The Cognitive Foundations of Reading and Its Acquisition : A Framework with Applications Connecting Teaching and Learning [1st ed.] 9783030441944, 9783030441951

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xxv
The Rationale, Focus, Features, and Uses of the Book (Wesley A. Hoover, William E. Tunmer)....Pages 1-11
Overview of the Cognitive Foundations Framework (Wesley A. Hoover, William E. Tunmer)....Pages 13-22
The Cognitive Foundations of Reading (Wesley A. Hoover, William E. Tunmer)....Pages 23-39
The Cognitive Foundations of Reading Acquisition (Wesley A. Hoover, William E. Tunmer)....Pages 41-84
Summary of the Cognitive Foundations Framework (Wesley A. Hoover, William E. Tunmer)....Pages 85-88
Understanding Reading Development and Difficulty (Wesley A. Hoover, William E. Tunmer)....Pages 89-115
Understanding Reading Across Writing Systems (Wesley A. Hoover, William E. Tunmer)....Pages 117-130
Overview of the Main Tools Used in Teaching Reading (Wesley A. Hoover, William E. Tunmer)....Pages 131-134
Standards and the Cognitive Foundations Framework (Wesley A. Hoover, William E. Tunmer)....Pages 135-177
Assessments and the Cognitive Foundations Framework (Wesley A. Hoover, William E. Tunmer)....Pages 179-197
Curriculum and Instruction and the Cognitive Foundations Framework (Wesley A. Hoover, William E. Tunmer)....Pages 199-240
Using the Cognitive Foundations Framework to Support Struggling Readers (Wesley A. Hoover, William E. Tunmer)....Pages 241-257
Using the Cognitive Foundations Framework to Create Coherence in Reading Practices (Wesley A. Hoover, William E. Tunmer)....Pages 259-263

Citation preview

Literacy Studies: Perspectives from Cognitive Neurosciences, Linguistics, Psychology and Education

Wesley A. Hoover William E. Tunmer

The Cognitive Foundations of Reading and Its Acquisition A Framework with Applications Connecting Teaching and Learning

Literacy Studies Perspectives from Cognitive Neurosciences, Linguistics, Psychology and Education Volume 20 Series Editors R. Malatesha Joshi Texas A&M University College Station, TX, USA Editorial Board Members Rui Alves University of Porto Porto, Portugal Linnea Ehri CUNY Graduate School New York, USA Usha Goswami University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK Catherine McBride Chang Chinese University of Hong Kong Hong Kong, China Jane Oakhill University of Sussex Brighton, UK Rebecca Treiman Washington University in St. Louis Missouri, USA

While language defines humanity, literacy defines civilization. Understandably, illiteracy or difficulties in acquiring literacy skills have become a major concern of our technological society. A conservative estimate of the prevalence of literacy problems would put the figure at more than a billion people in the world. Because of the seriousness of the problem, research in literacy acquisition and its breakdown is pursued with enormous vigor and persistence by experts from diverse backgrounds such as cognitive psychology, neuroscience, linguistics and education. This, of course, has resulted in a plethora of data, and consequently it has become difficult to integrate this abundance of information into a coherent body because of the artificial barriers that exist among different professional specialties. The purpose of this series is to bring together the available research studies into a coherent body of knowledge. Publications in this series are of interest to educators, clinicians and research scientists in the above-mentioned specialties. Some of the titles suitable for the Series are: fMRI, brain imaging techniques and reading skills, orthography and literacy; and research based techniques for improving decoding, vocabulary, spelling, and comprehension skills. Book proposals for this series may be submitted to the Publishing Editor: Natalie Rieborn; Springer; Van Godewijckstraat 30;3300 AA Dordrecht; The Netherlands; e-mail: [email protected] More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/7206

Wesley A. Hoover • William E. Tunmer

The Cognitive Foundations of Reading and Its Acquisition A Framework with Applications Connecting Teaching and Learning

Wesley A. Hoover American Institutes for Research Austin, TX, USA

William E. Tunmer College of Humanities & Social Sciences Massey University Palmerston North, New Zealand

ISSN 2214-000X     ISSN 2214-0018 (electronic) Literacy Studies ISBN 978-3-030-44194-4    ISBN 978-3-030-44195-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44195-1 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

We dedicate this work to those who were so instrumental in enabling us to complete it: • To Philip B. Gough, our mentor, who brought together deep insights about reading and an unflinching commitment to subject them to the tests of science and whose relentless press to learn so expanded our intellectual passions and discipline • To wilderness, especially the Bridger Wilderness, which has long centered another of our passions • To our many colleagues who have generously shared with us themselves and their wisdoms • To our respective wives, Susan and Jane, and children, Clayton and Kyle, and Ross, Adrien, and Alec, who have sustained us as our foundations

Preface

In 1992, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) found that 38% of fourth-grade students in the United States read below its basic level. And while significant improvements have been made, this number has fallen only to 34% in the most recent NAEP findings from 2019 (National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2020, January 25). Given all the resources expended over these years to change this outcome, why is it so difficult to make progress in supporting children to read? Though there is great diversity in the issues faced by the third of students who fail to read at the basic level (e.g., poverty and its accompanying conditions, limited skills in English, learning difficulties, limited opportunities to learn, poor instruction), we believe there is one overarching persistent obstacle to their progress: our general failure to effectively develop the abilities of reading professionals to connect what is known about the cognitive capacities required for reading to the professional use of the tools employed to develop those capacities in children. In short, we have yet to provide our professional staffs with the capability to judiciously connect the whys underlying reading competence to the whats used to develop it, resulting in reading practices wanting for both coherence and effectiveness. This capacity to connect within reading practice is the central issue we address here. The book is focused on supporting reading professionals – reading teachers, specialists, interventionists, coordinators, and coaches – as well as those preparing to serve in these roles and the teacher educators preparing them for such service. It is designed to help these professionals develop an understanding of the cognitive capacities upon which reading depends and to apply that understanding in ways that will enable them to bring coherence to their practices. Achieving coherence in reading practices based on the cognitive requirements of reading will help them better support all students learning to read, including those who encounter little difficulty with reading, but especially those who struggle to read. This book first describes the structure of cognitive components underlying reading and learning to read. This is achieved through the Cognitive Foundations Framework, which depicts the set of critical cognitive capacities, as well as their interrelationships, that must be in place if successful reading is to be realized. The vii

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book references (though not exhaustively) and sometimes highlights key research, but it does not attempt to bring full research detail to that which underlies the broad picture, which is the central focus. The book next shows how this view of reading and its development can be linked to the main tools reading professionals use in their everyday work – reading standards, assessments, and curriculum and instruction. It does this by providing detailed examples of such linkages through applications of the framework to some widely used materials: • Reading-relevant standards from the Common Core State Standards (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010) • A kindergarten through 12th-grade assessment portfolio used in one school district • The subtasks of the DIBELS Next (Good & Kaminski, 2012) assessment of reading skills • Evidence-based recommendations regarding the content of reading instruction from the reports of three expert panels, namely, –– Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read – Reports of the Subgroups (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000) –– Foundational skills to support reading for understanding in kindergarten through third grade (Foorman et al., 2016) –– Improving reading comprehension in kindergarten through third grade (Shanahan et al., 2010) • A kindergarten curricular sequence from the SRA Open Court Reading program (McGraw-Hill, 2018, November 11) For each of these examples, the book details their linkages to the cognitive foundations underlying reading to show how these connections may be made for other materials that may be in use within a given setting. The book is unique in that it provides a broad-stroke model of the cognitive capacities underlying reading as well as those cognitive capacities needed to master these cognitive requirements for reading. It describes the main evidence-based interrelationships of these cognitive capacities and explicitly represents them through structured graphic displays that aid overall understanding. And finally, it demonstrates how knowledge of these cognitive capacities can be connected to the available tools used in reading practice so that reading professionals can build a justified, coherent approach to their work. These relationships, discussed in detail, are also represented graphically through maps that overlay tool content onto the cognitive foundations of reading, further enhancing the understanding of both. The innovative approach of this book is on using knowledge of the cognitive requirements of reading and learning to read as a mechanism for brining coherence to the use of reading practice tools. In short, for reading, the book provides a framework whose applications can bind teaching and learning, allowing one to guide what children must be taught based on what they have so far learned.

Preface

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While the book is based on understanding reading and reading development in English, it also presents a more general model representing the cognitive requirements of reading and learning to read in any phonologically based writing system. This makes it useful for understanding what is required for learning to read other languages employing such systems and what the cognitive implications are for learning to read in a second language given the cognitive requirements for reading in the first language. Finally, the book aids understanding of the cognitive dimensions of reading difficulty and disability and provides a detailed focus on understanding and executing response-to-intervention approaches for struggling readers based on the cognitive issues faced. It follows this with a discussion of how to create coherent reading practices based on the previous material presented and ends with a summary of what has been covered and work that remains to be done. Wesley A. Hoover Austin, TX, USA Palmerston  North, New Zealand William E. Tunmer

References Foorman, B.  R., Beyler, N., Borradaile, K., Coyne, M., Denton, C.  A., Dimino, J., …, Wissel, S. (2016). Foundational skills to support reading for understanding in kindergarten through 3rd grade (NCEE 2016-4008). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE), Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Good, R.  H., III, & Kaminski, R.  A. (2012). DIBELS Next assessment manual. Eugene, OR: Dynamic Measurement Group. McGraw-Hill. (2018, November 11). Grade K, Unit 1, Lesson 2. SRA Open Court Reading Foundational Skills Kits. Retrieved from https://s3.amazonaws.com/ ecommerce-prod.mheducation.com/unitas/school/explore/sites/ocr/samples/ GRADE_K_TEACHERS_GUIDE/files/res/downloads/book.pdf National Assessment of Educational Progress. (2020, January 25). The nation’s report card: Reading. Retrieved from https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ reading/nation/achievement/?grade=4 National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers. (2010). Common core state standards for English language arts and literacy in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects. Washington, DC: National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel. Teaching children to read: Reports of the subgroups

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(NIH Publication No. 00-4754). Washington, DC: U.S.  Department of Health and Human Services. Shanahan, T., Callison, K., Carriere, C., Duke, N. K., Pearson, P. D., Schatschneider, C., & Torgesen, J. (2010). Improving reading comprehension in kindergarten through 3rd grade: A Practice guide (NCEE 2010-4038). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE), Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.

Acknowledgments

The original work underlying the Cognitive Foundations Framework, as well as much of its ongoing development, was supported by funds to the first author provided by the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory. Funding for later development of the framework was provided to the first author by the American Institutes for Research and to the second author by Massey University and the New Zealand Ministry of Education. Beyond the above organizations, we also recognize several individuals for their support of this work: • David Myers who both encouraged and supported further development of this work at the American Institutes for Research (AIR) • AIR Graphics Design Specialist Luis Martinez who created the framework graphics • Members of the literacy leadership team at St. Bernard Parish School District (Louisiana) who worked through an earlier version of the book: Nicole Bower, Liz Deshotel, Alison Gros, LeeAnne Harlton, Mary Lou Hay, Cheramie Kerth, Alex LaPres, Beverly Lawrason, Mary Lumetta, Debbie Seibert, Tessie White, and Kristi Wilhelmus • Colleagues who read and provided valuable comments on draft versions: Pooja Nakamura, Terry Salinger, and Rebecca Stone, American Institutes for Research; Alison Arrow, Canterbury University; Jill Slack, Louisiana Department of Education; James Chapman and Keith Greaney, Massey University; Malt Joshi, Texas A&M University; and Michael Kamil, Stanford University • Our Editor at Springer, Helen van der Stelt

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Contents

1 The Rationale, Focus, Features, and Uses of the Book ������������������������    1 1.1 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 1.2 The Rationale Behind the Cognitive Foundations Framework and Its Applications������������������������������������������������������������������������    2 1.3 The Focus and Unique Features of the Book����������������������������������    4 1.4 Using the Framework with Teaching Tools������������������������������������    7 1.5 The Content and Organization of Chapters������������������������������������    8 1.6 What’s Next������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    9 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   10 2 Overview of the Cognitive Foundations Framework����������������������������   13 2.1 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   13 2.2 Defining a Framework��������������������������������������������������������������������   13 2.3 Defining a Cognitive Foundation and Its Essential Characteristics��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   14 2.4 The Two Parts of the Cognitive Foundations Framework��������������   16 2.5 Other Reading Frameworks������������������������������������������������������������   17 2.6 What’s Next������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   21 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   22 3 The Cognitive Foundations of Reading��������������������������������������������������   23 3.1 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   23 3.2 Reading and Language��������������������������������������������������������������������   24 3.3 The Simple View of Reading����������������������������������������������������������   26 3.4 Select Issues in the Simple View of Reading����������������������������������   32 3.5 The Definition of a Cognitive Foundation Applied to the Simple View of Reading ������������������������������������������������������   35 3.6 Summary ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   36 3.7 Questions for Further Thought��������������������������������������������������������   36 3.8 What’s Next������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   37 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   37

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4 The Cognitive Foundations of Reading Acquisition ����������������������������   41 4.1 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   41 4.2 Language Comprehension��������������������������������������������������������������   42 4.2.1 The Cognitive Components Underlying Language Comprehension ��������������������������������������������������������������������   42 4.2.2 Summary of the Cognitive Foundations of Language Comprehension������������������������������������������������   52 4.2.3 Select Issues in Language Comprehension��������������������������   53 4.3 Word Recognition ��������������������������������������������������������������������������   54 4.3.1 Automaticity in Word Recognition ��������������������������������������   54 4.3.2 The Cognitive Components Underlying Word Recognition ��������������������������������������������������������������������������   55 4.3.3 Summary of the Cognitive Foundations of Word Recognition ��������������������������������������������������������������������������   74 4.3.4 Select Issues in Word Recognition����������������������������������������   76 4.4 Summary ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   77 4.5 Questions for Further Thought��������������������������������������������������������   79 4.6 What’s Next������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   80 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   80 5 Summary of the Cognitive Foundations Framework ��������������������������   85 5.1 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   85 5.2 The Cognitive Foundations Framework������������������������������������������   85 5.3 Revisiting Our Introductory Discussion of the Framework������������   87 5.4 What’s Next������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   88 Further reading������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   88 6 Understanding Reading Development and Difficulty��������������������������   89 6.1 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   89 6.2 Understanding Reading Development��������������������������������������������   90 6.2.1 Matthew Effects in Reading Development ��������������������������   93 6.2.2 Typical Development of Language Comprehension������������   95 6.2.3 Typical Development of Word Recognition��������������������������  100 6.3 Understanding Reading Difficulty��������������������������������������������������  104 6.3.1 Language Comprehension����������������������������������������������������  106 6.3.2 Word Recognition ����������������������������������������������������������������  108 6.4 Select Issues in Reading Development and Difficulty��������������������  111 6.5 Summary ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  112 6.6 Questions for Further Thought��������������������������������������������������������  113 6.7 What’s Next������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  113 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  114 7 Understanding Reading Across Writing Systems ��������������������������������  117 7.1 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  117 7.2 Key Features of Phonologically-Based Writing Systems ��������������  117 7.3 A Generalization of the Cognitive Foundations Framework����������  120

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7.4 Considerations for Learning to Read in a Second Language����������  124 7.5 Select Issues in Reading in Non-English Phonologically-­Based Writing Systems������������������������������������������  127 7.6 Summary ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  128 7.7 Questions for Further Thought��������������������������������������������������������  129 7.8 What’s Next������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  130 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  130 8 Overview of the Main Tools Used in Teaching Reading ����������������������  131 8.1 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  131 8.2 The Discipline to Connect Teaching and Learning������������������������  131 8.3 Standards, Assessments, and Curriculum and Instruction��������������  132 8.4 Gaining Coherence in Using Teaching Tools����������������������������������  132 8.5 What’s Next������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  134 9 Standards and the Cognitive Foundations Framework ����������������������  135 9.1 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  135 9.2 Defining Standards��������������������������������������������������������������������������  136 9.3 Standards for English Language Arts in the United States ������������  137 9.4 Mapping a Portion of the Common Core State Standards��������������  137 9.4.1 The Maps of the Reading-Relevant Common Core State Standards for Kindergarten��������������������������������������������������  141 9.4.2 Some Overarching Issues in the Standard Maps for Kindergarten ������������������������������������������������������������������������  159 9.4.3 The Map of One Strand of the Common Core State Standards Across Grade Levels ����������������������������������  162 9.4.4 Some Overarching Issues in the Foundational Skills Map Across Grade Levels������������������������������������������  172 9.5 Select Issues in Standards ��������������������������������������������������������������  173 9.6 Summary ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  175 9.7 Questions for Further Thought��������������������������������������������������������  176 9.8 What’s Next������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  177 Reference ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  177 10 Assessments and the Cognitive Foundations Framework��������������������  179 10.1 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  179 10.2 Defining Types of Assessments������������������������������������������������������  180 10.3 The Map of an Assessment Portfolio����������������������������������������������  181 10.3.1 Questions to Explore Through the Assessment Portfolio Map����������������������������������������������������������������������  183 10.3.2 Some Overarching Issues in the Assessment Portfolio Map����������������������������������������������������������������������  183 10.4 The Map of an Assessment Instrument: DIBELS Next ������������������  186 10.4.1 Questions to Explore Through the Assessment Instrument Map������������������������������������������������������������������  188 10.4.2 Some Details in the DIBELS Next Assessment������������������  188

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Contents

10.4.3 Some Overarching Issues in the Assessment Instrument Map ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  192 10.5 Select Issues in Assessments����������������������������������������������������������  193 10.6 Summary ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  195 10.7 Questions for Further Thought��������������������������������������������������������  196 10.8 What’s Next������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  196 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  196 11 Curriculum and Instruction and the Cognitive Foundations Framework ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  199 11.1 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  199 11.2 Defining Instructional Programs and Components ������������������������  200 11.3 Core Instructional Programs for Reading ��������������������������������������  200 11.3.1 The Core Continuum����������������������������������������������������������  201 11.3.2 Evidence Concerning the Effectiveness of Core Instructional Programs ����������������������������������������������  210 11.3.3 Characteristics of Effective Reading Instruction����������������  213 11.3.4 The Map of a Small Portion of an Instructional Program: SRA Open Court Reading ����������������������������������  225 11.4 Select Issues in Curriculum and Instruction ����������������������������������  233 11.5 Summary ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  234 11.6 Questions for Further Thought��������������������������������������������������������  237 11.7 What’s Next������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  237 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  238 12 Using the Cognitive Foundations Framework to Support Struggling Readers����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  241 12.1 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  241 12.2 Differentiated Instruction����������������������������������������������������������������  241 12.3 Response-to-Intervention Approaches��������������������������������������������  244 12.3.1 Screening����������������������������������������������������������������������������  246 12.3.2 Content of Instructional Support����������������������������������������  248 12.3.3 Progress Monitoring�����������������������������������������������������������  250 12.4 Select Issues in Supporting Struggling Readers ����������������������������  250 12.5 Summary ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  253 12.6 Questions for Further Thought��������������������������������������������������������  254 12.7 What’s Next������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  255 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  256 13 Using the Cognitive Foundations Framework to Create Coherence in Reading Practices ������������������������������������������������������������  259 13.1 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  259 13.2 The Big Picture of Coherence in Reading Practice������������������������  260 13.3 What Has Been Covered and What Remains to Be Done��������������  262

About the Authors

Wesley  A.  Hoover earned his PhD in Human Experimental Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin with a specialty in psycholinguistics. He worked at the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (SEDL) for 35 years in the areas of early reading, bilingual reading, language acquisition, and mathematics and science education, leading research, research application, and several large-scale education dissemination and professional development projects. His main research centered on the simple view of reading and its cognitive underpinnings and was focused on detailing the specifications and predictions of these conceptual models and testing them in the context of early grade reading. In his last 18  years at SEDL, he served as its President and CEO, directing the overall work of some 100 staff supported through competitively won awards. His culminating work at SEDL was leading its 2015 merger with the American Institutes for Research (AIR). Within AIR, he served as Executive Vice President and Senior Advisor, working on merger transition issues and special projects within the field of literacy, before retiring in 2019.  

William  E.  Tunmer is Distinguished Professor of Educational Psychology at the Massey University, Institute of Education. He received his PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin in 1979, specializing in the areas of theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive development. From 1980 to 1988, he held the positions of Research Fellow, Lecturer, and Senior Lecturer at the University of Western Australia. In 1988, he was appointed Professor of Educational Psychology at Massey University, where he served as Head of Department and Dean of the Faculty of Education. He has published over 150 journal articles, book chapters, and books on early literacy development, literacy learning difficulties, and reading intervention. He has served on the editorial boards of Reading Research Quarterly, Language and Education, Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and Journal of Learning Disabilities, and in 2012, he completed a 5-year term as Associate Editor of Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal. In 1999, he was co-winner of the International Reading Association’s Dina Feitelson Award for Excellence in Research and in 2019 was the recipient of the Eminent Researcher Award of the Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties.  

xvii

List of Acronyms

AAE African American English ASSR Assisting students struggling with reading: Response to Intervention and multi-tier intervention for reading in the primary grade C Language comprehension CAI computer-assisted instruction CCSS Common Core of State Standards D Word recognition (decoding) Daze DIBELS maze comprehension DIBELS Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills DORF DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency fMRI Functional magnetic resonance imaging FSF First Sound Fluency (DIBELS) LNF Letter Naming Fluency (DIBELS) MAE Mainstream American English MLU mean length of utterance MTSS Multi-tiered systems of support NAEP National Assessment of Educational Progress NRP National Reading Panel NWF Nonsense Word Fluency (DIBELS) PGFS Practice Guide for Foundational Skills PGRC Practice Guide for Reading Comprehension PSF Phoneme Segmentation Fluency (DIBELS) R Reading comprehension RTI Response-to-intervention SVR Simple View of Reading

xix

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 The National Reading Panel’s five pillars of reading instruction displayed as a sequence of steps�������������������������������������������������������  17 Fig. 2.2 The National Reading Panel’s five pillars of reading instruction displayed as a bi-­directional circular progression of components���������������������������������������������������������������  18 Fig. 2.3 Frameworks for understanding reading: The Reading Pyramid�����������������������������������������������������������������������  19 Fig. 2.4 Frameworks for understanding reading: The Modified Cognitive Model��������������������������������������������������������  20 Fig. 2.5 Frameworks for understanding reading: Basic Early Literacy Skills (with measures and timeline)��������������������������������������������������  21 Fig. 2.6 Frameworks for understanding reading: The Component Model of Reading�����������������������������������������������������������������������������  22 Fig. 3.1 The Simple View of Reading represented as a 2 × 2 matrix crossing poor and good abilities in word recognition and language comprehension������������������������������������������������������������������  29 Fig. 3.2 The theoretical relationships between the three variables of the Simple View of Reading with each variable ranging from no skill to perfect skill����������������������������������������������������������������������  30 Fig. 3.3 The Simple View of Reading graphically represented as the Cognitive Foundations of Reading���������������������������������������������������  31 Fig. 4.1 A model of the sequenced processes and products involved in spoken language comprehension������������������������������������������������������  42 Fig. 4.2 The articulatory organs of the human vocal tract involved in creating speech����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  44 Fig. 4.3 Structural representations for the two different meanings of the sentence Flying hang gliders can be dangerous���������������������  47 Fig. 4.4 Relationships among the cognitive elements underpinning the language comprehension component in the Cognitive Foundations of Reading Acquisition������������������������������������������������  52 xxi

xxii

List of Figures

Fig. 4.5 An example of what can be required in using a letter’s sound or name to connect that letter to a phoneme�������������������������������������  68 Fig. 4.6 The triangle model of word recognition�������������������������������������������  71 Fig. 4.7 The key elements in the development of analytic and automatic processing of print under the information processing model of spoken language comprehension��������������������������������������������������  73 Fig. 4.8 The word analysis and word form processing areas of the brain�������������������������������������������������������������������������������  74 Fig. 4.9 Brain scans from one child learning to read at different points of schooling��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  75 Fig. 4.10 Relationships among the cognitive elements underpinning the word recognition component in the Cognitive Foundations of Reading Acquisition������������������������������������������������  76 Fig. 5.1 The Cognitive Foundations Framework and its knowledge-skill set definitions������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  86 Fig. 6.1 Using color saturation to depict skill levels within the reading variables under the Simple View of Reading�����������������������  91 Fig. 6.2 Using color saturation to depict skill levels for a typical Englishspeaking student at the beginning of first grade under the Simple View of Reading�������������������������������������������������������������������������������  91 Fig. 6.3 Using color saturation to depict skill levels for a typical Englishspeaking student at the end of first grade under the Simple View of Reading�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  92 Fig. 6.4 Reciprocally facilitating positive Matthew effects between reading comprehension and both word recognition and language comprehension����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  94 Fig. 7.1 The generalized Cognitive Foundations Framework (for phonologically-based writing systems) and its knowledge-skill set definitions Each cognitive component represents an independent, but not necessarily elemental, knowledge-­skill set that is an essential, hierarchically positioned, building block in reading and learning to read�������������������������������������������������������������������������������  122

List of Tables

Table 9.1 The map of the kindergarten Reading: Literature strand of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework components�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  143 Table 9.2 The map of the kindergarten Reading: Informational Text strand of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework components���������������������������������������������������������������  147 Table 9.3 The map of the kindergarten Reading: Foundational Skills strand of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework components���������������������������������������������������������������  150 Table 9.4 The map of the kindergarten Speaking and Listening strand of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework components���������������������������������������������������������������  154 Table 9.5 The map of the kindergarten Language strand of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework components�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  158 Table 9.6 The distribution of the kindergarten reading-relevant Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy across the Cognitive Foundations Framework components�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  160 Table 9.7 The map of the kindergarten through Grade 5 Reading: Foundational Skills strand of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework components��������������������  170 Table 10.1 The map of one school district’s reading-relevant assessments by the grade levels tested onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework components���������������������������������������������������������������  184 xxiii

xxiv

List of Tables

Table 10.2 The map of the DIBELS Next assessment subtasks by the grade levels considered for testing onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework components�������������������������������������������  189 Table 11.1 Contrasts of key features across a continuum of teaching approaches for facilitating the development of alphabetic coding skill�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  208 Table 11.2 The map of the research review findings from Report of the National Reading Panel by strength of evidence onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework components��������������������������  216 Table 11.3 The map of the research review findings from Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade by strength of evidence onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework components�������������������������������������������  217 Table 11.4 The map of the research review findings from Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade by strength of evidence onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework components���������������������������������������������������������������  219 Table 11.5 A combined map of the research review findings from three expert panels by strength of evidence onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework component��������������������������������������������  220 Table 11.6 The map of a portion of the SRA Open Court Reading Foundational Skills Kit onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework components���������������������������������������������������������������  231

List of Boxes

Box 2.1 Use of the National Research Panel’s Recommendations in Teacher Preparation Programs����������������������������������������������������   19 Box 4.1 Box 4.2

Orthographic Regularity in English������������������������������������������������   57 Graphemes, Letters, and Phonemes in English������������������������������   61

Box 6.1

Speech Perception in Infants����������������������������������������������������������   97

Box 7.1

Distinguishing Types of Syllabaries���������������������������������������������  120

Box 11.1 A Typical Phonics Approach for Teaching Children to Recognize Words����������������������������������������������������������������������  202 Box 11.2 A Typical Whole-Language Approach for Teaching Children to Recognize Words�������������������������������������������������������  205

xxv

Chapter 1

The Rationale, Focus, Features, and Uses of the Book

Acronyms MTSS Multi-tiered systems of support RtI Response-to-intervention

1.1  Introduction In this chapter we first describe our rationale for writing the book: To help reading professionals bring an empirically grounded coherence to their practices through an understanding of the cognitive requirements underlying reading and learning to read. We discuss the book’s focus and unique features, including its descriptions of the major cognitive components underlying reading, their interrelationships, and the capacities that must be developed within them to advance reading. We then discuss the book’s intended uses and describe processes for linking the cognitive foundations to the primary tools reading professionals have available to support reading development – reading standards, assessments, and curriculum and instruction. We argue that bringing coherence to the use of such tools will help reading professionals better support all students learning to read but especially those who struggle – and we further argue that the framework can specifically strengthen use of response-to-intervention approaches. We end with a brief description of the topics covered in each of the book’s chapters and the common chapter structure used in presenting each topic.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 W. A. Hoover, W. E. Tunmer, The Cognitive Foundations of Reading and Its Acquisition, Literacy Studies 20, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44195-1_1

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1  The Rationale, Focus, Features, and Uses of the Book

1.2  T  he Rationale Behind the Cognitive Foundations Framework and Its Applications For many children, success in learning to read comes only through their own purposeful efforts coupled with those of a skilled and dedicated teacher focused on teaching reading effectively. We know much about what is required of both children and teaching in this shared endeavor, but cohesively linking these requirements has been difficult, for several reasons. First, the science around reading and its teaching is multi-faceted. Studies are focused on many different aspects of reading and learning to read, covering diverse learners, ages, and conditions, carried out under different theoretical perspectives, approaches, and methods. This makes it difficult to generate a broad, coherent, well-founded overview of what reading is, what is required to master it, and how best to support its development. Second, teaching reading is a complex undertaking. It can differ in the purposes it is to serve, the dimensions of its core instructional programs and supplementary activities, the capacities needed by those who teach it, and the decision-making required about which students would best benefit from what and when. Third, the primary tools using in teaching – standards, assessments, and regimens of curriculum and instruction – have different origins and focus on different aspects and content of education practice. They are based on separate, often divergent knowledge bases; they are designed to serve distinct educational ends; and they are generally applied within unique contexts and constraints. The convergence of these circumstances – in different states (indeed, different countries), school districts, schools, and classrooms – can result in inefficient and ineffective support when teaching children to read. While all children must acquire the same set of cognitive capacities to become readers in any alphabetically rendered language (capacities which we will describe), both how these are mastered and on what developmental timelines vary. For optimal success of teaching practices under such conditions, understanding the cognitive requirements of reading and learning to read can help teachers bring evidence-based coherence to their use of the tools available to them. This is not a trivial undertaking as their use of teaching tools must be appropriate for all children, including those who show little difficulty in learning to read, but especially for those struggling with such learning. As we shall see, there are several concepts that are critical to an understanding of the cognitive requirements of reading, for example, the notions of phonology and phonemes. And research indicates that both understanding and appropriately applying many of these concepts have been lacking in teachers (see Moats, 1994; Moats & Foorman, 2003; Moats & Lyon, 1996). Indeed, one study found that teachers with low knowledge of literacy concepts who nonetheless gave lots of appropriate, explicit instruction directed at recognizing words achieved lower word-reading achievement outcomes for their students than teachers who also gave lots of such instruction but had high knowledge of these concepts (Piasta, Connor, Fishman, & Morrison, 2009).

1.2 The Rationale Behind the Cognitive Foundations Framework and Its Applications

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One implication of these circumstances is captured in the Peter effect,1 named from a biblical passage where the Apostle Peter, when asked for alms by a beggar, replies that he has none himself to give (Acts 3:5). This term was first used in reading research to summarize a finding that a majority of sampled teacher candidates did not enjoy reading, leading to the question of whether such soon-to-be teachers could be expected to heighten reading enjoyment in their future students (Applegate & Applegate, 2004). Use of the term was extended into teacher education based on a finding that teacher candidates’ knowledge of the linguistic constructs critical for understanding the cognitive basis of reading was related to their teacher educators’ knowledge levels of these constructs (Binks-Cantrell, Washburn, Joshi, & Hougen, 2012). This implies that if we want teachers to understand the cognitive foundations of reading we must make efforts to ensure that those responsible for their development also understand them. This book, through the framework it presents, provides a way for reading professionals – reading teachers, specialists, interventionists, coordinators, and coaches – as well as those preparing to become such professionals and the teacher educators preparing them for such service, to understand reading and its development. Further the book details mechanisms that, coupled with such understanding, will help them link what children must know to become strong readers to what teaching can best provide through the coherent, competent use of available tools. In this way, the book will help reading professionals be both efficient and effective in what they provide all their students – and will better equip them to support those students who find learning to read so difficult. In sum, for reading, the book provides a framework whose applications can bind teaching and learning, showing what children must be taught based on what they have so far learned. For children, we know what the most critical cognitive competences are that underlie successful reading. Similarly, we know the general, sequenced cognitive capacities that must be developed to successfully transform the non-reader into a competent reader. We lay out both these aspects – reading and learning to read – in broad strokes in this book. For teaching, we know that effective beginning reading teachers share three competencies (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). First, they have a general understanding of the cognitive capacities involved in reading and in learning to read, including familiarity with the typical developmental patterns that exist within each. These understandings provide a big picture view of reading and its development and allow the teacher who has internalized them to think through developmental issues facing individual students. Second, effective beginning reading teachers can determine what beginning readers already know and what they still need to learn to become skilled readers. These understandings are critical in guiding the many instructional decisions reading teachers must make each day. And third, effective beginning reading teachers can provide their students with targeted, evidence-based 1  We use the convention of italicizing key concepts and distinctions for emphasis, but we also italicize words, phrases, or sentences when denoting them as linguistic objects. In both cases, the context we provide should suffice to determine the particular use being served.

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1  The Rationale, Focus, Features, and Uses of the Book

instruction that directly addresses their individual literacy learning needs, monitoring their students’ responses to the instruction provided and adjusting it appropriately when necessary. The book most directly addresses the first teacher competency above – building a broad understanding of the cognitive-developmental capacities involved in reading and learning to read. But it also shows how the latter two competencies – determining student learning needs and providing effective instruction  – can be strengthened through the understandings represented in the first one. It does this by providing a conceptual model of reading and learning to read  – the Cognitive Foundations Framework – to support critical thinking about reading and its teaching, including the use of standards, assessment, and curriculum and instruction. Building on the work of Hoover and Gough (2000) (which was the basis for an earlier framework that appeared in Wren, 2000), the book shows how this model can be used to analyze standards, assessments, and curriculum and instruction, enabling reading professionals to achieve greater coherence within their practices and, thereby, improve outcomes for students.

