Today’s podcast is inspired by … a podcast. Specifically, the excellent podcast Sold a Story, hosted by journalist Emily Hanford. The topic of its first season was how reading is taught in American schools, and, for a lot of parents, it opened their eyes to the fact that there isn’t just one way to teach reading and that many schools weren’t doing it right.
In the past couple of years — I think in large part due to Emily’s work — many U.S. states have embraced legislation about how kids are taught to read in school. The phrase that you may have heard is “science of reading,” as in “Let’s make sure schools are using reading curricula based on the science of reading.” But what does that actually mean? And how would you, as a parent, know if your school was doing it?
My conversation with Emily starts with the basics — what does science say about reading, and how do we know what’s the right approach? — and we then talk more practically about how parents can evaluate their own kids’ learning and whether the legislation we’re seeing is doing any good.
Here are three highlights from the conversation:
What does phonics mean, and why is it important for learning to read?
What about memorizing words or learning to read with cues?
What does the research say about the right way to teach reading?
Full transcript
This transcript was automatically generated and may contain small errors.
And the episode of Punky Brewster where she and her friend are babysitting, and the kids swallow something from underneath the sink, and we realize that Punky Brewster’s friend does not know how to read and is unable to read the Poison Control instructions.
They need to learn to read so they can read. They also need to learn to read so they can do math, and do social studies, and do science. Reading comes up all the time. And yet, in the US, only about a third of fourth and eighth graders are testing at grade level in reading. That means two-thirds of kids in those grades are not reading at the grade level we expect. And in the US, 14% of adults cannot read. Why is this and can we fix it?
If you’ve been following some of the recent media and political rhetoric on reading, you might have heard the phrase science of reading, phonics, or phonics versus balance literacy, or phonics versus a whole language approach. These are all referring to different ways that we might think about teaching kids how to read.
Phonics is probably the simplest to understand. When we talk about phonics, we’re talking about understanding the link between letters and sounds. So, when we teach kids to read with a primarily phonics-based approach, we teach them that sounds correspond to letters and that you can put those letters together by putting their sounds together and read. So, you teach the kid that, “S says suh,” and, “A says aa,” “a T says tuh.” And then, you teach them that, “You can say suh-at.” And then, they’re reading “sat”. And pretty soon they’re reading “hat”. And then, they’re reading “mat”. And we go on from there.
That has been the predominant method of teaching people to read for an extremely long time. But in the US, beginning in the 1960s, there was a movement towards what some people call a whole language approach, which was the idea that maybe instead of using this phonics system, which while simple, is quite boring, we could instead teach kids to read by exposing them to more interesting books and by having them absorb the words. It turns out that that whole language approach to learning to read is actually not very effective for most people, that for most people phonics is a much better way to approach reading instruction. And particularly for kids who are struggling to read, phonics is really required to make progress going forward.
My guest today on the podcast is Emily Hanford. Emily is a journalist who has worked on these issues, the issues around children being behind in reading and issues around how we teach kids to read, for many years. And in 2022, she released an incredibly successful podcast called Sold a Story, which has sparked a raft of discussion about these issues, and ultimately pushed legislation and changes in how kids are actually taught in schools.
At the core, her podcast is about not only how we should teach kids to read, but how we ended up with a reading instruction system, in many places in the US, which actually isn’t based on the best data. Her podcast is a long story about economics, politics, it’s about resistance to change.
Today, on this podcast, Emily and I will talk a little bit about her journey on Sold a Story. But we’ll also talk much more about the data on the science of reading and practically about how parents can know if their kids’ schools are teaching reading well. As a parent, how do you know how it’s going? What would make you concerned? And what would be some methods that you could use to step in?
We also discuss a bit how we got to this place and whether the wave of state legislation about the science of reading is actually going to rescue us.
After the break, Emily Hanford.
