."

So how are they going to figure out those words? Are they going to guess? No. As part of your book introduction, as part of supporting the meaning of the text, we are going to help the children understand what the story is about. The story is about little dinosaur who's hungry and he's out there looking for food. They are going to use some of the letters and sounds, but we're not actually going to expect them to sound out "dinosaur." We've told them little dinosaur is the character in the story.

But there are still opportunities for decoding: "Yum, yum." You don't have to tell them he says, "Yum, yum," everything. Let them decode those words. The same thing with bug.

And then of course, these books are very carefully designed to bring sight words in. At level C, you're going to see the sight word "here," which becomes a very important word. It shows up several times. It is repeated to help students learn and have automaticity with those words.

Anna Geiger: So I think she's saying that the kids can figure out the words because we've talked to them about the book because I didn't hear her say use the picture or anything like that. So she says that since you tell them about the book, then they can solve these hard words.

I think we need to give kids books they can actually read, without an introduction, because they have the tools to actually sound out the words.

I found it really interesting in The Next Step Forward in Guided Reading, they talk about early readers and say that they read the book using the pattern, but don't always attend to the print. What does that mean?

What does that mean? If you're not looking at the words, and you're not attending to print, you're not reading!

This is a confusion I had for a long time. I thought that they actually were reading because they were getting the words, but they weren't!

The Simple View of Reading, which has been proven many times by research, tells us that reading comprehension results when there is actual word recognition (which includes decoding because recognizing the word means actually looking at it and reading it), times language comprehension. So both things have to be present.

If I'm just guessing at the words using context or because the teacher told me something, but I don't know a hundred percent for sure because I don't have the phonics skills to sound it out, then I'm not really reading.

I know, I know, I know that balanced literacy teachers - I was one of them, remember - hate it when people say they're teaching kids guessing. It does not feel like you're teaching kids to guess. We don't use that word, guess. At least not usually. But if kids do not have a surefire way to figure out what a word is, they don't have the phonics skills to actually decode it, and they're relying on something their teacher told them or they're using the picture or they're using just a part of the word, they're not actually reading it. If you can't know for sure, that's what guessing is. Your best guess is still a guess.

I think we should also address that they're talking about sight words. Sight words are really the words you know by sight. Those can be any kind of word. They can be phonically regular or phonically irregular. They can be high frequency. They can be words you've read just a few times in your life. But as long as you can read it instantly, it's a sight word for you. The question really is how do we turn high frequency words into sight words? There's already a terminology issue, which I would hope for better from people with doctorates who are publishing programs.

Regardless, when I look back at their guidebook, it says that "the first sight words are difficult for some children to learn. The children might have poor visual memory, weak phonemic awareness skills, or difficulty attending to print."

First of all, we know that learning "sight words" is not about visual memory, it's about connecting the sounds to the letters and mapping those in your brain. I heard Jan Richardson use the phrase orthographic mapping earlier, not sure if I included that, but I'm not sure she understands what it means. In this book, it actually says to teach these difficult "sight words" as wholes, that you cannot sound them out.

That has been said many, many times to be inaccurate! I don't know, that's just a big red flag for me, that they're showing a misunderstanding of what sight words are and how to teach them.

Next, Dr. Dufresne goes on to show you some other examples of leveled text. She talks about all the different ways you can pull phonics into it, and of course you can. Of course you can. Some kids will do that. That's why balanced literacy seems like it works. Because some kids, once you've taught them phonics in a disconnected lesson, or maybe for three minutes at the end of your guided reading lesson, they will apply it.

But not all kids will do that! I think that's the big thing we need to remember.

For me, a huge turning point was when someone in the big science of reading Facebook group acknowledged that balanced literacy seems to work for some kids. I mean, there's always more they could learn, but in general, yes, they learn to read. I said, "Thank you. I'm not crazy," because I did use balanced literacy, and guess what? Most of my students became pretty good readers. Now I would probably define pretty good readers differently, but they could get through their leveled books just fine with fluency and comprehension. However, many children will not.

She talks a lot in this webinar about switching back and forth between decodable and leveled books. That's what I wanted to do. That's really what I wanted. When I started understanding the science of reading, I really wanted to hold onto my leveled books. I did not want to do purely decodable because a lot of decodable books aren't very good.

Now that's changed, but at the time, and certainly for many years, there weren't many good ones to choose from.

