essay about teaching reading

Effective Teaching of Reading in Education Essay

Effective teaching of reading is an important aspect as reading does not come as naturally as speaking. Children do not learn how to read just by being exposed to reading materials, but rather, for them to learn this important skill, they ought to be taught explicitly and systematically.

To start with, it is important to establish the main aim of teaching reading as there are several reasons why a learner can read. For instance, one can read in order to develop his/her knowledge of the language of instruction or for fun. An individual may also read for the purpose of gathering information or for confirming the authenticity of the knowledge at hand or even to critically assess someone’s thoughts or style of writing.

Establishing the intention of reading affects the most effective method of comprehension reading. For instance, in case a person is reading a particular poem for the purpose of gratification, he/she is only required to make out the words used by the poet and the manner in which they are presented and has no need to classify the subject of the poem.

On the other hand, in case an individual uses a scientific article with the aim of supporting a certain outlook, one requires to have been exposed to the terminologies being used. He/she should also comprehend the specific information as well as the cause-effect cycle of the information presented. This encompasses the main objective of teaching reading to learners in our learning institutions.

In the past, my main failure in teaching reading was mainly attributed to my presumption of the aim of learning how to read in a language, which I viewed as merely to get the content written in a given lingo. During that time, I mainly restricted teaching reading to literary texts that indicated a deep affiliation to culture.

However, this approach was wrong because it presupposed that students learn to read in a particular language only through learning its terminologies, words and sentence structures, but not by actually reading it, which ignores the aspect of communicative competence.

However, as a result of learning the importance of communicative approach and applying it in the teaching of reading, I have had a better perception of the role of reading as well as the types of texts to be applied in teaching reading in any given language, as a result of which I have succeeded in this endeavor.

When a teacher’s main objective of teaching reading encompasses communicative competence, diverse reading materials such as newspapers, comprehension text books as well as internet should be used. This is because exposing the learners to diverse reading materials develops their communicative competence tremendously. For this reason, we cannot separate instruction in reading from reading practice at any one time.

As an instructor of reading skills, I plan to lay out some comprehension strategies that my learners will employ in order to reap maximum benefits from any given texts in future. This way, the learners will learn to become dynamic and focused readers who can manage reading comprehension on their own.

The strategies include instruction on comprehension monitoring where I will teach the learners on how to be aware of what they understand and make out whatever they do not comprehend as well as employ suitable means of solving comprehension problems. In addition,

I will expose the learners to metacognition skills which will require them to have control over their reading and establish the purpose of reading prior to the reading process, while establishing the hurdles they encounter in understanding a particular comprehension. Furthermore, I will teach the learners on how to make use of semantic as well as graphic organizers for effective understanding.

These include diagrams as well as subject words that are crucial in understanding any comprehension. Other important aspects that I plan to teach include formulating and answering comprehension questions, elaborating the structure of the story as well as summarizing the main components of a given comprehension.

In conclusion, even though a teacher is crucial in instructing effective comprehension skills, the benefits can only be achieved through cooperative learning. Learners should work hand in hand with each other in order to comprehend texts. Besides, they should also employ the given strategies of comprehension reading. We as the instructors should assist the learners to work in groups and model the reading strategies to them.

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1. IvyPanda . "Effective Teaching of Reading in Education." June 7, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/teaching-reading/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Effective Teaching of Reading in Education." June 7, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/teaching-reading/.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Teaching reading: a case study through mixed methods.

• 1 Departamento de Didácticas Específicas, Universidad de la Laguna, San Cristóbal de la Laguna, Spain
• 2 Departamento de Psicología Evolutiva y de la Educación, Universidad de la Laguna, San Cristóbal de La Laguna, Spain
• 3 Departamento de Psicología Clínica, Psicobiología y Metodología, Universidad de La Laguna, San Cristóbal de La Laguna, Spain

The present study analyzes the relationship between teachers’ beliefs about learning to read, teaching practices, and discourse. To carry out this study, we benefited from the collaboration of six teachers in kindergarten and the first levels of primary education. First, an attribution questionnaire was used to analyze beliefs about learning to read ( Jiménez et al., 2015 ). Secondly, to study teaching practices, an observation tool was used ( Suárez et al., 2018 ). Thirdly, in order to know the opinion of teachers about how to teach reading, we adapted the instrument to assess teaching perspectives elaborated by Clark and Yinger (1979) . Finally, all the information was triangulated and analyzed using mixed methods. The results indicated that the relationship between beliefs, practices, and discourse is not always consistent. In all teachers, a relationship was found between some of their beliefs, practices, and discourse. At the level of beliefs, all teachers presented one predominant attributional profile, although to a lesser extent, their beliefs were also attributable to other learning theories. The results indicated that all the teachers carried out teaching practices associated with the different learning theories. Similarly to their discourse, all teachers showed diverse opinions about the learning processes involved in reading. These results indicate that teachers maintain eclectic approaches, both when they carry out activities in the classroom and when they think about learning to read.

Introduction

For almost three decades, research has documented the influence of teachers’ beliefs on educational practice ( Berthelsen and Brownlee, 2007 ; Kuzborska, 2011 ; Barrot, 2015 ). Teacher’s beliefs are thoughts, perceptions, and values about their roles as educators, education, and how students learn ( Vartuli, 2005 ). It has even been shown that if teachers are aware of their own beliefs, the repertoire of teaching skills can be increased ( Tracey and Mandel, 2012 ), leading to a change in classroom decision making, and teaching strategies and evaluation. If we want to achieve improvements in teaching, it is necessary to examine the teachers’ beliefs and modify them ( McAlpine and Weston, 2002 ). A great deal of research in this direction has shown that instructional events can be catalysts for changing beliefs ( Stevens, 2002 ; Theurer, 2002 ; Fazio, 2003 ), since beliefs are permeable mental structures susceptible to change ( Thompson, 1992 ), although there appears to be no consensus on this ( Block and Hazelin, 1995 ; Richardson, 1996 ).

More recent studies have provided us with more detailed information on how beliefs and implicit knowledge influence teachers’ instructional practices ( Cunningham and Zibulsky, 2009 ), actions, and strategies that they implement to teach reading in the classroom. The research carried out in this regard has focused on differentiating three traits appearing in the teaching and learning of reading. Thus, Tolchinsky and Ríos (2009) analyzed the relationship between what teachers say and do (2.250), teaching practice ( N = 2), and students’ knowledge ( N = 814). To do this, they used a self-report questionnaire of 30 questions, with high reliability (α = 0.81) and a Likert scale (0–6). Through a cluster analysis, they detected three differentiated profiles: instructional practices focused on teaching the names of letters, letter–sound relationships, as well as the importance of learning products; a situational approach to activities arising from classroom situations, where students look for the means to understand texts that they do not know; and multidimensional activities such as letter knowledge, recognition, and letter–sound association, as well as reading and writing work from situations that arise in the classroom. The results showed the following distribution: instructional (33.87%), situational (37.06%), and multidimensional (29.06%). Also, they found that 30% of the children were able to recognize unknown words and did not seem to have difficulty in mastering the code, and that teachers used explicit, early, and systematic teaching practices.

Also, in Spain, Barragán and Medina (2008) , analyzed the practices teachers use through questionnaires. They found significant differences depending on the profile and educational level. Thus, nursery/kindergarten teachers showed a higher profile of situational practices (50%), compared to elementary school teachers who showed a profile of instructional practices (70%). Subsequently, they analyzed the profile of practices according to geographical area, finding that the teachers who carried out the greatest number of situational practices were those of the Basque country, followed by teachers from Almería, Cantabria, Catalonia, and the Community of Madrid (more than 50%). Catalonia and Cantabria showed a lower frequency of instructional practices (less than 20%); however, the teachers from León and Asturias used these practices more frequently (more than 55%). The same authors also observed six Early Childhood Education classrooms in Almeria. The results showed a relationship between the declared belief profile and its practices in the classroom. In another study, Ríos et al. (2010) demonstrated the relationship between the knowledge learned and the practices in teaching reading of two Infant Education teachers. They found that the contents worked on by the teacher with a situational profile were reading and writing functions, identification of words in reading, and letter names and sound values.

The teacher with an instructional profile used word identification and word reading. In the study carried out by Baccus (2004) , a direct relationship was found between the teachers’ beliefs and the instructional time dedicated to the teaching of reading. In addition, Rapoport et al. (2016) focused on analyzing the beliefs that teachers maintain ( N = 144) regarding the contribution of executive functions in reading performance and their teaching practice. Their results showed a positive relationship between these two variables ( r = 0.512, p < 0.01).

Ethnicity has been another feature highlighted in studies assessing the dyad of beliefs and practices in teaching. The Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement [CIERA] (2001) examined the beliefs and practices of 250 early childhood teachers. Their results showed a relationship between beliefs (based on the importance of the development of alphabetic knowledge, word recognition, stories, and oral language) and practices. Differences in relation to beliefs were found based on the ethnicity of teachers. African American teachers tended to believe that it was more important for the child to learn to read through teaching the alphabet (e.g., naming letters, saying their sounds), while white teachers thought it was more important for children to learn to read from teaching oral language activities (e.g., answering questions about a story or telling a story from a drawing). On the other hand, they found significant differences depending on the academic training received, so teachers with a higher academic level believed that teaching of oral language was more important, while teachers with lower academic levels did not share this belief.

Also, the report presented by the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) ( OCDE, 2009 ) provides detailed information on the development of variables involved in the teaching and learning process. This report analyzed the beliefs of secondary school teachers in several countries. Their results indicated that most countries (Northeastern Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, and Korea) showed constructivist positions ( p < 0.05). Humanities teachers presented more structured beliefs and were little oriented toward students ( p < 0.05), also with differences depending on teaching experience, so the teachers with more years of experience thought and performed more structured practices ( p < 0.05). The analyses also revealed a positive correlation between constructivist beliefs and practices in teachers from different countries ( p < 0.05), except in Korea, where a weak relationship was found between beliefs and practices with a direct style. Finally, they found that positioning depended largely on the quality of the learning environment and job satisfaction ( p < 0.05). In subsequent reports ( OCDE, 2013 ), an average 95% of OECD teachers stated that they agree with constructivist practices.

Other lines of research have not found a bidirectional relationship between the teachers’ thinking and their action in the classroom. An example is the study carried out by Miglis et al. (2014) with 90 Norwegian teachers. They used a 130-item questionnaire to measure beliefs (e.g., their role as teachers, the role of teachers in teaching reading, consistency with current research about the importance of early literacy) and teaching practices (e.g., books, book contents, alphabetic knowledge, phonological awareness, and reading and writing). They found that teachers reported moderately positive beliefs about their role as a teacher in their students’ reading success, and they “agreed” with the idea that research has found that early literacy is necessary. These beliefs were not related to their practices, since the time devoted to this type of instruction was minimal. However, they discovered that the most widely used practice was “shared reading and reading aloud for 10 min a day” (29.3%). There are numerous studies that have not found a relationship between these two variables ( Wilcox-Herzog, 2001 ). Thus, for example, through two teachers’ collaboration, Pérez-Peitx (2013) was able to observe classroom practices and analyze interviews. Their results also indicated that there was no relationship between these two variables. Along the same lines, another recent study ( Utami et al., 2019 ) based on socio-cognitive theory studied teacher beliefs and practices in reading comprehension tasks. They found that the practices were not always consistent with their beliefs.

To our knowledge, there is no research assessing the profile of the teacher and teaching practices, in relation to all the theoretical principles that govern the teaching and learning processes of reading (i.e., innatist, maturationist, corrective, repetition, sociocultural, constructivist, psycholinguistic approaches).

The objective of this study is to find out whether or not there is a relationship between the beliefs, practices, and discourse used in teaching reading in the classroom, in order to propose more effective teaching strategies.

Materials and Methods

The study was carried out from a mixed methods perspective, integrating qualitative and quantitative sources of information through “merge” ( Creswell and Plano-Clark, 2007 ). The proposed design was triangulation ( Morse, 2003 ; Creswell and Plano-Clark, 2007 ; Tashakkori and Teddlie, 2010 ; Anguera et al., 2012 , 2018 ; Creswell, 2014 ), which was found suitable for the aims. A direct observation of teaching reading practices was carried out. The observational study was configured based on three criteria: study’s units, temporality, and dimensionality ( Anguera et al., 2011 ). The observational design can be classified as Nomothetic/Follow-up/Multidimensional (N/F/M) ( Sánchez-Algarra and Anguera, 2013 ; Portell et al., 2015 ). Frequency was analyzed. In order to analyze the relationship between teacher’s beliefs, practices, and discourse, a Pearson’s correlation was carried out.

Participants

Six teachers with an age between 25 and 50 years participated. The teachers’ years of experience ranged from 10 to 35 years. They belonged to different Infant and Primary Education units on the island of Tenerife (Canary Islands, Spain). The selection criteria were based mainly on the fact that the staff member taught the subject Spanish Language and Literature, devoting an average time period of 1 h a day to the teaching of reading.

To carry out this study, three fundamental tools were used: a questionnaire to know the teachers’ beliefs, an observation tool to analyze their practices, and a semi-structured interview to analyze the teachers’ speech about teaching and learning to read.

– Questionnaire on Beliefs about Learning and Teaching Reading , composed of 60 items (see Suárez et al., 2013 ; Jiménez et al., 2014 , 2015 ) corresponding to the basic postulates of each learning theory: innatist, maturationist, sociocultural, constructivist, corrective, repetition, and psycholinguistic (see for review Tracey and Mandel, 2012 ). Teachers had to respond according to their degree of agreement or disagreement using a Likert scale of 0–10, where 0 means strongly disagree, and 10, strongly agree. Cronbach’s Alpha was 0.88.

