Dr. Reid Lyon The Science of Learning to Read and the Art of Teaching February 20,
1999
Lecture Transcripts Scott Flemming: At the Schwab Foundation for Learning we value
research based inquiries into how students learn to read, why some students struggle to
learn to read, and how we as parents and educators and other professionals can support
children who struggle to learn to read. We also value researchers who are committed to
confronting the enormous challenge of translating research into practice. We have with us
this morning an extraordinary scientist and leader who has made this commitment. Dr.
Reid Lyon has devoted his life to confronting head on the epidemic which faces a nation
in which 20-30% of our children, close to 15 million kids, struggle with reading.
His message is one of hope that 95% of students in America can learn to read at grade
level if, as he says, we get to them early and with the right stuff. Much of today will be
spent discussing the right stuff. As an aside, as I was preparing this introduction last night
as I was putting my 10 month old to bed, we spun through Good Night Moon a couple of
extra times just to make sure that we were getting an extra piece of reading in last night.
His message is also one of urgency. Seventy-five percent of students who struggle to read
at age 9 face a lifetime of hardship in reading and too often in lives outside of school. His
message is one of reconciliation. As we move beyond the debilitating fight for the
supremacy of one approach to reading over another, in order to pose a more powerful and
ultimately more important question, which approaches for which child at which stage of
development? Over the years Dr. Lyon's message has guided much of our thinking about
reading and about learning differences at the Schwab Foundation for Learning. We have
an enormous respect for his passionate commitment to research based inquiries into
reading, regardless of whether or not it matches the popular sentiment of the time or the
place. His job title is longer than my job description. Dr. Reid Lyon is a
research psychologist and serves as the Chief of Child Development in the Behavior
Branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development within the
National Institutes of Health, and I thank my reading teachers for allowing me the ability
to read that. He also serves as the Director of Research Programs and Reading
Development and Disorders, Reading Disabilities, Language Development and
Disorders, and Cognitive Neuroscience. It is my privilege to introduce to you our friend
and our trusted advisor, Dr. Reid Lyon.
Dr. Lyon: Thank you very much. Good morning. I've never been introduced by David
Letterman before. Scott Flemming, thank you very much and also thanks to Chuck
Schwab whose compassion for kids and learning and teaching and so on is
insurmountable to Alexa Culwell and very much to Marcy Johnson who has organized
this with her staff and done a wonderful job. I'm delighted to be here. It's going to be a
fairly brisk morning where I'll try to discuss with you a good deal of information. What
I'd like to have you leave with are some ideas about what you can do tomorrow and the
next day with kids at every level of development; how you can help them learn to read
better whether they're just out of the womb or whether they are in kindergarten, first
grade, or whether they're in high school because that's what's going to face us in the years
to come. I'll be bringing you a lot of good news as Scott said. There's also some not so
good news. The good news is we're learning a lot, don't know everything clearly, but it's
tough to get what we know into practice. It's going to require your efforts to help us do
that.
Good news and bad news reminds me a bit of where I come from. Many of you may not
know what the National Institutes of Health are or where they're located. We're located in
Bethesda, Maryland, which is outside the beltway from Washington, D.C. Washington,
D.C. has been in the news lately and it's basically geographically 30 square miles
surrounded by reality, and I'm in that part of the reality. Actually, Bethesda is in
Maryland and it has geographically two shores. I don't know if you all know that; an
eastern shore and a western shore. The western shore is more the beltway thing and the
eastern shore is crabs and oysters and chickens.
We've got a fellow out there by the name of Frank Purdue who raises chickens and he
sells them across the eastern seaboard. I don't know what your chicken person is out here,
Tyson probably or something like that, but they are doing very well economically and his
marketing people thought that they should give some money to a worthy cause. So Mr.
Purdue asked his marketing folks what cause would that be where he could do some
good, and they said, "Well why not the Catholic Church? It's very large, it has a lot of
people, they do wonderful things, and it's by definition universal". So he said okay and
decided to go to Rome to meet with the Pope. In doing that he said, Your Holiness, Frank
Purdue Chicken from the eastern shore of Maryland would like to donate $50 million to
the Catholic church. Of course the Pope was ecstatic because they could do so much with
that. Frank Purdue said, "There was one small request we do have. You know in the
Lord's Prayer where it says, 'give us our daily bread', could you just tweak that a little bit
and say 'give us our daily chicken'?". Well, of course, the Pope was extremely upset and
Purdue saw this and said, "$75 million". The Pope then said he was even more upset and
said he was trying to buy the church. He said, "Well how about $100 million?," and the
Pope had to think about that. He said, "My goodness, we could do so much with it. I tell
you what, let me talk to my college of cardinals and I'll get back to you, but he had his
mind made up. When he got in front of his cardinals he said "Gentlemen, I have some
good news and some bad news. The good news is that Frank Purdue Chicken of the
eastern shore of Maryland wants to donate $100 million to the church". Of course, the
cardinals were overjoyed because of the hospitals, churches, and schools to which so
much good could be done. What could possibly be the bad news? The Pope said, "Well,
the bad news is that we just lost the Wonder Bread account."
I'm going to talk to you fairly briskly to get to the practical stuff about a research program
that's been around a long time. The National Institute of Child Health and Human
Development is your federal biomedical research arm that's part of the NIH where the
NIH also houses the Cancer Institute, the Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and many
others. We are charged, as are all the Institutes, with protecting the health and welfare of
our nation's children. In that context, people frequently ask me and others why is it that
the NIH and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development put so much
resource and investment into the study of learning and reading and other things
associated with learning. The reason is, particularly vis-à-vis reading, if children do not
learn to read, it not only constitutes an educational problem it constitutes a public
health issue. The reason being, particularly in society as we look at it today, the
importance of literacy far surpasses anything else we can give to children except their
lives.
We've done a very good job of eradicating most of the disease entities that have stricken
children down over the years. My institute has discovered ways to eradicate hemopholus
influenza; it's completely gone from the planet. That was the major cause of retardation
of a biological nature, prior to its eradication. So as we look at how children develop,
what helps them lead healthy and full lives and become successful as adults, reading and
their ability to negotiate what they read in a facile way is critical. As Scott pointed out,
the job that we have been trying to do over the last several years is threefold. The job is
fairly clear. Number one, we have to understand what it takes to read. How do children
learn to read? What are the skills? What are the abilities? What are the environments?
What are the teaching interactions that help develop the complex skills that integrate
reading and reading comprehension. As Scott also mentioned, an underestimate of the
number of kids having difficulties in schools today is probably 20-30%, but all of you
who work with children and measure their progress probably note very quickly that when
you're measuring anyone with a reading measure and they score let's say at the 40th or
50th percentile, that still does not constitute very strong reading. It's fairly rare for
someone reading at that level to actually read for pleasure. Be that as it may, the most
crucial job in front of us is to better understand how we can help kids at the earliest
possible time develop the skills so that their reading comprehension is equivalent to their
capabilities; that's our job. But to be able to comprehend what one reads, we have to go
down a fairly complex road to see what goes into that. So I'm going to be talking about
these three questions today and the research that we've done to try to understand these
three questions. The good news is that a lot of it is somewhat practical and we can apply
it tomorrow. The studies that I'll be talking about at the NIH are relatively unique in
their scope and design. A lot of the reasons the studies are designed the way they are
build clearly on the mistakes we've made in the past; particularly me. One mistake I made
in the early seventies when I began to try to understand what goes wrong with kids who
don't learn to read easily was I studied children fairly late in their career; around 10, 11,
12 years of age who weren't reading well. The job that I was trying to do was figure out if
certain characteristics of those kids would predict their response to certain kinds of
teaching methods. I didn't get very far and one reason was that by the time a youngster is
10, 11, or 12 years of age and hasn't learned to read very well, their opinion of reading is
not the highest that you would want. Their opinion of themselves is not great,
their opinion of people trying to teach them something that's extraordinarily difficult is
less than optimal, and so on. It's simply too late to figure out things. Even if something
had worked with 10, 11, and 12 year old kids I wouldn't have known why. I wouldn't
have known if it worked because of some things that youngsters had previously in
their academic tenure or whatever. You just can't control these factors in a very
complicated research situation. So the studies that you'll hear me talk about today are
studies that, in the main, start to look at children before they ever enter school at 5 years
of age. We're moving backward now in the next series of studies. The reason being if we
start at 5 years of age and then longitudinally follow the kids over time we'll be able to
account for more factors that contribute to their development and we can understand
better what works, what doesn't work, where does it work, under what conditions, and so
forth. The second big mistake I made was to study children identified as learning
disabled. We were studying learning disabled children in several states and many of you
who work with learning disabled children or that concept know that the definition
sometimes leaves something to be desired. That was clearly true in my research case
where we were studying children in Vermont who, as they moved to Kentucky, would be
cured just by the move. So you know what I'm talking about. Another characteristic of
many of the studies I'll talk about today is that the children are not selected because they
have been identified as this or this. The reason being is because people identify things
differently across geographic locations, across professions. So children enter the studies
that we'll be discussing today from the population; they're generally population
based. We'll sample 5 year olds from the general population at large so that all ethnicities,
all races, all IQ bands above 75, and so on, all factors that might impinge on a kid's
learning are covered. So this takes some hefty investment and the program is well
supported. In this research context there is no way that one study, no matter how
powerful that study is, should determine what we do the next day. Educational research,
reading research is far too complex to rely on one of anything. There are far too many