1.3  The Focus and Unique Features of the Book In line with its title, this book first provides an overview of the major cognitive components upon which successful reading is based. It then turns to the cognitive elements that underlie the ability to master the major cognitive components of reading. In short, the initial sections describe the cognitive structure of reading and then the cognitive foundation upon which that structure is built. This is followed with descriptions of how the framework aides understanding of reading development, reading difficulty, and reading disability. While focused on reading in English, the book also presents a generalization of its framework to reading in non-English, phonologically-based writing systems, followed by a discussion of the cognitive implications of learning to read a second language. The book then turns to the tools of reading practice, discussing how an understanding of the cognitive requirements of reading and learning to read can be used in practice with reading standards, assessments, and curriculum and instruction, to advance the teaching of reading. The book also discusses how the framework informs the delivery of interventions for students who encounter difficulties with reading along the way, closing with a discussion of how to gain coherent usage of teaching tools through the framework. As stated above, the book focuses on reading phonologically-based written languages, using English reading as the exemplar. Written English is based on a deep orthography, a writing system that contains more complex (i.e., less regular) relationships between its written units (i.e., the letters of the alphabet) and the units of speech they represent (Roberts, Christo, & Shefelbine, 2011). In more shallow orthographies, such as that used in written Spanish, there are much more consistent mappings between written and spoken units. This orthographic difference requires some additional elaboration in the Cognitive Foundations Framework, but the broad

1.3 The Focus and Unique Features of the Book

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cognitive requirements for reading and learning to read any phonologically-based orthography along the shallow-to-deep (or transparent-to-opaque) continuum are constant. This is so because orthography and phonology are intrinsically connected in the cognitive machinery responsible for word recognition under phonologically-­ based writing systems (Seidenberg, 2017; Share, 2011). The book references (though not exhaustively) and sometimes highlights key research supporting the cognitive framework, but it neither gives a detailed accounting of such research nor any contended views of it (this the object of proposed future work). While the framework is based on a substantial amount of research (for broad overviews of the relevant research, see Castles, Rastle, & Nation, 2018; Moats, 1999; Rayner, Foorman, Perfetti, Pesetsky, & Seidenberg, 2001; Torgesen, 2004; Tunmer & Hoover, 1992) and on a fairly broad consensus within the cognitive science community about how reading generally is accomplished and acquired (Seidenberg, 2013), the added value of the framework is in how it captures these basic understandings for intended users. Because most reading professionals are not trained scientists, we chose not to provide an interpreted inventory and critique of the relevant research followed by summary statements of what could be concluded. Rather, we believed presenting a coherent model of what that research generally revealed would be a far more useful tool for helping reading professionals retain and apply it in their work without having to digest all its studied details. It is also important to keep in mind that the book is focused on the cognitive foundations underlying reading and learning to read. As such it does not deal with other important factors impacting reading development and teaching. These include psychological factors such as motivation to learn to read, interest in reading, and self-efficacy, as well as ecological factors including the richness of the home literacy environment, or more broadly, the use of literate cultural capital – those literacy resources and activities available outside formal schooling that can be used to support literacy development (Aaron, Joshi, Gooden, & Bentum, 2008; Chapman & Tunmer, 2003; Guthrie, Wigfield, & You, 2012; Tunmer, Chapman, & Prochnow, 2006). We appreciate though that these all can impact reading through the cognitive domain (Tunmer & Chapman, 2012), which is our focus. While the book is intended to be accessible to its target audience of reading professionals, full understanding and use of it in practice will likely require additional supports, some for developing deeper understandings and others for enabling stronger actions based on such understandings. These additional supports include expanded materials and offerings of professional development activities and structured field supports (work we are also planning for future development). Just raising one’s awareness of the cognitive foundations underlying reading and their use in practice will be beneficial as an initial step, but it will not in itself bring about substantive changes in practice. Knowledge of the cognitive foundations needs to be used with knowledge of standards, assessments, and curriculum and instruction if practice is to best benefit developing readers. And bringing about changes in practice generally requires support provided in actual practice settings from those with relevant expertise and experience.

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1  The Rationale, Focus, Features, and Uses of the Book

The book incorporates several advantageous features. First, it offers a description of the major cognitive components underlying both reading and learning to read, and, importantly, specifies the interrelationships between components. The book defines these components in broad terms to expose their macrostructures and avoid getting lost in all the detail contained within them. As such, it is a book about “forests” and not so much about “trees.” Second, the book provides an analysis of the capacities within each cognitive component that the would-be reader must acquire in order to become a successful reader. Some of these are not the capacities that necessarily underlie the cognitive operations of skilled reading; rather they are those that underlie the learning of skilled reading. Indeed, some of these capacities, once mastered as foundational (i.e., critical) for learning to read, play relatively diminished roles in the skilled reading that is finally realized. Lastly, the book shows that some capacities must be developed to sophisticated levels before others can be acquired. This is crucial, for trying to facilitate the development of higher-order skills when the lower-order skills upon which they are based are weak, will likely be inefficient if not ineffective. And any students being so instructed will not be able to take full advantage of the supports being provided given their level of development. (We will come back to these points momentarily in our introductory discussion of understanding reading difficulty and remediation through the Cognitive Foundations Framework.) We caution the reader to avoid thinking that the framework described in the book is prescriptive with respect to instruction. First, there are several cognitive capacities that must be acquired to become a reader, and while some developmental sequences among these are dependent, others are not. This requires that reading professionals make well-informed decisions about where to devote instructional resources to better student benefit. The book can support this decision-making process. The structure of the framework can provide the basis for systematic assessments, the results of which can help reading professionals select appropriate instructional strategies for addressing the specific learning needs of students. Second, instruction can be multifaceted, designed to advance development in several cognitive components simultaneously. Thus, while the framework defines discrete cognitive components underlying both reading and learning to read, this does not mean that instruction should necessarily target components discretely. Nor does it mean that instruction must be delivered individually – group instruction can be better focused by using the individual cognitive profiles of students to both form instructional groups and provide them appropriate instruction. Overall, the framework implicitly distinguishes what must be known from what must be taught – reading professionals must decide where instruction will be most helpful given the level of student development. Indeed, decision-making and professional agency in reading instruction are key uses of the cognitive framework. While standards focus on the goals of learning (e.g., what students should know and be able to do) and curricula and instruction focus on what is to be taught (and when) to attain those goals, neither typically provides guidance about how they connect to a child’s cognitive development as a reader. In reading classrooms, most decisions reading professionals make are dictated within the curriculum, either by the curricular design of instructional sequences or by students’ responses to instruction (or

1.4 Using the Framework with Teaching Tools

7

both). These decision points are typically navigated with limited reference to an explicit understanding of what the developmental structure of reading is or where any given student stands with respect to it. With the structure provided by the Cognitive Foundations Framework, the promise is that reading professionals can tie their decisions to an understanding of all that has to be developed in a successful reader, can use assessment data to better understand where their students are developmentally within that structure, and can then make more informed decisions about where to focus instructional time.

1.4  Using the Framework with Teaching Tools In the book we provide mechanisms for linking the cognitive foundations to the primary tools used in teaching reading. These linkages take place through maps, which are matrices that take the hierarchically organized components of the Cognitive Foundations Framework and indicate the degree of match in their intersections with the components of the tool of interest. For example, a map of a given set of standards takes each standard and places it under the cognitive foundation component that represents its best fit, also indicating the degree of such fit it has. This mapping makes explicit whether each standard fully addresses a given cognitive component or provides something more, or less, than what is necessary. And collectively across a set of standards the maps make explicit how the standards are addressing the cognitive skills required for reading. A reading professional who focuses on a standard that misses the mark (overshooting or undershooting) may be doing important work but not work that targets the cognitive development of reading. In similar fashion, the book provides examples of maps that link an assessment portfolio, an individual assessment, and instructional recommendations and an instructional regimen to the cognitive foundations. In mapping instruction, the book gives special attention to the use of response-­ to-­intervention (RtI) approaches (also known as multi-tiered systems of support, or MTSS) for those struggling with reading. Under such approaches, all children in early grades, usually in kindergarten or first grade, are screened with tests that can indicate the potential for reading difficulties. The progress of identified children is then monitored as they participate in regular, or Tier 1, classroom reading instruction. Those children who do not make adequate progress in reading under such instruction are then provided more intensive instruction, which generally provides more instructional time, more individualized instruction, or more specialized instruction. Children who continue to show limited progress in response to this regimen are then moved to Tier 3 instruction, which is even more intense and individualized, and may lead to assignment to special education programs. Under these approaches, children are self-identified for reading interventions given their lack of appropriate response to high-quality instruction. In this book we think about such approaches as follows.

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As the framework is focused on the cognitive structures underlying reading and learning to read, it can play an important role in thinking about reading difficulties and interventions for addressing them. As a description of what must be mastered to become a reader, the framework presents a picture of what must be known if reading difficulties are to be avoided, thereby preventing the need for intensive interventions. Thus, if development within a given component of concern is progressing normally, then there will be no need for any specialized intervention. Conversely, if development is not progressing normally, then the failure may be one of readiness, instruction, or constitution. In the first instance, if development of any one (or more) of the lower-order components upon which the component of concern depends has not sufficiently progressed, then advanced development within that higher-order component of concern should not be expected and, accordingly, some attention focused on the development of the lower-order component(s) would be in order. In the second instance, if there is adequate development in all such lower-order components, then the instruction itself that is focused on the component of concern may be the cause of the difficulty. Specifically, if the instruction directed at the component of concern is not evidence based (i.e., there is no strong research that the regimen being provided can advance skill in the targeted cognitive domain in typical children), then the instructional regimen itself may be responsible for the developmental difficulty observed. This produces students who are educational casualties (Orlando & Lynch, 1974)  – casualties of curriculum or casualties of instruction. In such cases, a competently provided, evidence-based instructional approach should be used and student progress in the targeted cognitive domain should be monitored, with instructional adjustments made as needed. Finally, if there is both sufficient development in all lower-order components and the instruction being provided to develop the targeted component(s) is both evidence based and appropriately implemented, then student constitution (i.e., individual cognitive functioning) may be critically different from that of typical students (i.e., the constitution of those students for which the evidence-based practice was found to be effective). In such casualties of constitution cases, an intervention modification would be indicated. Such modification could be made with an evidence-based instructional approach (same or different from the evidence-based one that had been provided) that offers greater support, intensity, or individualized attention. This would be expected to spur development in the targeted cognitive component(s) and raise performance toward the level of non-struggling peers. In short, the Cognitive Foundations Framework can help the reading professional think about where the source of difficulty might be for students struggling with reading and what might be needed to support growth.

1.5  The Content and Organization of Chapters The following is a description of the content covered in this book (in the order in which it is covered):

1.6 What’s Next

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• an overview of the Cognitive Foundations Framework (Chap. 2); • detailed descriptions of the framework’s cognitive foundations of reading (Chap. 3) and learning to read (Chap. 4), and a summary across the two (Chap. 5); • a description of how the framework applies to typical reading development, atypical or difficult development, and reading disability (Chap. 6); • a generalization of the framework to reading in other non-English phonologically-­ based writing systems and a discussion of learning to read a second language (Chap. 7); • an introduction to the main tools used in advancing the teaching of reading (Chap. 8), and for each tool – reading standards (Chap. 9), reading assessments (Chap. 10), and reading curriculum and instruction (Chap. 11) – descriptions of how given examples relate to the cognitive foundations underlying reading and how the tools can be better utilized through an understanding of the cognitive foundations; • a description of how education tools and their relationships to the cognitive foundations can be used in response-to-intervention approaches to build a differentiated view of reading difficulties and to more effectively deliver reading interventions (Chap. 12); • a summary of how to gain coherent usage of teaching tools through the Cognitive Foundations Framework, followed by closing comments on what has been presented in the book and what still needs to be accomplished to extend success in reading practices (Chap. 13); and • a complete list of references. Each substantive chapter follows a common outline and includes: • an introduction, which abstracts the chapter’s content; • a presentation of main ideas; • a discussion of important, select issues in the details surrounding the main ideas presented; • a chapter summary; • a set of questions for further thought, which serves the purposes of both refining thinking about key concepts and further exploring their applications; • a brief introduction to what is addressed in the next chapter; and • a listing of the references cited in the chapter.

1.6  What’s Next With these in mind, let us now turn to the Cognitive Foundations Framework by first discussing how we define both a framework and its components.

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References Aaron, P. G., Joshi, R. M., Gooden, R., & Bentum, K. E. (2008). Diagnosis and treatment of reading disabilities based on the component model of reading: An alternative to the discrepancy model of LD. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 41, 67–84. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219407310838 Applegate, A.  J., & Applegate, M.  D. (2004). The Peter effect: Reading habits and attitudes of teacher candidates. The Reading Teacher, 57, 554–563. Binks-Cantrell, E., Washburn, E., Joshi, R. M., & Hougen, M. (2012). Peter effect in the preparation of reading teachers. Scientific Studies of Reading, 16, 526–536. https://doi.org/10.108 0/10888438.2011.601434 ∗Castles, A., Rastle, K., & Nation, K. (2018). Ending the reading wars: Reading acquisition from novice to expert. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 19, 5–51. https://doi. org/10.1177/1529100618772271 Chapman, J. W., & Tunmer, W. E. (2003). Reading difficulties, reading-related self-perceptions, and strategies for overcoming negative self-beliefs. Reading and Writing Quarterly, 19, 5–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/10573560308205 Guthrie, J.  T., Wigfield, A., & You, W. (2012). Instructional contexts for engagement and achievement in reading. In S.  L. Christenson, A.  L. Reschly, & C.  Wylie (Eds.), Handbook of research on student engagement (pp.  601–634). New  York, NY: Springer. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-1-4614-2018-7_29 Hoover, W. A., & Gough, P. B. (2000). The reading acquisition framework: An overview. Austin, TX: SEDL. Moats, L.  C. (1994). The missing foundation in teacher education: Knowledge of the structure of spoken and written language. Annals of Dyslexia, 44, 81–102. https://doi.org/10.1007/ bf02648156 Moats, L. C. (1999). Teaching reading is rocket science: What expert teachers of reading should know and be able to do. Washington, DC: American Federation of Teachers. Moats, L. C., & Foorman, B. R. (2003). Measuring teachers’ content knowledge of language and reading. Annals of Dyslexia, 53, 23–45. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11881-003-0003-7 Moats, L.  C., & Lyon, G.  R. (1996). Wanted: Teachers with knowledge of language. Topics in Language Disorders, 16, 73–86. https://doi.org/10.1097/00011363-199602000-00007 Orlando, C., & Lynch, J. (1974). Learning disabilities or educational casualties? Where do we go from here? The Elementary School Journal, 74, 461–467. https://doi.org/10.1086/460858 Piasta, S. B., Connor, C. M., Fishman, B. J., & Morrison, F. J. (2009). Teachers’ knowledge of literacy concepts, classroom practices, and student reading growth. Scientific Studies of Reading, 13, 224–248. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888430902851364 ∗Rayner, K., Foorman, B.  R., Perfetti, C.  A., Pesetsky, D, & Seidenberg, M.  S. (2001). How psychological science informs the teaching of reading. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 2, 31–74. https://doi.org/10.1111/1529-1006.00004 Roberts, T.  A., Christo, C., & Shefelbine, J.  A. (2011). Word recognition. In M.  L. Kamil, P. D. Pearson, E. B. Moje, & P. P. Afflerbach (Eds.), Handbook of reading research (Vol. 4, pp. 229–258). New York, NY: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203840412.ch11 Seidenberg, M.  S. (2013). The science of reading and its educational implications. Language Learning and Development, 9, 331–360. https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2013.812017 ∗Seidenberg, M. S. (2017). Language at the speed of sight: How we read, why so many can’t, and what can be done about it. New York, NY: Basic Books. Share, D. L. (2011). On the role of phonology in reading acquisition: The self-teaching hypothesis. In S. S. Brady, D. Braze, & C. A. Fowler (Eds.), Explaining individual differences in reading: Theory and evidence (pp. 45–68). New York, NY: Psychology Press. ∗Snow, C. E., Burns, M. S., & Griffin, P. (Eds.). (1998). Preventing reading difficulties in young children. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. ∗Torgesen, J. K. (2004). Avoiding the devastating downward spiral: The evidence that early intervention prevents reading failure. American Educator, 28, 6–9, 12–13, 17–19, 45–47.

References

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Tunmer, W. E., & Chapman, J. W. (2012). The simple view of reading redux: Vocabulary knowledge and the independent components hypothesis. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 45, 453–466. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219411432685 Tunmer, W. E., Chapman, J. W., & Prochnow, J. E. (2006). Literate cultural capital at school entry predicts later reading achievement: A seven year longitudinal study. New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 41, 183–204. Tunmer, W. E., & Hoover, W. A. (1992). Cognitive and linguistic factors in learning to read. In P. B. Gough, L. C. Ehri, & R. Treiman (Eds.), Reading acquisition (pp. 175–214). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351236904-7 Wren, S. (2000). The cognitive foundations of learning to read: A framework. Austin, TX: SEDL.

Chapter 2

Overview of the Cognitive Foundations Framework

Acronym NRP National Reading Panel

2.1  Introduction In this chapter we describe different types of frameworks and the purposes they serve. We discuss the features of the Cognitive Foundations Framework, its structure, and the four essential characteristics of its basic unit, a cognitive foundation. We briefly describe its two main sections, the foundations underlying reading and those underlying learning to read. We then present several other frameworks that have appeared in the reading literature, briefly describing them and their contrasts with the Cognitive Foundations Framework.

2.2  Defining a Framework We can think of a framework in general as an analytic tool that supports the understanding of a concept. Simple frameworks are lists of characteristics or steps that underlie a concept – for example, the widely-known continuous improvement framework popularized by Deming (1993) that contains the four cyclical, quality-­control steps of plan-do-study-act.1 More complex frameworks define concepts by contrasting 1  We use the convention of italicizing key concepts and distinctions for emphasis, but we also italicize words, phrases, or sentences when denoting them as linguistic objects. In both cases, the context we provide should suffice to determine the particular use being served.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 W. A. Hoover, W. E. Tunmer, The Cognitive Foundations of Reading and Its Acquisition, Literacy Studies 20, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44195-1_2

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the distinctive properties of each concept across a set of shared dimensions. For example, a framework of the different views of knowledge defined along four continuous dimensions (anchored by their extreme opposing values): type (objective to constructed), complexity (simple to complex), availability (explicit to tacit), and source (individual to social) (Hood, 2002). In Chap. 11 we will present a framework of this type in our discussion of instructional approaches to core reading curricula, one that distinguishes whole language and phonics approaches by contrasting them on a set of shared dimensions. The Cognitive Foundations Framework represents a framework of an even more complex type, one that includes descriptions of the cognitive components (or foundations) that are required for reading and learning to read and that represents the hierarchical relationships between these components. Here the framework is more than just a list of components, but one that represents a conceptual structure of reading by showing components and their interrelationships.

2.3  D  efining a Cognitive Foundation and Its Essential Characteristics As used here, a cognitive foundation is a distinct framework component, element, or module that reflects a mental ability, capacity, competency, function, or state. All foundations in the framework share four characteristic properties. First and foremost, each foundation represents knowledge or the understanding of something, which can be either explicit or tacit. In the case of the former, it is something one is aware of, like knowledge of the names of the letters of the alphabet. For the latter, it is something that is demonstrably known but which is not available to consciousness. An example of this is the set of the linguistic rules of syntax we acquire when naturally learning a language in childhood, knowledge that underlies our use of sentence structures. In this sense, a cognitive foundation represents knowledge or skill, a knowledge-skill set, which we will generally refer to as a skill set, or more simply, skills. In our use, the implication is that the knowledge captured in every cognitive foundation can be used to carry out a function that is important for reading or learning to read. Let us digress for a moment to further refine what we mean by this first characteristic of a cognitive foundation. Knowledge within a cognitive foundation could be realized as a process for doing something. In this case, a cognitive foundation could represent a mental operation (or process) that transforms one type of information into another; alternatively, it could represent the knowledge upon which such a transformation is based. To take an example, a cognitive foundation could represent the mental operations that transform the auditory information (i.e., airwave frequencies and intensities) contained in the continuous acoustic waveforms arriving at the ear via a speech act into a sequence of discrete speech units within the language being spoken (i.e., like those representing English vowels and consonants). Alternatively, it could simply represent the knowledge upon which such a transformative capacity is based – phonology or phonological knowledge, to continue our example. The definition of a cognitive foundation as a mental operation is typical in information processing models, which depict successive transformations of

2.3 Defining a Cognitive Foundation and Its Essential Characteristics

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information that move (flow) through a sequence of structural processors over time. We will present and discuss such a model in Chap. 4, one depicting the process underlying the comprehension of spoken language. In contrast, the definition of a cognitive foundation as simply knowledge of something is typical in individual difference models, which depict knowledge sets or capacities and their interrelationships rather than transformative processes. The Cognitive Foundations Framework is an example of the latter type of model, as it does not depict information flow between components. That is, it is not describing how reading (or its acquisition) is accomplished by describing the stepped sequences of information transformation readers use to relate the reflected light that arrives at their eyes from the marks on a printed page to their subsequent understanding of the linguistic expressions those marks represent. Rather it is describing what capacities are needed to accomplish reading (and to learn to read) and how these capacities are related to each other. Thus, the cognitive foundations contained in the framework represent knowledge sets and not transformative processes. Returning to our definition, the second characteristic of a cognitive foundation is that it serves as a building block in a hierarchy. This means that there are higher-­ order cognitive capacities that are built on the lower-order capacities connected to them. That is, the framework represents the idea that to develop capacity at a higher-­ order cognitive component, and to maximally benefit from actions (e.g., instruction) that target that component, there must be some level of capacity at the lower-order cognitive component(s) connected to it. Indeed, the hierarchical relationships in a component’s placement capture this idea that (1) any connected knowledge set below it is required in the development of the component and (2) the knowledge set in the component itself is required in the development of any connected knowledge set above it. Further, for any cognitive foundation connected to any lower-order component(s), development of that foundation minimally entails not only the application of the knowledge contained in the underlying individual foundational component(s), but the articulation (or integration) of that knowledge across the content of the higher-level component – we will have more to say about this later in Chaps. 3 and 4. We note here that while research on reading is ongoing about how best to measure a given cognitive component and what levels of capacity are needed within the component so measured to develop capacity in any of its higher-order components, the main components themselves are well established in the research literature. For example, although the proposed cognitive components of phonemic awareness and alphabetic coding are widely accepted as critically important in learning to read, less is known about what level of phonemic awareness as assessed by a particular measure is required to advance development in alphabetic coding skill as assessed by some other particular measure. In addition, the development of a given cognitive capacity can be reciprocally related to the development of capacity in a foundational skill above it. Thus, development in a higher-order capacity, while limited by the capacity in a lower-order foundational skill, can help develop further capacity in the lower-order skill. In short, the cognitive foundations depicted here do not represent strict hierarchies in the sense that full capacity must be acquired in a lower-­ order capacity before any capacity can be built in a higher-order capacity. However,

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the depiction does hold that without some development in an associated lower-order foundational skill, no development will be possible in a higher-order skill linked to it. The third characteristic of a cognitive foundation in this framework is that it is an independent representation of knowledge or skill. It is independent in the sense that the construct it represents is self-contained and does not depend on any other foundation for its definition (though it may reference the knowledge-skill sets immediately below it in the hierarchy). For example, we will see in Chap. 4 that phonological knowledge can be defined independently of the other components that underlie linguistic knowledge as well as any of the components underlying word recognition. While a knowledge-skill set is defined independently of other knowledge-skill sets, keep in mind that this does not mean that the development of capacity within it is independent of other sets. Indeed, as represented by their hierarchical relationships, all knowledge-skill sets depend on the application and articulation of the knowledge-­ skill sets below them to advance their own capacity (e.g., as we will show in Chap. 3, reading comprehension requires the application and articulation of both language comprehension and word recognition capacities). The fourth and final characteristic of a cognitive foundation in this framework is that it is not necessarily elemental. So, while the described components might be further divided into subcomponents (e.g., phonological knowledge that distinguishes speech sounds as opposed to phonological knowledge that distinguishes meaning-bearing differences in speech sounds), doing so would obscure the bigger picture of reading that the framework is designed to portray. To sum up our definition of a cognitive foundation and its characteristics, a cognitive foundation of reading represents an independent, but not necessarily elemental, knowledge-skill set that is an essential, hierarchically positioned, building block in either reading or in learning to read.

2.4  The Two Parts of the Cognitive Foundations Framework There are two parts to the framework we present. In Chap. 3 we define reading and its main cognitive components  – this constitutes the Cognitive Foundations of Reading. In Chap. 4 we turn to the second part of the framework, a description of the cognitive components that underlie learning to read  – this is the Cognitive Foundations of Reading Acquisition. Throughout the book we refer to these collectively as the Cognitive Foundations Framework. We note that the Cognitive Foundations Framework is a description of reading and learning to read English. The framework can be generalized to describe reading and learning to read in other languages that employ phonologically-based writing systems, and we will discuss the generalized framework in Chap. 7. But keep in mind that all the discussions up to that point will be focused on reading and learning to read in English, which is but one instantiation of the more generalized framework.

2.5 Other Reading Frameworks

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2.5  Other Reading Frameworks The Cognitive Foundations Framework differs from other frameworks dealing with the development of reading. In its important work in the United States, the National Reading Panel (NRP) reviewed the available research evidence that had been conducted prior to 2000 on whether instruction in five selected domains improved reading outcomes: (1) phonemic awareness, (2) phonics, (3) fluency, (4) vocabulary, and (5) comprehension (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000). While the NRP made positive recommendations for instruction within each of the five domains (though these were supported by varying levels of evidence), it did not elaborate on how these “five big ideas” of instructional components impacted the cognitive constructs underlying reading. Further, the NRP presented these instructional components as a list without explicitly addressing their interrelations, either in terms of instruction or cognitive development (hence, a list framework). The identified components became widely known as the five pillars of reading instruction and were typically displayed in just this way, five independent pillars (for two examples of such displays, see https://www.readinghorizons.com/dyslexia/ dyslexia-interventions and https://www.azed.gov/read20/read-aloud/). While other representations were more expansive, as shown in Figs.  2.1 and 2.2, these

Fig. 2.1  The National Reading Panel’s five pillars of reading instruction displayed as a sequence of steps Caption: This display of the National Reading Panel’s five instructional domains (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000) represents them as a progression of ordered steps (bottom to top) in the timing of instructional emphases and (presumably) learning outcomes Source: Learning Staircase Ltd. (2019, December 4). Steps research notes. StepsWeb. Retrieved from  https://support.stepsweb.com/269/five-big-ideas-in-beginning-reading. Reprinted with permission

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Fig. 2.2  The National Reading Panel’s five pillars of reading instruction displayed as a bi-­ directional circular progression of components Caption: This display of the National Reading Panel’s five instructional domains (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000) represents them as a bi-directional progression of reading components capturing either instructional emphases or learned skills Source: Florida Center for Reading Research at Florida State University (2019, December 4). Components of reading. Essentials for reading success. Retrieved from http://www.fcrr.org/assessment/ET/essentials/components/components.html. Reprinted with permission

extensions lacked explicit justification in either the NRP work or other presented research for the basis of the relationships depicted. In this book we present what is cognitively required for reading and for learning to read, laying out the justified relationships between the cognitive requirements. It is possible to tie the NRP’s instructional recommendations to the cognitive requirements specified in the Cognitive Foundations Framework, which we will do in Chap. 11, but these are not one and the same. Indeed, the last two figures just presented go beyond what the NRP found by confounding instruction and learning and inferring an order among these. (See Box 2.1 for a brief comment on how little the NRP’s complete set of recommendations seems to have impacted teacher certification programs in the United States.) Other frameworks are available that specifically deal with proposed cognitive components of reading, including the following as examples: • the Reading Pyramid (Fig. 2.3) from the Melissa Institute, which expands the National Reading Panel’s five instructional components and depicts them as “food groups” in a pyramid, arguing that students need a “balanced literacy diet” to achieve reading success;

2.5 Other Reading Frameworks

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Box 2.1: Use of the National Research Panel’s Recommendations in Teacher Preparation Programs A recent study on teacher preparation (National Council on Teacher Quality, 2016) found that only 13 of 820 undergraduate programs in the United States that train elementary teachers use both a high-quality textbook and include explicit course coverage of each of the five evidence-based instructional components identified by the National Reading Panel (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000). This is one suggestive indication that both current teachers and those preparing to become teachers will likely not have had the opportunities to learn and use the full span of what rigorous investigations have uncovered about reading and teaching reading over the last several decades.

Reading Comprehension LanOral gua g Kn o Bu wle ild dg ing e

e

Voc

abu

lary

Ph Aw onem are ic nes s

g din sion Rearehen s p gie ComStrate t Tex tures c s u g Str enre din Reaency n & G ts Flu ressio cep xp Con Print &E of ter Let nds Sou onics h &P

Fig. 2.3  Frameworks for understanding reading: The Reading Pyramid Caption: This framework holds that reading comprehension (top) is founded on language-related (left facing) and print-related (right facing) knowledge and skill sets, with each set based on developmental hierarchies of other distinct skills Source: Melissa Institute Literacy Website hosted by the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto (2019, December 4). Introduction to the food groups for literacy. The balanced literacy diet. Retrieved from https://www.oise.utoronto.ca/balancedliteracydiet/Food_ Groups/index.html. Reprinted with permission

• the Modified Cognitive Model (Fig. 2.4) from McKenna and Stahl (2009), which resembles the Cognitive Foundations Framework but includes different components and different relations (with little substantive rationale provided for either);

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2  Overview of the Cognitive Foundations Framework

Fig. 2.4  Frameworks for understanding reading: The Modified Cognitive Model Caption: This framework holds that reading comprehension is determined by three knowledge or skill sets (automatic word recognition, language comprehension, and strategic knowledge), with each set based on developmental hierarchies of other distinct knowledge or skill sets Source: McKenna, M.  C., & Stahl, K.  A. (2009). Assessment for reading instruction (2nd ed.) (Form 1.1, pp. 23). New York, NY: Guilford. Reprinted with permission

• the model of basic early literacy skills contained in the assessment manual for the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (Fig. 2.5), which shows the contributions of language and fluent reading of connected text as the primary contributors to reading comprehension but little detail on what is behind them; and • the Component Model of Reading (Fig. 2.6) from Aaron, Joshi, and Quatroche (2008), which includes cognitive, psychological, and ecological components but does not detail the relations of the subcomponents contained within them. What distinguishes the Cognitive Foundations Framework from these other models is that it depicts evidence-based component capacities and their interrelationships in a way that allows reading professionals to both better understand reading and its development, and better understand and utilize the tools at their disposal

2.6 What’s Next

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Fig. 2.5  Frameworks for understanding reading: Basic Early Literacy Skills (with measures and timeline) Caption: This framework holds that reading comprehension is determined by two skill sets (language skills and fluent reading skills), with the latter based on a developmental hierarchy of other distinct skills. Given the framework’s assessment focus, it also shows skill linkages to assessment subtasks (measures) and their use at different grade levels (timeline) Source: Good, R. H., III, Kaminski, R. A., Cummings, K., Dufour-Martel, C., Petersen, K., Powell-­ Smith, K., Stollar, S., & Wallin, J. (2011, revised 2018). Acadience reading assessment manual (Figure 1.1, pp. 4). Eugene, OR: Acadience Learning. (Changed in name from the original work published in 2011 as DIBELS Next.) Reprinted with permission

to better support student learning. In short, the Cognitive Foundations Framework is designed to help reading professionals distinguish and make explicit links between teaching and learning in reading.

2.6  What’s Next With this overview of frameworks and introduction to the Cognitive Foundations Framework and its two main sections, we next discuss the framework’s highest-­ order foundations, those that underlie reading comprehension.

