Unpacking the Full Science of Reading

What happens in your brain when you read a sentence? What happens in your heart and mind? How do you know what the sentence means? How do you understand where to begin on a page, where to pause, and what you are to take away when you're finished?

Many of us learned to read so long ago, it feels like second nature. Yet, at some point or other, we were taught this essential skill.

When Marsal School Professor Tanya Wright tells people she started her career as a kindergarten teacher, they often say, "You must have been really patient." This always surprises her. Maybe patience plays a part, but she argues that to be successful in such a role, one needs to know a lot. "It's a profession just like others. You have to learn how to teach kids to read."

Although it might not seem scientific at the outset, guiding young learners through the process of understanding what the words on a page mean requires a considerable amount of technical knowledge, and practice applying that knowledge. Who would expect an aerospace engineer to successfully design a rocket fit for space exploration without professional training? Expecting a teacher to teach a child—let alone an entire classroom of children—to read is no different. In fact, it might be more difficult.

"Teaching children is the hardest science of all," says Professor Gina Cervetti. "They're so complicated and extraordinary and joyful. It's a wonderful thing to do—but it's complex."

So, why is literacy so hard to teach?

"I think a huge challenge is that there's a lot of very specific, technical knowledge that you need that people wouldn't just have from everyday life. And then teachers need to apply that knowledge in real time with young children," explains Professor Nell Duke. "When you're teaching young children, you don't have a lot of wait time where you're sitting there trying to think of what to say next or how to respond to the child—you have to act very quickly. Teachers have to access their technical knowledge and access the knowledge that they need about how to actually teach that knowledge. It becomes really challenging to do all of that. When you're a beginning teacher, you haven't had as much practice being able to integrate all of this knowledge and think on the fly."

Another challenge Duke has identified for new teachers is figuring out how to address the many different aspects of literacy development. "There are so many different components you have to develop in children: concept and content knowledge, vocabulary knowledge, their ability to make inferences and comprehend what they're doing, their ability to write—everything from their handwriting, all the way to sophisticated rhetorical moves—plus all of the phonemic awareness and phonics and spelling that they need. It's a lot to cover."

Add to that the incredible diversity of students in any given classroom, and the unique base of knowledge each brings with them to school. "The kinds of skills and knowledge that students need in order to ultimately use literacy for personally meaningful and academic purposes are vast and kind of unconstrained," says Cervetti. "Within a classroom, you have a huge array of different individuals who have different needs and different strengths and different preferences. Trying to think about orchestrating all of these skills and all of this knowledge, and then also trying to think about both the collective of your classroom and each of the individual learners is a herculean task."

At the Marsal School, students learn how to teach literacy to young learners and earn their teaching certification in the state of Michigan in either the Elementary Undergraduate program (ELUG) or in the Elementary Master's program (ELMAC). In both programs, students take a four-part series of courses on early literacy.

"Our professors and field instructors do important work across the full science of reading," says Dean Elizabeth Birr Moje (who is herself a literacy researcher), referring to the body of research consisting of evidence-based practices that inform literacy instruction. The science of reading is a term that refers to all that we know from scientific research on reading, including how reading develops, how specific instructional practices affect reading, specific difficulties learners can have with reading, and more. Reading instruction needs to address many areas, including phonemic awareness (learning to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds—phonemes—in spoken words), phonics (decoding, or sounding words out), fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and language development. These components, explains Moje, are inextricably intertwined. "Our approach is to teach all of these skill areas in each literacy course. Individual components are highlighted, but they are always taught in the context of the full science of reading."

The topic of children's literacy, and how best to teach it, has spurred debate for decades. Lately, it has entered the cultural zeitgeist once more. But whether the current attention is fueled by sitting in on Zoom classrooms during the pandemic, consuming podcasts and media coverage that dive into the development of various literacy curricula, or alarm over recently declining NAEP scores, one thing remains clear: teaching children to read—to not only pronounce the words but to understand them—is hard. Amidst the many arguments for and against different methodologies for teaching literacy—phonics, balanced literacy, the whole language approach—various instructional foci based on the science of reading are prized and others are overlooked.

