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Reading Strategies and Practices: A Compendium
Practical reference for prospective teachers and literacy education professionals who want a clear, overall perspective of instructional procedures and who approach their teaching with a view of experimentation and decision making.
552 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
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April 7, 2024
I was about to post this review only to find out that the book I'm reviewing doesn't have an ISBN and so I can't add it here. This review is to Fact-Checking the Science of Reading: Opening up the Conversation by Robert J. Tierney and P. David Pearson. Published 2024.
First of all, you can download this book for free here: https://literacyresearchcommons.org
This book starts by doing some important groundwork. The first is to say that there are two ways people understand education, particularly learning to read. One is curriculum-centred and the other child-centred. Curriculum-centred approaches believe that there is a right way to teach children something as complex as literacy and that any deviation from that right path is (however unintended) an act of violence against children, since it ultimately denies them what ought to be their birthright. Child-centred learning, on the other hand, sees each child as unique requiring tailored responses to their learning needs. These needs cannot be determined by people unconnected to the child (via even the most carefully written curriculum documents) but rather must be assessed in vivo by a professional teacher who works as hard understand the needs and life situation of the child as they expect the child to work to learn.
Like all binaries, there are worlds of shades of grey in-between – but as a first helicopter view of the problems faced in education, this distinction is an important, orientating one to make.
The next has less to do with education, as such, and more to do with the philosophy of science. You see, those who promote the Science of Reading as the one true path often start by saying that ‘the science is settled’. As the authors here make clear – science isn’t really something that is ever ‘settled’. This is an essential epistemological stance and a mistake ‘real scientists’ would not be likely to ever make. As this book makes all too clear, many of the proponents of the Science of Reading are highly selective in what they count as evidence, and even the evidence they do endorse is often cherrypicked so as to exaggerate its support for their dogmatically held beliefs.
The book then proceeds to present ten claims made by the Science of Reading. The fact checking in the title is quite literal. And I believe done in a way that I wish more research in this area was done. That is, they present the claim as stated by those supporting it. They provide the evidence used by those supporting the claim. They evaluate the validity of these claims by unpacking the evidence from both those supporting the claim and the wider research evidence and then finally they provide their assessment of the validity of the claim, and the extent to which the claim is supported by the available evidence. I don’t think in any case the book provides an outright rejection of any of the claims – at least to the extent of saying that one or other of the claims is utter madness – in the ways the followers of the Science of Reading virtually invariably do. And this, to me, is the difference between authors actually following the scientific method, and those who declare themselves true scientists by decree.
I’m going to go through the ten claims one by one and provide quotes from the book under each pointing to the authors’ criticism of them. As such, this review is not going to be as objective as the book itself sets out to be. But I’m writing a review of the book, rather than rewriting the book itself.
Claim 1: Explicit systematic phonics instruction is the key curricular component in teaching beginning reading.
The authors quote the US National Reading Panel report:
“Phonics instruction is never a total reading program. In 1st grade, teachers can provide controlled vocabulary texts that allow students to practice decoding, and they can also read quality literature to students to build a sense of story and to develop vocabulary and comprehension. Phonics should not become the dominant component in a reading program, neither in the amount of time devoted to it nor in the significance attached.” p.26
And further research later found:
“...a careful review of the NPR (2000) findings show that the benefits of systematic phonics for reading text, spelling, and comprehension are weak and short-lived, with reduced or no benefits for struggling readers beyond grade 1.” p.28
“A close examination of these reports, informed by the research syntheses and various meta-analyses we have just reviewed, reveals them to be generally in favor of phonics—again, not on its own, but as a key component in a more comprehensive curriculum. These are certainly more modest than the claims made in the media, blogs and other outlets by policy advocates” p.34
They quote Mark Seidenberg who says:
“The goal of teaching children to read is reading, not phonemic awareness… Instruction in subskills such as phonemic awareness is justified to the extent it advances the goal of reading, not for its own sake… The PA situation and other developments suggest to me that the SoR is at risk of turning into a new pedagogical dogma” p.35
Claim 2: The Simple View of Reading provides an adequate theoretical account of skilled reading and its development over time.