Here's the problem. When you teach kids that, "In this book, you sound out the words, but in this book, you think about what the teacher told you before the lesson." I think she's honestly leaving out what we do tell kids to do, which is use the picture or use the picture and the first letter. She left that out in her discussion. But then you confuse kids.

The very first day I taught my youngest to read, I had learned about the science of reading, structured literacy, and I was going to teach him to read that way. I taught all my other kids to read with more of a balanced approach, with a combination of leveled and decodable, but mostly leveled.

With him, I thought, "Well, I'm definitely going to teach with decodable. That's going to be primary, but I don't want to let go of the leveled books, I think he needs those too." So I got them both out. We read the decodable, and it was very slow going. It was a wonderful decodable book from Flyleaf Publishing, one of their first ones. I think it's called I Am Sam. It's about a snake. He read it all very slowly.

And then I got this leveled book that I had. He tried to decode the words just like I told him with the other one, but he couldn't because they were all these patterns he hadn't been taught yet. So then I was like, "Well, actually, no, you can't sound these out, but use the picture." Or, "What do you think would make sense?"

I realized very quickly this was such an inefficient way to read. Each of the words required all of these questions I had to ask him to see if he could possibly figure out what the word was. It made no sense. I set aside the leveled books after that day, and we only used decodable in our reading lessons.

Now, he was a very good reader. He learned very quickly, and he, on his own, moved to "leveled" books during his independent reading in just a few months. But we had to start with a decodable so he understood that the first line of attack for a word is always eyes on the word, read it, sound it out.

The last thing I want to touch on today is the feeling that you have when kids are struggling through decodable books versus breezing through their leveled books. The leveled books, especially those very early ones, can make it feel like kids are making faster progress because if they pick up on that pattern right away and they're good at using the picture, they can "read" them rather quickly. Whereas with a decodable book, if they really have to sound out the words, it's very slow and can be painful to listen to.

The fact is they will seem to make faster progress with the leveled book, but if they don't have strong phonics knowledge, they will eventually hit a wall. I think we need to remember this, the wall may come after your classroom.

That was something else that perked up my ears. When people said, "Oh, yeah, kids can 'read' those leveled books in first and second grade because that's how the books are written. But then when they get to third grade or fourth grade and they get to these books with words they can't sound out, words they've never recognized, multi-syllable words, they hit a wall." That really made me think. So maybe the way I was teaching reading was a way that was going to get my kids through their leveled books, but wasn't going to equip them to read harder books later on. Food for thought.

We're going to talk some more and do some more reaction next week. Thanks so much for listening!

You can find the show notes for this episode, including links to articles and research at themeasuredmom.com/episode109. Talk to you next time!

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This episode is in response to:

Getting the Facts Straight on Guided Reading , with Jan Richardson & Michele Dufresne

Articles

At a Loss for Words , by Emily Hanford (journalist)
Is Emily Hanford Right? by Timothy Shanahan (researcher)
The Role of Decoding in Learning to Read , by Isabel Beck & Connie Juel (two researchers)

Research

The Simple View of Reading , by Wesley Hoover & Philip Gough
Orthographic Mapping in the Acquisition of Sight Word Reading, Spelling Memory, and Vocabulary Learning , by Linnea Ehri
Systematic Phonics Instruction Helps Children Learn to Read: Evidence from the National Reading Panel’s Meta-Analysis , by Linnea Ehri, Simon Nunes, Steven Stahl, & Dale Willows

Get on the waitlist for my course, Teaching Every Reader

Join the waitlist for Teaching Every Reader

The post My response to Jan Richardson & Michele Dufresne, Part 1 appeared first on The Measured Mom.

6 Things to remember about the science of reading

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TRT Podcast #108: 6 Things to remember about the science of reading

It’s exciting to see enthusiasm around the science of reading and research-based practices. But there are six important things that some people are getting wrong.

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Hello, Anna Geiger here from The Measured Mom!

In the last week or so, I've been doing a lot of study surrounding the foundations of the science of reading - what it is, where it came from, what are the big things we need to know - and it had me start to think about some misconceptions around the science of reading, even among people that support it.

We're going to talk about some of those things today. We're going to talk about six important things to remember when it comes to the science of reading.

Number one is something that you probably already know, and that is that the science of reading is simply a body of research. That's it. We hear from people that it's a pendulum swing, that it's a fad. And while it may be true that being excited about the science of reading is a fad, if that fad disappears, the science of reading will not disappear with it because it's a body of research. You can't erase it. It's just there. So that's the first thing to remember. That's all it is, a body of research about reading and how we learn to read.