I did want to take this opportunity to publicly say thank you because my daughter, my 12-year-old at the time, 11-year-old, listened to the podcast and she loved it and it was great. And then she wrote to you to say how much she loved it and you wrote back to her, which was so nice and totally made her weak. So thank you for doing that.
I think everyone who’s been involved in these debates shares the same goal of helping kids learn how to read, but the question has been sort of how does a kid get to that goal? How do you go from being a four or five, six-year-old child who knows how to speak a language but doesn’t know how to read it yet? What does it take to become a reader of a language? What’s happened is that cognitive scientists and many other researchers have been engaged in really interesting research that has sort of taken place outside the world of traditional education school sort of oriented research. It’s sort of been the cognitive scientists kind of on the other side of the quad, and they have discovered all these really fascinating things about reading.
The most important thing to understand is that you cannot be a good reader without having a good understanding. It doesn’t have to be a conscious, you can explain all the rules of the language understanding, but you have a really good ability of understanding the relationship between letters and sounds. And it turns out that a lot of other research has shown that the most effective way to make sure people have that knowledge, which is critical to ultimately becoming a good reader, it’s not the end goal, it’s not all you need, but it is a critical foundation, that the most efficient, most effective way to do that is to teach that to kids right out of the box, right away. They can learn it, they need to learn it. It’s teachable. And if you teach kids that at the very beginning of school, you increase their chances of becoming good readers.
We have fought about phonics for so long that it’s gotten caught up in a lot of stuff about reading and it’s turned out that there are many schools in the country that maybe teach a little bit of phonics, but they’ve also been teaching all these other sort of strategies and ways to get the words that don’t necessarily include looking at the word carefully, sounding it out, connecting the pronunciation of the word with the spelling and the meaning. And that’s what your brain has got to do for you to learn how to read those words quickly and efficiently. We’ve had a lot of approaches to reading that haven’t included a really good foundational focus on that, nor a good understanding among teachers about why that’s so important.
And for me, some of the most interesting data on this comes from what sort of putting people in an FMRI and seeing what their brain is doing when they’re looking at particularly longer words and recognizing that in fact, whether I perceive it or not, I am in fact chunking that word and sounding it out of course instantaneously, not in a long form act like my kids learned, but that skill remains as a central way that we are reading even when we don’t perceive it. And I think that connection for me has been very important in thinking about why that set of skills is so crucial because it remains so crucial. It’s not something you use and then forget and then never use again. It’s the whole thing.
I think this is one of the bigger tensions in the sort of debates about reading. I mentioned earlier that some of this really eye-opening research was taking place in psychology departments among cognitive scientists that weren’t in the education school. I think a lot of the research that has been taking place in schools of education has a lot of value, but much of it has been observational research, other kinds of research too. But that’s a very strong tenet within education research, is to sort of observe what learners, observe what children, observe what kids in classrooms are doing, and to do descriptional kinds of studies that are based on what you can observe.
What’s so fascinating when you get inside people’s brains is what you can observe is not what’s actually going on behind the eyes. And that’s what makes cognitive science so fascinating. Some of this stuff is kind of counterintuitive in a way. It doesn’t seem like that’s what’s happening, but that’s what is. And that’s why I think it’s really important for teachers to have some understanding. They don’t all have to become cognitive scientists. But I think it’s really profound for many teachers to gain a little bit of knowledge about what some of the cognitive sciences shown us about learning to read and learning in general over the past 50 years or so because it changes their notion. It helps you understand something about how people are actually learning, which has implications for teaching.
So that’s one thing, and that’s actually one reason why a lot of kids can look like they’re pretty good readers for the first couple years, kindergarten, first grade, maybe even second grade. They’re kind of chugging along and things sort of fall apart by third grade because suddenly the early reading books only have so many words in them. Some kids are really good memorizers and they can sort of memorize all those words, but when they start getting into more words they’ve never seen before, longer multi-syllabic words, they don’t know how to attack those words. They don’t know what to do and they’re really lost. So one thing is word memorization.
