A crash course in the big, beautiful, dynamic world of reading research

One my best friends and colleagues recently asked me to share some resources to send her some resources about the “science of reading” debates that are raging in the media because she knew that I had just finished auditing a professional development course called “The Science of Reading for Adolescents.” Like many educators, parents, and citizens, many of my colleagues in secondary literacy circles and I have been bewildered by both the intensity and superficiality of the media’s portrayal of literacy instruction.

Also, unlike our elementary literacy colleagues, many secondary literacy educators like me haven’t done as much teacher education preparation, research, or actual teaching of foundational literacy skills involved in teaching people to learn to read. Traditionally, our students come to us knowing the basics of decoding and comprehension, and our work is focused on critical thinking skills necessary for reading, analyzing, and evaluating complex texts.

But these days, many of us, like my friend and me, are taking this time when literacy instruction is in the media spotlight (and when we’re realizing that many more of our students need support in foundational literacy skills) to do some of our own deep dives into early reading research. Throughout the few couple years, I’ve read lots of articles that pop up in my news feed, reviewed several foundational studies by reading researchers that I read during my doctoral studies, done several internet deep dives to try to understand how certain literacy approaches are understood differently by researchers and by elementary teachers and school leaders, and begun working my way through a range of peer-reviewed scholarship on recent developments in reading research.

This summer, I signed up for the “The Science of Reading for Adolescents” course for three reasons:

• to deepen my knowledge of so that I can to support teachers and interventionists in my building as we work to build intervention systems to support adolescents
• to find resources and strategies to use in my time as a community literacy tutor for an adult multilingual learner who has high listening comprehension English skills but minimal decoding skills
• to have a better understanding of how educators and leaders in my community are learning about and responding to the plethora of journalistic reports and podcasts about reading science.

I’m happy to say that I feel like I met all three goals, though of course there’s always more to read and learn. So when my friend asked for some resources, it took me a while to narrow it down.Below, you’ll find my Top 5 list of resources (plus runners-up) related to reading research, specifically for teachers of adolescents. 

A note on language:”The science of reading” vs. reading research

When I first heard the term “The Science of Reading” and saw the acronym SoR in the news a few years ago, I assumed it was a commercial curriculum program or instructional model. Usually, when everyday words are capitalized in the education world, it means that someone has commercialized something and is selling a particular approach to teaching materials or practices. I quickly realized, though, that it was simply the latest phrase to be used in the media representing one side of the “reading wars.”

I’m avoiding the term “the science of reading” because it’s become so buzzy and exclusive, and it often means different things in the research than it does in the media. Instead, I tend to refer to reading research or reading science, and I always refer to it as broad, multifaceted, and dynamic. Here are three things I try to remind people when they ask me about “the science of reading”:

1. Reading research does not dictate one approach, program, or method.
2. Reading research says many things and it is still in progress.
3. Reading researchers agree that different readers need different instructional approaches.

Kate’s Reading Research Starter Kit

• Best researcher’s take on the problematic ways that journalists cover “the science of reading” and distort both the breadth of reading research and what “balanced literacy” really means.  I really respect Maren Aukerman’s work, and I think this is a REALLY great analysis of journalistic reports like Emily Hanford’s. It’s long-ish and dense-ish, but I think educators will find it useful for sorting out the difference between media frenzy and research complexity.
• Best recent scholarship that represents the beautiful complexity of the reading process (building on the “simple view of reading”):  I read Nell Duke and Kelly Cartwright’s, “The Science of Reading Progresses,”a few months ago on deep dive into Reading Research Quarterly’s recent special issues on reading science. I found it to be a really helpful summary of the history of the simple view of reading, a foundational piece of research from the 1980s by Gough and Tunmer. In places it gets a little dense about covariances and other statistical mish-mosh, but their “active view of reading” model is really robust and I think it helps to clarify that decoding and language comprehension are not the only pieces of the puzzle, despite the hold that the SVR has had on proponents of “the science of reading.”
• Best three-pack of practitioners’ guides to research on reading science. These three were featured in the Heartland course, and I found them to be good overviews in practitioner-friendly language.  Yes, they’re long (and two are 15 years old—I’m looking for updates!), but each section is pretty digestible/skimmable, and I think it’s important not to give teachers a one-pager about reading science because there’s SO MUCH to it.  Many teachers will feel like there are at least some pieces that confirm their current practices and some that present opportunities for growth and new focus.
  • The first one, “Effective Instruction for adolescent struggling readers: A practice brief” from the University of Texas at Austin, is a concise overview of five elements to support adolescent readers (word study, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, and motivation). 
  • The second, Improving adolescent literacy: Effective classroom and intervention practices: A Practice Guide, compiles intervention-based, causal research from the What Works Clearinghouse into a practice guide.
  • And the third, Education Leader’s Guide to Reading Growth, is published by Renaissance (which makes me skeptical because it’s an educational publisher that sells Accelerated Reader), has good footnotes, references well-known studies, in Sections 2 and 3 the authors describe the importance of independent reading practice—a research-supported practice neglected by the other two guides.
• Best webinars to help secondary teachers feel more comfortable teaching vocabulary and syntax in engaging ways. I found educational consultant Van Cleave to be a pretty engaging presenter who could help teachers feel more comfortable teaching about the nitty gritty of word parts and morphology, as well as grammar and syntax.  I appreciate the practical, “exploring language is fun!” tone he takes. I’m also linking here Dr. Peter Bowen’s work on Structured Word Inquiry because Van Cleave mentions it and it’s something I’d like to look into more—again, it feels really practical, functional, and inquiry-based.
• Best book chapter about the research-practice gap from 1998 that would have saved us all a lot of trouble if anyone had read it back in the day.  I first read about this chapter on a blog past that’s no longer published, back when I first tried to track down the origins of the three-cueing system in a late-night internet dive a couple years ago. Here’s a short version published somewhere on The Reading League’s website. Basically, 25 years ago, Marilyn Jager Adams realized that many teachers and schools were using what they called “the three-cueing system” as a way to teach students reading strategies focused on semantic, syntactical, and graphic cues in a text. But as a reader researcher, she was unfamiliar with it, as were many of her research colleagues. So she tried to track down its origins, and her odyssey is basically a primer in why we need to close the research-to-practice gap so that bastardizations of research don’t end up commercialized and codified in ways that hurt students. Contact me for the full chapter that I got from interlibrary loan.