Something else to remember, though, is number two, that the research doesn't tell us everything. I know, that would be nice. There's a lot of really interesting questions in the big science of reading Facebook groups that people ask wondering, for example, what research says is the best order to teach the alphabet, or wondering what exact kind of handwriting paper I should be using with my preschoolers. What does research say?

These are fine questions to ask, but I don't think we should be surprised to learn that the research doesn't tell us. There's a lot that is involved in setting up a good quality study that shows us causation. You need to have groups that agree to participate. You want to have randomized assignment to groups if possible. You need a control group. You need time to do the study. You need to have a way to determine whether there's causation. You need to pay for the study. So there's a lot involved in a study, and not the least is expense.

I think to expect that there's a research study out there for every little question we have is a little bit of a dream. There isn't going to be something like that. So we have to remember that research is not going to answer every single question.

Number three, just because someone says something is research-based or research says..., doesn't mean that it actually says it. I see that a lot in groups too, where people ask really good questions or they talk about a certain practice that they have and someone says, "Well, research says..." or, "Well, you shouldn't do that because research says..."

And I think a lot of people then back off and they say, "Oh, okay, the research says, so I won't do it," or "I'll try something different," but we need to take it a step further.

I always like it when people very kindly and respectfully say, "Could you link to a study that shows the research in this topic," because that's really what we want to see.

If someone sends you a link to an Education Weekly article, or an article from The Atlantic, or a blog post on my website, or a Reading Rockets article, those can certainly be very useful and interesting to read, but they are not the research. They may be someone's opinion or summary of the research, but they're not the research itself.

What you want to see is a link that leads you to something with the parts of an actual research article. You want to see the abstract, which is the summary. You want to see the introduction, the method, the results, and then a discussion or implications. If you're not seeing that in the link that someone sends you, then that's not the research itself.

Interestingly, it can be hard to find quality research even among places that have the things I just mentioned. The National Reading Panel, as you know, was a group of educators commissioned by Congress to study the research around teaching to read. 2000 was the year they submitted their report, and they actually had 115,000 studies to sort through. A lot of people will say they analyzed a hundred and some thousand studies to do their report, but that's not true. They actually had to whittle it down to just about 600 because only 600 studies or so of those 115,000 studies actually met their criteria for a quality study.

Now there are different opinions about this, but, in general, if you're trying to find a study that shows causation - this thing led to this, so therefore this educational practice is superior to that - you want to see that the study has experimental and control groups. You want to see a clear hypothesis that was established before they did the study. You want a detailed description of all the subjects - those in the control group and experimental groups. You want to make sure you can't attribute the causation to something else. You want the study to be replicable so that others can try it and see if they get the same results. Finally, you want it published in a peer-reviewed journal so that it's been subject to scrutiny. Now different journals have different practices of peer review and different levels of scrutiny, so it's not perfect, but it's definitely an important part of the process.

So there's a lot of research out there, but not all of it is quality research, not all of it is appropriate for drawing conclusions.

Something else to remember is number four, one study isn't enough to lead us to change what we're doing. Now as Stanovich and Stanovich point out in an article they wrote, which I'll link to in the show notes, they're clear that we need converging evidence - multiple studies - to draw the conclusion that a particular educational practice is research-based. We want a group of studies to consistently support a given theory.

Very often, a single study will come out, and that's really good to pay attention to, but we have to remember that a single study isn't enough. We shouldn't be expected to change everything based on a single study. In the Stanovich article, which is called Using Research and Reason in Education, they wrote, "Issues are most often decided when the community of scientists gradually begins to agree that the preponderance of evidence supports one alternative theory rather than another."

If you listen to my episode from two weeks ago, I talked about the research surrounding whether we should teach letter names first, letter sounds first, or both together. What I said was, "There's a growing body of evidence that we should teach both." I said growing body because they're still sorting this out. More work needs to be done. It seems that that's what the research is telling us, but we need to have more before we can say absolutely certainly. Recommendations are good though, and using what we do know from research to make our best judgment is really important.

The number five thing we need to remember about the science of reading is that research doesn't tell us everything we need to know because education clinical trials can be limited for ethical reasons.