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Component model of reading

Domain I

Domain II

Domain III

Cognitive components

Psychological components

Ecological components

Word recognition comprehension

Motivation and interest Locus of control Learned helplessness Teacher expectations Gender difference

Home environment, culture and parental involvement Classroom environment Peer influences Dialects ELL

Fig. 2.6  Frameworks for understanding reading: The Component Model of Reading Caption: This framework holds that reading skill is based on factors covered under three distinct domains, of which the cognitive domain is but one Source: Aaron, P.  G., Joshi, R.  M., & Quatroche, D. (2008). Becoming a professional reading teacher (Figure 1.1, pp. 11). Baltimore, MD: Brookes. Reprinted with permission

References Aaron, P.  G., Joshi, R.  M., & Quatroche, D. (2008). Becoming a professional reading teacher. Baltimore, MD: Brookes. Deming, W. E. (1993). The new economics for industry, government, and education. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Florida Center for Reading Research at Florida State University. (2019, December 4). Components of reading. Essentials for reading success. Retrieved from http://www.fcrr.org/assessment/ET/ essentials/components/components.html Good, R. H., III, Kaminski, R. A., Cummings, K., Dufour-Martel, C., Petersen, K., Powell-Smith, K., … Wallin, J. (2011, revised 2018). Acadience reading assessment manual. Eugene, OR: Acadience Learning. Hood, P. (2002). Perspectives on knowledge utilization in education. San Francisco, CA: WestEd. Learning Staircase Ltd. (2019, December 4). Steps research notes. StepsWeb. Retrieved from https://support.stepsweb.com/269/five-big-ideas-in-beginning-reading McKenna, M. C., & Stahl, K. A. (2009). Assessment for reading instruction (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Guilford. Melissa Institute Literacy Website hosted by the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. (2019, December 4). Introduction to the food groups for literacy. The balanced literacy diet. Retrieved from https://www.oise.utoronto.ca/balancedliteracydiet/ Food_Groups/index.html National Council on Teacher Quality. (2016). Landscape in teacher preparation: Undergraduate elementary education. Washington, DC: National Council on Teacher Quality. ∗National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel. Teaching children to read: Reports of the subgroups (NIH Publication No. 00-4754). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Chapter 3

The Cognitive Foundations of Reading

Acronyms C Language comprehension D Word recognition (decoding) fMRI Functional magnetic resonance imaging R Reading comprehension SVR Simple View of Reading

3.1  Introduction In this chapter we define reading and its essential relationship with language, discussing how this constrains our understanding of literacy. We discuss the Simple View of Reading (SVR), which serves as the basis for the Cognitive Foundations of Reading, and we describe its three constituent cognitive capacities – word recognition, language comprehension, and reading comprehension – and their interrelationships. We also discuss and show graphically how the SVR portrays both reading skill and reading disability, including dyslexia, hyperlexia, and mixed disabilities, and we cover several issues that have been raised about the SVR in the reading literature. Finally, we review our definition of what a cognitive foundation is and show how, as an example, it applies to the word recognition component of the SVR. We close with a summary of the chapter and a set of questions to guide further thought and application.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 W. A. Hoover, W. E. Tunmer, The Cognitive Foundations of Reading and Its Acquisition, Literacy Studies 20, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44195-1_3

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3.2  Reading and Language As a cognitive foundation, reading is defined as the ability to extract and construct linguistically-based meaning from written text. It is not simply being able to accurately identify written words; it is about gaining meaning from sequences of printed words as they appear in well-formed text, allowing construction of a mental representation (or model) of the situation the text portrays. It is what you are currently doing as you derive meaning from the print sequences on the page before you, print that to a non-reader likely appears as a series of mysterious, meaningless squiggles. (If you are not able to read written Hindi or Japanese, then that mystery will be evident to you when viewing the script presented in Box 7.1 in Chap. 7!) A clear aspect of this definition is its reference to language  – specifically, linguistically-­based meaning1 and written text. Try reading this sentence: Os resultados de dois estudos recentes opoiam essas proposicoes.

You most likely could not read it, though you might have been able to pronounce its words. If so, why not? It is because you are not familiar with the language being read, as being able to read English does not entail that you can read the written text of any other alphabetically rendered language, such as Portuguese in this case. Note that by defining reading through a close correspondence with language, we are constraining what counts as reading, excluding other skills like the interpretation of graphic information displays (e.g., schematics, drawings, pictures, charts) that may appear in print but which are largely non-linguistic conveyances of meaning. Relatedly, our definition of reading limits the aspects of literacy we are interested in understanding to that dealing with written language. Literacy that is defined relative to a specialized knowledge domain (e.g., computer literacy, digital literacy, media literacy, financial literacy) is only of interest here as it may relate to written language. Nonetheless, reading as we have defined it is of great import in acquiring the knowledge such domains represent: Language is critical to human learning, and since the large-scale production and distribution of written matter through print, reading has become the technological tool that can best advance both learning more complex language and acquiring broader and deeper knowledge of the world. But let us return to our definition of reading. Knowledge of the language being read is central to the reading process and without that knowledge reading could not take place. For typical children learning to read in their native language, the reading process is grafted onto the language listening process. From this perspective reading is the ability to convert language represented in print to a representation from which the child can already derive meaning, namely, one based in the child’s spoken language. Such an ability to convert print then allows the language system to be engaged to derive meaning. That is, if a child

1  We use the convention of italicizing key concepts and distinctions for emphasis, but we also italicize words, phrases, or sentences when denoting them as linguistic objects. In both cases, the context we provide should suffice to determine the particular use being served.

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can successfully identify written words and thereby gain access to their appropriate meanings, which are already in place by virtue of having learned the language, then the child can use her or his language system to construct the meaning of sentences and discourses from those word meanings. Overall, this would allow the successful reading of material up to the level of linguistic comprehension. Clearly there are differences between spoken and written language (Catts & Kamhi, 2005) – to cite but a few consider the following: • speech is ephemeral while print is more durable; • emphasis in speech can be conveyed through voice modulation, but in print by modifying letter appearances (e.g., boldface, capitalization, italics); • sentence boundaries can be represented by pauses in speech, but by punctuation marks in print; • word ambiguity has different features in speech and print  – the homophones caret and carrot are ambiguous in speech but not in print, while the homograph wind is ambiguous in print but not in speech given its two distinct pronunciations (as in what blows with a storm versus what action one might take with a watch); and • speech tends to be less complex, both at the sentence and discourse levels, than the language that appears in print, especially for texts typically seen after the early elementary grades. Nonetheless, the overlap between speech and print is substantial. Indeed, comprehending language in text requires the lion’s share of the linguistic skills needed to comprehend spoken language. These include the following, which are all described more fully in Chap. 4: • locating individual words in lexical memory (i.e., the mental dictionary, or lexicon, where the meanings of the words the listener or reader knows are stored); • determining the intended meaning of individual words, sometimes well after the word has been encountered, some of which may have multiple meanings (e.g., consider when the meaning of sentence is determined in His sentence was awkwardly constructed and His sentence was two years, three months); • assigning appropriate syntactic structures to word sequences, some of which may be structurally ambiguous (e.g., the two different structural representations of Flying hang gliders can be dangerous, where one structure references the act of flying hang gliders and the other the objects that constitute flying hang gliders); • deriving meaning from individually structured sentences; and • building meaningful discourse from the meanings assigned to individual sentences, which combine with both relevant knowledge of the world and the inferences made from such knowledge that are allowed within the developing discourse. One piece of recent evidence supporting the idea of substantial overlap between understanding oral and written language comes from a study of individuals who listened to and read several hours of the same narrative stories while their detailed brain activity levels were mapped through functional magnetic resonance imaging

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(fMRI). Results showed that the same patterns of brain activity appeared when attending to a given narrative sequence regardless of whether that sequence was listened to or read. This leads to the conclusion that the representations of linguistically-­based meaning in the brain are invariant over the source of the input (Deniz, Nunez-Elizalde, Huth, & Gallant, 2019).

3.3  The Simple View of Reading Our definition of reading under the Cognitive Foundations of Reading suggests that the typical child’s fundamental task in learning to read is to discover how print maps into (i.e., can provide access to) the cognitive structures underlying her or his existing spoken language. This implies that the process of learning to derive meaning from print can therefore be adversely affected in one, or both, of two ways: The child’s spoken language system may be deficient in various ways or the process by which print is connected to the child’s spoken language system may be deficient (or both). These basic ideas are represented in the Simple View of Reading (SVR) (Gough, Hoover, & Peterson, 1996; Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990; Hoover & Tunmer, 2018), a model of the directly linked causes of individual differences in reading comprehension performance, which provides a proximal explanation for why some beginning readers perform well on reading comprehension measures while other children perform less well. The SVR holds that at the broadest level of analysis, reading comprehension, the ability to understand printed text, is determined by just two cognitive capacities: decoding, the ability to recognize words in print, and language comprehension, the ability to understand spoken language. The three components of the SVR can be more precisely defined as follows: • Reading comprehension is the ability to extract and construct literal and inferred meaning from linguistic discourse represented in print. • Decoding is the ability to recognize printed words accurately and quickly to efficiently gain access to the appropriate word meanings contained in the internal mental lexicon. • Language comprehension is the ability to extract and construct literal and inferred meaning from linguistic discourse represented in speech. There are two key aspects of these definitions to keep in mind. The first is that (skilled) decoding entails an outcome that is achieved both accurately and quickly, and the second is that reading comprehension and language comprehension are defined in parallel fashion. Let us unpack these a bit more. The reason decoding must be accurate is that an incorrect identification of a word (e.g., mistakenly identifying not as hot) can result in very divergent renderings of a sentence’s meaning (e.g., compare John was not on the boat with John was hot on the boat). The reason decoding must be completed quickly is because if it is not, then the limitations of short-term memory and overall cognitive capacity come into

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play. The time constraint on short-term memory impacts understanding sentences as what was initially read may well be forgotten before it can be fully integrated with the understanding that must come from what remains to be read. Thus, slowly recognizing each word encountered (for example, by sounding them out) will not likely result in successful comprehension even if all the words are finally correctly identified. In addition, cognitive resources in general are limited, and the more such resources are consumed by decoding the fewer will be available to focus on comprehension. The reason for parallel definitions of comprehension is that the SVR holds that reading comprehension and language comprehension are essentially the same save that one is achieved through print and the other through speech. But beyond conceptual clarity, parallel definitions become important when assessing the adequacy of the SVR. If reading comprehension is assessed by retelling read passages of printed text but language comprehension is measured by providing definitions of vocabulary words, then the contrast is not parallel as the latter only represents a subset of the skills covered in the former. Beyond the above definitions, the SVR proposes that both decoding (D) and language comprehension (C) are necessary, and thus, of equal importance, for reading comprehension (R). This fundamental idea is represented in the simple equation, R = D × C, where R, D, and C range in value, under a theoretical perspective, from 0 (no skill) to 1 (perfect skill). This equation captures the idea that skill in both D and C are needed for success in R, for when considering their extreme values: • if decoding skill is high but language comprehension skill is absent, reading will not be possible (i.e., if D = 1 and C = 0, then R = 1 × 0 = 0); • if the opposite pattern occurs, where decoding skill is absent but language comprehension skill is high, then again, reading will not be possible (i.e., if D = 0 and C = 1, then R = 0 × 1 = 0); • if both decoding and language comprehension are absent, then reading will not be possible (i.e., if D = 0 and C = 0, then R = 0 × 0 = 0); but • if both decoding and language comprehension are high, then reading will be high (i.e., if D = 1 and C = 1, then R = 1 × 1 = 1). Stated succinctly, the ability to construct linguistically-based meaning from text (R) will be impaired for anyone who has difficulty recognizing the words of the text (D) or understanding the language being read (C), or both. Stated another way, wherever there is high skill in decoding and language comprehension, there will be high skill in reading; otherwise there will be some level of reading difficulty or disability. As shown in the equation, the components of D and C are combined multiplicatively (with an ×) in the SVR and not additively (with a +). This precisely captures the notion that the D and C components are individually necessary but not sufficient for reading, explicitly denying the additive claim that development in either one of these components alone could be sufficient for some development in reading comprehension. That is, in the multiplicative notion, no matter the skill level in one component, reading will not be possible without (at least some) skill in the other component.

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In the SVR, decoding is the term used for the ability to recognize words in print. However, within the reading literature, this term is usually more narrowly defined as a particular way to achieve word recognition. Specifically, decoding is word recognition accomplished through alphabetic coding. Such coding relates the letter sequences within a given word to the phonological structures underlying its pronunciation, which thereby allow access to the word’s location in the mental lexicon. Knowledge of these relationships is critical for learning the more direct linkages between the representations of a word’s letter sequences and the location of that word in the mental lexicon. These more direct linkages, which augment the phonological linkages, support the automaticity requirements of accurate and quick word recognition discussed above. (We will have much more to say about both alphabetic coding and automaticity in Chap. 4.) The use of the term decoding rather than word recognition in the original SVR proposal highlighted the importance of alphabetic coding in the development of word recognition, which had emerged as a key issue in the Great Debate (Chall, 1967) over phonics and whole language approaches to teaching reading. At this point, just keep in mind that under the SVR, decoding is best thought of in the broader sense of word recognition rather than in the narrower sense of alphabetic coding. The other SVR component, language comprehension, is often referred to as linguistic comprehension or listening comprehension. While all three terms can be equivalent in meaning, the latter is sometimes used to denote a specific way of assessing the construct of language comprehension, for instance by having one retell text that has been read aloud by another. (See Tunmer & Hoover, 2019, for a discussion of the distinctions between conceptual and measurement issues in reading.) Finally, reading comprehension and reading are generally interchangeable terms. But the latter term can be ambiguous, as it is sometimes used to refer to word recognition (e.g., using reading as the term for “word calling” when comprehension is not the goal when reading text aloud). In short, readers must be careful in coming to an understanding of the specific use of these terms within the reading literature.2 We show the dependency between the two components of reading comprehension graphically in Fig. 3.1. Here the horizontal dimension is language comprehension and the vertical dimension is word recognition. If we only distinguish between poor and good ability in each of these dimensions by turning them into dichotomous variables from the continuous variables they are, then we only find good readers in that quadrant where abilities in both language comprehension and word recognition are good; good readers do not appear in any of the other three quadrants. Where language comprehension is good but word recognition is poor, we find only poor readers, these showing specific word recognition difficulties. This category includes the special case of dyslexics who show persistent difficulty in word recognition due to an impairment in phonological processing skills despite otherwise normal development and exposure to high-quality, evidence-based literacy

2  To avoid confusion, we generally use the terms word recognition, language comprehension, and reading comprehension (or reading) for the Simple View of Reading constructs.

3.3  The Simple View of Reading

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Fig. 3.1  The Simple View of Reading represented as a 2 × 2 matrix crossing poor and good abilities in word recognition and language comprehension Caption: Under the Simple View of Reading, good readers are those with good skills in both word recognition and language comprehension while poor readers are those with poor skills in either word recognition or language comprehension (or both)

instruction (Tunmer & Greaney, 2010). Where word recognition is good but language comprehension is poor, we also only find poor readers. These have specific language difficulties, including the special case of hyperlexics who show remarkable skill in word recognition but extremely poor comprehension skills in spoken (and written) language (Stothard & Hulme, 1996). Finally, where both language comprehension and word recognition are poor, we also have only poor readers, who all show mixed difficulties or disabilities. It is important to note that in the quadrants containing the labels dyslexia and hyperlexia, a claim is not being made that all individuals whose reading performance places them in either of these two quadrants are dyslexics or hyperlexics. These are both special, constitutional conditions that describe a very small subset of those found in the respective quadrants (recall our introductory discussion in Chap. 1 about reading difficulties resulting from circumstances of readiness, instruction, or constitution – dyslexics and hyperlexics fall in the latter). In Fig. 3.2 we present the SVR in a three-dimensional plot employing continuous variables rather than the dichotomous ones used in Fig. 3.1. This better shows the predicted impacts on reading comprehension associated with different levels of word recognition and language comprehension. As in the earlier discussion in this chapter, the plot shows the theoretical skill levels that range from 0 (no skill) to 1 (perfect skill). Along the axes where there is no skill in either word recognition or language comprehension (or both), there is no skill in reading comprehension. But

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Fig. 3.2  The theoretical relationships between the three variables of the Simple View of Reading with each variable ranging from no skill to perfect skill Caption: Under the Simple View of Reading, reading comprehension (R) is the product of word recognition (D for decoding) and language comprehension (C), where each variable can range in value from 0 (no skill) to 1 (perfect skill). Note that along the D and C axes, whenever one variable is 0, R is 0 regardless of the values along the other axis

as skill levels increase beyond these two baseline values, skill in reading comprehension also increases. From a developmental perspective, note that the amount of increase in reading comprehension for a given increase in one component skill is greater the higher the skill in the other component. To take a specific example, improving hypothetical performance from .3 to .5 in word recognition when language comprehension is .6 results in a change in reading comprehension of .12 (namely, [.5 × .6 = .30] − [.3  × .6 = .18]). But the same hypothetical improvement in word recognition (from .3 to .5) when language comprehension is .8 results in a change in reading comprehension that is .16 (namely, [.5 × .8 = .40] − [.3 × .8 = .24]), which is improvement that is larger by a third. The takeaway for reading professionals is that the improvement in reading comprehension associated with any improvement in one of the two component skills depends on the skill level represented in the other component. To make this point even more concretely, any instruction that improves the word recognition ability of a student will result in greater gains in reading comprehension if that student has stronger rather than weaker language comprehension skill. Similarly, any instruction that improves the language comprehension ability of a student will result

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in greater gains in reading comprehension if that student has stronger rather than weaker word recognition skill. There is one last point to raise about Fig. 3.2. When comparing it to Fig. 3.1, you can see that if a theoretical skill level of .5 represents the arbitrary demarcation between poor and good skill levels, then there are no good readers (i.e., above .5 in reading comprehension, which is marked by the lower end of the green band in Fig.  3.2) when either word recognition or language comprehension, or both, are below their respective .5 levels. That is, all good readers are good in both word recognition and language comprehension. Also, you can see just how good one must be in either word recognition or language comprehension to be good in reading when considering these continuous variables. The amounts vary, of course, due to the multiplicative relationship. For instance, a theoretical skill level of .7 in word recognition requires a skill level in language comprehension that is only minimally higher (.72) to exceed a .5 level in reading comprehension. On the other hand, a theoretical skill level of .95 in word recognition requires a skill level just above .5 in language comprehension to exceed the threshold of a .5 skill level in reading comprehension. But note that skill levels of .6 in both components will not yield a reading comprehension value above .5. Again, these are theoretical values based on the notion of skill levels running continuously from none to perfection and setting .5 as the arbitrary delimiter between poor and good skill levels. The main point is that the influence of one component skill on the level of reading comprehension is dependent on the skill level of the other. If there is strong skill in one component, then the strength of the other component will determine the level of reading comprehension. But if there is weak skill in one component, then the strength of skill in the other component will be largely unrelated to the skill in reading comprehension for reading will be weak irrespective of that value. Importantly, the SVR does not claim that reading is simple. As we will discuss in Chap. 4, both word recognition and language comprehension are highly complex, and because of that, reading is complex. The SVR simply separates that complexity into two component parts, which provides the big picture of reading. The SVR, which is fully incorporated into the Cognitive Foundations Framework as the Cognitive Foundations of Reading, is shown in Fig. 3.3. Note that this depiction captures the building-block relationship between reading comprehension and

Fig. 3.3  The Simple View of Reading graphically represented as the Cognitive Foundations of Reading Caption: Reading comprehension is entirely founded on two necessary cognitive capacities, language comprehension and word recognition

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its two components – that is, the hierarchical relationship depicted is that the higher-­ order skill of reading comprehension depends completely on the lower-order skills of language comprehension and word recognition. The reader could envision arrows pointing up from the lower-order skills to the higher-order one to indicate this dependency, but this would be redundant if one remembers the building-block notion underlying the depiction of our reading competencies structure. We also note here the color scheme used in the graphic, with red for language comprehension, blue for word recognition, and purple for reading comprehension, which combines the two components (and colors). These are employed throughout the book to highlight the independence of the two subcomponents of language comprehension and word recognition, and the necessity (and articulation) of both needed for success in reading comprehension.

3.4  Select Issues in the Simple View of Reading The SVR is a static or concurrent model of reading, which means that it provides an account of reading at any single point in time when all its constructs are appropriately measured. Thus, by itself, the SVR is not a model of reading development. To be sure, certain aspects of reading development can be captured as successive changes in the relative strengths of the relationships of the two SVR subcomponents with reading comprehension, as we will discuss in Chap. 6. The SVR does not state how reading develops over time (i.e., what and when subcomponent skills change), only that the level of development at any point in time will depend entirely and only on the multiplicative combination of the levels of the two subcomponents. Further, the SVR provides an account of reading that encompasses the full range of reading skill from the non-reader, where either D or C, or both, are non-existent, to the fully proficient reader, where skills in both D and C are fully developed to an age-­ appropriate level. There is substantial empirical support for the SVR in the scientific literature on reading (see Catts, Adlof, & Weismer, 2006; Catts, Herrera, Nielsen, & Bridges, 2015; Hoover & Gough, 1990; Kim, 2017; Kirby & Savage, 2008; Language and Reading Research Consortium and Chui, 2018; Lervåg, Hulme, & Melby-Lervåg, 2017; Lonigan, Burgess, & Schatschneider, 2018). But there are issues within the SVR that are still being investigated (see, for examples, Adlof, Catts, & Little, 2006; Braze et al., 2016; Braze, Tabor, Shankweiler, & Mencl, 2007; Lonigan et al., 2018; Savage, Burgos, Wood, & Piquette, 2015; Tunmer & Chapman, 2012; Wagner, Herrera, Spencer, & Quinn, 2015), including: • whether some general cognitive factor drives skill in both language comprehension and word recognition given the strong relationships found between these; • whether skill in word recognition is completely independent of language comprehension (in consideration of the role of vocabulary);

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• whether there is need for an independent fluency component that addresses reading comprehension; • whether there is executive functioning in cognition that makes contributions to reading comprehension beyond that made to the word recognition and language comprehension components; and • whether the model can be extended beyond individual student performance to provide an appropriate description of classroom performance. Nonetheless, there is little evidence countering the main claim of the SVR for the substantial roles played by both word recognition and language comprehension in the success of reading comprehension. Beyond empirical questions, conceptual issues about the SVR also have been raised, for example, whether it can model all reading-based activities (e.g., skimming), reading development, or the complexity of reading instruction (Hoffman, 2009). Many of these issues revolve around what the SVR is (and is not) and what counts as reading. It is beyond the scope of this book to review these empirical and conceptual issues here, but the reader should be aware that such issues have been raised in the literature. In addition to its use in describing reading performance, the SVR has also been influential in the development of national literacy policies. In the United Kingdom, for example, the SVR was adopted in the government’s Rose report (Rose, 2006) as the model for understanding reading. The report served as the basis for revising the national curricular advice on teaching reading given to all United Kingdom schools. As one example, prior to the Rose report, teaching the relationships between a word’s letters and its phonological properties was done incidentally, with more explicit instructional focus placed on using other cues for guessing a word’s identity (e.g., semantic context). But given the empirical support for the role of efficient word recognition emphasized in the SVR, and the importance of alphabetic coding in achieving it, the curriculum was modified to teach these relationships explicitly to children to advance their word recognition skills. In the United States, cognitive models of reading, including the SVR, have not been widely used to inform reading instruction, most likely because more importance has been given to curricular standards in driving instructional focus. Also, the systems in place for teacher preparation tend to undervalue the contributions of cognitive science in understanding reading and its teaching in favor of helping teachers-to-be establish more general orientations to education. As consequence, teachers coming through programs in the United States are likely less prepared than they could be to teach students to read. As we have shown, reading is defined in the Cognitive Foundations of Reading just as it is in the SVR: the multiplicative combination of word recognition and language comprehension. This means that reading comprehension, as a cognitive skill, is accomplished through the articulation of its two components. While such articulation could require substantial cognitive resources, it apparently does not – for competent speakers of a language, once automatic word recognition skill is acquired, the comprehension of read material at the level of language comprehension is not generally further complicated. But for those who have yet to master word

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recognition, cognitive resources are so taxed by the inefficiencies of that underdeveloped process that even if it results in successful lexical access of word meanings, the resources that remain for language comprehension are insufficient for that task and reading comprehension suffers (LaBerge & Samuels, 1974; Perfetti, 1985; Pressley, 2006). Note that the SVR can model reading based in different levels of linguistic complexity as long as the measures of such complexity are parallel (i.e., comparable) in the assessments of both language and reading comprehension. For example, a third-­ grade student’s (language and reading) comprehension performance assessed relative to third-grade (language and reading) materials, or the same student’s performance assessed relative to higher-level, sixth-grade (language and reading) materials. The SVR can provide an adequate description of reading in both situations through reference to the standard being employed for comprehension level (e.g., mastery of language and reading comprehension in third-grade materials, but less than mastery for sixth-grade materials). This recognizes that reading performance can change over a lifetime, and performance can only be assessed against a relative standard, not an absolute one. Beyond linguistic complexity, the SVR can address different types of linguistic discourse (e.g., narrative versus expository), again, if these types of discourse are aligned (parallel) across both language and reading comprehension. Thus, while typical narrative and expository texts may differ on many linguistic parameters (e.g., word frequency, rarity of word meaning, syntactic complexity, specification of context, cohesion, semantic explicitness), this does not mean that reading comprehension is any less dependent on word recognition and language comprehension for success with the different text types. The results obtained from taking a measure of language comprehension based on narrative material and contrasting it with a measure of reading comprehension based on expository material would reflect a faulty assessment strategy, one that would not be helpful in assessing either the model of reading being investigated or an understanding of an individual’s reading ability under that model. This is the same issue raised in our earlier example, where employing third-grade materials in assessing the language comprehension of a third-grade student but sixth-grade materials in assessing reading comprehension would tell us little about either the model employed or the contribution of skills underlying reading ability. These are both examples of the important distinction between a hypothetical construct (e.g., reading comprehension, as it is defined within the SVR) and how that construct is operationalized under an assessment regimen (e.g., performance on a specific reading comprehension task). Failing to attend to how well the latter addresses the former has led to several seemingly misplaced criticisms of the SVR (e.g., Catts, 2018; Nation, 2019; Snow, 2018). One final word about the SVR: While it describes the need to have skills in two distinct components for reading success, it does not dictate how instruction should be used to build those skills. Particularly, the SVR does not require a “balanced” instructional approach between word recognition and language comprehension in learning to read. Balance in instruction is not what is critical, rather it is important to recognize that multiple skills need to be addressed to advance reading skill in

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both the short and long terms and that evidence-based instruction should be directed to where it is needed given a student’s current development. Thus, balancing instruction against student need is important, not balancing instruction against itself (see Castles, Rastle, & Nation, 2018 for a similar view). In the case of typical beginning readers (who already know the language they are learning to read at a fairly high level), what is needed to raise their reading comprehension to the level of their language comprehension is skill in word recognition; but once that is at hand, language comprehension becomes the limiting factor on their reading comprehension, and thus, advancing such comprehension must be of concern throughout their academic careers.

3.5  T  he Definition of a Cognitive Foundation Applied to the Simple View of Reading Before turning to a discussion of the cognitive foundations that underlie learning to read, let us revisit our definition of a cognitive foundation and provide an example of how it applies to one of the components of reading. In Chap. 2 we defined a cognitive foundation as an independent, but not necessarily elemental, knowledge-skill set that is an essential, hierarchically positioned, building block in either reading or in learning to read. Let us apply this definition to word recognition, which we described as the ability to recognize words in print (i.e., accurately and quickly gain access to the appropriate word meanings contained in the internal mental lexicon). Doing this, we see that word recognition so defined fits our definition of a cognitive foundation of reading as follows: • It is a knowledge-skill set, one that specifically enables the meanings of words to be accessed through their printed representations. • It is essential, as reading comprehension could not take place without this capacity. • It is independent, in that its definition does not depend on the definitions of other components modelled (namely, language comprehension or reading comprehension). • It is not necessarily elemental, and in this case, it is not, since word recognition can be decomposed to include several other knowledge-skill sets, for example, capacities to recognize individual letters, to recognize letter patterns, and to map letter patterns onto lexical entries. • It is a hierarchically positioned building block, as word recognition is required for success in reading comprehension. As we work through the cognitive foundations of learning to read, you should be able to apply each of these definitional aspects of a cognitive foundation to each of the components we will discuss.

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3.6  Summary In this chapter we defined reading (shorthand for reading comprehension) as the ability to extract and construct literal and inferred meaning from linguistic discourse represented in printed text. We showed how this definition of reading is closely tied to language and how that constrains our view of the much broader notion of literacy. In this conceptualization we recognized differences between spoken and printed language, but we argued that these occur in a virtual sea of similarities. We used the SVR as the framework’s foundation of reading, defining reading comprehension as the multiplicative combination of word recognition and language comprehension. Further, we defined word recognition as the ability to accurately and quickly gain access to the appropriate word meanings contained in the internal mental lexicon, and language comprehension, defined in a parallel fashion to reading comprehension, as the ability to extract and construct literal and inferred meaning from linguistic discourse represented in speech. We discussed how the SVR can be used to think about both reading skill and reading disability, including dyslexia, hyperlexia, and mixed disabilities. We presented a graphic depicting the entire surface of reading comprehension skill levels as determined by the varying component skill combinations of word recognition and language comprehension. We also discussed several select issues under the SVR, including that it (1) does not imply that reading is simple; (2) is a static model of reading; (3) has substantial empirical support; (4) presents issues that remain to be resolved; (5) has been used as a tool in reading policy; (6) can address differences in linguistic complexity and discourse; and (7) does not call for a particular approach to reading instruction. Finally, we reviewed our definition of a cognitive foundation (discussed in Chap. 2) and, as an example, showed how it applied to one of the framework components, word recognition, within the Cognitive Foundations of Reading.

3.7  Questions for Further Thought Below is a set of questions designed to extend your understanding of the SVR, and thus, the Cognitive Foundations of Reading. We believe that discussing your responses with colleagues will lead to even deeper understanding. Also, some of the issues raised by the questions below will be further addressed in subsequent chapters. 1. What is the difference between process and individual difference models of cognitive capacities? How do the goals of such models differ? 2. Would the SVR be compatible with a model of real-time reading that held that one first determines what words appear on the page, then comes to understand the identified words through the mechanisms used to understand spoken words, and finally derives the meaning of the printed discourse based on the meaning of the identified individual words?

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3. How might you understand skimming from the perspective of the SVR? What about speed reading? What about reading a written bus schedule or a diagram for assembling a piece of furniture? 4. Why must word recognition be both fast and accurate for success in reading? 5. If you failed to understand something you just read, what within the SVR might be the source of that failure (name and discuss at least four)? 6. How might one compensate for a difficulty in recognizing printed words? Do you think you could successfully guess a word’s identity given little to no print information about it? If it was possible for any word that one could not recognize to be said aloud (e.g., via a word reading machine), would this improve the individual’s reading comprehension? Do you think it would help one learn how to recognize words? 7. How does the definition of language comprehension (the ability to extract and construct literal and inferred meaning from linguistic discourse represented in speech) fit the definition of a cognitive foundation (an independent, but not necessarily elemental, knowledge-skill set that is an essential, hierarchically positioned, building block in either reading or in learning to read)?

3.8  What’s Next Having defined language comprehension and decoding (or, more generally, word recognition) as the knowledge-skill sets that are the foundations of reading, we next turn to the cognitive underpinnings of these two skill sets. These constitute the cognitive foundations of learning to read, and each constituent component adheres to the foundation definition given in Chap. 2: An independent, but not necessarily elemental, knowledge-skill set that must be developed to some degree before any knowledge-skill set at its higher-order levels can develop, and whose own development depends on the development of those knowledge-skill sets at its lower-order levels. The only difference between the foundations of reading and those of learning to read is that while the two cognitive components underlying reading are active in the process of reading, those underlying learning to read, while critical for mastering reading, may not be as critical in the actual reading process once mastered.

