The Science of Reading for Educators

In education, there has been a heavy emphasis on examining early literacy instructional practices supported by a great deal of funding from the government. Setting a solid literacy foundation for students by third grade is crucial to later success. Currently, struggling older readers read on approximately a 2.5 to 5.0 reading level (Archer, Gleason, & Vachon 2003). While efforts to improve early literacy efforts are worthy, what are we doing to help our students who still continue to struggle with reading beyond the second grade? For anyone who has worked with students in grades 3 all the way up to high school, you know how heartbreaking it is to work with students who are reading significantly below grade level. Frequently, these are students who have repeated grades and are still struggling significantly. Beyond third grade, remediation for struggling readers becomes much more complex as students struggle with multiple areas of literacy: decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and compreh

As teachers when we hear the word phonics, we think about the process of teaching students to read using sound-letter correspondences. As students learn to understand the alphabetic principle, or the understanding that individual letters and combinations of letters represent the individual sounds in our language, there are several stages that students move through as they become proficient readers. Louisa Moats defines these stages as: Logographic, Novice or Early Alphabetic Reading, Mature Alphabetic Stage, and Orthographic Stage. You can learn more about these stages from the work of Ehri and McCormick as they define four distinct stages of word reading. In K-1, phonics instruction focuses heavily on moving students through the first three stages in which they are learning sound-symbol correspondences and patterns and how to put these patterns together in reading and writing. Many students who struggle with reading never move beyond the Alphabetic Stages and need explicit instruct