READING SKILLS TECHNIQUES

There Are Four Foundational Reading Skills. Why Do We Only Talk About Phonics?

Opinion

—Vanessa Solis/Education Week. Source image: SireAnko/Getty

By Heidi Anne E. Mesmer

January 23, 2020

Here's the good news: Most educators have gotten the message that K-5 students need to learn the foundational reading skills outlined in the common core and other college and career-ready standards: print concepts, phonological awareness, phonics and word recognition, and fluency. The bad news? The foundational skills instruction that students receive is too often incomplete and ineffective. Districts are "checking" the foundational skills box but are using practices of questionable quality and not addressing all of the foundational skills. It's not enough to just do foundational skills. They must be taught completely—yet efficiently—with quality materials to build capacity for comprehending lengthy, advanced literary, and informational texts.

Literacy is livelihood. If you can't read words, many aspects of your life will be impacted. Take this question on a cosmetology licensing exam: "Which of the following refers to the deepest layer of epidermis—stratum spinosum, stratum granulosum, stratum germinativum, stratum lucidum?" It requires understanding complex Latin vocabulary as well as decoding multisyllabic words.

That's why foundational reading skills must work together—it is the integration of the skills that provide an entry point to complex literacy. As students increase in their abilities to automatically recognize words, they also increase in the amounts of mental energy they can devote to understanding complex ideas and vocabulary. No one can concentrate on Newton's laws, plot development, or electrical circuits if they are struggling to decode every fifth word.

A common misconception is that "foundational skills" only means "phonics." The truth is that the four areas are an integrated gestalt, greater than the sum of their parts. Often emphasized in K-2, phonics is teaching students the correspondence between visual symbols (graphemes made of letters) and speech sounds (phonemes). But to access phonics, children must have certain insights, or the system will make no sense.

Students often learn letters but don't know, for example, that print runs left-to-right or that words are groups of letters separated by space—insights called print concepts. Similarly, students learn letter names but do not understand the alphabetic principle—that symbols represent speech sounds ("cat" equals 3 symbols, 3 sounds). Kindergarteners learn the alphabetic principle and print concepts when their teachers model reading and writing. We are putting the cart before the horse if we drill letter/sounds without also teaching print concepts and the alphabetic principle.

That's why foundational reading skills must work together—it is the integration of the skills that provide an entry point to complex literacy.

Some educators think phonological awareness is synonymous with phonics, but this is another misconception. In fact, when I recently observed foundational skills lessons in more than 10 K-2 classrooms, I only saw one phonological awareness lesson. Phonological awareness is the ability to orally identify and manipulate the sound units of language such as words, syllables, and speech. Research tells us that if students do not consciously attend to and distinguish these units, they are unlikely to benefit from phonics. Similarly, instruction in print concepts primes students to learn phonics. Can you imagine going to a job where you learn all about the different types of buttons, threads, fabrics, and zippers but no one tells you that you are manufacturing jeans? Yet that's often how reading instruction can feel for children.

Phonics and word recognition skills include analyzing multisyllabic words into morphemes, the smallest meaning units (e.G., pre-treat-ing). Many schools stop instruction after students can decode single syllable words, but multisyllabic words outnumber single syllable words 4-to-1 in advanced texts . To complete foundational skills instruction, we need systematic instruction in morphology through the 5th grade and beyond.

The last foundational skill, fluency, closes the deal. It is the ability to read connected text automatically (with little conscious effort), accurately, and with proper expression using volume, phrasing, smoothness, and pace to convey the meaning. Addressed in 1st through 5th grade, fluency enhances—and is affected by—meaning making. Without requisite fluency, students will have little cognitive energy to devote to complex ideas.

It can be exhausting to hear about research-based this and research-based that—but there are well-established findings regarding foundational skills instruction. Simply put: Foundational skills cannot be separated. Print concepts and phonological awareness support phonics instruction, morphological instruction extends students' word recognition, and fluency automatizes word reading. Here are truths educators should focus on:

1. Systematic instruction is effective. It is driven by a scope and sequence, a guide specifying the content to be taught and its order. Let one scope and sequence drive instruction. I often see districts using two to three foundational skills plans, an overkill approach that is bound to confuse students.

