The Science of Reading for Educators

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