Dyslexia is a widely recognized learning difficulty, yet research shows misconceptions are widespread, not only among the general public but also among educators, school psychologists and reading specialists, and even college professors. This complicates the path to understanding the most widely identified learning disability and getting the right intervention and support to students.

As we observe Dyslexia Awareness Month, it’s essential to dispel these myths, offer clarity through research-backed models, and emphasize the importance of early screening and targeted intervention. By fostering a deeper understanding of what dyslexia is, educators and administrators can enable students to understand their difficulties and achieve their full potential.

Common misconceptions about dyslexia

While completing my doctorate, I researched how best to help dispel misconceptions about dyslexia among educators. Studies from the field of conceptual change, a subset of the field of learning science, show that dispelling misinformation can work better to improve long-term understanding than just giving people accurate information. To do this, we must first name and normalize myths before attempting to inform people about the facts.

Despite increased awareness, myths about dyslexia continue to thrive. One of the most common misconceptions is that dyslexia means people see letters or words backward. This myth has been perpetuated in pop culture, but dyslexia is not a visual problem; instead, most plainly, it’s an increased difficulty with learning to read and spell words.

Another myth is that dyslexia is tied to intelligence. Some assume that if a child is smart, they can’t possibly have dyslexia, or that struggling with reading equates to a lack of intelligence. Some people believe you have to find a discrepancy between intelligence scores and reading scores. Neither of these is true.

Dyslexia describes a difficulty with learning to decode words fluently and trouble with spelling. There is no need to find any discrepancies in intelligence, strengths, or weaknesses to identify a student with dyslexia. Instead, best practice for identification is a low response to generally effective reading intervention, combined with low achievement in reading that isn’t accounted for by other disabilities, like an intellectual disability or the need for glasses.

A path to clearer understanding: The Simple View of Reading

To understand dyslexia better, it’s helpful to look through the lens of the Simple View of Reading. According to this model, reading is composed of two essential components: word recognition (decoding) and language comprehension. While both components are crucial for successful reading, when we use the term “dyslexia,” we are only referring to the word-recognition component, that is, we’re referring only to decoding.

This difficulty with word recognition is the defining factor of the term “dyslexia,” which the International Dyslexia Association (IDA) defines as “a specific learning disability…characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities.”

This doesn’t mean students with dyslexia may also have a difficulty with language comprehension; as we know from research, about 50% of children with dyslexia also have developmental language disorder, or DLD. This fact helps educational leaders know to always assess both components separately, rather than just assessing reading comprehension, when doing a comprehensive assessment for dyslexia.

DLD and dyslexia: A connection through the Simple View of Reading

DLD can co-occur with dyslexia, further complicating reading and learning. While dyslexia affects word recognition, DLD impacts a child’s ability to understand and use language, influencing how they comprehend what they hear and read. For more on this, watch Tiffany Hogan, a leading researcher in dyslexia and DLD, as she emphasizes the importance of recognizing DLD as a significant factor in reading development.

Understanding DLD through the lens of the Simple View of Reading clarifies how both difficulties affect reading in unique ways: dyslexia impacts word recognition and DLD affects language comprehension. To learn more about DLD, visit DLDandMe.org for a wealth of resources. Understanding both dyslexia and DLD can help educators align interventions to student need and enable all students to learn to become readers.

Early screening for at-risk children

Given the overlap between dyslexia and DLD, early screening is crucial for identifying students who are at risk. Identifying which students are having the greatest difficulties allows educators to target word recognition, or decoding, skills for students at risk of later being identified with dyslexia; support language comprehension for those at risk of later being identified with DLD; and provide a double-dose of intervention for students who have difficulties in both areas. Early intervention is key to helping children succeed academically and avoid long-term struggles with reading.

Our K–5 reading assessment, MAP® Reading Fluency, can help with early identification of students in need of interventions, including those at-risk of later being identified with dyslexia and/or DLD. To learn more, download our MAP Reading Fluency Dyslexia Screener fact sheet and see our YouTube channel.

Early intervention: Aligning interventions with student needs

Remember, after screening identifies students who are at risk of not meeting grade-level reading benchmarks, the next step is not to identify students with dyslexia or DLD; it is to ensure that students who need intervention are given targeted lessons that are aligned with their specific areas of difficulty.

Dyslexia interventions should focus on word recognition—whether the student needs fluency with phonics skills, multisyllabic words, or passages of text—using structured approaches that are explicit and systematic. In the early grades, this may look like introducing a phonics skill, working with word chains, and reading decodable texts. In the later grades, this may look like teaching flexible division routines, morphology-based reading and spelling patterns, and text-level fluency work. 

For students with DLD, interventions should include strategies that focus on both vocabulary and morphology and reading comprehension. The key is that the interventions are tailored to the child’s individual difficulties, ensuring targeted support that meets the specific areas of need. If the child has more difficulty with learning new vocabulary and connecting concepts, pre-teaching science and social studies content could be impactful. Integrating writing should also be considered for students with DLD to connect explicitly taught skills in grammar, vocabulary, and content knowledge.

Practical tips for educators and administrators

Whether you’re a classroom teacher or school or district administrator, the following can help you serve the needs of students with dyslexia:

• Implement early screening. Identifying student difficulties early ensures interventions can begin before reading difficulties escalate. Prioritize universal screening for dyslexia and DLD during the early grades. Ensure your screener is brief and well-researched. MAP Reading Fluency is an excellent choice.
• Adopt evidence-based interventions. Use interventions grounded in research and tailored to address a targeted student need in either word recognition, language comprehension, or both.
• Invest in professional learning. Continuous professional learning is essential for educators to stay current with research and best practices for understanding and teaching students with dyslexia and DLD. Professional learning opportunities, whether virtual or in person, equip educators to implement effective interventions in their classrooms. Learn more about our offerings on our website.

Bonus: Watch the second part of our interview with Tiffany Hogan

To deepen your understanding of DLD and its connection to dyslexia, watch the second part of our interview with Tiffany Hogan. In this video, she shares valuable insights and strategies for supporting children at risk for or with DLD and dyslexia.

