What is reading?

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 Panel.  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 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. To test this for yourself, 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.