2. Students need to learn all the foundational skills. I see approaches that heavily emphasize just one or two skills, such as phonics, but completely miss others. These skills are complementary and need to be consistently taught, in response to development, through grade 5.

3. Instructional language should be explicit. Teachers should clearly and directly tell students the grapheme/phoneme relationships, word roots, or syllable patterns being taught. I recently tested more than 150 kindergarteners who knew about 90 percent of their letter/sounds but could not decode simple words. Most young children must be taught explicitly how to decode words.

4. Solid foundational skills instruction is assessment-guided and responsive. All students do not need the same thing. In a 2014 study, one researcher found that entering kindergarteners ranged from knowing zero letter names to knowing all of them. Teachers must use simple diagnostic assessments that inform cumulative review and instruction and often must use small group instruction.

5. Instructional materials must be aligned to the standards. A recent analysis from the RAND Corporation found that only 7 percent of elementary school teachers used at least one high-quality English/language arts material. Thoroughly vet materials to ensure full coverage of all foundational skills. EdReports.Org provides a rigorously developed tool that give leaders a road map. (I recently sat on an advisory panel for the organization's inaugural review of Foundational Skills curriculum.) With focused planning even small or underresourced districts can find research-based, standards-aligned materials.

Moreover, all four foundational skills deserve our full attention as they provide an entry point to complex literacy. Decisionmakers must fully understand what the foundational skills are and apply the robust research that informs best practices. These foundational reading skills are truly foundational—an essential ingredient but not the full recipe. Comprehension and writing instruction, which requires a wide range of instructional targets such as vocabulary and world knowledge, the focus of the other standards, round out the complete recipe. Millions of students are looking to their schools to provide them with the essential knowledge they need to succeed in college and career—it is imperative that we get these skills right.

Heidi Anne E. Mesmer is a professor in literacy in the school of education at Virginia Tech. Her latest book is Letter Lessons and First Words: Phonics Foundations That Work (Heinemann, 2019).

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School Smarts More Than Reading And Maths

By Natalie Parletta

It’s well established that cognitive abilities such as reasoning, memory and focussed attention help children do well at school, but emerging research suggests it is a two-way street – schooling also helps develop those skills.

This bidirectional effect is reviewed in the journal Child Development Perspectives, and underscores the importance of continuous, quality schooling – particularly for disadvantaged children, says Peng Peng from the University of Texas, US.

There is an enduring, one-way emphasis on training cognition to boost performance in academic abilities such as reading, writing and maths, Peng says. But he was curious to know if there was more to it.

“It’s widely thought that being smart helps you do better in school, but does doing better in school make you smarter?”

Two wide-scoping meta-analyses he led last year suggested it did, finding that long-term correlations between working memory and intelligence and academic achievement in reading and mathematics went both ways.

Exploring this further, Peng and co-author Rogier Kievit from the University of Cambridge, UK, report a body of supporting evidence.

But the two-way interaction between cognition and academic performance was not as strong in children with learning disabilities or from poorer backgrounds, who may lack the appropriate resources or foundational skills.

This suggests those at-risk children are in special need of targeted schooling, and could derive even greater benefits from it, like a snowball effect, says Peng.

They also found that short-term cognitive training doesn’t appear to have a meaningful impact on academic performance, highlighting the importance of sustained training – which can have significant and lasting effects in the long-term.

This is important because academic skills, particularly reading and maths, have wide-ranging benefits not just for educational outcomes, employment and income, but also for life skills, health and psychological wellbeing.

Although much of the research is correlational, Peng and Kievit note a meta-analysis of more than 300 studies that found direct tuition improved both academic performance and measures of cognition and intelligence.

Overall, the findings suggest that schooling has broader significance for children’s development, says Kievit, although more experimental studies are needed to confirm and explore this bidirectional relationship.

“The ultimate hope is to support both cognitive abilities and academic skills by better understanding these processes.”

Screen Reading Can Wreck Your Attention. Here’s How To Save It.

But digital work, of course, spares few Americans. The sheer volume of emails, articles and DMs leads to a “defense strategy,” Wolf said: skimming.

