Science of reading


The science of reading is the discipline that studies the objective investigation and accumulation of reliable evidence about how humans learn to read and how reading should be taught. It draws on many fields, including cognitive science, developmental psychology, education, educational psychology, special education, and more. Foundational skills such as phonics, decoding, and phonemic awareness are considered to be important parts of the science of reading, but they are not the only ingredients. SoR also includes areas such as oral reading fluency, vocabulary, morphology, reading comprehension, text, spelling and pronunciation, thinking strategies, oral language proficiency, working memory training, cognitive load theory, and written language performance.
In addition, some educators feel that SoR should include digital literacy; background knowledge; content-rich instruction; infrastructural pillars ; adaptive teaching ; bi-literacy development; equity, social justice and supporting underserved populations.
Some researchers suggest there is a need for more studies on the relationship between theory and practice. They say "We know more about the science of reading than about the science of teaching based on the science of reading", and "there are many layers between basic science findings and teacher implementation that must be traversed". Furthermore, the determination of policy or practice should "depend on studies that directly evaluate the effectiveness of a practice or policy", rather than basic research alone.
Research in cognitive science and neuroscience has made significant progress with respect to reading. Yet, one researcher asks "if the science is so advanced, why do so many people read so poorly?".
With respect to reading levels, in the United States, the 2019 Nation's Report Card reported that 34% of grade-four public school students performed at or above the NAEP proficient level and 65% performed at or above the basic level. As reported in the PIRLS study, the United States ranked 15th out of 50 countries, for reading comprehension levels of fourth-graders. In addition, according to the 2011–2018 PIAAC study, out of 39 countries the United States ranked 19th for literacy levels of adults 16 to 65; and 16.9% of adults in the United States read at or below level one.
As to why reading levels are low, neuroscientist, Mark Seidenberg, suggests it may be the result of three factors, 1) the English language has a deep alphabetic orthography, 2) a linguistic variability contributes to the "Black-White achievement gap", and 3) how reading is taught.
With respect to the #3, many researchers point to three areas:
  1. Contemporary reading science has had very little impact on educational practice—mainly because of a "two-cultures problem separating science and education".
  2. Current teaching practice rests on outdated assumptions that make learning to read harder than it needs to be.
  3. Connecting evidence-based practice to educational practice would be beneficial, but is extremely difficult to achieve due to a lack of adequate training in the science of reading among many teachers.

    Healthy Skepticism

Supporters of the Science of reading suggest that we make room for healthy scepticism but guard against allowing ignorance to influence our opinions or practices. Teachers and principals need to be skeptical about expert claims – especially claims made without evidence. They should demand sound evidence supporting a claim, as well as credible credentials of those experts offering their opinion. When faced with the conflicting views of expert opinions, the best course of action is to "compare their credentials".

Foundational skills instruction

Foundational reading skills are those that are generally taught from kindergarten to grade three. However, 30% or more of US students, up to grade 12, failed to perform at or above the basic reading level of the Nations Report Card. As a result, many secondary school teachers devote some class time to activities related to foundational reading skills.
The following chart shows the percentage of K-12 English Language Arts teachers that engaged in foundational reading activities with students.
Activities / GradesK–12–56–89–12
Print concepts73%56%35%40%
Phonological awareness85%59%29%22%
Phonics92%61%25%22%
Fluency80%65%36%36%

Secondary ELA teachers in states with reading legislation were significantly more likely to report frequently engaging their students in these activities than secondary ELA teachers in states without such legislation, even though only one-quarter of states with these laws include requirements around secondary ELA instruction.

Suggested reading instruction by grade level

Some education researchers suggest the teaching of the various reading components by specific grade levels. The following is one example from Carol Tolman, Ed.D. and Louisa Moats, Ed.D. that corresponds in many respects with the United States Common Core State Standards Initiative.

Oral language skills

Spoken language is the foundation of learning to read and children's knowledge of the phonological structure of language is a good predictor of early reading ability. Spoken language is dominant for most of childhood; however, reading ultimately catches up and surpasses speech.