Observation Tool on Reading Teaching Practices. This tool used here was developed by Suárez et al. (2018) and combines a field format and systems of categories. This consists of 14 criteria—alphabetic knowledge, phonological awareness, use of teaching resources, prior knowledge of children, reinforcement, feedback, modeling, direct instruction, guided oral instruction, extracurricular tasks, reading and writing, psychomotor skills, functional reading skills, and vocabulary—and 77 categories on practices in teaching reading. For the measurement plan, the results showed that the absolute and relative generalizability measures were acceptable (at 0.970 and 0.989) at 30 sessions and that 40 sessions were needed to reach 0.977 and 0.992, respectively. For the generalizability indexes to measure inter- and intraobserver reliability, a four-faceted SRC/O (Session, Criterion, Category/Observer) design was used, and analysis showed the greatest percentage of variability to be related to the Criterion facet (33%), while the Observer facet showed no variability at all. The absolute generalizability coefficient was 0.999, and the relative coefficient was also 0.999. With respect to the intra-rater reliability, using a four-faceted SRC/M (Session, Criterion, Category/Moment) design, analysis showed that 32% of variability corresponded to the Session facet and 33% corresponded to Criterion, while Moment showed no variability. The absolute and relative generalizability coefficients obtained for Observer 1 were both 0.999. The absolute and relative coefficients for Observer 2 were both 0.997, facet showed no variability at all. The absolute generalizability validity using a two-faceted model [Observation (2) and Criterion (74)] showed a value of 0.000 (absolute and relative validity).

– Four digital video cameras and Match Vision 3.0 software ( Perea et al., 2006 ) were used for the sessions to record teaching practices. Data quality was analyzed using the Generalizability Study (GT) version 2.0.E program ( Ysewijn, 1996 ) and the SAS 9.1 statistical package. Teacher discourse was analyzed using Atlas.ti 6.0 ( Friese, 2011 ).

– Structured Teacher Interview on Teaching Practices . We adapted the interview on teaching perspectives elaborated by Clark and Yinger (1979) , composed of 28 questions on aspects related to teaching and learning: general questions about teaching, daily classes, teaching and learning, curriculum, time, and teachers’ “philosophy.” Changes were included in the nomenclature of the subjects of the curriculum and in the section on teacher philosophy (F), where the questions were guided toward the field of reading (see Table 1 ).

Table 1. Interview adapted from Clark and Yinger (1979) .

– For the interviews, a video camera and two Panasonic recorders, model RR-US455 (with 66 h of recording capacity), were used to ensure safe information storage.

– To transcribe information, the program Naturally Dragon Speaking ( Baker, 1975 ), version 12 was employed, and Atlas.ti, version 6, for information analysis ( Friese, 2011 ).

Before the recordings were made, authorization was obtained from both the teachers and the pupils’ parents. All participants provided written informed consent prior to their participation. Likewise, a schedule was agreed on for when the study would be carried out. On the day indicated, the belief questionnaire was applied to the participating teachers, their doubts in this regard were clarified, and approximately an hour was spent to complete it. Seven recording sessions per teacher (twice a week for 1 h each day) led to total of 42 h of recording (see Suárez et al., 2018 ). The interviews were held with the participating teachers and recorded in classrooms devoid of noise. Cameras were located in front of each teacher, and the furniture was arranged in an interview layout. The interviews of the six teachers were recorded, each lasting approximately 1 h. The audio was later transferred to the computer for the literal transcription of the interviews. Subsequently, the available information was collated and all the material subject to data processing organized. To conclude this phase, each interview was reviewed to gain an overall impression of the information provided by each teacher.

In the next phase, the document was segmented and coded through the Atlas.ti 6.0 program. The data were processed using the thematic analysis technique, according to the proposal of Braun and Clarke (2006) . Initially, the hermeneutic units were defined according to the interview questions, taking into account the theories about learning to read. Subsequently, the primary documents were worked on and information segmented. In this case, we focused on words as well as phrases/sentences and texts. The relevant information was then selected, and these units were encoded. Later, we established code families composed of the different variables affecting teaching and its context. Teachers’ opinions about learning to read were categorized. The code families structured the relationship between the previously identified categories and theories on the learning of reading (e.g., innatist, maturationist, sociocultural, constructivist, corrective, repetitive, and psycholinguistic).

In order to classify each teacher according to his/her attributional profile, factor scores for each theoretical approach defined the teachers’ beliefs according to the percentiles (see Table 2 ).

Table 2. Teachers’ profiles in each theory in percentiles.

To determine which theory should be attributed most to each teacher, the score was set around the percentile ≥75, and to determine which theories fitted less, around percentile ≥50 (see Figure 1 ).

Figure 1. Example teacher F. profile.

Although all teachers were characterized by a predominant attributional profile that defined their particular beliefs, we found that their reading teaching behavior could also be attributed to any of the other theories to a lesser extent (see Table 3 ).

Table 3. Summary of teachers’ profiles.

Regarding teaching reading practices, it was found that the most used was feedback (praising or correcting the student), followed by the use of teaching resources (e.g., stories, songs, or poetry), direct instruction (e.g., individual–group reading, aloud or silent, with or without intonation, and fluency) and functional knowledge of reading (e.g., summary, questions, comprehension exercises). To a lesser extent, they used literacy activities, reinforcement through praise (e.g., tangible or verbal), reading and writing, and work on alphabetic knowledge.

The latter strategy indicated that teachers mostly referred to constructivist theory, except teacher M.C., who chose to position herself in psycholinguistic theory. Similarly, teacher F. emphasized that students should build their learning and that teachers should function as a guide. To a lesser extent, she commented on aspects of the maturation and behaviorist theory (see Figure 2 ). Teacher M. also focused on the foundations of constructivism (e.g., prior knowledge, children discover their learning). She also talked about the importance of psychomotor skills, correctness in reading, as well as the involvement of parents. Teacher C. commented that students learn through construction and must discover reading autonomously through the support offered by the teacher. She also emphasized the role that parents play in reading, the importance of resources, oral language work, phonological awareness, as well as maturity in the development of reading. Teacher M.C. placed greater emphasis on the development of phonological awareness and oral language to teach reading. However, teacher S. focused more on student autonomy in the learning process and to a lesser extent on oral language, use of resources, and correction during reading (feedback). Teacher I. focused mostly on the construction of learning and less so on the role of oral language and the use of resources (library).

Figure 2. Teacher F. Network summarizing key concepts associated with the teaching process.

Subsequently, the information was triangulated after analyzing the beliefs, practices, and discourse of the teachers. For this, several researchers who are experts in the learning and teaching of reading skills agreed on the following relationship, in accordance with the basic postulates of each of the theories considered (see Table 4 ).

Table 4. Triangulation between theoretical profile, teaching practices, and teacher discourse.

Then the teachers’ scores were compared in relation to their beliefs, teaching practices (in terms of frequency), as well as teacher discourse, previously analyzed through its categorization into teaching–learning processes and their context (see Table 5 ). Finally, the results were interpreted according to Pearson’s correlation analysis. The results showed a high correlation ( r = 0.72, p < 0.05) in teacher F. and in teacher I. ( r = 0.71, p < 0.05) and a negative and high correlation in teacher M. ( r = −0.81, p < 0.05) between beliefs and practices. Moreover, they showed a moderate correlation in teacher C. ( r = 0.52) and in teacher M. ( r = 0.45) between beliefs and discourse. Finally, the results showed a negative and high correlation in teacher I. ( r = −0.74, p < 0.05) and in teacher M.C. ( r = −0.76, p < 0.05) between practices and discourse.

Table 5. Percentages of teachers’ beliefs, reading practices, and discourse.

Teacher F. showed links between his theoretical profile and his practices. A relationship between corrective beliefs (27.8%) and practices (29.2%) was found. On the other hand, we observed that in his practices, he used activities associated with other theories: repetition (23.5%), constructivism (19.9%), and psycholinguistic (16%). This also happened when he thought about how children learn to read, since he considered that the construction of learning (77.8%), maturation (11.1%), and providing feedback (11.1%) were fundamental. Other discourse makers, teacher M. did not show a link between her sociocultural (22%) and maturationist (23.4%) theoretical profile and her practices (5.7% and 0.6%). However, the results indicated that her maturationist (23.4%), sociocultural (22%) beliefs were related only to her discourse. So, she thought that the use of psychomotor skills (21.4%), teaching resources such as stories, stories, poems, and texts (14.3%), and teaching previous knowledge (50%) were important. However, practices based on other currents were observed: corrective reading (32.6%) and repeated reading (25.2%), as well as constructivism (19.1%), such as working previous knowledge or reading and writing and psycholinguistic skills (16.6%) [e.g., alphabetic knowledge: teaching letter names and sounds, rules with support rhymes, etc.; phonological awareness: stimulating children to become aware of letter sounds, saying words that begin with a certain sound, separating words into syllables, playing the game veo-veo (I spy.); vocabulary: teaching the meaning of words]. During the interview, opinions related to other theories were also found (i.e., corrective).

As for teacher C., there was a bidirectional relationship between her sociocultural theoretical profile (39.6%) (e.g., use of teaching resources such as stories, songs, writings from different sources, etc.) and her discourse (33.3%). Also, it was found that her psycholinguistic profile (28.9%) was related to her discourse (11.1%) (e.g., oral language or phonological awareness). However, the results indicated that this teacher carried out other practices not related to her theoretical beliefs, such as: feedback (50.8%) and repetition (16.9%). The same occurred with her discourse; she thought that maturation was also important (22.3%).

Regarding teacher M.C., a negative relationship was found between her psycholinguistic discourse (59.3%) and her teaching practices (4.1%). The same happened with her corrective practices (37.6%) and her discourse (14.8%) (e.g., correct when the child is wrong, point out, provide examples, deny). However, when we analyzed her practices, we found activities justified by other theories, such as functional knowledge of reading or use of teaching resources (13%) or repetition (19.6%) and constructivism (13%) (e.g., previous reading and writing, and likewise when we asked her opinion about how children learn to read (e.g., constructivism).

Regarding teacher S., she showed a corrective (17.6%), innatist (17.6%), sociocultural (17.6%), maturationist (16.6%), and constructivism (15.3%) profile. Then, she carried out corrective (35.1%) practices (e.g., feedback, direct instruction). During her discourse, opinions were also found that were constructivist (47.9%) and psycholinguistic (20%). Nevertheless, repetition practices (36%) were observed that had nothing to do with her expressed beliefs.

A relationship was found between the constructivism profile (23%) of teacher I. and her practices (19.3%). Then the result showed a relationship between corrective (12.6%) and repetitive (12.6%) beliefs and practices. Furthermore, this teacher used other practices unrelated to any of her attributed beliefs, such as: sociocultural (10.6%). No relationship between corrective (23%) and repetition (25.3%) practices and discourse were found. In the same way, she referred to the implication of other (e.g., sociocultural and psycholinguistic) theories in infant readers’ learning. The innatist profile of teacher I. was not related to her practices or discourse.

The results of the present study are congruent with previous study results that showed that teachers hold eclectic positions ( Clemente, 2008 ; Jiménez and O’Shanahan, 2008 ; Clemente et al., 2010 ; Rodríguez and Clemente, 2013 ). Other research has shown quite different results, from studies finding a relationship between beliefs and teaching practices in reading learning ( Cunningham and Zibulsky, 2009 ; Tolchinsky and Ríos, 2009 ; Rapoport et al., 2016 ) to studies which indicated a moderate correlation ( Baumann et al., 1998 ). On the opposite side, other authors found no such relationship ( Pérez-Peitx, 2013 ; Miglis et al., 2014 ; Enyew and Melesse, 2018 ; Utami et al., 2019 ).

The data extracted from the belief questionnaires have been complemented with the analysis of teaching practices and each teacher’s interviews, which allowed us to provide additional information ( Castañer et al., 2013 ). In our case, the interview helped us complete the teacher’s profile. We found that the teaching and learning processes are mediated by multiple contextual variables that were not identified by the questionnaire or recorded observations.

Analysis of the practices allowed us to identify not only what activities the teachers performed in their real teaching context but also how their sequence of instruction was oriented in all cases toward the use of their own multiple resources, applying other theories. The relationship found between some beliefs and practices in this study suggests that if teachers are aware of their own beliefs, the repertoire of teaching practices can be increased ( Tracey and Mandel, 2012 ), causing changes in decision making in the classroom and in teaching and evaluation strategies. In addition, as all teachers used many activities characteristic of other theories they did not explicitly hold, we focused on the opposite process, modifying their practices to cause a change in their beliefs ( Fazio, 2003 ), since these are permeable mental structures that can be modified ( Thompson, 1992 ). But how can we achieve this? Some studies confirm that people form their implicit theories through the knowledge they acquire ( Suárez and Jiménez, 2014 ).

The first step is to achieve the teacher’s predisposition to change, always through invitation ( Baena, 2000 ), by encouraging reflection. To do this, they should become aware how their own beliefs are involved in their teaching practice and how they influence student performance. In addition, the false myths about learning to read and teaching practices should be recognized, as prescribed by the National Reading Panel [NRP] (2000) . The question remains whether teachers have received training based on the latest advances in scientific research on the teaching of reading, in order to provide young students (who may or may not have difficulties) with the tools necessary for their learning to proceed optimally.

Online training offers teachers the opportunity to recycle their knowledge ( Costi et al., 2005 ; Jiménez, 2015 ; Jiménez et al., 2015 ; Jiménez and O’Shanahan, 2016 ), which generates an important pillar supporting success, integration, and sustainability in education ( Haydon and Barton, 2007 ; Somekh, 2008 ). It is also an alternative solution to the lack of time and difficulties in reconciling work and family life. It has been found that experience with these resources plays a fundamental role, since it favors a positive attitude of teachers and also confidence in the use of these tools for education ( BECTA, 2009 ). Joshi et al. (2009) found that the training teachers receive is inadequate because textbooks and courses in education reflect superstitions, anecdotes, and beliefs that are not based on scientific evidence. Research has also found that teachers do not properly use the practices that are based on scientific evidence ( Moats, 2009 ). If the learning environment is effective, it can even happen that only a small percentage of students present difficulties in learning to read ( Cunningham and Zibulsky, 2009 ).