The other thing that you talked about though is definitely a phase in learning how to read, which is that sort of learning by cues. So you know the McDonald sign, you know Coca-Cola. Kids are sort of seeing that as a picture and the logo or whatever the picture is that goes with the word is key to them understanding. And there’s actually fascinating research that shows that kids can know a McDonald sign, but if you take away the big M and just give them the word, they can’t read that word, which means they weren’t reading the word, they were reading the combination of the word and the symbol. So young parents would be like, “Oh my gosh, my kid is reading.” Well, they’re not really. They’re understanding how to understand these various symbols in their environment. And they have yet to get to the alphabetic stage, which is really understanding that those letters themselves represent sounds and meaning in words.
But it’s also really important to recognize that the science of reading, the cognitive science, the getting inside the brain, understanding what goes on, doesn’t give you… It is not sort of directly translatable into a way to teach, right? The scientific research has implications. Understanding something about how people learn can then inform how you teach. What you teach, when you teach, at the order you teach it in all very profound, very important things. But translating that stuff into practice is one of the things that’s going on right now. But there is a large body of research going back decades of looking at particular approaches in classrooms going back. Long before we had all this cognitive science research, long before we could peek inside people’s brains to see what was going on, people were testing out various approaches to things like teaching little kids how to read.
And we have a pretty robust, there was a really important book written about this in 1967 looking at a whole bunch of research that had been done through the first part of the 20th century. That research has always found consistently that sort of starting with the letters and sounds and focusing on phonics and early reading instruction is a more efficient, more effective approach for more kids. You tend to give more kids a better chance at being good readers. And now all this brain science and cognitive science has in some ways helped us understand why. It’s helped us understand why that worked.
And that research is ongoing. So not only was there a huge amount of research done in the middle, early part of the century, partly because people have been fighting about phonics for so long, people started studying it a long time ago. “Let’s try to figure out what really works best.” But there’s been continuing research through the ’80s and ’90s, huge amounts of money of our taxpayer dollars have gone to these long-term studies that have looked at different approaches to instruction over a long period of time. And the consistent finding is that phonics instruction is critical. It’s not the only thing you need. It takes a lot more to be a good reader, but you can’t be a good reader without understanding the sounds and letters and words. And that if you want kids to know something, the best thing to do is to teach it to them.
So there is another line of research just about instruction itself in all areas, sort of whether you want instruction to be sort of direct and explicit. Especially at the early stages of learning, anything direct and explicit instruction of helping kids or the learner, whoever it is, understand the concept that you’re trying to teach them, how you break that down and teach it to them. And then later when they have a lot of foundational skills, we all know this from our own development, you can do so much more of this exploration and the discovery of new knowledge on your own, but having the skills is necessary.
So I think all of this debate about reading instruction is actually more a debate about direct and explicit instruction versus more discovery-oriented learning. All of this is always some shades of gray. There’s obviously room for both, but it’s really important to recognize that with something like reading in particular at the very beginning, if you want to make sure that kids know it, then teach it to them. Don’t expect them to discover it on their own. Don’t make that a sort of core or even sort of tangential kind of element of the instruction. And I would say it’s sort of a core tangential element of the reading instruction has been this idea that we’re going to kind of let kids discover it for themselves.
But I think there is this sense of for kids who are just naturally… I mean, people vary. There’s heterogeneity. And for kids who are naturally better at reading, they’re going to show up pretty much anything you do, they’re going to learn to read and then they’re going to enjoy it and you’re going to feel like, “Oh, wouldn’t it be great if everyone was little Lucy there who just sits in the corner and reads her book and is doing so great? Let’s try to generate an environment where everyone is experiencing it like Lucy is.” And we miss that maybe that’s the unusual thing and that if we don’t scaffold more explicit teaching for everybody, we’re not going to get them to sitting in their corner and reading Harry Potter.