The post Unraveling dyslexia: Dispelling myths and understanding early intervention appeared first on Teach. Learn. Grow..

We all agree time spent practicing reading is crucial for young students, but which types of texts should we use, and for whom? When are decodable texts appropriate? And when should we provide students time with a wider variety of leveled texts? I’m here to help you understand the strengths and drawbacks of decodable and leveled texts—and when to use each.

What is a decodable text?

Although many texts are marketed as decodable texts, not all are created equal. “Decodability” is a term that refers to the number of words in a given text that students have been taught with corresponding phonics patterns and irregular words. If a text set is marketed as decodable text, you should ensure the order in which the set introduces phonics patterns and high-frequency words matches the scope and sequence of your phonics curriculum. If there is a mismatch, the decodable text set will not be decodable for your students.

For example, if a student has learned all short vowels and most common consonant sounds, the sentence “Sam lifts a big bag and fills it to the brim with grain” should be mostly decodable. However, the “ai” in “grain” and the words “a,” “to,” “the,” and “with” would not be, as they include phonics patterns that likely have not been taught, like the /oo/ in “to” and the /th/ in “with.” That’s because neither is a short vowel or common consonant sound. These high-frequency words and the phonics pattern “ai” spelling long A would need to be pre-taught to make this text 100% decodable. If none of these were pre-taught, this text would be only 61% decodable and most likely not as helpful for highly successful practice opportunity.

Why and when are decodable texts helpful for instruction?

Decodable texts are a perfect tool for reinforcing a taught phonics skill or pattern. They are necessary for fluency and application opportunities for students who have been introduced to a new phonics skill in whole-group or small-group instruction or during an intervention.

After you introduce a new phonics skill and provide practice opportunities to read and spell words in isolation, a decodable text is a logical and appropriate next step. Using a longer text with sentences or paragraphs that include a high proportion of practice opportunities with the new phonics skill can help your students build fluency with their new learning in the context of a connected text.

For example, if I am in the fall of kindergarten and have introduced the most common sounds for the letters S, A, D, P, I, N, and C, following my scope and sequence, my next lesson is /t/ spelled with the letter T. I will begin by practicing reading and spelling words like “at,” “sat,” “pat,” “pit,” and “tap.”

Students will stretch each word, write blanks for sounds, then fill in each with the letter that spells the sound. I will then have similar CVC words with /t/ and previous sounds they have learned, one at a time, on the board for students to sound out and blend together. Finally, I will provide my students with more practice, so they not only remember the sounds associated with the letters, but also become more fluent with those sounds in a short, aligned, and highly-decodable text. This may be a book with the sentences “Sam taps. Pat taps. Sam and Pat tap, tap, tap! Pat and Sam spin and spin!” and an illustration showing two friends tap dancing on a stage. Alternatively, I could ask students to read with partners after they read with me initially, and I could provide a blank space instead of the illustration for students to draw what they pictured while reading the text.

Note: Some programs teach consonant blends, such as “sp” or “bl,” as separate lessons. However, if students have learned both sounds in a blend, they can sound and blend together to form the spoken sounds /sp/ as in “spin” or /bl/ as in “blot.” Therefore, there is no need to waste precious instructional time on the many combinations of consonant blends in separate lessons. Consonant diagraphs, on the other hand, are two letters that combine to form a different consonant sound than they do separately, such as C and H in /ch/ or P and H in /ph/. These would need to be taught explicitly for students to understand the new, unexpected sound that is formed.

What is a leveled text?

Any trade book or text can be leveled. There are different leveling systems that use features of the text— such as word and sentence length, unique words, or other factors—to assign a “level.” Most of the time, as levels get higher in number or letter, texts are more challenging to both decode and comprehend.

Leveled texts aren’t inherently aligned to a particular phonics skill. Instead, they contain an amalgamation of phonics skills that are typically increasing in complexity as the levels increase. Some leveled texts that are part of a comprehensive literacy curriculum include certain focus words, such as high-frequency words and/or vocabulary words, that have been previously introduced in the whole group lesson to reinforce these concepts in connected text.

Why and when are leveled texts helpful?

Decodable and leveled texts are not the same. Leveled texts do not have the same purpose as decodable texts. They are not meant to practice a specific phonics skill. Instead, leveled texts can be useful to practice generalizing phonics skills already taught, high-frequency words previously introduced, and specific vocabulary from prior lessons.

Recent research indicates teachers using leveled texts should preview the text to ensure students have a base of knowledge of the phonics patterns included, meaning that they can read the text with about 93–97% accuracy to maximize student growth in reading fluency. Leveled readers should be chosen purposefully to align with the generalization stage of learning to read (so, after students have acquired a base level of knowledge of phonics included in the texts, as shown by reading with 93–97% accuracy). Consider also aligning with the content focus to help students generalize new vocabulary, high-frequency words, and/or knowledge across subjects and throughout the school day.

Please note that the information on leveled texts presented here does not apply to leveled texts that are predictable texts. Predictable, or repetitive, texts are typically found in the first few levels of most organized leveling systems, for example, Levels A–D in Guided Reading levels. These texts are not appropriate for students to learn to acquire new phonics skills or practice generalizing phonics patterns to new words. Because the texts at this stage have predictable and repetitive sentence stems, they can encourage students to use the picture, first letter(s), or context to guess at some words without looking closely at the letters within the word to confirm or change these predictions. Instead, these predictable texts may be more appropriate for shared reading, modeling rhyming during a poetry unit, or making inferences or predictions about the text. For more information, check out Spelfabet, a demonstration by Australian speech pathologist Alison Clarke.

A benefit to using leveled texts, rather than high-controlled decodable texts, is that students begin to learn to utilize their set for variability. That’s a term researchers use for a student’s ability to flex the pronunciation of a word they have decoded into one they recognize in their oral vocabulary. For example, if a student hasn’t yet learned that the letter A following a W typically spells the sound /ŏ/, they may first decode the word “wasp” in the sentence “The wasp stings the pig” as rhyming with the word “clasp.” However, if they know that a wasp is a stinging insect, they may use their set for variability to flex the pronunciation to the real word, “wasp.” Encouraging students to flex sounds during reading, and providing a range of texts to read, not just highly controlled decodable texts, can allow students to grow their phonics flexing muscles, thus jumpstarting their self-teaching abilities.

