“Millions of Americans are not illiterate; they are simply not literate. In other words, they can read and write just enough to get by — barely.”
— Les Trautmann, newspaper editor
Phonemic awareness is foundational to reading.
Researchers have known this for years. To them it’s as obvious as saying oxygen is essential for life.
Which is why it was disconcerting last fall when renowned textbook author Nancy Calkins acknowledged that her core reading curriculum — one of the most widely used in the United States — is “unbalanced” and needs more emphasis on phonemic awareness.
Sigh.
Don’t misunderstand. It’s great that Calkins is adjusting the scale a bit. But it’s frustrating the balance has become so out of whack in the first place.
Some background: In 2000 a Congressionally ordained group called the National Reading Panel (NRP) issued a report outlining best practices for teaching kids to read. Phonemic awareness topped the list.
But in 2016 a national think tank discovered that only 39 percent of university teacher preparation programs were incorporating the NRP recommendations into their training curriculum.
And today, more than two decades after the NRP report, balanced reading teaching remains largely absent from American classrooms.
The results aren’t pretty. American students’ reading scores have not improved for more than a decade; in fact they’ve actually declined in recent testing.
Why are the revelations of reading research so slow to reach our schools? A combination of ignorance and obstinacy.
“There’s a little anti-science in teacher world,” says Kendra Wagner, a Seattle reading specialist and founder of Think/Read/Write. “They say, ‘I don’t have a zest for (phonics). It’s boring, so I’m not going to teach it.'”
Wagner says many schools teach “by the way” phonics.
“It’s when a teacher’s reading to a class and comes to a word like thin and says, the letters t and h together say /th/ by the way,” Wagner says. “Then they can say, ‘see, we teach phonics.'”
Schools incorporate phonemic awareness — the ability to identify and manipulate individual sounds within words — to varying degrees, but few teach it explicitly and systematically as experts advise.
“Teaching reading fundamentals is not all that glamorous, and it is a lot of work,” says one Seattle-based learning evaluator. “Despite all of the research available to the teacher training colleges, they have been able to get away with tuning out the researchers who have a different opinion and studies to back up their claims.”
Independent, research-based reading programs that incorporate the National Reading Panel’s criteria do exist.
Attempts to integrate these programs into schools have mostly failed, however, partly due to difficulty scaling lessons and partly because of educator resistance.
Teachers don’t like to be handcuffed by a program’s scripted instructions, Wagner says. “They want to feel like they’re creative.”
Besides, teachers need thorough training in one or more of these reading programs — often on their own dime — then the time to adapt the content to their classrooms.
Many feel it’s not worth the effort.
“It still seems to be the case,” says the Seattle learning evaluator, “that there is a small group of educators and parents who understand how to assist students with reading challenges but who are not making in-roads into the school systems.”
Private tutoring, or…?
This creates a dilemma for parents of struggling readers.
If their child’s teacher has had training in a balanced, research-based reading program, all might be well.
But it’s fair to say most teachers haven’t.
So how can parents tell if their kid will get quality reading instruction?
“Look at the credentials of the reading teacher,” Wagner says. “Some are great. Some schools don’t have a reading teacher.”
Ideally, reading instructors will have had training in a structured, multisensory, literacy approach such as Lindamood-Bell, Wired For Reading, Wilson Reading System, Slingerland, or any Orton Gillingham-based program.
Even if teachers don’t have special training, however, they could still have an approach that includes the five “pillars” of reading teaching indentified in the NRP report: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.
Wagner advises parents to ask lots of questions and listen carefully to the answers. Do they even mention phonemic awareness? How do they practice reading at word level (a synonym for decoding)?
“It’s amazing how many times they haven’t heard that little phrase,” Wagner says.
If they talk only about leveled books (e.g., A-Z), “run from that reading teacher,” she advises.
But to where?
Options are limited: find a different school, learn how to teach reading, or hire a reading tutor.
The Seattle learning evaluator has seen a “consistent, positive trend” in the prognosis of children who work with a reading specialist trained in multisensory, structured literacy programs.
Though most of these programs were designed for dyslexic learners, the NRP report validated their underlying approaches, with strong emphasis on phonemic awareness, as best practice for all students.
Teach your children well…
Ultimately, though, parents need to be their kids’ primary reading teacher.
Want to get your child off on the right foot? Invest in multisensory materials to make learning how to read and spell fun: finger paint, letter magnets, a white board, etc.
Play games with your kids, such as I Spy and Boggle, that encourage attention to sounds and letters.
Investigate different online resources. Sites such as Reading Rockets, All About Reading and Nessy have a variety of games, books, and resources for dyslexic readers and spellers — and their parents.
Read to your child. Have your child read to you.
Don’t assume the classroom teacher will have the knowledge and expertise to teach the fundamentals of reading. There’s a lot to it. And quite a ways to go.
“Education has an uphill battle because we have to change it at the level of teacher colleges,” Wagner says. “It will take a long time to catch up.”
Most children will learn to read even if they are not taught a structured curriculum based on the five pillars. But kids will learn to read better if they are taught this way.
And for dyslexics and other struggling readers, a balanced approach built on a foundation of phonemic awareness is a necessity.
“It would be exciting, indeed,” the Seattle learning evaluator says, “if the larger education community would come to understand, as we have known…teaching reading is rocket science. We need highly skilled teachers dedicated to the science of teaching reading.”
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