In other words, you might want to find out which is superior, balanced literacy with more of a haphazard approach to phonics, or structured literacy where we have a scope and sequence and we go through it and we teach everything in a structured way. But to do a study like that where you believe that people in the balanced literacy group are going to suffer - that some students in that group are not going to get what they need - is not ethical. So it's tricky, and therefore it can be hard to get the solid answers we want because we are, of course, dealing with actual people, actual children.

Finally, Dr. Steven Dykstra, a psychologist who's really an expert on this topic, reminds us that the science is incomplete and there's not enough science to fill the classroom day. In other words, there's not enough science to dictate everything that you do. This is a little bit of a repeat of an earlier item that I mentioned, but I just want to talk about this again because I want to talk about the difference between bullseye science and the other science.

This is how Steven Dykstra words it. He said, "Bullseye science is what we know for certain based on the research, and then we still have some questions which are in the outer parts of that target."

Some things in the bullseye science realm would be that systematic phonics is better than no phonics, or embedded phonics, or haphazard phonics. We also know that phonemic awareness is essential. It's not sufficient, but it's essential for learning to read.

But there are many other questions that we still have because the research has not had enough studies to give us a convergence of evidence, or there haven't been enough studies about it because there are ethical issues, or it's such a minute issue that probably no one is going to take it on for a study."

So where does that leave us because if everything is not entirely backed by research because the research doesn't exist? What do we do?

Well, I'm going to give you a little bit of a quote from Steven Dykstra in a presentation that he did for PaTTAN. It's called Translating Science into Practice. This is a video you can watch for free. I'll definitely link to that in the show notes. Here's what he wrote on one of his slides, which I think is a really good conclusion to today's episode.

He wrote,

"Knowing how science works: What would a scientific model of reading instruction include? It would include a foundation of rock solid truths that give broad guidance to our efforts. It would include clear statements about what we know is not true, and what we should avoid. It should include a clear connection between the science we know and our practice decisions that match those rock solid truths and avoid the forbidden."

He continues, and this is important,

"It should include a humble flexibility and an awareness of where the science ends and our best judgment begins because, as a teacher, your best judgment is going to play a big role. A scientific model of reading instruction should include a range of options, because, like medication, the best first choice for all isn't always the best choice for each of us. Finally, it would include a willingness to change as new science is developed, backed by healthy skepticism."

So those are some things to remember about the science of reading. Just a quick recap: Number one, the science of reading is a body of research. That's all.

Number two, the research doesn't tell us everything. It's a lot of work to put together a study, so they're not going to do studies for these minutia-type things.

Number three, just because someone says something is research-based doesn't mean that it is. You want to make sure that they can link to a study that actually is published in a peer-reviewed journal, and that it includes an abstract and all the other parts of a study.

Number four, one study isn't enough. You want to see a convergence of evidence before you can have a justification for changing classroom practice.

Number five, one reason research doesn't tell us everything we need to know is because it can be unethical to find answers to some of the harder questions. So there have to be workarounds for that and ways to make sure everyone is still getting a good education while we try to answer these tough questions.

Finally, the science is incomplete, and so we have to fill in the gaps using our best judgment.

I hope this was helpful. I have a lot to share with you in the show notes today at themeasuredmom.com/episode108.

Talk to you next time!

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Mentioned in this episode

Using Research and Reason in Education , by Paula J. Stanovich & Keith F. Stanovich
Translating Science to Practice , with Steven Dykstra








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What order should we teach the letters of the alphabet?

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TRT Podcast #107: What order should we teach the letters of the alphabet?

Should we teach upper or lowercase first? Which letters should come first in the sequence? And what does the research say, anyway? Get the answers in today’s episode!

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Hello, Anna Geiger here from The Measured Mom, and we're going to continue our alphabet series today discussing what's the best order to teach the letters of the alphabet.

This is a question I get asked all of the time. And the answer is, it depends.

Here are some questions people often have. Should we go in alphabetical order? Should we start with uppercase or lowercase? What does the research say?

Well first I want to restate what we talked about last week, and that is that research strongly suggests we should teach both letter names and sounds at the same time.

Now, I should note that last week when I recorded the episode, I recorded it on a Thursday, edited it, sent it to my team member who gets it all uploaded to Buzzsprout, and then the next day, Friday, I watched a video by Dr. Shayne Piasta, which is inside of the Reading Science Academy with Dr. Stephanie Stollar. If you're not part of that, I highly recommend it. It's really affordable. I can't remember how much I pay per year, but I think it's like $149 and you get access to just a ton of great resources plus expert interviews like this one. I was really excited to watch it because I'd read a lot of Dr. Piasta's research in working on last week's episode, but I also thought, oh boy, I hope I don't learn anything that means I would have to go redo that episode. Thankfully, I didn't. Everything she said agreed with the conclusions I had drawn based on the things I'd read.

