Early Literacy - The Science of Reading

According to Gough and Tunmer (1986) and Hoover and Gough (1990), the two most important components of reading are the ability to decode the written word and the ability to comprehend the language of text.

The orthographic processing system is on the left side of the brain, which serves language and is wired to the language centers. This area -- the “brain’s letterbox” (Dehaene, 2009 - 2013) -- is specialized for processing printed words, but not any other visual stimuli such as objects or faces.

Ehri’s phases of word-reading development (Ehri, 1996, 2014; Ehri & Snowling, 2004) derive from multiple experiments conducted over many years. Ehri has shown that the ability to recognize many words “by sight” during fluent reading depends on phonemic awareness and the ability to map phonemes to graphemes.

Reading is accomplished with letter-by-letter processing of the word (Raynor, Foorman, Perfetti, Pesetsky, & Siedenberg, 2001). Fluent readers perceive each and every letter of print. Printed word recognition depends on fast, accurate orthographic mapping or matching of letters and letter sequences to sounds of the spoken word.

The Four-Part Processing Model for Word Recognition (Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989; Seidenberg, 2013) is supported by modern brain science. In the Four-Part Processing Model, the phonological processing system is distinct from the orthographic processing system. Students need to be taught speech sounds and print patterns and then how orthography maps to speech. In contrast to this research-based model, the Three-Cueing Systems Model suggests readers depend on syntax and semantics to guess unknown words.

Hollis Scarborough, an eminent developmental psychologist and reading researcher, depicted the attainment of fluent reading as the progressive interweaving of strands or subskills in a rope (2001). Each domain of the Simple View of Reading -- language comprehension and word recognition-- includes strands that are definable, measurable, and somewhat independent.

Kilpatrick (2015) argues that there are three levels of skill sin phonological awareness: early phonological awareness, basic phonemic awareness, and advanced phonemic awareness. Assessment and instruction in all levels of skill are important for helping struggling readers and spellers at all grade levels.

One of the most well-established findings of educational research is that reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge are highly correlated with each other, and that knowledge of individual word meanings accounts for as much as 50-60 percent variance in reading comprehension (Adlof & Perfetti, 2014; Stahl & Nagy, 2006). While the Reading Rope indicates that other factors are important in reading comprehension, vocabulary is the most important single factor once students have learned the alphabetic code.

Charles Perfetti (2007) used the term lexical quality to describe the nature of a stored word image. A high-quality representation of a word in memory enables orthographic mapping better than a partial or poorly elaborated word image.

A good reader develops an overall representation of the text as it progresses. Some authors have called this a mental model (Johnson-Laird, 1983) or a situation model (Kintsch, 1998) of the text. The processes of reading described in the Reading Rope are all brought into play to build the mental model.