“the Simple View of Reading (SVR) maintains that reading comprehension (RC) is the product of decoding (D) and language comprehension (LC): (RC = D x LC).” p.38
“Much of SVR research over the past 20 to 30 years has focused on improving and fine-tuning the SVR model. Ironically, this line of scholarship seems directed toward enhancing the complexity of the simple view—suggesting that it may not be so simple after all” p.40
“So where do we stand on the Simple View of Reading? We believe that the adjective simple in the model’s name more aptly modifies the word view than the word reading. In other words, the SVR is a simple way of conceptualizing the complex phenomenon we call reading. It may be that the very complexity of reading demands a simple heuristic; with so many moving parts, we need these two big buckets to mentally store all of the components.” p.43
“While we can live (and indeed, have lived) with the SVR, we believe there are no credible theoretical, empirical, or practical reasons for making do with an adequate model. That is, we see no compelling ideas, research findings, or implications from those findings regarding classroom teaching that require us to put square pegs in round holes, especially when we have a more fulsome model (a sociocultural view of reading) available.” p.45
Claim 3: Reading is the ability to identify and understand words that are part of one’s oral language repertoire.
Quoting Rayner et al. “we define learning to read as the acquisition of knowledge that results in the child being able to identify and understand printed words that he or she knows on the basis of spoken language.” p.46
“What counts as reading? This remains a key question at the center of the SoR debate. If reading is defined as identifying and understanding words that are a part of one’s spoken language, then it makes sense to focus on what many novices lack when they enter school (i.e., the cipher that maps print to speech, acquired through systematic decoding instruction). However, if reading is defined more broadly, then it makes sense to offer a comprehensive curriculum that orchestrates those many processes and types of knowledge—in terms of the code; word meanings and relationships; language; and (perhaps most important) the social and cultural worlds in which we use reading, writing, and language to make sense of things. With such disparate perspectives, it is little wonder, then, that our debates are seldom resolved.” p.49
Claim 4: Phonics facilitates the increasingly automatic identification of unfamiliar words.
“We are not aware of any evidence that suggests that context cannot aid the development of orthographic mapping. To the contrary, we know from the work of Scanlon and her colleagues (see Scanlon & Anderson, 2020; Scanlon et al., 2024) that the Interactive Strategies Approach (ISA), which features a menu of cues to assist in identifying unknown words (what Scanlon calls “word solving”): a) Results in better performance than a phonics-only approach with a range of readers, including those identified with decoding difficulties; and b) Over time, nurtures readers to develop an increasing reliance on orthographic cues with an accompanying decrease in reliance on contextual cues.” p.53
Claim 5: The three-cueing system (orthography, semantics, and syntax) has been soundly discredited.
“Reading requires an orchestration of various factors across words and sentences. It seems overly limiting to discredit the use of cueing systems based on what some might consider a restrictive assumption—that reading is entirely the accurate naming of words, rather than an act of meaning making that involves hypothesizing. To dismiss the use of context as an over-reliance on “guessing” or “predicting” ignores important evidence. The essence of most theoretical models of reading involves semantic, syntactic, and orthographic processing. We also find some of the arguments against cueing systems (i.e., the view that the use of context or syntactic, semantic or pragmatic cues, even when coupled with phonics, may detract from word learning) to require the out of hand dismissal of important lines of research.” p.65
Claim 6: Learning to read is an unnatural act.
Quoting William Teale: “The belief is that literacy development is a case of building competencies in certain cognitive operations with letters, words, sentences and texts, competencies which can be applied in a variety of situations. A critical mistake here is that the motives, goals, and conditions have been abstracted away from the activity in the belief that this enables the student to “get down to” working on the essential processes of reading and writing. But, ... these features are critical aspects of the reading and writing themselves. By organizing instruction which omits them, the teacher ignores how literacy is practiced (and therefore learned) and thereby creates a situation in which the teaching is an inappropriate model for the learning.” p.73
“But, as nearly as we can fathom, it is as natural or unnatural as learning anything else we learn in our quest to make meaning and achieve coherence about all of life’s phenomena.” p.77
Claim 7: Balanced literacy and/or Whole Language is responsible for the low or falling NAEP scores we have witnessed in the U.S. in the past decade.