It is important to ensure students have a base of foundational phonics knowledge before asking them to generalize their skills to build fluency in leveled texts. However, without wide and varied text practice, students may not be exposed to enough word types to jumpstart this self-teaching and phonics flexing muscles. Be aware of that during your lesson planning.

The graphic above on instructional hierarchy was created by NWEA and adapted from Norris Haring and Marie Eaton’s “Systematic instructional procedures: An instructional hierarchy” in The Fourth R: Research in the Classroom. It illustrates different student learning needs and aligned teacher actions at each stage.

Decodable texts would fit well during the acquisition stage of learning and bring students into the fluency stage. Since the goal is to move through the generalization stage and into future literacy independence, leveled texts are an appropriate and necessary part of an early reader’s literacy learning journey.

Recommendations and next steps for teachers

If you’re a teacher, I encourage you to take inventory of your texts for teaching phonics skills. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What types of texts am I using to support this acquisition of introduced phonics skills and assist students in building fluency with those phonics skills?
• Do I have decodable texts for students to practice the specific phonics skills aligned with my phonics scope and sequence?

Next, take inventory of your library for students to practice reading a wide variety texts. Ask yourself:

• What types of texts am I using to support generalization and improve my students’ ability to flex sounds?
• Do I have other text types, such as leveled texts, that align to my students’ reading accuracy of 93–97%?

Finally, ensure students have ample opportunity to read a variety of texts every day. Ask yourself:

• At what point today did students read texts with teacher guidance to practice and receive feedback on new skills or challenging texts?
• At what point today did students read texts with peer feedback to build fluency and understanding?
• At what point today did students read texts independently to extend fluency practice on previously introduced texts or practice their skills?

Recommendations and next steps for leaders

If you’re a school leader, there’s a lot you can do to support your reading teachers in using decodable and leveled texts appropriately.

First, ensure your teachers have the following types of texts for optimizing student literacy success:

• Decodable texts that align with their adopted phonics scope and sequence
• Leveled texts that align with their content topics or ELA high-frequency words and new vocabulary

It’s important that you ensure predictable texts are not part of early literacy word recognition instruction.

Next, I encourage you to check out our evidence-aligned professional learning offerings on Early Word Recognition, Advanced Word Recognition, and Building Fluent Readers for more extended learning opportunities for your entire school staff.

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Who has better reading comprehension of a text, the student with “advanced reading skills” or the one who has a wealth of knowledge about the topic?

If you’re familiar with the Baseball Study, then you know this is a simple question with a complex answer—and important implications for how we understand learning and literacy. This study, conducted in 1987, found that having more background knowledge in a specific topic can be more predictive of a student’s success in comprehending a written text on that topic than having a high score on an overall reading comprehension test.

In the academic setting, we often call background knowledge a “shared academic vocabulary,” and it’s such a critical component of reading comprehension—and learning overall—that NWEA included the teaching of academic vocabulary as one of the Transformative Ten strategies that can be found in some of our nation’s highest-performing schools. These strategies emerged from High Growth for All, an NWEA research project that examined instructional practices in a handful of the country’s highest-performing schools.

Here are a few tips for making better use of the simple but powerful practice of teaching academic vocabulary to improve reading comprehension and achievement.

1. Keep word lists front and center

To succeed with grade-level content, students need a basic set of tools for approaching and understanding the curriculum in front of them—and this includes subject-specific academic vocabulary that helps them feel informed, up to speed, and ready to learn. Whether you’re teaching literature or mathematics, creating word lists and making them readily available to your students will greatly increase their preparedness for new material.

And it’s not just students who benefit from word lists. You, too, can use them as reminders to use the terms regularly yourself and avoid taking your own background knowledge for granted. We all fall back on our own speaking patterns, which may or may not be helpful to students as they work toward specific learning goals. By creating—and continuously referring back to—word lists that are explicitly connected to the concepts you’re teaching, you can help put your students on a level playing field where it’s your efforts to build a shared academic vocabulary, rather than students’ individual background knowledge, that determines their outcomes and growth.

2. Embrace teachable moments

In the High Growth for All project, NWEA researchers found that the most effective teachers make a habit of creating specific opportunities for students to learn new vocabulary terms. In humanities and mathematics alike, these teachers regularly focus on introducing new words that will allow students to actively participate in all the conversations and academic exercises to follow.

Whether you’re teaching literature or mathematics, creating word lists and making them readily available to your students will greatly increase their preparedness for new material.

Sometimes, however, learning opportunities arise outside of the structured spaces planned by teachers. When students come across a word they don’t know—whether they bring this to your attention themselves or you simply intuit that there’s something they’re not grasping—take a minute to pause and assess. Take these gaps in understanding seriously, as even a single word could be critical in helping students successfully interpret a text or complete an activity. You might be on a roll with your lesson plan, but these little interruptions represent teachable moments that you can use to your advantage by discussing a word’s meaning and adding to your prominently displayed word list.

3. Make the most of morphemes

Because it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer number of words in the English language, breaking them down into their functional and meaningful parts—or morphemes—can help make vocabulary instruction a more manageable process with plenty of “aha” moments.

For example, a student may never have seen the word “intractable,” but if they learn that the morpheme “tract” means “to pull,” then they can infer the meaning of “intractable” to mean, roughly, “you can’t pull it.” In this way, understanding morphemes can help open a lot of doors for students who may not be familiar with certain words but know where to look for clues as to the words’ meaning.

As Margaret McKeown, senior scientist and professor emerita at the University of Pittsburgh, explains in a short video on early vocabulary development, “Morphology is one of those resources where if you’re familiar with word parts, whether they’re prefixes, suffixes, or roots … those can help you either infer the meaning of a word, or they might help you figure out the pronunciation of a word that you might realize, once you’ve said it to yourself, you actually know! But you just didn’t recognize it in print.”

