What’s this Talk About the "Science of Reading?”

From My Learning Farm’s Monthly Blog www.mylearningfarm.com:

We in America, love our “buzz” words and it seems the new buzz word around reading is the “science of reading”- people, we have been studying reading for over 150 years!!! We KNOW a lot about reading and how to teach ALL children how to read and read well and it AIN’T the “science of reading.”

This new buzz word seems to stem from those in charge have now realized California is the 50th of 50 states in literacy rates-HOW SAD-so they are looking for the next buzz word to save the day!!!!!!!! Legislators and educators have been ineffectively meddling into classroom reading instruction for years with some successes, but mostly failures!

Let me provide some background…

1950s-1980s: On and Off Phonics Instruction: The 1950s was a time of great technological advancements as well as giant leaps in reading instruction.  The popular Dick and Jane books of basic phonics became the method of choice and did provide foundational phonics skills.

However, in the 1960s our country shifted away from phonics to the look, say, read method (later known as the whole word method) with marginal success and reduced literacy rates.

Those of us squarely in our 40s learned to read with phonics instruction-learning the alphabet and phonetic alphabet, vowel sounds, diphthongs, vowel teams, digraphs and syllables to decode and read.  Guess what? We are our nation’s most proficient readers-because it WORKS!!!

1990’s-2000: Whole Word Instruction: We shifted gears in the 1990’s from a phonics-based reading instruction to whole word language acquisition.  Basically, you look at the word, memorize it and-viola! you know it.  Well, this began our nation’s nosedive off the cliff of literacy.  Whole word instruction was a massive failure for many reasons, the biggest being that students don’t learn to read by memorizing whole words, instead students learn to read by understanding phonemes and syllable types, gleaning meaning from context and instruction in decoding unknown words.

2000’s-current: Common Core: As you may remember, a group of lobbyists, textbook publishers and mucky-mucks in theoretical education helped craft Common Core across all subjects to standardize our nation’s academics.  Common Core reading instruction incorporates the science of reading, collaboration, whole word principles and jumbles them all up a an unrecognizable soup of literacy instruction.  Teachers have sadly lost the ability to tailor instruction to the students in their classrooms, instead having to tick the MANY boxes of literacy standards. Common Core didn’t fund additional teacher literacy training. What resulted was high expectations without phonics instruction and teacher training has left California LAST in the nation for literacy-SAD, SAD, SAD!!!

Now back to the buzz word of the day the “science of reading”…“The science of reading refers to a body of research from the fields of education, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and neuroscience, that explains how individuals learn how to read and best practices for reading instruction” (Department of  Education).  This vague definition further explains elements within the “science of reading”-phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. FINALLY, there it is phonemic awareness and phonics-the two MOST critical foundations of literacy!!!!!

This new buzz word the “science of reading” should be squashed where it is and replaced with evidence-based literacy approaches.  Evidence-based means it derived from or informed by objective evidence— IT WORKS. We have MANY evidence-based literacy efforts; the top being Orton-Gillingham structured literacy programs!!!

My hope is that moving forward our state will scrap current literacy efforts that seemed to have benefitted few and will move toward evidence-based Orton-Gillingham structured literacy to build a society of STRONG, CONFIDENT readers!!!!!!

If your child is a struggling reader, please reach out to My Learning Farm at www.mylearningfarm.com