“These arguments also ignore the limits of the measures themselves. Even if we did accept the dubious practice of elevating correlations to causal connections between practices and outcomes, we would be forced to also acknowledge that on other outcomes—such as the enjoyment of reading—the evidence favors those countries that have been largely spared from reforms and mandates requiring the teaching of phonics” p.80
“In reviewing the Mississippi results, LA Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik (2023) and education bloggers Bob Somerby (2023) and Kevin Drum (2023) reported what they deem to be a statistical illusion—one that mischaracterizes Mississippi fourth-grade students’ unprecedented growth in reading performance as correlated with the state’s emphasis on phonics (and, by extension, the Governor’s support of Mississippi’s Literacy Promotion Act). According to Somerby and Drum, the results are not just suspect; they represent a cover-up.” p.86
Claim 8: Evidence from neuroscience research substantiates the efficacy of focus on phonics-first instruction.
“Given the questionable reliability of such results and other factors that might be in play, claims that enlist select neuroscience studies to argue for the primacy of phonics may be difficult to substantiate or even verify.” p.94
“Even those claiming major breakthroughs admit that a cloud hangs over connections between neurological studies and reading processes and pedagogies. While major gains have been made in learning about brain activity during reading, the findings are more suggestive than certain.” p.99
Claim 9: Sociocultural dimensions of reading and literacy are not crucial to explain either reading expertise or its development.
Quoting Purcell-Gates & Tierney: “Teaching models that strip down reading and writing to technical skills outside of meaningful practice may show what looks like good results on skills tests, but these gains are quickly lost after grade two. Children learn to read and write better when teachers respond to them based upon knowledge of them as individuals and as members of cultural communities.” p.109
“The mistake, we think, of the SoR reform initiatives is that in their zeal to ensure a secure hold on the science of word reading and understanding, they have lost their grip on the other equally-scientific endeavors—namely, the vast body of research that tells us that learning is enhanced when matters of diversity, equity, relevance, ecological validity, and cultural plurality are front and center in our enactment of curriculum and teaching.” p.111
Claim 10: Teacher education programs are not preparing teachers in the Science of Reading.
“much of the public discourse surrounding literacy research in the U.S. is filtered through the lens of “necessary illusions”—one of which, he notes, is that teacher education is fundamentally flawed, and needs to be radically overhauled (or even abandoned).” p.119
“Implicit in their recommendations seems to be erroneous theory of action, which assumes that (a) if you provide teachers with the right knowledge and (b) provide incentives and/or sanctions for holding themselves and their students to practices emanating from that knowledge, change will happen. Teacher learning, teacher change, and teacher education are a lot more complicated than that” p.119
Overall, my problem with the Science of Reading is that it sees children as basically computer programs that all learn in exactly the same way. The research against the view is virtually endless. From Delpit’s wonderful book Other People’s Children, Bernstein’s Class, Codes and Control, or Vygotsky’s Thought and Language, literacy is understood to be so fully embedded in social and cultural systems that to pretend it somehow sits outside these looks like someone is playing games, rather than doing science. What in the world could be more culturally determined than literacy? And so, demands like ‘no guessing words from the context’ sounds to me like the advice of someone who has never actually read themselves. Not only are children able to apply more than one strategy at a time (unlike a simple computer program), they inevitably do.
I avoid ‘the one true path’ in virtually every aspect of my life. So, if someone calls themselves a scientist and claims to know the truth – I’m going to put pretty high standards of proof upon that assertion. Recently, I’ve been reading a lot around this topic – not least since a lot of this stuff is being mandated in the Australian policy environment. What I’ve been astounded by is how thin the supporting evidence for any of the claims actually are. I’ve been particularly interested in the mandated requirement that initial teacher education courses teach about the brain and how it learns. Frequently, this is what would otherwise be self-evident (kids learn better if they aren’t distracted, or you might need to tell them more than once if you want them to remember) wrapped up in neurobabble about the occipital-temporal ventral cortex.
Basically, there is a fundamental intellectual dishonesty to those who promote hard line Science of Reading. It’s not just that they have a view that is different from mine – rather, they distort the evidence in ways I find repulsive. As such, this book is a much kinder critique of this subject than I would be capable of.