"A common model right now is the simple view of reading, which treats reading comprehension as the product of decoding skills and language comprehension," says Cervetti. "The idea is that the decoding skill is hard and complicated for lots of children for a whole range of reasons, so we have to teach that, but the language part of reading is natural. So if we just teach kids to decode the words, they will be able to map that magically onto their oral language, and everything will be fine." This, Cervetti argues, is a huge misconception. Yes, decoding can be complicated for kids to learn, but once they get the hang of it, the majority of children can read words pretty quickly, she says. It is in learning the language component of literacy that students become meaning makers of texts by gaining word knowledge, world knowledge, and syntactic knowledge. "If we ignore the language piece, we end up with students who are really good at calling out words, but who aren't necessarily skilled at making meaning of either individual words or stretches of words."

Duke notes that there is more debate in the larger community about how best to teach reading than she has observed in the research community. "There's actually a lot of overlap among scholars as to how to teach reading because we look at what has been proved to be effective in the research."

"Everywhere I go, people claim that teacher education programs do not teach phonics," says Moje. "That is patently untrue in our program. However, just because one learns how to teach phonics doesn't mean it's easy to do in a classroom of 30 children with everything happening all at once. It's really hard."

Which is why practice is key.

"The cognitive load of teaching young children literacy is really high," says Duke. "As with anything where there's a heavy cognitive load, the more practice you get, the better you get at doing it." At the Marsal School, interns learn by working with students at field placements in local elementary schools beginning in the first semester and continuing throughout the program. As their training progresses, they move from working with individual students, to working with small groups, to eventually leading an entire class.

"As part of every class session, I have the interns work one on one with a child to apply what they've recently learned," says Duke. "For example, if they have learned an instructional technique like word ladders, they would do a word ladder with a child. Or if we've been teaching them the interactive writing technique, they would actually practice it one on one with a child. The opportunity to apply what they're learning is really valuable in addition to the theoretical knowledge they're also getting in class."

In both the ELUG and ELMAC programs, students' preparation begins with Literacy 1: Foundational Skills (EDUC 401), which addresses questions about how literacy develops in young children and what teachers can do to foster that development. This course addresses several major constructs in early literacy development—oral language development, concepts of print, phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge, phonics, spelling, word recognition, and reading fluency from pre-kindergarten (pre-K) through sixth grade.

In the fall 2024 semester, ELUG students took Literacy 1 with Wright as an embedded course in a local elementary school. The school served as the students' first field placement, where they worked with first graders and a mentor teacher two mornings a week. One afternoon a week, Wright taught the Literacy 1 course in a classroom at the elementary school. After learning a concept in her class, Wright's students would plan a lesson to teach that concept to the first graders, get her feedback on the plan, and then implement it with the young learners.

"We learned ideas about how to teach kids to read, then we would all go down to the cafeteria and each pair of students would sit with a pair of first graders and try some of the instructional methods that we were learning about." All the while, Wright was nearby, circulating throughout the cafeteria and observing, close at hand if help was needed. "I could hear and see what was going on. I was there if they needed support, because it's new for them," says Wright.

Over the course of this first semester, teaching interns learn about early literacy and foundational skills. "The interns learn that the words we say can be broken down into sounds and that those sounds can be mapped to letters. How we teach kids about those sound-letter relationships and how we then teach them to take those sound-letter relationships and figure out what a word says is phonics instruction," explains Wright. "All of that may sound simple, but it's actually very, very technical. Teachers need to know a lot about language and how it works, the different types of sound-letter relationships, and the sequence of how to teach those relationships to kids." On top of that, they need to make it fun. Teaching interns learn different instructional practices that they can do with their students to make learning phonics engaging and playful. "That's what we want it to feel like for kids," says Wright. "Making these lessons fun is how to get kids started on being readers and writers."