factors that we can't control in doing this work. Within that context, we try to carry out
studies at many, many sites around the country where the investigators are using common
measures, sometimes common treatment protocols, but then doing their own thing as it
were; their own site specific kinds of research. There are 42 sites now operating in North
America and some of their names are up here. So you can see the range of the projects
that are moving along. We also study quite a few kids overseas because one critical
question that we're faced with is what is it about the nature about an
alphabetic orthography, better known as the English language, that may require different
teaching or different learning mechanisms than languages that are logographic in nature,
such as certain Chinese scripts. Are the processes of learning to read these more symbol
based languages different from our dynamic alphabetic languages where you learn 26
letters, a bunch of sounds, you put all that together. What goes into all of that? So we
studied across several languages, cultures, and countries and noticed that we were in
Serbo Croatia, but after we got over there they got offended by this whole language
phonics thing and went to war themselves. So we left there. We're no longer in Serbo
Croatia. There are a lot of misconceptions about the NIH research, the NICHD research,
one of which is that the program studies primarily individuals with reading difficulties or
disabilities. In all, over the years, we've studied 34,501 kids, the majority of whom are
normal readers. You can't figure out what kids have difficulties with until you can figure
out what it takes to learn to read in a facile fashion. So there's quite a few longitudinal
studies that, again, go to that first question, what does it take to learn how to read? I'm
talking about in a strong way. Then, obviously, we're looking at quite a few youngsters,
12,000 or so, who do have difficulties to try to figure out questions two and three; what
goes wrong and then what do you do about it? A lot of the work we do we have found
benefits all children, even if they do read well, and I hope I can explain some of those
common features that seem to help kids read fluently and automatically with great
interest and great comprehension as we go along. There may be some in the room
that have heard about difficulties learning to read, but have never actually seen what it
looks like. I'll take a minute here and show you three youngsters who come to us with
very strong cognitive capabilities. They're intelligent. They have all been exposed to
strong verbal interaction in the home and strong literacy interactions in the home and so
forth, but for the reasons, some of which I'll discuss today, they don't seem to be able to
negotiate reading very well. But I'd like us to at least get on a common page with respect
to what it looks like for some of our kids to not do well at the most visible educational act
they'll ever confront. Video Segment: Student: I get it on the make and river Teacher:
Okay. Student: /M/, /a/ /u/ /o/ Once there was black "uh" best and river. That was best
man. There was best man. Teacher: That needs some help with the wedding. Right
there. Dr. Lyon: She wanted to get out of there. Marjorie Potts has done some wonderful
jobs taping kids and talking to them over time and so forth. These were kids in our
Connecticut sample that came from Connecticut at that time at 5 years of age and in this
particular film they're 11 years of age. This was not an interventions study that we were
doing in Connecticut. The job of Ben and Sally Shaywitz in this particular study, who
will be coming to talk with you all, was to figure out how many kids like this are in the
population and what do they look like. So this is part of the group of youngsters who do
not learn to read well despite having a lot of strengths going for them. The middle
youngster there that you saw is the daughter of a radiologist and a biochemist with
133 IQ who takes 22 seconds to read the word sweet. The other kids have had enough
exposure to language and literacy and are strongly cognitively robust, but still, as you
saw, have a difficulty that most children who present with reading problems show us slow, laborious, inautomatic, dysfluent word recognition. As basic as that sounds, I know
it's not romantic - slow, laborious, inefficient word recognition. Now we can take the
book away from each of those three kids, read them what they were trying to read, and
they'll talk to us all day long about main idea, about inference, about how it relates
to them, but when they have to pull print off the page by a reading they have a bottleneck.
So the data do not come in well and they spend so much time trying to get the data off the
page that the cognitive resources that they should bring to bear to relate what's coming in
to what they know is clearly insufficient. You only have so much memory. You only
have so much attention. Reading, again, sorry to be not so romantic, is a skill, a set of
skills, a set of complex skills. There's no skill that any of us in this room have attempted
to learn whether it's piano playing, basketball, art, or whatever it may be, that if in fact
you are hesitant and inarticulate on any step you are going to like to do and you're going
to do it well. It's just not going to be there. That's why the major in the reading research
program is to bring all of the children we can up to very strong
comprehension capabilities, the ability to make meaning at the highest level of their
capability. To get to that particular goal requires a number of other skills that if not
accomplished will result in what you just saw on the screen. The question is, how do we
help youngsters like this? What are the kinds of things we can do at different stages of
their development to promote rapid automatic decoding and word recognition so that
comprehension becomes available to them? Now, as we pointed out earlier and Scott
mentioned in his introduction, at least 20% of our population, 10 million kids, show us
this particular phenotype, what it looks like, and probably more. We study kids below the
30th percentile in the intervention studies, but we could study people below the 50th
percentile in the intervention studies because, again, if you don't read easily in a facile
way, in an automatic way, it's not going to be something you generally deploy for
either pleasure or for learning. At any rate, whether you're looking at 10, 15, 20 million
individuals, one is too many. Now some of the good news is, as Scott mentioned, if we
can bring to bear what we know about what it takes to read, what goes wrong, and what
to do about it, I'll say again what he said, we can bring about 94% of our population of
kids with reading difficulties generally up to the average range. The bad news is we are
not doing well with kids who are reading below the 4th, 5th, and 6th percentile; kids that
traditionally have been identified as severely learning disabled or dyslexic. We're not
doing well with that. The things we're using in all of the intervention studies I'll
be talking to you about seem not to have the power we want with kids who are extremely
deficient in this one aspect of their development despite the fact that they can show us a
mosaic of strengths around that. So I have to just say we're sorry about that. We're trying
to figure out what it takes, when it takes, and how to do it to be able to reach everybody.
Still, the positive thing is that if you're looking at 20 or 30% of the population with
difficulties and we can help of that population all but 6%, we're doing pretty darn good,
at least for the moment. What does it take to learn to read? There's stuff up here you're
not going to be able to read yourself. In fact, the smaller print is there just to again
reinforce the idea that no one study ever can be used to influence teaching and policy. It
takes a lot of convergence of evidence when you're not working in a very controlled and
investigative domain, and educational settings aren't, classrooms aren't. So question
number one, what does it take to learn how to read? With amazing convergence we know
that it takes this. It takes the ability for our children or our adults to understand that
the words they hear when they're listening and speaking are actually composed of smaller
sounds. That's called phoneme awareness. It's the flavor of the month jargon wise. It is no
doubt necessary for individuals to learn to read an alphabetic language like English, but it
is in no way sufficient in and of itself. It's a tough concept to really put your hands
around, this phoneme awareness stuff, because it's mixed up with other terms like
phonological processing and so forth. Let me just help clear that away right now. When
we're talking about phonemes we're talking about segments of sounds, small units of
sounds. Phonological processing, this will bore some of you but for those of you who get
inundated with these terms all the time, phonological processing is the supraordinance,
the overarching term that means you can segment by syllable or sound. So if you do
backyard and you ask the youngster to say the big parts of backyard and the kid goes
"back" "yard", that kid is segmenting by syllable. That's not phoneme awareness yet.,
That's phonological; it's broader. Phoneme awareness is when we say how many sounds
do you hear in the word pet, /p/ /e/ /t/, and that kind of thing. So a smaller level and in
fact the most important in our language. Now why is it important? Phoneme awareness is
not phonics. Phoneme awareness provides the foundation for phonics. You can teach
phonics all day long, but if kids do not understand that the words they hear and that they
use are composed of smaller sounds, phonics will come and go without much success.
Why is that? First let me try to make sure I can explain what phoneme awareness is to
you and why it's hard. When you and I are speaking right now, you don't see any print
relative to what I'm saying. We're just speaking. If I took one word out of the sentence
I would say, like the cat went up the tree, and ask how many sounds do you all hear in the
word cat, the majority of folks who teach reading would say three, /c/ /a/ /t/, but I ask
how many sounds do you hear in the word "cat" and you only hear one sound. That's all
that can come by the ear. Why? Nature has given us this verbal mechanism to
communicate efficiently. So the minute any word that comes out of my mouth is
produced, like "cat", the minute the /c/ sound is folded and molded by my articulators, the
/a/ and the /t/ sound fold right up into it. So it doesn't come by the ear in a /c/ /a/ /t/ linear
sequence, it comes by the ear in an acoustic bundle that the brain must then pull out the
sound. So it's not as easy as it sounds. Like some kids play the piano more easily, some
kids play basketball more easily, some kids come to mathematics more easily, some kids
paint and draw more easily, some of our kids and adults pull these sounds out adeptly
without much trouble at all. A lot don't. This phoneme awareness stuff is distributed just
like any skill. Some kids who don't get it well are genetically predisposed not to get it
well, but that's a fairly small number. Because it's so abstract, this sound stuff, what's a
/b/ for example? A lot of kids who aren't read to, who don't get much practice with
language or literacy interactions after birth to five don't know what the job is. In fact the
kids most at risk for not learning to read are not learning disabled kids, they are children
whose socioeconomic characteristics don't provide a lot of books in the home or
parents who can spend time reading and interacting verbally. It's not a racial, ethnic
predictor, it's an SES predictor. What happens when you don't talk with kids, you don't
play with language, you don't read them stories and so forth from zero to when they start
school and beyond, is they don't understand what the job is. They don't have any
awareness, and this sound stuff is completely out of bounds. Phoneme awareness is tough
for anybody to understand because again people don't know that when we speak, all of
the sounds that have to be used in learning to read are obscured in this seamless language
of ours and it is the brain that pulls it out. So why is it important? Well because
when you're reading any language that has a code to it, whether it's Spanish or English or
Serbo Croatian or French, what reading and writing does is represent the language that
you speak. In our language, it does that by 26 letters and 40-44 sounds called phonemes.