First of all, you can download this book for free here: https://literacyresearchcommons.org
This book starts by doing some important groundwork. The first is to say that there are two ways people understand education, particularly learning to read. One is curriculum-centred and the other child-centred. Curriculum-centred approaches believe that there is a right way to teach children something as complex as literacy and that any deviation from that right path is (however unintended) an act of violence against children, since it ultimately denies them what ought to be their birthright. Child-centred learning, on the other hand, sees each child as unique requiring tailored responses to their learning needs. These needs cannot be determined by people unconnected to the child (via even the most carefully written curriculum documents) but rather must be assessed in vivo by a professional teacher who works as hard understand the needs and life situation of the child as they expect the child to work to learn.
Like all binaries, there are worlds of shades of grey in-between – but as a first helicopter view of the problems faced in education, this distinction is an important, orientating one to make.
The next has less to do with education, as such, and more to do with the philosophy of science. You see, those who promote the Science of Reading as the one true path often start by saying that ‘the science is settled’. As the authors here make clear – science isn’t really something that is ever ‘settled’. This is an essential epistemological stance and a mistake ‘real scientists’ would not be likely to ever make. As this book makes all too clear, many of the proponents of the Science of Reading are highly selective in what they count as evidence, and even the evidence they do endorse is often cherrypicked so as to exaggerate its support for their dogmatically held beliefs.
The book then proceeds to present ten claims made by the Science of Reading. The fact checking in the title is quite literal. And I believe done in a way that I wish more research in this area was done. That is, they present the claim as stated by those supporting it. They provide the evidence used by those supporting the claim. They evaluate the validity of these claims by unpacking the evidence from both those supporting the claim and the wider research evidence and then finally they provide their assessment of the validity of the claim, and the extent to which the claim is supported by the available evidence. I don’t think in any case the book provides an outright rejection of any of the claims – at least to the extent of saying that one or other of the claims is utter madness – in the ways the followers of the Science of Reading virtually invariably do. And this, to me, is the difference between authors actually following the scientific method, and those who declare themselves true scientists by decree.
I’m going to go through the ten claims one by one and provide quotes from the book under each pointing to the authors’ criticism of them. As such, this review is not going to be as objective as the book itself sets out to be. But I’m writing a review of the book, rather than rewriting the book itself.
Claim 1: Explicit systematic phonics instruction is the key curricular component in teaching beginning reading.
The authors quote the US National Reading Panel report:
“Phonics instruction is never a total reading program. In 1st grade, teachers can provide controlled vocabulary texts that allow students to practice decoding, and they can also read quality literature to students to build a sense of story and to develop vocabulary and comprehension. Phonics should not become the dominant component in a reading program, neither in the amount of time devoted to it nor in the significance attached.” p.26
And further research later found:
“...a careful review of the NPR (2000) findings show that the benefits of systematic phonics for reading text, spelling, and comprehension are weak and short-lived, with reduced or no benefits for struggling readers beyond grade 1.” p.28
“A close examination of these reports, informed by the research syntheses and various meta-analyses we have just reviewed, reveals them to be generally in favor of phonics—again, not on its own, but as a key component in a more comprehensive curriculum. These are certainly more modest than the claims made in the media, blogs and other outlets by policy advocates” p.34
They quote Mark Seidenberg who says:
“The goal of teaching children to read is reading, not phonemic awareness… Instruction in subskills such as phonemic awareness is justified to the extent it advances the goal of reading, not for its own sake… The PA situation and other developments suggest to me that the SoR is at risk of turning into a new pedagogical dogma” p.35
Claim 2: The Simple View of Reading provides an adequate theoretical account of skilled reading and its development over time.
