On “Structured Literacy” in the Science of Reading
An updated version of my book about reading and education will appear in a few months. It focuses on developments in reading education since it was published, including the emergence of the “science of reading” approach to instruction. This post is based on material that will appear in the new edition.
Structured Literacy is the term that the International Dyslexia Association created to describe the methods that they consider effective in teaching dyslexics and other children who struggle with learning to read. It emphasizes explicit instruction in the components of reading in a sequence moving from simple to complex. The IDA’s purpose was apparently to clarify the elements of effective interventions for their membership, which includes practitioners who work with struggling readers. Their recommendation is to break reading down into component parts that can be taught explicitly and systematically.
Although mainly developed to meet the needs of dyslexics and others for whom learning to read is unusually difficult, Structured Literacy has been adopted in the SoR as a framework for teaching all readers. As a tenet of the SoR approach it is incorporated in SoR legislation and in widely-used guides (such as the one from the Reading League). At first glance, Structured Literacy seems like a good way to correct the major flaw in Whole Language, its neglect of explicit skills instruction. WL incorrectly assumed that children would pick up such skills the way they learn a first language, which requires little instruction. Beginning readers actually have to be taught several things merely to get started, beginning with the fact that there is something we call reading, and that it involves a visual code that represents spoken words in specific ways. In contrast, children do not have to be taught that there is something called language that consists of sounds, words, and sentences, and most of what they learn comes from using language, not instruction.
By adopting Structured Literacy, the SoR addressed this need but in doing so it moved the dial to the other extreme, holding that basic skills and other components of reading need to be explicitly taught if they are to be learned. Teachers in science of reading classrooms are trying out new methods for teaching everything from print, phonics, and vocabulary to components of words such as phonemes and morphemes that they have learned about in SoR professional development courses. There is so much teaching of so many components of reading and language one wonders how anyone learned to read before science (supposedly) told us that all this explicit instruction is necessary.
Well, it isn’t–except, perhaps, if you are dyslexic.
For typically-developing children all of this instruction isn’t necessary because it isn’t the only way they learn. The other way is called implicit learning, which has been studied in humans and other species for many years. The brain has two complementary learning systems. Learning via the explicit system is relatively slow, requires conscious awareness, and relies on language. Learning via the implicit system occurs automatically, without conscious awareness or intention, and involves many kinds of information in addition to language. It is sometimes called “statistical” learning, because it involves picking up on patterns in the environment based on their frequencies and similarity to one another. This type of learning goes on in the background as one engages in activities such as reading or making dinner. Learning via this system involves a very large number of small adjustments to the neural networks that support such behaviors.
Most of the knowledge that supports skilled reading isn’t learned via explicit instruction, even at the elementary school level. My favorite example is vocabulary. First graders typically produce several hundred different words and comprehend several thousand. Some words are taught (as when a toddler is taught the names for some colors, animals, and objects) but these are a small fraction of the words they know. Most of the rest were learned implicitly through language use.
Leaving implicit learning out of the picture has resulted in overreliance on explicit instruction and learning via the more cognitively demanding, conscious system. There is an enormous amount to cover because people are teaching things that are normally learned by the other mechanism. Consider phonics. In a popular current curriculum, instruction in 128 phonics patterns is spread out over three grades (K-2). Some of that instruction is needed to clue the child in to what there is to learn and build a basic foundation; the rest is normally learned via the implicit mechanism. That is how people were able to learn to read before all this was taught.
Dyslexics are different, of course. Some may well need all that explicit instruction because they are dyslexic. One current hypothesis holds that dyslexia sometimes arises from an impairment in the statistical learning mechanism. For such children, being explicitly taught as many aspects of reading as possible may be a necessary workaround. Taking the same approach in teaching non-dyslexics makes learning to read harder because it doesn't adequately utilize the other learning mechanism. In effect, children are taught as if they are dyslexic.
How did an approach based on accommodating children with special needs become the basis for instruction in the SoR? The main conduit appears to have been LETRS, the professional development course for reading teachers developed by Moats and Torgeson. It is a long course that describes many detailed aspects of print and language and how to teach them. Moats chaired the committee that produced the IDA’s “Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teachers of Reading” (2010), which laid out the explicit, systematic, incremental approach to instruction. IDA subsequently chose “structured literacy” as the name of the approach. Moats co-chaired the IDA committee that produced a 2018 revision of standards, which utilized the new term. Science of Reading legislation has since incorporated this approach. In addition, several of the laws that require teachers to obtain additional professional training (or have it as an option) stipulate that it be LETRS; in other cases, LETRS is among the PD programs certified for adoption by state and local authorities.
Why was this approach so widely adopted? Four reasons stand out. First, any port in a storm: Structured Literacy satisfied the demand for a new instructional plan after the demise of Whole Language. Second, one size fits all: using the same approach for both dyslexics and nondyslexics accords with the observation that everyone needs to learn the same things in order to read. Third, leave no stone unturned: explicitly teaching all the components of reading appeared to be a way to ensure that all children would learn to read, and the risks associated with potentially overteaching typical or high achievers seem minimal. Fourth, the approach could be easily adapted to the practice of dividing reading instruction into units with specific topics and goals, each unit building on the previous ones.
On the first point, perhaps Structured Literacy was the best option in the short term, but now it is the law of most of the land, which complicates making adjustments. On the second point, it is true that everyone needs to learn the same things but they don’t all learn the same way or benefit from the same experiences. As explained in my book, essentially the same neural circuits are involved for all readers; they are tuned differently depending on factors such as writing system, reading skill, and individual differences in learning and other capacities. Although the destination is the same, the paths to getting there differ. Some children learn more quickly than others. Some learn more from individual experiences than others. Some have conditions that interfere with learning. Some require a greater amount of explicit instruction, a lot more practice, and a lot more time on task. These learning differences seem to have gotten lost in the transition from Structured Literacy as an approach to remediating dyslexia to Structured Literacy as the foundation of the SoR.
Finally, what about the view that overteaching some children is harmless? At this moment I wish we could hear from children who are being taught this way: it sounds like a long slog. The impact on children’s achievement and motivation to read aside, the opportunity costs are enormous. Doing all this instruction is wildly inefficient. It is very easy to stipulate that a curriculum include detailed instruction in a long list of components of reading. It is harder to see how that can be accomplished in the time available, especially given other conditions that routinely complicate classroom life. There are strong indications that the time problem is real. SoR instruction is starting earlier, in Pre-K, and ending later, with activities in areas such as phonemic awareness and phonics often extending into 3rd and 4th grade. In many schools, basic skills instruction is taking up more of the school day, eating up the time for other learning, like Pac Man gobbling dots. A child could be using that time to learn other things and the school day could accommodate more of them.
To summarize, Structured Literacy is a rational approach to ameliorating dyslexia, but the extension of the approach to the general population is a bad case of mission creep that involved two errors:
The fact that some basic aspects of reading need to be taught does not mean that everything does.
The fact that dyslexics require a great deal of explicit instruction doesn’t mean that nondyslexics do as well.
I hope it is apparent that I’ve provided this analysis because these should be correctable flaws. The way forward is to incorporate both implicit and explicit learning, with the balance between them depending on development (e.g., explicit is essential at the start, but then implicit is dominant) and capacities (e.g., dyslexics may require greater emphasis on explicit, fast learners may require very little). I go into these issues in greater detail in the new version of the book.
