Following the science of reading

By Marsha Harris, Director of Curriculum

Learning to read is the capacity to attend to the individual phonemes (sounds) of speech and then attach them to graphemes (letters) to spell, read words, and create meaning in a text.

Do you remember when you learned to read?

Think back. Do you remember when you learned to read? Do you remember how you learned to read? Do you have any specific emotions attached to those experiences? For some, reading was a fairly simple process with good instruction. For others, it was daunting, exhausting, and challenging. At Trinity, our primary literacy goal is to develop proficient readers who love reading. However, the ultimate goal is for our students to become deep readers, connecting the text and transferring their understanding across content areas. Teaching a child to read is a complex system of foundational skills culminating in comprehension. The methods, programs, and resources required to teach reading are specific and involve a deep content study. No one is born with the innate ability to read. It isn’t a natural skill like crawling, talking, or walking. The human brain is not wired to read. Reading is something that must be developed with explicit and direct instruction. Reading is a complex task, from visual identification of letters to the attachment of letters to sounds, meaning, and pronunciation.

What is the science of reading?

This year, our faculty has been studying the science of reading. Louisa C. Moats, Ed.D, a nationally recognized authority on literacy education, says, “The body of work referred to as the ‘science of reading’ is not an ideology, a philosophy, a political agenda, a one-size-fits-all approach, a program of instruction, nor a specific component of instruction. It is the emerging consensus from many related disciplines, based on literally thousands of studies, supported by hundreds of millions of research dollars, conducted across the world in many languages. These studies have revealed a great deal about how we learn to read, what goes wrong when students don’t learn, and what kind of instruction is most likely to work the best for the most students.”1

Over the decades, there have been shifts in reading practices in schools. Thanks to advances in brain research and the consensus of thousands of studies from reading experts, we now better understand how the brain learns to read. As a faculty, we are studying methods, routines, systems, and essential foundational skills that are proven best practices in reading instruction. The 2001 National Reading Panel report concluded that all students benefit from explicit and direct phonics instruction through a multisensory approach and a systematic program. They also determined that for students to become proficient readers, there are five critical pillars of instruction:

Fourth Grade Associate Teacher Cathrine Halliburton, Fourth Grade Lead Teacher Hunter Branch, and Fifth Grade Associate Teacher Kelsey Strickland use picture books, story passages, and partner reading to demonstrate reading fluency and expression during the Science of Reading session on Fluency professional development in January.

First Grade Lead Teacher Abbie Shaw watches as First Grader Jeremiah matches first and second syllables to make a word.

phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Our teachers have engaged in years of professional development around methods and practices that the National Reading Panel suggested back in 2001. We have studied and implemented a multisensory approach to phonemic awareness, phonics, and spelling over the years that aligns with the research. Over the past three years, we have selected programming and assessments that help inform and refine our instruction and differentiation for small group lessons. Learning how to read begins with the essential skill of listening. We teach students how to decipher sounds, identify the sequence, and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) that we hear in words. This is a skill that we can do with our eyes closed and without print. This phonemic awareness is the foundation of all reading skills. Once a child is proficient in playing with sounds, letters (graphemes) are introduced, and children are taught sound-symbol correspondence. For example, the letter Cc makes the sound /k/ like in cat or /s/ like in circle. While the English alphabet has 26 graphemes, 44 phonemes are made up of various combinations of letters. Listening and spelling, even invented spelling, is the building block of reading. We ask students to “tap out” the sounds in words when spelling or reading in the early grades. We are looking to see if they have phonemic awareness and can isolate individual sounds in words to spell and read. Once students learn how to isolate sounds, they learn about spelling rules and combinations of letters. This is called phonics. The goal of phonics education is to teach students how to understand and use the alphabetic principle, which is the understanding that there are systematic and predictable relationships between written letters and spoken sounds. First Grade Learning Specialist Michelle Perry, who is a certified Orton-Gillingham Associate, says, “Teaching students to ‘tap out’ sounds is a multisensory technique that helps students decode and become more proficient readers and spellers. Guessing at words based on pictures or context is not an efficient reading strategy and is not based on the science of how our brains learn to read.”

