Knowledge translation in early years reading instruction: A tale of two paradigms.

 

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I have written and spoken many times about the knowledge translation crisis that prevents findings from cognitive psychology research on early reading being delivered to the hands of the profession that needs this information more than any other: teachers. The reasons for this are no doubt multi-faceted, but at the top of my list would be that:

• This research is not carried out by education academics, who, in the main, have selected a cosy space in the empirical shade when it comes to using evidence derived from studies that may appear to them to be  "remote" from classroom practice, and so able to be dismissed as having low classroom relevance.
• Education academics typically focus on conceptualisations of reading as a "meaning-based activity" embedded within such postmodern constructs as critical literacy and socio-cultural influences on the learner, but without sufficient attention to the individual cognitive and linguistic processes at work and skills that the reading novice needs to master. This manifests as an ideological divide between education academics on the one hand and health and psychology academics on the other. Let's be clear, reading has no socio-cultural significance or currency for people who cannot access the code.
• Education academics are not typically schooled in or favourably disposed towards the scientific method as this pertains to quantitative research. I suspect this makes it difficult for them to critically appraise the merit of studies that employ complex study designs and statistical analyses, so it's easier to simply reject the entire paradigm and be busy in a space that feels more familiar and comfortable. Focussing on important but intellectually less rigorous aspects of early literacy, such as "quality children's literature" is a fig-leaf that does a poor job of covering up this lack of regard for the knowledge that needs to be made available to pre-service teachers. This manifests as an epistemological divide between education academics on the one hand and health and psychology academics on the other. It's also sadly ironic that the only group that seems to blame parents (via their socio-economic status) for low literacy levels is education academics, thereby diminishing the professional and social/public health importance of the work of classroom teachers everywhere.

One would have to wonder,  however, who this cognitive psychology evidence is being created for, if not for classroom teachers? Perhaps cognitive psychology researchers have been complicit in the knowledge-translation crisis, naively assuming that strong findings from well-conducted research and reviews would be enthusiastically and automatically picked up and used by academics in teacher pre-service education. Sadly, this isn't how it works. The shift in recent years to more open access publishing and sharing of research via social media undoubtedly helps to overcome the invisible divide between disciplines, but relies on teachers being active on social media platforms and open to different ways of conceptualising and approaching their work (which of course many are).

 

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Paradoxically (and frustratingly) pseudoscience has been fast-tracked into schools, often via teacher pre-service education, where it has in many cases, been welcomed with uncritical open-arms. I've blogged about this previously, but obvious examples here include learning styles, multiple intelligences, coloured lenses and overlays for struggling readers, Brain Gym, and a range of non-evidence based ideas about learning (every child learns differently; we only use 10% of our brains; notions of left-brain, right-brain learners). What do these ideas have in common? A superficial face-appeal that does not require in-depth knowledge about human cognition and neuropsychology. In fact, they are incompatible with such knowledge-bases. So failing to provide pre-service teachers with some rigorous foundations in these fields creates the fertile conditions in which pseudoscience can flourish and charismatic ideas are transferred into practice. 

Whole Language-based reading instruction (and its more recent metamorphosis, Balanced Literacy) is a good example of an idea that found its way into the education water-supply and is now extremely difficult to eradicate. I sometimes hear people say "No-one promotes Whole Language anymore" but this is at best naive and at worst, a wilful misrepresentation of the lineage of instructional approaches in modern classrooms, many of which are simply a re-branding of Whole Language. 

I wonder how many pre-service teachers learn about the contested history of reading instruction, and are taught about the fact that many of the approaches that are presented to them as lore, have weak or non-existent scientific evidence to support them? If you don't know this history (and everyone with a stake in this space should know it), I recommend you read this excellent summary by Stephen Parker.

Examples of such approaches that are often promoted in pre-service education and by government departments of education, include Three Cueing (also known as Multi-Cueing, or Search Lights), the Four Resources Model, and Balanced Literacy. None of these approaches were mentioned in any of the recommendations arising from three international inquires into the teaching of reading (USA in 2000; Australia in 2005, and UK in 2006), yet they are treated as lore in many education pre-service and policy arenas. I am frequently struck, too, when I give presentations to teachers, by the fact that so few of them (maybe one or two in a room of 100) are aware that there was a national inquiry in Australia into the teaching of reading. Rather than airing the report and critically appraising its basis and recommendations, education academics would prefer, it seems to pretend that the inquiry didn't take place. Interestingly, when I wrote an open letter to student teachers "outing" some of these difficult truths in 2018, this became my most accessed post since I commenced this blog in 2013. 