The updating of knowledge according to research conclusions is proposed as an alternative for teachers who specialize in teaching reading, since teaching quality is one of the main factors determining the academic success of students ( European Council, 2008 ). For teachers to learn good practices, it is important that they have the following knowledge at their disposal: (1) fundamental research and theories about the development of language and reading; (2) strategies for use in the classroom to teach word recognition, vocabulary, text comprehension, and fluency; (3) tools to work on reading and writing at the same time; (4) the best strategies to teach reading and the materials to use; (5) different techniques for student evaluation; (6) how to maintain a good balance between theory, practice, and information technologies; (7) knowledge of dyslexia and other learning disorders ( IRA, 2007 ); and (8) how to interpret and administer assessment tests to plan teaching ( IDA, 2010 ). In addition, they must learn to ask more complex questions to help students make inferences and more elaborate reflections, as well as work with students’ prior knowledge ( RAND, 2002 ). However, the teacher alone should not be responsible for this process, because we have confirmed that in the teaching environment, there are other strong factors such as society or culture ( Quintana, 2001 ). The challenge now consists of achieving a change in the ways of thinking of those responsible for educational administration. The necessary means should also be provided to facilitate refresher courses and ongoing e-learning for teachers, with training programs that include content based on scientific evidence. One limitation is that the study consisted of six teachers and is not generalizable to a greater audience.

In general terms, we can conclude that the relationship between beliefs, practices, and discourse varies according to certain nuances. Thus, of the two beliefs attributed to teacher F., only one (corrective) was related to his form of instruction and his opinion. Among the four beliefs attributed to teacher M. (sociocultural, maturationist, repetition, and psycholinguistic), a relationship was found only between her maturationist and sociocultural profile and her discourse. Both beliefs attributed to teacher C. (sociocultural and psycholinguistic) were related to the discourse content. Of the two beliefs attributed to teacher M.C. (corrective and psycholinguistic), neither of them was related to her actions and reflections. Among the five beliefs attributed to teacher S. (sociocultural, innatist, corrective, maturationist, and constructivist) only two (corrective and sociocultural) were related to her active practices and discourse comments. Finally, of the two beliefs of teacher I. (innatist and constructivist), only constructivism was related to her practices or her opinion.

Although it is true that a relationship was found in all the teachers between some of their beliefs, practices, and discourse, as revealed in their discursive talks, all the teachers thought that learning to read depended on factors underlying other theories not related to their attributional profile. Therefore, despite attributing to them certain beliefs when they teach children to read and when they think of learning to read, it can be concluded that all teachers maintain an eclectic approach.

Data Availability Statement

All datasets generated for this study are included in the article/supplementary material.

Ethics Statement

Ethical review and approval was not required for the study on human participants in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. Written informed consent to participate in this study was provided by the participants’ legal guardian/next of kin.

Author Contributions

NS: this author’s grant was used to run the project Integrando creencias y prácticas de enseñanza de la lectura (Integrating beliefs and practices about teaching reading), ref: PSI2009-11662. She participated actively in the research, analyzed the teaching practices and discourse, and was responsible for the literature review and drafting of this manuscript. JJ: supervised the project and the preparation of the study, offered theoretical guidance, and was responsible for reviewing the manuscript. CS: supervised the design and preparation of the study, offered guidance on methodology, and helped review the manuscript. All authors approved the final version of this article.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

This research has been funded through the Plan Nacional I + D + i (R+D+i National Research Plan of the Spanish Ministry of Economics and Competitiveness), project ref: PSI2009-11662 and project ref: PSI2015-65009-R, with the second author as the principal investigator. We also gratefully acknowledge the support of a Spanish Government subproject, Integration ways between qualitative and quantitative data, multiple case development, and synthesis review as main axis for an innovative future in physical activity and sports research (PGC2018-098742-B-C31) (2019–2021) (Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación, y Universidades/Agencia Estatal de Investigación/Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo regional), that is part of the coordinated project New approach to research in physical activity and sport from a mixed methods perspective (NARPAS_MM) (SPGC201800 × 098742CV0).

Key Concepts

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Keywords : beliefs, teaching practices, reading, teacher discourse, triangulation, mixed methods

Citation: Suárez N, Jiménez JE and Sánchez CR (2020) Teaching Reading: A Case Study Through Mixed Methods. Front. Psychol. 11:1083. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01083

Received: 30 November 2019; Accepted: 28 April 2020; Published: 10 June 2020.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2020 Suárez, Jiménez and Sánchez. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Natalia Suárez, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Academic Reading Strategies

Completing reading assignments is one of the biggest challenges in academia. However, are you managing your reading efficiently? Consider this cooking analogy, noting the differences in process:

Taylor’s process was more efficient because his purpose was clear. Establishing why you are reading something will help you decide how to read it, which saves time and improves comprehension. This guide lists some purposes for reading as well as different strategies to try at different stages of the reading process.

Purposes for reading

People read different kinds of text (e.g., scholarly articles, textbooks, reviews) for different reasons. Some purposes for reading might be

• to scan for specific information
• to skim to get an overview of the text
• to relate new content to existing knowledge
• to write something (often depends on a prompt)
• to critique an argument
• to learn something
• for general comprehension

Strategies differ from reader to reader. The same reader may use different strategies for different contexts because their purpose for reading changes. Ask yourself “why am I reading?” and “what am I reading?” when deciding which strategies to try.

Before reading

• Establish your purpose for reading
• Speculate about the author’s purpose for writing
• Review what you already know and want to learn about the topic (see the guides below)
• Preview the text to get an overview of its structure, looking at headings, figures, tables, glossary, etc.
• Predict the contents of the text and pose questions about it. If the authors have provided discussion questions, read them and write them on a note-taking sheet.
• Note any discussion questions that have been provided (sometimes at the end of the text)
• Sample pre-reading guides – K-W-L guide
• Critical reading questionnaire

During reading

• Annotate and mark (sparingly) sections of the text to easily recall important or interesting ideas
• Check your predictions and find answers to posed questions
• Use headings and transition words to identify relationships in the text
• Create a vocabulary list of other unfamiliar words to define later
• Try to infer unfamiliar words’ meanings by identifying their relationship to the main idea
• Connect the text to what you already know about the topic
• Take breaks (split the text into segments if necessary)
• Sample annotated texts – Journal article · Book chapter excerpt

After reading

• Summarize the text in your own words (note what you learned, impressions, and reactions) in an outline, concept map, or matrix (for several texts)
• Talk to someone about the author’s ideas to check your comprehension
• Identify and reread difficult parts of the text
• Define words on your vocabulary list (try a learner’s dictionary ) and practice using them
• Sample graphic organizers – Concept map · Literature review matrix

Works consulted

Grabe, W., & Stoller, F. L. (2002). Teaching and researching reading. Harlow: Longman.

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How the Science of Reading Informs 21st‐Century Education

The science of reading should be informed by an evolving evidence base built upon the scientific method. Decades of basic research and randomized controlled trials of interventions and instructional routines have formed a substantial evidence base to guide best practices in reading instruction, reading intervention, and the early identification of at-risk readers. The recent resurfacing of questions about what constitutes the science of reading is leading to misinformation in the public space that may be viewed by educational stakeholders as merely differences of opinion among scientists. Our goals in this paper are to revisit the science of reading through an epistemological lens to clarify what constitutes evidence in the science of reading and to offer a critical evaluation of the evidence provided by the science of reading. To this end, we summarize those things that we believe have compelling evidence, promising evidence, or a lack of compelling evidence. We conclude with a discussion of areas of focus that we believe will advance the science of reading to meet the needs of all children in the 21st century.

For more than 100 years, the question of how best to teach children to read has been debated in what has been termed the “reading wars”. The debate cyclically fades into the background only to reemerge, often with the same points of conflict. We believe that this cycle is not helpful for promoting the best outcomes for children’s educational success. Our goal in this paper is to make an honest and critical appraisal of the science of reading, defining what it is, how we build a case for evidence, summarizing those things for which the science of reading has provided unequivocal answers, providing a discussion of things we do not know but that may have been “oversold,” identifying areas for which evidence is promising but not yet compelling, and thinking ahead about how the science of reading can better serve all stakeholders in children’s educational achievements.

At its core, scientific inquiry is the same in all fields. Scientific research, whether in education, physics, anthropology, molecular biology, or economics, is a continual process of rigorous reasoning supported by a dynamic interplay among methods, theories, and findings. It builds understandings in the form of models or theories that can be tested. Advances in scientific knowledge are achieved by the self-regulating norms of the scientific community over time, not, as sometimes believed, by the mechanistic application of a particular scientific method to a static set of questions (National Research Council, 2002, p. 2).

What is the Science of Reading and Why are we Still Debating it?

The “science of reading” is a phrase representing the accumulated knowledge about reading, reading development, and best practices for reading instruction obtained by the use of the scientific method. We recognize that the accrual of scientific knowledge related to reading is ever evolving, at times circuitous, and not without controversy. Nonetheless, the knowledge base on the science of reading is vast. In the last decade alone, over 14,000 peer-reviewed articles have been published in journals that included the keyword “reading” based on a PsycINFO search. Although many of these studies likely focused on a sliver of the reading process individually, collectively, research studies with a focus on reading have yielded a substantial knowledge base of stable findings based on the science of reading. Taken together, the science of reading helps a diverse set of educational shareholders across institutions (e.g., preschools, schools, universities), communities, and families to make informed choices about how to effectively promote literacy skills that foster healthy and productive lives ( DeWalt & Hink, 2009 ; Rayner et al., 2001 ).

An interesting question concerning the science of reading is “Why is there a debate surrounding the science of reading?” Although there are certainly disputes within the scientific community regarding best practices and new areas of research inquiry, most of the current debate seems to settle upon what constitutes scientific evidence, how much value we should place on scientific evidence as opposed to other forms of knowledge, and how preservice teachers should be instructed to teach reading ( Brady, 2020 ). The current disagreement in what constitutes the scientific evidence of reading (e.g., Calkins, 2020 ) is not new. During the last round of the “reading wars” in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s these same issues were discussed and debated. Much of the debate focused on conflicting views in epistemology between constructivists and positivists on the basic mechanisms associated with reading development. Constructivists, such as Goodman (1967) and Smith (1971) , believed that reading was a “natural act” akin to learning language and thus emphasized giving children the opportunity to discover meaning through experiences in a literacy-rich environment. In contrast, positivists, such as Chall (1967) and Flesch (1955) , made strong distinctions between innate language learning and the effortful learning required to acquire reading skills. Positivists argued for explicit instruction to help foster understanding of how the written code mapped onto language, whereas constructivists encouraged children to engage in a “psycholinguistic guessing game” in which readers use their graphic, semantic, and syntactic knowledge (known as the three cuing system) to guess the meaning of a printed word.

Research clearly indicates that skilled reading involves the consolidation of orthographic and phonological word forms ( Dehene, 2011 ). Work in cognitive neuroscience indicates that a small region of the left ventral visual cortex becomes specialized for this purpose. As children learn to read, they recruit neurons from a small region of the left ventral visual cortex within the left occipitotemporal cortex region (i.e., visual word form area) that are tuned to language-dependent parameters through connectivity to perisylvian language areas ( Dehaene-Lambertz et al., 2018 ). This provides an efficient circuit for grapheme-phoneme conversion and lexical access allowing efficient word-reading skills to develop. These studies provide direct evidence for how teaching alters the human brain by repurposing some visual regions toward the shapes of letters, suggesting that cultural inventions, such as written language, modify evolutionarily older brain regions. Furthermore, studies suggest that instruction focusing on the link between orthography and phonology promote this brain reorganization (e.g., Dehaene, 2011 ). Yet, arguments between philosophical constructivists and philosophical positivists on what constitutes the science of reading and how it informs instruction remain active today (e.g., Castles et al., 2018 ). In a recent interview with Emily Hanford, Ken Goodman defended his advocacy for the three cuing system saying that the three-cueing theory is based on years of observational research. In his view, three cueing is perfectly valid, drawn from a different kind of evidence than what scientists collect in their lab and later he stated that “my science is different” ( Hanford, 2019 ).

As scientists at the Florida Center for Reading Research, we are often frustrated when what we view to be the empirically supported evidence base about the reading process are distorted or denied in communications directed to the public and to teachers. However, Stanovich (2003) posited that “in many cases, the facts are secondary—what is being denied are the styles of reasoning that gave rise to the facts; what is being denied is closer to a worldview than an empirical finding. Many of these styles are implicit; we are not conscious of them as explicit rules of behavior” (pp. 106-107). Stanovich proposed five different dimensions that represent “styles” of generating knowledge about reading. For our purposes, here, we focus on the first dimension: the correspondence versus coherence theory of truth. It hits at the heart of how people believe something to be true. People who believe that a real world exists independent of their beliefs, and that interrogating this world using rigorous principles to gain knowledge is a fruitful activity are said to subscribe to the correspondence theory of truth. In contrast, those who subscribe to the coherence theory of truth believe that something is “true” if the beliefs about something fit together in a logical way. In essence, something is true if it makes sense.

Stanovich believed these differing truth systems might lie at the heart of the disagreements surrounding the science of reading. One side shouting, “Look at this mountain of evidence! How can you not believe it?” and the other side shouting, “It doesn’t make sense! It doesn’t match up with our experiences! Why should we value your knowledge above our own?!” By approaching the science of reading from the perspective of the correspondence theory of truth, we consider how compelling evidence can be generated, what we believe is the compelling evidence, what we think lacks evidence, and what we think is promising evidence.

How We Build a Case for Compelling Evidence

Research is the means by which we acquire and understand knowledge about the world ( Dane, 1990 ) to create scientific principles. Relatively few scientists would argue with the importance of using research evidence to support a principle or to make claims about reading development and the quality of reading instruction. Where significant divergence often occurs is in response to policy statements that categorize research claims and instructional strategies into those with greater or lesser levels of evidence. This divergence is typically rooted in applied epistemology, which can be understood as the study of whether the means by which we study evidence are themselves well designed to lead to valid conclusions. Researchers often frame the science of reading from divergent applied epistemological perspectives. Thus, two scientists who approach the science of reading with different epistemologies will both suggest that they have principled understandings and explanations for how children learn to read; yet, the means by which those understandings and explanations were derived are often distinct.

The correspondence and coherence theories of truth described above are examples of explanations from contrasting epistemological perspectives. Consistent with these perspectives, researchers approaching the science of reading using a correspondence theory typically prioritize deductive methods, which embed hypothesis testing, precise operationalization of constructs, and efforts to decouple the researchers’ beliefs from their interpretation and generalization of empirical evidence. Researchers approaching the science of reading using a coherence theory of truth typically prioritize more inductive methods, such as phenomenological, ethnographic, and grounded theory approaches that embed focus on the meaning and understanding that comes through a person’s lived experience and where the scientist’s own observations shape meaning and principles (e.g., Israel & Duffy, 2014 ).