Phonological awareness and Phonemic awareness

relates to oral language. It involves the detection and manipulation of sounds at three levels of sound structure: syllables, onsets and rimes, and phonemes.
Phonemic awareness is a sub-set of Phonological awareness. It is the process by which the phonemes are heard, interpreted, understood and manipulated – unrelated to their grapheme. The National Reading Panel concluded that phonemic awareness is a means rather than an end. Its value is in helping learners understand and use the alphabetic system to read and write. This is why it is important to include letters when teaching children to manipulate phonemes. When teaching phonemic awareness, the NRP found that better results were obtained with focused and explicit instruction of one or two elements, over five or more hours, in small groups, and using the corresponding graphemes. See also Speech perception. In one instance, a 2014 program of advanced phonemic awareness training improved the PA but not the word reading. Some researchers feel that the most effective way of teaching phonemic awareness is through segmenting and blending, a key part of synthetic phonics and structured literacy.

[Systematic phonics]

To use phonics is to teach the relationship between the sounds of the spoken language, and the letters or groups of letters or syllables of the written language. Phonics is also known as the sound-symbol association, decoding words, and the alphabetic principle or the alphabetic code.
Systematic phonics is not one specific method of teaching phonics; it is a term used to describe phonics approaches that are taught explicitly and in a structured, systematic manner. They are systematic because the letters and the sounds they relate to are taught in a specific sequence, as opposed to incidentally or on a "when needed" basis. The National Reading Panel in the U.S. concluded that systematic phonics instruction is more effective than unsystematic phonics or non-phonics instruction. Systematic phonics is also supported by Teaching Reading, National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy and the Independent review of the teaching of early reading.

Vocabulary, sight vocabulary, and sight words

An important aspect of reading comprehension is vocabulary development. When a reader encounters an unfamiliar word in print and decodes it to derive its spoken pronunciation, the reader understands the word if it is in the reader's spoken vocabulary. Otherwise, the reader must derive the meaning of the word using another strategy, such as context. If the development of the child's vocabulary is impeded by factors such as ear infections that prevent the child from consistently hearing new words, then the development of reading will also be impaired.
Sight words, sometimes called the look-say or whole-word method, are not a part of the phonics method. They are usually associated with whole language and balanced literacy where students are expected to memorize high-frequency words such as those on the Dolch word list and the Fry word list. The supposition is that students will learn to read more easily if they memorize the most common words they will encounter, especially words that are not easily decoded.
On the other hand, using sight words as a method of teaching reading in English is seen as being at odds with the alphabetic principle and treating English as though it was a logographic language.
In addition, according to research, whole-word memorization is "labor-intensive", requiring on average about 35 trials per word. Also, phonics advocates say that most words are decodable, so comparatively few words have to be memorized. And because a child will over time encounter many low-frequency words, "the phonological recoding mechanism is a very powerful, indeed essential, mechanism throughout reading development". Furthermore, researchers suggest that teachers who withhold phonics instruction to make it easier on children "are having the opposite effect" by making it harder for children to gain basic word-recognition skills. They suggest that learners should focus on understanding the principles of phonics so they can recognize the phonemic overlaps among words, making it easier to decode them all.
Sight vocabulary is a part of the phonics method. It describes words that are stored in long-term memory and read automatically. Skilled fully-alphabetic readers learn to store words in long-term memory without memorization, making reading and comprehension easier. "Once you know the sound-based way to decode, your mind learns what words look like, even if you're not especially trying to do so". The process, called orthographic mapping, involves decoding, crosschecking, mental marking and rereading. It takes significantly less time than memorization. This process works for fully-alphabetic readers when reading simple decodable words from left to right through the word. Irregular words pose more of a challenge, yet research in 2018 concluded that "fully-alphabetic students" learn irregular words more easily when they use a process called hierarchical decoding. In this process, students, rather than decode from left to right, are taught to focus attention on the irregular elements such as a vowel-digraph and a silent-e; for example, break, height, touch, and make. Consequentially, they suggest that teachers and tutors should focus on "teaching decoding with more advanced vowel patterns before expecting young readers to tackle irregular words". Others recommend including high-frequency words while teaching the "sound-symbol relations".