The job of the beginning reader is to learn how all of those can be matched up together in
different situations so that when a young reader comes across a word they've never seen
before, they are able to unlock it by applying the sounds to the letters. There we get to the
"f" word, that's phonics. Phoneme awareness is always assessed, and I'll show you some
film in a while about how it can be assessed with a lot of fun, but phoneme awareness is
sound. When they become linked to the letters or letter patterns that then is the alphabetic
principle. Kids begin to understand that the print in front of them actually represents
sounds and language and words and then they can go on from there. In talking about this
I have to take some time to explain these more code based things kids have to do. Then I
become a "phonicator". Phoneme awareness, the understanding, simply put that what you
hear is actually composed of smaller sounds. Some kids get it and some don't. When I
was in school I learned to read Dick and Jane, a look/say method, as they say and one that
repeats these patterns over time. It doesn't really address this phoneme awareness or this
phonics stuff. But look at all of us who, after all of that, by the end of the first grade,
you'd come across a word never shown in Dick and Jane and decode it. We had that
capability and a lot of children don't. That's what's hard for people who read
to understand. Phoneme awareness is therefore necessary but not sufficient. When we're
assessing phoneme awareness, one way to do it with the young kids is at the bottom. We
can say to a youngster, tell me some words that rhyme with the word cat. A would be
good reader at 5 or 6 years of age would say "sat" or "bat". How did that youngster do
that? Well they have to slice off the /k/ sound and replace it with a /s/ sound. The
question is how do they know where to slice it because remember "cat" doesn't have any
boundaries. So they have to have an intuitive or taught understanding that "cat" actually
has three sounds when you can't hear it. That's the way they're able to slice it off. That's
why something as simple and straightforward as rhyming is a nice window on
downstream reading development. When we would ask Michelle in the middle there, the
22 second "sweet" lady, to give us something to rhyme with cat, and you all have seen
this who work with kids, she'll say "kitty" or "dog". She doesn't get the idea. She gives
you a semantic kind of thing. So these kinds of tasks are always done without print. Any
time you show the kid print and ask about sound, you've changed it to what we call
orthography and you can't do that. So that's what phoneme awareness is in its
most practical sense; understanding that the words we use have sounds in them and you
can manipulate those sounds to slap on different letters and letter patterns. As narrow as
this phoneme stuff is, look how powerful it is. Up there is speeded word identification,
that is, how fast and accurately someone can read words. Down here is word
attack, showing kids nonsense words or words they have never seen before that can be
read. They've never seen these words before. If you look at good readers, as identified in
the blue line here, you can see that in both cases at fifth grade, blue readers are doing all
of this at ninth grade level. If you look at lousy readers, in the red depiction both top and
bottom, what you can see is they're substantially below grade level. The reason is those
are all kids who do not understand that the words they hear are composed of sounds.
That's how powerful this is with respect to downstream reading development. It is
necessary, but not sufficient. You can teach phoneme awareness all day long, but if kids
don't know how to relate that to the letters and letter patterns, the phonics aspect, it won't
do any good. Likewise, if you teach phonics all day long for some children and they
still don't get the sound idea, then we have a problem. So what do parents do, for
example, after the youngster enters the world, to promote these kinds of things? Anything
you can do verbally, linguistically to play with sounds and sing nursery rhymes and read
to your youngster, even if they are more interested in eating the book. Anything you
can do to continue to give kids this range of experiences with sound structure and words
and so forth is mentally helpful. As kids get older it's great to do rhyming things with
your preschoolers and your kindergartners. As they get older it's great to do fun games
like "Ubby Dubby" and "Pig Latin". Look what Pig Latin does. Remember when we did
that when we were kids. Like my name is Reid, and in Pig Latin it's Eidray, take the first
thing off, put it on the end, and added "ay", right? Well look how I did that. If I didn't
have phoneme awareness I couldn't have sliced the "R" off. So those kinds of things are
immensely helpful. If someone has a possibility of not having these experiences because
of socioeconomic issues, then we've got to try to figure out how to get it to a large part of
our population. What it says is, they have learned to connect letters and letter patterns to
these abstract phonemes, that's the abstract principle, and has developed decoding and
word recognition skills. This part of the reading process has probably been something
that has fueled this emotion the reading community will show you. Both phoneme
awareness and the learning of these more basic skills seems to upset people and there are
a lot of reasons for that, some probably pretty good and most not very good. I think some
of the good reasons why people get mad at this concept of phonics is that it has been
taught in the past in a pretty monotonous way in some situations. The skill and
drill concern is a concern, or it has been in the past, and I think a lot of people responded
to banging kids over the head with ditto masters and these kinds of things which seemed
to bore both the kids and teachers to tears. It was also to prescribe for a lot of people. The
problem is phonics is nonnegotiable. You can't learn to read without understanding how
to code or decode. You can't. The majority of poor readers that you'll see have difficulties
with this phoneme, phonics, or fluency level. The kids you see who can read every word
quickly and accurately, but still don't comprehend, when we check whether they're
vocabulary is squared away or we check to see whether they're actually using strategies to
comprehend, we find either one or both of those issues is out of whack. The majority of
kids you're going to see, whether they're your own or in your classroom, are going to
present to you like the three kids did on the screen, albeit in a more mild to severe
dimension. I hate to sometimes talk to people about phonics because it engenders so
much emotion, but you've got to have it. There's no way a young reader can learn to read
without applying it. To think that kids like myself who came across reading relatively
easily is unfortunately misinformation. My grandparents and parents taught me a great
deal before I even went to school. When we study kids who look to be natural readers we
go back and watch how much experience and exposure they had and the kinds of
interactions in the home they had. Parents are pretty darn good teachers. They
can highlight these different kinds of things nicely. So I'm not selling the "F" word. What
I'm saying is that in order to learn to read, to answer the first question, what do you have
to have, you have to have phoneme awareness and you have to have phonics. You can
have both of those, as necessary as they are, but they're not sufficient because if you
can't apply those skills... Dr. Lyon: ...the kids on the screen were in classrooms that felt
that kids should be able to discover those concepts on their own. Some kids appear to do
that, though not some of them. But even though they have now, at least 2 of the 3, have
established some idea about sounds in the words they hear and then apply those sounds to
letters and letter patterns. They're all slow and labored still. One problem is they didn't
start to get the right stuff until about the fourth grade. We see them now in the fifth grade
where they are having problems. What does it take to learn how to read? It takes
understanding that the words you hear are composed of sounds that will later be placed
on the symbols that are in the writing system to forge a decoding and word
recognition mechanism. You also have to be able to do it so quickly and rapidly that you
have a lot of attention and memory left over to figure out what it is that you're pulling off
the page because that's the most important thing- comprehension. These are all means to
an end. Another point of heavy contention these days is how much should the text allow
kids to practice? How much should what they read be controlled to some degree so that
the words on the page are words that reflect patterns that they've seen before? The
buzzword that engenders so much emotion is predictable versus decodable text. What
you're looking at here is the amount of recurrence of words in various texts that our
school systems buy. You can see they range from zero all the way up to one hundred.
Why would anybody want to have decodable text? Why would someone not want to have
it? Reading is a skill and like any other skill it requires practice. What's great about good
readers is they like it and they read more. What's tough with lousy readers is they don't do
it well, they hate it, and they don't read at all. You'll see that in a little bit. They've got to
have practice. Everything has to be integrated and integration of all of these different
components of reading are only pulled together by doing it. But what happens if
you've got someone like you saw on the screen struggling just with this basic coding level
stuff and they get text material that then presents words they've never seen before? No
matter how rich, no matter how wonderful, no matter how authentic no matter how
inspiring the text is, if you can't get the words into the system, it's no good. Just because
something is interesting and authentic, doesn't mean that it's going to push the kids'
motivation to overcome these bottlenecks. So how do you do this? You can't go back and
skill and drill and bang kids over the head with ditto masters and fact sheets. You've got
to create text which allows youngsters to practice over time what they're learning at a
word level and at a phoneme level and so forth in as interesting of a textual format as you
can get it. As we study what helps kids gain fluency, this speed thing, having text which
helps people practice over time what they've learned at lower layers, at higher levels of
interest seems to be critical. That does not say, I don't know why everything in this
reading stuff always has to be either/or, or is that just where I come from? Every research
study we do at the NIH as we manipulate these conditions to try to figure out what works
best for when are all carried out in a common sense environment. Let me tell you what I
mean. Let's say we're testing the effects of decodable text versus predictable text on
fluency and comprehension. Decodable text is when the elements of the text that you're
reading contain words that you have studied before and that correspond to a fairly regular
sound/symbol correspondence system. Predictable text is less controlled, based more
on interest, and built on a premise that difficulties reading a word can be offset by using
the context to predict that word. Now I'll go over that in a minute. I'm sorry I didn't do
that. All right, so when we study the effects of those kinds of text formats, the kids that
get the decodable text, as do the kids that get the predictable text, are read to by their
teachers using the most wonderful literature you can find. Because there's no way for a
laboring reader to be teaching these decoding skills, these phoneme awareness things and
so forth, without always showing them what that is going to get them down the road.