And the Top 5 runners-up (because reading research is just that big and beautiful)

• This article about dyslexia is really interesting because Elliot, the author, tries to pin down a definition and he analyzes several different possible definitions, eventually rejecting them all.  I haven’t read much beyond this, but his argument that dyslexia is not a precise or helpful diagnostic term is pretty compelling. Tim Shanahan’s recent article about Tier 1 strategies for students with dyslexia and other reading difficulties also acknowledges the slipperiness of the term.
• Placing Text at the Center of the Standards-Aligned ELA Classroom  (Liben & Pimentel). As much as I hate to cite Susan Pimentel for anything (because I hold her and David Coleman responsible for everything the Revised Publishers’ Criteria hath wrought), this document has some REALLY strong arguments against assessing standards in isolation that I hope to share with DMPS leaders as the district revises standards-referenced grading practices.  This document’s connection to reading science is really to remind teachers that yes, there are all these super-important discrete skills in reading (fluency, vocabulary, decoding, etc.), but we have to remember that the end goal is all about helping students make meaning of texts and express their ideas about them.
• Comprehension Skills or Strategies: Is there a difference and does it matter? (Shanahan) This was also in the Heartland course, and I love it because it’s approachable and it clearly takes down the sacred cow of comprehension strategies as an entry point or organizing principle for ELA classrooms. He calls the focus on isolated  strategies like “making inferences” and “determining the main idea” a fungus that’s hard to eradicate…and I feel like that’s true of so many well-intentioned but narrowly-implemented instructional practices.
• Milner’s contribution to the 2020 RRQ special issue calls for rethinking what counts as knowledge in the science or reading, and I really appreciate and value this lens because the vast majority of the readings from the course I took were intensely deficit-minded. Many experts pointed out that students from historically marginalized communities are at greater risk for experiencing reading struggles, but very rarely (if ever) did they acknowledge the assets that students from multilingual cultures (including speakers of Black Language).
• And I’ll close with this quote from Gholdy Muhammad’s Unearthing Joy, which I think everyone should read because it’s a beautiful book (including Spotify playlists and coloring pages!), rich with asset-focused thinking about education:

“Educators often ask how the Hill Model [Muhammad’s historically and culturally relevant framework for instruction that goes beyond skills and intellect to include identity, criticality, and joy] aligns with reading science research. What needs to be understood is that the HILL Model  does not interrupt the teaching and learning of foundational reading skills such as letter-name recognition, letter-sound recognition, phonemic awareness, decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and/or comprehension. The model only complements and elevates traditional reading skills. However, many traditional reading programs don’t take into consideration students’ lives and the world around them. Adding the framework to a traditional lesson or unit plan will left student learning and help them to retain the skills and strategies. Earlier in the book, I offered a unit plan for decoding based on the framework. You will observe a big difference when you teach skills and strategies in contextualized ways. It’s important to connect learning to students’ lives and the world around them, every chance you get.”

Gholdy, Muhammad, Unearthing Joy, p. 163

Media + capitalism + scripted instruction= Oversimplified and harmful bastardizations of research

In short, when students aren’t learning to read, it is probably because some narrow, oversimplified version of reading research has dominated the ways teachers have been told to teach by their administrators and curriculum developers. It’s probably also because large class sizes prevent the kind of differentiation that young people need, because schools—particularly urban schools where many historically marginalized students learn— are under-funded and unable to fill all the financial, nutritional, health, mental health, family, and community needs that also support literacy learning. But that’s another blog post.

As educators, all we can do is focus on teaching with attention to beautiful breadth, depth, diversity, and complexity of reading research rather than the silver bullet method that is often supported by commercial interests, under-informed teacher and administrative decision-making, and hot takes in the media that do not reflect a nuanced understanding of the ever-growing knowledge of research-based knowledge of what helps readers read.