The Science of Reading

Reading is an essential part of society, and a child’s success in reading influences their success in all other subjects. While reading is a fundamental skill, it is something that educators are so often ill equipped to teach.

When teaching reading, there has typically been the mindset that reading is a natural skill that kids will pick up, such as walking and talking; with enough exposure to books, children will learn to read the words on the page. However, this practice does not produce sustainable results, and many children end up not proficient in reading for the rest of their lives.

The children impacted the most by this approach to reading are neurodiverse, such as those with a reading disability like dyslexia, because their brains struggle to translate written words to spoken words. Children with dyslexia need to learn encoding and decoding skills, which is a foundation of structured literacy.

The Science of Reading

Reading utilizes specific portions of the brain, and by understanding the mechanisms of the brain, educators can better understand how to teach a child to read. It’s similar to a plumber needing to know how the pipes run before they can go in and fix a leak.

Many researchers have examined the brain through imaging, concluding that the brain is not wired to read. While talking is a natural skill picked up by children when they are talked to, reading needs to be taught because our brains do not naturally know how to do it.

Additionally, reading is generally considered a visual act. However, for children to succeed, they must first understand how the words sound to connect the words they hear and say to the ones written on the page.

The basis of the science of reading lies around phonics, or how different letters make certain sounds when placed next to each other or in a particular order. Through training with phonics, students are given the skills to translate a word on the page into a word they recognize, which then makes reading possible.

A Transition to Structured Literacy

Teachers have long been taught to teach reading one way, typically through continued exposure to books and words without much instruction on how the order of letters in a word creates these sounds.

Through structured literacy, there is a greater focus on teaching children encoding and decoding skills, which provides them with the skills needed to determine what any word sounds like just by looking at it written on a paper.

Not only does this help students with reading disabilities such as dyslexia make sense of the words on a page, but it can also help all other students in a class.

Even children with Autism, who are traditionally strong readers but struggle with reading comprehension, can benefit from structured literacy. This is because children with Autism may find that they are good at memorizing sight words but cannot break down a word into its individual sounds, causing them to struggle whenever they find a word they have not seen before. Additionally, while they can memorize words, they struggle to attach meaning to them, which affects reading comprehension.

Improving Reading Skills

Structured literacy is an important approach for teaching reading to all children, not just those with Autism or dyslexia. This strategy teaches and improves encoding and decoding reading skills, setting the children up for future success.

Our brains may not naturally have the skills needed to read, but by following structured literacy, teachers can equip children with all the tools they need to be strong readers for life.