A couple of key sort of findings here, that there are a number of people who struggle to learn how to read. You might be a very smart person. It doesn’t have to do with intelligence, right? There are very smart people who struggle to learn how to read and they need to be taught how to do it. They may stumble along and come to reading eventually, sort of, kind of, but there’s a lot of stuff they miss out on, there’s a lot of stuff around spelling in particular, right? So there are a lot of kids I think, who are sort of limping along because they’re not getting the instruction they need.
And then there’s a subset that is not a small number who are not limping along at all. They’re really struggling. They really can’t figure this thing out. And they’re starting to really kind of get lost in the shuffle early on in school. And they’re sort of getting disengaged or having behavior problems because this reading thing isn’t making sense and no one’s explain it to them.
I mean, that’s how I started on this reporting years ago, long before Sold a Story. Sold a Story was sort of the result of reporting that I had been doing for years. I really wanted and Sold a Story to try to answer some questions about how it happened. Why is it, how is it that a lot of teachers don’t know about a lot of this research don’t know how to teach kids to read? And I know that because they’ve told me.
I was a first grade teacher for 15 years. I guess I thought I was teaching kids to read. But you know what is so devastating? This is not uncommon that a teacher realizes that she, and very often in elementary school education in particular, it’s women, they don’t know how to teach kid to read when they have their own child who really struggles and they realize, “I don’t know how to teach her. I don’t know how to teach my own child how to read.”
If you do get a chance to go into your child’s class, you probably will see some phonics instruction. And for a long time I think people’s thought, “Well, I’m seeing them. They’re introducing letters, they’re sounding out P-H or whatever, so they’re doing phonics.” And so people checked the box like, “Oh, phonics.” But I think it’s really important to recognize that you want to make sure that kids are not also being taught other strategies to learn to read. So they’re not being handed books that have all kinds of words in them that they haven’t yet been taught how to read in their lessons.
So you want to see some matching up between kids have been taught. You want to see some sort of sequence, like kids are being taught sort of the most frequent letter, patterns first, and it’s building up to complexity and they’re being given books that have words with the letter combinations that they have been taught so they don’t have to guess or memorize the words, they can actually sound out most of the words in the book. So you want to see some connection between the word reading instruction and the words they’re actually reading in the book. So-
But it is really weedy and difficult to understand this. So it’s very important I think for parents to open a dialogue with schools. Many schools are talking about this issue these days, and so I think you can be actually more successful in having a productive conversation with schools today than maybe you would’ve four or five years ago. I think things are really changing.
I would also really encourage parents to talk to their friends and other parents and other parents in the community of kids who are struggling with reading because those parents have often educated themselves quite deeply about what the school is doing, what they have been doing, what they’re trying to change, the kinds of struggles that kids are having, where you can go for help outside of the school system. Other parents are really going to be some of your key assets here in you figuring out what you can do for your child because you really do also… And I don’t mean to put a sense of panic into anyone here, but it’s important to deal with this quickly because the clock is ticking and you really want a kid to not fall behind early in reading. That is a really difficult thing to recover from. You really want to sort of nip this problem in the bud right at the beginning and get your child the help he or she needs right away.
Use your oral language ability, like you know the meanings of lots of words. Use what you know about spoken language to sort of use some clues from the text to figure out these words. This will get kids into books early, will get them going and they will be Lucy off in the corner reading.And that does happen for some kids.
So I think it was sort of hard even in my reporting about this topic, because I think once people understand some of the scientific research, once they understand some stuff about what phonics is, that you have to sound out words in order to know them, it seems kind of obvious to people. You’re like, “Oh wait, well, why would anyone think that there was another way to do it?” Well, I think there’s a good reason why people found that there was another good way to do it, which is the English language is hard. It actually can take a couple of years to take people through the way the English language works to teach them a good phonics program. And we want to get kids reading. We want to get them the enjoyment. We want to get them to the good stuff.