When the National Research Council published Scientific Research in Education (2002), a significant amount of criticism levied against the report boiled down to differences in epistemological perspectives. Yet, these genuine contrasts can often obscure contributions to the science of reading that derive from multiple applied epistemologies. Observational research, using both inductive (e.g., case studies) and deductive (e.g., correlational studies) approaches, substantively informs the development of theories and of novel instructional approaches (e.g., Scruggs et al., 2007 ). Public health research offers a useful parallel. As it would be unethical to establish a causal link from smoking cigarettes to lung cancer through a randomized controlled trial, that field instead used well-designed observational studies to derive claims and principles. These findings then informed later stages in the broader program of research, including randomized controlled trials of interventions for smoking cessation.

In the science of reading, principles and instructional strategies should indeed capitalize on a program of research inclusive of multiple methodologies. Yet, as the public health domain ultimately takes direction from the efficacy of smoking cessation programs, so too must the science of reading take direction from theoretically informed and well-designed experimental and quasi-experimental studies of promising strategies when the intention is to evaluate instructional practices. The use of experimental (i.e., randomized trials) and quasi-experimental (e.g., regression discontinuity, propensity score matching, interrupted time series) designs, in which an intervention is competed against counterfactual conditions, such as typical practice or alternative interventions, provides the strongest causal credibility regarding which instructional strategies are effective. The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) of the Institute of Education Sciences (e.g., What Works Clearinghouse, 2020) and the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA; Every Student Succeeds Act, 2015 ) are efforts by the US Department of Education to hierarchically characterize the levels of evidence currently available for instructional practices in education. The WWC uses a review framework, developed by methodological and statistical experts, for evaluating the quality and scope of evidence for specific instructional practices based on features of the design, implementation, and analysis of studies. Similarly, ESSA uses four tiers that focus on both the design of the study and the results of the study in which the tiers differ based on the quantity of evidence and quality of evidence supporting an approach. For both WWC and ESSA, quantity of evidence refers to the number of well-designed and well-implemented studies, and quality of evidence is defined by the ability of a study’s methods to allow for alternative explanations of a finding to be ruled out, for which the randomized controlled trial provides the strongest method.

As outlined above, the “science of reading” utilizes multiple research approaches to generate ideas about reading. Ultimately, the highest priority in the science of reading should be the replicable and generalizable knowledge from observational and experimental methods, rooted in a deductive research approach to knowledge generation that is framed in a correspondence theory of truth. In this manner, the accumulated evidence is built on a research foundation by which theories, principles, and hypotheses have been subjected to rigorous empirical scrutiny to determine the degree to which they hold up across variations in samples, measures, and contexts. In the following sections, we summarize issues related to the nature, development, and instruction of reading for which we believe the science of reading either has or has not yielded compelling evidence, identify what we believe are promising areas for which sufficient evidence has not yet accumulated, and suggest a number of areas that we believe will help move the science of reading forward, increasing knowledge and enhancing its positive impacts for a variety of stakeholders.

Compelling Evidence in the Science of Reading

In this section, we focus on a number of findings centrally important for understanding the development and teaching of reading in alphabetic languages. The evidence base provides answers varying across orthographic regularity (e.g., English vs. Spanish), reading subskill (i.e., decoding vs. comprehension), grade range or developmental level (e.g., early childhood, elementary, adolescence), and linguistic diversity (e.g., English language learners, dialect speakers).

There are large differences among alphabetic languages in the rules for how graphemes represent sounds in words (i.e., a language’s orthography). In languages like Spanish and Finnish there is a near one-to-one relation between letters and sounds. The letter-sound coding in these languages is transparent, and they have shallow orthographies. In other languages, most notably English, there is often not a one-to-one relation between letters and sounds. The letter-sound coding in these languages is opaque, and they have deep orthographies. Children must learn which words cannot be decoded based solely on letter-sound correspondence (e.g., two, knight, laugh) and learn to match these irregular spellings to the words they represent. Where a language’s orthography falls on the shallow-deep dimension affects how quickly children develop accurate and fluent word-reading skills ( Ellis et al., 2004 ; Ziegler & Goswami, 2005 ) and how much instruction on foundational reading skills is likely needed. Studies indicate that children learning to read in English are slower to acquire decoding skills (e.g., Caravolas et al., 2013 ). Ziegler et al. (1997) reported that 69% of monosyllabic words in English were consistent in spelling-to-phonology mappings and 31% of the phonology-to-spelling mappings were consistent. Thus, in teaching children to read in English, the “grain size” of phoneme, onset-rime, and whole word matters ( Ziegler & Goswami, 2005 ) and the preservation of morphological regularities in English spelling matters (e.g., vine vs. vineyard ).

Gough and Tunmer’s (1986) “simple view of reading” model, which is supported by a significant amount of research, provides a useful framework for conceptualizing the development of reading skills across time. It also frames the elements for which it is necessary to provide instructional support. The ultimate goal of reading is to extract and construct meaning from text for a purpose. For this task to be successful, however, the reader needs skills in both word decoding and linguistic comprehension. Weaknesses in either area will reduce the capacity to achieve the goal of reading. Decoding skills and linguistic comprehension make independent contributions to the prediction of reading comprehension across diverse populations of readers ( Kershaw & Schatschneider, 2012 ; Sabatini et al., 2010 ; Vellutino, et al., 2007 ). Results of several studies employing measurement strategies that allow modeling of each component as a latent variable indicate that decoding and linguistic comprehension account for almost all of the variance in reading comprehension (e.g., Foorman et al., 2015 ; Lonigan et al., 2018 ). The relative influence of these skill domains, however, changes across development. The importance of decoding skill in explaining variance in reading comprehension decreases across grades whereas the importance of linguistic comprehension increases (e.g., Catts et al., 2005 ; Foorman et al., 2018 ; García & Cain, 2014 ; Lonigan et al., 2018 ). By the time children are in high school linguistic comprehension and reading comprehension essentially form a single dimension (e.g., Foorman et al., 2018 ).

Children’s knowledge of the alphabetic principle (i.e., how letters and sounds connect) and knowledge of the morphophonemic nature of English are necessary to create the high-quality lexical representations essential to accurate and efficient decoding ( Ehri, 2005 ; Perfetti, 2007 ). Acquiring the alphabetic principle is dependent on understanding that words are composed of smaller sounds (i.e., phonological awareness, PA) and alphabet knowledge (AK). Both PA and AK are substantial correlates and predictors of decoding skills (e.g., Wagner & Torgesen, 1987 ; Wagner et al., 1994 ). Prior to formal reading instruction, children are developing PA and AK as well as other early literacy skills that are related to later decoding skills following formal reading instruction ( Lonigan et al., 2009 ; Lonigan et al., 1998 ; National Early Literacy Panel [NELP], 2008 ; Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998 ). Reading comprehension takes advantage of the reader’s ability to understand language. In most languages, written language and spoken language have high levels of overlap in their basic structure. Longitudinal studies indicate that linguistic comprehension skills from early childhood predict reading comprehension at the end of elementary school ( Catts et al., 2015 ; Language and Reading Research Consortium & Chiu, 2018 ; Mancilla-Martinez & Lesaux, 2010 ; Storch & Whitehurst, 2002 ; Verhoeven & Van Leeuwe, 2008 ). The developmental precursors to skilled reading are present prior to school entry. Consequently, differences between children in the development of these skills forecast later differences in reading skills and are useful for identifying children at risk for reading difficulties.

The science of reading provides numerous clear answers about the type and focus of reading instruction for the subskills of reading, depending on where children are on the continuum of reading development and children’s linguistic backgrounds. Much of this knowledge is summarized in the practice guides produced by the Institute of Education Sciences ( Baker et al., 2014 ; Foorman et al., 2016a ; Gersten et al., 2007 , 2008 ; Kamil et al., 2008 ; Shanahan et al., 2010 ) and in meta-analytic summaries of research (e.g., Berkeley et al., 2012 ; Ehri, Nunes, Stahl et al., 2001 ; Ehri, Nunes, Willows et al., 2001 ; NELP, 2008 ; Therrien, 2004 ; Wanzek et al., 2013 , 2016 ). Whereas the practice guides list several best practices, here we emphasize those practices classified as supported by strong or moderate evidence based on WWC standards.

Since the publication of the Report of the National Reading Panel ( National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000 ) and supported by subsequent research (e.g., Gersten et al., 2017a ; Foorman et al., 2016a ), it is clear that a large evidence base provides strong support for the explicit and systematic instruction of the component and foundational skills of decoding and decoding itself. That is, teaching children phonological awareness and letter knowledge, particularly when combined, results in improved word-decoding skills. Teaching children to decode words using systematic and explicit phonics instruction results in improved word-decoding skills. Such instruction is effective both for monolingual English-speaking children and children whose home language is other than English (i.e., dual-language learners; Baker et al., 2014 ; Gersten et al., 2007 ) as well as children who are having difficulties learning to read or who have an identified reading disability ( Ehri, Nunes, Stahl et al., 2001 ; Gersten et al., 2008 ). Additionally, providing children with frequent opportunities to read connected text supports the development of word-reading accuracy and fluency as well as comprehension skills ( Foorman et al., 2016a ; Therrien, 2004 ).

Similarly, a number of instructional activities to promote the development of reading comprehension have strong or moderate supporting evidence. For younger children, teaching children how to use comprehension strategies and how to utilize the organizational structure of a text to understand, learn, and retain content supports better reading comprehension ( Shanahan et al., 2010 ). For older children, teaching the use of comprehension strategies also enhances reading comprehension ( Kamil et al., 2008 ) as does explicit instruction in key vocabulary, providing opportunities for extended discussion of texts, and providing instruction on foundational reading skills when children lack these skills; such instructional approaches are also effective for children with significant reading difficulties ( Berkeley et al., 2012 ; Kamil et al., 2008 ).

Lack of Compelling Evidence in the Science of Reading

In the above section, practices were highlighted that have sufficient evidence to warrant their widespread use. In this section, we address reading practices for which there is a lack of compelling evidence. Some practices have simply not yet been scientifically evaluated. Other practices have been evaluated, but either the evidence does not support their use based on the generalizability of the results or the studies in which they were evaluated were not of sufficient quality to meet a minimal standard of evidence (e.g., WWC standards). Although we lack sufficient space to present a comprehensive list of practices that do not have compelling evidence, we provide examples of practices that are commonplace and vary in the degree to which they have been scientifically studied.

Evidence-based decision making regarding effective literacy programs and practices for classroom use can be difficult. Often, there is no evidence of effectiveness for a program or the evidence is of poor quality. For instance, of the five most popular reading programs used nationwide (i.e., Units of Study for Teaching Reading, Journeys, Into Reading, Leveled Literacy Intervention and Reading Recovery; Schwartz, 1999) only Leveled Literacy Intervention and Reading Recovery, both interventions for struggling readers, have studies that meet WWC standards. The evidence indicates that there were mixed effects across outcomes for Leveled Literacy Intervention and positive or potentially positive effects for Reading Recovery (e.g., Chapman & Tunmer, 2016 ). Classroom reading programs are typically built around the notion of evidence-informed practices – teaching approaches that are grounded in quality research – but have not been subjected to direct scientific evaluation. As a consequence, it is currently impossible for schools to select basal reading programs that adhere to strict evidence-based standards (e.g., ESSA, 2015 ). As an alternative, schools must develop selection criteria for choosing classroom reading programs informed by the growing scientific evidence on instructional factors that support early reading development (e.g., Castles et al., 2018 ; Foorman et al.2017 ; Rayner et al., 2001 ).

Common instructional approaches that lack generalizable empirical support include such practices as close reading ( Welsch et al., 2019 ), use of decodable text ( Jenkins et al., 2004 ), sustained silent reading ( NICHD, 2000 ), multisensory approaches ( Birsh, 2011 ), and the three-cueing system to support word recognition development (Seidenberg, 2017). Some of these instructional approaches rest on sound theoretical and pedagogical grounds. For example, giving beginning readers the opportunity to read decodable texts provides practice applying the grapheme-phoneme relations they have learned to successfully decode words ( Foorman et al., 2016a ), thus building lexical memory to support word reading accuracy and automaticity (Ehri, this issue). However, the only study to experimentally examine the impact of reading more versus less decodable texts as part of an early intervention phonics program for at risk first graders found no differences between the two groups on any of the posttest measures ( Jenkins et al., 2004 ). Such a result does not rule out the possibility of the usefulness of decodable texts but rather indicates the need to disentangle the active ingredients of effective interventions to specify what to use, when, how often, and for whom.

Similarly, multisensory approaches (e.g., Orton-Gillingham) that teach reading by using multiple senses (i.e., sight, hearing, touch, and movement) to help children make systematic connections between language, letters, and words ( Birsh, 2011 ) are commonplace and have considerable clinical support for facilitating reading development in children who struggle to learn to read. However, there is little scientific evidence that indicates that a multisensory approach is more effective than similarly structured phonological-based approaches that do not include a strong multisensory component (e.g., Boyer & Ehri, 2011 ; Ritchey & Goeke, 2006 ; Torgesen et al., 2001 ). With further research, we may find that a multisensory component is a critical ingredient of intervention for struggling readers, but we lack this empirical evidence currently.

Instruction in reading comprehension is another area where despite some studies showing moderate or strong support (see section on compelling evidence) other practices are employed despite limited support for them (e.g., Boulay et al., 2015 ). The complexity of reading comprehension relies on numerous cognitive resources and background knowledge; as a result, intervention directed exclusively at one component or another is not likely to be that impactful. For example, research shows a clear relation between breadth and depth of vocabulary and reading comprehension ( Wagner et al., 2007 ). One implication of this relation is that teaching vocabulary could improve reading comprehension. Numerous studies have tested this implication using instructional approaches that vary from teaching words in isolation to practices that involve instruction in the use of context to learn the meaning of unfamiliar words. Instruction has also included strategies to determine meaning of words through word study and morphological analysis (e.g., Beck & McKeown, 2007 ; Lesaux et al., 2014 ). Although these practices have been effective in increasing vocabulary knowledge of the words taught, there is limited evidence of transfer to untaught words (as measured by standardized measures) or to improvement in general reading comprehension ( Elleman et al., 2009 ; Lesaux et al., 2010 ). Such findings do not mean that vocabulary instruction is not a useful practice; rather, by itself, it is not sufficient to improve reading comprehension. To make meaningful gains, intervention for reading comprehension likely requires addressing multiple components of language as well as teaching content knowledge (see next section) to make sizable gains.