References Adlof, S. M., Catts, H. W., & Little, T. D. (2006). Should the simple view of reading include a fluency component? Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 19, 933–958. https:// doi.org/10.1007/s11145-006-9024-z Braze, D., Katz, L., Magnuson, J. S., Mencl, W. E., Tabor, W., Dyke, J. A. V., … Shankweiler, D. P. (2016). Vocabulary does not complicate the simple view of reading. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 29, 435–451. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-015-9608-6

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Braze, D., Tabor, W., Shankweiler, D.  P., & Mencl, W.  E. (2007). Speaking up for vocabulary: Reading skill differences in young adults. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 40, 226–243. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222194070400030401 Castles, A., Rastle, K., & Nation, K. (2018). Ending the reading wars: Reading acquisition from novice to expert. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 19, 5–51. https://doi. org/10.1177/1529100618772271 Catts, H. W. (2018). The simple view of reading: Advancements and false impressions. Remedial and Special Education, 39, 317–323. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741932518767563 Catts, H. W., Adlof, S. M., & Weismer, S. E. (2006). Language deficits in poor comprehenders: A case for the simple view of reading. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 49, 278–293. https://doi.org/10.1044/1092-4388(2006/023) Catts, H. W., Herrera, S., Nielsen, D., & Bridges, M. (2015). Early prediction of reading comprehension within the simple view framework. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 28, 1407–1425. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-015-9576-x ∗Catts, H. W., & Kamhi, A. G. (2005). Language and reading disabilities (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson. Chall, J. S. (1967). Learning to read: The great debate. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Deniz, F., Nunez-Elizalde, A.  O., Huth, A.  G., & Gallant, J.  L. (2019). The representation of semantic information across human cerebral cortex during listening versus reading is invariant to stimulus modality. Journal of Neuroscience, 39, 7722–7736. https://doi.org/10.1523/ JNEUROSCI.0675-19.2019 ∗Gough, P. B., Hoover, W. A., & Peterson, C. L. (1996). Some observations on a simple view of reading. In C. Cornoldi & J. Oakhill (Eds.), Reading comprehension difficulties: Processes and intervention (pp. 1–13). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Gough, P. B., & Tunmer, W. E. (1986). Decoding, reading, and reading disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7, 6–10. https://doi.org/10.1177/074193258600700104 Hoffman, J. V. (2009). In search of the “Simple View” of reading comprehension. In S. Israel & G. G. Duffy (Eds.), Handbook of research on reading comprehension (pp. 54–66). New York, NY: Routledge. ∗Hoover, W. A., & Gough, P. B. (1990). The simple view of reading. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2, 127–160. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00401799 ∗Hoover, W.  A., & Tunmer, W.  E. (2018). The simple view of reading: Three assessments of its adequacy. Remedial and Special Education, 39, 304–312. https://doi. org/10.1177/0741932518773154 Kim, Y.-S. G. (2017). Why the simple view of reading is not simplistic: Unpacking component skills of reading using a direct and indirect effect model of reading (DIER). Scientific Studies of Reading, 21, 310–333. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2017.1291643 Kirby, J. R., & Savage, R. S. (2008). Can the simple view deal with the complexities of reading? Literacy, 42, 75–82. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4369.2008.00487.x LaBerge, D., & Samuels, S. J. (1974). Toward a theory of automatic information processing in reading. Cognitive Psychology, 6, 293–323. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(74)90015-2 Language and Reading Research Consortium, & Chiu, Y. D. (2018). The simple view of reading across development: Prediction of Grade 3 reading comprehension from prekindergarten skills. Remedial and Special Education, 39, 289–303. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741932518762055 Lervåg, A., Hulme, C., & Melby-Lervåg, M. (2017). Unpicking the developmental relationship between oral language skills and reading comprehension: It’s simple, but complex. Child Development, 89, 1821–1838. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12861 Lonigan, C. J., Burgess, S. R., & Schatschneider, C. (2018). Examining the simple view of reading with elementary school children: Still simple after all these years. Remedial and Special Education, 39, 260–273. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741932518764833 Nation, K. (2019). Children’s reading difficulties, language, and reflections on the simple view of reading. Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties, 24, 47–73. https://doi.org/10.108 0/19404158.2019.1609272

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Perfetti, C. A. (1985). Reading ability. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Pressley, M. (2006). Reading instruction that works: The case for balanced teaching. New York, NY: Guilford. ∗Rose, J. (2006). Independent review of the teaching of early reading: Final report. Nottingham, UK: Department for Education and Skills. Savage, R., Burgos, G., Wood, E., & Piquette, N. (2015). The Simple View of Reading as a framework for national literacy initiatives: A hierarchical model of pupil-level and classroom-level factors. British Educational Research Journal, 41, 820–844. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3177 Snow, C. E. (2018). Simple and not-so-simple views of reading. Remedial and Special Education, 39, 313–316. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741932518770288 Stothard, S. E., & Hulme, C. (1996). A comparison of reading comprehension and decoding difficulties in children. In C. Cornoldi & J. Oakhill (Eds.), Reading comprehension difficulties: Processes and intervention (pp. 93–112). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Tunmer, W. E., & Chapman, J. W. (2012). The simple view of reading redux: Vocabulary knowledge and the independent components hypothesis. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 45, 453–466. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219411432685 Tunmer, W. E., & Greaney, K. T. (2010). Defining dyslexia. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 43, 229–243. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219409345009 Tunmer, W. E., & Hoover, W. A. (2019). The cognitive foundations of learning to read: A framework for preventing and remediating reading difficulties. Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties, 24, 75–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/19404158.2019.1614081 Wagner, R. K., Herrera, S. K., Spencer, M., & Quinn, J. M. (2015). Reconsidering the simple view of reading in an intriguing case of equivalent models: Commentary on Tunmer and Chapman (2012). Journal of Learning Disabilities, 48, 115–119. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219414544544

Chapter 4

The Cognitive Foundations of Reading Acquisition

Acronyms fMRI Functional magnetic resonance imaging SVR Simple View of Reading

4.1  Introduction In this chapter we discuss the cognitive skills needed to master the two main components of reading, language comprehension and word recognition. For language comprehension, we first present an information processing model of the stages needed to convert speech sound to meaning in a linguistic system. We use the model to frame our thinking about the knowledge-skill sets of phonology, syntax, and semantics that support the derivation of the literal meaning of sentences; we also discuss the roles of background knowledge and inference making in moving language comprehension beyond literal meanings. We end this section with a discussion of a graphic display of the cognitive foundations underlying language comprehension. For word recognition, we discuss why beginning readers must acquire the ability to map letters and letter patterns onto phonological forms at the level of phonemes, what that entails, and what is required to learn such mappings – letter knowledge, phonemic awareness, and knowledge of the alphabetic principle. We then discuss fluent, automatic word recognition and why alphabetic coding skill is critical for acquiring it. We end this section with a discussion of a graphic display of the cognitive foundations underlying word recognition.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 W. A. Hoover, W. E. Tunmer, The Cognitive Foundations of Reading and Its Acquisition, Literacy Studies 20, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44195-1_4

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4.2  Language Comprehension Recall that in the Simple View of Reading (SVR) language comprehension is defined as the ability to extract and construct linguistically-based meaning from spoken language. According to the SVR, children who have acquired an oral language can fully understand age-appropriate text when it is read aloud to them. If they become readers, then the comprehension these children experience in terms of meaning extraction and construction when reading text is largely the same comprehension they would experience when listening to someone else read that text aloud to them. To foreshadow, language comprehension so defined is an active process based on both the content contained in the linguistic transmission as well as the relevant knowledge and inference making brought to bear on that content by its recipient. What makes it active is that the listener has a contribution to make toward building understanding that goes beyond the content contained in what is being said. What, then, are the skill sets that must be mastered to derive meaning from speech?

4.2.1  T  he Cognitive Components Underlying Language Comprehension In spoken language comprehension, words are built up from speech sounds, sentences are built up from words, and discourse is built up from sets of interrelated propositions (i.e., meanings) underlying individual sentences, tapping both knowledge of the world and inferencing. The cognitive conversion of language from sound to meaning can be represented in terms of a process model, as shown in Fig. 4.1, that specifies a set of interacting processors (i.e., mental mechanisms) in which the output of one becomes the input to the next. As stated in Chap. 2, this type of model differs from the Cognitive Foundations Framework, which represents

Fig. 4.1 A model of the sequenced processes and products involved in spoken language comprehension Caption: Spoken language comprehension is accomplished through a modeled sequence of information transformation stages (represented by the boxes), each taking an input (left side of box) and creating a transformed output (right side of box). The circles represent additional information sources that both provide and receive information used in a transformation stage

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knowledge-skill sets and their interrelationships rather than the temporal flow and transformation of information that operationalize a cognitive capacity. We will use a cognitive process model to describe how language comprehension generally is carried out, but we will relate that process model to the knowledge-skill sets that will be employed in the Cognitive Foundations of Reading Acquisition. 4.2.1.1  Linguistic Knowledge The first part of language comprehension deals with the internalized, formal system that underlies knowledge of a language. This is linguistic knowledge and it is based on the articulated knowledge from three distinct domains: phonological knowledge (or phonology), semantic knowledge (or semantics), and syntactic knowledge (or syntax). Below we describe each of these linguistic domains, and then briefly revisit their use within a single system. Phonological Knowledge Oral language comprehension starts with the acoustic signal, the sound waves produced by a speaker’s speech act that arrive at a listener’s ear. This signal is converted through several transformations into a sequence of discrete abstract1 units – phonemes – through the process of speech perception. These units, which we will discuss in much more detail in the section on word recognition, represent the basic units in a language that mark differences in meaning. As an example, the distinctive spoken word pairs hit and pit differ only in their initial phonetic (i.e., speech sound) segments. And since these words have different meanings, these respective initial phonetic segments are based on distinct phonemes. The speech perception process is highly complex, largely because there is no one-to-one correspondence between segments of the acoustic signal and segments of the phonetic information in that signal from which phonemes are identified. That is, it is not the case that only and all the information needed to identify a given speech sound is contained in any single segment of the speech stream corresponding to a spoken word. This segmentation issue, as we will discuss later in this chapter, can represent an enormous obstacle to mastering the skills that allow letter sequences to be related to phonological sequences, which are critical in the development of word recognition. The main difficulty is that information about the phonetic content of speech is transmitted in parallel because the articulators – including the tongue, lips, teeth, and throat – used to generate a given speech sequence are moved dynamically from one structural target (i.e., one configuration of the articulators) to the

1  We use the convention of italicizing key concepts and distinctions for emphasis, but we also italicize words, phrases, or sentences when denoting them as linguistic objects. In both cases, the context we provide should suffice to determine the particular use being served.

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Fig. 4.2  The articulatory organs of the human vocal tract involved in creating speech Caption: The positioning and movement of the articulatory organs are responsible for creating the distinct sounds used in a language, but their dynamic movements mean that information about a given linguistic unit within a speech act is transmitted simultaneously with information about the linguistic units that both precede and follow it in that act Source: U.S. National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute (2019, December 4). Head & neck overview. SEER Training Modules. Retrieved from http://training.seer.cancer.gov/head-neck/ anatomy/overview.html. Public domain

next. (Fig. 4.2 depicts the articulators that are involved in creating speech, showing both the active ones that move and the passive ones that remain still.) As an example of these articulator gestures, you can feel (and see in a mirror) that your outer articulators are initially positioned differently when you begin to say pot as opposed to pit. These starting points influence the trajectories the articulators must follow as they are moved to make the remaining sounds of these words. Consequently, the acoustic signal produced during these movements contains overlaid phonetic information about both the initial and following sounds. In short, the transmitted information that allows the speech sounds to be identified is not presented in ordered discrete segments, but is interlaced (again, more about this later). Yet despite this parallel transmission of phonetic content, the speech perception mechanism produces as output a sequence of distinct phonemes, or a phonemic stream (see Fig. 4.1). In linguistics, the knowledge represented in this process is phonological knowledge, which deals with the definition, organization, and combination of speech sounds in a language. Without this knowledge for a given language, the words that it contains would defy both recognition by ear and production via speech. If you have witnessed a conversation between two speakers of a language that you do not speak, you realize immediately how critical this knowledge is, whether you are trying to identify words in a stream of speech or correctly repeat a word you have heard!

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Semantic Knowledge As shown in the process model in Fig. 4.1, phonemes serve as input to a mechanism that groups the phonemes and searches a phonemically accessible mental lexicon to find the meanings of the words contained in the input utterance. Thus, the accurate identification of the individual phonemes in spoken words is essential because the misclassification of a single phoneme could result in retrieving lexical information that is different in both meaning and syntactic category from the target (e.g., ran, a verb, versus man, a noun). The output of the lexical access mechanism shown in Fig. 4.1 not only contains information about the objects, ideas, properties, and actions to which words refer, but also information about how words can be combined with other words to form larger units of meaning. This information includes rules that govern the syntactic structures into which a word can enter. For example, The boy slept the bed is not a grammatically acceptable sentence but The boy broke the bed is acceptable, the difference residing in the properties of the verbs contained in the sentences, which constrain what can serve as an object of their respective actions. Information in the mental lexicon also includes rules that place constraints on how words of different syntactic categories can be combined. For example, The cage cried is not allowed because of constraints on the types of nouns and verbs that can be combined, inanimate versus animate in this case (compare with acceptable sentences The cage creaked and The child cried). The meanings of some words, especially the function words of English (e.g., a, the, she, and and), are expressed entirely in terms of rules specifying how the words can be combined with other words to form larger units of meaning. For example, try to define the meaning of the, which is the most frequently occurring word in the English language. If you said that it is an article or determiner, you only said what it is, not what it means. But you know that the two phrases the ball and a ball mean something different. In fact, the meaning of the, which is a quantifier, is very complex – linguists have devoted entire treatises to it! In linguistics, the knowledge represented in words is morphological knowledge, more commonly but less precisely known as vocabulary. This knowledge deals with the meaning-bearing units of language – the morphemes – that exist at both the word level (e.g., do) and the sub-word level (e.g., un as in undo). Word knowledge is complex, composed of many dimensions rather than one, as revealed in the following list of word characteristics (Nagy & Scott, 2000): • Incrementality: Knowing a word is not all-or-none, but rather an issue of degree, as you may have a very limited sense of what a given word means upon encountering it initially, but with more encounters of it in different sentences and different contexts, your knowledge of what it means and how it is used expands. • Multidimensionality: Word knowledge covers many different types of knowledge including morphological relations like prefix and suffix, semantic relationships like antonyms and synonyms, and the denotative and connotative aspects of meaning, which deal with a word’s explicit definition and its associations with other words.

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• Polysemy: Words can have multiple meanings, and further, the different meanings can vary in similarity (e.g., compare the different meanings of close in Keep your enemies close and Keep a close eye on your enemies with the meanings of bark in dog bark and tree bark). • Interrelatedness: Knowledge about a given word depends on knowledge about other words (e.g., knowing the meaning of living aids your understanding of bacterium). • Heterogeneity: Word qualities are not constant but vary by word type (e.g., the meaning of ball is very different from the meaning of the). And we must also recognize that multi-word phrases can have special meanings that go beyond any meanings of their constituent words (e.g., phrases like piece of cake and walk in the park that express the ease with which something can be accomplished). This complexity in word knowledge has implications for how vocabulary is both learned and taught, as well as for how words are used as tools to build higher-order linguistic meaning from lower-order units – that is, how propositions and their interrelationships representing the meaning of sentences are built from constituent morphemes, phrases, and clauses. But before considering such higher-level meaning under the semantics component of the Cognitive Foundations of Reading Acquisition, we must first consider sentence structures and how they relate to sentential meaning – this is the domain of syntax. Syntactic Knowledge Although the meaning of an utterance clearly depends on the meanings of the words it contains, it also depends on how the words are arranged, or parsed. To illustrate this point, go to the end of the next paragraph and begin reading the words in reverse order. You clearly know the meanings of the individual words, but the paragraph makes little or no sense. Not only is the order of words important, but so also is how they are hierarchically grouped. Another processor in the information processing model  – the parser  – takes the words and related information retrieved from the mental lexicon and builds a structural representation of the utterance based on word-­ phrase relationships, which allows the utterance’s literal meaning to be derived (see Fig. 4.1). For example, the sentence Flying hang gliders can be dangerous2 has two different meanings depending on how the words of the sentence are hierarchically organized (or grouped). The first structural representation shown in Fig. 4.3 holds that the act of flying hang gliders as carried out by an unspecified person can be dangerous to that person, whereas the second structural representation holds that the physical objects

 This is adapted from Chomsky’s (1965, p. 21) classic example Flying planes can be dangerous.

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Fig. 4.3  Structural representations for the two different meanings of the sentence Flying hang gliders can be dangerous Caption: The different meanings of this sentence come from the different groupings of its words and the functions those words serve under each

themselves when in flight (i.e., flying hang gliders) can be dangerous to innocent bystanders (ignore the linguistic symbols that reflect the operation of rules that specify the structural representations of the two meanings of the sentence). In linguistics, the knowledge represented in the parser that assigns such structural representations to utterances is syntactic knowledge. This knowledge deals with the definition and combination of phrases, clauses, and sentences in a language. The output of the lexical access mechanism that becomes the input to the parser (i.e., words and their meanings; see Fig. 4.1) is placed in a temporary storage system called verbal working memory. Verbal working memory is often described as the bottleneck in the language processing system because information retention in working memory is limited in both duration and capacity. To illustrate these two properties of verbal working memory, perform the following task: Quickly read the following list of words, immediately covering the page when you have finished so that you can no longer see the words, and then attempt to recall all the words you just read in the order they appeared.

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next the hair the to with girl sat boy red the You may have retained some of the words by actively rehearsing (i.e., repeating) them, but without rehearsal the words are quickly forgotten because they remain in working memory for only a brief period. Also, due to the capacity limitations of working memory, which is typically fewer than 10 items, you probably found the task increasingly difficult as you progressed through the list. Now try performing the same task again with the following list of words, which are the same as before but re-arranged: the boy sat next to the girl with the red hair You no doubt found this task much easier to perform. This is because your parser grouped the words in the list into a smaller number of structural units that did not exceed the capacity limitations of working memory. That is, such grouping, which requires attention and cognitive resources, allows verbal working memory to hold more information because a simple unstructured entry can require the same amount of capacity as a more complex structured one. Because verbal working memory is limited in capacity and duration, the parser immediately attempts to build a structural representation of a new sentence as soon as word meanings retrieved from lexical memory arrive as input. This is demonstrated by sentences like the following: The large man weighed two thousand grapes and The shooting of the prince shocked his wife since she thought he was a good marksman. The element of surprise or confusion you may have experienced when you reached the end of these garden path sentences occurred because the parser

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immediately began assigning a structural representation to each sentence that seemed probable given the content at the beginning of the sentence. However, the predicted structural representations turned out to be inconsistent with the content found toward the end of the sentences, thus requiring the creation of different structures to make the sentences comprehensible. As an aside, it is important to note that the processing limitations of verbal working memory and attention have important implications for reading development. Word recognition processes that are inefficient and capacity draining make understanding text much more difficult for children. Readers with slow, non-automatic word recognition processes often forget the words they read at the beginning of a sentence by the time they reach the end of it, or they are unable to devote the attentional resources needed to group read word sequences into a smaller number of more complex structural units. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to determine the overall meaning of the sentence being read, to say nothing of the developing understanding of the discourse. This is because the earlier recognized words are no longer available, and due to the heavy expenditure of cognitive resources on word recognition, the remaining resources are inadequate for successful parsing and text integration processes. We will come back to this point later. Revisiting Semantic Knowledge Above we said that the cognitive component of semantics went beyond individual word meaning, including the building of higher-order linguistic meaning from lower-order units. That is, given word meaning and syntactic structure, the remaining semantic tasks are to build propositions from sentence structures and their constituents (morphemes, phrases, and clauses), and then to build discourse meaning from sets of interrelated propositions. To understand this, consider the following narrative: John drove to the store. There he bought a dozen eggs. When he returned home, his wife asked about the milk. John touched his forehead and got back into his car.

Taking the meanings of the individual words, the semantic system can build propositions that underlie each sentence to yield literal meaning that provides a model of the situation described in the linguistic discourse. Let us take our example sentence by sentence and see what we know just by knowing the language. First, we know John drove to a store; we do not know what he drove or what kind of store he visited, though we do know it was not just any store, but one previously known to him to serve whatever purpose he had for his visit. Second, we know he refers to John, who bought twelve eggs at the store he visited. Third, we know John originally left home before driving to the store, and that John’s wife asked about milk that she and John had previously communicated about. Fourth, we know that John touched his forehead and got back into his car, which we now know he had previously driven to the store. You will note that there are several things that can be inferred across sentence boundaries just by knowing the language – John drove his car from his home

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to the store, John bought a dozen eggs at that store, and John got out of his car. The model of the situation developed thus far is based on the semantic system underlying language, and that system is used whether the sentences confronted come from speech or print. But we know so much more of the situation portrayed by the four sentences above than just what can be known through knowledge of the language. For example, we understand that John’s wife likely asked that he make a trip to the grocery store to buy eggs and milk, that John forgot to buy milk, that as an expression of his forgetfulness John bought his hand to his head (most likely mock-slapping the palm of his hand against his forehead), and that John was going to drive back to the store to get the forgotten milk. We will see shortly the basis of such additional knowledge, which goes well beyond what is given directly in language, but first a quick recap. 4.2.1.2  Revisiting Linguistic Knowledge Taken together, the phonology, syntax, and semantics of a language constitute its grammar, which represents linguistic knowledge. And quite remarkably, in just the first few years of life through little more than exposure and interaction in an engaging linguistic environment, a child will acquire much of the complex grammar of the language of the speech community in which she or he has been immersed (Lenneberg, 1967). This will be learned naturally, without the need for any explicit instruction. The linguistic knowledge so acquired will be unconscious and tacit, but its articulation will allow the child to understand the complex sound-to-meaning (i.e., language listening) and meaning-to-sound (i.e., language speaking) relationships the language allows. Such linguistic knowledge defines the formal system that provides the literal meaning of sentences and passages, but as we have just seen, more is needed to achieve full comprehension and use of language – one’s linguistic knowledge must interact with what one knows about the world. 4.2.1.3  Background Knowledge and Inferencing Skills As indicated in Fig. 4.1, the propositions underlying individual sentences normally do not stand in isolation but are integrated into larger sets of interrelated propositions through the application of inferential and pragmatic rules. Such rules combine the new information one draws from the meaning of the sentence just processed, with previously existing information, one’s knowledge of the world, and the situational context. For example, most listeners would not fully understand the sentence The cloth ripped but the haystack saved her unless they knew it was about a woman parachuting from an airplane (Bransford, 1979). That is, unless they had comprehended a preceding discourse and made inferences that went beyond an interpretation of this sentence based solely on linguistic knowledge. Similarly, inferences based on pragmatic rules for using language in social contexts enable listeners to

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understand the intended (as opposed to just the literal) meaning of utterances. For example, if a parent said to her or his child, The garbage is beginning to stink, the child would infer from the situational context, knowing the household distribution of responsibilities, that more is expected than just understanding that a particular state of affairs exists in the world at a particular place and point in time! Background knowledge is the generic term used to refer to knowledge of the preceding discourse, prior knowledge made relevant (i.e., activated during comprehension) by the developing meaning of the discourse, and knowledge of the situational context. To comprehend spoken language, children must have and use background knowledge that is relevant to what they are trying to understand. To understand spoken (or written) stories, they must have background knowledge that is related to the topic of the story. For example, children raised in New Zealand would more likely find it easier to understand a story about cricket than a story about baseball, whereas the opposite would be true of children raised in the United States. Understanding will also vary as a function of the cultural experience children have, both prior to school entry and outside of school once enrolled. Inferences based on background knowledge can even influence the interpretation of single words in sentences that are structurally very similar. Consider the following sentences drawn from the research literature: The city council rejected the protesters’ application for a parade permit because they feared violence and The city council rejected the protesters’ application for a parade permit because they advocated violence (Bransford, 1979). In the first sentence they refers to the city council, whereas the referent for they in the second sentence is the protesters. In each case the referent is determined by inferences drawn from background knowledge. Background knowledge also includes knowledge of schemas, which are knowledge structures that represent our understanding of commonly occurring events and their relationships, such as the routines followed when going to eat at a restaurant. However, simply having the relevant schema in long-term memory will not facilitate language comprehension unless it is activated and brought to bear during the activity of comprehending. Consider an example, also drawn from the research literature. Read the passage below and cover the page when you have finished. Now attempt to write a detailed summary of what you just read. The procedure is actually quite simple. First, you arrange items into different groups. Of course, one pile may be sufficient depending on how much there is to do. If you have to go somewhere else due to lack of facilities that is the next step, otherwise you are pretty well set. It is important not to overdo things. That is, it is better to do too few things at once than too many. In the short run, this may not seem important, but complications can easily arise. A mistake can be expensive as well. At first the whole procedure will seem complicated. Soon, however, it will become just another facet of life. It is difficult to foresee any end to the necessity for this task in the immediate future, but then one never can tell. After the procedure is completed one arranges the materials into different groups again. Then they can be put into their appropriate places. Eventually they will be used once more and the whole cycle will then have to be repeated. However, that is part of life. (Bransford & Johnson, 1972, pp. 722.)

Now imagine how much easier it would have been for you to carry out this task if you had been told at the outset that the passage was about washing clothes!

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Background knowledge is critical for success in language and reading comprehension. Research reveals that those who lack such knowledge or fail to bring it to bear during a (language or reading) comprehension task struggle (for an overview, see Compton, Miller, Elleman, & Steacy, 2014), and this has important implications for teaching reading. When teachers ask children to listen to or read material, they can improve their students’ understanding of the material by providing or activating relevant background knowledge at the beginning of the lesson (Levin & Pressley, 1981). Teachers can also provide students with strategies that can help them recognize when background knowledge is needed to aid their comprehension (Elbro & Buch-Iversen, 2013).

4.2.2  S  ummary of the Cognitive Foundations of Language Comprehension The relationships among the cognitive elements underpinning the language comprehension component of the Cognitive Foundations of Reading Acquisition are shown in Fig. 4.4. This part of the framework draws from the description of the cognitive

Fig. 4.4  Relationships among the cognitive elements underpinning the language comprehension component in the Cognitive Foundations of Reading Acquisition Caption: Skill in language comprehension depends on both (1) background knowledge and inferencing skills and (2) linguistic knowledge, and the latter depends on knowledge of the language’s phonology, syntax, and semantics

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processes involved in deriving meaning from speech. Here language comprehension, which represents the extraction and construction of linguistically-based meaning from spoken language, is seen as the articulation of background knowledge and inferencing skills operating in conjunction with literal meaning provided through linguistic knowledge, the latter representing the articulation of phonological, syntactic, and semantic knowledge.

4.2.3  Select Issues in Language Comprehension There are two important additional issues to raise regarding language comprehension: (1) differences in types of language contained in discourse and (2) differences in levels of background knowledge. For the former, there is a distinction between the informal language that is typically used in conversation and the formal or academic language that is typically found in texts and used in schools. Informal language is generally less precise than formal language and is much more context dependent  – it relies on facial expression, social context, and knowledge of the immediate situation and linguistic environment. As such, the meaning of informal language depends, sometimes to a great degree, on non-linguistic information. In contrast, formal language or “book” language strives to eliminate such contextual dependencies, with meaning carried exclusively through linguistic mechanisms. There are several differences between informal and formal language, differences that appear even in the linguistic environments of young children, including the following (Chafe & Danielewicz, 1987; Montag, Jones, & Smith, 2015; Montag & McDonald, 2015; Olson, 1977): • Vocabulary: In formal language, there is greater use of more precise and less frequently used words, and explicit attention must be paid to connections between the words used (e.g., in discussions of science, connections between words such as study and associated words like method, bias, and outcome). • Grammatical structures: In formal language, there is greater use of compound sentences (two complete sentences connected by a coordinating conjunction), prepositional phrases (those that start with a preposition and modify a noun, verb, phrase, or clause, and which can be embedded within other prepositional phrases), independent and subordinate clauses (which have both a subject and a verb, but which, in the latter case, cannot stand alone as a sentence), and adjective and adverb clauses (dependent clauses used as adjectives or adverbs, respectively). • Text structures: In formal language, text structures (both narrative and expository) tend to be more complete, detailed, and explicit, and require integration of meaning across multiple sentences to be successfully comprehended. • Inferencing: In formal language, there is a greater need to think critically, connecting ongoing comprehension to what else is known, predicting what may come next, hypothesizing about relationships, and applying understandings to current contexts.

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Note that the distinctions being made are between type of language – informal versus formal – and not mode of transmission – speech versus print – though these are highly correlated. It is an important distinction because children often have difficulty moving from the informal language they have generally acquired outside of schooling to the more formal language used in school contexts. A second issue concerns background knowledge. As shown in the cognitive elements underpinning the language comprehension component in the Cognitive Foundations of Reading Acquisition, language comprehension is based on the articulation of linguistic and background knowledge, such that language comprehension will be improved if background knowledge is improved. This is important when thinking about language skill, for it highlights the somewhat counterintuitive notion that one may be skilled in language comprehension where there is strong background knowledge but less skilled where there is weaker background knowledge. Thus, both language comprehension and reading comprehension may be defined relative to different knowledge domains, where one could be relatively strong in certain domains (e.g., history), but relatively weak in others (e.g., physics). In such cases, the difference is not primarily in linguistic knowledge but in background knowledge (though there may be some linguistic differences, such as those in vocabulary, related to the different knowledge domains), and these differences in knowledge are then reflected in both language and reading comprehension. Having discussed the language comprehension component of the Cognitive Foundations of Reading Acquisition, we now turn to the other component necessary for reading success, word recognition, and the foundations upon which it is built.

4.3  Word Recognition Words are essential elements of language, and reading comprehension depends on the ability to recognize words in text. Below we discuss the attributes of word recognition skill that are essential for successful reading comprehension, as well as the set of cognitive skills that underlie mastery of skilled word recognition.

4.3.1  Automaticity in Word Recognition As stated in Chap. 3, word recognition must be both accurate and quick for success in reading. Accuracy in word recognition is important because the meaning of text critically depends on the meanings of the words it contains and using meanings from words recognized in error will degrade sentence and discourse understanding. The ability to recognize words quickly is important because inefficient, capacity-­ draining word recognition processes hinder text understanding by placing extreme burdens on memory capacity and reducing the cognitive resources available for comprehension processes. Difficulties in recognizing words in alphabetic

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orthographies typically occur when children attempt to identify most of the words they encounter by painstakingly sounding out and blending the constituent letter sounds (e.g., identifying bag by blending [bah]3-[ah]-[guh]), or by laboriously using sentence context cues to guess word identity (e.g., guessing gasoline as the last word in John’s car was on empty so he drove it to the station to fill it up with). These require conscious effort, but automaticity in word recognition must be accomplished without conscious attention either to the explicit analysis of a word’s constituent letters and their relationships to its phonological representation or to its sentential context. But developing such automaticity entails attending to and mastering the detailed relationships between letters and phonology. Before considering word recognition automaticity in greater length, we turn to the cognitive capacities that are its foundations.

4.3.2  T  he Cognitive Components Underlying Word Recognition Reading in an alphabetic writing system like English requires mastering the linkages between print and speech, which constitutes the cognitive skill of alphabetic coding (more completely defined below). This skill itself depends on the development of several other cognitive skills. In the sections that follow, we discuss each of these skills in detail, as well as their interrelationships. 4.3.2.1  Alphabetic Coding Skill For progress to occur in learning to read an alphabetically written language, beginning readers must acquire the ability to map letters and letter patterns onto phonological forms at the phonemic level (Gough & Hillinger, 1980; Juel, 1991; Shankweiler & Fowler, 2004). Doing so will allow readers access to the meanings of words they know from having learned their native language. This alphabetic coding skill (also referred to as phonological decoding skill or phonological recoding skill in the reading literature) includes, for English, knowledge of the following: • correspondences that map single letters onto single phonemes (e.g., and onto /f/ and /b/, respectively); • correspondences that map digraphs (i.e., a pair of letters) onto single phonemes (e.g., and onto /sh/ and /th/, respectively);

3  We follow the standard convention of using arrow brackets () to denote written characters and character combinations, slash brackets (/ /) to denote phonemes and phoneme combinations, and square brackets ([  ]) to denote distinct speech sounds (phones) and phonetic combinations. To reduce the burden on the reader, we use letters to indicate phonemes and phones rather than the symbols used in the International Phonetic Alphabet, clarifying in text as needed.

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• correspondences that map groups of letters onto groups of phonemes (e.g., onto /shun/); • polyphonic spelling patterns (e.g., as in bear and hear, and as in clown and flown), including the one-to-many relationships for letters representing vowels (e.g., representing the different medial phonemes in bard, back, and bake); • position-specific constraints on the mappings between letters and phonemes (e.g., the digraph at the beginning of words corresponds to /g/, as in gherkin, ghost, and ghastly, but to /f/ at the end of words, as in tough and cough, although ugh represents an exception); • the use of marker letters that determine correspondences (e.g., the absence or presence of the final letter determines whether the phoneme representing the prior vowel is short or long, as in hop versus hope, tap versus tape, cut versus cute, and bit versus bite); and • highly context-sensitive correspondences (e.g., represents one phoneme in the final position of two syllable words, as in baby and happy; another at the beginning of words, as in yes, yell, and yogurt; and yet another in single, open-­ syllable words, as in by, my, and cry). The letter-phoneme mappings above are not based on any semantic constraints in English. But alphabetic coding skill does draw upon morphophonemic rules that govern the representation of meaning-bearing units in speech that speakers of English know implicitly through language acquisition. An example of such a rule is that the morpheme (the elemental meaning-bearing units discussed above) for the regular noun plural inflection represented by in English orthography is realized as /s/ when it follows an unvoiced consonant, but as /z/ when it follows the voiced version of the same consonant, as shown in the following examples: Unvoiced /s/ caps cats sacks myths muffs

Voiced /z/ cabs fads sags lathes dives

To understand the distinction between voiced and unvoiced consonants, place your fingers on your voice box and alternately say ssss and zzzz – you should feel your vocal chords vibrate when you say zzzz but not when you say ssss, even though the place of articulation (that is, where the other articulators are positioned) is the same for both sounds. Similarly, the morpheme for verb past-tense inflection represented by in English orthography is realized as /t/ when it follows an unvoiced consonant, but as /d/ when it follows the voiced version of the same consonant, as shown in the following examples:

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Unvoiced /t/ reaped peeked unearthed puffed kissed

Voiced /d/ grabbed hugged seethed loved buzzed

To take yet another example, the pronunciation of the bound morpheme meaning not (namely, in) reflects the phonological rule of spoken English specifying that within a word, a nasal consonant assumes the same place of articulation as the immediately following consonant, as in indiscrete, implausible, and inconceivable. (Note that the rule does not apply if the next phoneme is a vowel, as in inoperable.) In English orthography the spelling of the in morpheme in implausible is changed to to reflect this change in pronunciation (which also occurs in impossible and impractical). Also, in line with this phonological rule governing the pronunciation of nasal consonants within words, the second phoneme in inconceivable is /ng/ (as in the final phoneme contained in song and bang), though the spelling remains . (See Box 4.1 for further comments about orthographic regularity in English.)

Box 4.1: Orthographic Regularity in English There are several influences on the spelling of an English word, including the word’s language of origin and its meaning (Moats, 2005). Most of the words in English have Anglo-Saxon origins (e.g., ankle, goose, and meat), but English also has borrowed words and adapted spellings from other languages like Latin (e.g., aquatic), Greek (e.g., pyrotechnics), French (e.g., allege), and Spanish (e.g., arroyo). Knowing these origins helps a reader understand the orthographic and phonologic connections within such words. Also, as discussed earlier in this chapter, in many cases English spelling maintains relationships between words based on meaning rather than pronunciation (e.g., the differing phonemes in the first vowels in nation and national both being spelled with ). Thus, in many cases, if English words share orthography, they also may share morphology. As a measure of orthographic regularity, it is estimated that about 70% of English monosyllabic words are feedforward consistent (Ziegler, Stone, & Jacobs, 1997) – that is, there is only one way to pronounce the word given its spelling (e.g., can only be pronounced as [buck]). In contrast, about 28% of monosyllabic English words are feedback consistent – that is, there is only one way to spell the word given its pronunciation (e.g., [probe] can only be spelled as ). This helps to explain why spelling a pronounced word in English is so much more challenging than recognizing its printed form.