“You are missing words. You are missing clues. You are missing your ability to put your background information to work in the most productive way,” said Wolf, director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners and Social Justice at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Maybe that’s fine for a few texts with friends. But what about the most demanding parts of daily work? Many of the day’s most important tasks involve careful, sequential thinking — functions honed by what scholars call deep reading. Some, like Wolf, have worried that constant digital work threatens those cognitive processes.

“We have already begun to change how we read — with all of its many implications for how we think,” Wolf writes in “Reader, Come Home.”

The brain’s “reading circuit” is adaptive, Wolf writes. Processes that aren’t used can wither, and the circuit will adjust to the digital environment’s rapid-fire demands.

“What if, one day, you pause and wonder if you, yourself, are truly changing,” Wolf writes, “and, worst of all, do not have the time to do a thing about it?”

To others, the threat isn’t so dire.

A long strand of research has shown that reading comprehension is better on paper than on screens. The reasons are unclear, though researchers have some theories why. Study designs vary (and some find little difference in comprehension, depending on the conditions).

The divide depends on the type of reading, Willingham said.

“Informational” texts are harder to read on screen than “narrative” ones, according to a 2018 review of research by Spanish and Israeli scholars. Reading to memorize complicated facts or to gain a new skill is often easier on paper. Reading a novel for fun, on the other hand, is probably fine either way.

Readers who are pressed for time also tend to show higher comprehension on paper, the review found.

Willingham prefers to read tougher materials in print, but it’s not always convenient. On planes, he’s usually stuck with his phone. For work, it’s most practical to stick with PDFs. But their highlighting and annotating tools don’t compare with good old paper. He’ll often find himself with a PDF and a Word document open at the same time, highlighting in one and noting down thoughts and page numbers in the other. “My workaround is pretty clunky,” he said.

If screen reading is here to stay, how can it be better? Software designers go about it in different ways.

Some cut down on distractions to imitate the sacred dullness of the printed page — think browser add-ons that chop out ads or phone apps that imitate page turns.

Others do just the opposite, harnessing notifications and real-time commenting to nudge readers toward good habits. Educators have started using that kind of technology to help students read complex texts, making reading almost like a social platform.

When it comes to comprehension, there could be small, cumulative effects from design tweaks such as virtual page flips, Willingham said. But those effects on their own are “ornaments on the basic architecture of the cognition that gets reading done,” he said. Things including vocabulary, background knowledge and syntactical skills remain larger contributors, he said.

The broader problems with screens, he said, have to do with impatience and boredom. Digital environments are primed for distraction.

That doesn’t mean they’re hopeless for thoughtful work.

Rather than see digital reading and print reading as frighteningly different, Wolf writes in “Reader, Come Home,” we should see them as two languages, with different advantages. Tomorrow’s ideal reader will be fluent in both.

So what does this research mean when you’re stuck in a train station or airport with only your phone to read? “It’s probably not exactly the same experience as reading a paperback book, sitting in your easy chair,” Willingham said.

But no need to stress too much. “Look at what those small differences are and use technology for what it affords best,” he said. Good practices for concentration are good practices for reading on-screen.

When you can, pick the right environment. “For a lot of us, it’s kind of romantic to read in a coffee shop,” Willingham said. “But if you’re doing difficult reading, that may be pretty distracting.”

Then, cut out remaining distractions. Turn off WiFi or even put your phone in airplane mode, Willingham said.

Take breaks. There’s lots of evidence that taking breaks truly refreshes your mind, Willingham said. The best timing for those breaks may vary from person to person.

Don’t use breaks for Instagram and email. “That’s not actually very restful, it’s just a different type of work,” Willingham said. It never hurts to take a walk.

Take mornings or evenings (or both) off-screen. Contemplation and reflection are just as importantas the work you’re leaving behind, Wolf said. Get in the habit of bookending your days with an “alternative view of what productivity really needs.”

These rules of thumb are all about cultivating attention. “We are most productive when we can have insights that come into our work that allow us to go beyond just what’s in front of us,” Wolf said. “Deep reading provides that.”

The stakes, Wolf said, are higher than how much a person is able to get done in a day.

Immersive reading, with its ability to take on other perspectives and ideas, has implications for the basic stuff of society, Wolf said: empathy and connection. Contemplation. A richer emotional life.

“Sometimes we don’t realize,” Wolf said, “it’s equally productive in our days if we have that within us.”