The Not So Simple View of Reading
On Scarborough's Rope
Dear Reader,
Few things are more paramount in an elementary school’s responsibilities than the teaching of reading, and I count it among my numerous failings during my first years in the classroom. Quite frankly, I taught reading in a haphazard way — read alouds with some sprinkling of Pinterest-endorsed phrases like “when two vowel go walking…” Like many others, I bought into a mythical view of reading where children simply learn to read once their bodies and souls are “ready.”
Unfortunately, learning to read is not an internal, organic process. It is, in the words of Gould and Hillinger, an unnatural act! We obviously do not teach reading to infants, but we know specific choices, like engaging in back and forth babbling conversations and reading books with new vocabulary, do help children learn to read when they are older. Moreover, there are specific instructional choices that support reading in the majority of children. I think often of the missed opportunities with my second graders, many of whom needed someone to help them break the code of letter-sound correspondences. I waited for the magical reading transformation to happen in them when, in reality, my students were waiting for me.
Like many teachers, I was under the misapprehension that consistent exposure to high-quality read alouds would adequately help students learn how to read. In my first years, I gobbled up any book about reading instruction: The Daily Five, Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study, and The Next Step in Guided Reading by Jan Richardson were by far the most influential. It wasn’t until I worked at a school that used a normed reading assessment system (STEP and F&P) that I began to see where so many of those books missed a pretty big point. My students who struggled with reading weren’t struggling because they substituted “is” for “was” or “pony” for “horse.” They struggled because when they saw the word horse, they didn’t know what to make of the “or” or the lingering “e” at the end of the word. No matter how many times I coded an error for “meaning” or “syntax,” the error was always the same: students misread the letter-sound correspondences on the page. Often, students with wonderful inferences during a read aloud discussion struggled to do the same type of thinking during independent reading. They couldn’t dig into the deeper ideas of a text until they first broke the alphabetic code.
This week’s newsletter focuses on Scarborough’s Rope, which is used to represent the “Simple” view of reading. Of course, there is nothing simple about reading and writing. It is perhaps the most remarkable of human inventions, and teachers bear a great honor and responsibility when they share it with young children.
Have a great week!
Erin
First Things First: Finland
Unlike Finnish, where the written representation of a sound is highly consistent, English has multiple letter representations for the same sound, especially vowels. There are three ways to write the short a sound (æ) and twelve ways to write the long a sound (eɪ.)
Whenever discussions about reading instruction in the United States arises, someone inevitably makes a version of this point:
But kids in Finland don’t start formal reading instruction until they are 7. Why is everyone making such a big deal if kids can learn to read when they’re older?
The reason kids in Finland learn to read later is because Finnish is a different language than English, and those differences have significant instructional implications. For instance, learning to decode words in Finnish is much, much easier. Timothy Shanahan explains it well in a 2015 blog post:
“Finnish is reputedly the easiest language to learn to read (something I was writing about in the 1970s). The relationship between spelling and pronunciation is highly consistent, making it especially easy and quick to learn to decode. Because the country is so small, there are not dialectical differences to complicate things. All things being equal, a Finnish child can learn to read Finnish much faster than an American child can learn to read English.”
Unlike Finnish, where the written representation of a sound is highly consistent, English has multiple letter representations for the same sound, especially vowels. There are three ways to write the short a sound (æ) and twelve ways to write the long a sound (eɪ.)
Much has been written mocking the absurdity of English spelling. Here’s one of my favorite examples, which has been attributed to a number of different authors:
I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough.
Others may stumble but not you,
On hiccough, through, lough and through.
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps.
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead--it's said like bed, not bead. For goodness's sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat:
They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there,
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there's dose and rose and lose--
Just look them up--and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart.
Come, come, I've hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Man alive, I'd mastered it when I was five.
Throughout American history, there have been movements to change standardized spelling to make it more accessible, and, quite frankly, sensible. None of these movements have been particularly successful, and no matter how ridiculous adults find the English language, young children in English-speaking countries will still need to learn how to read and spell in English; moreover, the deep and complicated orthography of English means most children will need systematic phonics instruction in order to learn to read and spell well.
Check out this primer created by Amplify, the curriculum developer, if you’re interested in reading a clear and concise explanation of the decoding process. Quick disclaimer: I have never used or reviewed Amplify curriculum materials, so I cannot say anything definitive about their quality. All the same, the primer is a useful starting place to learn more about how humans learn to read.
Scarborough’s Rope
So often, the rhetoric of the “reading wars” misrepresents the battle lines in early literacy. While it is true that most young children require explicit instruction in phonemes and phonics, they also need instruction that broadens their vocabulary and equips them to make inferences. Without any one of these capacities, skilled reading is out of reach.