Other instructional practices go directly against what is known from the science of reading. For example, the three-cueing approach to support early word recognition (i.e., relying on a combination of semantic, syntactic, and graphophonic cues simultaneously to formulate an intelligent hypothesis about a word’s identity) ignores 40 years of overwhelming evidence that orthographic mapping involves the formation of letter-sound connections to bond spelling, pronunciation, and meaning of specific words in memory (see Ehri, this issue). Moreover, relying on alternative cuing systems impedes the building of automatic word-recognition skill that is the hallmark of skilled word reading ( Stanovich, 1990 ; 1991 ). The English orthography, being both alphabetic-phonemic and morpho-phonemic, clearly privileges the use of various levels of grapheme-phoneme correspondences to read words ( Frost, 2012 ), with rapid context-free word recognition being the process that most clearly distinguishes good from poor readers ( Perfetti, 1992 ; Stanovich, 1980 ). Guessing at a word amounts to a lost learning trial to help children learn the orthography of the word and thus reduce the need to guess the word in the future ( Castles et al., 2018 ; Share, 1995 ).

Similarly, alternative approaches to improving reading skills for struggling readers often fall well outside the scientific consensus regarding sources of reading difficulties. Some of these approaches are based on the tenet that temporal processing deficits in the auditory (e.g., Tallal, 1984 ) and visual (e.g., Stein, 2019 ) systems of the brain are causally related to poor word-reading development. Although there is some evidence that typically developing and struggling readers differ on measures tapping auditory ( Casini et al., 2018 ; Protopapas, 2014 ) and visual (e.g., Eden et al., 1995; Olson & Datta, 2002 ) processing skill, there is little evidence to support the use of instructional programs designed to improve auditory or visual systems to ameliorate reading problems ( Strong et al., 2011 ). Further, interventions designed to decrease visual confusion (e.g., Dyslexie font) or modify transient channel processing (e.g., Irlen lenses) to improve reading skill for children with reading disability have also failed to garner scientific support ( Hyatt et al., 2009 ; Iovino et al., 1998 ; Marinus et al., 2016 ). Similarly, although use of video games to improve reading via enhanced visual attention is reported to be an effective intervention for children with reading disability ( Peters et al., 2019 ), studies of this supplemental intervention approach have not compared it to standard supplemental approaches. Finally, studies of interventions designed to enhance other cognitive processes, such as working memory, also lack evidence effectiveness in terms of improved reading-related outcomes (e.g., Melby-Lervåg et al., 2016 ).

Promising but Not (Yet) Compelling Evidence in the Science of Reading

There are many promising areas of research that are poised to provide compelling evidence to inform the science of reading in the coming years. As we do not have space to provide a comprehensive list, we highlight only a few promising areas in prevention research and elementary education research.

Promising Directions in Prevention Research

Research on the prevention of reading problems is critical for our ability to reduce the number of children who struggle learning to read. One area of prevention research that has great promise but needs more evidence is how to more fully develop preschoolers’ language abilities that support later reading success. Both correlational and experimental findings indicate that providing children with opportunities to engage in high-quality conversations, coupled with exposure to advanced language models, matters for language development ( Cabell et al., 2015 ; Dickinson & Porche, 2011 ; Lonigan et al., 2011 ; Wasik & Hindman, 2018). Yet, most programs have a more robust impact on children’s proximal language learning (i.e., learning taught words) than on generalized language learning as measured with standardized assessments ( Marulis & Neuman, 2010 ).

Promising studies that have demonstrated significant effects on children’s general language development elucidate potential points of leverage. First, improving the connection between the school and home contexts by including parents as partners can promote synergistic learning for children as language-learning activities in school and home settings are increasingly aligned (e.g., Lonigan & Whitehurst, 1998 ). A second leverage point is increasing attention to children’s active use of language in the classroom to promote a rich dialogue between children and adults (e.g., Lonigan et al., 2011 ; Wasik & Hindman, 2018). A third leverage point is integrating content area instruction into early literacy instruction to improve language learning, for example, building children’s conceptual knowledge of the social and natural world and teaching vocabulary words within the context of related ideas (e.g., Gonzalez et al., 2011 ).

Promising Directions in Elementary Education Research

We present two promising areas in reading research with elementary-age students, one focused on improving linguistic comprehension and one focused on improving decoding, consistent with the simple view of reading.

The knowledge a reader brings to a text is the chief determinant of whether the reader will understand that text ( Anderson & Pearson, 1984 ). Thus, building knowledge is an essential, yet neglected, part of improving linguistic comprehension (Cabell & Hwang, this issue). Teaching reading is most often approached in early elementary classrooms as a subject that is independent from other subjects, such as science and social studies ( Palinscar & Duke, 2004 ). As such, reading is taught using curricula that do not systematically build children’s knowledge of the social and natural world. Instruction in reading and the content areas does not have to be an either/or proposition. Rather, the teaching of reading and of content-area learning can be simultaneously taught and integrated to powerfully impact children’s learning of both reading and content knowledge (e.g., Connor et al., 2017 ; Kim et al., 2020 ; Williams et al., 2014 ). This area of research is promising but not yet compelling, due to the small number of experimental and quasi-experimental studies that have examined either integrated content-area and literacy instruction or content-rich English Language Arts instruction in K-5 settings (approximately 31 studies). Through meta-analysis, this corpus of studies demonstrates that combining knowledge building and literacy approaches has a positive impact on both vocabulary and comprehension outcomes for elementary-age children ( Hwang et al., 2019 ). Further rigorous studies are needed that test widely used content-rich English Language Arts curricula (Cabell & Hwang, 2020, this issue); also required is new development of integrative and interdisciplinary approaches in this area.

There is also promising research on helping students to decode words more efficiently. It is widely accepted that students with reading difficulties often have underlying deficits in phonological processing (e.g., Brady & Schankweiler, 1991 ; Stanovich & Siegel, 1994 ; Torgesen, 2000 ; Vellutino et al., 1996 ) and these deficits are believed to disrupt the acquisition of spelling-to-sound translation routines that form the basis of early decoding-skill development (e.g., van IJzendoorn & Bus, 1994 ; Rack et al., 1992 ). For developing readers, decoding an unfamiliar letter string can result in either full or partial decoding. During partial decoding, the reader must match the assembled phonology from decoding with their lexical representation of a word ( Venezky, 1999 ). For example, encountering the word island might render the incorrect but partial decoding attempt, “izland”. A child’s flexibility with the partially decoded word is referred to as their “set for variability” or their ability to go from the decoded form to the correct pronunciation of a word. This skill serves as a bridge between decoding and lexical pronunciations and may be an important second step in the decoding process ( Elbro et al., 2012 ).

The matching of partial phonemic-decoding output is facilitated by the child’s decoding skills, the quality of the child’s lexical word representation, and by the potential contextual support of text ( Nation & Castles, 2017 ). Correlational studies indicate that students’ ability to go from a decoded form of a word to a correct pronunciation (their set for variability) predicts the reading of irregular words ( Tunmer & Chapman, 2012 ), regular words ( Elbro, et al., 2012 ), and nonwords ( Steacy et al., 2019a ). Set for variability has also been found to be a stronger predictor of word reading than phonological awareness in students in grades 2-5 (e.g., Steacy et al., 2019b ). Recent studies in this area suggest that children can benefit from being encouraged to engage with the irregularities of English ( Dyson et al., 2017 ) to promote the implicit knowledge structures needed to read and spell these complex words. Additional research suggests that set for variability training can be effective in promoting early word reading skills (e.g., Savage et al., 2018 ; Zipke, 2016 ). The work done in this area to date suggests that set for variability requires child knowledge structures and strategies, which can be developed through instruction, that allow successful matching of partial phonemic-decoding output with the corresponding phonological, morphological, and semantic lexical representations.

Where Do We Go Next in the Science of Reading?

Basic science research.

The science of reading has reached some consensus on the typical development of reading skill and how individual differences may alter this trajectory (e.g., Boscardin et al., 2008 ; Hjetland et al., 2019; Peng et al., 2019 ). Less is known about factors and mechanisms related to reading among diverse learners, a critical barrier to the field’s ability to address and prevent reading difficulty when it arises. Investigations with large and diverse participant samples are needed to improve understanding of how child characteristics additively and synergistically affect reading acquisition ( Hernandez, 2011 ; Lonigan et al., 2013 ). Insufficient research disentangles the influence of English-learner status for children who also have identified disabilities (Solari et al., 2014; Wagner et al., 2005 ). Greater attention to how language variation (e.g., dialect use) and differences in language experience affect reading development is crucial ( Patton Terry et al., 2010 ; Seidenberg & MacDonald, 2018; Washington et al., 2018). New realizations of the interaction between child characteristics and the depth of the orthography have also highlighted the importance of implicit learning in early reading ( Seidenberg, 2005 ; Steacy et al., 2019). Innovative cross-linguistic research is exploring how diverse methods of representing pronunciation and meaning within different orthographies, and children’s developing awareness of these methods, jointly predict reading skills (e.g., Kuo & Anderson, 2006 ; Wade-Woolley, 2016 ). Furthermore, a better understanding of the role of executive function, socio-emotional resilience factors, and biopsychosocial risk variables (e.g., poverty and trauma) on reading development is critical. Additional research like this, in English and across languages, is needed to develop effective instruction and assessments for all leaners.

A clearer understanding of child and contextual influences on the development of reading also will support improvements in how early and accurately children at risk for reading difficulties and disabilities are identified. Currently, numerous challenges remain in identifying children early enough to maximize benefits of interventions ( Colenbrander et al., 2018 ; Gersten et al., 2017b ). Investigators often use behavioral precursors or correlates of reading to estimate children’s risk for reading failure. Whereas this work has shown some promise ( Catts et al., 2015 ; Compton et al., 2006 , 2010 ; Lyytinen et al., 2015 ; Thompson et al., 2015 ), identification of risk typically involves high error rates, especially for preschoolers and kindergarteners who might benefit most from early identification and intervention. Similar challenges to accuracy have emerged when identifying older children with reading disabilities. Historically, this process has relied on discrepancy models (e.g., such as between reading skill and general cognitive aptitude), often yielding a just single comparison on which decisions are based (Waesche et al., 2011).

Challenges to identification for both younger and older children may be best met with frameworks that recognize the multifactorial casual basis of reading problems ( Pennington et al., 2012 ). Newer models of identification that combine across multiple indicators of risk derived from current skill, and that augment these indicators with other metrics of potential risk, may yield improved identification and interventions (e.g., Erbeli et al., 2018 ; Spencer et al., 2011). In particular, future research will need to consider and combine, while considering both additive and interactive effects, a wide array of measures, which may include genetic, neurological, and biopsychosocial indicators ( Wagner et al., 2019 ). Furthermore, more evaluation is needed of some new models of identification that integrate both risk and protective, or resiliency, factors, to see if these models increase the likelihood of correctly identifying those children most in need of additional instructional support (e.g., Catts & Petscher, 2020 ; Haft et al., 2016 ). Even if beneficial, it is likely that for early identification to be maximally effective, early risk assessments will need to be combined with progress monitoring of response to instruction ( Miciak & Fletcher, 2020 ). Of course, for such an approach to be successful, all children must receive high-quality reading instruction from the beginning and interventions need to be in place to address children who show varying levels of risk ( Foorman et al., 2016a ). Identifying children at risk and providing appropriate intervention early on has the potential to significantly improve reading outcomes and reduce the negative consequences of reading failure.

Intervention Innovations

Despite successes, too many children still struggle to read novel text with understanding, and intervention design efforts have not fully met this challenge ( Compton et al., 2014 ; Phillips et al., 2016 ; Vaughn et al., 2017 ). Greater creativity and integration of research from a broader array of complementary fields, including cognitive science and behavioral genetics may be required to deal with long-standing problems. For example, genetic information may have causal explanatory power; randomized trials are needed to evaluate the efficacy of using such information to select and individualize instruction and intervention ( Hart, 2016 ).

The field would benefit from increased attention to the problem of fading intervention effects over time. Although there can be detectable effects of interventions several years after they are completed (e.g., Blachman et al., 2014 ; Vadasy et al., 2011 ; Vadasy & Sanders, 2013 ), invariably effect sizes reduce over time. A meta-analysis of long-term effects of interventions for phonemic awareness, fluency, and reading comprehension found a 40 percent reduction in effect sizes within one year post-intervention ( Suggate, 2016 ). Perhaps reading interventions with larger initial effects or sequential reading interventions with smaller but cumulating effects would be more resistant to fade-out.

Solutions to the problem of diminishing effects may be inspired by examples from other fields. The field of memory includes examples of content that appears immune from forgetting. This phenomenon has been called permastore ( Bahrick, 1984 ). For example, people only meaningfully exposed to a foreign language in school classes will still retain some knowledge of the language 50 years later. Additionally, expertise in the form of world-class performance appears to result from cumulative effects of long-term deliberate practice ( Ericsson, 1996 ), and skilled reading can be viewed as an example of expert performance ( Wagner & Stanovich, 1996 ). Informed by these concepts and by advances in early math instruction (e.g., Sarama et al., 2012 ; Kang et al., 2019 ), reading intervention studies should prioritize follow-up evaluations, including direct comparisons of follow-through strategies aimed at sustaining benefits from earlier instruction. For example, studies should evaluate booster interventions, professional development that better aligns cross-grade instruction, and how re-teaching and cumulative review may consolidate skill acquisition across time (e.g., Cepeda et al., 2006 ; Smolen et al., 2016 ).

