Science of Reading: The Big Picture

I was asked by the New Jersey Montessori Administrator's group to give a quick, high-level talk on the Science of Reading. The intention was to help administrators recognize what science of reading teaching looks like. If their teachers were doing it, they could relax. If not, they could get support. 

You can watch a recording of the talk on our YouTube channel and read on below for details of what we covered.

Science of Reading Includes the Neuroscience of Learning

We only had 45 minutes so I had to paint with broad strokes. The big takeaway is that the Science of Reading includes decades of research in literacy, education, psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience. It's not just about phonics, it's about honoring human development. 

I tried to create a little graphic to represent this. I started with these five core components of the science of reading: vocabulary & oral language, phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, and comprehension.

Vocabulary/Oral Language

Learning to speak is a natural biological process for most humans. In fact, humans have a speaking and listening area in their brain similar to that of other vertebrates. So this is an old system in terms of evolution.

The way we learn how to speak is by being spoken to (hearing language) and by taking turns speaking (conversational turns). The more we hear humans speak (as opposed to hearing recorded speech) and the more we speak, the stronger these foundational neural networks become. As we develop our vocabulary, we are also developing our executive function abilities (and possibly vice versa). 

If you need teaching support/guidance in this area, we have a large collection of materials you can use and activities you can play to support vocabulary and oral language development in our Speaking and Listening Collection.

Phonological Awareness

Phonological awareness refers to the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds of language. It develops a great deal in early childhood (as we myelinate our auditory cortex) but it continues to develop as we grow. In fact, learning to read helps us refine our phonological awareness. Think of how a young child might pronounce the word surprise as if it has only one r (suhprise). But, when children begin to read, they discover the missing r and change their articulation of the word. So reading and phonological awareness go hand in hand. (This is also why it's helpful to see someone's name badge at a conference when trying to pronounce their name.)

The key takeaways here are that phonolgical awareness is experience-dependent, that it improves when we start reading, and that it can be enhanced by musical training.

If you need teaching support/guidance in this area, we have a large collection of materials you can use and activities you can play to support the development of phonological awareness in our Speaking and Listening Collection.

Phonics

While evolution prepared our brains to speak and listen, it did not prepare us to read. To read, we have to repurpose the part of our brain that recognizes faces into one that can recognize letters. We do that by explicit activities to link letter/digraph shapes with their key sounds. Once we know letter/digraph sounds, we need practice encoding (writing) and decoding (reading) to build strong neural networks for phonics.

The bottom line is that we have to train the brain to recognize letters/read; it's not something effortless in terms of evolution. The proven ways to do this are by using systematic, multi-sensory, play-based methods that are tied to student interests.

If you need teaching support/guidance in this area, we have a large collection of materials you can use and activities you can play to support the development of phonics in our Essential Letter-Sound Phonics Kit and in our Phonics Collection.

Fluency

Fluency is the ability to read words effortlessly, accurately, and at an appropriate speed (rate). But it also overlaps with the next literacy idea, comprehension, in terms of prosody. Prosody means when we read a word, we express it vocally in a way that is related to its meaning in context. Before we have prosody, we often read in a monotone. Once we develop prosody, we start reading with expression (we might even make character voices to match how we think different characters sound). 

To support students becoming fluent, we need lots of opportunities for them to read silently and aloud. A great way to encourage this is to find things they're interested in reading! We can also make grammar and word study activities fun so that they appeal to the student. For example, we can try to make the longest phrase using the most adjectives possible to modify a single noun.

If you need teaching support/guidance in this area, we have a large collection of materials you can use and activities you can play to support the development of fluency in our Reading, Word Study, and Grammar collections.

Comprehension

Comprehension means making meaning from the written word. When we comprehend something, we can understand literally what's written but also make inferences, draw conclusions, evaluate, and make judgments about the text. It's the ultimate goal of reading.

One aspect of comprehension is metacognition. In this context, metacognition means being aware of whether or not we're understanding what we read. Remember a time when you read a few pages and then realized you hadn't got anything you just read. Maybe you were day dreaming or falling asleep. But, you noticed and so you backed up and reread the part you missed. This ability to self-monitor and self-regulate is essential if we want to understand what we read. 

The bottom line for fluency and comprehension is that we need to find the student's interests and inspire them to let their voice be heard. This will drive them to read, write, and express themselves as they refine their abilities. All of this together leads to fluency and comprehension.

If you need teaching support/guidance in this area, we have a large collection of materials you can use and activities you can play to support the development of comprehension in our Reading Comprehension collection.

I hope this helps. Please feel free to leave your comments, thoughts, or questions below. We can all benefit from your thinking!