How do children learn to read? Why do so many students struggle to read? Emily Hanford of American Public Media has a report that answers these tough questions. If children attend school every day, why are they unable to read age-appropriate text? Why is it difficult to learn to read? What methods are teachers using to teach children to learn to read?
What We’ve Learned from Emily Hanford’s Hard Words
On September 10, 2018, Emily Hanford of American Public Media released a report titled Hard Words: Why Aren’t Kids Being Taught To Read? It explores low literacy in American schools. She followed young children, teachers and principals in Pennsylvania to college students, professors and doctors of early education in Mississippi. What she discovered was a solution to the reading crisis, a problem unfortunately rooted in our national education system.
This post covers the key points in Hanford’s audio-documentary for APM Reports. You can listen to her entire report here.
The Status Quo: Only Four out of Ten Kids Learn To Read at a Proficient Level
Hanford’s report begins by following Jack Silva, the chief academic officer for all public schools in the city of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Silva discovered that only 56 percent of his third graders were able to read at a proficient level. He himself was astounded, but the administrators of the school district simply came to accept it as a status quo. They believed that some unlucky children could not and would not learn to read due to learning disorders. Many held absentee parents and difficult home life responsible for poor reading scores. Others even blamed poverty, but it couldn’t be poverty. Even schools in the wealthier neighborhoods had a large percentage of struggling readers.
Silva didn’t know why the scores were so low. To find the answer, he spent time researching the way children learn to read. He discovered the science behind reading that explained that children can properly learn to read if taught in the right way.
Reading science is not new, Hanford reports. It has been around for decades and there are thousands of reports that explain exactly how children learn to read. Louisa Moats, an education consultant, has been studying reading science since the 1970s and says that it is the “most studied aspect of human learning.”
What does the science and research say? One in six children have learning disabilities that will always make it difficult to learn to read. However, the other five out of six children can be taught. So why are test scores so low for elementary schools? These schools cannot possibly be packed with a large population of students with learning disabilities. No, what Silva found was that the teachers did not use proven methods of instruction—those supported by reading science—to teach children how to learn to read.
Currently, in the United States:
- More than 6 in 10 fourth graders are not proficient readers
- 30 million adults struggle to read basic text
- 1 in 3 struggling readers are from college educated families
Additionally, kids who do not learn to read are more likely to:
- Drop out of high school
- End up in the public justice system
- Live in poverty
Science has repeatedly shown that children who cannot learn to read proficiently at the end of the third grade are at high risk of staying poor readers for the rest of their lives.
The Current Crisis: How Children Learn to Read from Teachers
Silva now knew the right method to help children learn to read. From here, he wanted to know more about how the teachers in his district were teaching. He sent Kim Harper, the supervisor of literacy, to visit elementary schools and investigate the methods teachers used to teach children to learn to read.
When speaking with Hanford, Harper recalled attending a professional development day where teachers congregated to discuss current issues and problems in their classrooms. She listened as teachers conversed over how children should handle words they did not know when reading a story. They agreed on one tactic; they encouraged the students to guess using context clues. What word would allow the sentence to make sense? What word is it most likely to be using the pictures provided in the book?
These teachers felt that the most important part of reading was understanding the story as a whole, not necessarily the individual words that made up sentences in the story. So, if a child came to the word “horse” and read it as “house,” it was considered incorrect. However, if the child read it as “pony” instead, the teachers would let it pass because those two words were synonymous.
Harper was bewildered, mostly because the same strategy would not be applicable to more mature readers where books did not contain pictures for clues. Harper later learned that this approach was called whole language. Teachers of whole language believe that if they provide enough good books for children, with enough practice and exposure, they learn to read on their own.
But the problem was that children were not learning how to read on their own. Annual standardized tests had repeatedly shown that a little over half of the students were able to read appropriately leveled print using this method.
Research Shows Us the Way Children Learn to Read
How does the brain learn to read? Hanford summarizes that decades of research, testing and investigations have proven that learning how to read is not a natural process. Everyone is wired to talk; no one is wired to read. The written language is only a few hundred years old. In the grand scheme of time, written language is but a baby.
Reading begins with sound. The alphabet is a series of symbols used to visually represent units of sounds. A child learns to read when he or she knows how to connect symbols on the page to the sounds in speech. While this may seem simple to fluent readers, this is a very difficult concept for most children.
Take an example from the AMP Report. Consider the words thistle, thinker, theory and therefore. Each of these words start with the letter “t,” but which word doesn’t start with the same sound? That is the difference between a letter and a phoneme, between speech and text.
