Literacy FAQ
What is reading?
Reading is an extremely complex process, and there have been many theories about how people learn to read. In 1997, the U.S. government commissioned a study that is called The National Reading Pannel. The goal of the study was to analyze all of the available research to determine what, if any, practices were effective in teaching children how to read. In the decades since the national reading panel, its findings have been expanded on, but every major study had confirmed its recommendations. So what works to teach kids how to read? What is reading? It turns out that there are 5 components of reading.
1. Phonemic Awareness
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a spoken word. For example, the word "dog" has 3 phonemes. They are /d/ /o/ /g/. This simple understanding is the foundation of reading. In order to read and spell words, we must first understand that words are made of sounds. The ability to isolate and manipulate these sounds is one of the most important skills that readers ever develop and is the foundation for everything that comes after. When a student has dyslexia, difficulty with this skill is almost always the foundation of all of the difficulties that come after.
2. Phonics
Phonics is the understanding that the squiggles we call graphemes represent sounds. Graphemes are any letter or group of letters that represents a sound. For example, t is a grapheme that says /t/. Sh is also a grapheme that represents the sound /sh/. When students understand that words are made of sounds, and that graphemes show us which sounds to make, they begin to understand how reading and spelling really works. Words are supposed to be sounded out, not memorized. While there are words where the spelling and the pronunciation don't seem to match, these words are actually quite few and far between. Most of them only differ from their expected spelling by one sound. The problem with English isn't that it is random or crazy. If it were, none of us would be able to read it. The problem is that most of us don't know the rules of the English well enough to explain them to a beginning reader. There is a reason why the grapheme "or" says one sound in "fork" and another sound in "doctor" and most of us know it on some level because we are able to read those words correctly. That said, most of us can't explain it. Teaching a struggling reader requires that a person be able to explain the rules words follow so that the struggling reader can begin to have a set of strategies and rules to work with.
3. Fluency
Fluency is what happens when we become good at something. When you drive a car along a familiar road, you may find that you don't have to stop and think about every turn or correction you make with the steering wheel. Your motions with the wheel, and your navigation down the road are things that you have practiced so many times that they have become automatic. This is fluency. Reading fluency is the ease and speed with which a reader can read a text and understand it. Fluency is what happens when we get good at all of the components of reading. Rate, the speed and accuracy with which students can read, is one of the best ways to tell whether students have become fluent with their phonics and phonemic awareness. In fact, it turns out that whether a student can easily and accurately read a text is one of the largest predictors of whether they will understand it.
4. Vocabulary
Our vocabulary refers to how well we understand the meanings and nuances of individual words. Like fluency, vocabulary is one of the biggest predictors of whether we will comprehend a text. It also plays an active role in reading words. For example, what does this word say: read. You might have said the word as it is pronounced in this sentence "I can read many words." You would be right. You might also have said it as it can be pronounced in the sentence "Yesterday I read many words." You would also be right. Both are the correct pronunciation, and in fact the grapheme "ea" can say /ee/ and /e/. It can even say /ay/ in some words such as break. To know which pronunciation is the correct one, we have to rely on our vocabulary after we have sounded out the word. We also need vocabulary to understand what we read. If you like, google a technical manual for something you know absolutely nothing about. Airplane mechanics is a good one for most people (find something else if you are an airplane mechanic). I bet you can sound out all the words, but can you explain any better how a jet engine works? Likely not. You do not have the vocabulary knowledge to understand what you just read. Unsurprisingly, vocabulary is related to background knowledge. A person who loves baseball likely has an excellent vocabulary for anything related to baseball. They may not have such a good vocabulary for talking about reading challenges. Equally, I have a great vocabulary for talking about reading challenges, but my vocabulary for baseball is not so good.
5. Comprehension
Comprehension is what happens when we use all 4 of the other components of reading. It refers to our ability to read and understand phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and ultimately whole texts. Comprehension is the goal of reading. It is the reason why we need to be able to read and spell words in the first place. Books provide information. Whether you are reading a novel, a textbook, or a text message from a friend, your goal is to understand it.