“the Simple View of Reading (SVR) maintains that reading comprehension (RC) is the product of decoding (D) and language comprehension (LC): (RC = D x LC).” p.38
“Much of SVR research over the past 20 to 30 years has focused on improving and fine-tuning the SVR model. Ironically, this line of scholarship seems directed toward enhancing the complexity of the simple view—suggesting that it may not be so simple after all” p.40
“So where do we stand on the Simple View of Reading? We believe that the adjective simple in the model’s name more aptly modifies the word view than the word reading. In other words, the SVR is a simple way of conceptualizing the complex phenomenon we call reading. It may be that the very complexity of reading demands a simple heuristic; with so many moving parts, we need these two big buckets to mentally store all of the components.” p.43
“While we can live (and indeed, have lived) with the SVR, we believe there are no credible theoretical, empirical, or practical reasons for making do with an adequate model. That is, we see no compelling ideas, research findings, or implications from those findings regarding classroom teaching that require us to put square pegs in round holes, especially when we have a more fulsome model (a sociocultural view of reading) available.” p.45
Claim 3: Reading is the ability to identify and understand words that are part of one’s oral language repertoire.
Quoting Rayner et al. “we define learning to read as the acquisition of knowledge that results in the child being able to identify and understand printed words that he or she knows on the basis of spoken language.” p.46
“What counts as reading? This remains a key question at the center of the SoR debate. If reading is defined as identifying and understanding words that are a part of one’s spoken language, then it makes sense to focus on what many novices lack when they enter school (i.e., the cipher that maps print to speech, acquired through systematic decoding instruction). However, if reading is defined more broadly, then it makes sense to offer a comprehensive curriculum that orchestrates those many processes and types of knowledge—in terms of the code; word meanings and relationships; language; and (perhaps most important) the social and cultural worlds in which we use reading, writing, and language to make sense of things. With such disparate perspectives, it is little wonder, then, that our debates are seldom resolved.” p.49
Claim 4: Phonics facilitates the increasingly automatic identification of unfamiliar words.
“We are not aware of any evidence that suggests that context cannot aid the development of orthographic mapping. To the contrary, we know from the work of Scanlon and her colleagues (see Scanlon & Anderson, 2020; Scanlon et al., 2024) that the Interactive Strategies Approach (ISA), which features a menu of cues to assist in identifying unknown words (what Scanlon calls “word solving”): a) Results in better performance than a phonics-only approach with a range of readers, including those identified with decoding difficulties; and b) Over time, nurtures readers to develop an increasing reliance on orthographic cues with an accompanying decrease in reliance on contextual cues.” p.53
Claim 5: The three-cueing system (orthography, semantics, and syntax) has been soundly discredited.
“Reading requires an orchestration of various factors across words and sentences. It seems overly limiting to discredit the use of cueing systems based on what some might consider a restrictive assumption—that reading is entirely the accurate naming of words, rather than an act of meaning making that involves hypothesizing. To dismiss the use of context as an over-reliance on “guessing” or “predicting” ignores important evidence. The essence of most theoretical models of reading involves semantic, syntactic, and orthographic processing. We also find some of the arguments against cueing systems (i.e., the view that the use of context or syntactic, semantic or pragmatic cues, even when coupled with phonics, may detract from word learning) to require the out of hand dismissal of important lines of research.” p.65
Claim 6: Learning to read is an unnatural act.
Quoting William Teale: “The belief is that literacy development is a case of building competencies in certain cognitive operations with letters, words, sentences and texts, competencies which can be applied in a variety of situations. A critical mistake here is that the motives, goals, and conditions have been abstracted away from the activity in the belief that this enables the student to “get down to” working on the essential processes of reading and writing. But, ... these features are critical aspects of the reading and writing themselves. By organizing instruction which omits them, the teacher ignores how literacy is practiced (and therefore learned) and thereby creates a situation in which the teaching is an inappropriate model for the learning.” p.73
“But, as nearly as we can fathom, it is as natural or unnatural as learning anything else we learn in our quest to make meaning and achieve coherence about all of life’s phenomena.” p.77
Claim 7: Balanced literacy and/or Whole Language is responsible for the low or falling NAEP scores we have witnessed in the U.S. in the past decade.