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Our discussion thus far argues that there is a systematic relationship between printed and spoken English, albeit a complex one. The learning of these relationships cannot be achieved through direct instruction because of both the number and complexity of the relationships – rather they must be induced by the learner. And reading itself, through the exposure to print it affords, provides the greatest opportunity for such learning if the learner can connect the letters of the printed word with the phonological representation of that word. These connections, for example, can be accomplished by using correspondences between letters and phonological forms that have already been internalized, by sounding out word parts that are unknown, or by having someone else read the unknown word aloud or provide corrective feedback for words read in error. As we will see, learning all these correspondences comes gradually, based in the accumulations of exposures to printed words gotten through reading practice. This is not to say that instruction is unimportant – it is generally critical for helping learners acquire the tools needed to learn to read from the print they are exposed to, and for many, without such instruction they will fail to become readers. The word recognition skills of children who do not make use of the relationships between letters and phonology in learning to read English will remain relatively weak because they will not develop the rich network of sublexical (i.e., non-­ meaning-­based) connections between the orthographic (i.e., letter-based) and phonological (i.e., phoneme-based) representations of words, which are critical for achieving automaticity in accessing the appropriate word meanings in lexical memory. (Again, we’ll have much more to say about this later in this section, including some examples.) And because of their inefficient and capacity-draining word recognition skills, these children will experience progressive deterioration in their rate of reading comprehension development as they grow older (Byrne, Freebody, & Gates, 1992). But before leaving our consideration of alphabetic coding, let us briefly consider an alternative view to the development of word recognition skill as learning to map letters onto phonological forms. It is the view that the ability to read evolves naturally and spontaneously out of children’s pre-reading experiences with environmental print. Such print refers to commonly occurring labels accompanied by context or logos, such as the word STOP appearing on red octagonal signs at road intersections. According to this view, children are naturally predisposed to learn written language if the emphasis is on the communication of meaning. If this view is accurate, literacy teaching should then focus on meaning construction, not on the abstract structural units that provide the basis for mapping print onto the phonological representations underlying spoken language. Explicit instruction in word analysis activities would therefore be downplayed or discouraged. There are two major difficulties with this view of the development of word recognition. First, given that the world is awash in print, we would not expect that so few children learn to read before going to school, with those who do typically having received a considerable amount of encouragement and support in literacy-­ related activities in their homes prior to school entry (Nicholson, 1999). Second, fast, accurate word recognition skills do not emerge from the kind of spontaneous

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word learning that results from exposure to environmental print, where children learn to read the environment rather than the word. Let us explore this a bit more deeply. Children do, in fact, initially learn to identify a few words through the natural strategy of associating some distinguishing feature of the printed word with its spoken whole counterpart. Any cue that will distinguish the word may be used by the child, such as features of the immediate environment in which the word appears (e.g., the golden arches of McDonald’s restaurants), a single letter or a matching pair of letters, the font in which the letters appear, the names of some of the letters if the child knows some letter names, or possibly a property of the whole word (e.g., its color, its length, or the resemblance of the whole word to a familiar object, such as the double humps in camel) (Byrne, 1992; Gough, 1993). However, beginning readers who continue to learn to read words this way will face two major problems. First, although children will easily acquire a few words based on visually distinctive cues, this natural strategy of associating a familiar spoken word with some feature or attribute of the word’s printed form will eventually break down. Each new word will become increasingly hard to acquire due to the difficulty of finding a unique cue to distinguish it from those that have already been learned. For example, if the child selects the presence of the squiggly to recognize the word stop, then difficulties will arise when attempts are made to use this character to recognize spot, tops, or pots (not to mention the less frequent post or opts). Notice that in this example, the selection of any character as a distinguishing cue, such as the cross-shaped or the tail of

will fail. Beginning readers will make an ever-increasing number of errors and become confused and frustrated unless they discover, or are led to discover, an alternative strategy for establishing the relationship between the written and spoken forms of language. The second major problem children will face in attempting to selectively associate visually distinctive cues with words is that the strategy is developmentally limiting because it is not generative – it does not provide a means for identifying words not seen before. This is a critical consideration because most of the words that beginning readers encounter in print are novel, having never been seen (Jorm & Share, 1983; Share, 1995). Beginning reading materials typically employ upwards of 1500 words, each of which must be encountered a first time. Moreover, when new words appear in print, they do not suddenly begin to appear with great frequency (e.g., as in a story about the eruption of a volcano). Beginning readers are continually encountering words that they have not seen before and may not set eyes on again for some time. Yet by the time the average student learning to read an alphabetic orthography leaves high school, she or he can quickly and accurately recognize at least 25,000 words (Gough & Hillinger, 1980). For beginning readers who continue to rely mostly on partial visual cues supported by contextual guessing at the expense of learning the relationships between letters and phonology, little attention is paid to the interaction between the subcomponents of written and spoken words (i.e., between the letters and letter strings in a word and the phonemes and phoneme strings it contains). To understand what learning to read this way would be like, imagine a writing system in which each spoken

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word of English is represented by an arbitrary string of numbers – [cat] as 47,937 and [hat] as 35,690. Without the support provided by letter-to-phonology connections, the word recognition system would quickly become overwhelmed; the process of learning to recognize words at the level of the average high school graduate would be roughly equivalent to that of learning to quickly and accurately recognize the spoken names of 25,000 people through their printed telephone numbers (Adams & Bruck, 1993). A similar situation occurs when learning to read in a nonalphabetic orthography like Japanese kanji, which is based on borrowed or modified Chinese logographs and which, in its purest form, does not contain any internal symbols representing phonology. In this case, it takes a student 10–12 years of devoted study to learn to recognize just 2000 logographs (Akamatsu, 2006)! To summarize, progress in learning to read in an alphabetic writing system can occur only if children abandon the more natural non-analytic strategy of using partial visual cues to recognize words. They must instead learn to develop fully analytic links between print and phonology by means of processing that links letters to phonemes. But what must children know to learn such relationships? Two critical knowledge sets are required – concepts about print and knowledge of the alphabetic principle. We discuss these next. Concepts About Print Children who would become readers must develop an understanding of the conventions used in print to represent linguistic discourse. In written English, these basic concepts about print (Clay, 1979) include the broad notions about how print works – that printed text carries a linguistic meaning, that there is correspondence between printed and spoken words, that spaces mark word boundaries, that punctuation marks delineate sentence boundaries, that words in sentences are arranged left-to-­ right and top-to-bottom on a page, and that successive book pages are ordered left-­ to-­ right and turned right-to-left. Learning these concepts early is critical for advancing word recognition skills as they allow the child to pair printed and spoken words, thus expanding the opportunities to learn the connections between orthography and phonology. Note that the basic concepts about print are being addressed here. The more advanced concepts that appear in some sets of reading standards – like the abilities to recognize different types of text (poems, story books, informational texts), to distinguish the roles of author and illustrator, or to use different text features (captions, headings, glossaries) – are not included here, just those aspects that are needed by the child to link print and language. While these concepts about print are clearly necessary for successful reading and must become known early in the process of learning to read, their acquisition does not appear to represent major difficulties for children (Tunmer et  al., 1988). But beyond these basic concepts about print, knowledge of the alphabetic principle, which can represent a major obstacle, must also be learned if alphabetic coding skills are to be mastered.

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Knowledge of the Alphabetic Principle The second critical knowledge set that must be acquired in order to learn the analytic links between print and speech is knowledge of the alphabetic principle – the conscious awareness that letters and letter combinations are used to represent the phonemes underlying spoken words. This means that children must explicitly understand that there is a structure to the string of letters contained in written words (i.e., a structure that underlies the whole word being represented) that is tied to the phonological structure that underlies the spoken word. This principle allows a small set of graphic units (the 26 letters in the English orthographic system, individually or in combination) to represent a small set of linguistic units (the phonemes, about 44 in English phonology). And this is the basis of a productive system that enables an indefinitely large number of words (some one million in English) to be represented by combinations of a relatively small set of letters. Learning to read in such a system then becomes learning the letter-phoneme relationships. This is very different from learning to read in a pure logographic writing system in which the written units, lacking a systematic internal structure tied to phonology, correspond to individual words, thus requiring the child to learn a large set of arbitrary correspondences. (See Box 4.2 for a brief discussion of graphemes and their relationships to letters and phonemes in English.) The child who writes color as clearly grasps the alphabetic principle. Without this insight, instruction designed to help students learn the relationships between the units of print and speech, such as phonics, will only lead to frustration, because the unaware child will not understand the relationships being targeted. Further, most children will not become aware of the alphabetic principle without explicit instruction (Byrne, 1998). Of course, it is possible that instruction focused on letter-sound relationships, such as phonics, will lead the child to discover the

Box 4.2: Graphemes, Letters, and Phonemes in English The 26 letters of English form more than 250 graphemes (Moats, 2000), these being single letters and letter combinations that represent single phonemes (with one case where a single letter represents a combination of two phonemes, namely, representing /ks/ as in lax). Consider consonants, for example. The grapheme represents the single phoneme /v/ (as in void, over, and rev); the grapheme represents the phoneme /s/ (as in sick, crisis, and bus), but also the phonemes /sh/ (as in sugar), /z/ (as in please), and /zh/ (as in treasure); and the grapheme represents the phoneme /f/ (as in rough), /g/ (as in ugh, in some dialects), and silence (as in though, although in this case it marks the final phoneme difference from that in thou). Indeed, things get even more complicated for vowels given the five commonly used letters (, , , , and ) that must cover some 20 phonemically distinct vowels.

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alphabetic principle, but until it is grasped, such instruction will not help the child induce any specific mappings between letters and phonological forms. We have now discussed the two knowledge sets that are required for learning alphabetic coding skills: Concepts about print and knowledge of the alphabetic principle. But to learn the latter, two additional knowledge sets must be acquired: These are the knowledge sets about the units that are to be connected under the alphabetic principle – letters and phonemes. We now turn to these. Letter Knowledge One knowledge set necessary to learn the alphabetic principle is letter knowledge – the ability to recognize and manipulate the letters of the alphabet, including letters in different fonts and cases (i.e., lowercase and uppercase). In mastering this principle, children must be able to differentiate each letter of the alphabet from all others, a skill usually acquired by learning letter names (Adams, 1990). Importantly, it is not the names of the letters per se that are critical; rather, it is the ability to reliably distinguish and manipulate the units of the written language in order to map them onto phonological forms in the language. For example, the would-be reader must come to recognize that and are different letters and that and are different words containing the same letters but in different order. Letter-name knowledge, nonetheless, does contribute to beginning reading achievement in important ways (Foulin, 2005; Treiman, 2000). First, letter-name knowledge serves as a bridge toward understanding the alphabetic principle, as reflected in children’s invented spellings (e.g., for day and for bell), in which the names of letters are used to represent speech sounds in words. Second, letter-name knowledge can act as a precursor to alphabetic coding skill because the names of most letters contain the phoneme to which the letter normally refers. For example, /b/ is the first phoneme (of two) in the name of the letter ; but there is no /w/ in the name for . Third, letter-name knowledge can facilitate the development of phonemic awareness, especially when children are exposed to alphabet books and games that increase knowledge of letter names and their relation to speech sounds in words (e.g., is for snake). Rather than just having knowledge of the letter names, these are most likely the reasons that letter-name knowledge is one of the best predictors of beginning reading achievement. Phonemic Awareness A second knowledge set needed to learn the alphabetic principle is the conscious ability to recognize and manipulate the linguistic units underlying the spoken word that demarcate differences in meaning – the phonemes. The knowledge behind this ability must be more than implicit; it must be explicit – that is, it must be conscious knowledge. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, any child who knows a language can implicitly recognize and manipulate the units of the language that mark differences in meaning between words (e.g., distinguish [bat] and [bag] as different words with different meanings). However, knowing explicitly that this distinction in

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meaning is carried by a specific unit in a specific location (namely, by the last unit in the preceding example) does not come automatically with learning the language. In most cases, this knowledge must be taught – or, more accurately, as we will see, it must be uncovered with the assistance of explicit instruction. This knowledge is phonemic awareness: the conscious knowledge (or insight) that words are built from a discrete set of abstract units – phonemes – coupled with the conscious ability to manipulate these units. Phonemic awareness is a critical skill for learning to read an alphabetically written language, one that does not seem to be required to learn to read in nonalphabetic systems though there is not complete agreement on this issue (Hanley, 2005; Huang & Hanley, 1994; Read, Zhang, Nie, & Ding, 1986). Yet given its importance, a fair amount of confusion among reading professionals persists about what this skill is and why it is so important. Below we describe phonemic awareness and then discuss why it is a prerequisite for learning to read, why it can be difficult to acquire, and what happens to the would-be reader who fails to acquire it. To foreshadow the discussion to come, while phonemic awareness is a language-­ based skill, it is, as described above, not a skill that is needed for either learning language or using language. It is a metalinguistic skill – a higher-order linguistic-­ cognitive process that operates on the products of a lower-order linguistic-cognitive process. Certainly, every competent speaker of a language has mastered its phonology. But because language learning is a tacit process, one that takes place without conscious attention, that mastery comes without the need for an explicit, conscious understanding of phonology. However, in learning to read a language represented in an alphabetic writing system – specifically in learning the alphabetic coding of that language – a conscious understanding of the phonological units underlying the spoken word is critical. Given this necessity, we will describe the linguistic characteristics of phonology in more detail here than we did in the section concerning the language comprehension component of the Cognitive Foundations of Reading Acquisition. Phonemic awareness consists of three elements. The first one concerns the phoneme as a linguistic unit; the second covers the explicit, conscious awareness of that unit; and the third involves the ability to explicitly manipulate such units. As discussed earlier in this chapter, a phoneme is an abstract linguistic unit, the most basic linguistic unit capable of marking a difference in meaning. As a reminder, the difference between the word pairs (each containing three phonemes) bit and pit, bat and bet, and bin and bid is a single phoneme, one that underlies in these examples, the speech segment appearing in the initial, medial, or final position, respectively, of the spoken word. Phonemes are abstract because they are not the actual speech sounds of which spoken words are composed; those are known as phones. Phonemes, rather, are the underlying category of which the phones are members – and the members of the set of phones representing the same phoneme are called allophones. To illustrate this concept, think of how the sound represented by the letter

is different in the words pan and span. To make this apparent, hold your hand close to your mouth and notice that the puff of air that is released when saying the former is much stronger

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than that released with the latter. The puff, known as aspiration, is not distinctive in English (though it is in other languages), in that there are no pairs of English words in which this single difference in aspiration marks a difference in meaning (e.g., there are no words like [phan]4 and [pan] carrying different meanings). In short, in English these two speech sounds (or phones) are different, yet they represent the same underlying category (or phoneme), which makes them allophones. As we will see, the abstract nature of phonemes is an obstacle that a child must overcome in developing phonemic awareness. It is also important to recognize that phonemes are linguistic units and not units of writing systems. Thus, while , , , and all differ in the number of letters they possess, from three to six, they each represent words containing only three phonemes, which differ only in the medial position. Beyond the phonemic unit, the second element of the phonemic awareness concept covers the explicit, conscious awareness of these units. As stated above, all children who have learned a language know the phonemes of that language – if they did not, they could not recognize (implicitly) the difference between spoken minimal pairs in that language, like the words bit and pit. But being able to use that linguistic difference in speaking and listening to language is very different from knowing explicitly that the difference being used is in the initial part of the word. This explicit knowledge is the metalinguistic component of phonemic awareness: a higher-order linguistic-cognitive skill – in this case conscious awareness of aspects of a language system  – operating on the products of a lower-order linguistic-­ cognitive skill – namely, those coming from the speech perception mechanism (as illustrated in Fig. 4.1). Beyond explicit awareness, the third element of the phonemic awareness concept involves a level of skill in consciously manipulating phonemes. Such manipulation is important because children learning to read must be able to segment, hold, contrast, and blend in memory both the phonemes and the letter strings that represent them – for example, noting that the phoneme /ch/ in the initial position of chip is represented by two letters, , while in the final position of match it is represented by three letters, ; or that the same letter can represent different phonemes, as with the initial in colonel and citadel that represents /k/ and /s/, respectively. As mentioned above, phonemic awareness does not seem to be necessary for reading all written languages, only those in alphabetic representation. For instance, writing systems that use (pure) logographic representations (again, where a single symbol represents a word but provides no information about its phonology) would not seem to require would-be readers to possess phonemic awareness. But any system that links written letters to the phonemes underlying the spoken word requires phonemic awareness. The would-be reader cannot connect the units underlying the written word  – the letters  – with the units underlying the spoken word  – the

 We use h to represent the articulatory feature of aspiration contained in the speech sound it references.

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phonemes – unless there is conscious awareness of both sets of units and the intent to learn the relationship between the two sets (i.e., the alphabetic principle) is present. Thus, if beginning readers know the letters, and if they know there is some relationship between the letters and the spoken word but are not explicitly aware of the units underlying the spoken word, they will not be able to induce the relationships between the two representations. Reading does improve skill in phonemic awareness (Perfetti, Beck, Bell, & Hughes, 1987): Reading practice advances reading skill, and the more skill in reading, the more skill in phonemic awareness. This indicates a reciprocal relationship between phonemic awareness and reading, in which developing skill in one area supports development of skill in the other and vice versa. But a critical question is whether some amount of skill in phonemic awareness is necessary before any skill in word recognition can advance. In other words, is phonemic awareness causally related to the development of word recognition? The research evidence – especially that from training studies – suggests that it is. And we now turn to briefly discuss these different types of research studies on the development of phonemic awareness and their typical findings. Much research, conducted under a variety of research designs, converges on the conclusion that phonemic awareness is critical for learning to read in alphabetically written languages (for reviews, see Blachman, 2000; Melby-Lervåg, Lyster, & Hulme, 2012). First, there is evidence from concurrent correlations, which are derived from research designs that simply measure two skills in a sample of students at roughly the same point in time and then determine how those skills vary with each other within the student sample. For example, a typical design might use all the first-grade students in a school as a sample, measuring each student’s phonemic awareness skill and reading skill at the end of first grade. Positive correlations between these two measures exist when, in general, students with better performance on one skill (phonemic awareness) also have better performance on the other skill (reading) and vice versa (that is, when students with poorer performance on one skill also have poorer performance on the other skill). Such positive correlations are generally found when both phonemic awareness and reading skills are measured in the early elementary grades. This same positive relationship has been found whether reading skill was measured as skill in reading (i.e., naming) isolated printed words, skill in reading isolated printed letter sequences that do not form real English words but are constructed like English words (for example, the pseudo-word splure), or skill in reading connected text where fluency or comprehension were measured. These correlations are consistent with a causal relationship between the two variables, where skill in one is the cause for the development of skill in the other, but they do not guarantee that the variables are causally linked – indeed, there might be a third variable that is causing the development in the other two skills. Nor do these correlations, even if causally linked, specify the direction of causation – does phonemic awareness cause the reading skill or is it the other way around? Even more suggestive evidence comes from a closer look at the distributions between phonemic awareness and reading skills concurrently measured. If you plot skill in phonemic awareness against skill in alphabetic coding (measured as reading

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individual pseudo-words), you find triangular distributions (Tunmer & Nesdale, 1985). In these distributions, there are many instances of either low skill in both domains or high skill in phonemic awareness coupled with either low or high skill in alphabetic coding. However, there are no instances of low skill in phonemic awareness and high skill in alphabetic coding. This pattern suggests that phonemic awareness is a necessary, but not sufficient, requirement for skill in alphabetic coding, though the levels of phonemic awareness needed may depend on the orthographic depth of the language to be read (Goldenberg et al., 2014). That is, you must have skill in phonemic awareness if you are to acquire skill in alphabetic coding but having skill in phonemic awareness is no guarantee for successful development of skill in alphabetic coding. To achieve the latter, you need something in addition to phonemic awareness – as we have seen, you also need knowledge of the letters and of the alphabetic principle, plus considerable practice with pairs of corresponding written and spoken words. Predictive correlations, derived from research designs in which phonemic awareness is measured at one point in time and reading skill is measured at some subsequent point in time, are even more suggestive of causal relationships. Many studies report such correlations, where the time lag between the measure of phonemic awareness and the subsequent reading skill (measured either as alphabetic coding skill via pseudo-word reading, real word reading, or reading comprehension) ranges from very small (a matter of months) to very large (a matter of many years). While providing stronger evidence than concurrent correlations do, these results could still appear even when the two variables were not causally related. For instance, as in concurrent correlations, there could be a third, unmeasured factor that is the cause underlying the development of both skills, where the two skills themselves are not at all causally linked. The strongest evidence for a causal relationship between phonemic awareness and reading comes from training studies. In the typical training study design, children who lack phonemic awareness skills are randomly divided into different groups, one receiving training designed to develop phonemic awareness skill and the other receiving training designed to develop a skill that is unrelated to reading (say, a mathematical skill like counting). After training, the different groups are given the same reading instruction, and one looks to see whether those groups that received phonemic awareness training in fact do better in both assessments of phonemic awareness and reading than those who did not. Many studies like this have been conducted that report that the groups receiving phonemic awareness instruction were subsequently found to have much better skills in both phonemic awareness and reading than those who did not receive such training. Research indicates that only 40–50% of children in the United States start school with adequate skill in phonemic awareness, and that if there is no explicit instruction in this skill, many will fail to acquire it. Indeed some 15–20% of children still lack adequate phonemic awareness skills by the middle of first grade (Fletcher et al., 1994). So, what is known about the reasons behind the difficulty some children have in acquiring phonemic awareness?

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First, as discussed above, phonemes are abstract – they cannot be isolated and presented to the child as objects. When we explain to a child that the first sound in bug is [buh], what we are pronouncing is neither abstract nor something that corresponds to a single phoneme. In fact, what we are saying is concrete – a syllable containing two phones that has two phonemes underlying it. Thus, one difficulty in developing phonemic awareness is that it is difficult to explicitly state to children what they must become aware of; rather, we can only lead them to try to uncover for themselves what must be acquired. In our discussion of phonology, we explained the second reason that children may experience difficulties with phonemic awareness. As noted, the information that specifies individual linguistic units is not generally represented in the speech stream in a holistic, discrete serial fashion. Rather, the information that allows the listener to detect a speech sound in a spoken word generally comes overlapped with information about both the previous and subsequent segments in the word – information about linguistic units is transmitted in parallel, not serially. Thus, if you recorded yourself speaking the word bug and then, starting at the end of the recorded segment, eliminated successive pieces and played what was left, you would never be able to isolate a piece of the recording representing only the initial linguistic unit in the word. Rather, the best you would come away with in terms of speech sounds would be some semblance of the first two sounds of the word. Recall that this is the result of the placement and movement of the articulators that reflect both the initial and following phonemic targets guiding the speech act. Again, you can get a sense of this for yourself by noting the position of your lower jaw as you begin to say, for example, bug and bought, which both begin with the same underlying phoneme. In the latter example, the lower jaw is lowered from the outset to prepare for the pronunciation of the vowel that follows, and this difference in the initial placement of the articulators and their subsequent movements is reflected in the initial sounds of the two words. As another example, note the difference in the rounding of your lips when you say two and tea. These co-articulation effects result in the parallel transmission of linguistic information. This phenomenon poses a significant problem for acquiring phonemic awareness: In many cases, we cannot isolate even the initial sound (the phone) that is a member of the underlying abstract phonemic category of which the child is attempting to become aware. Again, the best we can do is to set conditions where the child will induce awareness of the phonemic category of interest. A third obstacle in acquiring phonemic awareness is that what we are wanting the child to do is counterintuitive. For the child learning language, meaning has been paramount, while the linguistic forms in which meaning is represented have been unimportant (at least consciously)  – they are merely the medium, which is largely to be ignored in favor of the message. With phonemic awareness, the child must focus attention in the opposite fashion, ignoring meaning and attending only to form. For example, if children are read a passage and asked to raise their hands every time a word ending with the phoneme /sh/ is uttered (as in fish), their comprehension of the passage will almost certainly be impaired.

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These considerations – the abstract nature of phonemes, the parallel transmission of linguistic information caused by the dynamic movement of the speech articulators, and the counterintuitive nature of the task – provide a likely explanation for why children may have difficulty developing phonemic awareness. And while letter-­ sound and letter-name teaching strategies may help children to become aware (e.g., Roberts, Vadasy, & Sanders, 2019), it is important to remember that the underlying letter-phoneme relationships targeted in such strategies cannot be fully mastered until awareness is achieved. As examples, the letter-sound strategy of sounding out a printed word like bag results in [buh]-[ah]-[guh], a three-syllable nonsense word rather than the three-phoneme sequence /b/-/a/-/g/ that we want the child to associate with the three-letter string . Similarly, the multi-phonemic letter name for , bee, must be segmented to associate its first phoneme, /b/, with the letter (see Fig. 4.5). Finally, it is important to note that while phonemic awareness is an insight, skill in manipulating phonemic segments does not come all at once, but, rather, gradually develops. Some manipulations are much easier to master than others. To take one example, Treiman (2000) has shown that children can more accurately judge whether a syllable begins with the same phoneme as another syllable when the only difference between the two is in place of articulation (e.g., /k/ and /p/ as in kale and pale, respectively) as opposed to voicing (/k/ and /g/ as in kale and gale, respectively). As a second example, we know that segmentation of phoneme-initial and phoneme-final positions is easier than segmentation of phoneme-medial positions, and that phoneme deletion is easier than phoneme addition (Moats, 2000). Thus, once a child has demonstrated some mastery of phonemic manipulations, success with other manipulations may require additional learning opportunities provided by adults and additional practice from children. And given the reciprocal relationship between phonemic awareness and reading, reading itself can provide opportunities for further development of advanced levels of phonemic awareness skill once the initial skills have been acquired.

Fig. 4.5  An example of what can be required in using a letter’s sound or name to connect that letter to a phoneme Caption: Connecting the letter with the phoneme /b/ through either its letter sound or name requires phonemic awareness as both the letter sound [buh] and name bee contain multiple phonemes

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Indeed, while skills in segmentation and manipulation at the phonemic level are required for learning to read in English, for those having difficulty at the easiest phonemic segmentation tasks, learning other segmentation skills can be helpful (Adams, 1990). We can think about conscious segmentation at several phonological levels: • word level – segmenting spoken sentences into their constituent words (e.g., segmenting Juan ran fast into Juan – ran – fast); • syllable level – segmenting multisyllabic words into their constituent syllables (e.g., segmenting [important] into [im]-[por]-[tant]); and • onset-rime (sub-syllable) level – segmenting a syllable into its pre-vowel consonants and vowel-plus-following-consonants segments (e.g., segmenting [splint] into [spl]-[int]). Learning phonological segmentation in succession at these levels can help with learning phonemic segmentation, but it is segmentation at the phonemic level that is critical for success in learning to read in English. This is the reason why phonemic segmentation alone is included in the Cognitive Foundations of Reading Acquisition without reference to these other segmentation skills, which are not necessarily prerequisites for such learning. For the child who has not acquired phonemic awareness, the prognosis for reading success is not good. First, the child is not able to take advantage of the alphabetic principle. The child might know the letters of the alphabet, even that the letters are somehow connected to the spoken word, but without phonemic awareness, is baffled by what that relationship might be. Second, we know that exposure to print is important for discovering the relationships between letters and phonemes (Share, 2011). With the prerequisites in hand (namely, knowledge of the letters, phonemes, and alphabetic principle), the greater the opportunity to pair printed and spoken words, the greater the opportunity to learn the relationships between letters and phonemes. The child who lacks phonemic awareness (or any of the other prerequisites, for that matter) cannot take advantage of such opportunities, and print exposure is no longer as efficacious in learning to read. And overall, children who experience early difficulties in learning to read are not likely to catch up to the level of reading achievement of their same-age peers (Juel, 1988) unless they are provided early, intensive, targeted interventions (Torgesen, 2004). Fortunately several teaching activities designed to promote the development of phonemic awareness in beginning readers have been shown to be effective (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998), especially ones combined with letter-sound training (Blachman, 2000; Ehri et al., 2001; Gillon, 2018; Goswami, 2001; Pressley, 2006; Shankweiler & Fowler, 2004). As we have argued, acquiring the alphabetic principle and learning the systematic relationships between letters and phonemes are critical for learning to read in an alphabetic writing system. However, readers of such systems must move beyond alphabetic coding, for two reasons. First, alphabetic coding is obviously insufficient for distinguishing between orthographically distinct words that are phonologically identical (e.g., bear and bare, beet and beat). But even more, automaticity in word recognition is needed to free up the cognitive resources required for alphabetic

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coding, which can then be devoted to the more arduous task of text comprehension. We now return to this aspect of word recognition. 4.3.2.2  Revisiting Automaticity in Word Recognition In our discussion above of alphabetic coding skill we drew your attention to context-­ sensitive and morphophonemic spelling rules to demonstrate that when examined at a deeper level, the English writing system is not nearly as irregular as often claimed (Gough & Hillinger, 1980). For example, we saw that the different pronunciations of the letter in the words cats and dogs reflect regularity, not irregularity, in English orthography. And the irregularities in some of the most irregular words (e.g., colonel, yacht) are generally restricted to only part of the spelled words. Making use of known relationships between letters and phonological units to identify orthographically unfamiliar words is the basic mechanism for acquiring word-specific knowledge, including knowledge of irregularly spelled words (Adams, 1990; Adams & Bruck, 1993; Ehri, 1992, 1997, 2005, 2014; Gough & Walsh, 1991; Harm & Seidenberg, 1999; Perfetti, 1992; Snow & Juel, 2005; Tunmer & Chapman, 1998, 2006). That is, taking advantage of the systematic mappings between subcomponents of written and spoken words enables those who have learned such mappings to identify novel words in print. For example, the child who has successfully extracted the letter-phoneme correspondences in learning to read bat, cup, and leg is then much more likely to successfully read a newly encountered word like bug. Each successful identification of a word strengthens the word-­ specific, sublexical connections between its constituent orthographic representations (i.e., specific letter sequences) and corresponding phonological representations (i.e., specific phone and phoneme sequences) in lexical memory, thus bootstrapping alphabetic coding skill. This self-teaching process (Share, 1995) also provides the basis for constructing the detailed orthographic representations required for the automatization of word recognition in which orthographic representations become directly tied to semantic information contained in lexical entries. This eliminates sole dependence on the use of phonological representations to achieve lexical access, adding redundancy to – as well as improving speed and accuracy in – the word recognition process. The triangle model of word recognition (Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989) graphically depicted in Fig. 4.6, captures this idea of interconnecting orthographic, phonological, and semantic representations of words formed from print and speech inputs. The model is a member of a class of neural network connectionist models. Such models can distil statistical regularities represented in complex data by adjusting the weighting of simple units (not depicted in Fig. 4.6) contained in interconnected networks in response to data encountered. Let us explore these models in a little more detail. Connectionist models have been used as simulations of cognitive processes. One of their strengths is that they use distributed representations that accord with our understanding of brain mechanisms, where activation patterns across many

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Fig. 4.6  The triangle model of word recognition Caption: Under this model, language learning connects a word’s phonological and semantic representations; word recognition skill is based on building connections between a printed word’s orthographic and phonological representations, which allows development of direct connections between the word’s orthographic and semantic representations Source: Adams, M. J. (1990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print (Figure 8.1, pp. 158). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Adapted with permission

interconnected neurons encode information, with different patterns representing different information sets. In a connectionist model of word recognition, for example, there can be units that correspond to phonological features of words, where a given unit is activated by all words that contain the corresponding feature. Similarly, units can be set to represent the orthographic and semantic properties of words, and these all can be interconnected, through a set of hidden intermediate units, to form a network. When presented with a string of letters as input, the corresponding orthographic units of the network are activated. This activation spreads to the other connected units that represent all the semantic and phonological features associated with the letter string and its substring constituents. The interconnections between these units carry weights that moderate the amount of activation spread, and these are adjusted based on experience. That is, adjustments are made to current weights that have been established through the network’s experience with previously encountered words. In each new presentation, the activation weights are adjusted in small amounts to minimize the discrepancy between the achieved network output and the target (or correct) output pattern. Let us consider a simplified example. When the network is presented with bear, it computes an orthographic representation that corresponds to the ordered four letters , , , and . The network also computes phonological representations consistent with both the individual letters, as well as with their positional combinations (e.g., , ), based on its previous experience with similar words. This means, for example, that it could produce (i.e., activate) a number of phonological representations, one that was correct as [bear], consistent with pear, tear (meaning to rip), and wear, but others that were incorrect, as (1) [beer], consistent with the phonological representations of dear, fear, gear, hear, near, rear, sear, tear (as in teardrop), and year, as well as beer, bead, beak, beam, bean, and beat, or

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(2) [boor], consistent with beau. (And for simplicity, we considered only those words that differed from the target by a single letter.) Such representations could also activate the meanings associated with bear (those related to the animal and the burden), and perhaps those associated with the homophone bare, as well as those associated with beer and boor. Given the correct pairing of the letters with either the pronunciation as [bear] or the meaning as the animal, the weights would be adjusted across the relevant parts of the network (e.g., by slightly suppressing the activations that yielded incorrect responses). These adjustments refine the connections along the orthographic-phonological-semantic pathway as well as along the orthographic-­ semantic pathway. As the system is tuned (i.e., weights are adjusted) by additional experience, word identification takes place via the total activation pattern. Experience does not block one pathway in favor of the other but can result in more of the work (i.e., more of the effort to recognize the word) being done through the orthographic-­ semantic pathway than through the orthographic-phonological-semantic pathway. Acquiring word recognition skill in a connectionist model is based on both the predefined structures that are capable of orthographic, phonological, and semantic encoding, as well as what has been experienced to date, whether that comes from orthographic, phonological, or semantic encounters with words. Further, what is learned from such experience depends on both the breadth and frequency of previous experience  – in other words, on the statistical properties of the materials encountered. Correctly identifying words based on relationships between letters and phonology (via the orthographic to phonological to semantic route) just a few times ultimately establishes their orthographic representations firmly in lexical memory (Reitsma, 1983; Share, 1995, 2004). From these, two self-teaching actions can unfold: (1) analytic access can be strengthened by inducing additional orthographic to phonological to semantic connections without the need for explicit instruction (Thompson, Fletcher-Flinn, & Cottrell, 1999), and (2) automatic access can be strengthened by building additional orthographic to semantic connections through orthographic learning (Nation & Castles, 2017). Using the cognitive process model of listening comprehension presented earlier in this chapter, Fig.  4.7 depicts this transition from singular reliance on analytic word recognition to the added capacity gained through automatic word recognition. Note that automatic processing is not replacing analytic processing, rather it is augmenting it as both continue to operate in skilled reading. 4.3.2.3  S  ome Neurological Research on Automaticity in Word Recognition One source of support for the development of automaticity in word recognition comes from neurological research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study changes in the anatomical distribution of neurophysiological activity in the brain as children progress from unskilled to skilled readers. The general picture that has emerged from this research (Aylward et al., 2003; Shaywitz et al.,

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Fig. 4.7  The key elements in the development of analytic and automatic processing of print under the information processing model of spoken language comprehension Caption: Fluent word recognition skill involves augmenting an analytic capacity focused on linkages between printed words and their constituent phonemes with an automatic process that directly links print to meaning

2004; Simos et al., 2002; Simos et al., 2007; Taylor, Rastle, & Davis, 2013) is that typically developing readers initially rely primarily on a brain system located in the parieto-temporal area of the left cerebral hemisphere to identify words in a slow, analytic manner by taking them apart and linking their letters to phonological features. However, as reading skills develop, a system located in the occipito-temporal area of the left hemisphere gradually becomes more involved. This system is described as the express pathway to reading, the word form area of the brain, where printed words come to be recognized very rapidly on sight through their orthographic features alone. These areas of the human cortex are highlighted in Fig. 4.8. As said earlier in this chapter, in learning to recognize words, one brain mechanism does not replace the other  – indeed, there is strong evidence of the use of analytic processes in skilled readers (e.g., Rayner, Schotter, Masson, Potter, & Treiman, 2016). Rather, with the accumulation of experience in analyzing printed words (in terms of both breadth and frequency), there is a change in the division of labor in deriving meaning from print (Seidenberg, 2017), with more of the effort being borne by automatic rather than analytic processing routines. Suggestive evidence of the consolidation of these efforts over the time course of reading development is indicated in the fMRI brain scans presented in Fig. 4.9 of a typical child learning to read over a multiyear period. As can be seen in the first three columns of Fig. 4.9, with increasing time in school and the improving reading skills it brings, there is more intensive activation in the word form area of the brain and less intensive activation in the word analysis areas. To summarize, in learning to read an alphabetically represented language, children must acquire and make use of analytic links between print and speech (i.e., alphabetic coding skill) to identify previously unseen words, which are ubiquitous for beginning readers. But after such words are successfully identified just a few

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Fig. 4.8  The word analysis and word form processing areas of the brain Caption: There are two areas of the brain’s left hemisphere most active in the analytic processing of printed words and one in the automatic processing of them (word form) Source: Shaywitz, S. E. (2003). Overcoming dyslexia: A new and complete science-based program for reading problems at any level (Figure  21). New  York, NY: Knopf. Used by permission of Alfred A.  Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved

times, automaticity in their recognition is strengthened based on the development of word-specific, sublexical interconnections between the orthographic and semantic representations of words in lexical memory. This allows access to lexical entries that had only been accessible via a phonologically-based mechanism to now be augmented by an orthographically-based one. Thus, lexical access becomes more efficient and requires fewer cognitive resources, leaving more of those limited cognitive resources available for use on the more difficult task of language comprehension. Note that acquiring automaticity in word recognition is not the logographic problem mentioned earlier in this chapter of connecting arbitrary letter strings to lexical entries. Here we are talking about connecting analyzed letter strings in which constituent letters and letter combinations are systematically related to phonological representations. These connections allow access to word meanings for known words, and this allows the orthographic patterns underlying those words to be directly connected to their meanings.