The big one is that research strongly suggests we teach BOTH letter names and sounds at the same time. I think that's important to remember as we think about the order for teaching the alphabet.

The first big question is, should we teach upper or lowercase letters first? According to Dr. Shayne Piasta, there is correlational evidence that children may use uppercase knowledge to learn lowercase letters, but no studies have been conducted to determine which is best to teach first so everything that follows here is going to be based on our best judgment.

What about teaching uppercase letters first? Many preschool teachers would say that is a good way to go. I have a lot of respect for Jamie White. She's over at the blog Play to Learn Preschool. She's done a lot for early literacy. Her website is amazing. She's currently teaching an at-home preschool, and she supports her students when they write their names in all capitals.

Here are some of her reasons. Children see capital letters everywhere and therefore learn them more quickly. Think about alphabet puzzles and toys, they almost always have the uppercase alphabet, right? Capital letters are easier to recognize, and that's important because kids are still developing visual discrimination skills. Think about the capital D and B. Those are much easier to distinguish than lowercase d and b.

Many occupational therapists would agree that teaching uppercase letters first makes sense. Here's an argument from Laura Sowdon. She's an occupational therapist, and she writes at Five Senses Literature Lessons. Here's what she wrote, "Uppercase letters are generally straighter and simpler to form than lowercase letters, which makes them easier to write. Unlike many lowercase letters, capital letters don't require students to write on lines they've already written." If you're thinking about the capital M, it goes down, then you lift your pencil up and go down, up, down. Whereas with a lowercase m, it's down, trace it back up, bend around, trace it back up and around. That act of writing over what they've already done can be hard for kids who are first learning to write. And finally, "Curves and intersections are the hardest parts of a letter to form, and there are fewer of those in uppercase than lowercase."

Now, on the other hand, if the comment section of my blog is any kind of clue, many kindergarten teachers believe that preschoolers should learn lowercase letters first.

Here are some of the reasons for that. When children learn to read, they will primarily encounter lowercase letters. It's also hard to break the habit of uppercase letters in the middle of a child's name or in other words. In one way, you could say uppercase alphabet letters are actually trickier to write because there's so much picking up and putting down of the pencil, whereas with lowercase, it's more of one continuous stroke or more likely to be a continuous stroke.

My conclusion is that if you're teaching preschool, you should choose upper or lowercase based on what you think is best for your students. If you're teaching kindergarten, I think you should start with lowercase because you want your students reading as soon as possible and lowercase letters are primarily what they're going to be reading and writing.

With that out of the way, upper or lowercase, what's the best order to teach those letters?

Well, I think you need to consider your goal. Are you focused on matching letters with sounds? Are you focused on letter formation? Are you merely interested in letter recognition? Whatever is your primary focus will help you choose an order.

Here's how I do it. I recently finished writing a Letters and Sounds Curriculum for Preschool. As of this recording in January of 2023, it's not quite ready. Hopefully in February we'll be done editing it and have it in our shop. But with this program for preschool, I'm mainly focused, in addition to letters and sounds, on letter formation. I wanted to make sure that the letters were grouped based on strokes and, in general, easy to hard in terms of letter formation. When it comes out, you'll see that the program has an uppercase letter sequence and a lowercase letter sequence, and that's because it mixes review all the way through.

Because upper and lowercase letters are formed differently, I have a different order for teaching them. Here's my sequence. When you're listening on the podcast, this isn't entirely helpful, but there are show notes where you can go ahead and copy this down. But the uppercase sequence is like this: T, L, I, F, H, E, those are all pretty much straight lines. D, P, B, straights and curves. O, C, G, U, those are a lot of curves. S, R, Q, again, more curves. And then we've got a bunch of straight letters with slants included: A, M, N, Z, V, W, K, Y, X.

Then the lowercase sequence also starts with the really basic letters - just a line - and then starts to add curves and then slants. That sequence looks like this: t, l, i, j, u, r, n, m, h, b, p, o, c, d, a, g, q, s, f, e, z, v, w, k, y, x.

Now could someone with the same goals that I have, have chosen a different order? Definitely. This is just one way to do it.