Translational and Implementation Science

If the science of reading is to be applied in a manner resulting in achievement for all learners, the field must increase its focus on processes supporting implementation of evidence-based reading practices in schools. The field can leverage its considerable evidence-base to systematically investigate, with replication, both the effectiveness of reading instructional practices with diverse learners and to investigate processes that facilitate or prevent adoption, implementation, and sustainability of these practices (National Research Council, 2002; Schneider, 2018 ; Slavin, 2002 ). Research on these processes in educational contexts may be best facilitated by making use of methodological and conceptual tools developed within the traditions of translation and implementation science research ( Gilliland et al., 2019 ; Eccles & Mittman, 2006 ). For example, these frameworks can support studies on whether and how educators and policymakers use information about evidence to inform decision making (e.g., Farley-Ripple et al., 2018 ) and studies on how institutional routines may need to be adapted to best integrate new procedures and practices (e.g., scheduling changes in the school day; Foorman et al., 2016b ).

Reading research that uses translational and implementation science frameworks and methodologies will make more explicit the processes of adoption, implementation and sustainability and how these interact within diverse settings and with multiple populations ( Brown et al., 2017 ; Fixsen et al., 2005 , 2013 ). This work will be guided by new questions, not only asking “what works” but also “what works for whom under what conditions” and “what factors promote sustainability of implementation.” Innovative studies would adhere to rigorous scientific standards, prioritize hypothesis testing within a deductive, experimental framework, and leverage qualitative methodologies to systematically explore implementation processes and factors ( Brown et al., 2017 ). Results could iteratively inform the breadth of scientific reading research, including basic mechanisms related to reading and the development of novel assessments and interventions to support achievement among diverse learners in diverse settings ( Cook & Odom, 2013 ; Douglas et al., 2015 ; Forman et al., 2013 ).

There has recently been a resurgence of the debate on the science of reading, and in this article, we described the existing evidence base and possible future directions. Compelling evidence is available to guide understanding of how reading develops and identify proven instructional practices that impact both decoding and linguistic comprehension. Whereas there is some evidence that is either not compelling or has yet to be generated for instructional practices and programs that are widely used, the scientific literature on reading is ever-expanding through contributions from the fields education, psychology, linguistics, communication science, neuroscience, and computational sciences. As these additions to the literature mature and contribute to an evidence base, we anticipate they will inform and shape the science of reading as well as the science of teaching reading.

Acknowledgments

First author was determined by group consensus. Authors equally contributed and are listed and alphabetically. The authors’ work was supported by funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Institute of Education Sciences (R305A160241, R305A170430, R305F100005, R305F100027, R324A180020, R324B19002) and Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P50HD52120, P20HD091013, HD095193, HD072286).

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Teachers’ Thoughts on Teaching Reading: An Investigation of Early Childhood Teachers’ Perceptions of Literacy Acquisition

• Published: 11 December 2014
• Volume 43 , pages 523–530, ( 2015 )

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• Rebecca M. Giles 1 &
• Karyn Tunks 1  

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Teachers’ assumptions about teaching and learning have a critical impact on pedagogical practices. This study was conducted to investigate the perceptions of early childhood educators regarding children’s acquisition of literacy in an attempt to gain a picture of current instructional practices. Prekindergarten through second grade teachers (n = 76) responded to the Literacy Acquisition Perception Profile. Responses on the reading readiness and emergent literacy subscales served as the dependent variables in a series of ANOVAs conducted with educational level, teaching assignment, and teaching experience as the independent variables. Results revealed a statistically significant difference [F(4, 65) = 3.31, p  = .03, η 2  = .17] between the teachers who had 6–10 years of experience and more than 21 years, with teachers who had 6–10 years clearly ascribing to reading readiness as the preferred way of teaching reading over teachers with 21+ years. This finding may be attributed to many teachers with more than 21 years experience having received initial teacher training during the late 1980s and early 1990s when an emergent literacy perspective, a departure from the traditional view of reading readiness, was the predominant view. It is posited that differentiated instruction rather than the application of a single instructional approach fully grounded in a particular perception may be the best approach to facilitating young children’s literacy acquisition.

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Giles, R.M., Tunks, K. Teachers’ Thoughts on Teaching Reading: An Investigation of Early Childhood Teachers’ Perceptions of Literacy Acquisition. Early Childhood Educ J 43 , 523–530 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-014-0672-3

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Improving Student Writing through Reading Strategies

In their MLA Style Center post “Reading Is Not One Thing,” Annie Del Principe and Rachel Ihara make some excellent points about student reading behaviors. They observe that reading a text carefully while marking key passages and making notes in the margins, while once traditional, is no longer required in every class or discipline. The cursory, nonlinear reading that many students do often yields the information they are looking for, especially online. Perhaps this should not surprise us. As Del Principe and Ihara note, experienced academic readers also read selectively to see if a text merits closer attention. (In fact, I skimmed Del Principe and Ihara’s article the first time through!) The authors argue that “[t]hese strategies are not shortcuts or signs of laziness; rather, they are skillful, smart approaches appropriate to our goals and purposes and to the genres we are reading.” I agree in many instances.

Why Deep Reading Is Valuable

That said, what Nicholas Carr characterizes as deep reading is still a valuable skill (97). For one thing, good writing is unlikely without deep reading. Composition courses emphasize documentation (as readers of The MLA Style Center know), but students also learn about essay content and structure from exposure to effective models . Instructors can teach students to notice and analyze authors’ rhetorical moves and to practice applying those techniques in their own writing.

In the classroom, writing instructors may focus on fewer texts so they can spend time helping students read more actively and deeply. In my classes, I demonstrate how I approach an article, a story, or a poem by “thinking aloud” to show the mental connections I make when I read (Schoenbach et al. 101). I read a few lines of the text (a paragraph or less) out loud slowly, verbalizing the thoughts, questions, and associations that come to my mind as I read. After I model the process, students take turns verbalizing their own reading thoughts in pairs or small groups. I also show various ways to annotate or mark the text and, again, give students time to experiment. As the semester progresses, students use these reading strategies and others to connect with assigned texts both in and outside class. Our group discussions are better, and many students seem more engaged as a result.

How Reading and Writing Intersect

In more than twenty years of experience teaching composition and working in a writing center, I have seen many ways that reading intersects with writing:

• In all disciplines, reading is an important precursor to writing on a purely informational level. Students must understand a topic before they can write coherently about it. They must do the research before they can write a research paper.
• Students who read widely (in any genre) usually have a greater command of vocabulary and the nuances of written expression. Many readers also absorb correct grammar and punctuation subconsciously, whether or not they know the rules behind when to use a comma. The poet Jane Kenyon’s advice to “have good sentences in your ears” is often quoted for a reason (qtd. in Popova) .
• This relationship between reading and writing is not a new concept. Reflecting on his writing process, for instance, the popular author Stephen King notes the value of ineffective models as well as inspirational ones. “One learns most clearly what not to do by reading bad prose,” he says. In contrast, “[g]ood writing . . . teaches the learning writer about style, graceful narration, plot development, the creation of believable characters, and truth telling” (211). While fiction writing is less emphasized in academia, the principle holds true.
• Finally, college writers need a deeper knowledge of their subject to think—and write—critically about it. Whether it be anthropology, economics, or literature, that knowledge often comes from scholarly articles and books, whether in print or online.

In our digital society, we have become accustomed to easy access to information; however, the metacognitive work of active reading is still necessary for effective writing. Google and YouTube are useful, but there are things they cannot provide.

Using Reading Strategies in the Writing Center

Learning assistance benefits from cross-pollination with reading as well. Some training and practice with reading strategies is a valuable addition to the skills of any tutor, especially in the writing center. Writing tutors focus primarily on the process of developing an essay, but they can also demonstrate and encourage reading strategies on multiple levels:  

• The text that tutors and students look at together most frequently is the writing prompt assigned by the teacher. Tutors should model how to break the prompt into manageable parts; point out questions, key terms, and other significant features; and help tutees interpret unfamiliar vocabulary.
• Tutors can read both writing prompts and student papers aloud and verbalize their thoughts. This gives tutees some “reader response” feedback and often helps them feel more comfortable sharing their own thoughts and questions.
• Embedded tutors who work with students in a specific class have even more opportunity to coach students in reading skills because they are familiar with the teacher’s expectations and the assigned texts as well as the required writing.

Ultimately, tutors are ideally situated to support metacognitive development by helping students recognize, evaluate, and adapt the ways they approach both reading and writing in college courses.

Modeling Literacy Expectations

Reading—in all its variety—is a key method of accessing information and understanding concepts in every academic field and in the world at large. Students have limited experience, so college instructors who want their students to engage effectively with the course material must take responsibility for explaining and modeling the literacy expectations of their disciplines. Tutors can help, but teachers need to “make the invisible visible” by showing students the cognitive moves that seem natural to them after years of study and specialization (Schoenbach et al. 23). To quote Del Principe and Ihara again, we must “slow down our instructional pace to make space to model and enact the types of reading we think are valuable and will work best in our classes for our students.” Then we must scaffold assignments that facilitate their learning. This takes time and effort, but the results are worth it for both students and instructors.

Works Cited

Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology , edited by Samuel Cohen, 5th ed., Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2017, pp. 87–97.

Del Principe, Annie, and Rachel Ihara. “Reading Is Not One Thing.” The MLA Style Center , 27 Aug. 2019, style.mla.org/variability-of-reading-practices/.

King, Stephen. “Reading to Write.” 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology , edited by Samuel Cohen, 5th ed., Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2017, pp. 210–14.

Popova, Maria. “Poet Jane Kenyon’s Advice on Writing: Some of the Wisest Words to Create and Live By.” Brain Pickings , 15 Sept. 2015, www.brainpickings.org/2015/09/15/jane-kenyon-advice-on-writing/.

Schoenbach, Ruth, et al. Reading for Understanding: How Reading Apprenticeship Improves  Disciplinary Learning in Secondary and College Classrooms . 2nd ed., Jossey Bass, 2012.

Jamil 10 November 2021 AT 01:11 PM

Your article is excellent

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Sophy sophi 16 November 2021 AT 12:11 AM

The work is awesome...what are the reading strategies that one can adopt that can help in writing a term paper?

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‘Writing Directly Benefits Students’ Reading Skills’

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All of us obviously want to help our students become better writers. But are there ways we can “double-dip,” too—in other words, help them improve their writing AND also use writing instruction to improve reading skills?

We’ll explore that question today with Tony Zani, Mary Tedrow, Mary Beth Nicklaus, Colleen Cruz, and Pam Allyn. You can listen to a 10-minute conversation I had with Tony, Mary, and Mary Beth on my BAM! Radio Show . You can also find a list of, and links to, previous shows here.

Giving kids the ‘write stuff’ makes them better readers

Tony Zani is a literacy coach in the Salt Lake City school district. He has a bachelor’s degree in elementary education and a master’s degree in instructional leadership. Tony is a national-board-certified teacher with a specialization in early-childhood education:

Writing is often the overlooked content area. After the National Reading Panel left it out and No Child Left Behind focused on reading achievement, there seemed to be a decline in teaching writing. After the Common Core State Standards came out, there was an increase in writing instruction. But, if your state is like mine, writing is only tested in a few grades. So, guess what? Those are the grades when writing is taught like crazy. In other grades, it often becomes a nice thing “if there’s time.” There’s rarely time.

This mentality is prevalent because every level of the education system focuses on making sure students do well on end-of-year, high-stakes assessments. Jobs are at stake. Money from the government is at stake. Heaven forbid your school does so poorly that an outside group comes in to help you “turnaround.”

Never fear, though. Writing directly benefits students’ reading skills. For example, if you have students write about what they’ve read or learned (for nearly any content or age), you’ll dramatically improve reading comprehension. Students are often forced to reread and think more deeply about what they’ve read. When students have to consider a controversial question and use texts they’ve read to defend their point of view, reading comprehension is off the charts. In our school, we’ve emphasized writing about what we read. It took about two years for most teachers, and students, to really embrace the concept. It was about that time that our end-of-year reading scores had a huge jump. Our highly impacted Title I school made enormous growth just because students were better at thinking about what they read.

Writing also improves students’ reading fluency. When students have to stop and think about what spelling patterns to use when they write, they are making a deeper connection in their brains about sound and spelling patterns. This deeper connection makes it easier, and faster, for students to recall those same patterns when they read. Written language is literally a secret code that someone made up to represent spoken sounds. The more students think about and practice the code in written form, the better they will be at understanding the same code in writing. Again, in our high-needs school, we saw students’ scores on tests like DIBELS and our end-of-level test rise dramatically. Fluent readers more deeply understand that code.

Writing also improves reading comprehension as students get better at formatting their writing. When students write argumentative essays, they learn how authors often lay out their arguments and evidence. This, in turn, gives students a framework for reading others’ argumentative writing. Having a framework in your mind helps you fill in the blanks and improves comprehension. When students write narrative pieces, they develop an understanding of how authors typically lay out character development, setting, plot, problems, turning points, and resolutions. Again, students have a framework to build upon when they read others’ narrative texts. In a bit of irony, our school focused on writing informative and argumentative pieces—those are emphasized in the common core, right? Our students had very high scores when reading informational texts. However, students scored lower when reading literature. Reading literature was a strength for most other schools. Writing in all genres is important. Don’t lose that balance!

Writing is a critical communication skill. Universities and employers frequently complain that writing is an underdeveloped skill. It’s no wonder, when we have an education system that often relegates writing to the land of “I wish we had time” and “That’s not on the test.” What a tragedy. Teaching students to be effective writers is important by itself. However, writing also provides big gains in reading comprehension and reading fluency.

‘Reading is the inhale; writing is the exhale’

Mary K. Tedrow, an award-winning high school English teacher, now serves as the director of the Shenandoah Valley Writing Project. Her book, Write, Think, Learn: Tapping the Power of Daily Student Writing Across the Content Area is available through Routledge:

Writing and reading are intricately intertwined. One is the inverse of the other: Reading is the inhale; writing is the exhale. They depend on each other, and when we find time to practice both, the students are the winners.