4.3.3  S  ummary of the Cognitive Foundations of Word Recognition The relationships among the cognitive elements that underpin the word recognition component of the Cognitive Foundations of Reading Acquisition are shown in Fig.  4.10. This figure depicts the components needed for success in learning

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75 Words > others

Days at school

Flat maps Left Right

Faces > others Left hemisphere

Left

Right

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School starts

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130

200

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End of school year 774

One year later

3

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Fig. 4.9  Brain scans from one child learning to read at different points of schooling Caption: The differential activation patterns in the brain scans of one child processing words (versus other visual stimuli) at different points of time while learning to read are shown in the left three columns. The scans reveal initial increased intense activation in the word analysis areas during initial schooling followed by decreasing activity in those areas with increasing intense activation in the word form areas during later schooling Source: Dehaene-Lambertz, G., Monzalvo, K., & Dehaene, S. (2018). The emergence of the visual word form: Longitudinal evolution of category-specific ventral visual areas during reading acquisition (Figure  3). PLoS biology, 16(3), e2004103. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2004103. Public domain

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Fig. 4.10 Relationships among the cognitive elements underpinning the word recognition component in the Cognitive Foundations of Reading Acquisition Caption: Skill in word recognition depends on skill in alphabetic coding, which depends on concepts about print and knowledge of the alphabetic principle; and the latter depends on letter knowledge and phonemic awareness

alphabetic coding skills, which, once acquired, become the basis for achieving automaticity in word recognition.

4.3.4  Select Issues in Word Recognition As we have seen, in learning to read alphabetically represented languages, alphabetic coding skill must be acquired to build automatic word recognition skill. To summarize our use of terms, alphabetic coding is also referred to as decoding, phonological decoding, or phonological recoding in the reading literature  – it is the identification of printed words based on their phonological representations. The term word recognition is more broadly defined, referring to the identification of words regardless of the underlying process employed (e.g., phonological or orthographic access). As a cognitive foundation, word recognition is defined as the ability to recognize printed words accurately and quickly, or automatically, and such automaticity is based on the foundation of alphabetic coding skill. In the SVR (fully described in Chap. 3), decoding (D) is used to signify the importance of alphabetic coding in reading alphabetic orthographies, but this critical skill in the SVR formulation of R = D x C is better thought of as word recognition. Occasionally we have used the term letter-sound relationships in our descriptions of word recognition and by that we generally mean the connection between a printed word (or a constituent sublexical letter sequence, like in ) and its pronunciation; as such, the term denotes a letter-phone relationship. Phonics programs, as we will see in our discussion of instruction in Chap. 11, typically teach letter-sound correspondences, and their utility is that they give would-be readers a mechanism for pairing a printed word with its pronunciation via “sounding out”

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using the rules of phonics. Such a pairing can then serve as a self-teaching mechanism, as discussed above, allowing other orthographic-phonological-­semantic connections as well as other orthographic-semantic connections to be induced. It is learning the letter-phoneme connections that is critical and phonics does not provide these directly; rather, it allows them to be induced indirectly by providing the enabling mechanism of letter-phone pairings. We will come back to this in Chap. 11. Finally, expanding on our discussion of automaticity in word recognition, we can think about fluency as a property of the experience of the reader (Rayner, Foorman, Perfetti, Pesetsky, & Seidenberg, 2001). Words that have been successfully read on multiple occasions will come to be recognized automatically with little analytic effort. But words that have not been repeatedly encountered in print, especially those that are very different from other words that have been successfully read, will require analysis. Once these words are successfully read, recognition of them will be on its way to automaticity. Thus, a fluent reader is one who has accumulated a lot of experience in successfully reading a lot of words, but fluency itself is better thought of as a property of a reader’s experience relative to a word and others like it.

4.4  Summary In this chapter we explored the cognitive skills that must be acquired to master the two main components of reading, language comprehension and word recognition, taking each one in turn. We reviewed our definition of language comprehension as the ability to extract and construct linguistically-based meaning from spoken language. We recognized that this is an active process based on both the content contained in the linguistic transmission as well as the relevant knowledge and inference making brought to bear on that content by its recipient. We noted that in comprehending meaning through spoken language, words are built up from speech sounds, sentences are built up from words, and discourse is built up from sets of interrelated propositions (i.e., meanings) underlying individual sentences, tapping both knowledge of the world and inferencing. We presented a process model to show the stages needed to convert speech sound to meaning in a linguistic system, and we used that model to think about the knowledge-skill sets needed for language comprehension as represented in our cognitive framework. We discussed the phonological, syntactic, and semantic knowledge-skill sets underlying the linguistic system. We noted the importance of phonemes in marking meaning-based differences between words. We recognized that because of co-articulation effects, there is no one-to-one correspondence between segments of the acoustic signal produced during speaking and segments of the phonetic information in that signal from which phonemes are identified. We noted that this lack of serial correspondence creates a critical obstacle for reading to which we would return. We discussed the semantic system that provides information about the objects, ideas, properties, and actions to which words refer, but also information about how words can be combined with other words to form larger units of meaning. We

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discussed the syntactic system, which specifies how the words of sentences are hierarchically organized and supports the building of sentential meaning. We then returned to semantics to discuss how the semantic system, beyond providing information about individual words, can build propositions that underlie each sentence to yield literal meaning that provides a model of the situation described in the linguistic discourse. We discussed that beyond the linguistic knowledge that provides literal meaning, background knowledge, including knowledge of the preceding discourse, prior knowledge made relevant (i.e., activated during comprehension) by the developing meaning of the discourse, and knowledge of the situational context, is also needed for successful language comprehension. We concluded our discussion of language comprehension by discussing differences in types of linguistic discourse (informal and formal) as well as the impacts of domain-specific knowledge that extend beyond common background knowledge, but which operate in the same fashion on both language and reading comprehension. Turning to word recognition, we first noted that in learning to read an alphabetically written language, beginning readers must acquire the ability to map letters and letter patterns onto phonological forms at the level of phonemes, which then allows them access to the meanings of words they know from having learned their native language. We discussed how trying to link a word’s letters to its meaning without the use of phonological linkages would initially work until the system was overwhelmed by the similarity between encountered words based on whatever visual cue was being used to access a given word. We also discussed that the number and complexity of the relationships between letters and phonemes meant that they could not be learned through direct instruction. Rather these relationships had to be induced by the child, something mainly done through reading. We next discussed why knowledge of the alphabetic principle, the awareness that letter sequences are linked to phonemic sequences, was a critical insight to acquire, along with basic knowledge about the conventions of how print worked. Further, we discussed how knowledge of the alphabetic principle was dependent on both letter knowledge and phonemic awareness. We also discussed why the latter can be so difficult to acquire, including the abstract nature of phonemes, the parallel transmission of linguistic information resulting from the dynamic movement of the speech articulators, and the counterintuitive nature of the task that now ignores meaning and focuses on the properties of the linguistic transmission itself. We then discussed why the prognosis for reading success was so dire for the child who fails to acquire phonemic awareness. We finally returned to a discussion of automaticity in word recognition, and why alphabetic coding skill is critical for obtaining automaticity, which must be learned to move cognitive resources away from the task of recognizing words to a focus on the meaning of what is being read. We discussed the importance of self-teaching mechanisms in learning to read on two fronts. We first noted how the successful identification of a word strengthens analytic access by reinforcing the word-­specific,

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sublexical connections between its constituent orthographic representations (i.e., specific letter sequences) and corresponding phonological representations (i.e., specific phoneme sequences) in lexical memory. Second, we said successful identification of a word also strengthened automatic access by building the direct connections between orthographic structure and word meaning. Finally, we discussed fluency, holding that a fluent reader is one who has accumulated a lot of experience in successfully reading a lot of words, and that fluency itself is best thought of as a property of a reader’s experience relative to a word and others like it.

4.5  Questions for Further Thought The set of questions that follow are designed to extend your understanding of the Cognitive Foundations of Reading Acquisition. We believe these will be most helpful when discussed with colleagues, leading to even deeper understanding. 1. Why is the comprehension of language described as an active process instead of a passive one? 2. Why is linguistic knowledge insufficient for success in comprehending language? 3. What else is needed to comprehend language beyond knowing the meaning of words? 4. Is linguistic knowledge the sum of phonologic, syntactic, and semantic knowledge? If not, what else is required? 5. How might you support students in their development of formal language? 6. Given all the obstacles in acquiring phonemic awareness, why might some children come to school already knowing it without having received any previous instruction? 7. How does phonemic awareness differ from phonological awareness, and why is phonemic experience more critical for success in learning to read in English? 8. What is automatic word recognition and how is it related to fluency? 9. If automaticity in word recognition is weak, how will that impact reading connected text? 10. How does learning the relationships between orthography and phonology support the development of automatic word recognition? Why would automatic word recognition be very difficult to acquire without knowing the relationships between letters and phonemes in words? 11. What is the difference between analytic and automatic word recognition? Is there any analysis involved in successful automatic word recognition? 12. What are self-teaching mechanisms? How do they work in learning to recognize words? Does the presence of such mechanisms invalidate the need for explicit instruction in word recognition?

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4.6  What’s Next We next turn to integrating the Cognitive Foundations of Reading and the Cognitive Foundations of Reading Acquisition into a single display, the Cognitive Foundations Framework.

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Chapter 5

Summary of the Cognitive Foundations Framework

Acronym SVR Simple View of Reading

5.1  Introduction In this chapter, we first present the complete Cognitive Foundations Framework, combining the cognitive elements that underlie reading with those that underlie reading acquisition. We close the chapter by revisiting our introductory remarks about what we said the framework would do to help reading professionals better understand reading and learning to read.

5.2  The Cognitive Foundations Framework Figure 5.1 presents the overall Cognitive Foundations Framework. It combines the cognitive elements underpinning the development of the language comprehension and word recognition components of the Simple View of Reading (SVR) (Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990). The figure also summarizes the knowledge-­ skill sets represented in each component (as discussed in Chaps. 3 and 4). The structure of the framework is not intended to suggest that development of the higher-­ order cognitive elements cannot occur until all1 the lower-order elements are fully  We use the convention of italicizing key concepts and distinctions for emphasis, but we also italicize words, phrases, or sentences when denoting them as linguistic objects. In both cases, the context we provide should suffice to determine the particular use being served. 1

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 W. A. Hoover, W. E. Tunmer, The Cognitive Foundations of Reading and Its Acquisition, Literacy Studies 20, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44195-1_5

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Fig. 5.1  The Cognitive Foundations Framework and its knowledge-skill set definitions Caption: Each cognitive component represents an independent, but not necessarily elemental, knowledge-skill set that is an essential, hierarchically positioned, building block in reading and learning to read Notes: Components are defined as follows: •  R  eading comprehension: The ability to extract and construct literal and inferred meaning from linguistic discourse represented in printed text •  Language comprehension: The ability to extract and construct literal and inferred meaning from linguistic discourse represented in speech –– B  ackground knowledge and inferencing skills: Knowledge of relevant content, the preceding linguistic discourse, and the situational context, and the ability to use them to derive logical conclusions that go beyond the literal meaning of linguistic discourse –– Linguistic knowledge: The unconscious knowledge of a language’s grammar (including its phonology, syntax, and semantics), which defines the sound-to-­ meaning (listening) and meaning-to-sound (speaking) relationships the language allows Phonological knowledge: Linguistic knowledge about the definition, organization, and combination of speech sounds Syntactic knowledge: Linguistic knowledge about the definition and combination of phrases, clauses, and sentences Semantic knowledge: Linguistic knowledge about the meaning bearing units of language at the word and sub-word levels and their use in building meaning at the sentence and discourse levels •  W  ord recognition: The ability to recognize printed words accurately and quickly to efficiently gain access to the appropriate word meanings contained in the mental lexicon

5.3  Revisiting Our Introductory Discussion of the Framework

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–– A  lphabetic coding skill: The ability to map letters and letter patterns onto phonological forms at the level of phonemes Concepts about print: Basic knowledge about how print works in representing linguistic discourse Knowledge of the alphabetic principle: The conscious awareness that letters and letter combinations in alphabetic writing systems are used to represent the phonemes underlying spoken words •  L  etter knowledge: The ability to recognize and manipulate the letters of the alphabet used in print •  P  honemic awareness: The ability to consciously recognize and manipulate the phonemic units underlying spoken words

developed, although it does hold that some level of mastery is needed in lower-order elements. Typically, once a critical level of development is attained in an element, it tends to develop concurrently with those immediately above and below, in a reciprocally facilitating manner. This suggests that the elements not be taught in isolation from each other but, rather, in a more integrated manner. Beginning readers should be given plenty of opportunities to practice and receive feedback on applying their newly acquired skills while engaged in performing the more advanced cognitive functions specified in the framework.

5.3  R  evisiting Our Introductory Discussion of the Framework Let us revisit our introductory discussion of what we said the framework would do to help reading professionals build their understanding of reading and see how we have fared. First, we said the framework would offer a description of what the major cognitive components of reading and learning to read are, as well as their interrelationships. We have shown these in broad terms across the two parts of the Cognitive Foundations Framework (i.e., for both the Cognitive Foundations of Reading and the Cognitive Foundations of Reading Acquisition). Remember that the broad depiction is designed so users do not lose sight of the forest (that is reading comprehension) for all its trees (the cognitive foundations)! Second, we said the framework would provide an analysis of the component skills that the would-be reader must master to become a successful reader, and that some of these skills might become less important in skilled reading once mastered for learning skilled reading. That is, for some components, once mastered as foundational for learning to read, they might have a reduced role in the skilled reading that is finally realized. To take an example of this, consider the role of alphabetic coding skill. While alphabetic coding skill is, as we have seen in Chap. 4, a foundational skill that is critical for mastery of word recognition, once automatic word

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recognition is at hand, access to the mental lexicon is more generally accomplished through orthographic-semantic interconnections rather than through the orthographic-phonological-semantic interconnections that were critical in establishing them. This is not to say that alphabetic coding is irrelevant to reading – it is critical when seeing words for the first time (though this becomes an increasingly rare event for well-practiced readers), and it continues to augment the orthographic-­semantic access process rather than being replaced by it. Third, we said the framework would help the practitioner understand that some skills must be learned to sophisticated levels before other skills could be acquired. To take an example of this, we have seen that phonemic awareness is a critical skill for learning alphabetic coding, and that the skill level needed requires more than just phonological awareness at the word, syllable, or onset-rime levels, or even at the level of initial or final phonemic segments. Rather, to learn alphabetic coding, the sophisticated skills of full phonemic segmentation (as well as manipulation of those segments) across the entire length of any given word are needed. Finally, let us again note the differences between the Cognitive Foundations Framework in Fig. 5.1 and the other reading frameworks we presented as framework examples in Chap. 2 (we suggest you review these and note the most salient differences you see). We reiterate that the most important difference is in specifying (and justifying) both the cognitive skills required for success in reading as well as the relationships between those required skills. We note that the Cognitive Foundations Framework does not depict expectations around the timelines for either the development of the cognitive foundations nor for the instructional sequences recommended for such development; we will discuss each issue in Chaps. 6 and 11, respectively.

5.4  What’s Next We next turn to a discussion of how the Cognitive Foundations Framework can be used to think about the developmental timeline of reading. We discuss this in the contexts of typical reading development and reading disability.

Further reading ∗Gough, P. B., & Tunmer, W. E. (1986). Decoding, reading, and reading disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7, 6–10. https://doi.org/10.1177/074193258600700104 ∗Hoover, W. A., & Gough, P. B. (1990). The simple view of reading. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2, 127–160. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00401799

Chapter 6

Understanding Reading Development and Difficulty

Acronyms AAE MAE MLU SVR

African American English Mainstream American English mean length of utterance Simple View of Reading

6.1  Introduction Having described the cognitive foundations of both reading and learning to read, we now turn to the applications of the Cognitive Foundations Framework as an aid to understanding the development of reading skills as well as reading difficulty during such development. We first describe what reading development looks like within the framework of the Simple View of Reading (SVR) (Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990; Hoover & Tunmer, 2018). This is followed by a discussion of Matthew effects in reading, which are important to understand given that much of reading, especially following initial skill development, is learned through reading itself. We then give brief overviews of the typical development of language comprehension and word recognition. In turning to reading difficulty, we describe both proximal and distal causes of such difficulties, and then discuss specific difficulties within language comprehension and word recognition. We close with a discussion of some key issues in the details of our descriptions, a summary of the chapter, and some questions for further thought.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 W. A. Hoover, W. E. Tunmer, The Cognitive Foundations of Reading and Its Acquisition, Literacy Studies 20, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44195-1_6

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6.2  Understanding Reading Development As we have said, the SVR is a static model of reading, but successive static views can be used to track the relative contributions the two component skills make to the development of reading comprehension. For typical English-speaking pre-school children who know the language (for their age level), their language comprehension skills are far superior to their reading comprehension skills – what they lack is word recognition skill, which is close to non-existent at that age. Further, by the time such children enter school, their language comprehension skill (especially their linguistic knowledge) is already highly developed, though over the next several years they will further develop their knowledge of vocabulary, acquiring new word meanings at the rate of some 3000 per year through the twelve grade (Nagy & Herman, 1987), gain some new syntactic knowledge, come to a much greater understanding of discourse and formal (academic) language, and greatly expand their knowledge of the world and their capacities to make inferences from it (Hirsch Jr., 2016). Typical children will also develop their ability to recognize words, approaching mastery in the early grades of school regarding the words in their mental lexicons that they have seen in print, and then expanding their ability to recognize both less frequent words and new ones as they encounter them and learn their meanings. Thus, for typical children there will be great progress in reading comprehension in the early school grades as their word recognition skill develops from almost no skill for many to the point where it approaches perfection (at least on grade-level reading materials). At that point their reading comprehension will be mostly limited only by their language comprehension. That is, such children will be able to read almost any text that they could understand if it was read to them. Let us consider a graphic depiction of such a hypothetical developmental progression in reading skill during first grade as seen under the SVR. Before delving into our substantive discussion let us first provide a mechanism for visualizing reading growth. As we said in Chap. 3, we can view the skills represented in the SVR (namely, language comprehension, word recognition, and reading comprehension labelled as the three variables, C, D, and R, respectively) as each running from no skill (0) to perfect skill (1). We can depict these ranges in skill value in terms of color saturation, which we have done in Fig. 6.1. With this way of capturing levels of skill within the SVR, let us take up our discussion of reading development. For typical English-speaking children entering school, their language comprehension skills are far superior, relatively speaking, to their word recognition skills. Let us suppose that on an end-of-first-grade assessment, a typical student entering first grade could understand 80% of what was read to her or him from end-of-first-­ grade reading materials. Thus, in terms of the SVR, where R = D × C, in this case C = .80, which would not be an unexpected level of performance for such children. Let us further assume that our typical student could only recognize, (say) on average, every fifth word in the words contained in an end-of-first-grade word list. Thus, for this student, D = .20, again not an unexpected level of performance. In such a

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Fig. 6.1  Using color saturation to depict skill levels within the reading variables under the Simple View of Reading Caption: Color saturation running from low (bottom of bar graph) to high (top of bar graph) can represent skill levels within reading variables running from none to perfect

Fig. 6.2  Using color saturation to depict skill levels for a typical English-speaking student at the beginning of first grade under the Simple View of Reading Caption: Color saturation depicting skills levels for a typical English-speaking student at the beginning of first grade show (relative to end-of-first-grade reading materials) high skill in language comprehension, low skill in word recognition skill, and even lower skill in reading comprehension

situation, our beginning first grader would be expected to comprehend very little of any end-of-first-grade text she or he was asked to read (R = .20 × .80 = .16). Further, the limitation in reading ability would be mostly due to word recognition skills relative to language comprehension skills. This is depicted in Fig. 6.2, where the level of color saturation (in accord with the scales above) in the respective components represent the corresponding skill levels of our typical beginning first grader. We would expect the situation to be very different at the end of first grade. Here our typical first-grader might now be able to comprehend almost all of the text read to her or him from end-of-first-grade materials (say, C = .95) and successfully read

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Fig. 6.3  Using color saturation to depict skill levels for a typical English-speaking student at the end of first grade under the Simple View of Reading Caption: Color saturation depicting skills levels for a typical English-speaking student at the end of first grade show (relative to end-of-first-grade materials), somewhat improved skill in language comprehension (relative to the beginning-of-first-grade performance depicted in Fig. 6.2) from a high level to an even higher level, large improvement in word recognition skill, and large improvement in reading comprehension skill

almost all of the words in the end-of-first-grade word list (say, D = .80). In this situation our typical student should be able to understand most of the connected text she or he might read from any end-of-first-grade text (R = .80 × .95 = .76); this situation is depicted in Fig. 6.3. Thus, from the SVR, we can see that over the course of first grade, some progress is made in the (language) comprehension of connected text, but relatively greater progress is made in recognizing words, which leads to a great improvement in reading comprehension. In short, for the typical English-speaking child, reading comprehension is limited by word recognition in this early grade much more than by language comprehension. Note that overall, given appropriate high-quality data, we could display the relative strengths of each component of the entire Cognitive Foundations Framework in a similar fashion to the above example, yielding a straight-forward mechanism for quickly seeing where student performance indicated a possible need for additional support. We see correlational patterns consistent with such growth trends in studies of reading development, where reading comprehension is highly correlated with word recognition in younger children, coupled with more moderate correlations with language comprehension. But in later school years the patterns change, with the relationship of reading comprehension becoming much stronger with language comprehension while that with word recognition becomes more moderate (Gough, Hoover, & Peterson, 1996; Sticht & James, 1984). These patterns are also revealed in regression analyses that track the unique, relative contributions of word recognition and language comprehension to reading comprehension over time (Vellutino, Tunmer, Jaccard, & Chen, 2007). We also see evidence in the reading research literature that knowledge of the world continues to grow throughout adulthood, and that domain-specific reading comprehension grows in step with one’s advance of knowledge in that domain (Hirsch Jr., 2003).

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6.2.1  Matthew Effects in Reading Development As we have seen (Chap. 4), word recognition ability and language comprehension skills are themselves each dependent on the development of several other cognitive elements as described in the Cognitive Foundations Framework. Children who do not possess sufficient levels of mastery of these foundational skills during the early stages of learning to read (and who are not provided with explicit instruction where needed to develop them, especially those pertaining to the development of word recognition skills) will be forced to rely increasingly on ineffective strategies to identify unfamiliar words in text – picture cues, partial visual cues, and contextual guessing. The continued use of such ineffective compensatory strategies will inevitably lead to difficulties in learning to read (Stanovich, 1980). Further, children may rely on these ineffective strategies to such an extent and for such a long period of time (years in some cases) that the strategies become entrenched and very difficult to unlearn, making remediation even more difficult. The consequences of continuing to rely on ineffective reading strategies can be profound, as relatively small differences in the foundational skills during the early stages of formal reading instruction can develop into very large generalized differences in school-related skills and academic achievement. These downstream consequences are referred to as Matthew effects1 (Stanovich, 1986), or rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer effects, after the passage from the Gospel of St. Matthew 25:29 (King James Version): For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. These effects operate as follows in reading. Poor readers not only receive less practice in reading (because they read less, read less successfully, and read more slowly), but soon begin to confront materials that are too difficult for them, which typically results in continued avoidance of reading, inattentive behavior, low expectations of success, and withdrawal from reading tasks (i.e., negative, poor-get-­ poorer Matthew effects). Consequently, such children are prevented from taking advantage of the reciprocally facilitating positive Matthew effects between growth in reading comprehension performance and growth in the two constituent components of reading. These positive Matthew effects are depicted in Fig. 6.4. As children become better readers, both the amount and difficulty of the material they read increases, providing them better practice opportunities (i.e., more opportunities with more advanced text) to further build component skills. Word recognition skills are improved by strengthening fluency and the implicit learning of novel (i.e., low frequency) linkages between the orthographic, phonologic, and semantic representations of words. Language comprehension skills are improved by further developing knowledge of vocabulary, more complex syntactic structures, more diverse and 1  We use the convention of italicizing key concepts and distinctions for emphasis, but we also italicize words, phrases, or sentences when denoting them as linguistic objects. In both cases, the context we provide should suffice to determine the particular use being served.

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Fig. 6.4  Reciprocally facilitating positive Matthew effects between reading comprehension and both word recognition and language comprehension Caption: In development, improving skills in language comprehension and word recognition advances skill in reading comprehension, and advancing skill in reading comprehension further improves both language comprehension and word recognition skills

complex text genres, and richer and more elaborate knowledge bases. These improvements in word recognition and language comprehension then promote further growth in reading comprehension enabling children to cope with even more difficult materials that build even greater strengths in word recognition and language comprehension. We are not implying that word recognition and language comprehension are based on reading comprehension. The SVR holds that word recognition and language comprehension are the proximal (closest origin) causes of reading comprehension at any given point in time. The dual arrows used in Fig. 6.4 indicate that from a developmental perspective not only will reading comprehension grow as word recognition and language comprehension grow, but also that growth in reading comprehension will advance word recognition and language comprehension (on this point see Tilstra, McMaster, van den Broek, Kendeou, & Rapp, 2009). Indeed, for many of the components of the Cognitive Foundations Framework there is a reciprocal developmental relation, where improving skill at a higher-level component (e.g., word recognition) will advance skill at a lower-level component (e.g., alphabetic coding, to continue the example). Again, such relations are based on developmental trends and do not undermine the notion that some skill is required in a lower-level skill set before skills in the related higher-level set can advance. Resulting from repeated learning failures, many struggling readers also develop negative self-perceptions of their abilities and therefore do not try as hard as other students because of their low expectations of success and poor reading-related self-­ efficacy. For some of these children, especially boys, the sense of failure and feelings of frustration, coupled with the need to disguise their inability to perform reading tasks, become so great that they begin to exhibit classroom behavior problems. Thus, what begin as relatively small differences in the foundational cognitive skills of reading during the early stages of schooling can soon develop into the downward spiral of achievement deficits and negative motivational and behavioral spin-offs (Prochnow, Tunmer, & Arrow, 2015).

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Given the nature of Matthew effects in reading, which are particularly marked in New Zealand (Tunmer & Chapman, 2015), beginning reading instruction that focuses on helping struggling readers overcome weaknesses in the foundational cognitive elements represented in the Cognitive Foundations Framework is a more effective teaching strategy than delaying action until substantial evidence of reading difficulties has accumulated, an intervention strategy called “wait to fail.” The longer the delay in providing targeted, needs-based assistance, the greater the likelihood that reading problems will become severe and more difficult to ameliorate. Identified weaknesses in any of the foundational reading skills need to be addressed early and persistently by teachers and parents because these skills are necessary for the development of reading comprehension ability. The main point behind Matthew effects is that reading is greatly strengthened through practice, and if practice is degraded, the development of reading skill will suffer.