In ordering my sequence, I was also conscious that because I'm focused on teaching letter sounds, I'd want to make sure that letters that may be formed very similarly are not right next to each other in the sequence if they have similar sounds. That would be easy for students to confuse the sounds. By that I mean basically short vowels. Letters like A and O, I wouldn't want those right next to each other, even if I felt they were formed very similarly, because we don't want children to begin to confuse those vowel sounds, which is very easy to do when you're teaching them right next to each other. So we may have to make concessions. Again, it's all about our goals.

If you're teaching kindergarten, I think your order definitely needs to have a different focus. We're certainly wanting kids to form letters correctly, and research definitely supports teaching handwriting through third grade, but in kindergarten, our main goal is getting kids to read.

I think we should do lowercase, and I think we want to make sure that those early letters can be grouped to form words as soon as possible. Many teachers would agree that we want those first five letters to allow us to make some words. We want a short vowel, most programs start with letter A, and then some consonants.

How do you choose which consonants to put at the beginning? Well, one consideration is to put as many consonants with continuous sounds at the beginning as you can. A continuous sound would be the sound of /s/ or the sound of /f/, just because we know that it's easier for kids to sound out words when they can connect a lot of the sounds together. In the word Sam, for example, /s/ /��/ /m/, we've got all those sounds we can hold out versus a word like pat, /p/, /��/, /t/, where only the A is sustainable. As much as possible, we want sustainable letters at the beginning.

We want to make sure we separate those short vowels. We want to separate consonants that are easy to confuse, like B and D, or P and Q.

Now, for me personally, when I chose my sequence for teaching letters and sounds to kindergarten, I wanted to be able to form words that I could use in stories. For me, there's a difference between reading words in a list and choosing words that can actually tell a story. It's much harder to do the latter.

Because of that, I did have to include a low utility letter that has a stop sound towards the beginning, the letter J. The letter J isn't in too many words, and it's a stop sound. You can't sustain it. That might be an argument for not including it early, but I wanted a story about a little bear named Sam who can't open a jar of jam. Because of that, I need a J early on. To me, that was more important than some of the other considerations.

As you can see, it just depends on so many things. The next time someone tries to argue with you about upper or lowercase letters first or what's the best order, you can tell them that research does not tell us, but we can use our best judgment and our goals to help us choose the right order for our students.

You might want to check out the show notes to get those sequences that I listed, as well as the blog post that this podcast episode is based on. It's got everything laid right out there for you. The show notes for this episode can be found at themeasuredmom.com/episode107.

Talk to you next time!

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Mentioned in this episode

Dr. Stephanie Stollar’s Reading Science Academy (highly recommended!)
Last week’s episode:
Blog post: What’s the best order to teach letters?��
Jamie White: Should children write their names with capital letters?��
Laura Sowdon: Why OT’s tell you to learn capital letters first

Sequences mentioned in the episode

Preschool sequences: Uppercase: T, L, I, F, H, E, J, D, P, B, O, C, G, U, S, R, Q, A, M, N, Z, V, W, K, Y, X Lowercase: t, l, i, j, u, r, n, m, h, b, p, o, c, d, a, g, q, s, f, e, z, v, w, k, y, x

Kindergarten sequence�� s, j, a, t, p, m, d, c, h, r, n, i, b, f, g, k, ck, o, e, l, v, w, sh, th, u, ch, wh, x, y, qu z

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The post What order should we teach the letters of the alphabet? appeared first on The Measured Mom.

What’s the best order to teach letters?

I’m often asked, “What’s the best order to teach letters?” The answer is: it depends. Keep reading to find out my recommendations!

Many teachers and parents wonder what’s the best order for teaching letters of the alphabet.

Should we go in alphabetical order? Should we start with uppercase or lowercase? What does the research say?

Well, here’s the first thing to know: , research strongly suggests that we should teach both letter names and sounds at the same time.

This conclusion may very well bother people of the “letter sounds first” camp, who believe that letter sounds are what matter when it comes to reading (true), and that learning letter names will confuse children who are trying to learn to read (debatable).

Knowing that, let’s move on.

Should we teach upper or lowercase letters first?

According to Dr. Shayne Piasta, a major researcher in the field of alphabet learning, there is correlational evidence that children may use uppercase knowledge to learn lowercase letters, but no studies have been conducted to determine which is best to teach first.

In other words … we are left to our best judgment.