In two-on-two pairs, Wright had her teaching interns read aloud with kids, explaining texts and showing how texts work. "For example, they might show that in English, we read from left to right and from the top to the bottom of the page. They might be teaching what a period or an exclamation point is. They're also doing games and activities to help kids hear sounds and understand that there are sounds in words." In addition to reading, interns worked on developing early writing skills with their students by having kids write as many sounds in a word as they could figure out, and by having them draw pictures to share their ideas.

When she's taught Literacy 1 in the past, Duke has had her students dress up as letters of the alphabet for Halloween. Each pre-service teacher selects a letter to represent and then does presentations about their letter to different groups of kids. The kids fill out activity sheets about the letters to complete a scavenger hunt. There are even animal crackers in the shape of letters to snack on, making a celebration out of the lesson. The kids love it, but it is equally impactful for the interns.

"One of the important things you need to learn as an early elementary or preschool teacher is what make good alphabet key words and what don't make good alphabet key words. For example, you'll see a lot of alphabet charts that say things like ‘A is for airplane,' but airplane is not a good alphabet keyword because it doesn't start with the short "a" sound, it starts with what's called an r-controlled vowel. We're teaching the letter's short sound initially, because that's the most important one for children to learn first." Understanding this importance and the reasoning behind the learning sequence is exactly what Duke means when she says there is a heavy load of technical knowledge her students need to acquire in preparation for teaching their own classrooms of children.

"There's all of this knowledge that needs to go into selecting alphabet keywords," says Duke. "And so when the pre-service teachers dress up as the letter, they have to carefully choose the objects or pictures that they are going to feature on their costume to make sure that they're good alphabet keywords. It's a fun way for me to teach something that they really need to know."

Another component of the introductory literacy course is learning how to assess students' literacy development. "In a kindergarten classroom, you have kids who can read a chapter book, kids who are just starting to learn about letters and sounds, and everybody in between," says Wright. "Part of what we're teaching interns to do is figure out where students are in their thinking and in their literacy learning. We use that information to target a lesson to meet kids' instructional needs."

After doing an assessment to find out where a child is in phonics and spelling development, Duke has often had pre-service teachers create a book wherein the vast majority of the words would be decodable based on what the child knew at that point in time. Because Duke's students do this one on one with children in their field classrooms, each gets to really think about the child they are working with.

"If they knew that the child was really into animals, they would try to write a decodable text that was based on an animal that the child was interested in," says Duke. "Or sometimes they would actually make the child a character in the book. It is really fun for kids to have a custom book made about them. Kids also really enjoy books that they can read themselves. Having the books be largely decodable means that the children are likely to experience success with them if they're using decoding strategies, which is what we want children to do. And it's fun for the interns to be a little bit creative, to think about how they're going to illustrate the book, and what the content of the book is going to be. It's also very educational for the interns. They need to understand the scope and sequence of phonics and spelling instruction. They need to understand the individual child's knowledge around phonics and spelling. And then they need to reflect that in the words that they choose. All of that takes real expertise."

The second course in the literacy series, Literacy 2: Comprehension & Motivation preK-6 (EDUC 403), addresses effective teaching of reading comprehension across preK-6. The focus in this course is on the skills, strategies, knowledges, and motivations that support the development of reading comprehension, how to assess comprehension, and how to design and enact a range of instructional strategies and routines to support students in becoming skillful and engaged readers across subject areas.

For this course, interns have field placements in upper elementary classrooms in the third, fourth, and fifth grades. Now they are working with students on more advanced literacy skills, like reading fluency with more complex texts—reading words not only accurately but smoothly and with good expression.

"Just because kids can look at the symbols and say the words doesn't mean that they understand what the text means," says Wright. "It takes us a whole course for interns to learn the many things that go into a student understanding a text—everything from how a text is structured, the genre of the text, and the features of the text, to developing strategies to figure out what's happening if they misunderstand the text. They learn how to support kids in having background knowledge and vocabulary associated with the text as well as how to support them in having discussions about text—all of which are important to help their comprehension."

