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.
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:
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:
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.
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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.
Thank you, again.
It is very difficult to understand this post. While it provides many references, which is great in itself, the content summary is lacking. For instance, the statement that “neuroscience is still far from being prescriptive” doesn’t offer much to work with. There could have been a more effective way to summarise the links provided.
When I reviewed Mark Seidenberg’s PPT, I found a lot of familiar lines already discussed in the literacy literature, none of which were particularly novel or insightful. Why not pose some questions instead of reiterating the same old ideas? For example, consider this: If learning to read isn’t natural, how have so many people learned it? Is language learning more natural? After all, it’s not as if we all possess a Shakespearean command of our respective first languages.
Another question to ponder: If neuroimaging doesn’t distinguish between the phonological processing of a decoding model of reading and the graphophonic processing of a meaning-centred model, what else might this suggest? Or perhaps they were looking for the wrong things? The questions you mention here that SOR is supposed to investigate seem somewhat outdated, which further complicates our understanding of the neuroimaging findings.
I was also looking for connections between these ideas about “reading” and the Australian Curriculum, but I couldn’t find any, as if the curriculum’s considerations were separate from the concerns of “how to learn to be literate.” Are they? In trying to simplify, we might actually be complicating matters.
kind regards
Ania Lian
CDU
Thanks Aina, as you can imagine writing about complex issues in a Blog post can be limiting and the additional links are designed to enable the reader to engage in wider reading on topics that may interest them. In an academic piece we would provide greater analysis and discussion and include citations.
Indeed, the neuroimaging findings about the brain and reading have not yet resulted in a clear, definitive approach to teaching reading. Tierney and Pearson, in their review of neuroimaging research, questioned the extent to which neuroscience can offer discrete and unfettered conclusions about literacy learning. See https://literacyresearchcommons.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Fact-checking-the-SoR.pdf
Steven Strauss, a neurosurgeon with a Ph.D. in linguistics, may be someone you would like to follow up on as he is a neurosurgeon with a PhD in linguistics.
Strauss, S. L. (2014). The political economy of dyslexia. Monthly Review, 66(4), 35-35. https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-066-04-2014-08_4
Strauss, S. L., Goodman, K. S., & Paulson, E. J. (2009). Brain research and reading: How emerging concepts in neuroscience support a meaning
construction view of the reading process. Educational Research and Review, 4(2), 021–033.
Your point about the Australian Curriculum is important. Noting that the curriculum clearly advocates for children to be taught to draw on a range of sources when reading, including the graphophonic, semantic and syntactic information available. This is an indicator in the Foundation curriculum, which clearly identifies reading as more than deciphering the print on the page. Instead, ACARA emphasises meaning-making and provides guidance for using a range of texts in the classroom, even with children at the earliest stages of reading.
Hi Martina,
I truly appreciate your effort to respond. It used to be standard practice for blog authors to engage with responses—that’s part of what makes it a blog. Unfortunately, it seems that this courtesy was largely abandoned after COVID, almost as if there was a causal link.
Regarding the Australian Curriculum, its primary focus in literacy is not on the integration of “graphophonic, semantic, and syntactic information”, but rather on how the methods employed support the General Capabilities. Gilbert’s (2017) argument that these capabilities are not well conceptualised is less a critique of the Curriculum itself and more a call for educators to make informed connections.
I briefly reviewed the references in Tierney and Pearson’s book and the book itself, and while they rightly conclude that no single discipline can provide all the answers, the same logic should apply to linguistics, correct? The key question, then, isn’t where to look for answers but rather what questions to ask in order to connect relevant fields. As I read Tierney and Pearson, I find myself stuck in 20th-century concepts (which makes it difficult to read for me), with more recent insights either overlooked or, in the case of the Damasio & Immordino-Yang research team, minimised. I think that the future of literacy research lies in pushing the boundaries of imagination and fostering stronger cross-disciplinary connections. But are we up for it?
kind regards
Ania Lian
CDU