The Science of Reading for Educators

  Learning to read in the primary grades is a complex process that is essential for students to master. We all know that the outcomes for students who never learn to read proficiently are dire as these students are more likely to drop out of school (Alliance for Excellent Education 2002), have higher rates of delinquency (Center on Crime, Communities, and Culture 1997), and experience higher incidents of suicide (Daniel et all 2006).   Evidence on how the brain learns to read has long supported the fact that in order to learn to read proficiently, students must be taught phonics explicitly in order to master the written code.  As students begin to learn to read there are multiple components at work that must work in tandem to result in proficient reading. The National Reading Panel (2000) identified five key skill areas that must be present in literacy instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Kindergarten and first grade are key to building

Phonological Awareness and Phonemic Awareness What are they, and why are they important? What is it? All humans inherently have the ability to see, speak, hear, feel, and taste. We are born with the body parts needed for each of these in conjunction with specific areas of our brain dedicated to processing the information from each of these senses. However, reading and writing are artificial tasks created by humans that create the need for multiple parts of the brain to work together.                 Reading is dependent upon there being a written form of language. There are three broad categories of written language: logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic, and each of these can then be further broken down into subcategories (Schwanenflugel & Knapp 2017). In logographic writing systems, each character or symbol represents one word, and this is one of the oldest writing systems. Chinese is an example of a logographic language. Attuning to the differences in the sounds of