Fluent reading, says Wright, takes practice. To make practicing reading fun, she teaches interns a range of instructional methods to support reading fluency and comprehension, like "reader's theater," where interns create scripts for their students based on a picture book. The children get practice reading by going over the script and they have fun acting out the script for their classmates.

"There's so much more that goes into this whole process than simply reading word by word. If all you're doing is reading word by word, you're not going to make sense of the text in the same way," says Moje. She also emphasizes that, as readers move beyond the elementary grades, literacy learning continues.

"As you progress throughout the grades, print becomes less and less accessible," says Moje. "When you start reading about mitochondria or atoms or democracy, those are words representing complex concepts. So now where are you drawing from, and how do you make sense of these texts? The more knowledge you have, the more you're going to be able to read advanced texts."

The third course, Literacy 3: Language & Composition (EDUC 405), addresses the design and enactment of engaging literacy instruction that advances the literacy learning of children in grades preK-6. This course focuses, in particular, on building students' speaking, listening, language, and composition skills and knowledge. In Literacy 3, says Cervetti, interns learn how to develop students' language skills and learn how to teach writing.

"We have a few different ways that we think about the trajectory of interns' learning," says Cervetti. "One of them is across a set of aspects of literacy development, another is working in increasingly complex educational contexts. This is the first course in which they teach a whole class lesson, and it's a whole-class writing lesson. We collect students' writing from their field classroom. We analyze that writing, we look at the standards, we figure out what's the right next step for these students. The interns develop a lesson and then go out and they teach the lesson. They record themselves in the classroom, and then reflect on their teaching. It's a semester-long project where they're learning an assessment, instruction, and reflection cycle."

When Cervetti teaches the course, she actively models certain skills and strategies for teaching literacy for her graduate students. The students then practice these methods with each other. "We can't practice everything in the field in this highly guided way, so we practice some things together," she explains. "We watch videos of expert teachers enacting these practices with children. We analyze students' writing. We engage in centers—a common activity they'll see in elementary classrooms. We also explore different kinds of resources for teaching, like digital resources."

The final course in the literacy series, Literacy 4: Teaching Language, Literacy, and Academic Content to Diverse Learners (EDUC 407), revisits core literacy teaching content in prior courses to deepen and hone literacy teaching practices. The focus is on teaching children how to learn academic language and content while they are developing academic English-language proficiency with an emphasis on teaching multilingual learners. During this term, their final semester in either the ELUG or ELMAC program, teaching interns work full-time in an elementary school for their student teaching placement. 

"When we're training elementary school teachers, it is very important to make sure that all of them leave understanding how important literacy is and to leave with the technical knowledge they need to teach literacy well, but also to leave with a level of enthusiasm about literacy that they can convey to children," says Duke. "For example, making sure that they get exposed to high-quality children's books is important as part of developing their enthusiasm for literacy and their knowledge of literacy instruction." After all, inspiring their students will be crucial to teachers' careers in the classroom.

Through the combination of taking the sequence of literacy courses and spending four terms working with children in schools, Marsal School-educated teachers enter the classroom as professionals prepared to manage the challenges of teaching literacy. By then they know that just like their own journey to becoming a teacher, learning to read takes a lot of instruction and a lot of practice.

"Working on literacy instruction with kindergarteners, first graders, and fourth graders as a teaching intern this year has helped me understand how literacy knowledge and skills are built over time," says Leilani Wetterau, a current undergraduate teaching intern. "All students are at different places in their literacy journey, but I got to see the progress from kindergarteners who were learning that letters have sounds to fourth graders who were learning how to create summaries of what they were reading. It was a joy to get real experience assessing and building upon students' literacy strengths and needs, and I feel very prepared to start my year of student teaching and launch my own classroom soon after that!"

Look for the second article in our series on literacy in our fall issue of Marsal Educator. Dean Elizabeth Moje and colleagues who study adolescent literacy development will elaborate on the importance of continuing to teach literacy to older learners so that they can manage all of the complex demands of more and more specialized—and more and more abstract—texts.