Lest anyone think otherwise, it's important to note that knowledge translation is a dynamic rather than a static process. It requires us to play the probabilities with respect to where we focus our energies, recognising that we can't call on high-quality published research to support every decision and every practice. We do, however, need to base policy and practice recommendations on a sound theoretical understanding of what the process of reading is (cognitively and linguistically, as well as socially and culturally), so that teaching practices meet the needs of as many children as possible, regardless of their starting point on school-entry. 

What knowledge translation does not look like, however, is selective cherry-picking and quote-mining of scientific research and reading inquiries, sprinkling key documents with words such as “phonics” and “decoding”, as a form of appeasement to those lobbying for greater rigour in early reading instruction. The question is not whether phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, morphology, comprehension, and fluency are “in there somewhere”, but rather how they are positioned in relation to each other with respect to scope and sequence of instruction and the level of background teacher knowledge required for effective reading instruction. 

The “phonics is in the mix” argument results in massive confusion for teachers about the role of context and inferencing in early reading instruction, with Whole Language/Balanced Literacy advocates effectively positioning this as a “decoding strategy” (aka “psycholinguistic guessing”, as per the writings of Kenneth Goodman), while advocates for empirically-derived cognitive psychology research agree that context is important, but in most cases, as a means of accessing meaning, after initial decoding, as conceptualised in the Simple View of Reading.

Reading instruction is not a fruit-cake – it is not OK to throw a range of tasty, multi-textured ingredients into the bowl and then present the finished product of “my favourite recipe”.

It is impossible to control the quality of children's pre-school experiences, but we do have some control over what goes on in early years classrooms, and we need to exercise that control for the benefit of all children. Rather than issuing children and their parents with lottery tickets on school entry, this means providing a level, high-quality playing field, based on the best possible interpretation, at this point in time, of the available research evidence. 

Knowledge translation is taken for granted in medicine, engineering, aviation, architecture, and a raft of other fields, but is not yet business-as-usual in education, where, as Dr Louisa Moats observed in 2000:

“Unfortunately, lack of rigor and respect for evidence in reading education are reinforced by the passivity of education leaders who feel that any idea that can muster a vigorous advocate is legitimate and deserves to be aired”. 

Even more unfortunately, not a great deal has changed in the nearly twenty years since these words were penned.

 

(C) Pamela Snow, 2019

Oral language competence. How it relates to classroom behavior (Ashman & Snow, 2019)

Recently I collaborated with secondary teacher Greg Ashman (@greg_ashman) on writing an article for classroom teachers about Developmental Language Disorder and how this might manifest (or masquerade, as the case may be) in the classroom.

This piece was published in open access format (i.e., no paywall) in American Educator today, and you can locate it here.


I greatly enjoyed writing this piece with a practitioner as the lead author and look forward to further opportunities to publish in this way.

If you're interested, please get in touch (p.snow@latrobe.edu.au).

Note, though, that I have learned (the hard way, as with all good life lessons) that when someone is offering to collaborate, they are sometimes in fact intending (albeit possibly unwittingly) to make stone soup. If you don't know this fable, you will find it here.

So - I'm happy to hear from practitioners who'd like to pitch an idea around shared authorship, as long as there's no stones involved ;-)

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(C) Pamela Snow (2019)

Whole Language Unicorns at home at the University of Melbourne

I was disappointed this week to see that the University of Melbourne, one of Australia’s (and indeed the world’s) most highly-esteemed universities, was promoting the ideas of David Hornsby on the important subject of how we teach children to read. If you haven’t already done so, you can listen to the interview I am referring to (it takes about 25 minutes) here. 

I have some familiarity with David’s work, having read publications such as this one and have no doubt about the depth of his commitment to supporting teachers and improving children’s progress in learning to read. It is unfortunate, however, that his key ideas about the role of phonics instruction remain uninformed by the last 20 years of cognitive science research on how best to get all children across the bridge to successful reading, writing, and spelling, in the first three years of school. Instead, David’s ideas are pretty Whole Language unicorns that persist in the imaginations of those who believe that “authentic children’s literature” is the key driver of successful reading. This does not align at all with the recommendations of three national inquiries into the teaching of reading, in the US, the UK, and Australia all of which recommended an explicit focus on systematic phonics instruction as the starting point for novice readers - alongside development of all of the other skills essential for successful reading. 

I did not find myself in complete disagreement with David, however, as I listened to this podcast. 