In the earliest readers, writing is a natural way to ingest and experiment with a growing knowledge of letters and their function in symbolizing the sounds we speak. Encouraging students to write, even before they know all the rules, builds a deeper understanding of how reading works. In kindergarten, the inventive spelling students employ to compose early writings allows children to represent on the page what they are hearing in the world. Children more clearly understand the letter/sound relationship as they compose thoughts and stories in writing. Recent research has revealed that students who are given latitude to use inventive spelling become better readers (Oulette & Senechall, 2017).

But the interplay between writing and reading goes well beyond just learning to read. When students are asked to write for their own purposes, they intuitively understand the choices authors make as they create a work that moves a reader.

Teachers who have students writing authentically—that is, the way real writers write—can interrupt the process and teach craft lessons. Show students how to develop several good beginnings and ask them to choose the one which serves their purpose best. Show how to incorporate the senses in description, how to move a plot forward through dialogue, how to manipulate sentences for punch and clarity.

All of these writing skills are the inside/out version of analyzing writing by others. When we analyze the books, poetry, and essays we read, we are simply describing the choices an author made on their road to composing a piece. When students are heavily involved in creating those pieces themselves, they will more easily see what authors are doing and understand the messiness required in producing effective communication. Writing brings the author and his or her skill to life.

Students who write are better, more observant, and appreciative readers in general. And students who read are better, more competent writers. Be sure your students have the chance to breathe in and out throughout the day.

Ouellette, G., & Sénéchal, M. (2017). Invented spelling in kindergarten as a predictor of reading and spelling in Grade 1: A new pathway to literacy, or just the same road, less known? Developmental Psychology, 53 (1), 77-88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/dev0000179

‘Lure’ students into reading through working with their writing

Mary Beth Nicklaus is a secondary-level teacher and literacy specialist for the Wisconsin Rapids public schools in Wisconsin:

I have found it possible to lure secondary-level students into the reading world through working with their writing. I work with 6-9th grade struggling readers as a reading specialist and literacy coach. By the time they are referred to me, they have not been reading for years—which accounts for much of their struggle. When we teachers work through the power of written self-expression with and for these students, we can also tinker with content-specific academic vocabulary, text structure, and mechanics of writing. We can also prime and build basic reading and comprehension skills. Even researchers have found that use of reading-response writing, explicitly teaching writing process, and engaging students in wide writing practice enhances basic reading skills and comprehension in K-12 readers. Here are some strategies I have found to be successful working with secondary-level students based on the aforementioned three areas:

• Create reading-response writing opportunities focusing on opinions and feelings of the reader. By the time they are in 6th grade, most students want to share information about interests and opinions. How can we connect that interest into reader response? To begin with, we don’t always have to work with published text. We can create our own texts in the classroom. We teachers can start the process by writing a letter to students sharing some general information and interests. The teacher then guides the students to write a letter back to them with similar information. This experience encourages students to begin sharing and expressing themselves in writing. Get into the habit of crafting student-writing response assignments for which we are asking about students’ feelings and opinions regarding classroom reading—even soliciting poetry writing if that genre works best for some students. Students may also find starting with a salutation hailing a specific audience helps them focus their thoughts in their writing. “Dear teacher/class/partner, I think that ____.” They can also focus on sharing their writing with a partner or small group.
• Teach the writing process relative to classroom text. Teach students a few writing structures to clearly communicate thoughts and ideas. Teach the main structures of the text you use in your content—be it narrative or expository structures. Let’s say we want to teach students to compare and contrast within a classroom text on the running of restaurants. We might use a Venn Diagram graphic organizer to compare and contrast the information about restaurant operation with them on the smartboard. Allow the class to help fill in information. Then together, flesh out a comparison-contrast response with a question like, “Based on our reading today, what might be a more difficult restaurant to run, Culver’s or Buffalo Wild Wings?” Use a template to gather student input to flesh out a response. Teach students to support viewpoints with evidence from the text and show them a specific way you will always want them to use to cite evidence. Allow the class to help design or co-create a rubric for evaluating writing, which will help students internalize the elements of the specific writing. Steer the strategy to a similar text where you might use the same kind of structure and response.
• Engage in wide practice of written response: Continuing both “big” and “little” writing in our classes, based on the structures and types of texts we teach, can increase reading comprehension. Working on mechanics of writing improves basic reading skills like fluency and word recognition. In addition, continue to practice reading, writing, and reflecting and sharing in whole-group, small-group, and partner contexts. Have students create “Why?” questions to inquire about text. Supply sentence stems to help students focus their text response with their writing such as, “I think ___________ did what he did because in the story_______.” Make it a habit of requiring written response in the form of exit response slips where students within a limit of 3-5 minutes, quickly write a response to an inquiry regarding what they learned through the reading. Wide practice of writing helps students’ classroom reading become second nature, and it helps prune their focus on text.

I know the strategies I have elaborated upon work, because my students made enormous, lasting gains in their reading through focusing on writing. Also, the gains secondary-level students can make through focusing on feelings and opinions in their reading-response writing foster livelier conversations during classroom discussion. Students’ overall gains even show students that content texts across the curriculum can pique their interests outside of the classroom. It’s a win-win all around!

Having students annotate their writing with the Strategies they use

Colleen Cruz is the author of several titles for teachers, including The Unstoppable Writing Teacher , as well as the author of the young-adult novel, Border Crossing , a Tomás Rivera Mexican American Children’s Book Award Finalist. She was a classroom teacher in general education and inclusive settings before joining the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, where as the director of innovation, she shares her passion for accessibility, 21st-century learning, and social justice. Most recently, Colleen authored Writers Read Better: Nonfiction (July 2018) and Writers Read Better: Narrative published by Corwin:

As an educator who works with teachers and students in grades 2 through 8, I find that I often look at the practices of primary-grade teachers and wish we upper-grade folks borrowed more heavily from them. Whether it be a focus on individual development, an emphasis on play, or just an overarching focus on the whole child, there are pedagogical treasures we need to bring more to our big-kid classrooms. At present, the most pressing for me is the desire to use writing to support reading instruction more often.

Every kindergarten and 1st grade teacher I know asks students to write as soon as they enter the classroom. This is long before students know the entire alphabet or how to read any words. In fact, most of us who have had little ones at home can attest to how often kids pick up a marker or crayon and write their names, strings of letters, or familiar words. Our youngest learners often produce words before they consume them. And when they do that, they are setting themselves up for success as readers because they learn early on, if they can write their name they can read it. If they can write any word, they can read it.

Also, many of us grew up as educators with the knowledge that reading supports writing. I first learned how this conventional wisdom applies to children’s writing from Katie Ray and her seminal book Wondrous Words. So, it should not be all that revolutionary to discover that those early-writing and -reading connections still apply when students move into more complex reading.

Yes, they might have moved past simple decoding and literal comprehension work. But the role of writing and reading reciprocity still applies. For every comprehension move a reader makes, there is an author on the other side of the desk. If a young reader is also a writer, they will be well-positioned to see the mirror moves they have made as a writer in the texts they are reading by other authors. Studies have shown this, of course (Graves, Calkins, Chew, Graham & Hebert to name a few). But in my work with young readers and writers I have seen time and again that if something is challenging to a reader, one of the most accessible paths to overcoming that challenge is through writing. It’s a transferable understanding that can last a lifetime: Show students that every reading skill has a reciprocal writing skill, and if they have written something like it, they are able to read it well, too.

One of my favorite ways to do this is to ask students to annotate their writing with the strategies they tried as writers and the reasons why. For example, “I used show-don’t-tell in this paragraph to help make a picture in my reader’s mind.” I then ask them to read a book of their choice with their own writing nearby. When they come to a spot in the text they find challenging, they can look back to their own writing to see if they made a similar move and why. A few common writing/reading reciprocal moves I teach students include:

• Show-not-tell in writing helps readers to infer in reading.
• Plotting in writing helps readers to make predictions in reading.
• Developing objects as symbols in writing helps readers interpret symbols in reading.
• Defining a word in writing helps readers to understand the meaning of an unknown word.

There are, of course, countless more.

We know the power of modeling. And I believe for many years, rightly so, we have taught students how to mine the power of the published word for ideas for their own writing. For many of us, it’s time to try to teach the power of modeling by asking students to look at their own writing as their mentor for their reading lives. I am hard-pressed to think of more empowering reading work.

Writing ‘is a powerful lever for helping our students learn to read profoundly’

Pam Allyn, senior vice president, innovation & development, Scholastic Education, is a leading literacy expert, author, and motivational speaker. In 2007, she founded LitWorld, a global literacy organization serving children across the United States and in more than 60 countries, pioneering initiatives including the summer reading program LitCamp and World Read Aloud Day:

Writing and reading are not just two sides of the same coin; they are profoundly related and entwined. I have often said that reading is like breathing in, and writing is like breathing out—the child is taking new breaths in this new world, feeling her power and her potential.

Surrounding our children in the sounds of language from literary and informational text is crucial to their understanding of language. The child who is read aloud to multiple times per day, week, month, and year is already realizing the sound and feel of language. Then, too, the child who is given the opportunity to put her first marks on the page is already beginning to make meaning in the world. When reading a book, she sees it as something constructed from a world she already knows because her scribbles connect to those of others and give her the powerful idea that she has a voice.

Writing early and constantly, in and out of school, is a powerful lever for helping our students learn to read profoundly. Here are five ways writing supports reading and vice versa:

1. Building a deep sense of the beauty of grammar, sound, and vocabulary

The student who writes becomes alert to the structure of sentences, the rhythm of multiple words together, and words that surprise. Because our students are using the tools of language to build their own stories, they are awake to the qualities of texts. When students share works by authors such as Jacqueline Woodson or Naomi Nye, they’re astounded and try to emulate them in their own writing.

2. Understanding the purpose of and use of genres

Students who write quickly learn the necessity of genre. My 1st graders were writing informational texts and choosing their own topics. One wrote about nursing homes because that’s where her grandpa was. Later, I saw her scouring a book with a glossary in it. She explained, “I want to add a glossary to my story. My readers might need to know some of the big words I use to describe where my grandpa lives.” Genre is already embedded within her at the age of 6.

3. Recognizing the power of writing to connect us

Students who write understand that by telling their stories, they’re making their thoughts permanent, which leads to a hearty respect for the text, the authors who write them, and the uses we make of them. When our student writers are finishing works to put into the classroom library, they have an opportunity to see themselves side by side with published works, which feels celebratory. Writing, theirs and others, inspires and connects them.

4. Becoming aware of the ways writing can change someone’s mind or change the world

Even the smallest writer has big ideas. My 2nd grade class once wrote letters to the entire neighborhood inviting them to come see our play. People young and old came, and students saw how they could change their communities with the power of their own words. So, when they read, they consider all the ways writers can change people.

5. Knowing and deepening one’s own writing and the voice of an author

The student who writes is building confidence, courage, and a sense of self. She is learning how to evoke emotion, keep someone in suspense, and persuade while developing her own voice, which will serve her in the future whether she’s writing a narrative or an email. When she turns to her reading, she is now more aware of the author’s voice and knows the risks the author takes. She is one herself.

Thanks to Tony, Mary, Mary Beth, Colleen, and Pam for their contributions.

(This is the first post in a two-part series)

The new question-of-the-week is:

In what ways can writing support reading instruction?

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at [email protected] . When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo .

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• Best Ways to Begin the School Year
• Best Ways to End the School Year
• Implementing the Common Core
• Student Motivation & Social-Emotional Learning
• Teaching Social Studies
• Cooperative & Collaborative Learning
• Using Tech in the Classroom
• Parent Engagement in Schools
• Teaching English-Language Learners
• Reading Instruction
• Writing Instruction
• Education Policy Issues
• Differentiating Instruction
• Math Instruction
• Science Instruction
• Advice for New Teachers
• Author Interviews
• Entering the Teaching Profession
• The Inclusive Classroom
• Learning & the Brain
• Administrator Leadership
• Teacher Leadership
• Relationships in Schools
• Professional Development
• Instructional Strategies
• Best of Classroom Q&A
• Professional Collaboration
• Classroom Organization
• Mistakes in Education
• Project-Based Learning

I am also creating a Twitter list including all contributors to this column .

Look for Part Two in a few days.

The opinions expressed in Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.

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Reinventing teaching of reading and writing

Teaching is the profession that teaches all the other professions.” (Anonymous)

National Teachers’ Month began on Monday, Sept. 5, and ends on Oct. 5, which is National Teachers’ Day and World Teachers’ Day. Those directly connected to schools—teachers, students, parents, school administrators—are figuring out how this new school year will unfold, given the various ways of learning, teaching, and coping with new challenges that confront each one of them. COVID-19 is still very much around despite the vaccinations. The so-called “new normal” can still yield to “newer normals,” depending on the situation ahead.

Some days ago, I was with friends who had spent most of their lives teaching students and teaching teachers how to teach effectively. Though they have all retired from the academe, they—with their years of teaching experience and Ph.D.s in tow—continue to teach and mentor teachers when called upon. For more than a decade, they were the indefatigables of the Mentoring the Mentors Program (MMP), a brainchild of Inquirer founding chair Eugenia Apostol through her Education Revolution, and Chinit Rufino of the Marie Eugenie Institute of Assumption College. The two women had merged their respective visions to form MMP and snared in veterans from the teaching field.

I was often invited to MMP’s yearend gatherings as if I were part of the program. I think it was because I was present at its conception and I fired the first salvo in media when MMP was off and running. I wrote about MMP’s feats. Alas, after more than 15 years of mentoring teachers, MMP ceased operations because of the COVID-19 pandemic. But note that on their own, MMP’s tried and tested mentors are still at it when the need arises.

The highlight of our lunch meeting was Leticia Martin’s presentation of her three “Learn to Write” and “Learn to Read 1 and 2” ring-bound guide books (illustrated by Germinia Vecino) for the primary grades. These were initially printed by a foundation for the use of their adopted schools. Martin owns the copyright, but these can be available to interested publishers. Martin disclosed that one interested party wanted to buy the copyright. “No!” I interjected, “your opus might lie there and die there.”

Martin has done some pilot testing of her work, one with school teachers in Southern Luzon where MMP had often been invited by a corporation (with CSR or corporate social responsibility in its DNA) that helps schools in surrounding communities. I had heard stories about how MMP mentors had been treated generously and how teachers responded so well in that part of the woods.