Scarborough, H. S. (2001). Connecting early language and literacy to later reading (dis)abilities: Evidence, theory, and practice. In S. Neuman & D. Dickinson (Eds.), Handbook for research in early literacy (pp. 97–110). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
To paraphrase Dr. Jane Oakhill, Scarborough’s rope is a product, not a sum. Reading is not the sum of language comprehension and word recognition; the skills combine to create a new, unique ability: skilled reading.
As I mentioned in my anecdote above, the primary challenge in a young child’s reading development is their ability to map sounds onto written representations. But there are children who quickly learn the alphabetic cipher and read quite beautifully. These are the children who seem perfectly proficient until you ask them any questions about what they read.
So often, the rhetoric of the “reading wars” misrepresents the battle lines in early literacy. While it is true that most young children require explicit instruction in phonemes and phonics, they also need instruction that broadens their vocabulary and equips them to make inferences. Without any one of these capacities, skilled reading is out of reach.
Proponents of “balanced literacy” claim that their approach does just that, but this claim doesn’t quite hold up once you evaluate balanced literacy materials. Some of the issues with balanced literacy materials include: emphasizing leveled texts rather than decodable texts; teaching students guessing strategies when they struggle to decode a word; separating reading and writing instruction. This idea of balanced literacy seems right, but the materials created under that banner do not measure up to the evidence.
Conclusion
The simple view does not and should not lead to reductive, one-size-fits-all instruction.
Often, the combination of word recognition and language comprehension is referred to as “the simple view” of reading, or SVR. But even one glance at Scarborough’s rope mocks the use of the word “simple.” Reading teachers know firsthand that reading instruction is far from simple. Even with consistent, systematic phonics and a rich curriculum where students build their language comprehension, each child has unique strengths and areas of growth. The simple view does not and should not lead to reductive, one-size-fits-all instruction.
If anything, the simple view does offer a helpful framework to evaluate and reconsider our instructional materials. Over the years, I have worked with a number of struggling readers who needed decodable texts to support their development, and I had to depart from the school provided leveled texts in order to prioritize decodables during a reading lesson. I have also worked with students who needed a concerted focus on their vocabulary because new chapter books contained too many unfamiliar words. As a result, I intentionally revise my ELA curriculum to include more vocabulary exposure and practice. SVR is a model that equips me to make evidence-supported professional decisions for my students.
In the next few weeks, I’ll dig into the specific strands of Scarborough’s rope. Until then, check out some of the articles and podcasts linked in the “Extra Credit” section.
Extra Credit:
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” - Jorge Luis Borges
Check out Amplify’s Science of Reading podcast interview with Dr. Jane Oakhill, who provides an excellent overview of Scarborough’s Rope, especially on the language comprehension end.
Emily Hanford’s reporting on reading instruction in the United States is essential for every elementary school teacher, and even teachers of older students. They are available as articles and as podcasts.
For those of you who want to get to nitty gritty stuff, here you go:
What Research Tells Us About Reading Instruction by Rebecca Treiman
Memorable Quote: “For many children, what is hard about learning to read is understanding that the marks on the page represent units of their language and figuring out the code by which they do so. This is the unnatural part of reading. It is particularly unnatural when the marks represent individual speech sounds, as in alphabetic writing systems. Adults who know how to read and write an alphabet find it obvious that spoken words are composed of sounds. We can easily judge that bean begins with the same sound as bat and that went includes the same “n” unit that name does. But these things are not obvious to preliterate children, illiterate adults, or adults who are literate in a nonalphabetic writing system.”
Ending the Reading Wars by Anna Castles, Kathleen Rastles, Kate Nation
Memorable Quote: “If left to their own resources, what hypotheses will preliterate children form about print and its relationship to sound and meaning? That is, on exposure to printed words, will children naturally induce the basic alphabetic principle that symbols represent sounds? If not, what is required for them to do so? These were the questions asked by Byrne and colleagues in a detailed series of experiments on preschool children between the ages of 3 and 5 years (Byrne, 1992; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1989, 1990; for a review, see Byrne, 2005). The experimenters used a transfer of training paradigm: Children who knew no letter names were taught to read aloud pairs of written words, such as fat and bat. Subsequently, they were challenged with a transfer task in which they were shown, for instance, the written word fun and then asked whether the word was “fun” or “bun.” The results were clear: Across more than 80 preschool children who participated in the various experiments, virtually none succeeded on the transfer task. When left to their own devices, the children showed no evidence of inducing the alphabetic principle.”