And it works for some kids. If you can figure out a way to get them to the end goal, they do all the work, a lot of the work in between. They get from the beginning to the end, and they don’t need a huge amount of direct instruction from anyone to get there. But half of kids or more really do need significantly more direct instruction in getting there than they’ve been getting in many, many classrooms, not just in the United States, but in other parts of the world. This is really a reckoning that’s going on in many English-speaking countries and in non-English-speaking countries too.
But I think this is particularly significant in the English-speaking world because even for a typically developing reader who’s developing pretty rapidly, they probably need a few years in school and a lot of good exposure and some guidance and instruction on written language to get how English works and a language like Spanish where there’s a much more consistent relationship.
And oh, by the way, knowing a lot of words means that you’re going to be able to decode them more easily. You’re going to be sounding them out, and then you say the word and “Oh, you know that word.” Whereas another kid who doesn’t speak English as a first language in an American school for example, or doesn’t have as much vocabulary is not going to have as much of an assistance in learning how to read. So I think this whole debate is just very intertwined with class and race in this country because kids who come into school with this sort of oral language advantage often have an advantage when it comes to learning how to read, especially if they’re not being directly taught, but they don’t always.
And I would say one of the ways that I saw this whole problem most profoundly, myself being an upper middle class white woman who learned how to read easily and had children who learned how to read easily, it really was profound to me when I started meeting a lot of people like me who did sort of “everything right,” I’m doing that in air quotes, before their kids got to school, lots of reading to them, lots of talking to them, and then their kids still couldn’t read. Often what you have in that case is a kid with a true reading disability, right? This is a child who really, really needs a lot of extra help learning how to read.
But if you think of that one little pure example, now think of all the kids out there who are somewhere on that spectrum. That word reading ability is somewhere from really easy to really, really hard, and most kids are in between. And that oral language ability is somewhere from really high to really low, and most people are somewhere in between. That combination of things are what you really are going to be sort of the foundation that takes you to sort of being a good reader or not.
The decoding part, the teaching kids how to read the words, that is very teachable. It can be done by skilled and knowledgeable teachers in a few years in school. The rest of it, all of that knowledge and language comprehension, you need to be a good reader, that is harder for schools to control because so much of that happens outside of school. And it’s also what all of education is beyond learning how to read, right? So I think one of the things that’s happening now in schools is as they’re starting to understand that there’s something they have to do better differently with the early reading instruction, once you get kids to be good little word readers, then it opens up the whole box and a whole set of very, very important questions about what else are kids learning in school. Are we teaching them what they need to know? Are they getting a good education in American public schools?
At the same time, there’s some delicate balance when it comes to good policies turning into good change or instigating good change where you have some balance of sort of bottom up and top down, right? Bottom up needs the top. Top down can become too much, right? Policies have all kinds of unintended consequences. The policy itself is never the solution. It’s sort of like how the policy is implemented, how the policy gets changed to meet what maybe wasn’t right about the policy in the first place or additional things that need to be added.
So it’s kind of a mess out there right now, and I think this is very much a work in progress. I think there are many people who are very glad to see state legislators finally responding. And I think many of those same people are sometimes taking a little pause when they’re seeing what the legislatures are actually doing or how that’s actually getting translated. There’s a lot of now lists or people saying, “You can’t use this curriculum and you have to use that curriculum.” I think there’s a couple of really important questions there. One, curriculum is clearly an important part of this, but definitely not the only part, and in fact may not even be the most important part. I actually think teacher knowledge and training and educator knowledge in general is really important. And how are these different curriculum getting on these lists? What’s the evidence that this is good, that this is better, that this is going to work?
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I so appreciated this conversation but in terms of helping parents know what to do next, I don’t think getting advice and support from other families goes far enough, and “talk to your child’s teacher” isn’t an option for families who don’t know enough about learning to read to ask the appropriate questions. We need to change the norms around parent/teacher partnerships to make them more transparent and collaborative: schools need families to help create strong readers, and families don’t have the support to go it alone.
I am on a mission to create productive family partnerships around reading development at scale, and at low cost – and it’s starting to work at innovative schools. There is no reason not to raise the bar!