Here are the points on which David and I agree:

1.      Teachers are not nearly knowledgeable enough about the structure of language. In order to be able to teach the written code, teachers need to be able to understand that English is a morpho-phonemic language, and the full implications of what this means for how written and spoken language map to each other. I have blogged previously about concepts that teachers need to understand in order to be able to do their jobs properly, about the fact that they currently lack this knowledge, and the fact that responsibility for this sits with education academics who have shown a disgraceful disregard for the reading science, and the importance of ensuring this is transmitted to classroom teachers. 

I note that A/Prof Misty Adoniou has also written about low teacher knowledge stating that “All the participants in this study had patchy content knowledge of the English language, and very little knowledge of how to apply what content knowledge they had, although they were convinced this kind of knowledge was important”. So we seem to be in agreement, David, Misty, and me, that teachers are being sold short by their pre-service education. Where you choose to direct your rage about this is up to you, but I would start with the damage done to young children, particularly those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, and need the turbo-charging impact of highly effective teaching by highly knowledgeable teachers in the first three years of school. You might also want to consider the indignation of teachers who are paying thousands of dollars for courses that do not deliver the goods they thought they were buying – competence to go into a classroom and teach children how to read. 

2.      Low teacher knowledge means that teachers jump around from one seemingly attractive quick-fix commercial product to another. There’s an awful lot that goes on in schools that either lacks an evidence base, or for which the published evidence indicates a lack of efficacy. My colleague Dr Caroline Bowen AO and I have written about this here. This damages the professionalism and accountability of teachers, and yes, sorry, teachers, do need to be accountable for their decisions and practices, though the extent to which this plays out in practice is questionable. When was the last time a teacher was held to account by a registration body for failing to apply evidence-based approaches in their practice? 

3.      Programs don’t teach children how to read, teachers do. This is a point that is often made by Dr Louisa Moats, and speaks to some of the points made above about the importance of strong teacher knowledge. I understand though, why many teachers seek the security of a program, because it instils some confidence, given the weak knowledge base conferred by their pre-service education. Can you see a vicious cycle here?

These are the points on which I disagree with David:

1.      He makes a blanket declaration that “Programs don’t work”. That’s about as silly as saying “antibiotics don’t work”. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. It depends on a range of factors. My experience in working with teachers in schools is that programs often create the platform on which teachers go on to extend their knowledge and develop their practice. Programs definitely work better in the context of high teacher knowledge (in which case, perversely, there is less need for them) and when they are administered with fidelity.  When teachers deliver their own version of Program X and see only mediocre results in return, it is highly problematic that they then report “Program X does not work”. If we’re going to deliver programs, let’s first:

a.      Check their alignment with the current evidence on how best to teach reading

b.      Ensure that teachers receive appropriate training and ongoing coaching support so the program is delivered as intended, i.e. with fidelity. 

2.      David appeals to the romantic notion that all that is needed to get children interested in reading, is exposure to “authentic texts” (this is, in itself a problematic term as it implies a non-existent binary distinction, but I won’t get distracted about that here). Again, I have blogged previously about the “authentic illusion” in teaching children how to read. The logical fallacy that is occurring here is the conflation of books we read to children, with books we use to teach children to read. We want to expose children to a wide range of rich texts, to

a.      Help them understand the power and “magic” of books

b.      Extend their receptive and expressive vocabularies

c.      Expose them to increasingly complex sentences (and the increasingly complex ideas they represent)

d.      Help them understand narrative structure (and later, the structure of other discourse genres).

 

My three and a half year old grandson can be seen here "reading" to his two-month old sister. Yes, it warms my heart, at so many levels to look at images such as this. But no-one in my family is under any illusion that any actual reading instruction is taking place here. My grandchildren are engaged in precursors to becoming successful readers, but my daughter and son-in-law should be able to rely on their children's teachers to do the actual business of teaching them how to read. Schools should not rely on parents to be the critical link here. Some are able in this respect and some are not. Let's meet the needs of all children who enter foundation-year classrooms, not just the more advantaged ones. 

Immersing children in text does not teach them how to read, any more than playing hours and hours of Mozart concertos turns them into pianists or violinists who can play Mozart. Instead, the hours and hours need to be invested into learning and practising sub-skills.  Listening to music may be motivating and enjoyable, but it won't in and of itself teach the complex skill of playing music. Why do we "get" this in relation to music, but not in relation to reading?

