Research suggests three key factors support reading instruction that goes beyond phonics, according to an Education Week article. Today, the “science of reading” has become synonymous with phonics instruction.
1) Provide “serious and intentional” teaching about the structure of language.
Language comprehension—students’ ability to understand spoken words—directly relates to reading ability.
Children soak up language naturally but they still need explicit instruction to apply their knowledge to reading, says Julie Van Dyke, an associate research professor at the Yale-University of Connecticut Haskins Literacy Hub.
Language structures common in written text aren’t that common in spoken conversation, such as subordinate clauses. Students need to be taught how to interpret and use those structures, she says.
Read-alouds is one way to do this. Use books that are above students’ reading level, she says. Expose students to “complex structures as much as possible.”
Schools should use systems that support evidence-based approaches to language comprehension, says Tiffany Hogan, a professor in the department of communication sciences and disorders at the Mass General Brigham Institute of Health Professions in Boston.
Kindergartners struggling to understand both the written code of language and processing spoken language should have opportunities to work on both goals, not just decoding print. “We need to change the ecosystem,” she says.
2) Acknowledge home languages and dialects.
Understand how other languages differ from English, and how English dialects differ from standard English, to guide teaching.
Most assessments of students’ phonemic awareness—identifying individual sounds in words—instruct teachers not to deduct points for cultural variation.
Teachers need to be familiar with the phonology that students use so they can respect home dialects at the same time they instruct students to read and write in standard English.
3) Don’t abandon comprehension strategies.
Reading programs often work on comprehension skills in a linear fashion — spending a week or two practicing to identify text structure or find the main idea before moving on to another skill.
Practices such as these “have failed us miserably,” says Kay Wijekumar, a professor in the College of Education and Human Development at Texas A&M University. They don’t allow students to identify which are the most important pieces of information in a text—information that can help them determine what the test is about at its core.
Wijekumar has developed research-tested tool, the Knowledge Acquisition and Transformation framework. Students using the KAT first identify the overall structure of the text, then use a sentence stem based on that structure to extract relevant details to help form their own understanding of the meaning of the text.
Students using this model performed better on reading comprehension assessments than a control group, studies have shown.
Understanding a text’s main idea—the argument it’s trying to make, or the evidence it’s presenting—is essential to comprehension, Wijekumar says. “Nothing is going to happen if you don’t fix that.”
Education Week
