Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition From Novice to Expert

Abstract

There is intense public interest in questions surrounding how children learn to read and how they can best be taught. Research in psychological science has provided answers to many of these questions but, somewhat surprisingly, this research has been slow to make inroads into educational policy and practice. Instead, the field has been plagued by decades of "reading wars." Even now, there remains a wide gap between the state of research knowledge about learning to read and the state of public understanding. The aim of this article is to fill this gap. We present a comprehensive tutorial review of the science of learning to read, spanning from children's earliest alphabetic skills through to the fluent word recognition and skilled text comprehension characteristic of expert readers. We explain why phonics instruction is so central to learning in a writing system such as English. But we also move beyond phonics, reviewing research on what else children need to learn to become expert readers and considering how this might be translated into effective classroom practice. We call for an end to the reading wars and recommend an agenda for instruction and research in reading acquisition that is balanced, developmentally informed, and based on a deep understanding of how language and writing systems work.

Longitudinal associations between conflict monitoring and emergent academic skills: An event‐related potentials study

“…Learning to read in English builds on early foundations such as phonemic awareness (i.e., abstracting the relevant phonemic units from the stream of speech) and letter knowledge, and requires the acquisition of the grapheme-morpheme relations, that is, the visual symbols of the written language (graphemes) represent the sounds of the language (phonemes) (for a review, see Castles, Rastle, & Nation, 2018). As children become skilled readers, they gradually rely less on alphabetic decoding and transition to recognizing familiar written words rapidly and automatically, a process referred to as orthographic learning (Castles et al, 2018). As children become skilled readers, they gradually rely less on alphabetic decoding and transition to recognizing familiar written words rapidly and automatically, a process referred to as orthographic learning (Castles et al, 2018).…”

“…Becoming a skilled reader requires gaining background knowledge about what words can mean in specific contexts and the ability to make inferences, for example, understanding that "jam" in the sentence "Denise was stuck in a jam" refers to traffic jam and not the fruit preservative (Castles et al, 2018). Conflict monitoring may not be involved in early skills such as phonemic awareness and orthographic learning, but may be involved in more complex reading skills.…”

The importance of early phonics improvements for predicting later reading comprehension

“…Second, these findings suggest that the phonics check may be a valuable tool for identifying children in need of early intervention and that those students who are able to ameliorate their early phonics difficulties fair substantially better in later reading tests compared with children with equivalent difficulties who do not improve in the first year of schooling. These findings support the idea that there is a critical period for the development of phonetic decoding skills around the period of development that occurs at school entry (Ehri et al ., ; Castles et al ., ). It should, however, be noted that we do not have evidence of how much additional support the children who failed the first phonics check received in the year before the retaken assessment, but these results suggest that the progress made by students in the year between the two checks has long‐term implications for reading comprehension development.…”

“…The main focus of the so-called 'reading wars' has been whether phonemic awareness-that is, the understanding of the relationship between letters (graphemes) and phonemes (sounds)-is an essential precursor to the teaching of reading, or whether reading should instead first be taught at the whole-word level (Pearson, 2004;Kim, 2008). To some extent, a treaty has been called on this war, with an increasing recognition in the research literature that the explicit teaching of phonics is an important component in the teaching of reading (Castles et al, 2018). This has been supported by evidence that early phonics interventions effectively promote reading development (Ehri et al, 2001;Slavin et al, 2011;Snowling & Hulme, 2012), and that phonemic awareness at early ages has moderate correlations with later literacy (Missall et al, 2007;Snowling et al, 2019).…”

“UNIFIED”: Bridging the Researcher–Practitioner Divide in Mind, Brain, and Education

“…It is clear that pedagogy can also inform theories in psychology and neuroscience (LaRusso et al, ) and test the applicability of neuroscience and psychology theories in the real world (Kuriloff et al, ; Stafford‐Brizard et al, ), just as psychology can help explain how and why some practices foster learning and development, while others do not (Ansari & Coch, ; Christodoulou & Gaab, ). For example, Sigman et al () described how an understanding of the neuroscience of visual learning could have predicted the superiority of a letter‐by‐letter “phonics” system over the whole word approach to the teaching of reading, saving the field a decades‐long debate (e.g., Castles et al, ). Another less well‐publicized example is motivation.…”