Comments on: PROOF POINTS: Controversies within the science of reading

By: Carolyn Mixon

Carolyn Mixon — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 17:03:07 +0000

As a speech-language pathologist and certified dyslexia therapist (CALT), I appreciate your timely article of evolving research. Please, please don’t reference sounds in print as “kuh” and “tuh”. This is adding a schwa vowel and doing so is detrimental to developing readers and spellers. It is an explicit part of teacher training and student instruction that these sounds are brief and crisp. In print, the sounds should be represented as /k/, /t/, /b/, etc.

By: Michael H Baum

Michael H Baum — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 13:53:27 +0000

The first step in any reading instruction should be universal phonemic awareness assessment. A basic assessment can be done in 10 minutes or so per child, with more in-depth testing when the basic test shows a possible problem. Kids on the dyslexia spectrum can then get more intensive awareness and phonics than most kids require. But I’m afraid most schools still don’t require that universal screening. Our severely dyslexic daughter, in a very highly-rated district, was almost to 5th grade before her dyslexia was discovered – by us. Any reading program that doesn’t include universal screening will inevitably under- or over-emphasize phonemic awareness and will not catch the kids that need early intervention the most.

By: Sheila Keller

Sheila Keller — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 16:31:24 +0000

Educators require an understanding of the current and ongoing state of the instructional implications of the science of reading. Even more importantly, we need the understanding that even if research contradicts what we believe, it is carried out in a way to avoid the many biases that impact our thinking- and at some point there is enough evidence to say we have “proof” of this and not that, as with how to effectively and efficiently teach PA. Integrating phonemic awareness into foundational skills instruction, in other words, blending in a connected way to read and segmenting orally to spell, is the lynchpin for teaching all beginning readers to read effectively and efficiently. Showing a word morph as you change a phoneme at a time and blending the new word together, as well as having students respond to prompts to change out a phoneme at a time in a word chain through spelling or reading, strengthens that PA muscle and supports reading. Some students need a lot more practice than others, but all benefit. Many phonics programs or approaches minimize integrated PA with letters. Perhaps the theory is that by getting students reading the whole word as quickly as possible after introducing the sounds, and encouraging that students view and say the whole word, they will gain automaticity quicker than by prioritizing integrated oral PA with those words. With the cumulative research, teachers might recognize that pulling back from quickly requiring students to read whole words and using a systematic, explicit approach integrating PA with letters might be a better application of research and will likely increase how quickly and happily children learn to read.

By: Howard Dolgin

Howard Dolgin — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 12:34:59 +0000

The utility of teaching phonemic awareness depends on the child’s range of skills. If a child is proficient at using phonics to read words, phonemic awareness is helpful but not crucial. If a child has difficulty sounding out words, phonemic awareness may be an essential part of a child’s instructional program. If a child has great difficulty sounding out words and learning phonemic awareness skills, that child may benefit from learning to read using a reading program emphasizing sight words. The importance of phonemic awareness instruction depends on the child’s decoding strengths and weaknesses.