Another example is the name Eunice. The first letter is an “e,” but the first sound is /u/. Likewise, the name Charlotte is spelled with the letter “c,” but the first sound is /sh/.
While there are 26 letters in the alphabet, there are 44 phonemes. Phonemes are the smallest units of sound in a word and the ability to recognize phonemes in words is called phonemic awareness. The more a child can recognize phonemes in words, the better they can read and spell—even words they do not know. As they continue to manipulate different phonemes in various combinations, they learn to create words. This overall method is called phonics and the one method that reading science says works.
In 2015, after a year of research, Silva figured out that the whole language approach wasn’t working for his school district. Instead, he decided to implement phonics and start by training principals in his schools.
Hanford says the teachers were overwhelmed with the material. They have never had to learn about phonics or any part of reading science when they were being trained to become teachers in college. They didn’t know what to do with the information or how to teach their students using the material. But over time, once they learned about phonemes, phonemic awareness and the principles of phonics, they became excited. They were eager to use phonics and have their students learn to read the correct way.
After they completed training, teachers took their new curriculum into their classrooms. At the end of the year, students were tested. Just the year before them, 65 percent of kindergarteners were unable to read appropriately leveled text. They were passed onto the first grade at risk of reading failure. Now, across the district, 84 percent of kindergartners met or exceeded their level. Phonics saved the schools in Bethlehem and low-performing students were able to learn to read.
It Takes More Than Phonics to Learn to Read
If the studies show that phonics works, why aren’t more people using them? Hanford recounts the Reading Wars of the 90s. It was the whole language supporters versus the reading science proponents. These two groups waged war against each other on the best way to teach children to learn to read.
The “war” grew so intense that Congress had to intervene. In 1997, Congress formed the National Reading Panel. It was responsible for finding the most effective method to teach children reading skills. The NRP today provides the guidelines and benchmarks on what children should be able to read and comprehend at their age.
To stop the Reading Wars, the NRP completed research themselves. In 2000, they released a report supporting phonics as the most effective method to reading instruction. (Unfortunately, even though reading science was irrefutable, many whole language proponents did not take the time to read the report.)
In their report, they detailed the “simple view of reading.” The simple view of reading states that reading comprehension is a combination of a child’s ability to decode letters and understand language.
Reading Comprehension = Decoding Skills x Language Comprehension
In other words, a child can pronounce words and manipulate phonemes, but may not understand what he or she reads. So, in order to build reading comprehension skills, they not only need to be able to crack the code, they also need a good vocabulary.
Decoding letters into sounds and recognizing those letters and sounds in text requires explicit training through phonics and phonemic awareness. Very few children are able to understand the relationship between phonemes and letters (graphemes), enabling them to learn how to read on their own. Training on language comprehension, on the other hand, comes through speech and conversations. This is when children pick up new words, learn what they mean and how they are used in sentences.
Hanford notes in her report that whole language supporters had one thing right: reading aloud and having plenty of books for children to practice reading is very important. But, they must start with fundamental phonics training.
Is it boring? Many whole language teachers think so. They believe that phonics drills take the fun out of reading and discourage children from reading and learning altogether. However, the teachers in Bethlehem found the opposite to be true. Learning phonics was not limited to drills and dry instruction. Learning phonemes and phonics was fun, much like a puzzle to be solved. Once their students learned about phonemes and phonics, they were even more excited to learn how to read. They were excited to read a new book, learn new words, how to spell and how to write. Better yet, because the students gained a sense of confidence, they were more engaged in class and excited for the next challenge.
Other schools districts wanted to know just how Silva drastically improved reading scores for early learners. Silva and Harper explained that phonics training was responsible for teaching their students learn how to read. Unfortunately, the educators wanted a different answer. They didn’t believe that phonics would work for their schools. Too many people would fight against it. It would cost too much to implement phonics training. Parents would complain and so would the teachers.
Phonics supporters have always faced backlash for their reading science. This is largely in part because the teachers in school had negative experiences with phonics when they were learning how to read. Additionally, they were not taught the importance of phonics while studying to become teachers themselves.
Why weren’t teacher candidates learning how to teach children how to read? Emily Hanford next headed to the Barksdale Reading Institute to meet education consultant Louisa Moats and Kelly Butler.
Most Teacher Programs Do Not Teach How Children Learn To Read
Before becoming preschool or kindergarten teachers, they are students and candidates earning teaching credentials. These candidates learn about early childhood education, child behavior and how to lead a classroom. The whole process might take anywhere from one to two years depending on the program itself. Once these students graduate, they are ready to teach preschool and kindergarten.