4. Encourage curiosity about words

One of your best assets in the effort to expand the way you teach academic vocabulary is the natural curiosity that kids bring to everything they do. You can tap into this curiosity and get kids interested in—even excited about—the new words they encounter as they approach new subject material.

Along these lines, I highly recommend keeping a tab open for the Online Etymology Dictionary, a website that’s a lot more fun and engaging than its name might suggest. Simply type in any word, and you’ll get a solid explanation of where the word originated, why it’s spelled the way it is, and what other words it’s related to.

It’s not always easy to make sense of the English language (consider the different pronunciations of “though,” “through,” “cough,” and “rough”), but the goal here is not to solve every mystery but, rather, to encourage and reward curiosity. Research suggests that nurturing curiosity in this way can have a major impact on what students are able to comprehend. And with the right resource at your fingertips, you can always respond to students’ questions about particular words with, “I don’t know. Let’s look it up together and find out.”

It starts with you

Because we can’t expect students to understand words that we don’t actually use ourselves, the critical first step in teaching academic vocabulary is simply to model the vocabulary we need them to know. Your students might think you put that big word list on the wall for them, but it can be just as valuable a resource for you. And with these vocabulary terms front and center, you can then tap into professional development resources to strengthen your pedagogical practice.

The post 4 ways to teach academic vocabulary and help students master grade-level content appeared first on Teach. Learn. Grow..

Do you wonder how to help students build their reading fluency? We recently spoke with Jan Hasbrouck, a researcher, author, leading expert in reading fluency, and co-developer, with Gerald Tindal, of the oral reading fluency norms. Our goal was to better understand important nuances and distinctions when thinking about reading fluency and building fluent readers.

“Fluency is not fast reading. Fluency is fluent reading,” Jan told us. “The biggest misconception around fluency is that we want students to read faster and faster.” But speed for speed’s sake isn’t a worthwhile goal. “We should think about getting students to the point where their reading mirrors spoken language,” Jan explained. “That’s what our brains understand. And that facilitates comprehension.”

To hear more about building fluent readers from Jan, watch our video below.

What is reading fluency?

Reading fluency is comprised of three parts: accuracy, rate, and expression (sometimes referred to as prosody). Although all three components can be measured, most oral reading fluency assessments focus on the predictive skill of automaticity. Automaticity, in turn, is made up of the most predictive two components correlated with later reading success: reading accuracy (the percentage of words read correctly out of the amount of total words attempted) and reading rate (the number of words correct per minute).

An oral reading fluency assessment, such as the oral reading fluency measure in MAP® Reading Fluency, is the quickest way to screen students to determine if immediate intervention is needed. Without early intervention in place, research suggests student phonics and fluency gaps will continue to widen and students will continue to fall behind grade-level expectations.

How do I use oral reading fluency data?

If a student is low in accuracy while reading an on-grade-level passage, this signals that the student needs acquisition-level instruction and has difficulty with decoding words. A brief screening with an oral reading fluency measure can help you determine if any students are below grade level in accuracy when reading a grade-level text. After the screening, you can assess phonics patterns not yet known and group students accordingly to effectively intervene and teach specific phonics skills.

Here is a list of common actions teachers may need to take, followed by tips on how to go about them:

1. Identify students with word recognition needs. Use a universal screener that delineates between word recognition and language comprehension difficulties, such as MAP Reading Fluency.
2. Assess student knowledge of phonics patterns. Use a phonics and/or spelling diagnostic survey to assess phonics skills that students have and have not yet mastered.
3. Group students for intervention based on data. Form groups of 3–5 students who have similar phonics needs.
4. Begin intervention at the first commonly missing phonics skill. Align student needs with the phonics scope and sequence of your intervention program.
5. Monitor progress. If students are not making expected progress, adjust the intensity of the intervention. Ensure groups are flexible and aligned to student needs.

If a student is low in reading rate but not in reading accuracy, this signals the student needs fluency-level instruction and requires more guided practice with reading connected text. One way to provide this is to do a first read and to scaffold learning anytime the student misreads a word. The feedback provided should be the least amount of prompting needed for optimal student learning. For example, if a student misreads “wage” as “wag” and does not self-correct, the teacher may use a series of prompts, as shown here:

If at any point the student reads the word correctly, you do not need to provide the more extensive level of support and feedback. This way, the student is prompted to do the hard work of decoding and can gain the experience needed to increase their chances of applying this pattern to other words. If the student is given the word as a whole, they may be less likely to think about the unfamiliar pattern within the word and assimilate it into their understanding of how words work. You may then have the student start at the beginning of the sentence and read the word again in the context of the story.

If the word is a Tier 2 vocabulary word or a concept the student may not be familiar with, you may follow up with a student-friendly definition or example, such as “A wage is money you earn for doing work. If you work at a job, you are paid a (wage).” This may be done while keeping in mind the time constraints, the amount of context explaining the word within the text being read, and the importance of understanding the target word to the passage.

What should I do now?

In your journey of learning, growing, and shifting practices to align with research, remember to give yourself grace. Choose one thing to focus on at a time and partner with trusted colleagues to collaborate and seek feedback. Leveraging oral reading fluency data can help to tailor interventions to accelerate student progress. Rather than asking kids to laboriously sound out words or expend precious effort to read at an appropriate rate, prioritize improving their phonics and fluency skills, as this allows them to focus on, understand, and ultimately enjoy what they read.

Here’s a quick summary of what you can do when building fluent readers, whether you’re a teacher or a school leader.

Recommendations for teachers:

• Use oral reading fluency screening data to identify students in need of word recognition intervention. If students score low in accuracy (regardless of their score on rate), place students in a phonics-focused intervention group aligned with a phonics scope and sequence. If students score low in rate (and on or above level in accuracy), place students in a fluency-focused intervention group.
• Use least-to-most prompting and feedback to help students acquire skills faster.
• Monitor student progress and adjust intervention intensity as needed.

