Lately, there’s been a significant push for “the science of reading” when it comes to educating our children. In order to support this initiative, it’s important for educators and parents to have a thorough understanding of what it is.
In this article, we’ll take a deep dive into the science of reading, discussing what it is and how it can help strengthen reading skills.
Understanding the Science of Reading
The science of reading is actually an older topic in education that has found new life and support in recent years. Reading scores are falling nationwide, a trend that has been hastened by the pandemic. This has meant that educators and scientists are evaluating how reading has been traditionally taught and looking for better ways to support students.
What Is the Science of Reading?
The science of reading encapsulates a body of scientific knowledge and research-based evidence of best practices for reading instruction. The science of reading argues that children learn best from systematic and targeted instruction in areas such as phonics and word recognition. In contrast, most of reading instruction for the last few decades has focused on balanced literacy and a cueing approach.
Now, education is moving away from a balanced literacy approach and towards the science of reading with the goal of improving reading instruction.
What the Science of Reading Teaches Students
In early literacy instruction, the science of reading research focuses on a few key components.
Text comprehension
Vocabulary and oral language comprehension
Fluency
Phonics and word recognition
Phonological awareness
It’s important that students gain an understanding of these different components through systematic and strategic lessons. We’ll get into each of these components in a little more detail below.
Text Comprehension
Scaffolded reading and read-alouds are rich texts that are helpful teaching tools to use even before young students can read on their own. While reading, you can teach students to use metacognitive strategies. Metacognitive strategies mean that students are thinking about the text in a critical way while they are reading. These strategies include:
Building inferences
Monitoring for meaning
Setting a purpose
Encourage your student to ask questions while they read, such as questioning a character’s motivations or wondering about the meaning of a new word. You can even give your student a stack of post-it notes and prompt them to record their questions, then stick them on the page of a book!
Vocabulary and oral language comprehension
Students build language skills through experience, such as listening to an adult read aloud or looking up a new vocabulary word in a dictionary. Always include language-rich and high-quality interactions in instruction, such as breaking down vocabulary words into root words and affixes. Encourage students to keep a word journal where they can track new and interesting words that they stumble upon while reading.
Fluency
Fluency refers to how smoothly a student reads a text, either out loud or independently. With oral fluency, the goal is for the student to read in a way that matches the cadence and emphasis of a spoken conversation. For example, do students imbue their voice with emotion or take a brief pause when reading a comma? When reading independently, do students have to go back and reread sentences multiple times in order to understand? Try building fluency by encouraging your student to read text out loud, whether from a grocery list or a book of their choice.
Phonics and word recognition
Phonics refers to the systematic instruction of letter-sounds and spelling patterns. This includes breaking down words into their constituent parts, called phonemes. If a student is reading the word “cat”, it’s recommended that they break down the word into the individual letter sounds, “c/a/t”. Teaching phonics skills can help students sound out unfamiliar words and improve both fluency and comprehension. The science of reading places a heavy emphasis on phonics as a foundational building block of literacy. This is a huge ideological shift from the current practices of balanced literacy, which placed less value on phonics instruction. One of the best ways to incorporate phonics instruction is through decodable readers! Decodables are texts where students can practice their word decoding in a structured way.
Phonological awareness
Phonological awareness is interconnected with phonics. Phonological awarness is the idea that students recognize words are made up of discrete sounds. Teach students about manipulating and recognizing the sounds within words. Build phonological awareness by singing rhymes and verbally discussing which words have similar sounds.
Pushing the Science of Reading
The education community is now focusing on incorporating the science of reading into classrooms across the country, moving away from the balanced literacy approach. Much of the COVID-19 relief funding received by institutions has been used towards focusing on teacher training or instruction of early literacy. The District of Columbia and18 states agreed upon this, based upon the science of reading research results.
Here are a few examples of how different states use this funding for reading.
Kansas
COVID-19 relief funds are used to train pre-K-5th grade educators in Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS), a professional development program for early reading.
Alabama
COVID-19 relief funds are used to run summer camps providing struggling readers with “direct, explicit, and systematic” interventions during summer 2021 and to provide training for program implementation.
Nevada
$1 million in funding is being used for the professional development of educators in the science of reading during the 2021-22 school year
ryco.io and the Science of Reading
Here at ryco.io, we take education very seriously. So, it comes as no surprise that we have our own team of experts who focus explicitly on the science of reading. ryco.io has been involved in complex and thorough market research related to the best practices of the science of reading. Our company has used our extensive knowledge to develop decodables for many large publishers. We’ve also been involved in multiple projects updating existing curriculum to better align with the newer science of reading approach.
Final Thoughts
Now that you have a better understanding of the science of reading, you should see why it is so important in educating students early on. If you need help creating or updating educational content that fits with the science of reading, we are ready to help! Let’s improve literacy by incorporating the research-backed strategies of the science of reading.
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