What do they teach in preschool? Teachers often play with students, using group activities to build social skills, language skills and vocabulary. Students learn about colors, numbers, shapes and sounds. When our children graduate to kindergarten, they learn how to write and read basic words, language arts, math and even science. By the end of kindergarten, children should be able to read and write.
But how do you teach a child to read in one year? What methods are teachers using to accomplish this? What is the success rate using their chosen methods? Most importantly, are students moving on to the first grade prepared to read and write at appropriate levels?
Candidates enter credential programs with the hopes of graduating as well-prepared teachers. However, when studying the course materials and syllabi of credential programs across the US, the National Council on Teacher Quality found that “only 39 percent of them appeared to be teaching the components of effective reading preparation.” So, if teacher candidates themselves are not receiving proper training on how children learn to read, how do children learn to read in school?
To continue her investigation, Hanford attended a conference where teachers gathered for a phonics teaching program designed by Louisa Moats. The people attending this training are the professors and doctors in charge of teacher education programs. They train future teachers to teach children how to read. This select group started with a small quiz and were asked, “True or False: speaking is natural, reading and writing are not.”
At this point, we know that reading and writing are not naturally acquired skills, but these professors are being asked this question because they might not know the answer. When Hanford interviewed some of the professors in attendance, many confessed that they had never learned about phonemes, phonics or sound recognition while they were in school. Many more were overwhelmed with the information.
Mississippi consistently ranks last in reading scores across the U.S., and the Barksdale Reading Institute wanted to know why. Specifically, they wanted to know if teacher programs in Mississippi universities taught candidates how children learn to read, and whether candidates learned about science-backed reading instruction as indicated in the report released by the National Reading Panel.
To do this, the Barksdale Reading Institute studied eight public universities and their curricula to see whether or not they included reading science. Kelly Butler led the search. Butler is the managing director of the Barksdale Reading Institute and has been trying to persuade early education teachers to implement science-backed reading instruction into their curricula for decades.
After reviewing those eight credential programs, Butler discovered that the majority of these schools did not fully incorporate the five components of reading. The five components of reading are five skills that children must have to learn to read and become strong readers. They include:
- Phonemic awareness
- Phonics
- Vocabulary
- Fluency
- Reading comprehension
Butler found that future teachers often graduated from teaching programs without knowing what these components were or how to teach them. Hanford reports that Butler “found that teacher candidates in Mississippi were getting an average of 20 minutes of instruction in phonics over their entire two-year teacher preparation program.” Now it was no longer a mystery why the children in Mississippi did not learn to read and why reading scores for children were so low.
Butler and her team at Barksdale took their research findings to state education officials, pleading to make changes in state curriculum requirements. Their findings were enough to spark legislative change. In 2003, the State Department of Education mandated that “every teacher preparation program in Mississippi require two courses in early literacy to cover what was in the National Reading Panel report.” This meant that every teacher credential program in the state of Mississippi needed to cover science-backed methods to reading instruction. It was a big win for reading science supporters—or so they thought.
The Department of Education Enforces Reading Science to Teach Children Learn to Read
Hanford says that with the new mandate, universities had to teach their own teacher candidates about phonics and reading science. In theory, it should have solved the problem. However, Butler wanted to know for certain if the mandate made an impact and if teacher candidates were actually learning the material. Hanford reports, “if new teachers coming out of teacher prep programs didn’t know reading science, the state would be spending money perpetually retraining teachers. At this point, no one really knew what prospective teachers were learning in those early literacy classes required by the state.”
That year, Butler and the Barksdale Reading Institute repeated the same study. This time, they studied 15 universities in total, including private colleges. Fourteen out of 15 schools said they now included the five components of reading into their programs. But what did that look like in the classrooms? Butler wanted to know exactly how the curriculum had changed. So, she interviewed teacher candidates, professors, doctors and deans. She asked them simple questions about how children learn to read with answers easily found in the report released by the NRP. To her dismay, many revealed that they never read the report and could not answer her questions regarding reading science. Butler learned that while these universities were technically abiding by the law issued by the DOE, they had no idea what reading science was or how it helped children learn to read.
In order to combat that, the DOE in Mississippi issued an exam. Teacher candidates were required to pass this exam on reading science. If they could not pass the exam, they would not be licensed to teach elementary education. Now, professors, deans and teacher candidates had a strong incentive to ensure that everyone knew and understood exactly what reading science was, how it worked and how they would teach children to read. If they didn’t, graduates would not be qualified for any job in early education, wasting both time and money.