The brain is a pattern detector, and skilled readers do not use pictures or context clues to read words. When they encounter unknown words, they apply their knowledge of letter-sound relationships to decode them. For example, here are two nonsense words: englaption/serlendiphilous. Even though they are nonsense words, our brain learns patterns from the alphabetic principle and form words. Students develop their phonics skills over several years. Decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling) lead to fluent readers. Reading and spelling go hand in hand. If we teach a

First Grader Olive codes syllables in two-syllable vccv (vowel-consonant-consonant-vowel) pattern words. child to read, there is no guarantee they will learn to spell, but if we teach them to spell, they will learn to read. One engaging task that can be used when developing sight word automaticity is to have students say the word, tap the sounds, write the word, then read it back. This practice firmly establishes auditory (hear the word), visual (see the word), and kinesthetic (hands-on engagement) associations. Citing Rasinksi, Cognitive Scientist Marcie Penner-Wilger wrote, “Reading fluency is the ability to decode and comprehend text simultaneously. Thus, reading fluency forms a bridge from decoding skills to comprehension.”2 Fluency is the ability to read accurately, at an appropriate rate for the text, with suitable intonation and expression. When students become fluent readers, there is a stronger motivation to read and deep comprehension is achieved. For students who are still struggling to decode, the cognitive load will impact their comprehension. Fluency of sounds, letters, individual words (sight and nonsense), sentences, phrases, and passages should be practiced for automaticity at all reading stages. “Second Grade is a year when students increase their independence as readers,” says Second Grade Lead Teacher Katherine Spits. “Trinity School follows the most up-to-date research on teaching children how to read by homing in on the five key elements of reading instruction. In Second Grade, we explicitly teach students how to decode words through the six syllable types. With this knowledge in place, our students are able to apply the tools they have learned to decode unknown words when reading independently.” Vocabulary development is also a skill that continually evolves throughout our lifetime. At Trinity, our students learn about the morphology (study of the smallest unit of meaning in words) and etymology (the origin or history) of words by studying roots, prefixes, and suffixes. With this, they can understand

meaning and spelling patterns when they encounter unfamiliar vocabulary in their reading and when they use strong vocabulary in their writing. Finally, comprehension is the culmination, mastery, and integration of all the components of the essential skills for reading. Reading comprehension is not a single skill that can be mastered. Children who decode accurately, read fluently, and have strong language skills become proficient readers who can comprehend text, which is the ultimate goal of learning to read. Our ability to understand our reading changes based on background knowledge, vocabulary, and the text’s complexity and type. Comprehension is the ability to extract and construct meaning while engaging with a text. We encourage our students to think about the author’s intentions and recognize the structure and purpose of the text. Can they make a movie in their mind while reading? Can they talk about what they have read and connect it to another text or themselves? Can they summarize the text they just read? Proficient readers read for meaning and know when their understanding of the text breaks down; they reread and pause to think when they do not understand the text.

How do we know your child is developing as a proficient reader?

Our goal is to provide students with intentional, structured programming to become proficient readers and spellers and comprehend complex text by the time they leave Trinity School. We intentionally design our program and curriculum to align our trajectory of skills with the science of reading. Through a multisensory approach that is direct and explicit, our students engage in language development that is robust and rich with visuals, routines, rhymes, and age-appropriate materials. Additionally, Trinity has invested in systems and assessments that screen, monitor progress, and diagnostically measure benchmarks throughout the year. Teachers use this information to analyze as teams, design for differentiation, and plan for progress monitoring. We have never been stronger in our assessment practices and teaching methods. We are committed to continuing to grow in our instruction, response to intervention, and collective teacher efficacy as a school.

What can parents do with children to grow reading skills?

• Read together. Take turns reading passages. Encourage your child to decode words that are appropriate for their age. • Play rhyming and sound games together. Nursery rhymes, songs, poetry, and alliteration are great ways to develop sounds and patterns in sounds. • Use rich language and vocabulary in conversation. • Give your child experiences that build background knowledge and directly impact reading comprehension. • Provide books that fit the developmental age and readiness of your child. • Remember that reading is a skill that needs to be directly and explicitly taught. It will take time.

“As author Emily Buchwald famously said, ‘Children are made readers on the laps of their parents,’” says Upper Elementary Learning Specialist Samantha Steinberg. “Even when your child is too big to sit on your lap, and even after they learn to decode on their own, don’t give up the special time you share reading together. By reading aloud, or taking turns reading, you are modeling your own fluent reading and how you make sense of text. By talking about unfamiliar words, you help to build your child’s vocabulary and understanding of the story. By spending time reading with your child, you demonstrate that reading is something you value.”

1Moats, Louisa. “Of ‘Hard Words’ and Straw Men: Let’s Understand What Reading Science is Really About.” Voyager Sopris, EdView360 Blog Series, October 16, 2019. https://www.voyagersopris.com/blog/edview360/2019/10/16/lets-understand-what-reading-science-is-really-about 2Penner-Wilger, Marcie. “Reading fluency: A bridge from decoding to comprehension.” AutoSkill International Inc. Research Brief, 2008.