At the 2000 Annual Conference, a panel of five reading experts discussed what we've learned from recent reading research and how that new knowledge is being applied in classrooms. The panel was moderated by Diane Berreth, a deputy executive director at ASCD. Here are the panelists' opening statements, slightly condensed:
Photo by Mark Regan
Marsha Berger, deputy director of the educational issues department, American Federation of Teachers (AFT):
I'm very pleased to be here. We always appreciate the opportunity to share with others the feelings of the American Federation of Teachers on this issue. I'm also here representing the Learning First Alliance, which is an alliance of the 12 major education organizations in the country, including ASCD. So what I'm going to talk about includes their position and their sense of the reading issue as well.
We all know that in today's society, the child who doesn't learn to read does not make it in life. President Clinton declared in 1996 that reading instruction was a national priority and that there was a priority to ensure that every child in America reads independently by the end of the 3rd grade. The Learning First Alliance firmly agrees with this position that the President has taken.
According to recent international comparisons, our students are among the best readers in the world. However, we know that there really has not been any improvement in reading performance since the early '70s, and we know that there's much more that needs to be done.
The extent of the reading problem in this country varies depending on which set of assessments you look at. However, whatever the correct figure for overall proficiency, reading researchers do report that by 4th grade, about 20 percent of U.S. students are already so far behind in reading that they may never catch up. We also know that poor, immigrant, and minority children represent a disproportionate percentage of those with the lowest reading achievement.
However, affluence is no guarantee of reading success either. In fact, according to NAEP studies, approximately one-third of all poorly performing 4th graders are children of college-educated parents, indicating that reading difficulty is not just a problem among the poor, immigrant, and minority populations but is a national problem that extends across all socioeconomic strata.
The Learning First Alliance believes that the ultimate goal of all reading and English-language-arts instruction is to allow students to become fluent readers, writers, and thinkers who are able to comprehend, to learn from and add to, the collective imagination and experience of all human history.
To accomplish this, students must be challenged to meet high academic standards and be exposed to a rich core curriculum that will give them a strong vocabulary base, broad background knowledge, and ample exposure to an interesting array of narrative and expository texts. They must learn to read for understanding, and they must be given a command of the rules of spelling, grammar, and syntax so that they will be able to write with imagination, clarity, and precision.
Undergirding all of this, at a very early age they must be given the keys to the speech-sound symbol system of the English language that will allow them to decipher written text. In other words, they must learn the alphabetic code and how to use it to read and write words. Sadly, it's during this very elemental stage of reading that many students encounter their problems.
Fortunately, because of research over the last several decades, we now have a good deal of information about how to help those students who experience early problems. The first step is to apply the consistent findings of these research studies in such various fields as neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, and education.
The researchers have identified several basic, interconnected subskills that all children must master to become proficient readers. Young students must develop phonemic awareness; they must learn phonics. In addition, the association between letters and sounds must become virtually automatic; students [must] learn to decode words almost instantly so that they are able to concentrate their mental energy on the meaning of the written text.
Research suggests that 50 to 60 percent of students are able to master these subskills with relative ease. However, the remaining 40 to 50 percent — especially those without a language-rich home environment or with mild-to-severe reading disabilities — may experience very real problems that, unless resolved by the end of 3rd grade, are likely to place them at permanent educational disadvantage.
This is not to say that the ability to decode words is sufficient to make every child a skillful reader — just that it is a necessary precondition for reading proficiency. Children need a balance of both phonics-based instruction and literature-based instruction. It's critical to strike that balance in the right way.
Early exposure to systematic, explicit instruction in phonics and decoding skills and phonemic awareness, along with reading comprehension strategies, claim the researchers, will indeed make sure that virtually every child — except those experiencing the most severe reading and cognitive disabilities — can be taught to read.
Susan Burns of the Graduate School of Education at George Mason University:
Thank you for having me here this afternoon. I'd like to give you a context for this particular report that I worked on, Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children [edited by Catherine E. Snow, Susan Burns, and Peg Griffin; Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1998]. This is the popular version of it that was meant more for parents so that they too can understand and think about these issues of preventing reading difficulties.
To provide that context, I'm going to make three points. The first point is: This report was done by a lot of people. I'm here talking about it, but there were a number of people who worked on this committee for two years, two and a half years, to come up with consensus about converging research — converging recommendations based on converging research in the area. Certainly there are people in emergent literacy, sociolinguistics, linguistics, education, special education. We even thought school reform was important to include because there are some issues there that are just integral.
One person who was very important is David Pearson. David Pearson was the review coordinator for this report. At the National Academy of Sciences, we go through a rigorous report review that has [about] 17 other experts of this caliber reviewing the report and giving us feedback. So it's really based on 30 people in the field. That's my first point.
The second point is that it's really important to know that the emphasis of this report is prevention of reading difficulties. It's not on all the best methods to teach reading; this is on preventing reading difficulties. So we were interested in conditions under which reading is likely to develop most easily. In this we did include the early childhood years; stimulating environments for infants, toddlers, preschoolers; effective kindergarten instruction; excellent reading instruction; and the absence of a wide array of risk factors.