6.2.2  Typical Development of Language Comprehension In this section, we provide a brief overview of the typical development of the main components of language comprehension, beginning with those underlying linguistic knowledge (namely, phonology, syntax, and semantics) and then finishing with the development of background knowledge and inferencing skills. We do this to provide an overview of the milestones within the development of language comprehension so that the reader will better know when children might be struggling with language issues and how such difficulties relate to reading disability. Speech sounds are created by using the respiratory system to force air from the lungs through the vocal tract, which consists of the larynx, pharynx, mouth, and nose (see Chap. 4). Variations in speech sounds come (1) by changing the shape of the vocal tract (from open, to partially closed, to completely closed); (2) by altering when (or if) vocal cord vibration begins; and (3) by narrowing (but not closing) the articulators to create air turbulence. All human languages can use these mechanisms, but each one does so selectively. The task for a child learning the phonology of the language to which she or he is exposed – the language of exposure – is to learn which speech sounds are being used; how the individual, used sounds are produced and combined fluidly with other sounds in the language; and which of the used sounds mark differences in meaning. Before discussing developmental issues, let us review the types of speech sounds used in languages. Recall that there are two general types of speech sounds, vowels and consonants (Ladefoged, 1975). Vowels are made with a relatively open vocal tract. In a multi-­ sound speech sequence, the vocal tract position producing the vowel is generally held in a steady state for a small amount of time before moving the articulators to create the following speech sound (this is especially true for vowels in stressed syllables within a word). The sounds of the different vowels are made by changing the overall, non-occluded shape of the vocal tract (e.g., by lowering the jaw), and generally can be defined by the position of the jaw, the height of the tongue, and the

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position of the lips. Air pushed out of the lungs and modulated by the vibrations of the vocal cords moves through the vocal tract, and the vowel sounds are created by the resonance of the moving air within the oral cavities shaped by the articulators. Consonants generally involve a more constricted vocal tract and are classified according to three parameters: (1) place of articulation (which articulators are used at what places); (2) manner of articulation (how the articulators at a given place are used, either to close, narrow, or modify the shape of tract as the articulators approach each other); and (3) voicing (whether and when vocal cord vibration is used). Resonance of the air moving from or through the articulatory restrictions within the oral cavities create the consonant sounds. Hearing different speech sounds requires sensitivity to very small differences between distinct sounds (e.g., detecting small differences in the timing of vocal cord vibration in certain consonants). Producing speech requires fine motor control in coordinating the movements of the articulators. Given these requirements for success in using language, how does language learning proceed? Humans have an innate, biologically-based capacity for language (Lenneberg, 1967), which means there are cognitive structures present at birth that allow the child to learn any natural language to which she or he is broadly exposed within an active environment. Language learning is accomplished tacitly, without the need for instruction. Thus, children do not learn languages in the same way that they learn other things (e.g., the rules of multiplication) because they are predisposed to learn language just by being appropriately exposed to it. This built-in, linguistic capacity supports the learning of phonology (as well as the other components of syntax and semantics) and allows infants to both hear and produce the speech sounds languages incorporate. These capacities are revealed early in life and are refined based on interactions with the language community in which the child is immersed. What specifically underlies such learning is still under study, with debates about the degree to which language learning is truly specialized or more broadly based in the statistical learning that is the focus of connectionist models (Westermann, Ruh, & Plunkett, 2009). Let us consider how phonological capacities develop. Initially infants can distinctly hear all the speech sounds that occur in any human language. That is, for any speech sound used in a human language, an infant can distinguish it from other speech sounds, almost from birth. But in the late months of their first year, infants start to show evidence of reducing sensitivity to speech sounds that are not phonemic (i.e., not used to distinguish words with different meanings) in the language of exposure. At the same time, infants make finer distinctions among those speech sounds that are phonemic in the language of exposure, starting with vowels and then moving to consonants (Carroll, 2008). (See Box 6.1 for a discussion of a distinctive feature of speech perception in infants.) Although infants produce many sounds from birth, true speech sounds emerge with babbling at about six months of age (Menn & Stoel-Gammon, 2001). This initial activity seems largely unrelated to the language of exposure as babbling begins in similar fashion, and with similar character, at this same time for congenitally deaf children. In initial babbling, infants generally produce repeating consonant-­vowel strings (e.g., dadadada). But by the end of the first year, these

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Box 6.1: Speech Perception in Infants Many of the distinguishing properties of speech are based on articulatory movements capable of producing continuous variation in their outputs. For instance, the timing of the initiation of voicing (i.e., the vibration of the vocal cords) distinguishes [b]2 and [p] in English, as in ball and pall. In this case, when saying the initial segment of ball, [ba], the vocal cords begin to vibrate within the first 40 milliseconds after releasing the articulators from their initially stopped positions. But when saying the initial segment of pall, [pa], this vibration is delayed to begin later than 40 milliseconds after the release of the articulators from their initial positions. This difference in voice-onset-timing is what marks the various context-dependent instantiations of [b] and [p] as members of two different phonemes, /b/ and /p/, respectively. There is evidence that infants perceive these differences categorically (Carroll, 2008). That is, for given differences in voice-onset-timing below the 40-millisecond delay (say, between 30 and 40 milliseconds), infants perceive the sounds as all the same (i.e., all as [b]). And for the same timing differences (of 10 milliseconds in our example) applied above the 40-millisecond delay (say, between 40 and 50 milliseconds), infants again perceive the respective sounds as all the same, but now as members of a different category (i.e., all as [p]). Such categorical perception seems to be innate, as infants are born with the ability to make these distinctions – in both hearing and producing speech – and do not need to learn them through exposure.

strings become more complex, consisting of different consonant-vowel constituents (e.g., badobago). These later strings also are produced with an overall intonation contour mimicking the sound structure of spoken sentences. Further, it appears that certain types of consonants (i.e., stops, nasals, and glides) appear earlier in babbling and in the initial words children say, while other types of consonants (i.e., fricatives, affricates, and liquids) appear later in babbling and later in the sequence of spoken words. Overall, babbling shows a developmental progression of advancing string complexity and finer articulatory control. From a start in babbling, children gradually move to saying their first words, at about one year of age, brought about by increased control of the articulators (which allows them to create the more precise speech acts dictated by their language of exposure), the development of cognitive structures underlying language (which enables the intent to communicate), and the awareness that objects can be named

 We follow the standard convention of using arrow brackets (< >) to denote written characters and character combinations, slash brackets (/ /) to denote phonemes and phoneme combinations, and square brackets ([]) to denote distinct speech sounds (phones) and phonetic combinations. To reduce the burden on the reader, we use letters to indicate phonemes and phones rather than the symbols used in the International Phonetic Alphabet, clarifying in text as needed. 2

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(which allows words to be used). As children learn words, the phonology they apply to them shows patterned signs of: • reduction – deleting or eliminating sounds within words (e.g., top for stop); • coalescence – combining phonemes while maintaining some of the properties of each of the phonemes combined (e.g., foon for spoon); • assimilation – changing one sound in a word that is similar to a sound in the word that it replaces (e.g., fweet for sweet); and • reduplication  – repeating one syllable in a multisyllabic word (e.g., mama for mommy). These appear to be mechanisms children use to ease the processing burdens their cognitive systems face in mastering phonology. By the time most children are three years old, they can produce most of the sounds of English, though they may not be entirely consistent in their pronunciations of every speech sound in all its phonological contexts. Over the next few years, this knowledge is extended, and by the time children are seven years old, they can pronounce correctly and consistently all the sounds of English. In addition to learning the phonetics of the language of exposure, children must learn the phonemic structure of the language. In doing so, they must learn that certain distinct phones are in fact allophones representing the same underlying phoneme (recall our discussion in Chap. 4 of the aspirated [ph] in span and the unaspirated [p] in pan both representing the same phoneme /p/ in English). For instance, children must learn that the initial vowel sound in nation and national are distinct phonetically but identical phonemically, and that the alteration in sound is rule governed. A similar instance of this (also discussed in Chap. 4) is that the plural inflection in English, which is voiceless when following a voiceless stop (e.g., caps) is voiced when following a voiced stop (e.g., cabs). These morphophonemic regularities must be learned by children learning English, and some of them take time (e.g., learning that the plural of child is children). In general, most of these regularities are well mastered by the time children turn seven years old, but some of these, especially the phonemic correspondences tied to stress (e.g., the stress pattern differences between theory and theoretical) may take much longer. Many of a child’s first words are the names of objects (e.g., ball, kitty), but also include actions words (e.g., go, run), modifiers (e.g., pretty), and social words (e.g., please). The use of these words also shows both over-extension (e.g., using car to refer to all objects with wheels) and under-extension (e.g., using book to refer to a specific book rather than all books) in meaning. The use of such words becomes more refined with continued exposure to language in authentic situations. Also, children at this early age typically use single words to convey multiword meanings (e.g., ball used to mean get the ball), which are known as holophrases. The growth of a child’s understanding of meaning changes over time, with experience. In the early years, word meanings are very concrete, personal, and incidental (Snow, 1990). As the child gets older these become more abstract, with the addition of synonyms, explanations, and specification of categorical relationships (Pan & Gleason, 2001). As the meanings of more words are added, semantic networks,

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which are operative at an early age and connect meanings across lexical entries, become more important. These networks allow finer distinctions in meaning to be made because of the learned relationships words have with other known words (e.g., the meaning of play as it relates to fun, games, and friends for young children; the meaning of beauty as it relates to elegance, grace, and refinement for young adults). Word meanings are always developing and being enhanced – on average, students leaving secondary education know the meaning of some 45,000 words, receptively recognizing at least some aspects of the meanings of these words, while they are able to use expressively the meanings of some 25,000 words (Nagy & Herman, 1987). The single words (and holophrases) that began to appear at the end of a child’s first year evolve into two-word utterances by the end of the second year, which also marks the emergence of overt syntactic skills. Despite the many structural differences between languages (e.g., compare the mechanisms for defining tense, gender, and number in highly and weakly inflected languages, such as Spanish versus English), there is remarkable similarity in development of early syntactic skills in children (Slobin, 1985). One of the common measures of such development is mean length of utterance in morphemes (MLUs), which simply counts the number of morphemes contained in a child’s utterance. In general, these steadily increase from an average of one morpheme per utterance at one year of age to about five morphemes per utterance at around five years of age. Children’s pre-school utterances are not random strings of words, but can be characterized as semantically structured, by agent, action, and object acted upon, for example, daddy hit ball (Bowerman, 1973). Structuring such strings follows rules that the child is learning and imposing on her or his speech output. This is not mimicking adult language, but rather shows the child extracting patterns and applying what is learned to the developing language system. With time, children expand beyond structures that contain only nouns and verbs, to add conjunctions, pronouns, and prepositions. Children also begin to use the wh-words of what, where, and when, with the latter coming in later given the cognitive maturity its use requires regarding time. Still most syntax is mastered, without explicit instruction, by the time children enter school, and by late elementary and middle school, most children have mastered the more advanced syntactic structures such as use of the passive voice, embedded and relative clauses, and modals (e.g., the use of verbs like can, could, or may) (Aaron, Joshi, & Quatroche, 2008). In addition to developing syntactic skills at the sentence level, children also improve their abilities to connect sentences across sentence boundaries and to use background knowledge (and the learned situational models derived from such knowledge) to support both the production and understanding of coherent discourse. These skills originate in conversation, augmented by learning through activities like listening to stories told by others, describing scenarios to others (e.g., how Lupe fixed her bike), and participating in formal, structured learning environments (e.g., schools) that require the use of decontextualized language. As children advance through formal education, developing discourse skills and building background knowledge largely comes from reading (recall the earlier discussion in this chapter dealing with Matthew effects). So, too, does the development of inferencing skills

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based in their growing knowledge bases, which depends on the depth of their understanding of words and associated concepts, and their ability to identify relevant information in spoken and written discourse. Having briefly described the typical development of language (in English speaking environments), let us turn to the second major component of reading, word recognition. Below we briefly describe typical development of this component, including a discussion of the timeline over which such development generally unfolds.

6.2.3  Typical Development of Word Recognition We have seen that success in reading critically depends on the ability to quickly and accurately recognize printed words, without conscious attention. Lacking such skill, cognitive resources must be devoted to trying to recognize words by other means, either by sounding them out (e.g., saying [buh]-[ah]-[guh] for bag), by reasoning through analogy (e.g., identifying swoon by using its similarity to a known word like spoon), or by guessing through the use of partial letter-sound relationships and context (e.g., identifying receipt by combining its partial recognition as [re]-[seept] and combing that with the accurately read context of He checked the [re]-[seept] to see if he had been correctly charged). All these approaches require some level of conscious attention and the expenditure of cognitive resources, which reduces the resources that can be devoted to comprehending what is being read. There has been much research devoted to understanding the development of automaticity in this process and it has been best described as a series of phases would-be readers move through as they master the process (Ehri, 2005). These should not be thought of as strict stages, as engaging in one phase does not depend upon the earlier one having been fully mastered. Rather, the boundaries between them are loose and children pass back and forth between phases as their word recognition skill develops. The phases are the pre-alphabetic, partial alphabetic, full alphabetic, and consolidated alphabetic. We describe each of these below, some of which covers previously presented materials from Chap. 4 (presented again to improve coherence), followed by a brief discussion of the general developmental timeline over which these phases operate. In the pre-alphabetic phase, children use visually salient features as cues to identify words. These features may be tied to the letter content of the word (e.g., the two humps in camel, the dangling trunk in elephant, or the two eyes in eye), to the overall shape of the word (e.g., giraffe with something going down in the beginning and up toward the end), or to the non-letter content in which the word is embedded (e.g., the golden arches of McDonald’s). This phase is marked by an exclusive reliance on the visual characteristics of printed words to connect them to their respective meanings. The recognition process is non-linguistic in the sense that is not based on the alphabetic characteristics of print, which would allow linkages between a word’s constituent letters and its meaning via letter names, corresponding sounds, or

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underlying phonemes. Further, the strategy of using visual cues is non-generative. This is so because there are a limited number of distinctive visual features and any encounter with a new word entails that a new feature must be selected and remembered if the newly encountered word is to be successfully recognized. As such, this strategy will fail as the child encounters more words to identify. Thus, in this phase, which relies exclusively on visual and contextual connections between print and meaning, only a few words will be reliably recognizable. The next phase, the partial alphabetic phase, is characterized by use of the developing knowledge of letter names or their corresponding sounds. In this phase, children learn either the names or sounds of a few letters and use them as the identifier for a given word. As an example, a child in this phase might identify as fin by knowing either the letter name or letter sound associated with the first and last letters, while ignoring the middle letter. The great advantage here is the beginning of a generative system that would allow many words to be read based on the various combinations of the known letter-names or letter-sounds. Given that knowledge in this phase is only partially alphabetic and relies only on connections between the more salient letters and sounds known, children in this phase reveal many mistakes in recognizing words that share the same letters, excluding those letters that were ignored (e.g., mistakenly identifying as fin, to continue the example from above). Note that this is the beginning of gaining the insight that is the alphabetic principle, which requires some level of both letter knowledge and phonemic awareness. As children acquire greater knowledge of letters and the names and sounds associated with them, they move to the alphabetic phase. Here, children learn the full set of connections between a word’s constituent letters (and intra-word letter patterns) and its phonemic representation. As we have seen, such ability is contingent upon letter knowledge, phonemic awareness, and knowledge of the alphabetic principle – and once these begin to develop, then full alphabetic learning can be built through exposure to print and explicit instruction where needed. Children in the alphabetic phase learn to connect all the letters and letter patterns (i.e., graphemes) within a word to the appropriate phonemic representation, which then allows access to the word’s meaning. Further, this capacity also allows direct connections to be built between a word’s orthographic representation and its meaning, and this is the basis of automaticity in word recognition. As we discussed in Chap. 4, learning the orthographic patterns and corresponding phonemic representations allows those patterns to be used in identifying novel words that the child has yet to encounter in print. The final phase in learning to read words is the consolidation phase. Here words are recognized based on their morphographic properties – the syllabic and morphemic connections made directly to word meaning. In this phase words are recognized as whole units (e.g., count) or as combinations of subunits recognized as wholes (e.g., recognizing favorable from the two units favor and able). Learning such patterns is based on the capacity to make grapheme-phoneme connections coupled with broad exposure to print, where successfully identifying a word in a small number of encounters with it leads to its constituent letter patterns becoming directly associated with the word’s meaning. This means that some work done under the

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consolidation phase is carried out as children are in the alphabetic phase linking orthography to meaning through phonology. The direct link between orthography and meaning provides an additional access mechanism to meaning, augmenting lexical access accomplished through the word’s orthographic-to-phonologic connections. Finally, let us describe the time span for development over these phases, though there is great variability. The pre-alphabetic phase starts in pre-school (around four years of age), and generally lasts until children begin to explore the linguistic aspects of print in kindergarten (five years old). Advancing from the linguistically non-generative, pre-alphabetic stage to the partial alphabetic phase requires some knowledge of letters and sounds. For many children, such knowledge is gained prior to school entry, and for those that do not know the letters (i.e., their identity, names, or sounds) upon entering school, these will likely be taught in kindergarten and the early part of first grade. With such knowledge, children will begin to learn to recognize some words because of the connections they now will be able to make between the constituent letters and sounds in select words. Progress in this phase is generally made during kindergarten. Moving from the partial alphabetic phase through the alphabetic phase requires mastering all the connections between letters and phonemes. And as discussed, this requires letter knowledge, phonemic awareness, and knowledge of the alphabetic principle. It also generally requires explicit instruction in support of discovering grapheme-phoneme relationships. This is generally a focus of early elementary school, during first and second grade (six- and seven-year olds). The consolidated alphabetic phase entails connecting the orthographic substructure of printed words directly to word meaning. To be successful, one must be able to correctly pair orthographically analyzed printed words with their phonemic representations, which then allows the orthographic structures to be tied directly to the appropriate meanings. This can be achieved through the self-teaching mechanisms we discussed in Chap. 4, coupled with broad exposure to print; appropriate instruction can also be very helpful, and will be necessary for many. Since the basic requirements for making orthographic-semantic connections is an adequate linguistic analysis of print, initial work in establishing these connections for some words can begin in the partial alphabetic phase and continue through each of the following phases. However, given the requirements for mastering the orthographic-phonemic-­ semantic connections and the volume of print needed to establish direct connections between orthography and meaning, the work in this phase will continue throughout elementary school and beyond. Before leaving the development of word recognition, let us discuss the development of the main components underlying the alphabetic phase just discussed. This includes letter knowledge, phonemic awareness, and knowledge of the alphabetic principle. Letter knowledge, as discussed in Chap. 4, is the capacity to recognize and manipulate the letters of the alphabet, including in different cases and fonts. While it does not require knowing the letter names or their sounds, using either or both these mechanisms is generally the way letter recognition is learned. This not

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only facilitates recognizing letters, but, as discussed in Chap. 4, can address other learning needs by: • facilitating the development of phonemic awareness, especially when children are exposed to alphabet books and games that increase knowledge of letter names and their relation to speech sounds in words; • serving as a bridge toward understanding the alphabetic principle, as reflected in children’s invented spellings in which the names of letters are used to represent speech sounds in words; and • acting as a precursor to alphabetic coding skill, because the names of most letters contain the phoneme to which the letter normally refers. Children typically begin to learn to identify letters in preschool (four years old), make substantial progress in kindergarten (five years old), and develop mastery by the middle of first grade (six years old). We discussed the development of phonemic awareness in a fair amount of detail in Chap. 4; we will not repeat it here but will review the main points. In learning to read English, segmentation at the phonemic level is required, and while segmentation at higher levels (i.e., word, syllable, and onset-rime) is not required, engaging children in learning to segment at these levels can be helpful in leading them to phonemic segmentation. And the reason such help could be needed, you may recall, is because phonemic segmentation can be difficult to master due to: (1) the abstract nature of phonemes, (2) the parallel transmission of linguistic information resulting from the dynamic movement of the speech articulators, and (3) the counterintuitive nature of the task that ignores meaning and focuses on the properties of the linguistic transmission itself. The developmental milestones in the progression to full phonemic segmentation are generally rhyming, syllable segmentation, and onset-rime segmentation in kindergarten (five years of old), phonemic segmentation of short words via finger tapping for each constituent phoneme in first grade (six years old), phoneme deletion in word-initial and word-final positions at second grade (seven years old), and full segmentation at all positions with skills in both phoneme deletion and addition tasks during third and fourth grades (eight and nine years old) (Moats, 2000). Remember that the more advanced levels of phonemic awareness can develop with reading in a reciprocal relationship – thus, it is not necessary to develop full phonemic segmentation skills before beginning work on instilling the alphabetic principle or providing instruction on the orthographic-phonological connections represented in print. The alphabetic principle develops once knowledge of letters and phonemic awareness are at hand. As children learn the names or sounds of letters, they are setting the stages for acquiring the insight, but the mapping of letters and phonemes takes time, and thus complete application of the principle extends from the partial alphabetic phase (five years old) through the alphabetic phase (seven years old) of word recognition. Given this brief overview of the typical development of language comprehension and word recognition, let us now turn to reading difficulty. Here we will highlight

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the types of problems that can occur in reading, and we will discuss the implications of having weak skills in either of the two major components of reading.

6.3  Understanding Reading Difficulty Under the Cognitive Foundations Framework, difficulty in reading comprehension can stem from either proximal or distal difficulties. In the former, difficulties emerge in either language comprehension, word recognition, or both. Recall in our 2 × 2 matrix crossing the components of the Cognitive Foundations of Reading (see Chap. 3) that reading comprehension was successful whenever there was success in both language comprehension and word recognition. Beyond that, where there was limited success in either of the two main components or in both, there was reading difficulty. Distal difficulties come from weaknesses in the skill sets that underlie the proximal components; these have their impact on reading comprehension through their impacts on the proximal components rather than by impacting reading comprehension directly. Thus, within language comprehension, difficulties in background knowledge and inferencing, or in linguistic knowledge or any of its components (namely, phonology, syntax, or semantics) will lead to some level of difficulty in language comprehension. Within word recognition, difficulties in alphabetic coding or in its underlying skill sets of knowledge of the alphabetic principle, letter knowledge, phonemic awareness, or concepts about print, will lead to some level of word recognition difficulty. For both proximal and distal sources of difficulties in reading comprehension, reading problems can originate from issues of opportunity or constitution. Difficulties of opportunity represent circumstances where the child’s cognitive structures are adequate and available to advance appropriate development, but circumstances prevent their full engagement. These could be from a lack of either appropriate or adequate exposure to what is needed to engage those capacities or from a lack of appropriate or adequate instruction that allows those capacities to be engaged. The dimensions of adequacy that are critical are content (the degree to which the substance is capable of advancing the child’s cognitive capacities), fit (the degree to which the content is accessible given the child’s cognitive capacities), time (both the amount of engagement and the sequencing of content during engagement), and support (the availability and use of outside assistance for furthering engagement in the content). If these dimensions of the opportunities made available are adequately addressed, then one should expect improvement in the targeted cognitive capacity; if they are not adequately addressed, then those expectations would be diminished. Let us consider some examples of such circumstances. For a child who does not show evidence of knowing the alphabetic principle, there would be little progress made in learning to recognize words by providing instruction in phonics. Of course, we know why – phonics instruction is focused on teaching the relationships between letters and sounds, but without knowledge of the alphabetic principle, a child cannot grasp what is being taught. A phonics regimen

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of instruction might lead the child to an understanding of the alphabetic principle, but a better strategy would be to first see if the child has both letter knowledge and phonemic awareness. If both these are in place or appropriately under development, one would expect that they could be used to help the child explicitly understand that learning to read was about understanding the relations between printed and spoken words. If skills in one or the other of these were deficient, then support to cover the identified gaps would be indicated. Let us extend the example above to consider inappropriate instruction. Here we have the same student as above (i.e., one with little understanding of the alphabetic principle), but the instruction being offered now is one based in whole language, where the child is encouraged to use context (pictures, pieces of the text understood, prior knowledge) to guess what an unrecognized, encountered word is. This strategy is no more likely to succeed (for this child or for any child for that matter) because the instruction cannot lead to the development of automatic word recognition, which requires skill in alphabetic coding in order to advance. The first example was a lack of appropriate instruction because of a mismatch in fit (i.e., the child’s cognitive capacities had not been developed to the point where the instruction provided could advance the targeted capacities). The second example is also a lack of appropriate instruction, but here it is due to inappropriate content (i.e., teaching word recognition that is not focused on the relationships between printed and spoken words at the levels of letters and phonemes will only advance reading skill by chance, if at all). As a second circumstance, consider the child who has mastered most of the grapheme-phoneme correspondences and is well on her or his way to reading words automatically, with accuracy and speed. Advancing reading skill at this point is largely based on exposure to print – reading more. In accord with our discussion of Matthew effects earlier in this chapter, such exposure advances both language comprehension (exposure to less common syntactic constructions, vocabulary, and discourse structures, as well as expanding knowledge of the world) and word recognition (exposure to less frequently occurring words and more obscure letter patterns). But if the reading of such a child is curtailed (i.e., lack of appropriate reading materials, available time spent in other activities), then this failure of exposure will result in reading skills that stagnate. By far, the largest issues underlying poor reading comprehension skills are casualties of opportunity – most children can learn to read well if they are provided with the appropriate opportunities and instruction to learn. But for some, that learning is exceedingly difficult, and these include cases where the difficulties in learning to read are casualties of constitution – the capacities of the individual learner differ from those of the typical learner in ways that prevent development of the usual capacities that underlie skilled reading through the evidence-based regimens available. As we saw in our 2  ×  2 matrix crossing the components of the Cognitive Foundations of Reading, dyslexia is an instance (importantly, not all instances) of poor reading comprehension that comes from adequate language comprehension but poor word recognition, hyperlexia from adequate word recognition but poor language comprehension, and garden variety difficulties from poor skills in both language comprehension and word recognition. We think of reading difficulties that

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stem from constitutional capacities as reading disabilities, representing distinct issues from those reading difficulties stemming from poor opportunity. We talk further about these difficulties and disabilities below.

6.3.1  Language Comprehension Here we discuss the implications of having weak language comprehension skills in both learning to read and reading, as well as the kinds of difficulties that can be encountered within language comprehension. 6.3.1.1  T  he Implications of Weak Language Comprehension in Learning to Read There are several implications for the development of reading comprehension that follow from weakness in language comprehension, including reduced opportunities to build and refine (1) knowledge of the world and inferencing skills, (2) vocabulary, and (3) formal language (recognizing that continued singular reliance on informal language will not drive formal language development). Each of these reduced opportunities can be viewed in terms of reciprocal relationships within language comprehension, where growth in lower-level capacities drive growth in upper-level ones and vice versa. A related issue centered on language comprehension, one that presents a difficulty (but not a disability) in learning to read, concerns learning to read under conditions of dialect differences, where the dialect of the language the would-be reader knows differs from the dialect of the language learning to be read. As an example, one current thought about minority population achievement gaps in the United States between African American and Anglo-American students is that they might result from the use of different English dialects between the two groups (Seidenberg, 2017). Many African American students have been only exposed to African American English (AAE) prior to school entry, at which time they encounter Mainstream American English (MAE). In this situation, students are attempting to learn to read a dialect of English that they do not fully know. Thus, learning to read becomes much more challenging, with difficulties reflected in both language comprehension and word recognition. The issues in language comprehension come from difficulties in comprehending, both through listening and reading, a language where there is only partial overlap with the known language. This difficulty is reflected in vocabulary differences, as well as syntactic differences between the dialects. Further, as most elementary schools in the United States focus on MAE, as do their teaching materials, especially regarding the more formal, academic language of the classroom, the mismatch in dialects is ever present in schooling environments.

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These dialect differences also present difficulties in mastering word recognition. In AAE, many words can drop the final consonant in two consonant final blends (e.g., test becomes tes, hand shifts to han). The dialect also includes metathesized forms where final consonant blends can be transposed (e.g., ask goes to aks, grasp to graps). These differences impact the development of word recognition through their influence on developing phonemic awareness (e.g., trying to isolate phonemes that are not heard, as in deleting the final sound in craft when what is heard is craf) and alphabetic coding (e.g., trying to understand the relations between letter patterns and their phonological representations when those representations do not accord to entries in the internal mental lexicon). In the latter case, what is required is to either learn a new word and associate the letter pattern with its phonology, associate the letter pattern with the phonology of the dialectic version of the word (which results in more variable pairings), or learn both pairings. All of these increase the difficulty of the task of learning to recognize printed words. In sum, differences between a learner’s known dialect of a language and that of the dialect learning to be read, can create significant difficulties in learning to read. 6.3.1.2  Difficulty in Language Comprehension As discussed earlier in this chapter (and in Chap. 4), most children acquire much of their native language with relative ease through little more than exposure to an engaging, active speech community during their first years of life. Yet many children come from impoverished linguistic environments with limited pre-school exposure to the kinds of verbal interactions and language play activities that promote the development of more advanced language skills, such as the ability to deal with the more formal, decontextualized, academic language used in classrooms (Dickinson & Beals, 1994). For these children, both exposure to rich language environments as well as explicit classroom instruction aimed at developing language skills are needed. As noted in Chaps. 3 and 4, learning to read involves the full set of linguistic skills involved in understanding spoken language. Weaknesses in the different components of language functioning (as discussed in Chap. 4) would therefore be expected to result in different kinds of difficulties in learning to read, for example: • Children who have problems discriminating between different speech sounds because of a high-frequency hearing loss or deficits in auditory acuity due to otitis media (or glue ear), will encounter difficulty in analyzing speech and relating it to print. • Children with limited understanding of the meanings of the words of spoken language will be impaired in their ability to derive meaning from text, even for words they have correctly identified. Such children will also have trouble identifying previously unseen printed words, especially partially recognized or irregularly spelled words, if the corresponding spoken words are not in their vocabulary. This in turn can limit the development of their alphabetic coding skills, as addi-

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tional letter-sound relationships can be induced from the words that have been correctly identified through partial recognition based on a subset of their letter patterns supplemented with the use of context. • Children with weaknesses in syntactic knowledge (i.e., the implicit knowledge of rules that specify structural relationships within sentences) will have difficulty understanding written sentences, which will diminish any potential use of the structural constraints of sentential context as a learning aid in identifying partially recognized words. • Children who have problems in relating the meaning of each new sentence in spoken discourse to the meanings of the sentences that preceded it (i.e., discourse processing) will have difficulty comprehending and recalling written stories and passages. It is little wonder, then, that children who begin school with weaknesses in one or more of the subsystems of spoken language comprehension are much more likely to encounter problems in learning to read than children with age-appropriate oral language skills (Catts & Kamhi, 2005; Leach, Scarborough, & Rescorla, 2003; Scarborough, 2005). Differences in language exposure during early childhood, which result in individual differences in vocabulary and syntactic development as well as knowledge of the world, can be very large – some estimates suggest that the differences in the number of words children have been exposed to by three years of age across different linguistic environments can be as large as thirty million (Hart & Risley, 1995). Given the structure of reading, such a difference in opportunity of exposure to expand language comprehension could have a substantial impact on reading comprehension. Before turning to word recognition, let us mention hyperlexia. As was discussed in Chap. 3, hyperlexia falls within the class of children characterized by above average skill in word recognition but below average skill in language comprehension. Not all children whose performance is so characterized are hyperlexics. Indeed, such cases are very rare, representing extreme skills in word recognition relative to language comprehension, and the behavior is usually associated with other disorders such as autism (Healy, 1982). There are precocious children who are simply able to recognize words at an earlier age than their peers, but hyperlexics are special cases likely resulting from brain-based neurological issues (Ostrolenk, d’Arc, Jelenic, Samson, & Mottron, 2017).

6.3.2  Word Recognition Just as we did for language comprehension, we now turn to word recognition, discussing the implications of having weak word recognition skills in both learning to read and reading, as well as the kinds of difficulties that are found within word recognition.

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6.3.2.1  The Implications of Weak Word Recognition in Learning to Read What are the implications of having persistently weak skills in word recognition when trying to learn to read? First, as we have said several times (see Chap. 4), word recognition that is labored and not automatic takes resources away from language comprehension, which requires most of the cognitive resources available for success. Second, word recognition that is either slow or inaccurate interferes with language comprehension on two fronts. Word recognition that is slow negatively impacts language comprehension because of the limits of short-term memory that constrain language processing. That is, the longer the amount of time needed to recognize words, the lower the quality of the material maintained in short-term memory, and thus the less likely such material will be useful in building comprehension. Word recognition that is inaccurate results in failure to access appropriate word meanings, which leads to failed sentential (and thus, discourse) comprehension. Third, weak word recognition skill results in the loss of opportunity to benefit from the reciprocal impacts between word recognition and its underlying component, alphabetic coding skills. If words cannot be recognized, then the ability to further word recognition through reading is limited – one is not able to strengthen both the orthographic-phonologic-semantic connections as well as the orthographic-­ semantic connections used in word recognition through correctly identifying words never before seen in print or words that are only rarely seen. Fourth, weak skills in word recognition can bring about the engagement of compensatory processes that are neither efficient nor effective substitutions. Not only will such processes fail to fully compensate for what would be the more efficient and effective processes had they been learned, they may even prevent those processes from being learned. We can see this in trying to use context to identify words, a process that might become so well ingrained despite limited success that it interferes with learning the relationships between orthography and phonology. 6.3.2.2  Difficulty in Word Recognition What do we know about specific difficulties in word recognition? We know they can come about because of difficulty in acquiring alphabetic coding skill (or any of the cognitive components that underlie it) or in gaining the skill of automatic recognition of words via orthographic-to-semantic processing. Weaknesses in any of the different components of word recognition (as discussed in Chap. 4) would therefore be expected to result in different kinds of difficulties in learning to read, for example: • Children who do not understand the basic operations of print cannot benefit from the pairing of written and spoken words in learning to read (but fortunately, these skills are not difficult to learn, and few students struggle with them).

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• Weak capacities in identifying letters of different case and font will prevent learners from being able to consistently pair orthographic and phonologic representations of words, which will impair their ability to acquire alphabetic coding skills; but again, gaining such skills does not present major, long-term obstacles. • Struggles with acquiring phonemic awareness is a major obstacle in gaining the alphabetic principle and in acquiring the alphabetic coding skills upon which it is built. Without the ability to isolate and manipulate phonemic representations, their relationships with orthographic representations are indeterminate, and this is a critical skill needed to advance word recognition. Fortunately, there are many training resources available to support development of this competency (see Chap. 11 for references to where these can be found). • Difficulties in acquiring alphabetic coding skills generally come from difficulties in mastering the alphabetic principle, but they can also come from a lack of opportunity or instruction in pairing written and spoken words. Children need such skills to engage the self-teaching mechanisms used in acquiring automaticity in word recognition. • Weakness in automatic word recognition can come about from lack of print exposure or failure in acquiring alphabetic coding skills. What is critical in gaining automaticity is the ability to accurately pair orthographic representations of words with their phonological counterparts, this leading to lexical access that allows the orthographic patterns to be mapped directly to the semantic representation of the word. The most widely known disability in word recognition, dyslexia, comes from an impairment in the phonological processing skills needed to acquire word recognition skills in an otherwise typically developing child, where the impairment persists despite exposure to high-quality, evidence-based instruction (Tunmer & Greaney, 2010). One longitudinal study investigating reading disability in a large sample of children found that about 9% experienced significant reading problems by the middle of first grade, though most were able to overcome their difficulties through participation in an intensive, high-quality, evidence-based, remedial instruction intervention; however, for about 1.5% of the children, such remedial instruction was ineffective (Vellutino, Scanlon, & Jaccard, 2003; Vellutino et al., 1996). This provides us a sense that a high proportion of those experiencing problems in learning to read because of difficulties with word recognition may be helped through modifications to the instruction they are receiving. We should mention here the case of “garden variety” difficulties in reading, which include those children who are relatively weak in both language comprehension and word recognition skills. These cases can include children who may have a variety of difficulties with language or whose circumstances have led to limited opportunities to learn a language, or who are otherwise normal but have not progressed as far as their peers in either language comprehension or word recognition. In general, these children have more widespread language impairments than are typically found among children with dyslexia, going beyond phonological

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processing deficits to include impairments in vocabulary, morphology, syntax, or discourse-­level processing (Tunmer & Greaney, 2010).