“These arguments also ignore the limits of the measures themselves. Even if we did accept the dubious practice of elevating correlations to causal connections between practices and outcomes, we would be forced to also acknowledge that on other outcomes—such as the enjoyment of reading—the evidence favors those countries that have been largely spared from reforms and mandates requiring the teaching of phonics” p.80
“In reviewing the Mississippi results, LA Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik (2023) and education bloggers Bob Somerby (2023) and Kevin Drum (2023) reported what they deem to be a statistical illusion—one that mischaracterizes Mississippi fourth-grade students’ unprecedented growth in reading performance as correlated with the state’s emphasis on phonics (and, by extension, the Governor’s support of Mississippi’s Literacy Promotion Act). According to Somerby and Drum, the results are not just suspect; they represent a cover-up.” p.86
Claim 8: Evidence from neuroscience research substantiates the efficacy of focus on phonics-first instruction.
“Given the questionable reliability of such results and other factors that might be in play, claims that enlist select neuroscience studies to argue for the primacy of phonics may be difficult to substantiate or even verify.” p.94
“Even those claiming major breakthroughs admit that a cloud hangs over connections between neurological studies and reading processes and pedagogies. While major gains have been made in learning about brain activity during reading, the findings are more suggestive than certain.” p.99
Claim 9: Sociocultural dimensions of reading and literacy are not crucial to explain either reading expertise or its development.
Quoting Purcell-Gates & Tierney: “Teaching models that strip down reading and writing to technical skills outside of meaningful practice may show what looks like good results on skills tests, but these gains are quickly lost after grade two. Children learn to read and write better when teachers respond to them based upon knowledge of them as individuals and as members of cultural communities.” p.109
“The mistake, we think, of the SoR reform initiatives is that in their zeal to ensure a secure hold on the science of word reading and understanding, they have lost their grip on the other equally-scientific endeavors—namely, the vast body of research that tells us that learning is enhanced when matters of diversity, equity, relevance, ecological validity, and cultural plurality are front and center in our enactment of curriculum and teaching.” p.111
Claim 10: Teacher education programs are not preparing teachers in the Science of Reading.
“much of the public discourse surrounding literacy research in the U.S. is filtered through the lens of “necessary illusions”—one of which, he notes, is that teacher education is fundamentally flawed, and needs to be radically overhauled (or even abandoned).” p.119
“Implicit in their recommendations seems to be erroneous theory of action, which assumes that (a) if you provide teachers with the right knowledge and (b) provide incentives and/or sanctions for holding themselves and their students to practices emanating from that knowledge, change will happen. Teacher learning, teacher change, and teacher education are a lot more complicated than that” p.119
Overall, my problem with the Science of Reading is that it sees children as basically computer programs that all learn in exactly the same way. The research against the view is virtually endless. From Delpit’s wonderful book Other People’s Children, Bernstein’s Class, Codes and Control, or Vygotsky’s Thought and Language, literacy is understood to be so fully embedded in social and cultural systems that to pretend it somehow sits outside these looks like someone is playing games, rather than doing science. What in the world could be more culturally determined than literacy? And so, demands like ‘no guessing words from the context’ sounds to me like the advice of someone who has never actually read themselves. Not only are children able to apply more than one strategy at a time (unlike a simple computer program), they inevitably do.
I avoid ‘the one true path’ in virtually every aspect of my life. So, if someone calls themselves a scientist and claims to know the truth – I’m going to put pretty high standards of proof upon that assertion. Recently, I’ve been reading a lot around this topic – not least since a lot of this stuff is being mandated in the Australian policy environment. What I’ve been astounded by is how thin the supporting evidence for any of the claims actually are. I’ve been particularly interested in the mandated requirement that initial teacher education courses teach about the brain and how it learns. Frequently, this is what would otherwise be self-evident (kids learn better if they aren’t distracted, or you might need to tell them more than once if you want them to remember) wrapped up in neurobabble about the occipital-temporal ventral cortex.
Basically, there is a fundamental intellectual dishonesty to those who promote hard line Science of Reading. It’s not just that they have a view that is different from mine – rather, they distort the evidence in ways I find repulsive. As such, this book is a much kinder critique of this subject than I would be capable of.
Read
February 20, 2017so beauty but so hard when IReading Strategies and Practices: A Compendium found it
April 8, 2015
This is a very dry textbook, but has good information. It's great for a reading specialist or someone who wants to learn more about intensive reading strategies.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews