Noella Mackenzie and Martina Tassone explore the Science of Reading (SoR) in this fourth post to celebrate Book Week. What we’ve covered so far:

One: How to find your way through the reading jungle

Two: What really works for readers and when

Three: What is the Simple View of Reading?

What do people mean when they talk about the science of reading?

The terms ‘science of reading’ or ‘Science of Reading’ are often mentioned in media reports. Where have these terms come from and what do they really mean?  The science of reading (sor) as a term has been used for more than 200 years to describe reading science or reading knowledge. The  term has no single definition and is currently used in different ways by different stake-holders.   

The sor, (without capital letters) as a “corpus of objective investigation and accumulation of reliable evidence about how humans learn to read and how reading should be taught”. This sor is a rich, and constantly growing source of knowledge, a virtual library of research into reading. It has been contributed to by countless researchers from many different disciplines, with various different methodological approaches and a range of findings related to; 

• what happens when we read, 
• why some people find it hard to learn to read, and
• the success or otherwise of different instructional approaches with different groups of learners. 

Reading research includes; 

• typically developing learners, 
• learners who find learning to read difficult, 
• learners who are learning to read English as extra language or dialect, and 
• adult learners. 

Should it be the Science of Teaching Reading?

In 2021, the construct  was expanded to the Science of Teaching Reading. Others have argued in 2024 that we should refer to the integration of science of teaching reading AND science of teaching writing. 

The term Science of Reading (SoR, with capital letters) is often used to refer to, or give strength to, approaches to reading instruction that privilege or prioritise synthetic phonics, Structured Literacy (SL) (International Dyslexic Association), or the Simple View of Reading (SVR). SoR has been identified as having a focus on assessed reading proficiency as the primary goal of reading instruction.

Some schools publicise that they are SoR schools and sometimes advertise for teachers who can ‘teach’ the SoR.  Some professional learning providers and commercial programs also identify with being informed by the SoR. 

This SoR, is ‘characterised by a narrow theoretical lens, an abstracted empiricism, and uncritical inductive generalisations derived from brain-imaging and eye movement data sources’.

It has been argued that ‘neuroimaging does not distinguish the phonological processing of a decoding model of reading from the graphophonic processing of a meaning-centred model’.

The practical wisdom of teachers

SoR activists often criticise teachers’ knowledge and any approaches that don’t align with SoR.  But Dehaene, often quoted by SoR advocates as providing the answers for how to teach reading based upon brain scans, suggests the practical wisdom of teachers has an important role to play in the day-to-day decisions of what different children may need. He sums up his concerns in this way:

Our own impression is that neuroscience is still far from being prescriptive. A wide gap separates the theoretical knowledge accumulated in the laboratory from practice in the classroom. Applications raise problems that are often better addressed by teachers than by the theory-based expectations of scientists.

Unfortunately, this SoR movement has led to the breaking down of reading into skills and subskills. It is taking teachers away from the bigger goal of teaching children to become readers who want to read. Some suggest that:

Instruction in sub-skills such as phonemic awareness is justified to the extent it advances the goal of reading, not for its own sake. . . Time spent jumping through PA hoops could instead be spent on activities that expand the knowledge that supports comprehending texts of increasing complexity and variety

Is the ‘science of reading’ settled? 

In the last decade alone, over 14,000 peer reviewed journal articles have been published that included the keyword reading based on a PsycINFO search. Our knowledge related to reading is not settled. It  is “ever evolving, at times circuitous, and not without controversy”. Other researchers also question the notion of settled science.

The ‘artful implementation of pedagogies and interventions that close the circle – from scientific findings translated into practical applications in education and back to addressing problems in education as impetus for evidence-informed theorizations of learning’. This has not happened with some of the studies that come under the banner of SoR. 

What are these findings really?

Findings from laboratory studies are not tested in mainstream classrooms, before being hailed as miraculous, and studies that focused on students with learning difficulties, are not tested on students without learning difficulties before being heralded as the perfect way to teach all students. This is akin to a medication that has helped control nausea in a particular group of patients with a specific illness, being prescribed to the general population to prevent or treat nausea, without clinical trials. 

Our next post will tease out the terms structured literacy, whole language and balanced literacy. 

Noella Mackenzie is an adjunct associate professor at Charles Sturt University. Her areas of research and expertise include the teaching and learning of literacy. Martina Tassone is a senior lecturer in teacher education at the University of Melbourne. Her research interests include literacy teaching, learning and assessment in the early years of schooling.