Unraveling the Science of Reading: Understanding the Basics (Part 1)

Over the past few years, there's been more and more discussion about the science of reading. What that is, what that means, and how we can integrate it into classroom instruction to ensure that every student learns how to read efficiently and effectively. Let's start by talking about what the science of reading is and what it is not.

First off, the science of reading is a research base. It's based off of decades of research that show how people learn how to read. Reading is the most studied aspect of human behavior. We have lots and lots and lots of research that shows the most efficient and effective ways to teach someone how to read.

5 Essential Components

The science of reading points to five essential components that must be integrated into reading instruction.

1. Phonological Awareness

2. Phonics

3. Fluency

4. Vocabulary

5. Comprehension

Scarborough's Rope

Let's dig in a little bit more into this concept of reading instruction. We'll begin by looking at a model that was developed by Hollis Scarborough called Scarborough's Rope.

Scarborough's rope shows two big elements that are essential to teach people how to read. Within those big elements there are specific strands. The bottom relates to word recognition. The idea here is that we begin with teaching students phonological awareness, getting students to be able to hear that words are made up of sounds. From there, we focus on decoding skills, where students have the ability to break down words either into individual sounds or into chunks, to be able to read or decode what a word says. We also teach students high frequency words that are irregular in nature. Words whose sound spelling patterns don't match the rules. Some of those words are very simple, like the and some are more complex, like foreign. Those words don't follow the sound spelling pattern and rules. So we have to teach students those words specifically and explicitly. So that they can recognize them when they're reading. The idea with word recognition is that we want students to build automaticity. We want them to be able to see a word and automatically recognize it, not have to spend their cognitive energy breaking down what that word is, whether they do that sound by a sound or by chunks.

We want students to see a word and know it. Then, their cognitive energy can go towards understanding what that word is, how it fits in within the particular piece of text. The top part of Scarborough's reading rope relates to language comprehension. This is a separate but just as important strand. Here, we're talking about the background knowledge that students have and need in order to understand what's written. The vocabulary that's embedded within the text that students need to understand in order to comprehend. The language structures that are presented, how complex the text is. Verbal reasoning skills, like metacognition and literacy knowledge like genres.

We want students to be increasingly strategic with this knowledge as they move towards comprehension. It's important to say here that comprehension is always the goal of reading instruction. We want students to be able to learn to read effectively and efficiently so that they can read anything they're interested in and get to the critical thinking. We want students to reflect on: Why is this important? How is this help me, do I care about this? Is this important to me? How does this fit in within my family, my community, my school, my county, my state, my country, the world? Why is this important? That's always the goal of reading. Instruction is comprehension, understanding what's there, and engaging in critical thinking about what students are reading. That's where we want their cognitive energy to go to. And so, we utilize specific strategies to help students get there.

Simple View of Reading

It's helpful here to also mention the simple view of reading, which is a mathematical formula. It's decoding multiplied by language comprehension equals reading comprehension.

It's important that it's a multiplication problem, not addition. Here's why. If you have no decoding skills, you cannot break down the words, but you understand all of those words. Maybe if they're told to you you're not reading. That's not reading comprehension. It's zero multiplied by one equals zero.

Similarly, if you can decode all of the words, you can read them, but you don't know what any of them means. You have one for decoding multiplied by zero. for language comprehension equals zero. If you have some decoding skills, point five and you have some language comprehension skills .5 .5 times 0.5 equals 0.25, you're still not getting to reading comprehension.

You need both elements strongly in place, word recognition and language comprehension and skills in order to get to true skilled reading comprehension. It's likely that we have all experienced students in both of these camps. A student who cannot decode very well and really struggles with just reading the words on the page. They cannot comprehend the text well. On the other hand, we have students who can decode very well. They can read any word in the text, they can read the text with some level of fluency, but can't understand anything that they've read. It means that they're missing some critical components that we need to teach so that students can be effective and efficient readers.

The Science of reading is NOT:

It is also important to understand what the science of reading is not. It's not a specific curriculum.

It's not only teaching phonics. It's not only one of these specific components: phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. It's all of them. It's all of them being taught explicitly and intentionally to help students learn how to comprehend what they've read.

In this series of blog posts and videos, we're going to explore each of those five big components of reading instruction.

It's important to note that here we're going to show you how to integrate these concepts into your instruction through Be GLAD. It doesn't mean it's a replacement for the literacy instruction that you're doing at some point during the day, but rather how you are reinforcing these skills through the instruction that you're using with Be GLAD strategies. That might be during language arts, that might be during science or social studies or mathematics or any other content area. How do we reinforce the skills, teach those skills, provide additional practice for these skills so that students are learning content and language as they're learning how to read.

Watch the video on Unraveling the Science of Reading: Understanding the Basics (Part 1):