The Science of Reading is Different!

Teachers must be very explicit in teaching phonics. We know that for phonics instruction to be successful, it must have scope and sequence that moves from easier to more difficult. From letter/ sound correspondences to blends, digraphs, syllable types and division rules all the way through morphology, teachers must understand the intricacies in order to help a student make sense of the language. Phonics has traditionally been taught in context of a specific book or need; the focus now is to provide more explicit phonics instruction. Research on successful reading instruction supports practicing what has already been learned. In contrast, leveled texts are largely predictable, filled with high frequency words, and contain a high level of picture support. When trying to read an unknown word, students were taught to look at the first letter and the picture and guess the word. These strategies did not provide students with the skills to decode unfamiliar words. The shift to using decodable texts – which have a large percentage of words that are decodable based on what has already been taught – will lead students to become automatic at decoding. The goal is to create readers who look at the word and try to sound it out before using the picture to check for visual clues. READ BETWEEN THE LINES 4 THE SCIENCE OF READING IS DIFFERENT Students in Arkansas will benefit as evidence based practices are incorporated into classroom instruction. 5 The four-part processor is one theoretical model used to explain how the brain learns to read. Use of this model started with the context processor and focused on context to make sense of the word. After extensive research using functional MRIs, neuroscientists have proven that the model has been taught in reverse order for decades. The phonological processor fires first, followed quickly by the orthographic processor. Then comes the meaning processor and finally the context processor. This is an example of existing research being refined and better understood through modern discovery. In the past, high-frequency words were considered to have no regular spelling pattern; however, this is often not the case. Students were taught to memorize high-frequency words using flash cards rather than decoding the parts. Using the research of permanent word storage and orthographic mapping introduced by Linea Ehri and brought back to the forefront by David Kilpatrick, we can teach students to build their sight word vocabulary much more quickly using decoding techniques. Readers analyze each word with a focus on the parts that are decodable first and then the parts that are irregular. We have very specific assessments for phonemic awareness and decoding which can help pinpoint areas of weakness in students. It is much more efficient to group students based on common needs and then work to build those skills in small group instruction than to put students into a common level of text. Teachers have difficulty using text level as a way to group students because of the lack of continuity in texts which are not based on a specific algorithm and differ between publishers.