How do Children Learn to Read?
In the 1950's, we all learnt to read using phonics. We sat there, every day, as the teacher wrote "cat" and "mat", and as a class, we "sounded out" the word, over and over.

But it worked ... until a new theory was introduced, called "whole language". The idea was that the children would "immerse" themselves in words around the classroom, and they would "learn the shape" of the whole word, rather than breaking it into its phonics components.

Over the next 30 years, many research projects attempted to discover "what are the skills children need to read" and "what is the best way way to teach those skills".

30 Years of Research

In the USA, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development compiled more than 30 years worth of research findings - a massive task - to finally get some evidence on what was needed, and what system was best to achieve it. The research was commissioned by The Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning with funding support from the Pacific Bell Foundation.

Major Findings
 •  About 30% of the school age population has reading difficulty.
 •  This percentage also applies to the general community.
 •  Phonics is essential for effective, fluent reading.
 •  Contextual clues are unreliable and ineffective for fluency.
 •  Most reading difficulties are due to low phonemic awareness in the child.
 •  Reading difficulties can be fixed with an explicitly phonic program.
 •  Begin phonemic awareness at an early age.
 •  Use beginner texts which are fully decodable using phonics.

What is Developmentally Appropriate?

• Treatment intervention research has shown that early, direct instruction seems to be the best medicine for reading problems.
• Reading is not developmental or natural, but is learned.
• Reading difficulties reflect a persistent deficit, rather than a developmental lag in linguistic (phonological) skills and basic reading skills.
• Children who fall behind at an early age (K and grade 1) fall further and further behind over time.
• Longitudinal studies show that of the children who are diagnosed as reading disabled in third grade, 74% remain disabled in ninth grade.
• Adults with reading problems exhibit the same characteristics that are exhibited by children with reading problems.

These findings contradict the prevalent notion that children will begin to learn to read when they are "ready." The concept "developmentally appropriate" should not suggest delaying intervention, but using appropriate instructional strategies at an early age - especially in kindergarten. Although we now have the ability to identify children who are at-risk for reading failure, and we now understand some of the instructional conditions that must be considered for teaching, the majority of reading disabilities are not identified until the third grade, which significantly increases the task of repair.

Early Identification and Treatment
The liklihood of future reading difficulty (in a pre-reading child) can be detected and measured.

• The best predictor in K or 1st grade of a future reading difficulty in grade 3 is performance on a combination of measures of phonemic awareness, rapid naming of letters, numbers, and objects, and print awareness.
• Phonemic awareness is the ability to segment words and syllables into constituent sounds units, or phonemes. Converging evidence from all the research centers shows that deficits in phonemic awareness reflect the core deficit in reading difficulties. 
• These deficits are characterized by difficulties in segmenting syllables and words into constituent sound units called phonemes--in short, there is a difficulty in turning spelling into sounds.

Lack of phonemic awareness seems to be a major obstacle to learning to read. This is true for any language, even Chinese. About two in five children have some level of difficulty with phonemic awareness. For about one in five children phonemic awareness does not develop or improve over time. These children never catch up, but fall further and further behind in reading and in all academic subjects.

Instruction using the following types of phonemic awareness tasks has had a positive effect on reading acquisition and spelling for pre-readers:

• rhyming,
• auditorily discriminating sounds that are different,
• blending spoken sounds into words,
• word-to-word matching,
• isolating sounds in words,
• counting phonemes,
• segmenting spoken words into sounds,
• deleting sounds from words.

Explicit instruction in how segmentation and blending are involved in the reading process was superior to instruction that did not explicitly teach the children to apply phonemic awareness to reading .

• Kindergarten children with explicit instruction in phonemic awareness did better than a group of first graders who had no instruction, indicating that this crucial pre-skill for reading can be taught at least by age five and is not developmental.
• In a study, seven weeks of explicit instruction in phonemic awareness combined with explicit instruction in sound-spelling correspondences for kindergarten children was more powerful than instruction in sound-spelling correspondences alone and more powerful than language activities in improving reading skills.
• In a study, 260 children were randomly assigned to a revised kindergarten curriculum (n=80) and a standard curriculum (n=160) consisting of developmentally appropriate practices described by the state of Texas' essential elements for kindergarten. The revised curriculum sought to prevent reading disabilities by teaching phonemic awareness for 15 minutes a day using the Lundberg, Frost, and Petersen (1988) curriculum from Sweden and Denmark. Children in the revised curriculum made significant gains in phonemic awareness over the year. Foorman et al. found that the greatest gains occurred when the explicit instruction moved into teaching the sound-spelling relationships concurrently with the instruction in phonemic awareness.

Explicit, Systematic Instruction in Sound-spelling Correspondences

• Phonemic awareness alone is not sufficient. Explicit, systematic instruction in common sound-spelling correspondences is also necessary for many children. Researchers found that intensive instruction in sound-spelling relationships during reading (45 minutes per day) was more effective than sound-spelling instruction occurring only during spelling and not during reading.
• Instruction in specific sound-spelling relationships was more effective than teaching students a strategy for using analogous word parts on transfer to new words and on standardized reading measures (Lovett, Borden, DeLuca, Lacerenza, Benson, & Brackstone, 1994). Torgesen et al. (in press) also found that explicitly teaching the sound-spelling relationships was superior to teaching word families and word analogies and superior to an implicit approach.

Researchers found that explicit, systematic instruction in sound-spelling relationships in the classroom was more effective in reducing reading disabilities than a print-rich environment characterized by interesting stories, even with children who had benefited from phonemic awareness instruction in kindergarten.

Prediction From Context is not a Useful Strategy for Word Recognition
One of the techniques of "whole language" is prediction - that faced with an unknown word, children can 'guess' the meaning by the surrounding words.

• Research quite clearly shows that word guessing ... can be counterproductive. Stanovich and Stanovich (1995) recently summarized the research findings regarding the "predictability of authentic text":

"...It is often incorrectly assumed that predicting upcoming words in sentences is a relatively easy and highly accurate activity. Actually, many different empirical studies have indicated that naturalistic text is not that predictable. It works best for function words, and is often quite low for the very words in the passage that carry the most information content." (p. 90)

• "...the word recognition skills of the good reader are so rapid, automatic, and efficient that the skilled reader need not rely on contextual information. In fact, it is poor readers who guess from context--out of necessity because their decoding skills are so weak."