Recommendations for administrators:

• Ensure teachers screen students with an oral reading fluency measure three times a year, starting by the winter of first grade.
• Provide time for teachers to have high-quality, practical, and embedded professional learning in teaching word recognition and reading fluency aligned to the science of reading.
• Encourage collaboration by scheduling data meetings for teachers to discuss students’ data, needs, and progress toward goals.

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In many discussions on the science of reading, phonics is featured on the main stage. This is most likely because, unlike language comprehension, word recognition is a constrained skill—one with a limit—that can be mastered, typically within a few years of initial teaching. However, if we don’t pay attention to the bigger beast of language comprehension from the earliest grades, students without this opportunity will fall further and further behind their peers. We need to rethink our approach to teaching reading comprehension.

We think about reading comprehension as the product of word recognition and language comprehension. Nationally, we’ve done a great job getting the word out on the importance of phonics. This is, arguably, the easiest part of the equation to get right. However, that’s not all that needs to happen in the early years so students are successful readers later on.

Two pathways to teaching reading comprehension

We at NWEA recently spoke with Natalie Wexler, an education writer and author of The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System—And How to Fix It. Natalie reminds us that “We really have to see literacy developing along two pathways that are going to be, to some extent, pretty separate in the early years.”

These pathways are word recognition and language comprehension. While phonics has a mound of intervention research on how to effectively get students to reading fluency, cognitive science tells us that students need to acquire plenty of knowledge to be able to understand the texts they encounter, and that this must start early on. Otherwise, the opportunity gaps between kids with experiences to gain background knowledge and kids without will only grow wider.

Natalie highlights how students “are going to be acquiring those foundational skills [of phonics and decoding] through decodable readers and practicing fluency.” But she adds, “That’s not how they’re going to be acquiring new knowledge and vocabulary of a new topic… That’s really going to come through this other pathway, which is reading aloud text that’s probably more complex than they can read themselves and engaging them in discussion of that content.”

In the early years, these pathways to becoming a reader are largely separate. Younger students or older readers with decoding difficulties won’t yet be able to read texts that are building their vocabulary and knowledge. They need to have these rich and complex texts read aloud to them. What does this mean for educators? Both paths need to be effectively taught for the best chance of literacy success in the upper elementary grades and later in life. One doesn’t come before the other—decoding and comprehension both must be valued in the early grades—and both must have adequate instructional time devoted.

What is reading comprehension?

Natalie says, “we have to think of reading comprehension as a process.” Sometimes you may hear teachers asking comprehension questions about a text to students. This is thinking of comprehension as a product, not a process. Assessing students’ comprehension of a text by asking them questions is not the same as teaching students to comprehend.

Comprehension is a metacognitive skill, one that is developed through purposely choosing text sets to build knowledge and leveraging specific reading comprehension strategies to help students acquire this knowledge and apply these metacognitive skills on their own.

So how do we go about building knowledge?

Reading strategies should not be the focus of teaching reading comprehension. Instead, they should be used in service of teaching students new content. The most recent research suggests we use three strategies to help students learn the content of the texts they are reading. Specifically, when combined with instruction in vocabulary and background knowledge, these strategies are most helpful in building student knowledge and understanding. We can teach students to:

1. Identify the text structure
2. Using the text structure, identify the main idea
3. Summarize a text by expanding on the main idea

If students can summarize a text, they now have a situation model to work from. Think of it like helping them build a web of Velcro that all the details in the text can stick to. Teaching students to use these steps will help them build the metacognitive muscles they’ll need to do this type of understanding on their own. By helping students arrive at a coherent understanding, teachers position readers to do the deep work of making inferences, generating questions, and making connections.

Imagine, for example, a class of first-grade students learning about animals and their habitats in science. They read an informational text about owls. Their teacher may then plan to use the book Owl Moon by Jane Yolen to help students step into the role of the child protagonist who is going owling for the first time. Their teacher may refer to what the students learned about owls’ eyesight and sleeping patterns from the informational text. With these goals in mind, the teacher may use various reading strategies and activities to help students understand what they are reading and gain knowledge about animals and their habitats.

Before reading, the teacher may activate students’ background knowledge from the earlier lesson by asking questions like, “What are the ‘special powers’ we learned about owls yesterday?” and “What are owls’ sleeping patterns like?” Activating these concepts will help students make connections during the narrative story. The teacher may also focus students on a problem–solution sentence stem or a narrative story map to help them better understand the plot. The work could be displayed on an anchor chart in a student-friendly format so the class can take notes together. This could transition to students taking brief notes on a graphic organizer or dry-erase board once they are more independent spellers, typically toward the middle of the year.

During reading, the teacher may ask connecting questions to help solidify knowledge, such as, “When did this happen?” and “Why do you think Pa chose to take them owling so late?” The teacher may also highlight the meaning of unfamiliar vocabulary that is related to understanding the content, such as “pine trees,” “meadow,” or “clearing.” The teacher can list these words on index cards so students can refer to them and use them in their writing throughout the unit. As they encounter a plot element, they can record it together on their graphic organizer.

After reading, the class could talk about the plot structure and use the completed graphic organizer or sentence stems to summarize the story. The teacher could also have students add descriptive words about the owl’s habitat to their science journal. This could be extended to a few sentences to explain why it was so difficult to find an owl. Students may also be guided to use a graphic organizer to compare their learning about the owl habitat to the habitat of a field mouse they explored while reading Frederick by Leo Lionni.

Notice that each of the strategies and activities—from recognizing a story’s structure, to summarizing, to eliciting details and answering questions, to comparing and contrasting—are all in service of learning content related to the science unit on animals and their habitats. The focus of reading a new text is not on learning a certain strategy but using the strategies to learn the content.

Natalie notes, “There is evidence that teaching kids comprehension strategies, or at least certain kinds of comprehension strategies, does boost their comprehension. But we’ve been trying to do this in the abstract… What really will work better is teaching a topic and bringing in whatever strategy or skill is appropriate to help kids think deeply about that topic and understand that text for that topic.”