You've got to make sure children understand that reading is not phoneme awareness.
Reading is not reading words. Reading is taking wonderful language off of a page,
relating it to what you know, and learning or enjoying it. You have to have some things
to get there though. So while you're getting those things to get there that aren't the most
exciting things that one would like to do, we always have to constantly show kids the
wonders of literature and how language is used to show all kinds of things, so you read to
them. There have been more situations that I'd like to tell you about, about people who
said to me, "Well, I'm a whole language teacher" or "I'm this kind of teacher". What does
that do? It basically dumbs down the whole thing. That's a silly way to look at
things. Reading requires phoneme awareness, it requires phonics, and those are nonnegotiable. It requires speed and fluency, and to get to the speed and fluency part,
philosophy and belief systems shouldn't get in your way of helping kids practice as long
as you can provide kids at the same time and all the time with an idea of what in fact
they're learning all this for. A lot of our children simply can't discover some of these
tougher concepts on their own. If they could we would not have a lot of the difficulties in
reading that we see today. I wish they could and I'll talk about this more in detail. They've
learned to comprehend text obviously. What does it take to learn how to read?
Yes... Question or comment not miked. Dr. Lyon: I will but let me get to that. I'll clarify
all of this. Some work and some don't, so let me get to it. Comprehension is the key to
reading. What we want to do is provide kids with all of the strategies that they need to get
it in the system, like it, learn it, enjoy it, comprehend it, and so forth. We are finding
though that a lot of our kids that can read fairly well and seem to comprehend
by performance on a test don't really know some of the things that you would want them
to know. They know main ideas and they know inference, but if you ask them what the
author's point of view is they don't understand what you're asking about and so on. So a
lot of comprehension probably needs to be taught more explicitly in some cases than
other parts of comprehension and good strategic use for comprehenders might be
something we want to look at. We clearly find that when we give good readers structures
or strategies to evaluate what they're reading as they go along their comprehension moves
up dramatically from a fairly adequate level to something that's much more
adequate. Again, as simple as it sounds good reading is forged and reinforced by
opportunities to read. There's no doubt about it that if people don't practice this, or if they
haven't been exposed to the language aspects or the literacy interactions like how you
hold the book and you go left to right and so forth in preschool years, that you're going to
be a very good reader. It's a Matthew effect, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Good readers get better and lousy readers get worse over time because there is not the
practice that is required to not only maintain but to elevate a complex skill. Those of you
who do assessments of youngsters over time, let's say see the same children every three
years, will note that kids who have reading difficulties will predictably move
downward in verbal IQ as they grow older. Why? Because after generally the third grade
a great deal of the verbal concepts come in through print rather than through heavy duty
teacher interaction or oral language interaction. So we have to have obviously,
opportunities to practice. What happens is very stark. If you look at the top line, kids who
read well, kids who are reading at an independent level and they're reading quickly,
fluently, and automatically with good comprehension, will generally at about the fourth
grade be doing this. These are averages. Over a six year total, good readers read over
1,000 hours. Just contrast that quickly with what the readers on the screen will do. Even
though they look like they're reading, even though you have them sitting there attempting
to do that, a reader that I showed you on the screen will generally read one minute per
day in good, connected text, and 36 hours over a six year period. That's one of
the difficulties. Again, something we can't ignore, the lack of language and literacy
interactions from birth through the first six years strikes at the heart of what we're seeing
nationally. The majority of kids who come to us in our schools come to us, if they're at
risk for reading failure, because of a lack of strong, consistent interactions with the
language and with literacy materials in the first five years. It really does make a
difference. Again, there's a core of kids that have substantial difficulties learning how to
read even though they've been exposed to wonderful verbal interactions and high rate
literacy interactions, being read to in bed, being read to on the lap, and so forth. There is
still a large number of kids, albeit much smaller than the 30% that we're seeing
having difficulties, who are placed at risk for this. To review, what does it take to learn to
read? It takes an understanding that words are made up of sounds. It takes the application
of those sounds to the text, to the graphings, to the code. It takes the application to be
rapid and fluent and automatic at some level. It takes good comprehension strategies. It
takes an opportunity to practice over time, and it takes a good deal of foundational work
done from birth to three. People ask me, "Well hold on now. I'm teaching kids in the
sixth grade or I'm teaching 16 year olds in the ninth grade. You're telling me that we have
to foster all of these skills?" Yes. Just because a kid is 11 or 12 or a kid is 16, doesn't
mean that the same principles that provide the foundation don't have to get in. I don't
need to tell anybody in here who's teaching in middle school or high school how difficult
that is because at the end of our first grade studies we can watch kids who have had
difficulty learning these concepts begin to pull off the attempt. They don't like it. They're
embarrassed by it and the brighter they are the harder that ax falls. Much less, an 11 or 12
year old who has not been able to do this well for 4, 5, or 6 years and is expected then to
negotiate content text with skills they don't have. I never taught above the third grade
because I couldn't teach the third grade well but I could B.S. them. You can't B.S.
sixth graders and adolescents. It's an amazing task. So what we're trying to figure out
where I work is how you get all of these things that go into reading to kids who are less
than motivated and will tell you where to stick the materials. So we're working on
computer formats where they can interact in a non-threatening place where other people
aren't looking at them and so forth. There's a number of people around the country trying
to figure out how you can teach, for example adolescents, all of these basic skills, but at
the same time expand their knowledge of the Greek and Latin roots in words and to make
that interesting and age appropriate, but at the same time get all of these essential
components to them. Jane Green is trying that and there are a number of other
programs that are based upon some pretty solid research. So it doesn't take a rocket
scientist to figure out if it takes all of these things to learn how to read. Impediments in
any one or several are going to cause detriments in learning to read. If we have
to prioritize why some kids have difficulties learning to read, it's going to fall at the level
of the sound if we have to predict. For example, the best predictor of reading
comprehension is the speed and accuracy by which you read words, as unromantic as that
sounds. The best predictor of the speed and accuracy by which you read words is your
ability to understand that words are made up of these smaller components or constituents
called phonemes. There's other things that build the prediction, but in terms of the things
we can do, working on issues like this from birth onward to help kids understand these
processes can be of some help. I'm going to show you some film in a little while that
should give a pretty good picture of what it takes to do this in a fun way with kids who
are having difficulty; one of many ways you can do it. The biggest bottleneck that we
continue to see from over 200 studies overseas and in our sites here is this issue of
helping children understand these more basic conditions that they have to apply. Now the
question once we understand that and you actually find the reading community
coming back around saying yes, kids do need the "F" word. Yes, phoneme awareness,
everybody needs it. Of course people will tell you that and they don't know what
phoneme awareness is yet, but it's got that glitz to it. The question is how do you do it?
That's still where a lot of emotion is generated. Yes, kids need phoneme awareness, they
need phonics, they need fluency, they need comprehension, but how do you teach it? Of
course a lot of people still believe that you can teach it in context for everybody and that
if you take it out of context you're going to turn young human beings into Rush
Limbaugh. It goes back to that either/or thing, you know what I mean? The kid has to
discover all of this on his own. The teacher is a guide not a direct teacher and so forth and
so on. That's great for some kids, but probably not so good for other kids. So let's take a
look at those series of questions. Let me review a bit. When we talk about reading and
reading disability, reading requires an awareness of the segmental nature of speech. A
weakness in this tends to be, again, a major culprit, introducing this slow, labored
decoding and word recognition that in and of itself isn't sufficient, but clearly necessary.
If you look at it graphically, what a lot of you see in this room over your years of
experience is the scenario where children come to a text and we want that child to move
all the way to the right side and make meaning. Despite having good solid general
intelligence, good vocabulary at least initially, good reasoning, good conceptual abilities,
they're unable to deploy those particular strengths to move around this bottleneck that
seems to be related to this more basic linguistic feature called phoneme awareness,
decoding. word recognition. What do you say to kids? What do you say to Michelle?
"Michelle, use your head. Try harder." You know you can say "Michelle, does that word
make sense here? Go back and use the context or look at the picture" or something like
that. I'll talk to you in a minute here about when we study those different strategies how
some may be right and some may not be so right. So that's what our task is in many cases,
notwithstanding the fact that a lot of kids in the country can read words quickly and
accurately and still don't comprehend well. Again, the teacher or the parent's job is to
make sure #1- Is the vocabulary that's imbedded in the text being read well within the
kid's repertoire? And if it is, does that youngster integrate or combine information in a
strategic way so that they know the job is to read the words and then compare it to
hearing it? Any time you start to look at a relatively slow, labored reader, even though it
looks pretty good to you, like a 40th percentile, just realize that that lack of facility and
automaticity is going to detract from comprehension. So when you think you've got a
good reader in front of you, a lot of people say, "Well I've got these kids that can read
words really well. They come into the studies and they read about 120 words per minute".
