Phonics is about recognizing letters and letter blends and the sounds they make. Think of a student sounding out letters individually or practicing sounds like “ch” or “st.” Phonemic Awareness The Reading League offers a free tool to evaluate your school’s reading curriculum (opens in a new window).

All of us who are literate—and it is worth remembering for a moment that many even in the developed world are not—have, of course, learned to become so. Reading, as one of its first scientific investigators pointed out, is not natural. No nonhuman creature has ever done it, as far as we know. And yet, “this habit,” as Edmund Burke Huey marveled in 1908, “has become the most striking and important artificial activity to which the human race has ever been moulded.” Huey was surely right in that arresting realization. And the questions that forced themselves upon his mind in consequence of it were surely the appropriate ones too. Since reading is unnatural, he asked, “What are the unusual conditions and functionings that are enforced upon the organism in reading? Just what, indeed, do we do, with eye and mind and brain and nerves, when we read?” Apparently simple, these questions are in fact deep and complex; and they are extremely difficult to answer. They require not only sophisticated psychological and physiological concepts but stances on such matters as the mind-body relationship and the nature of knowledge itself. All of science and philosophy, we might almost say, are implicit in them. That is surely why, Huey observed, in ancient times reading was accounted “one of the most mysterious of the arts,” and why its operation was still accounted “almost as good as a miracle” even in his own day. And yet, starting in about 1870, generations of scientists did take on Huey’s questions. The Science of Reading is about the rise and fall—and subsequent rise again—of the enterprise these scientists created to answer them. The science on how our brains learn to read is well-established (Seidenberg, 2017; D’Mello & Gabrieli, 2018), but don’t confuse basic research on how and why reading develops with research on successful instructional practices (Shanahan, 2020). Educators and policymakers must look for the evidence-base for specific instructional programs and practices to see what works and if the findings can be applied to their own schools, classrooms, and students.The science of reading is the converging evidence of what matters and what works in literacy instruction. The renowned Florida Center for Reading Research has printable research-to-practice student center activities for pre-kindergarten to fifth grade. Many could be used at home, too.

Mangen A, et al (2013). Reading linear texts on paper versus computer screen: Effects on reading comprehension. DOI: I like this book because, again, if you are in a balanced literacy classroom, this shows you how to start to understand the science of reading and make some changes. It's not judgmental, but is a good way to start integrating the science into more of what you're doing.

Conclusion

Research, over time, from multiple fields of study using methods that confirm and disconfirm theories on how children best learn to read. Here's this one, "Proust and the Squid" by Maryanne Wolf. She is a professor of child development, and she's excellent. You can find her doing a lot of interviews all over the place. I found this book hard to get through, but maybe eventually I'll be able to do it. While phonics and phonemic awareness are about being able to say or spell a word, vocabulary is about knowing what a word means. It’s one part of language comprehension. The bigger our vocabularies, the easier and more fluent our reading becomes. Comprehension

Orthographic mapping is supported by phonics, as it's designed to build and strengthen relationships between sounds and letters and sequences of letters. This can explain why kids who haven't been taught phonics correctly, or who have poor decoding skills, struggle to learn words they're only exposed to a few times. What can educators do with this research? As with any science, it is never complete. We can always know more. More study happens all the time and researchers, teachers, and families can work together to bring the best research into classrooms. Suggested Citation I love that this book goes into small group instruction for a variety of skills and how each will look different. Areas covered include phonological awareness, word recognition, fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary. While I have only read the version for Grades K-3, there is also a 4-5 version available for upper elementary teachers.Lots of good materials have been produced to get this research into practice, much of it paid for by our tax dollars.