Recommendations for teachers

When teaching reading comprehension, I encourage teachers to avoid choosing texts to focus on a particular comprehension skill or strategy. Choose texts instead based on the content focus. Here are some suggestions for how to align your instructional focus with best practices in reading science:

• Plan to use texts that revolve around a specific science or social studies topic. These can be both narrative and informational texts, as in the narrative example I shared earlier. Using texts around a common topic enables students to build a rich and enduring web of knowledge.
• Teach students to identify the text structure and generate a main idea statement. This enables students to understand and summarize what they are reading more easily. When students understand the main idea of a text, it empowers them to move into higher levels of understanding.
• Explicitly teach and review new vocabulary that relates back to the science or social studies topic. Help students understand how these words relate to one another and the topic at hand. Research in cognitive science suggests using distributed practice enables students to learn more words and, therefore, understand more concepts.

Recommendations for school administrators

If you’re a school administrator, here are some ways to support your teachers in this work of shifting from a strategy focus to a content focus when teaching reading comprehension:

• Provide teachers with high-quality text sets for read-alouds related to your grade-level science and social studies standards. In second grade and up, also provide multiple copies of chapter books around these topics for students to discuss in small groups or as a whole-class book study.
• Provide teachers high-quality professional learning and time to plan. Teachers need to be able to think deeply with one another about the vocabulary to highlight and strategies to use to help students acquire information and learn new concepts. Use practitioner articles to guide PLCs in integrating new practices into your existing curricula.
• Create a culture of collaboration. Give time for art, music, PE, and other shared-subjects teachers to plan lessons around the topic of study. Students are more likely to learn deeply when they are building common knowledge across class periods.

Learn more

To hear more from Natalie on the importance effectively teaching reading comprehension, watch our interview with her.

For additional ideas and tips on literacy instruction from Teach. Learn. Grow. authors, browse our archive of ELA posts.

The post The science of teaching reading comprehension appeared first on Teach. Learn. Grow..

Many people have been talking about the need for phonics instruction, but most of these conversations come to a screeching halt after talking about instruction in basic decoding skills. Instruction in multisyllabic word reading, or teaching students to read words with more than one syllable, is a crucial bridge between basic phonics and fluent word reading. It is also a major stumbling block for older readers who are still working on foundational reading skills. How to practically teach students to read long words has also been largely left out of the national conversation on the science of reading.

Marissa Filderman and Jessica Toste, two university professors who research multisyllabic word reading interventions, joined us to discuss what we know about teaching students to read long words. Marissa is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama and researches literacy interventions for students with and at risk for learning disabilities, with an emphasis on data-based decision-making. Jessica is an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She focuses on effective interventions for students with and at risk for reading disabilities, as well as how to intensify interventions through data-based instruction.

Misconceptions in multisyllabic reading

As Marissa and Jessica note, there are several misconceptions about multisyllabic reading and how to approach teaching young children how to read longer, more difficult words.

The first misconception is that instruction should center primarily on syllables. Marissa recommends not getting too hung up on syllable rules because many of them “are very rigid and they don’t always apply.” For example, teaching students to divide a word with a VCV pattern (like pilot or travel) before the first consonant and pronouncing the first vowel as a long vowel only works about half the time, according to research on the usefulness of syllable division patterns by Devin Kearns. “It can be more confusing for a reader who already has a lot of difficulty with just decoding in general to also think about those rules,” Marissa adds.

“There’s also often a misconception that foundational reading instruction and knowledge of grapheme–phoneme correspondence and decoding skills translate automatically into multisyllabic word reading,” Jessica says. But a young reader having a good grasp of the alphabet and the sounds each letter makes isn’t enough.

Foundational reading skills, including phonics and word recognition, are critical but they are not enough on their own. Jessica explains that kids need to be helped in taking decoding to the next level: “Students really need to be taught, and students who struggle especially need to be taught—explicitly—how those skills scale up. They’ve been effective for them before. Now how can they use those skills to move from identifying and pronouncing individual letter sounds to identifying and pronouncing word parts to read more complex words? Students need this continued instruction as the words they are being exposed to become more complex and don’t always follow the rules they’ve been practicing in previous instruction.”

Another misconception is that foundational skills never need revisiting. That may be true for some students, but definitely not all. “There’s a careful balance we have to find with ongoing foundational skills instruction,” Jessica explains. For some students, “we need to continue to review vowel patterns and practice flexing vowel sounds while supporting students in decoding multisyllabic words. They need continued practice with those grapheme–phoneme correspondences so that they can apply them fluently and automatically every time they’re reading a word.”

Finally, there is sometimes confusion about the role of reading longer texts, as opposed to reading multisyllabic words in isolation. “It’s important to always read connected text in reading instruction, to always move from isolated word reading to connected text, even if you only have time for a few sentences to read at the end of a lesson,” Jessica advises.

6 ways to help kids with multisyllabic word reading

The following six strategies can help you approach multisyllabic word reading with your students:

1. Ensure students have prerequisite skills. The first step in approaching multisyllabic words with your students is to confirm they’re ready for the added level of complexity. “Make sure students have prerequisite skills, that they know vowel sounds and consonant sounds, and that they can recognize most grapheme correspondences,” Marissa says.
2. Focus on affixes. Marissa recommends explicitly teaching the pronunciation and meaning of affixes. “And continue to review all the affixes you’ve taught regularly,” she adds. Teaching students to quickly identify and “peel off” prefixes and suffixes within words can help students begin to recognize both pronunciation and meaning of larger chunks as they encounter more unfamiliar words.
3. Practice chunking. Because syllable rules can be inconsistent and confusing, Marissa recommends chunking, either by using the vowel in a word or the morpheme. “Students might use the short or the long form of that vowel sound to read the word,” Marissa says. Teachers can also help students chunk by using morphemes and affixes. “One of the most important things when focusing on multisyllabic words is really building morphological knowledge through breaking words into meaningful parts to make them easier to read,” Marissa explains. The “peel off” strategy is useful when chunking, too.
4. Make a game of reading multisyllabic words. It’s easy for multisyllabic reading instruction to get a little dry, so Marissa recommends getting playful. “After having structured practice with assembling and blending word parts to read multisyllabic words, I like to gamify this,” she says. “Students can play with the words in a sort of game format that’s fun, fast paced, and engaging. […] Introduce a select number of base words you think might work in your particular instructional context. Have students attach or build onto those base words with prefixes or suffixes. Have them point and say each word part and then blend the word parts and say the whole word.”
5. Move on to fluency when kids are ready. “For word reading fluency practice,” Marissa advises, “I like to use targeted word lists until students get really comfortable. I recommend you focus on certain patterns that you want to work with in those word lists, or certain affixes. Your word list can become more complex as you go.” Some of that playful approach she mentioned earlier can work well with fluency, too. “There can be a timed component of this practice as well, if that’s helpful to students. Or you can have a tracking component where they track their own performance every time they read a word list and see if their fluency is improving over time.”
6. Practice words in context. Just as Jessica noted, students need time to practice reading more than just isolated words. “Just like with any foundational skills instruction lesson, we always move from reading practice with words in isolation to words in connected text, and doing a lot of practice with connected text,” Marissa says. “This can look like sentences where the affixes you’re learning appear and multisyllabic words that you’ve been practicing move into passages as well.”

