- How does reading work? What are the important component skills and knowledge, and how do they work together?
- How is reading related to spoken language? How does it relate to spelling and writing?
- How do children learn to read? How does their behavior change over time?
- What is the impact of experience on children’s progress?
- This includes experience in the classroom: instruction and other learning activities; and experience in the home and community: before children start school, and after.
- Which experiences are most important at different points in development?
- What factors promote or interfere with children’s progress?
- Why do some children struggle with reading? How can they be helped?
- What are the brain circuits and operations that support reading? How can understanding the brain bases of reading be used to improve children’s learning?
It addresses not using the three-cueing system. In fact, these strategies are discredited.
Attention should be focused on decoding words rather than the use of unreliable strategies such as looking at the illustrations, rereading the sentence, saying the first sound or guessing what might ‘fit’. Although these strategies might result in intelligent guesses, none of them is sufficiently reliable and they can hinder the acquisition and application of phonic knowledge and skills, prolonging the word recognition process and lessening children’s overall understanding. Children who routinely adopt alternative cues for reading unknown words, instead of learning to decode them, later find themselves stranded when texts become more demanding and meanings less predictable. The best route for children to become fluent and independent readers lies in securing phonics as the prime approach to decoding unfamiliar words.
On this website, resources contain information on phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension, and fluency.
Additional Resources for Science of Reading
-Embedded Vocabulary Instruction
--Webinars
--Fluency task:Reading Letters with Punctuation
-Summer, 2019: “At a Loss for Words: How a flawed
idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers” American Public Media https://www.apmreports.org/story/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading
-January 27, 2020: “Experts say widely used reading curriculum is
failing kids”. American Public Media