That isn't going to do it. That's still too slow and labored even though on a Woodcock
Johnson they'll be at the 50th percentile. Speed, automaticity, fluency is so critical. Now
one of the things that has been problematic in the reading community since all of this
was born is the tendency to forge particular assumptions that guide practice and policy
and textbook production and teaching materials and professional organizations which are
never bedded. The assumptions are never tested or evaluated well. The assumptions are
carried forward by appealing to authority. So and so said this. So and so said that. In my
recent congressional testimony, Congressman Goodling asked me, he said, "Well this
can't be that a lot of these kids are having difficulties because those companies that make
the textbooks that the teachers use to teach them clearly must go through clinical trials." I
said, "You want a bridge?" He said, "You mean to tell me that we do things with children
that have not been evaluated systematically?" He was being obviously a little facetious.
Congressman Goodling was a principal, a teacher, and all of that. But textbooks are built
on assumptions. They're sold on the basis of market research not empirical, objective
research. Until five years ago no textbook had ever gone through any objective trials
to determine whether its content was more suited for a particular kind of reader than
another. Those studies are now five years old. We're starting another set. Some textbooks
don't do worth a lick and some do. So there are a lot of these assumptions. Some of them
are pretty striking. One is that learning to read is natural. I don't know if you've ever
heard that in California. In fact California would seem to be the place where it should be
born. I used to live in Santa Monica, so I can say these things. Learning to read is natural.
What that means, I suppose, the assumption apparently means that you do not have to
directly point out anything in this reading stuff, but you just conversely expose children
to context, the wonderful world of literature. zzYou read with them and to them,
you utilize a set of materials where they begin to intuit a lot of these more complex and
abstract things we've talked about already. Reading is natural. I can see how the
assumption was built. First, part of the assumption came from people going to Noam
Chomdky's work which is extremely strong and glossing off the top without reading the
content. Chompsky pointed out that you don't have to directly teach oral language,
listening and speaking, that there is an internal device that helps kids learn that. Indeed, in
every country and culture we study in our early studies like our child care studies that
start at zero years of age, we see kids all over this planet coming in the world and
using language in a very predictable way. They coo, they babble, they use single word
holophrastic speech, they link two words together and extend syntax and so on. Not only
that, but the production of the sounds, the phonemes themselves, are very similar from
Baghdad to Brooklyn to Jerusalem to Oslo to San Mateo. It's amazing. It's hard wired.
You can see the biology driving it. It's species specific, or a language is. It's ingrained in
the genome. It definitely is. Those kinds of sounds that kids don't hear in their own little
world as they grow up, drop out. But early on, every little one can produce and respond to
every sound of every language produced by every culture. It's an amazing thing, hard
wired. Reading is in no way hard wired. Reading is young evolutionarily. It doesn't have
any protoplasm that goes with it, yet that's driven genetically. Look, reading is an
arbitrary set of conventions we place on page or print to reflect how a culture feels about
its language. We use 26 letters, 44 sounds. In Scandinavian countries, they use
fewer letters and more sounds. So it's arbitrary. When we talk about the genetics of
reading disorders we're talking about the genetics of the linguistic foundation, most
notably the genetics of phonological processing which is genetically predisposed. Most
kids fortunately get it. A lot of kids don't. But it's not genetic in nature, it's because they
don't have this early exposure. They don't get a lot of practice with it. If reading were
natural, why is it that there are so many cultures on this planet that use oral language very
well with one another who have yet to devise a written language? If reading were natural,
why is it that we have so many individuals in our highly literate culture, next to Finland
or something, who still can't read? Why is it, if reading were natural, that all of these kids
who aren't exposed to parental or grandparent or caregiver interactions with language and
books and so forth, can't read? It's an assumption and it's hung around for so many years,
driven philosophically and through belief and it probably is responsible for some heavy
duty pain on the part of parents and kids and so forth. Reading is not natural. Some kids
come across those complex components I talked about earlier relatively easily. A lot do
not. You never take an instance of ease to explain what everybody should do. Why not
then take a look at Mark McGuire and figure everybody should be able to do that? An
assumption that doesn't have much to it. Now, back to the issue of predictability and so
forth. In order to develop good, fast sight word reading, we have found that that is so
integrated with the sound stuff. That is, kids who have difficulties understanding that the
language has /t/ sounds in it are also kids who have trouble memorizing words. Sight
word reading requires fluent practice and so forth and so on. Now a lot of our teaching
over the past twenty years has been directed toward helping children who can't
read words well predict the pronunciation of that word by using context, in other words,
to use the syntax or the word order or the meaning. And we've taught our teachers, I think
in some good ways, to have kids use every available piece of information to them when
they come across a word they don't know. That's okay, but you've got to understand
which of those things actually mean something and which don't. One way you can do that
is to study all kinds of good readers and see what they do. How does a good reader deal
with words they don't know yet? Do they use context? Simple question. Do good readers
who come across a word in text gloss back over the text to see if they can predict
the pronunciation of that word? No, not at all. Good readers will use context to confirm
using the "F" word. Good readers when they come across, everybody in here who reads
unfamiliar text when you come across a word you don't know, whether you know it or
not, you're going to decode that word. If it's still new or not in the vocabulary or if it's
still loosely ingrained, you're going to then use context to confirm. Now, why is this such
an important point? It's an important point because a lot of our teachers have been taught
not to deal with any kind of decoding or "F" word work, but to use the context to do all of
that so you keep it nicely running. So you never decontextualize. You never do these
fragmenting things that change kids into Rush Limbaugh. Don't ever do that. Don't
fragment. Don't isolate. Don't do this. Don't do that. Don't do this. It's based upon
an assumption that says that readers who come across words they don't know use context
to figure it out. They use context to confirm and to keep the story going. They don't use
context to figure it out. Video Segment: Teacher: If you look at the nature of reading,
you'll notice that they tend not to do it separately from the tapes. Instead reading is
guided by meaning, and if they are attending to individual words that they are doing so at
a glance and perhaps only the important ones. It turns out that through advances in
technology and a lot of serious laboratory research, of particular importance here was the
development of computer-controlled eye movement apparatuses, were we able to watch
readers moving their eyes across meaningful text when we gave them challenges. We
found that in fact skillful readers do fixate; that is, they do read virtually each and every
word of text, the big ones and the little ones. When they skip a little one it's a word like
"a" or "of". They visually process virtually every letter within each and every word and
not only that but they automatically, irrepressibly translate the print to speech as they go,
that is they sound it out. They do it so quickly, so automatically, so effortlessly, that all
the while their conscious attention, their reflective attention, their awareness can be
focused on the message of the text. It turns out to be less critical on their recognition of
the letters within the words and the translation of those letters to speech. Dr. Lyon: Those
of you who have ever heard Marilyn Adams just saw her. Marilyn is a very
good researcher and good colleague. I always ask Marilyn why she snorts helium before
she gives a talk. In last month's edition of Psychological Bulletin, which is a very
prestigious review of scientific research, is a complete review of the data to date on eye
studies like this. That's Keith Reiner's work, Justin Carpenter's work. There's over 300
studies of this phenomenon. Steve Crashin down south feels that you see this because the
apparatus keeps the eyes locked into this left right stuff. That's not true because, as you
can see, we've now developed technology which allows an unobtrusive look at what they
eyes are doing. Good readers, as Marilyn said, even if they are highly experienced, read
basically every word and they seem to be decoding it to sound even though it may be a
sight word. It's counter-intuitive because it's so quick, so effortless. They can comprehend
well because it is quick and effortless. Guess who uses context to predict an unknown
word? Lousy readers. What their eye movements show us is they'll be coming along,
they'll come to a word they don't know, and it's all over the place which slows them down
more. A lot of these kids have not been taught to do some F work so they go back and
forth. That's not to say now that teachers shouldn't try to get kids to use as much info as
they can, but always realize that speed is so important and what's going to help speed
and fluency better is teaching them probably how to unlock words quickly. Any time you
guys are working with kids, or I'm working with kids and I see a youngster come along
and he puts one of these stupid words in context, you go back and say, "Now does that
make sense here?" The reason they made this stupid guess is because they're reading so
slow to begin with. Even if they look like they're reading fairly well to you, I will bet
they're reading so slow that the energy has gone into the reading, even though it seems
much better than Charlie over here at the 10th percentile, that they don't remember what
it was that got them up to the word that says "bite" and they said "Buick". So it was slow,
it was labored. They don't remember. That's why good readers we know really don't go
back and forth because now it's slowing them down. They don't need to do that. They're
going quickly and accurately enough to keep everything in mind so they use context as
they go along. They don't need to go back and recapture it. All I'm saying is know your
assumptions. Know if they're accurate or not. If it's an assumption that's been taught to
you and you use with children that doesn't seem to be very valid, don't throw it out
completely. Just use it for the purpose it might be best used for, which is to check and
confirm accuracy, and not to use it as a crutch to predict an unknown word. Here's where
the combination of strategies has to be brought to bear. Okay, back to learning styles.