Arguments for teaching uppercase letters first

Because we are left to our best judgment, this means we will have disagreements. I have great respect for Jamie White, of Play to Learn Preschool, who supports her students when they write their names in all capitals. Here are some of her reasons:

Children see capital letters everywhere and therefore learn them more quickly (think of alphabet puzzles and toys).Capital letters are easier to recognize because they are still developing visual discrimination skills (for example, D and B are easier to distinguish than d and b).Forming capital letters is easier because there they tend to have simpler lines (think E vs. e).

Many occupational therapists agree that it makes sense to have preschoolers learn the uppercase alphabet first. Here’s a summary of this argument from Laura Sowdon, an occupational therapist and writer at Five Senses Literature Lessons.

Uppercase letters are generally straighter and simpler to form than lowercase letters, making them easier to form than the lowercase versions.Unlike many lowercase letters, capital letters don’t require students to write on lines they’ve already written. (Think M vs. m, or B vs. b.) Curves and intersections are the hardest to write, and there are fewer of these in the uppercase alphabet.Arguments for teaching lowercase letters first

If the comments section of my blog are any kind of clue, many kindergarten teachers believe that preschoolers should learn lowercase letters first. Here are reasons to teach lowercase first:

When children learn to read, they will primarily encounter lowercase letters.It’s hard to break the habit of uppercase letters in the middle of a child’s name or other words.In one way, the uppercase alphabet letters are actually trickier to write because there is so much picking up and putting down of the pencil, instead of using more continuous strokes like we do with lowercase letters.

My conclusion? If you teach preschool, do what you think is best for your learners – but if you are teaching kindergarten, absolutely start with lowercase because you want to get your students reading as soon as possible.

What’s the best order to teach letters?

Once you’ve decided on upper or lowercase, there are other things to consider. What is your goal here?

Are you focused on matching letters with their sounds?Are you focused on letter formation?Are you merely interested in letter recognition?

Whichever is your primary focus will help you choose an order for teaching the alphabet.

I recently finished writing a letters and sounds curriculum for preschool (my team is currently editing it). Since the program is for preschool, I am most focused on letter formation. Therefore, I’ve chosen an order that groups letters based on how they are formed.

How to choose an order based on letter formation

My curriculum (coming soon) includes two different sequences: Uppercase and lowercase. Each sequence aims to order letters by stroke as well as by easy to hard in terms of letter formation. Is it based on science? No, because science doesn’t tell us the best order. It’s based on common sense and good judgment, which is what many of our teaching decisions must be based on because there’s often no research to draw on.

The uppercase sequence looks like this:

T, L, I, F, H, E, J, D, P, B, O, C, G, U, S, R, Q, A, M, N, Z, V, W, K, Y, X

The lowercase sequence looks like this:

t, l, i, j, u, r, n, m, h, b, p, o, c, d, a, g, q, s, f, e, z, v, w, k, y, x

Could someone with the same goals order the letters differently? Yes. This is just one way to do it.

In ordering my sequence, I was also conscious that my curriculum teaches letter sounds. I left at least a little space between vowels because those sounds are easily confused. This means that I had to make a few concessions when it comes to the order of easy to hard based on letter formation.

How to choose an order based on getting kids to read

I use a different sequence when I teach the alphabet to kindergartners because my goals are different. While I certainly want kindergartners to form letters correctly, we have a more pressing goal: getting them to read.

When creating my set of decodable stories with custom illustrations (free on the website), I chose an order that separated both vowels and consonants which are easily confused, while also including letters that allowed students to read CVC words as soon as possible.

In choosing an order like this, it’s wise to start with letters whose sounds can be sustained (like s, f, or m), teach high utility letters first (for example, waiting to teach letters like z and x) and order the short vowels in what is often considered the best order (a, i, o, e, u).

For me personally, it’s important for students to be able to read stories as soon as possible, so I had to make exceptions with my sequence. I needed the word JAM in the first short, basic decodable book, so I included j (a low utility letter with a stop sound) early on.

You see? It all depends on your goals.

My scope and sequence for teaching lowercase letters and sounds to kindergarteners follows (you’ll notice that digraphs are included throughout):

s, j, a, t, p, m, d, c, h, r, n, i, b, f, g, k, ck, o, e, l, v, w, sh, th, u, ch, wh, x, y, qu z

This order allows me to start with very basic decodable books (you can get them for free here) like this one:

So what do you think? How do YOU choose the order for teaching letters? Feel free to let us know in the comments!

The post What’s the best order to teach letters? appeared first on The Measured Mom.