Science of Reading, where have you been all my career?

When I taught Kindergarten, I eagerly absorbed PD on whole-language literacy strategies. We did Book Walks, we made predictions based on the pictures, and we learned how to guess at words we didn't recognize.

The Reading and Writing Workshop models had plenty of positives: Students saw their teacher model fluent, engaged reading. They were excited about the stories and eager to talk about the text. Something was missing, though.

Students were not learning to be independent readers. Everything seemed to be about support, scaffolding, mimicking, and using tricks to read. News flash: there are no shortcuts to reading fluency. Students must learn how to decode words. They must learn the patterns they are looking for in spelling and pronunciation. They have to be able to help themselves when they get stuck.

The recent pedagogical dive into the Science of Reading has shown educators that there is a place for explicit instruction in literacy. Perhaps the most important, piece, though, is understanding how our brains make reading happen in the first place. Without this understanding, how can we teach youngsters the process? We can't expect students to connect a text to another text if they can't even decode either one. We can't ask students without sufficient background knowledge to comprehend what they have read. Let's take a look at how we learn to read.

How we read (1).pdf

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The PDF included here is what I compiled as I was learning from Stanislaus Dehaene in Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read (2009). I also added some great information from Uncovering the Logic of English (Eide, 2012). If I had been teaching kids to read and leading literacy instruction for years without this knowledge, what could my colleagues be missing out on?

What we do with what we see

A fluent, adult reader sees the words on the page very quickly. Our eyes make jerky movements across the page so that a very limited focus can find 7-9 words at a time and process them almost instantaneously. These jerky movements, called saccades, happen every 250 milliseconds.

The fovea (inside the retina) breaks up what it sees. The photoreceptor recognizes parts of the image. What we recognize is then reassembled to answer the following questions:

• Is that a letter?

• What does it sound like?

• What sound do those letters make together?

• Have I heard or seen that word before?

• What does this word mean?

• What do the words around it mean?

• What does this mean in the context of what I know about the world around me?

What our eyes take in is sent along two paths in our brains:

• The orthographic pathway processes the spelling of the word, its parts (letters, graphemes, morphemes, suffixes, etc.). It also registers features like the font, size, and color of the text.

• The phonological pathway processes the sounds of the letters, graphemes, and morphemes. It examines the syllables, blends, pronunciation rules, and rhymes, among other features.

At this point, we haven't even touched on comprehension yet. This is only a very basic explanation of what happens when we see words on a page.

Further, we haven't discussed how disabilities, cultural knowledge, literacy-rich or -poor environments, vocabulary, and reader confidence can all have an effect on a reader's ability and progress.

If we start with how the brain reads, we can move on to how we teach it effectively and efficiently so that children can easily master the most foundational of the skills they will learn in school.

Check out a fascinating and informative interview with Professor Dahaene in Psychology Today.

Do you have additional insights into reading? Please share!