Serving students well

The crucial bridge for students from basic phonics to fluent word reading often goes overlooked. Consider reaching out to your leaders for any additional support you might need for your students. I recommend the following:

• Ensure your school has materials to help students read long words. The lessons Jessica uses in her research are available for free online, and they have been shown to be effective for older students who need more instruction in advanced word reading.
• Request professional learning opportunities around advanced word reading, and job-embedded coaching to answer ongoing questions and help you strengthen your practice. NWEA offers a professional learning workshop titled “Grades K–5: Building Fluent Readers” that’s a great place to start.
• Explore assessment options. If older students are not meeting benchmarks on your school’s reading comprehension assessment, consider using a follow-up assessment, like MAP® Reading Fluency, that can help you better understand if students are struggling with word recognition or language comprehension. If students are having difficulty with word recognition in the upper grades, make sure their intervention addresses this in a systematic way.

Reading long words fluently opens the doors to a limitless world of learning opportunities through rich and complex texts for students. To hear more from Marissa and Jessica, watch our videos.

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Have you ever heard that the term “dyslexia” means people see letters or numbers swapped or flipped? Have you seen claims that colored overlays, special fonts, eye-tracking exercises, music therapy, or brain-balancing techniques can help students with dyslexia learn to read? These are all popular myths, mere folklore associated with the most identified learning disability in public schools: dyslexia.

Dyslexia is another name for what schools call a specific learning disability in basic reading skills. It’s another way to say a student has a significant difficulty and needs more intensive intervention to learn to read and spell words. Fortunately, early screening for reading difficulties—leading to early, intensive intervention in reading and spelling—can help to lower later dyslexia identification rates in schools.

Sharing research with classroom teachers

Unfortunately, the many misconceptions that surround dyslexia can often hinder effective instructional practices. Recently, I had the opportunity to act as a guest editor with my friend and colleague Marissa Filderman for the special issue on dyslexia from Literacy Today, a magazine for educators from the International Literacy Association. Our goal was to provide a line of communication from researchers who study reading and interventions directly to classroom teachers and leaders. This magazine issue shares information directly from research on dyslexia to dispel myths, provide scientifically backed insights, and catalyze a shift in how we approach teaching students to read in schools today.

In the issue, researchers who study reading instruction, intervention, and difficulties directly translate their findings into what these mean for teachers and students. I’ll highlight some here, but I encourage you to check out the issue’s full contents online.

Approaches for early word reading

In the article “Early word reading and dyslexia: Strategies to help students achieve early reading success,” researcher Katherine O’Donnell explains specific strategies that can help teachers more effectively teach beginning reading skills to all students. She also highlights how students with beginning reading difficulties might struggle: recognizing and differentiating letter-sound correspondences, relying on context or pictures more heavily to read, or having difficulty reading fluently, which impacts their understanding of the text.

You may be familiar with popular approaches to teaching word-solving, such as the three-cueing method or the Beanie Baby reading strategy. Instead, Katherine suggests some specific research-backed steps for when students encounter an unknown word, such as breaking it down, applying phonics, and looking for prefixes and suffixes.

How to handle advanced word reading

In the article on advanced word reading skills, Laura Steacy and colleagues at Florida State University and the Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR) describe what we know about teaching students moving into more advanced word reading in late elementary school. They point out the need for instruction to transition from the letter-sound level to larger chunks, such as syllables and morphemes. They also recommend training that helps students flexibly decode words. This could look like teaching students to try a long vowel sound if the short vowel sound doesn’t make sense, for example. If students read the word “travel” as “tray-vel,” they would be asked if this sounds like a word they know and flex to the vowel to “trav-el.” Allowing students to practice these skills with a variety of texts, not just highly decodable ones, allows students to transition to more skilled reading.

See “Cracking the code: Decoding, self-teaching, and dyslexia” by David Share and “Bridging the disconnect: The role of set for variability in word reading” by Ashley Edwards and colleagues in the same issue for more information on the importance of flexible decoding skills.

Advice on multilingual learners and dyslexia

Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan moves us to consider how the science of reading gives insight into supporting early literacy development for students with biliteracy skills in “Dyslexia and English learners: Supporting early literacy development and biliteracy skills.” She compares how word recognition skills, those that students with dyslexia have difficulties acquiring, develop in both Spanish and English.

Spanish has a more transparent orthography, or spelling system, than English. If students have learned some decoding skills in Spanish, they can transfer some knowledge and skills to English reading and spelling. Elsa notes that teachers can guide students to make cross-linguistic connections, explicitly pointing out similarities and differences in the sound–symbol relationships and the patterns in both languages. Her article includes a helpful table of sounds that transfer from Spanish to English, and I encourage you to print this for reference if you teach students who speak Spanish.

What should I do next?