Learning styles can be good. Learning styles have let us know that kids learn in many
different ways. It's a concept that has helped us understand that there are individual
differences in the way that human beings accumulate knowledge. Learning styles
are good. It makes us more diversified in our thinking. When it's not so good is when we
use learning styles as kind of a magic bullet, as in right brain learners or left brain
learners and so on. You know, to learn how to read, if you want to teach using holistic
right brain methods, you're not going to teach the kid to read. There's no way a reader of
the English language is going to be able to memorize holistically the entire lexicon, and
they're going to be very slow and labored. It's pay now or pay later. The skills that go into
learning to read are phoneme awareness, phonics, fluency, comprehension, and those
skills have to be taught. Now how you show that to the kids could be with different
representations, but they still have to have those components. Do you hear
my distinction? So sometimes learning styles are things that are nice. They let us know
that kids get stuff in different ways using different means or materials or exposures or
representations. But when we're thinking about a complex skill like reading, we've got to
realize that at 6, at 16, at 26, you still have to bring to bear knowledge of all of these
things we've talked about this morning. Yes, the teacher's job is how you do that. How do
you show it to the kids? How do you give them practice? A lot of kids though do need
more direct and explicit and yes some kids do need decontextualized work to get the
noise out for a while because they can't handle the amount no matter how wonderful
the amount is, how interesting it is. Read it to them. When you're teaching some of these
concepts to them control number, if that's what it looks like they need. Control the
amount of information coming to kids. You guys remember when you were in any course
throughout school, college, or whatever where the information did not cling easily to the
knowledge base? Do you guys remember when you were in one of those situations like
algebra or geometry, you've got three people who get it and you've got the teacher
looking at them for the entire nine weeks? Everybody else is Ferris Bueller, slobbering on
the desk. Did you ever notice that as it gets hard the teacher gets faster with more? In
seventh grade I took Algebra I. I made straight A's. My grandparents couldn't believe it
because it didn't seem there was a hefty math gene in the family. Eighth grade Algebra II
I got straight F's, never got above a 47. I was trying hard, so we had a meeting with my
grandparents, with the counselor, and with the algebra teacher, they said, "Well, you did
so well in Algebra I. What's going on with Algebra II?" I decided to tell the truth and I
said, "Jimmy Singleterry moved to Kentucky." It's true. Jimmy had no concept of
somebody cheating, like me. I don't know what the character defect was but at any rate he
was very talented in algebra so I tended to do well. Well anyway, they sent me to this
tutor, and the tutor was actually taking more time, controlling numbers, showing me
some concepts, helping me practice and apply and all those things. Well, that was great,
but then I went back to the classroom and the speed was the same, the amount was the
same, the examples were different, and so forth and so on. I think we have to
continually remember what it's like to try to struggle and learn something that doesn't
come easily. Be that as it may, it's not that amorphous. To learn to read you've got to
know some particular things, some of which I've described to you this morning. I'll show
you some actual examples of how some people can teach that in an interesting way after
the break which is now. Thank you. Dr. Lyon: Okay. Hope you had a nice break. I do
want to answer as many questions as I can, but I also want you to see some other kinds of
things. As usual, during the break I am reminded that I have left a lot of things out. I just
want to mention to anyone in the room, parents, teachers, speech and language
pathologists, psychologists, whoever is working with kids in teaching them to
read, always remember that asking kids to write for you and using the writing process in
combination with everything we've talked about thus far is a wonderful thing to do. If
you think about what writing does as an act, it certainly makes very visible and concrete
to you, as the teacher, a child's understanding of the internal constituent sound structure.
It also gives children a wonderful concrete representation of how sounds are represented
by letters. If I can get to some of the film I'll show you how that's woven in, but the film,
that I'll be showing you was actually made here in California and is available from your
State Department of Education. So if I don't get to that, you can see it. One of the things
we've talked about throughout the morning is that we desperately need to get the kids as
early as we can with the most informed instruction we can. The reason for that is because
of what you see on the screen. This data, which will be explained in much more detail by
Sally Shaywitz when she comes in, reflects a longitudinal population-based study. Let me
just go back over how we do these things. Children at 5 years of age are selected from a
particular geographic region. At 5 years of age those youngsters generally are in
kindergarten but have not started first grade. Because there are so many ideas and
different perspectives about what goes into reading, what it takes, and what are the
culprits in impeding reading, all 5 year olds receive measures of attention, language,
perception. Their home environments are studied fairly extensively. I won't go through
that in detail, but it's just common sense. If certain people have a belief system that
certain things cause reading difficulty, then we want to measure those or compare that
hypothesis against other things. To give you a concrete example, for years if you will
recall, people thought that the reversals that you see in kids' reading and writing,
particularly kids who have difficulties but also the kids who are young and do that as a
function of being young, do that because of visual perceptual reasons. You remember all
of the balance beam stuff and the angels in the snow and so forth and so on that was
designed to remediate perceptual-motor and visual perceptual problems. So to test
that hypothesis, we study all of the 34,000 children generally by all of those measures, as
well, because if that in fact is a specific thing that seems to thwart kids in developing
reading, we want to know that. We haven't found anything in the visual perceptual
system at that level to date that could account for any reading difficulties. Kids generally
will reverse this way or that way because it's a probability statement to them. If they can't
attach a sound to it quickly, it's a very abstract kind of thing. We're studying a lot of
lower processes, as in Paula Talal's hypothesis about timing, and that could certainly have
some effect. But I'm talking about the visual perceptual things where kids see things
backwards; they don't. Any time you have a kid reverse while reading or writing,
write down the word that was reversed. For example, if "bat" was either read or written at
"dat", write down "bat", put it in front of the kid, and see if she can copy it. If they copy it
in the right orientation, it simply isn't in the visual system. So that's kind of an easy test of
that hypothesis. You're looking up here at just two curves and all they represent on the
top line is children who come into the first grade. They will now extend out, if I had the
most recent data up there, into 21 years of age. These kids are now 21. We started with
them when they were 5, so they are measured at kindergarten across all of these domains
and then measured a couple of times per year every year since they were 5. Whereas all
of them were in Connecticut starting out, they are now in 22 states and 4 foreign
countries, and they're still being followed. Ninety-four percent of the original sample is
still with us. This is not an intervention sample. We're just tracking kids as they grow up.
The top line reflects fairly good readers, kids above the 20th percentile. This is how
we know, by the way, that kids at the 40th percentile, when they become adolescents or
adults, don't like to read. These aren't guesses we're making. Now you can talk to them,
particularly in their early twenties. When you try to talk to them about reading at 16, they
go, "uhh" and stuff like that. Now they'll converse with you a little bit more. It was like
one word things you know like, "Do you like to read?" "No." "Why?" "Bored." So
anyway, this is just the good readers coming along. A lot of these kids were down here,
but if they received some good intensive work early on they tended to be okay. What's
been found is that basically after 9 years of age, even if you bring a lot to bear with some
of these kids, they don't seem to want to get better. They don't really kick up in their skill
levels. Now there are two hypotheses that can immediately be posed. Number one: Is it
an issue of sensitive or critical period that after 9 years of age the system if you will just
doesn't want to respond? Is it just a little to late, as some people believe about foreign
languages? Another hypothesis: Is it just that they're not responding after third grade to
really powerful instruction because they're sick of it? They're not motivated? Frankly, my
guess would be more the latter. Joe Torgeson in his studies down in Florida State, as part
of our network clearly shows that if you get to an 11 or 12 year old kid below the 10th
percentile and work with that youngster in a comfortable environment for two 50 minute
blocks per day for 26 weeks you can move them, if they're going to be moved, quite well.
But keep in mind the importance of early identification and intervention is such that kids
who are below the 10th percentile in first grade can, if provided with some good stuff,
come up to average ranges nicely if you work with them 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week.
That's not too bad, but that becomes more than quadrupled by the time kids get older. So
while older kids can certainly learn how to read and adults can certainly learn how to
read, it does take a great deal of intensity and duration that we really don't know a great
deal about. It just takes more and that's what makes it difficult. So number one, the issue
of early identification and intervention is so critical and the data show that because, if we
can get to these kids before the third grade with teaching interactions that make clear to
children how all of this fits together, phoneme awareness, phonics, speed and fluency,
comprehension, they can move right along with their peers. If we wait, or a lot of these
kids as we watch them grow up had to wait, they don't seem to respond with less than a
very intensive program. A lot of people ask me, "Well didn't a lot of those kids in the
bottom line there that never caught up, didn't they get special education?" Didn't they get
some intensity? In a lot of cases as we watch, they certainly did. Of course the difficulty
always is that even if children are getting intensive, well structured work on reading
development, if that is not reinforced when they go back to the classroom setting, the
generalization is very, very tough. They don't maintain it. That's of value, but a painful
value of longitudinal studies because we can see that children who do well and come up
in some intervention contexts lose that over time. It washes out. Even though the kids
are getting better, they still aren't as automatic as they need to be. They don't own the
concepts as much. Just put it in your own life. Those kinds of things that come difficult to
us, that are harder to really perform, that we ultimately get to a certain level of expertise,
sometimes is still hard to remember down the road. Always try to remember in your own
life what it's like to try to take a skill that was difficult to learn, apply it elsewhere, if in
fact the reasons you're applying it differ from one context to another. Simply put, a lot of
the teachers in the classroom settings were trying the best they could, but they had no
idea what the special educators or SLP's or reading specialists were doing in their settings
and so at times different examples, as in my algebra example, were being used. That
tends to confuse folks. The Y-axis is reading achievement score. It's based on a 500 being
average. All right, I'm going to take you through very quickly, so we can get to questions,
some of the intervention studies. Intervention studies are ongoing at all of those sites.