Further, the incidental embedding of phonics instruction into the process of reading beautiful literature to children is inefficient (see Stephen Parker's free books on phonics instruction for further expansion on this) and fails to systematically address the knowledge of phoneme-grapheme correspondences that children need to learn in an efficient manner in the early stages of reading, in order to use their knowledge of the code to access more and more complex texts and their meanings. Sure, some children will be fine with the incidental approach, but we should not be focussing our teaching methods on those more advantaged children who will get across the bridge almost irrespective of the reading instruction they experience. 

A strong Tier 1 is the best insurance against the creation of instructional casualties, but is often not in place.

Ironically, in order to teach in accordance with the recommendations of the three international inquires referenced above, teachers need to be more knowledgeable about language, in exactly the way that David Hornsby and Misty Adoniou are advocating. 

3.      David relies on the (almost comically) flawed definition of decoding in the Australian Curriculum*:

A process of working out a meaning of words in a text. In decoding, readers draw on contextual, vocabulary, grammatical and phonic knowledge. Readers who decode effectively combine these forms of knowledge fluently and automatically, and self-correct using meaning to recognise when they make an error.

This may as well just be a definition of reading, as it fails to focus on the specific and essential sub-skill of mapping phonemes onto graphemes in order to first make sense of the black lines that we call letters on the page.

So – just because a definition has found its way into the Australian Curriculum, does not mean that it aligns with the science of reading. Anyone who is familiar with the Simple View of Reading, or with the Hollis Scarborough Reading Rope, will know how far short this definition falls of the skills beginning readers need to be taught in order to achieve decoding mastery. For my money, a child who can read aloud an isolated written word has decoded that word. Meaning comes next – the word is either in the child’s lexicon or needs to be added as a new word as a consequence of the oral language value-add of being able to read.

4.      David dials up the hoary old wind/wind chestnut to argue that “phonics alone isn’t enough”. Well, first of all, I am yet to meet anyone who claims that “phonics alone is enough”. 

       The debate as I see it, as around the role and type of initial instruction to get novices off the blocks as successful readers. Anyone familiar with the terrific Five from Five Project will know that no-one on the systematic phonics instruction side of the debate overlooks the importance of vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension – as well as inferencing and using contextual cues. The latter, however, should augment word identification rather than being the primary strategy relied upon by a novice who encounters an unfamiliar word.

My question for David, then is how does a child even get to the dilemma of wind Vs wind without first using phonics-based decoding skills?

5.      Finally, David makes the bizarre claim that systematic phonics instruction involves the teaching of nonsense words. Sigh. We don’t seem to be able to put this silly idea to bed. Firstly, the distinction between real words and non-words is dimensional rather than categorical. Just have a look at J.R. Tolkein, Lewis Carroll, J. K. Rowling, Dr Seuss, to name a few, if you don’t believe me. I am not aware of any evidence that says that novice readers approach unfamiliar words with a real-word – non-word filter.
      
Consider too, the ever-evolving nature of spoken and written language and the constant addition of what were once non-words, to the real-words lexicon. You can find examples of recent additions to English here. How can anyone (child or adult) read these new words if they are unable to decode in the truly get-the-word-off-the-page sense of decoding?

Think about this for a moment – every word is potentially a non-word to a novice, because their orthographic lexicon is still under construction. I have seen teachers “play” with non-words in Phonological Awareness activities and am completely comfortable with that – the children were experiencing rhyme and enjoyed talking about the meaning of the words. Consider this example: the teacher is using the words “wig, pig, and big” in a rhyming exercise and then introduces “rig” asking the class if it is a real word or a non-word. Chances are a lot of five-year olds will say it’s a non-word. What a great opportunity to wrap some vocabulary work into the Phonological Awareness activity. 

So can we be very clear about this please – non-words are extremely useful as a light-touch screening tool to determine the extent to which children are mastering essential phoneme-grapheme correspondences, so that they can decode in line with the scientific definition of decoding, not the politically sanitised version that is pleasing to Whole Language unicorns. 

I hope going forward that our esteemed educational institutions will apply careful quality and evidence-alignment filters over ideas they promote to teachers, who, more than anyone else, must be thoroughly tired of the contentious nature of something that they need to be able to do everyday - and across all year levels. 

In the last fifty years, we have put men on the moon, eradicated a number of terrifying childhood illnesses, and made major advances in engineering, aviation, construction, and manufacturing.  

But thanks to a massive knowledge-translation failure,  we cannot be relied upon to teach children how to read.  

*Postscript: I am pleased to advise that Australian Curriculum website definition of decoding has been updated since this blogpost was published, and now reads as follows:

A process of efficient word recognition in which readers use knowledge of the relationship between letters and sounds to work out how to say and read written words.

(C) Pamela Snow (2019)