I encourage you to continue to explore these practices and dive deeper into topics that have intrigued you. The direct line to researchers within this special issue of Literacy Today cuts out the noise and bypasses the game of telephone that happens all too often in the science of reading movement. Armed with this information, let’s find a way to take action. I encourage you to:

• Find one topic from this post you’d like to learn more about, then visit and read the article from the researcher on that topic so you can discuss the findings and practices with other literacy leaders in your building or district.
• Consider bringing evidence-aligned, practical literacy learning to your school or district through our professional learning offerings, including workshops on two of the instructional areas featured here: early word recognition and building fluency.
• Tell others about this special issue of Literacy Today or post your takeaways from these researchers on social media to help advocate for transformative change in word recognition instruction.

The articles in Literacy Today demonstrate how research into dyslexia can help us gain insight into effective teaching practices for all students, including teaching students to read using a phonics-based decoding strategy, using morphology to break down long words, and explicitly pointing out similarities and differences in letter–sound correspondences for students learning to read in two languages. Together, we can engender more inclusive, effective, and supportive learning environments to help all kids learn.

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In many kindergarten and first-grade classrooms, students are tasked with memorizing a list of words commonly appearing in texts. These lists of high-frequency words tend to go by a variety of names, such as “snap words,” “sight words,” “star words,” and “red words.” Unfortunately, this practice of centering the learning on high-frequency words before students have learned to sound out words through phonics is an inefficient practice birthed out of the misconceived notion that children learn to read by memorizing whole words.

We know from decades of research that it is more effective for students to be taught individual letter-sound correspondences and use them to sound out words.

The trouble with sight words

Have you ever seen books used to teach reading to young students that have a repetitive pattern, such as “I see the police officer. I see the firefighter. I see the mail carrier,” or “In the summer, I can climb. In the summer, I can swim. In the summer, I can paint”? These books are also designed to support that same mistaken and outdated notion that students learn to read by memorizing whole words rather than sounding out words based on phonics skills learned.

These books emphasize high-frequency words, many of which use phonics patterns students have not yet been taught. This can lead students to believe that reading is a practice where they must memorize whole words rather than reading as a practice where they can use their phonics knowledge to sound the words out. This approach to reading instruction inadvertently teaches students the habits of poor readers, leading to an over-reliance on guessing at words based on the first letter, picture, or sentence context.

What researchers mean by “sight words”

Many people think students learn to read by memorizing a word’s shape or repeatedly seeing the whole word. You may have heard in schools, “Students need to learn their sight words” or “Let’s practice your sight words.” But this is different from how researchers refer to the term “sight word.” In research, a sight word isn’t merely one of several on a list of high-frequency words. It is any word that can be recognized instantly, as if by sight.

We now know students learn to read by mapping individual sounds (called phonemes) to letters that represent them (called graphemes). Scientists call this process of mapping phonemes to graphemes orthographic mapping. The more opportunities students are given to practice decoding and spelling words, the more these letter–sound correspondences “stick” in their memory. Once a word can be recognized within a fourth of a second, reading scientists call it a sight word: a word that can be read as if by sight.

Some think the value of sight words is that they help students quickly recognize words that are irregular, that is, words with spellings that “are not as clearly linked to the sounds used to pronounce the words,” such as “you,” “are,” and “what.” But as Linnea Ehri, one of the leading researchers in word recognition, said, “It is not true that only irregularly spelled words are read by sight. Rather all words, even easily decoded words, become sight words once they have been read several times…. Sight word reading refers not to a method of teaching reading but to the process of reading words by accessing them in memory.”

Learning to read irregular words

Even words we traditionally consider irregular, some of which are on high-frequency lists, have parts that can be mapped to sounds. For example, in the high-frequency word “said,” the letter “s” spells the sound /s/, and the letter “d” spells the sound /d/. The only part of the word students need to learn is the middle two letters, “ai,” which spell the sound /e/.

Research suggests that when teachers call attention to the parts of words students know and do not yet know, rather than presenting words as wholes, it can help students better learn to read and spell. Students can just memorize the part of the word that is irregular based on the phonics patterns they have learned. Some teachers call these “heart words” because students learn the irregular part of the word by heart.

As students attempt to use their phonics knowledge to decode unknown words, they will run into words with irregularly spelled parts. Teachers and administrators alike can support students in a variety of ways.

What teachers can do

There are several things teachers can do to support young readers:

• Provide opportunities for students to practice flexible decoding strategies with irregularly spelled words. Begin by teaching them to ask questions that help them tap into what they already know: “What word do I know that sounds like that word? Does it make sense in this context? Does it make sense with these letters and sounds I know?” Research suggests encouraging students to use a flexible decoding strategy aftersounding out the word using their phonics knowledge will help them become problem solvers while reading, leveraging what researchers call their “set for variability” to shift pronunciation and problem-solve words with irregular parts.
• Use decodable texts that align with your curriculum’s phonics scope and sequence. Buyer beware: Many companies market books as “decodable,” but without alignment with your curriculum’s phonics scope and sequence, it’s unlikely the text is decodable for your students.
• Examine high-frequency word lists and determine which words are phonetically regular (“can,” “his,” “me”) and which words have irregular parts (“said,” “there,” “would”). Use this information to plan for your phonics and fluency instruction.

What administrators can do

If you’re an administrator, here’s what you can do to support your literacy staff:

• Ensure your early grades classrooms have appropriate materials for phonics, including a wide range of decodable texts that align specifically with your school’s phonics scope and sequence.
• Do not create goals that include a set amount of sight words to reach by the end of the year. Instead, base student progress on curriculum-based measures, including foundational skills assessments, such as word-recognition fluency in kindergarten or oral-reading fluency in first grade.
• Ensure teachers feel supported with time for professional learning. Teachers need ample time to gather resources to plan for instruction, learn new professional practices, collaborate with colleagues, and reflect on their learning and growth.

It’s time for a change

If we want to build truly fluent readers, it’s crucial to reevaluate our initial approach to teaching reading. By teaching and practicing letter–sound correspondences in isolation and in decodable texts, pointing out parts of words that are irregular, and encouraging flexible decoding strategies, we can help students build a solid foundation in learning to read and spell and, ultimately, understand the world around them.

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