Honorable Mention: Morphology
Morphology is part phonics and part vocabulary. It is also the reason for many of the words that drive us crazy. In English, there are two forces that determine how words are spelled. The first is that we spell phonetically. In other words, we write the graphemes that represent the sounds we hear. The second is meaning. We spell words to preserve their meaning. For example, we know that the grapheme "t" usually represents the sound /t/. That said, in the word "cursed" we spell that sound with the letters "ed". We do this to clarify the meaning of the word. When we add "ed" to the ends of words it makes those words past tense. "Curst" would give us the same sounds, but not the same meaning. This is morphology. A morpheme is the smallest part of a word that carries meaning. For example, in the word jumped there are two morphemes. The first is the base word "jump". The second is the suffix "ed" indicating that the word is past tense. Morphology is the study of these morphemes. We need to be able to understand morphemes because just as with the word "cursed" they change how words are spelled and pronounced.
What is dyslexia?
The International Dyslexia Association defines dyslexia in the following way “Dyslexia is a specific learning disability that is neurobiological in origin. It is characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities. These difficulties typically result from a deficit in the phonological component of language that is often unexpected in relation to other cognitive abilities and the provision of effective classroom instruction. Secondary consequences may include problems in reading comprehension and reduced reading experience that can impede growth of vocabulary and background knowledge.”
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That is quite a word salad though. Sometimes I feel like we ironically use the most difficult words we can find to read in order to describe reading difficulties. If you feel like you need a definition for the definition, read on. I have you covered.
1. "Neurobiological in origin"
This means that dyslexia is something that you are born with. It is a part of your biology. In fact, it is fairly common for reading difficulties to be inherited from a parent or grandparent.
2. "a deficit in the phonological component of reading that is often unexpected in relation to other cognitive abilities"
When you read "deficit in the phonological component of reading" it means is that dyslexia is nearly always, though not always, caused by problems hearing and manipulating the spoken sounds in words. This goes back to the phonemic awareness component of reading described above. If we can't isolate and manipulate the sounds in words then spelling and reading them is mostly impossible. Have you ever seen a person who is new to reading spell the word "last" as "lat" or the word "get" as "git"? These are phonological errors. They aren't hearing both the /s/ and the /t/ in last and they are mishearing the /e/ as /i/ in "get". These are the kinds of errors that we often see in the spellings of people who have dyslexia. This is especially true when these errors persist after kindergarten and first grade.
The unexpected part of this definition is a little more complex and controversial. It turns out that unless we are talking about very extreme cases, IQ and decoding aren't all that predictive of each other. Students who have lower IQs can often still learn to read and spell fairly well. They tend to struggle more with comprehension. Equally, a student with a lower IQ can absolutely also have dyslexia. Students with higher IQs can absolutely struggle with decoding and spelling. Equally, Dyslexia occurs quite often with other challenges including dyscalculia, ADHD, and many others. That a student has ADHD, dysgraphia, or any number of other challenges does not mean that they do not also have dyslexia. That said, for a student to have dyslexia there has to be some deficit that can't be explained by other biological factors. For example, I have had students who had medical issues which prevented them from tracking words with their eyes. While this looked initially looked like dyslexia, these students often responded very quickly to interventions once the medical challenge with their eyes was brought under control because these students did not actually have any challenges with their phonics or phonological awareness. Once their eyes were physically capable of reading, they learned to read quickly and easily with direct instruction. Although they still required an intensive intervention because they were behind in reading, they did not have dyslexia.
3. What does all the rest of that definition mean?
The rest of the definition has two big ideas. The first is that a student can only be said to have dyslexia if they have been exposed to effective classroom instruction and the deficits still persist. This is because there is now way to know whether a student who has not been taught to read has dyslexia. We would expect that a person who has not been taught to read would struggle to read. They have never been taught how. We only begin to suspect dyslexia when we teach them to read and notice that that they still struggle.
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The second is that while dyslexia often begins with isolated deficits, when we don't provide effective instruction and support it doesn't stay isolated. It can spiral into all sorts of other problems. This is called the Matthew Effect. The Matthew Effect is the tendency for those who are successful to become more successful and those who struggle to struggle more. This is a serious problem for struggling readers. When students struggle to read, they read less than their peers who are not struggling. They also can't read many of the kinds of books that would give them access to a lot of the vocabulary and complex language that they will need to read the increasingly complex books that they will see throughout their school career and adult life. As a result, their vocabularies grow more slowly than proficient readers, they know less about the world because they have read less, and they have less understanding of complex language. This, in turn, makes them worse readers. Left unchecked, the gap will only continue to grow because while struggling readers continue to learn how to read, proficient readers are already reading to learn, and the more we read to learn the better we tend to get at reading. This is why reading aloud to struggling readers and providing them with accommodations for longer writing assignments is so critical. It stops a manageable problem from cascading into a catastrophe.