Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science

Excerpt from Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science

Reading is the fundamental skill upon which all formal education depends. Research now shows that a child who doesn’t learn the reading basics early is unlikely to learn them at all. Any child who doesn’t learn to read early and well will not easily master other skills and knowledge, and is unlikely to ever flourish in school or in life.

Low reading achievement, more than any other factor, is the root cause of chronically low-performing schools, which harm students and contribute to the loss of public confidence in our school system. When many children don’t learn to read, the public schools cannot and will not be regarded as successful—and efforts to dismantle them will proceed.

Thanks to new scientific research—plus a long awaited scientific and political consensus around this research—the knowledge exists to teach all but a handful of severely disabled children to read well. This report discusses the current state of teacher preparation in reading in relation to that research. It reviews and describes the knowledge base and essential skills that teacher candidates and practicing teachers must master if they are to be successful in teaching all children to read well. Finally, the report makes recommendations for improving the system of teacher education and professional development.

In medicine, if research found new ways to save lives, health care professionals would adopt these methods as quickly as possible, and would change practices, procedures and systems. Educational research has found new ways to save young minds by helping them to become proficient readers; it is up to us to promote these new methods throughout the education system. Young lives depend on it. And so does the survival of public education. The urgent task before us is for university faculty and the teaching community to work together to develop programs that can help assure that all teachers of reading have access to this knowledge.

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How Should Spelling Be Assessed?

When testing students’ spelling, it’s important to go beyond simply marking words right or wrong. The assessment should be an opportunity to evaluate students’ understanding of sounds and conventional spelling patterns. The kinds of words that students miss and the types of errors they make are important in evaluating their spelling achievement and their understanding of language structures.24 For example, by carefully reviewing students’ errors, a teacher may see that some students are confusing /b/ and /p/. Figuring out what to do requires some follow-up. Many students confuse /b/ and /p/ because the letters that are used to spell them are visually similar. But some students who consistently confuse /b/ and /p/ may not be aware that even though the positions of the tongue, teeth, and lips are the same when pronouncing /b/ and /p/, one sound is voiced (i.e., /b/ activates the vocal cords) and the other is unvoiced.25 This difficulty can be corrected by having the student place two fingers on his or her vocal cords as the word is pronounced in order to feel whether or not the vocal cords are activated.

To deliver more targeted instruction, researchers devised a seven-point rubric to judge kindergarten students’ spelling.26 A score of 0 designated a random string of letters with no alphabetic representations. Scores of 1 to 5 indicated increasing degrees of accuracy, and 6 represented a correct spelling. The scores of lowincome, inner-city students improved on this measure after 11 weeks of instruction on the sounds that make up English words, even though the trained students did not spell all of the post-test words correctly. However, their post-test spellings demonstrated improvement in segmenting sounds and sound-letter knowledge. Although the assessment of spelling using a validated rubric takes more time than marking words right or wrong, it provides a more complete picture of students’ linguistic knowledge and is helpful in designing appropriate instruction.*

* To learn more about assessing spelling, see: Kathy Ganske, Word Journeys: Assessment-Guided Phonics, Spelling, and Vocabulary Instruction (New York: Guilford Press, 2000); and Donald R. Bear, Marcia Invernizzi, Shane R. Templeton, and Francine Johnston, Words Their Way: Word Study for Phonics, Vocabulary, and Spelling Instruction (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003).

Endnotes:
24. R. Malatesha Joshi, “Assessing Reading and Spelling Skills,” School Psychology Review 24 (1995): 361–75.

25. Louisa C. Moats, Spellography for Teachers: How English Spelling Works; Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS), Module 3 (Longmont, CO: Sopris West, 2005); and Moats, “How Spelling Supports Reading.”

26. Darlene M. Tangel and Benita A. Blachman, “Effect of Phoneme Awareness Instruction on Kindergarten Children’s Invented Spelling,” Journal of Reading Behavior 24 (1992): 233–61.