In terms of the risk factors, there are certain group risk factors that make children at risk for reading difficulties, and in our review of the research we found that there are also individual risk factors.
If the child belongs to a group with a group risk factor, you're just going to make sure that the whole school gets intervention; you don't necessarily have to single out any individual child. But certainly children growing up in poverty, children entering the schools who do not speak English, and [children who attend] schools that have chronic year-after-year school failure — children at those schools are at risk for having reading difficulties.
Individual children who are at risk for having reading difficulties are children whose parents have a history of reading difficulties; who have acquired less skill and knowledge pertaining to literacy during the preschool years; who lack age-appropriate cognitive linguistic processing, like phonological awareness that was mentioned earlier; who have been diagnosed with specific early language impairment; and children who have hearing impairment.
Finally, my third point is that our committee concluded from the research that we reviewed that in order for children not to have reading difficulties, they need to have the following opportunities:
- To experience contexts that promote enthusiasm and success in learning to read and write, as well as enthusiasm for learning by reading and writing;
- To explore the various uses and functions of written language and to develop appreciation and command of them;
- To develop and enhance language and metacognitive skills to meet the demands of printed texts; and
- To grasp the alphabetic principle for reading and writing.
And then, in prevention, if you're a child who's likely to experience difficulties in becoming a fluent reader, [you need] to be identified and participate in effective prevention programs.
Finally, if a child is experiencing difficulties in learning to read, [he must] be provided early intervention — not waiting until he's in 3rd grade to be identified as having a learning disability. This early intervention — this is a very strong point of the committee, too — the early intervention has to be well integrated with ongoing, good classroom instruction. You don't have an outside intervention if the instruction isn't good in the classroom; that's your first [requirement]. I always view the teacher as the boss in terms of having to be the front line.
Nancy Oelklaus, Executive Director of Texas ASCD:
I became interested in this work on the basis of a phone call I received one day, tipping me [off] that there was some research about reading that perhaps educators — and especially our curriculum leaders — in the state of Texas might not know much about. So I started looking into it and got myself on a sharp learning curve.
I met Dr. Reid Lyon, who's with the National Institutes of Health, and discovered that the research he had undertaken was longitudinal, spanning many years; it was in many locations across the country; and it had been prompted by a Congressional inquiry about the increasing numbers of students in special education classes, which found that the primary reason for that is inability to read. Congress had said, "If this were a disease, it would be an epidemic. And so we need to look into it intensively and do an epidemiological study to get to the causes."
So I brought Dr. Lyon and some of his colleagues into our state for briefings with our curriculum leaders, and some of things we learned are that
- Phonemic awareness is the strongest indicator of success in reading — that is, just understanding the concept that the sounds we make when we speak connect to print. [That's] something that most kids just get by figuring it out, but a lot of kids don't.
- Children who leave 1st grade reading poorly never catch up, for the most part.
- Bottom line: A balanced approach to teaching reading is best, including all of the different components and facets of reading — phonological awareness, comprehension, fluency, enjoyment of literature, vocabulary development, and writing. It's not an either-or proposition.
Some of the challenges I have observed as I've watched this new conversation come down the road are these — and I think they all come under the umbrella of our prevalent mental models in our profession. You know, we hear Bob Sylwester and Eric Jensen and others talk about neuronal patterns, and we always think about other people's neuronal patterns. It's easier to see those than it is to see our own. But I want to talk about some of the neuronal patterns I observe within our own profession.
One of them is: I still hear people say, "Any program will work as long as the teacher believes in it." What goes along with that prevalent mental model is our proclivity to look at short-term results and not long-term results. That's one of the challenges I see.
Another challenge I see is that we are such a hopeful profession. And so if we're not successful with a child, we say to ourselves, "Well, he'll get it later on." It's our willingness to live on hope and not look at the science of reading and what research absolutely tells us.
Another challenge is our own memory of bad phonics instruction. When we hear terms like "phonemic awareness," we incorrectly translate that to phonics, and then what's bonded with that is the emotion of boredom and anger at all of those worksheets. That's a real barrier and a real challenge for us to overcome.
Here's a challenge that's near and dear to my heart: inadequate professional development and support for teachers to change their practice — even to talk about changing their practice. We've worked on this in Texas for many, many years, and we're still not where we want to be.
Our tendency to focus on programs, I think, marks off lines of conflict. Another thing that's in our long collective memory is the controversy surrounding these issues. Today I'm wondering if we can overcome our love for controversy. We understand the rules of the reading war. I wonder if we can learn how to live in reading peace.
Donna Ogle, professor of education at National-Louis University and vice president of the International Reading Association (IRA):
It's wonderful to be here because I like to live in peace rather than war also. I think that we know enough in our field to move forward peacefully. The reports that have come out and the status of what's going on in the schools give us a real sense of hope for the future.
One report that's not available to us to discuss today is the National Reading Panel report. That's why I'm here — so what I can't talk about is what I want to talk about, which is the latest report. It was supposed to be out in January, then it was supposed to be out in March, now it's supposed to be out April 12th.