There's a bunch of them enrolled. There's about 8,000 kids on average moving through
studies now. The intervention studies typically start in kindergarten and run for 5 years.
The intervention studies are not designed to test phonics versus whole language. That
would be a ridiculous comparison. The intervention studies are designed to assess which
components of instruction, shown in which ways to kids for how long and in what
setting, bring about the most change for kids who are very well defined. So they're fairly
complexly designed and you'll hear a lot of controversy about some of these
studies, Barbara Forman's in particular in Houston. What Barbara's study showed very
clearly was that if you take children below the 16th percentile, children defined typically
as Title I kids (those eligible for free or reduced lunch due to socioeconomic
considerations) in different regions, they were below the 20th percentile in reading
capability. That was the first sample in the Houston study. Kids who primarily came to
the reading task without a great deal of language interaction beforehand or whatever
because there wasn't enough money to do all that. The Forman Study was very clear and
it continues to be very clear, but you have to realize it is one study and what it showed.
There were 280 kids that went through this, fairly hefty for an intervention study.
Some of those children received a program that went after the components that I talked
about explicitly today. This program is the Open Court series, 1995. We do not endorse
programs. The reason Open Court was selected was that its design and content went after
phoneme awareness, then linked it to phonics, then provided decodable text to develop
fluency, and then moved to greater ranges of authentic text and more whole language
kinds of concepts. It was contrasted with a program that taught phoneme awareness a
little, but phonics concepts always embedded in text, because that's a big deal
philosophically. People really get worried if you take something out of text because
they feel it will reduce the child's interaction with print and with language and they will
not know what reading is. So that's a hypothesis. You've just got to test it. It's right there
in front of you. So Freddie Hebert's program that does that kind of contextualizing was
contrasted along with two child centered approaches currently in use in Houston. This is
where the teacher was viewed as a facilitator, rather than as a teacher vis-à-vis
philosophically, and I think you know what I mean. Never were any of the coding skills
taught explicitly. The best way to say it is if something came up in the course of the
instruction, a phonics point may have been made, but it was never systematically done. It
was addressed in the course of presenting children with reading and writing activities
generally composed around authentic text. What you see in terms of both phonological
processing is one program clearly outstripping the others. That program for these children
was the program that clearly established these concepts, wove them together, and then
moved to higher levels of text reading and so forth. Some of the Open Court program in
fact does present things in isolation. Its strength may lie in the fact that it tries to move
those elements quickly into a contextual frame. Reading, word reading, and
reading comprehension equally came along, far outstripping any of the other programs.
But keep in mind that there were children who did not respond to the Open Court
program as well. Probably around 6% of the sample who had this program nationally, if
you would, if we extrapolate it nationally, would not have responded. 6% is a heck of a
lot better than 20%. Now we're not endorsing any kind of program. You're going to see
some film here in a minute where a teacher builds her own instructional format, doesn't
use a packaged program, and gets some pretty good results. The only thing I'm trying to
get across is that we've got to move away from being method driven to some degree. If
somebody were to ask me what my wish list would be, it would be that every teacher had
the time and training and the quality of training to feel comfortable with selecting
many things to get these different components ingrained and not have to be tied to this or
that. That would be a wonderful wish because teaching is a profession as complex, by the
way, as any other profession we've studied. We know that teachers make as many
decisions per day as air traffic controllers. We study those interactions, and it's an
extraordinarily complex task. Teachers get hammered for all of the things that academics
do to them frankly. I used to be an academic, so I can say that. I'm not any more; that's
why I do say it. You can see some of these contrasts a little bit more by the graph format
in Joe Torgeson's shop. The red bar, called past, is a combined program made up of the
Lindamood. Pat Lindamood had the courage to give her program to this objective trial
plus text reading and so forth. The RCS, the gold kind of thing, is again a more literature
based program as is the gray control. The EP is the embedded phonics, always teaching
phoneme awareness and phonics within textual context. For children below the 15th
percentile in Tallahassee, Florida, again, the gains are quite clear. A combined program
that more directly shows these components with these children seems to bring them along
at a much better clip. Both of these are generalizing nicely, by the way, over the five year
period and maintaining. What you'll see in comprehension though, while the
combined program is still significantly more productive, you are ceilinged out at about a
92 standard score. If you will recall, when I started out, I said that one of our major goals
was to make sure that children comprehended at the level of their verbal ability. These
kids are constrained at the level of their verbal ability. Their verbal IQ average is 95. If
there's anything we can figure out to do to get kids comprehension wise and conceptually
above that verbal IQ, I'd love it. It is very difficult, and I think all people need to know
this, teachers, administrators, whoever works with children, that there seems to be a
constraint on the meaning side of things that is best predicted by the verbal IQ. It's very
difficult to get around. So we haven't done our job with kids who seem to have
some constraints with lower verbal IQ's. That is, their comprehension rarely gets above
that. So that means we've got to start earlier. We've got to build better oral language
skills. We've got to build better conceptual skills and so on. We're also not doing a very
good job at the bottom 6%. Let me take some time here and get you to something more
concrete. While this is pretty neat, you know how hard we work with kids and we get
depressed and frustrated when they don't come along. Look at how long it takes some of
the kids in these combined programs to actually come along before they make an upward
move. The black line up on top are your normal readers moving along over time. You can
see that in the red line here there's not very strong movement until about 111 months into
the program. So you've got to have some patience with a lot of these kids. This is from
Joe Torgesen's laboratory, and he does a nice job. We can use procedures to track
whole groups of children as they go through the interventions, but the procedures allow
us to pull individual kids out and watch exactly how they go along and when they
change. So our technology, and particularly our design mathematics, are getting very
nicely done. Video Segment: Teacher: I brought a friend with me today. His name
is... Kids: Chuck. Teacher: And what Chuck likes to do more than anything else
is... Kids: Eat. Teacher: Have you met Chuck before? Kids: No. Teacher: That's all he
ever wants to talk about is food, and he's a picky eater. He won't eat just any old food. He
likes to eat food where the name of the food starts with the same sound as his
name, Chuck. He often gets to choose what food he will have. Chuck's favorite meal is
lunch. Yesterday he got to choose what he would have for lunch and Chuck thought,
"What do I want to eat?" My favorite foods begin with the same sound as my name, or at
least the beginning sound of my name is in the food." That's how he's picky. And he
chose a cheese sandwich, chopped up chunks of peach, and cheese chips. Kids:
Mmm. Teacher: And I asked him, "Chuck, would you like to have some milk?" And he
said, "Oh no. Milk is not one of my favorite foods. I just like foods that begin with the
same sound as my name, Chuck." Raise your hand if you remember one of the foods that
Chuck chose. Danielle? Danielle: Cheese. Teacher: Cheese. Caitlin Katelin: Chopped up
um Teacher: Chopped up fuzzy fruit. Someone help Katelin. F: Peach. Teacher: Peach.