Martin showed the result of her recent mentoring foray in that area—a well-collated output of teaching materials done by the seminar attendees themselves, with colored illustrations, graphics and all, downloaded from the internet. Whoa! Awesome is the word for what the teachers could do! The teachers only had to have their laptops. Internet, paper, and printers were provided for their use at the seminar. Talk of CSR at work, indeed.

“See how the teachers can produce their own teaching materials!” Martin exclaimed. The teachers had Martin’s “Writing and Reading Readiness Program Handbook” for their use and to tap into their creative juices.

The downside to all these, the mentors bewailed, is that public school teachers are so overloaded with work, they have so many papers to submit to their superiors, so many extra tasks awaiting them, not to mention the poor teaching environments that they find themselves in.

It is always, if not often, the schoolchildren that are placed at the center stage of education programs and research. Their learning skills are tested, computed, and judged. Statistics establish their level of proficiency in reading, writing, and comprehension. What about their teachers? How to increase their level of competency and their zeal? How do we reward them for their backbreaking work?

It was during our lunch meeting that I learned from these grizzled teaching veterans that teaching reading and writing to first graders do not necessarily begin with the first letters of the alphabet A, B, and C, but with letters M, S, A, E, I, and O. It is called the Marungko approach that originated in the University of the Philippines.

At our meetings’ end, we all agreed that Martin’s groundbreaking effort should be named, if it has to be named: “Alternative Approaches for Teaching Reading and Writing in the Early Grades.” (If interested in the books and seminar, call 0905-2605391 or 02-799-6681.)

Hail, teachers! I think teaching is the oldest profession.

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Our 15th Annual Summer Reading Contest

Students are invited to tell us what they’re reading in The Times and why, this year in writing OR via a 90-second video. Contest dates: June 7 to Aug. 16.

By The Learning Network

The illustrations for this post were originally created by Adolfo Redaño for “ Summer Books 2023 .”

Our Summer Reading Contest is our longest-running challenge — and our simplest.

All you have to do to participate is tell us what you’re reading, watching or listening to in The New York Times and why.

Don’t have a subscription? No problem! We’ll be providing dozens of free links to teen-friendly articles, essays, videos, podcasts and graphics every week from June through August.

And this summer, both to celebrate the contest’s 15th year and to shake things up a bit, we’ll be trying something new: Students can enter as they always have by submitting a short written response — or they can make a video up to 90 seconds long.

Got questions? We have answers. Everything you need is detailed below.

But if you’re a teacher who would like to have your students practice for this now, before the contest begins, note that the only rule around content is that a piece must have been published in 2024. Beyond that, we don’t care if your students pick something on cats , chatbots , the cost of college or the crisis in the Middle East ; Beyoncé , book bans , basketball or banana bread . We just want to hear what they think. To help, we’ve created a special practice forum . Join us!

Have fun, and, as always, post your questions here or write to [email protected].

This announcement is available as a one-page PDF to hang on your class bulletin board.

Here’s what you need to know:

The challenge, rules and guidelines, resources for teachers, students and parents, frequently asked questions, how to submit.

Choose something in The New York Times that got your attention and tell us why — via a short written or video response.

Here’s how the contest works:

Every Friday for 10 weeks beginning on June 7, we will publish a post asking the same question: “What got your attention in The Times this week?” That’s where you should submit your response any time until the following Friday at 9 a.m. Eastern, when we will close that post and open a new one that asks the same question. On Aug. 9 we’ll post our final question of the summer, open until 9 a.m. on Aug. 16.

You can enter every week, or any week, all summer long, but you may only submit once each week.

You can always find the proper link to the place to submit at the top of this page, updated each week. Once the contest begins, you can also find it on our home page . Please see the How to Submit section below for more details.

You can choose anything you like that was published in the print paper or on nytimes.com in 2024, including articles, Opinion and guest essays , videos , graphics, photos and podcasts . To see the variety of topics winners have responded to over the years, read this column .

Then tell us what Times piece you chose and why it got your attention via a 250-word essay OR a 90-second video. See the full Rules and Guidelines for each type of response below. We have a contest rubric , as well as a guide for students that details four simple ways to make your response stand out.

We’ll choose winners each week, and every Tuesday during the contest, starting June 25, we’ll publish them in a separate post, which you can find here . All written and video entries will be judged together. We will also celebrate the winners on Facebook.

Please read these rules and guidelines carefully before you make your submissions.

Guidelines for written responses

Your written response should tell us what you read, watched or listened to in The Times and why it got your attention. You can find many examples in this column , which spotlights the work of our previous winners.

This guide walks you through some of the key elements of a great reader response, including making a personal connection to the piece, thinking critically about it, referencing specific details or quotes, and writing in your own unique voice.

Here are some guidelines to keep in mind:

Written responses must be no more than 1,500 characters, or about 250 words.

Make sure to i nclude the complete URL or headline of the Times piece you have chosen. For example, “The Joys and Challenges of Caring for Terrance the Octopus” or https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/11/us/tiktok-octopus-pet-oklahoma.html. Yes, this is included in the word count.

Guidelines for video responses

Just as with written responses, video responses should explain what Times piece you chose and why you chose it. The advice in this guide , while originally created with written responses in mind, can apply to video, as well.

We hope you’ll be creative, but that doesn’t mean your video has to be complicated or use special effects; sometimes simple is best. All you need is yourself and the camera on your phone to make a great video response.

Here are the guidelines:

Use a phone to shoot your video vertically (so it looks like the videos you might see on TikTok or Instagram Reels ).

Your video must be 90 seconds or fewer .

Please be sure to say or show the headline of the Times piece you are discussing.

Your video MAY NOT use any images, video clips, music or sound effects, other than those that appear in the Times piece you are discussing or what you create yourself. We cannot publish your video if it uses any copyrighted images or sounds — including TikTok sounds.

Make sure we can see and hear your video clearly. Pay attention to lighting and try to limit background noise as much as possible if it’s not an intentional part of your video.

Please do not include anyone else in your video. For the most part, we recommend filming only yourself, inanimate objects, animals, or your Times piece. You may film crowds of people in public places, but, to protect people’s privacy, try to avoid any close-ups.

A few additional rules

These rules apply to both written and video responses:

You can participate as often as every week, but we allow only ONE submission per person per week.

Any teenager 13 to 19 years old anywhere in the world is invited to join us , as long as you are in middle or high school, or have graduated from high school in 2024 and haven’t started college yet. See below, How to Submit , for more details.

The children and stepchildren of New York Times employees are not eligible to enter this contest. Teenagers who live in the same household as a Times employee are also ineligible.

The work you submit should be fundamentally your own — it should not be plagiarized, created by someone else or generated by artificial intelligence.

Your work must be original for this contest. That means it should not already have been published at the time of submission, whether in your school newspaper, for another contest, or anywhere else.

Keep in mind that the work you send in should be appropriate for a Times audience — that is, something that could be published in a family newspaper (so, please, no curse words).

For this contest, you must work alone , not in pairs or a group.

Entries must be received by the deadline at 9 a.m. Eastern time each Friday to be considered.

We have created many resources to help students practice for and participate in this contest over the years. Although they were written with the goal of helping students create written responses, many of them can work for video, too.

Writing Resources and Lesson Plans: Our full unit on independent reading and writing has lesson plans, writing prompts and mentor texts that can support students in the kind of thinking we’re asking them to do for this contest.

But, to see how easy this contest is, you might start with “ A Simple Exercise for Encouraging Independent Reading .” We invited four teachers across the country to try a short experiment in which they challenged their students to read a Times article on a topic within their comfort zone, and one article on a topic outside it. In this piece, they and their students reflect on the successful results.

We also have a Student Opinion question that challenges any student to do the same.

Student Mentors: “ Writing Rich Reading Responses: Participating in Our Summer Contest ” showcases a series of student-written mentor texts that demonstrate the four key elements that can make a short response — whether in a written or video format — sing.

You can also read all of the winning student entries from 2017 to the present , including reflections from many participants and judges.

And, check out a video version of our “Annotated by the Author” series (embedded above) in which two student winners of our 2020 contest discuss the “writer’s moves” they made.

Webinars: Teachers, to learn more about this contest and how you can teach with it, watch this free on-demand webinar from 2020 . And, to get ideas for supporting your students’ independent reading and writing, watch this on-demand webinar from 2021 .

Our Rubric: This is the rubric our judges will use to judge this contest. We’re looking for written and video responses that include personal connections, critical thinking, references to the source material, and voice and style.

Q. What kinds of responses are you looking for?

A. The subject matter isn’t important; neither is whether you loved or hated it. What we care about is what you have to say about why you picked it.

If you don’t believe us, scroll through the work of previous winners . They have written on weighty topics like abortion , racism , the war in Ukraine , Alzheimer’s disease , climate change and the dangers of vaping , but they have also covered handbags , hummingbirds , the Minions , text messaging , staycations , power naps, junk food , Wordle , Disney shows, running and bagels.

Whatever the subject, you’ll see that the best responses year after year make personal connections to the news and discuss the broader questions and ideas that the topic raises. We have even created a guide that outlines four simple things you can do to make your responses more powerful. We will use this rubric to judge entries.

So whether you were moved by an article , irked by an essay , bowled over by a photo , or inspired by a video , simply find something in The Times that genuinely interests you and tell us why, as honestly and originally as you can.

Q. Since you now offer the option to respond in video, are you looking for something different in that format?

Short answer: No. Longer answer: We’re excited to see what you come up with! We’ve purposely not put a lot of guidelines around what you can create since a) it’s summer, and we want this to be casual and b) we hope you’ll surprise us and show us what’s possible.

Though at the beginning all our contests focused on writing, in recent years we’ve been trying to encourage other forms of composition and expression. We hope you’ll take a risk and submit in video at least once this summer.

Q. Who will be judging my work?

A. The Learning Network staff, a team of New York Times journalists, along with educators from across the country.

Q. What is the “prize”?

A. The prize for winning any of our contests is having your work published on The Learning Network.

Q. When should I check to see if my submission won?

A. Every Tuesday from June 25 until Aug. 27, we will publish the previous week’s winner or winners in a separate article that you can find here . We will also celebrate the winners on Facebook.

Q. How do I participate in this contest if I don’t have a digital subscription to The Times?

A. All Learning Network posts for students, as well as all Times articles linked from them, are accessible without a digital subscription . So if you use any of the articles we have linked to on our site, they will not be blocked.

Each time we pose our question — “What got your attention in The Times this week?” — we will link to dozens of recent, teen-friendly pieces that you can choose from if you don’t have your own subscription.

You can also find copies of The New York Times at most public libraries, and some even allow you to access NYTimes.com with your library card.

And remember: You can use anything published anytime in 2024.

Q. How do I prove to my teacher that I participated?

A. If you are 13 to 19 in the United States and Britain — or 16 to 19 elsewhere in the world — and are submitting your written response by posting a comment, make sure to check the box that asks if you would like to be emailed when your comment is published. If you do so, the system will send you a link to your comment, which you can use to show your teacher, your parents, your friends or anyone else you’d like to impress. (Please note that you will not get an email until the comment has been approved, which may take longer over weekends.)

If you are submitting a video response or an adult is submitting a written response on behalf of an eligible student via the embedded form at the bottom of the post, please take a screenshot if a student needs proof that they are participating in the contest. You will not receive a confirmation email.

Another method? Some teachers ask students to keep a Google Doc of all their submissions, while others instruct students to take screenshots of their responses before they hit “submit.”

Q. How can teachers, librarians and parents use this challenge?

A. Our goals for this contest include some that appear on many educators’ lists. We want to help students become more aware of the world and their place in it; learn how to navigate sophisticated nonfiction; and create for a real audience, beyond the classroom. But more than anything else, we just want students to realize that reading the newspaper can be fun.

Through the years, adults have told us over and over that participating in this contest has made their students both more aware of and more interested in what’s going on in the world. Many see it as a low-stakes way to help teenagers start building a news-reading habit.

And, too, at a time when some educators are alarmed by the ability of chatbots to do students’ work for them, this is a contest that rewards the human touch. As our step-by-step guide to participating shows, what we’re looking for are genuine personal connections to the news, explored with voice, style and personality — something A.I. can’t (yet?) do with anywhere near the verve of the teenagers we hear from.

Another reason? For some teachers, assigning the contest over the summer helps them to quickly get to know their new students when school starts. In our related webinar , Karen Gold, English department chair at The Governor’s Academy in Byfield, Mass., details how she uses the contest in this way.

But maybe the most compelling reason to assign this contest is what students themselves say about it. In 2017, Emma Weber, a student from London, posted that, thanks to the contest, “I feel grounded in my views and understand what’s going on in the world. It’s amazing what a change 1,500 characters a week make.” In 2020 we invited Emma to help judge the entries, and here is what she had to say after Week 10:

I know firsthand that the Summer Reading Contest has the ability to change the way one engages in the news — I went from passively reading to actively thinking and questioning. The more you reflect on what is going on in the world and what interests you about it, the more you will understand your place within it. I urge all those who enjoyed participating this summer to continue reading, reflecting and writing.

Thank you for making this contest a hit year after year, and please spread the word that it’s back for its 15th season.

Any 13- to 19-year-old anywhere in the world is invited to join us, if you are in middle or high school, or if you graduated from high school and haven’t yet started college.

Every Friday starting on June 7, we’ll post a fresh version of this question: “What got your attention in The Times this week?” We will link to each week’s version at the top of this post. Here is an example from last summer. How you respond to this question will depend on your age and whether you are choosing to respond via writing or video, but all responses will be judged together.

For written responses:

Students ages 13 to 19 in the United States and Britain — and ages 16 to 19 elsewhere in the world — can submit by posting a comment on the post itself. See the GIF below to see how to do that.

If you are a teacher, parent or guardian of a student or child who is ages 13 to 15 anywhere in the world besides the United States and Britain, then you should submit an entry on the student’s behalf using the form embedded at the bottom of each week’s post.

For video responses:

All students should use the form at the bottom of each week’s post to submit video responses. Students ages 13 to 19 in the United States and Britain — and ages 16 to 19 elsewhere in the world — can submit their own entries. Students ages 13 to 15 anywhere else in the world must have a parent, teacher or guardian submit on their behalf.