In that report, Congress commissioned a panel to look at all of the research that's been done in the field of reading recently to see what we know from scientific research about reading — not just beginning reading, but across all aspects of reading. And I think that's another significant piece that should be added to this discussion.
I'm sorry that the report findings aren't out yet, but [from] what I have followed and what I know in terms of some of the members of the panel, we're not going to have very many surprises. We do know a lot about reading instruction, we know a lot about beginning reading processes, and we know a lot about the reading processes that continue throughout schooling, through middle school and high school and on through life. In the panel report, we're going to have a lot of confirmation, I believe, about what we've done and what we've accomplished so far. So I think there is a lot of reason for peace in terms of what we know and should be doing in reading education for students at all levels.
[There are] three things that I want to tie together from these different reports. One is the commitment to [reaching] students from all populations — you heard people talk about poor, the immigrant, minority languages. No longer are we forgetting that the contexts in which students learn are very different.
When I work at a school in Chicago that has 100 percent language-minority children in it, and the transient rate is 110 percent, we're not talking about teachers who have an easy job. We're talking about contexts that are enormously different than they were even in the 1970s. It's terribly important that we recognize what teachers have to deal with these days.
That we are holding our own in terms of the reading level of elementary kids, I think, speaks enormously to the sophistication of the work that's going on in our schools, and we need to congratulate a lot of schools for doing well. Not to say that we can't do better. That's the other part of these reports that are coming out. We know that we know more than we're applying. Most school administrators and most school teachers know that too.
So it seems to me our next task is to take what we know and make it a reality in schools, and that means that we have to teach smarter, we have to work smarter together, and we have to work longer and harder.
One of my hopes today is we'll talk about how we [can] take what we know and create a reality for that in each of the school buildings in which we work. Because teachers often don't read; teachers don't get together and problem solve; schools don't take the time, or find the time, to implement what we know [is] best.
We have a commitment to all children which is new, and it's very visible. The commitment that our society wants to make to all children learning by 3rd grade is very much in front of us. Yet the process of making that happen has not been addressed fully. We have to create environments for teachers, administrators, parents, and children to learn together, and to make the best research available to all of us.
Carmelita Williams, professor of early childhood education at Norfolk State University and president-elect of IRA:
We've been at this a long time. It amazes me that we seem to have a pendulum going again — we go from one side or the other. How come we never stop right here [in the middle]? Because all of it's important.
When we talk about a theoretical base — this is coming from the standards for reading professionals in the International Reading Association standards book. Reading should be taught as a process of getting meaning. It's very important. We always get meaning from the printed page, according to what we already know, so it's important to help children to understand. That's a way to go through the process of helping children learn to read. That does not say that there's one way to teach reading, okay? Because there are many, many ways to teach reading.
Also, one needs to understand the impact of the emotional, the social, the cultural, the environmental, the intellectual factors that influence a child's learning to read. I often think when I see teachers working with 1st graders and I see them sitting over on the side, how [each] child feels if he's not successful. Sometimes there's a real reason why that child is not learning that day, and we have to understand that.
Moving on to the knowledge base, one needs to understand the phonemic, morphemic, semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic systems of language and their relation to the reading and writing process.
Now, I'm coming from the experience of working with teacher educators, helping them to understand the knowledge base when it comes to helping children to read. We know that many of these ideas are really geared toward reading professionals, people who are going to be reading specialists. But it's helpful for the classroom teacher who is out there working every day with helping children learn to read to have some idea what this means.
To create a literate environment: When it comes to helping children to read, have lots of print available. One of the things that we often talk about [is that] children need access to learning how to read. They need access to books; they need lots of opportunities to read. When I look at the information coming from CIERA [The Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement], one of the things they talk about is that children need opportunities to develop their oral language. If you go down classrooms — and I supervise student teachers — many of the principals feel that the quietest classroom is the best classroom, and we know that children need to interact. We need to talk about things too. Helping children to talk about what they're reading, to develop their oral language abilities, is a strong indicator of helping them learn how to read well.
We also know that they need to know the print. We have an alphabetic language, so they need to know letters, they need phonemic awareness, they need phonics — all of those are important skills for children to learn.
They also need to practice fluency. [Teachers should be] helping kids to do lots and lots of reading, helping them to have the opportunity to read books, to read magazines, to read newspapers. Some of the research about reading acquisition says that children do not have the opportunity to read often in schools. In fact, some of them read only seven minutes a day in a classroom, and we know that that is not helping them to develop their fluency. It's not helping them to develop their reading acquisition.
We also need to remember that kids need to understand about comprehension. They need to learn how to move information in such a way that it helps them to understand what they read. Have you ever read a page and when you got down to the bottom of the page you didn't know what you had read? Well, you didn't do anything to that information. So we need to help kids to know how to move information so that they can understand what they read.
We also have to help them to want to read. Being a reader and wanting to read go together. Those kids who really enjoy reading and want to read are the ones who are able to develop the best reading skills.