Chopped chunks of peach. Brian. Brian: Chips? Teacher: Chips. Yes. What kind of
chips? Brian: Cheese. Teacher: Cheese chips. And why did he pick those foods and he
didn't want any milk? Bonnie? Bonnie: Because it didn't begin with his name. Teacher: It
didn't begin with the sound at the beginning of his name. /Ch/ is a sound that has no voice
and I didn't hear anyone using a voice on that. So you were really listening and hearing
that sound. /Ch/ is a sound that's just in your mouth. We squish in our cheeks and we let
the air come out. /Ch/ is a sound that if you put your hand here where your vocal cords
are in your voice box, you're not using it. Kids: /Ch/ /Ch/ /Ch/ Teacher: Because it's made
in your mouth. Kids: /Ch/ /Ch/ /Ch/ Teacher: There is a sound that sounds a lot like /ch/
and that's the sound /sh/. And the reason that they sound the same is because you put your
mouth the same way to make them, but the difference is that /sh/ is the sound just like a
hot shower. Can you think of some other foods he might like? F: Jacket? Dr. Lyon: That
kid's parents asked me to dinner, but I declined. All right. I'll come back to "jacket" in a
minute. This is a highly integrated set of activities. I'm going to take you through them
quickly, but just to point out to you, what she was just teaching was phoneme
awareness. There was no print there. What she's trying to highlight for them is that words
have sounds to them, and she's trying to do that in a fun kind of way. These are second
semester first graders who are reading below the 15th percentile. They represent a
segment of this class, probably 25-30% of this class which you'll see as we go through
quickly are also being taught in the class. This teacher was trained as a combination of
things, a speech and language pathologist but also in reading recovery and went through
the California State system and learned literature based techniques as well. She's put this
together. What you just saw her do was develop a set of activities to make clear this
phoneme awareness stuff. These kids had had earlier, much more concrete work
on phoneme awareness using manipulatives to understand how sounds can move in and
out of words. If you've seen a Lindamood program or Benita Blackman's stuff, that's what
that's used for. There are a bit higher level now. You're next going to see her move to
phonics, then things to develop fluency, then reading decodable text to develop
contextual fluency, then a lot of writing, and then all of it together. Okay? Now the thing
about "jacket" is this. All of you who work with little ones, preschool kids, will always
generally see any kid interchange the /ch/ sound and /j/ sounds and also /sh/ and /j/ and so
forth and so on. You'll see that in older, lousy readers also. Now why are they doing
that? Generally the brain, we think, pulls out the sounds from running speech by a
mechanism which compares it to how the sounds are made. They're called articulatory
gestures. You're going to watch her try to teach this kid, and hopefully the other ones in
the group that may have the confusion, about how different sounds can be perceived from
one another. Obviously, this /ch/ and /j/ confusion is going to get that kid in trouble in
reading and writing. So how is she going to do that? You're going to see how she does it
and then I'm going to fast forward to get to our questions. Video Segment: Teacher: The
sound at the beginning of "jacket" is very close to that /ch/ sound. The beginning sound
in "jacket" is very much like "/ch/ because you keep your mouth in the same place. Let's
put our mouth and get ready for /ch/. Kids: /Ch/ /Ch/ /Ch/ Teacher: Put your hand where
you make your voice and now we'll say /J/ /J"/ /J/. Kids: /J"/ /J/ /J/ Teacher: And then go
back to /Ch/ /Ch/ /Ch/. No voice. Kids: /Ch/ /Ch/ /Ch/ Dr. Lyon: Now she's going to
move to phonics. That was phoneme awareness and now here comes phonics. Video
Segment: Teacher: /Ch/ is a very special sound. It's not made with just one letter, it's
made with two letters. Now they're together. Two letters making one sound. /Ch/ /Ch/
/Ch/. Now we can read and say the sound. Kids: /Ch/ /Ch/ /Ch/ Teacher: When two letters
come together and make one sound that sound and those letters together is called a
digraph. Can you say digraph? Kids: Digraph. Teacher: "Di" means two, two letters.
"Graph" means a symbol or something you write down or the letters. So two letters,
digraph, one sound. It's a very special sound, /ch/, and we're going to be using it for the
rest of the day. Dr. Lyon: So she goes into some detail on the digraph stuff for two
reasons. One, she's trying to give them a structure to help remember what these types of
things are. So the kids also know what dipthongs are and what syllable types are. It's a
mental linguistic kind of effort to help them remember some things. Equally though, it's
there to help the kids develop vocabulary and to also feel somewhat smart. They all feel
pretty stupid, but they are some of the few kids in the school that know what digraphs and
diphthongs are. That's there for a strategic reason to help them do a lot of things like that.
Okay, I'm going to very quickly go through how she tries to develop rapid blending
because that slows kids down as they tear things apart, putting it back together and
so forth, and some text reading. Video Segment: Teacher: I say peck, you say... Kids:
Check Teacher: I say near, you say... Kids: Cheer Teacher: I say case, you say... Kids:
Chase Teacher: I say range, you say... Kids: Change Teacher: Excellent. You're very
good at this game. You're very good at listening to the sound /ch/ and using it and
substituting it, making a new beginning sound, making a new word, and you always give
me a rhyming word. You have so much information in your brain that you can use. You
can rhyme, you know the sound, and you can take off a beginning sound from a word and
put a new one on all in your brain. You know what that means? You're super smart
superstars. That's what that means. Teacher: /Ch/ /air" Kids: Chair Teacher: /Ch/
/in/ Kids: Chin Teacher: /Ch/ /uck/ Kids: Chuck Teacher: /Ch/ /at/ Kids: Chat Teacher: I
can't fool you. Teacher: Point to the word "duck". And what letters spell the beginning
sound? Cynthia? Cynthia: "D"? Teacher: A "d", and there's a line under the "d". Point to
the word "stop." What's the beginning sound Tony? Tony: /St/ Teacher: You put that
blend together. It's a two letter beginning sound. Now I'm going to give you each a new
beginning sound. Which one do you suppose it's going to be? Kids: /Ch/ Teacher: It's
going to be Chuck's special sound. Kids: /Ch/ /uck/ Teacher: Point to your word and pick
up your /ch/ and lay it down on top of the "d" and now you give it a new beginning sound
and what word do you see now, Autumn? Autumn: Chuck Teacher: If we put the /Ch/ as
the beginning sound? Autumn: Chuck Teacher: What kind of "c" would you need at the
beginning of your name? Autumn: Capital Teacher: Capital. And lucky for us we just
happen to have Child: All names begin with a capital. Teacher: Yes, all names begin with
a capital letter. Dr. Lyon: Now you'll see them practicing for a minute here. Video
Segment: Teacher: You know what I'd like to see? You know what word you're reading
because you know where your eyes are, but I can't tell which word you're reading so
could you track for me and put your finger under each word? Thank you. Kids:
[practicing words simultaneously] Teacher: How do you know this book already? Did
you practice and practice? Kids: No Teacher: Are you sure? You are seeing this book for
the very first time? Kids: Yep. Dr. Lyon: Okay, so it's not the best text reading you've
ever heard but it was the first time they had gotten connected text using some of those
kinds of concepts and I think you had asked me about the definition of decodable text.
That's what it looks like. It probably can be made more interesting than that, but, be that
as it may, these kids get a lot of rich literature throughout the day through shared reading,
big book reading, and so on. So you don't even need to worry about the either/or. These
children did need this degree of explicitness. They were all Reading Recovery kids and
this teacher, being a Reading Recovery teacher, felt that they needed a greater degree of
explicitness. Now this is followed by a lot of writing exercises and so forth to help try to
provide a good concrete representation for those concepts she's teaching. I've got two
minutes so I'll go through something here that people asked me to talk a little bit
about. We do a lot of genetic and biological work within the research network. This is
one of our magnets at the NIH. That's a magnet that gives good anatomy and also we can
do what's called functional MRI. In that what we're interested in in that very resistant
group of learners who don't seem to be able to get reading very easily, is there something
neurobiologically that may be a bit different from those that can get it either easily or
with instruction? That's myself in the magnet, I get in there so people don't freak out. It's
not the kids that freak out, it's the adults that do. There's all kinds of t.v. screens available
and sound stuff so we can have people read and do language things inside the magnets
and we can watch what the brain is doing. I have told you some of this before, I am
embarrassed about this slide. My feet are very long and narrow and that's embarrassing,
but it's not as humiliating as how small my frontal lobe is. When you look at anatomy
that tells you some things for structural deficiencies as you can see here, but with
reading and language kinds of things we're more interested in what the brain is doing,
how it functions when it drives to perform behavior. I'm explaining this very
superficially, but what we measure is what happens when a behavior is performed, what
brain systems seem to activate. By activate I mean that in order for the brain to work to
produce behavior, it has to have blood and bloodflow because blood carries oxygen and
glucose; nutriments that the cellular substrate has to have to make us who we are. Up at
the top there you see a left hemisphere in blue. The brain really isn't that color.
The computer does anything we want. The blue just indicates resting cells, limited flow
and volume of blood going to those regions. The gold stuff reflects highly activated
cellular substrate. What that individual is doing is thinking about counting from 1 to 10;
just thinking about it and not vocalizing. That is a very reliable signature of activation
that would occur in all of us who are right handed, and it seems to be that system in the
brain that activates or works hard when any planning is done. The middle one is our
United States Congress thinking as hard as they can, particularly over the last couple of
months. Here is another left hemisphere in red this time, red indicating resting cellular
substrate. The goldish color is that system that seems to be activating through a rhyming
task, a 10 year old inside the magnet, as they do a phonological or phoneme
awareness task. This seems to be a system that works hard to help kids pull sounds out of
running speech. That's a normal signature, and here is a signature for Michelle, the girl
you saw in the middle of our video. Now what we're doing, as Sally and Ben Shaywitz
will talk to you about when they get here, is identifying kids early who are going to have
difficulties learning to read. We fly them from Syracuse, New York, because that's where
that study is being done, to Yale. They go through the neuroimaging studies, they're
flown back to Syracuse. Benita Blackman is doing the interventions with them for a
year's period of time. What we're interested in is, as reading behavior hopefully increases,
what happens in terms of neurobiological substrate. Do we get commensurate differences
or changes in neurobiology. If we do, do those changes ultimately reflect what you see in
a normal signature or do those changes reflect some circuitous route, if you will, as
a compensatory neurobiological development. These are the first studies of their kind to
be done this way so this will hopefully give us information about plasticity, when the
brain is most appreciative of intervention, when it might tighten up in terms of sensitive
periods, or whatever. We publish in the finest journals. Ben and Sally Shaywitz put this
together. I worked with them on it. They gave me the one task of drawing the brain that
you see in the middle, and I just want you to see how big my frontal lobe is.