By enforcing this exam, incoming teacher candidates now had to learn the essentials of phonics to teach children to read in the most effective way available. The curriculum and graduation requirements were changing for the better, but what about the teachers who already have their credentials? What about the teachers who are already teaching children using ineffective methods?
The Department of Education was serious about changing the way they taught children to read. In 2015, they passed the Literacy-Based Promotion Act. According to Hanford, “the law says that kids who aren’t reading on grade level by the end of third grade cannot be promoted to fourth grade.” Now, even working teachers, far past graduation, had to pay attention to the science behind literacy. Schools neither wanted nor could afford students to fall behind and pile up in third grade. In addition, Hanford says “the legislature appropriated millions of dollars to pay for training in the science of reading for all of the state’s elementary school teachers.”
Teachers were offered conferences and trainings on reading science. They could learn for themselves about phonemes, the simple view of reading and the science of phonics. Those who attended also received training on how to teach children to read using reading science as explained by the National Reading Panel. Teachers who wanted to give phonics a try attended; others who refused reading science did not.
Who Teaches Children to Read?
Hanford wanted to find the teachers who didn’t want to attend the training. Stacy Reeves, an associate professor of literacy in elementary education, was one of two willing to speak with her.
Reeves believed that phonics drills took the joy out of reading. In her personal experience, she felt that when she taught in a “more whole way” through reading aloud, her students learned better. “Kids learn to read in different ways. A lot of children come to school already reading, because they have been immersed in print-rich environments from the time they were born,” Reeves says. She argues that phonics drills are not worth her time or the time of her students.
However, Hanford explains that much of what Reeves says is untrue. Phonics is not boring. In fact, children are far more engaged in class because they feel confident about their ability to recognize letters, sounds and words. As Butler has found in her own research, proper phonics training early on encourages children to be stronger learners. She says, “It becomes a self-reinforcing cycle. I can read, therefore I like to read, therefore I will read.” On the other hand, early learners who struggle with reading grow embarrassed and frustrated and dislike reading, eventually avoiding text altogether. These children never learn to read.
According to reading science, the correct approach to teaching children reading skills is first through heavy phonics training in the early grades. Of course, phonics training itself is not enough. Students need to know what they’re reading, which is why it is crucial to encourage practice by providing good books, expanding vocabulary and reading comprehension skills.
Hanford continues to report that some kids crack the code quickly. One in every three children does not need much instruction and can figure out how to decode the system on his or her own. This might be because a parent or teacher provided enough clues for the child to understand the relationship between sounds (phonemes) and letters. Other times, it might be because the child has an inclination toward language skills. Sometimes, it is a combination of both. However, this only accounts for one-third of all early learners. What about the other two-thirds? Phonics training becomes vital to help prepare these students to learn to read and write.
We have already seen children miss benchmarks on reading tests from poor reading instruction, but which students have the hardest time? Students with learning disabilities like dyslexia have an especially difficult time learning. For them, it is additionally challenging to understand the connection between sounds and letters. While wealthier families can afford outside tutors for extra help, poorer families cannot so the gap between readers and non-readers becomes bigger and bigger. Just how bad it is? According to Hanford’s report, “[A]ccording to a study of the Texas prison population, nearly half of all inmates have dyslexia. They struggled to read as kids and probably never got the help they needed.”
Take Charge of How Your Students Learn to Read
The state of the public school system and its approach to reading instruction may be dismal and discouraging. For this reason, it becomes increasingly important for working teachers and parents to take charge over how children learn to read by using science-backed methods that are proven to work. In doing so, not only do children learn to read, but schools will see the difference phonics makes and, hopefully, make a change.
At Professor Pup’s Academy, we aim to make teaching children learn to read as simple as possible. Our programs do not require extensive training on phonics, so you can help your child learn to read without too much work on your part.
For educators who want to use phonics training, our phonics programs are easy to integrate in class and come with prepared lesson plans. For preschool and kindergarten classrooms, consider Professor Pup’s Phoneme Farm. Children learn all the phonemes through 49 distinct lessons.
For kindergarten to first grade classrooms, we suggest Pup’s Quest for Phonics and Pup’s Quest for Phonics II. In these lessons, children learn to read basic words using the phonemes they learned on the Phoneme Farm. By the end of Pup’s Quest, children are reading and writing at a basic level. If you’d like to set up a free trial of any of our programs, please visit our page for teachers.
For parents who want to help their children learn to read, our home editions are available for $2.99 on the App Store and Google Play Store. The home editions of all programs provide the same interactive lessons, helping children learn to read at their own pace. Our programs are designed to be friendly and simple to navigate while delivering enjoyable high quality lessons so that your child will absolutely learn to read.