6.4  Select Issues in Reading Development and Difficulty There are several issues to keep in mind concerning reading development and difficulty. First, one must remember that reading development is an on-going process – language comprehension and word recognition can always be improved, and for readers, because of the reciprocal learning relationships, they improve with reading. And keep in mind there are great differences in the amount of reading children do. One estimate of the number of words fifth grade students in the United States read during the year ranged from less than 60,000 words at the lower end of the distribution to more than 4,000,000 words at the upper end (Anderson, Wilson, & Fielding, 1988)! Such differences have the potential for large impacts on growth in language comprehension, word recognition, and reading comprehension. Second, recognize that weak development in one of the proximal causes of reading comprehension has implications for the impact the other proximal cause can show on reading comprehension. For instance, if language comprehension is weak, improvements in word recognition will show limited impacts on reading comprehension, which will not be revealed until language comprehension is improved. In this case, language comprehension is the driving force in reading comprehension, and even large improvements in the stronger skill will show little impact on reading comprehension because of the limitations placed on its influence by the weaker skill. This is not to say that work to improve word recognition should be delayed, only that the evidence of such improvements will be difficult to see in reading comprehension until language comprehension is improved. Third, reciprocal relationships between reading components have implications for instruction and intervention. As we have said, some level of skill is required within any relevant lower-level skill before progress can be made in the relevant upper-level skill. But because of the reciprocal relationships between components it is possible to work on higher-level skills before there is complete mastery at lower-­ level skills. Indeed, progress on the higher-level skill (e.g., alphabetic coding skill) can yield progress on the connected lower-level skill (e.g., phonemic awareness). Fourth, as we discussed, when the most effective and efficient mechanisms for mastering reading are proving difficult to develop, compensatory processes may come into play (Stanovich, 1980). Thus, in word recognition one can compensate for poor alphabetic coding by attempting to use understood sentence context to guess the identity of unknown words. But these processes will not be as effective or efficient, and indeed, their use may interfere with developing those processes, making their acquisition even more difficult. This is particularly important when thinking about the kinds of instruction that should be provided children learning to read at specific points of development because instruction focused on the development of some processes may be doing harm to future development.

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Finally, in the hierarchy of skills, it may be difficult to know how much of a given skill is known at a lower level, or even must be known, before the development of another skill at a higher level can be effectively pursued. The best course of action here is to be mindful of any signs of struggle or lack of progress in given component processes, focusing instruction on those showing weakness to see if improvements in them lead to advances in higher-level skills.

6.5  Summary In this chapter we used the Cognitive Foundations Framework to look at reading development and reading difficulty. We described reading development under the SVR, with language comprehension skill typically being much more highly developed in children entering school than their word recognition skill. Accordingly, for such typical students, their weaker word recognition skill, which is close to zero, has the most impact in the early elementary grades on their skill in reading comprehension. But in the later elementary grades, their skill in language comprehension comes to have the greater impact because their word recognition skill then approaches perfection. We discussed the importance of Matthew effects in reading, where good skills are further strengthened through reading because of the more advanced materials read and the more reading generally done. Those with weaker skills tend to read less challenging materials and read a lower volume of material, and thus are not able to take advantage of the learning opportunities reading provides. For these children, their reading skills stagnate or decline. We discussed the typical development of language comprehension, including growth in linguistic components (i.e., phonology, syntax, and semantics) as well as knowledge of the world and the inferencing skills such knowledge allows. We then discussed typical development of word recognition skills, including the four main phases of development that culminate in acquiring automaticity in recognizing words. We next discussed reading difficulty, first discussing the proximal causes, then the distal ones. We distinguished difficulties that are casualties of opportunity (with limitations in either exposure or instruction) from those that are casualties of constitution (with limitations in cognitive capacities that prevent taking advantage of commonly provided, appropriately timed and structured opportunities), which represent reading disability. We closed the chapter with mention of some key issues concerning reading development and difficulty, (1) briefly discussing reading development as an on-going process, (2) recognizing that the skill level in one proximal component impacts the influence that the skill level in the other component can have on reading comprehension, (3) keeping in mind the importance of reciprocal relationships when thinking about instruction and intervention, (4) cautioning about issues around compensatory processes, and (5) acknowledging the difficulties of knowing how much of a given skill must be known before work on a high-order skill can be effective.

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6.6  Questions for Further Thought The set of questions that follow are designed to extend your understanding of how the Cognitive Foundations Framework can be used to aid your understanding of reading development and difficulty. As with the earlier sets of questions presented, we believe these will be most helpful when discussed with colleagues, leading to even deeper understanding. 1. How can reciprocal relationships in reading development be viewed as examples of self-teaching? 2. In thinking about the development of reading comprehension in the later elementary grades, why is it important to stress development of both language comprehension and word recognition skills in the early elementary grades? 3. In using Matthew effects to understand development in reading comprehension, why do the “poor get poorer” – could the reading skills of poor readers actually decline as a result of these effects? 4. What do you think infants gain in their knowledge of phonology by babbling, especially given that their vocal productions are unrelated to the speech they hear from adults in their environments? 5. Why is exposure to an engaging, active speech community necessary for children to learn a language – do you think a child could learn a language if the only exposure to it was through electronic media (e.g., radio, television)? 6. What skill levels in language comprehension and word recognition would a typical student entering first grade have? As a result, what skill levels would the typical student entering first grade have in reading comprehension? Would the language comprehension skills of such a student show any influence on her or his reading comprehension skill? 7. How does the operation of compensatory processes in reading help you think about the kinds of instruction that serve the best interests of children? 8. How might the Cognitive Foundations Framework help you think about bilingualism and its relation to learning to read? 9. How would you think about determining whether an identified limitation in reading comprehension was a casualty of instruction or constitution? How would your determination influence your approach to remediation?

6.7  What’s Next There are over 6000 languages currently in use around the world, and some 5000 of them are written (Aaron et al., 2008). Having discussed how reading, learning to read, and reading difficulties in English are viewed under the Cognitive Foundations Framework, we now move to discuss a generalization of the framework that can be applied to understanding reading in other alphabetically written languages.

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References ∗Aaron, P. G., Joshi, R. M., & Quatroche, D. (2008). Becoming a professional reading teacher. Baltimore, MD: Brookes. Anderson, R.  C., Wilson, P.  T., & Fielding, L.  G. (1988). Growth in reading and how children spend their time outside of school. Reading Research Quarterly, 23, 285–303. https://doi. org/10.1598/rrq.23.3.2 Bowerman, M. (1973). Structural relationship in children’s utterances: Syntactic or semantic? In T. E. Moore (Ed.), Cognitive development and the acquisition of language (pp. 197–213). New York, NY: Academic. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-505850-6.50015-3 Carroll, D. W. (2008). Psychology of language (5th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Catts, H. W., & Kamhi, A. G. (2005). Language and reading disabilities (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson. Dickinson, D. K., & Beals, D. E. (1994). Not by print alone: Oral language supports for early literacy. In D. Lancy (Ed.), Children’s emergent literacy: From research to practice (pp. 29–40). Westport, CT: Praegar. ∗Ehri, L. C. (2005). Development of sight word reading: Phases and findings. In M. J. Snowling & C. Hulme (Eds.), The science of reading: A handbook (pp. 135–154). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470757642.ch8 Gough, P. B., Hoover, W. A., & Peterson, C. L. (1996). Some observations on a simple view of reading. In C. Cornoldi & J. Oakhill (Eds.), Reading comprehension difficulties: Processes and intervention (pp. 1–13). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Gough, P. B., & Tunmer, W. E. (1986). Decoding, reading, and reading disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7, 6–10. https://doi.org/10.1177/074193258600700104 Hart, B., & Risley, T.  R. (1995). Meaningful differences in the everyday experiences of young American children. Baltimore, MD: Brookes. Healy, J. (1982). The enigma of hyperlexia. Reading Research Quarterly, 17, 319–338. https://doi. org/10.2307/747522 ∗Hirsch, Jr., E. D. (2003). Reading comprehension requires knowledge — Of words and the world: Scientific insights into the fourth-grade slump and the nation’s stagnant comprehension scores. American Educator, 27, 10–13, 16–22, 28–29, 48. Hirsch, E. D., Jr. (2016). Why knowledge matters: Rescuing our children from failed educational theories. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. Hoover, W.  A., & Gough, P.  B. (1990). The simple view of reading. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2, 127–160. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00401799 Hoover, W.  A., & Tunmer, W.  E. (2018). The simple view of reading: Three assessments of its adequacy. Remedial and Special Education, 39, 304–312. https://doi. org/10.1177/0741932518773154 Ladefoged, P. (1975). A course in phonetics. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Leach, J.  M., Scarborough, H.  S., & Rescorla, L. (2003). Late-emerging reading disabilities. Journal of Educational Psychology, 95, 211–224. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.95.2.211 Lenneberg, E. H. (1967). Biological foundations of language. New York, NY: Wiley & Sons. Menn, L., & Stoel-Gammon, C. (2001). Phonological development: Learning sounds and sound patterns. In J. B. Gleason (Ed.), The development of language (5th ed., pp. 70–124). Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Moats, L. C. (2000). Speech to print: Language essentials for teachers. Baltimore, MD: Brookes Publishing. Nagy, W. E., & Herman, P. A. (1987). Breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge: Implications for acquisition and instruction. In M. G. McKeown & M. E. Curtis (Eds.), The nature of vocabulary acquisition (pp. 19–35). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Ostrolenk, A., d’Arc, B. F., Jelenic, P., Samson, F., & Mottron, L. (2017). Hyperlexia: Systematic review, neurocognitive modelling, and outcome. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 79, 134–149. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2017.04.029

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Pan, B. A., & Gleason, J. B. (2001). Semantic development: Learning the meanings of words. In J. B. Gleason (Ed.), The development of language (5th ed., pp. 125–161). Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Prochnow, J.  E., Tunmer, W.  E., & Arrow, A.  W. (2015). Literate cultural capital and Matthew effects in reading achievement. In W.  E. Tunmer & J.  W. Chapman (Eds.), Excellence and equity in literacy education: The case of New Zealand (pp.  145–167). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137415578.0014 Scarborough, H.  S. (2005). Developmental relationships between language and reading: Reconciling a beautiful hypothesis with some ugly facts. In H. W. Catts & A. G. Kamhi (Eds.), The connections between language and reading disabilities (pp. 3–24). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. ∗Seidenberg, M. S. (2017). Language at the speed of sight: How we read, why so many can’t, and what can be done about it. New York, NY: Basic Books. Slobin, D. I. (1985). Crosslinguistic evidence for the language-making capacity. In D. I. Slobin (Ed.), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition. Theoretical issues (Vol. 2, pp. 1157–1256). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Snow, C. E. (1990). The development of definitional skill. Journal of Child Language, 17, 697–710. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305000900010953 Stanovich, K.  E. (1980). Toward an interactive-compensatory model of individual differences in the development of reading fluency. Reading Research Quarterly, 16, 32–71. https://doi. org/10.2307/747348 ∗Stanovich, K. E. (1986). Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 21, 360–407. https://doi. org/10.1598/rrq.21.4.1 Sticht, T. G., & James, J. H. (1984). Listening and reading. In P. D. Pearson (Ed.), Handbook of reading research (pp. 293–317). New York, NY: Longman. Tilstra, J., McMaster, K., van den Broek, P., Kendeou, P., & Rapp, D. (2009). Simple but complex: Components of the simple view of reading across grade levels. Journal of Research in Reading, 32, 383–401. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9817.2009.01401.x Tunmer, W.  E., & Chapman, J.  W. (Eds.). (2015). Excellence and equity in literacy education. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. ∗Tunmer, W. E., & Greaney, K. T. (2010). Defining dyslexia. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 43, 229–243. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219409345009 Vellutino, F. R., Scanlon, D. M., & Jaccard, J. (2003). Toward distinguishing between cognitive and experiential deficits as primary sources of difficulty in learning to read: A two year follow-up of difficult-to-remediate and readily remediated poor readers. In B. R. Foorman (Ed.), Preventing and remediating reading difficulties: Bringing science to scale (pp. 73–120). Baltimore, MD: York Press. Vellutino, F. R., Scanlon, D. M., Sipay, E. R., Small, S. G., Pratt, A., Chen, R. S., & Denckla, M. B. (1996). Cognitive profiles of difficult to remediate and readily remediated poor readers: Early intervention as a vehicle for distinguishing between cognitive and experiential deficits as basic causes of specific reading disability. Journal of Educational Psychology, 88, 601–638. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-0663.88.4.601 Vellutino, F. R., Tunmer, W. E., Jaccard, J. J., & Chen, R. (2007). Components of reading ability: Multivariate evidence for a convergent skills model of reading development. Scientific Studies of Reading, 11, 3–32. https://doi.org/10.1207/s1532799xssr1101_2 Westermann, G., Ruh, N., & Plunkett, K. (2009). Connectionist approaches to language learning. Linguistics, 47, 413–452. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling.2009.015

Chapter 7

Understanding Reading Across Writing Systems

Acronym SVR Simple View of Reading

7.1  Introduction We now describe how the Cognitive Foundations Framework can provide a general understanding of reading within writing systems that represent the phonology of a language. Below we first describe the key, general features of phonologically-based writing systems and the broadened definitions needed in the Cognitive Foundations Framework to accommodate them. We then provide a generalized version of the Cognitive Foundations Framework that applies across such writing systems, followed by a discussion of learning to read in a second language. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of some select issues in reading in languages other than English, a chapter summary, and questions for further thought.

7.2  Key Features of Phonologically-Based Writing Systems Phonologically-based writing systems are those where each individual written symbol (or symbol combination) represents an individual unit of the written language’s phonological system. Such writing systems generally come in two types, alphabetic

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systems,1 which represent phonemes, and syllabaries, which represent syllables, usually ones with a vowel nucleus that appear alone or with a preceding or following consonant (Moats, 2000). Which system is used is generally related to the predominant properties of the language being written. For example, in writing English, which contains some 44 phonemes but well over a thousand syllables (Rayner & Pollatsek, 1989), an alphabetic system is used to represent its relatively fewer phonemes (e.g.,

2 represents /p/, at least in most cases). But in Japanese, which contains around 100 syllables, a syllabary system is employed, the kana, which contains two syllabaries (Taylor & Taylor, 2014). One, the hiragana, is used to represent syllables of words that are of Japanese origin (e.g., the symbol represents the syllable [ka] in such words), while the other, the katakana, is used to represent syllables of words that are of foreign origin (e.g., represents the syllable [ka] in foreign origin words). Both alphabetic and syllabary systems differ from pure logographic writing systems (now extinct across human languages) where each individual written symbol represents a meaningful unit within the written language (i.e., a morpheme, a word, or a phrase), but whose phonological properties are not represented within the logograph itself. Modernized logographic systems, like kanji (a third Japanese writing system), are hybrid systems as the logographs are generally supplemented by phonological indicators contained within them or by accompanying syllabary symbols that provide information on the pronunciation of the meaningful unit the logograph represents. Learning to read in logographic systems (even hybrid versions) can be very burdensome because of the complexity and number of characters used. Returning to our example, in Japanese kanji there are tens of thousands of logographs (though only a few thousand are in common use). Students in Japan are required to learn a list of 1006 kanji characters over the course of elementary school and another 1130 prior to exiting secondary school. Some of these characters are complicated and difficult to produce, requiring some 20 distinct hand strokes to be correctly rendered in writing! (You may wonder why such learning is necessary given the two Japanese syllabaries described above. It is because many written Japanese sentences will contain all three linguistic representations – kanji, hiragana, and katakana characters.) But let us return to our discussion of phonologically-based writing systems. Overall, the critical properties of phonologically-based writing systems are defined by the written symbols employed, the phonological units represented, and the relationships between the two. For the first property, the key features concern the number and character of the symbols employed. Systems that have many symbols are those that generally have many distinct units within the given phonological level 1  We use the convention of italicizing key concepts and distinctions for emphasis, but we also italicize words, phrases, or sentences when denoting them as linguistic objects. In both cases, the context we provide should suffice to determine the particular use being served. 2  We follow the standard convention of using arrow brackets () to denote written characters and character combinations, slash brackets (/  /) to denote phonemes and phoneme combinations, and square brackets ([  ]) to denote distinct speech sounds (phones) and phonetic combinations. To reduce the burden on the reader, we use letters to indicate phonemes and phones rather than the symbols used in the International Phonetic Alphabet, clarifying in text as needed.

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to be represented in writing (e.g., systems that contain many distinct symbols for languages containing many distinct syllables or many distinct phonemes). Along with the number of symbols, the intricacy and distinctiveness of each symbol in relation to other used symbols impacts the complexity of the writing system. Finally, in some systems, as we shall see below, the symbols used to represent the phonological units of the language may not be arbitrary; rather, they may be structured to systematically represent phonological features. As we said above, the units represented in phonologically-based writing systems, the second critical property in these systems, are generally syllables or phonemes. Syllabic systems represent phonological information at the level of syllables, while alphasyllabic systems represent syllables but their characters also contain phonemic information. Alphabetic systems represent phonemes rather than syllables, although some of these go beyond simply representing an individual phoneme to also represent some of its distinctive properties. For example, the Korean hangul employs a featural alphabet whose characters detail some distinctive phonological features of the phonemes they represent (e.g., that the phoneme represented is a bilabial, which brings the lips together during pronunciation). The following are examples of some of the languages that use phonologically-based writing systems (the number of distinct characters used to represent the corresponding linguistic units are given in parentheses): • syllabic: Cherokee (85 characters that represent distinct syllables) and Japanese kana (two syllabaries, hiragana and katakana, each containing some 46 characters that represent distinct syllables that are not meaningful units themselves); • alphasyllabic: Kannada (49 letters that represent distinct syllables as each consonantal letter assumes an inherent vowel when a vowel letter does not follow it in print), Hindi (46 characters that represent distinct syllables but which also contain constituent phonemic elements), and Korean (24 alphabetic characters presented in syllable blocks, thus constituting an alphabetic syllabary, whose alphabetic characters also contain some information about the distinctive phonological features of the phonemes they represent); and • alphabetic: Abkhaz (64 letters), Spanish (27 letters), English (26 letters), and Rotokas (12 letters). (See Box 7.1 for examples of differences between syllabic and alphasyllabic syllabaries.) Finally, under the third critical property of phonologically-based writing systems, the relationships between the written units and the phonological units they represent can vary. The complexity of these relationships, known as orthographic depth, ranges from shallow (or transparent), where each written unit corresponds to a single phonological unit, to deep (or opaque), where each written unit represents several distinct phonological units, with the appropriate one determined by the context (either semantic or phonological) in which it occurs. To take some examples, Spanish is a relatively transparent orthography as each of its letters generally corresponds to a single phoneme (e.g., always represents /g/ as in gato, and generally represents /k/ as in calle but can represent /s/ as in ciudad). In contrast,

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Box 7.1 Distinguishing Types of Syllabaries Syllabaries generally represent phonological information at the syllable level. Some only represent the distinct syllables used in the language (syllabic), while others represent the distinct syllables, but their representations also carry phonemic information as well (alphasyllabic). To more fully understand the alphasyllabic writing systems, consider the following examples (taken from Bright, 1999; Kiefer, 2012). Written Hindi (or Devanagari), which employs an alphasyllabic system, contains the following syllable representations: as [ka], as [ke], as [ku], as [ki], and as [ko]. Compare these with the same syllables as written in the Japanese hiragana, a syllabic system: as [ka], as [ke], as [ku], as [ki], and as [ko]. In the former (Hindi), there is a clear representation of /k/ (as ) within each written syllable, while in the later (Japanese) there is no such indication. Further, consider the following, also from the Japanese hiragana: as [ra], as [re], as [ru], as [ri], and as [ro]. As with the other hiragana syllables listed, there is nothing in these written syllables to indicate that they have anything in common in representing the /r/ they each contain, and, in comparing the last two lines of hiragana characters, there is nothing that indicates that the corresponding members from the two sets of syllables listed share the same vowel. In sum, while both the Japanese and Hindi systems are syllabaries, the Hindi system carries phonological information (hence, its designation as an alphasyllabic system) while the Japanese system does not (a syllabic system).

English is a relatively opaque orthography as many of its letters correspond to multiple phonemes (e.g., represents /k/ in cat, /s/ in cite, and /ch/ when paired with in chat; represents /d/ in hurried but /t/ in iced). Orthographic depth is not limited to alphabetic systems but can also be used to describe mapping complexity within syllabic systems. With this understanding of the three key features of phonologically-­based writing systems, let us turn to their implications for the Cognitive Foundations Framework originally defined based on reading in English.

7.3  A  Generalization of the Cognitive Foundations Framework Given the key features of writing systems just discussed, we can generalize the Cognitive Foundations Framework to accommodate reading in other, non-English phonologically-based systems. The model is based on the Cognitive Foundations

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Framework but includes broadening the narrower specifications it contains within its components as an English-only application. As in the English formulation, the Simple View of Reading (SVR), where reading comprehension is the product of language comprehension and word recognition, still holds as the Cognitive Foundations of Reading. In the underlying foundations, those of the Cognitive Foundations of Reading Acquisition, the components treating language comprehension are unchanged as these are universal elements underlying natural language. However, the definitions of knowledge-skill sets within some of the components under word recognition have been broadened to accommodate differences in the orthographic characteristics of phonologically-­ based writing systems and the phonological levels to which orthographies are mapped. These adjustments include the following: • Letter knowledge becomes knowledge of the orthographic units, defined as the ability to recognize and manipulate the units of the orthography. In this component, variation in the complexity and number of such units, which is partially determined by the phonologic properties they are designed to capture, will influence the difficulty of learning them and how they can be used in mastering word recognition. • Phonemic awareness becomes phonological awareness, which is the ability to consciously recognize and manipulate the phonological units that are represented in the orthography. As such, awareness is not required for lower phonological levels (e.g., the phoneme) if the phonological unit represented by the orthography is exclusively at a higher level (e.g., the syllable). • Knowledge of the alphabetic principle becomes knowledge of the orthographic principle and is defined as the explicit understanding that there is a principled correspondence used in the writing system to link the relevant orthographic and phonologic units. Thus, in syllabic writing systems, this is the knowledge that the characters appearing in print are related to the syllables contained in the language. • Concepts about print is not modified, but the concepts to be mastered under this component will be centered on the way the written language is represented in print (e.g., word order as left-to-right and top-to-bottom on the page for English, but as top-to-bottom and right-to-left for Japanese). Recall that these are basic concepts about print that enable the would-be reader to track the correspondence between the written and spoken word. • Alphabetic coding skill becomes orthographic coding skill and is defined as the ability to map the orthography of the writing system onto the phonology it represents. This is the knowledge-skill set for mastering the orthographic-phonologic-­ semantic pathway in recognizing words, and the ease of learning these relationships will depend upon the depth of the orthography as well as the complexities within both the knowledge of the orthographic principle and the two components that underlie it. • Word recognition is not modified as attaining automaticity (i.e., speed and accuracy) remains a critical skill regardless of the complexity represented in the orthographic-phonologic relationship. That is, even in highly transparent sys-

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tems, the empirical evidence reveals that children still learn the orthographic-­ semantic connections between print and meaning even though the shallow depth of the orthography they are reading makes recognition via the orthographic-­ phonologic relationship relatively straight forward (Ehri, 2005). While it may be easier to establish automaticity in more transparent orthographies, it is important to remember that exposure to print remains a critical parameter for building such skill. The generalized framework for reading in a phonologically-based writing system, which reflects the changes just discussed, is presented in Fig. 7.1. Note that as this generalization covers only phonologically-based writing systems it does not address reading in pure logographic systems; it can apply to hybrid systems like Japanese kanji, but it is limited to the degree that phonological properties are not represented within all component logographs.

Fig. 7.1  The generalized Cognitive Foundations Framework (for phonologically-based writing systems) and its knowledge-skill set definitions Each cognitive component represents an independent, but not necessarily elemental, knowledge-­ skill set that is an essential, hierarchically positioned, building block in reading and learning to read

Notes: Components are defined as follows: •  R  eading comprehension: The ability to extract and construct literal and inferred meaning from linguistic discourse represented in printed text •  Language comprehension: The ability to extract and construct literal and inferred meaning from linguistic discourse represented in speech

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–– B  ackground knowledge and inferencing skills: Knowledge of relevant content, the preceding linguistic discourse, and the situational context, and the ability to use them to derive logical conclusions that go beyond the literal meaning of linguistic discourse –– Linguistic knowledge: The unconscious knowledge of a language’s grammar (including its phonology, syntax, and semantics), which defines the sound-to-­ meaning (listening) and meaning-to-sound (speaking) relationships the language allows Phonological knowledge: Linguistic knowledge about the definition, organization, and combination of speech sounds Syntactic knowledge: Linguistic knowledge about the definition and combination of phrases, clauses, and sentences Semantic knowledge: Linguistic knowledge about the meaning bearing units of language at the word and sub-word levels and their use in building meaning at the sentence and discourse levels •  W  ord recognition: The ability to recognize printed words accurately and quickly to efficiently gain access to the appropriate word meanings contained in the mental lexicon –– O  rthographic coding skill: The ability to map the orthographic units and their combinations onto phonological forms of the language Concepts about print: Basic knowledge about how print works in representing linguistic discourse Knowledge of the orthographic principle: The conscious awareness that the orthographic units and their combinations are used to represent a particular level of phonological units underlying spoken words •  K  nowledge of the orthographic units: The ability to recognize and manipulate the orthographic units used in print •  Phonological awareness: The ability to consciously recognize and manipulate the phonological units underlying spoken words at the level to which they are tied to the orthographic units used in print

There is research on the cognitive components underlying reading skill in non-­ English phonologically-based writing systems though it is less extensive than that focused on reading in English. But as we said in Chap. 1, we will not review the research base here as that is planned for future work. Nonetheless, the reader should know that relevant investigations of certain aspects of such reading have been found to be consistent with the generalized formulation just presented (e.g., Florit & Cain, 2011; Joshi, Tao, Aaron, & Quiroz, 2012; Lervåg & Aukrust, 2010; Proctor, Carlo, August, & Snow, 2005; Verhoeven, van Leeuwe, & Vermeer, 2011).

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Based on the generalized model of the Cognitive Foundations Framework just discussed, we now turn to how such a model can help us think about learning to read in a second language.

7.4  C  onsiderations for Learning to Read in a Second Language In this section we briefly explore how the Cognitive Foundations Framework can help aid understanding of learning to read in a second language, discussing the issues the framework would lead us to consider. From the many contexts that exist around both learning multiple languages and learning to read in multiple languages, we take only one as an example: When some level of reading skill has already been acquired in one known language prior to learning to read in a second language. In this case, we further restrict our discussion only to address typical children who are either just entering elementary school (at the kindergarten level) or who have completed the first few years of elementary school (through the third grade). In the former case of younger children, we would expect minimal reading skill development, while in the latter case of older children, we would expect enough development that would allow reading comprehension skill levels to approach the level of language comprehension. In addressing learning to read in a second language under our example, the Cognitive Foundations Framework helps us think through several issues: (1) the overlaps between the two languages of interest, (2) the overlaps between the two writing systems used in those two languages, (3) the levels of language comprehension the child has in the two languages, and (4) the domains and levels of reading skills (if any) that have already been acquired in the first language of interest. A separate issue not included in the framework, but which is important to consider in teaching reading, is the language and materials being used for reading instruction. We touch on each of these below as we consider our selected case. Let us start with the overlap between the two languages under consideration. Differences between languages will have little impact on their learnability by children. As we discussed in Chaps. 3 and 6, human languages can be learned by typical children just through exposure to them in active linguistic environments. There is no evidence that children have difficulty separating languages or their linguistic properties when learning them at a young age. Language learning is a more deliberate process for older children and adults, and is much more effortful, but for younger children, learning comes through exposure in an engaging linguistic community. However, language learning takes time, so exposing a child to a new language when first arriving at school will require continued exposure and use in active environments, for several years, before competency in that language is established. Let us first suppose that in our example both languages are well-developed to age-appropriate standards at school entry. This means that the basic linguistic properties of both languages are largely in place: The phonological systems have been

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mostly mastered, most of the syntactic systems are known (but with knowledge of more advanced structures still to come), age-appropriate vocabulary is known (but tens of thousands of more word meanings will be acquired), and age-appropriate processes are in hand for understanding discourse (but many more will be learned). Most of this knowledge would be based in informal language, with more formal, decontextualized language structures to be learned in subsequent years of school. But countering such a circumstance in language development, if any of the language systems are weak, then language comprehension in that language will be compromised (relative to that possessed by same-aged children who show no such weaknesses in components). And such weaknesses in language will have impacts on what can be understood through reading once (or if) acquired. Particularly, given the critical role of phonology in reading, if knowledge of the phonological system has not been adequately developed, then developing any skills in word recognition that are tied to phonology  – phonological awareness, knowledge of the orthographic principle, orthographic coding, and word recognition – will be exceedingly difficult. This will be true regardless of whether some reading skills have already been acquired in the other language of interest. That is, even if one knows the basic orthographic properties tied to reading in one language, if knowledge of the phonological properties of the second language are weak, then learning to read that language will be very difficult. The reason is simply that the lack of such knowledge hampers the ability to reliably associate individual phonological units (be they syllables or phonemes, as appropriate for the orthographic system to be learned) with individual orthographic units. If phonological skills are strong but there are weaknesses in syntax or semantics, then for any success that might be had in acquiring word recognition skill, understanding what is read will be weak due to the limitations these weaknesses will place on language comprehension. In short, learning to read a language that is only weakly known will not result in successful reading, the difficulties encountered related to the specific weaknesses in the language components. But beyond the linguistic parameters just discussed, language comprehension is also driven by knowledge of the world and the inferencing capacities such knowledge allows. As such knowledge is (largely) not specific to a language, whatever knowledge of the world is evidenced in language comprehension in one known language will also be evidenced in a known second language. The implication for our example is that if you master word recognition in a second language, reading comprehension will be driven by language comprehension in that language, which will include what you know about the world and can infer from that knowledge. In short, if one does not work on developing a child’s knowledge of the world, both language comprehension and reading comprehension will suffer. The next consideration focuses on the writing systems used in the two languages of interest, where the main concerns are on the underpinnings of word recognition. If both languages are based on alphabetic writing systems, then the skills learned under one system can make their acquisition under a second system less burdensome. If one has developed phonemic awareness in one language, gaining it in a second language will be easier if there is mastery of the phonological system of that

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second language. If, however, one writing system employs a syllabary while the second, to-be-learned system, employs an alphabet, then additional effort will be needed to learn the alphabetic principal (as opposed to the more general orthographic principle already learned from reading in the first language) as well as the phonemic awareness skills that underlie it (as opposed to the more general phonological awareness skills already acquired from learning in the first language). If, on the other hand, learning to read under the alphabetic writing system came first, then mastering the orthographic principle and the phonological awareness skills underlying reading in the second language may be more straightforward. Learning the orthographic units employed in reading the second language will depend on the complexity of orthographic characters to be learned. If the writing systems for the two languages of interest are both alphabetic, learning the second alphabet may be easier if only because the learner will better understand the principles of graphic displays (e.g., orientation, fonts, and case) and what is required to learn alphabetic characters. If the initially learned writing system employed a syllabary, then learning phonemic awareness as part of understanding alphabetic reading may be required to support learning alphabetic characters. Moving to orthographic coding, there are two issues to consider about our two languages of interest: (1) any skill levels developed when learning to read the first language and (2) the depth of the orthographic systems used in representing the phonology of the two languages. If no previous skill was developed in orthographic coding for reading in a first language, then acquiring it for a second known language will be no different than acquiring it as a first language (all other things equal). If, however, there is some orthographic coding skill present from learning to read in a first language, then acquiring that skill for the new language-to-be-read may be easier – it will largely depend on the depth of the orthography. Deep orthographies (e.g., English) will require more time and effort to master than more shallow ones (e.g., Spanish), and previous experience with another deep orthography may help orient the learner to the need to learn the contextual dependencies that appear in such orthographies, dependencies that appear much less frequently in more shallow orthographies. Shallow orthographies will be easier to acquire in general and won’t likely be assisted as much by previous experience given the relative ease with which they are learned. But what about word recognition? If orthographic coding is in place or on the way to being in place, then it can support the self-teaching mechanisms so important for acquiring automaticity in word recognition. But to be successful, print exposure is also required. The difficulty here is that in learning transparent orthographies one may think that reading has been accomplished given the ease with which words can be identified in such orthographies. But for reading to further improve, there will need to be improvements in comprehension. If these improvements come about largely through oral practices, then the opportunities to build automaticity in word recognition will diminish. Thus, children learning transparent orthographies need to build comprehension (as do children learning opaque orthographies) – but they also need to read to engage the self-teaching mechanisms that can advance word recognition, which largely comes from Matthew effects enabled by reading. Once children

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learning transparent orthographies have shown they know the orthographic-phonological connections in the language they are learning to read, explicit instruct on those relationships can be curtailed – but text reading needs to continue. The final issue concerns language of instruction. In many international settings, children come to school with competence in their native language but the language they are to learn to read in school is different, and frequently one they don’t speak. Further, the language of instruction may also be the language they are trying to learn to read. While exposure to that language during instruction might help them acquire it, until they develop even basic skills in it, using it as the language of instruction will likely add little support to the already difficult task they face in trying to learn to read a language they do not speak.

7.5  S  elect Issues in Reading in Non-English Phonologically-­Based Writing Systems There are several issues we think are important to discuss concerning reading in phonologically-based writing systems, some of which we touched on earlier in this chapter. The first issue is to continue to recognize that reading comprehension depends on the development of both language comprehension and word recognition regardless of the language to be read. While great skill in word recognition can lead one to think that reading has been mastered, that can only be the case when language comprehension has been mastered as well. The second issue is to recognize there can be great variability in learning word recognition due to the following: (1) learning the symbol set used in the orthography, (2) acquiring awareness of the phonological units represented in the orthography, (3) gaining an understanding of the orthographic principle that links the orthographic and phonological elements, and (4) mastering the relationships between the orthographic and phonological units. These can all require more or less effort than learning the corresponding elements in learning to read English, and it is important to be mindful of these (especially for those who only know about reading in English) in discussions of developing reading skills in other languages. The third issue concerns the implications of learning to read in orthographically transparent systems. In such systems (e.g., Spanish) learning the systematic relations between written and spoken words is relatively easy, taking both less time and effort to master than learning such relations in more opaque systems like English (Aro & Wimmer, 2003). In terms of the SVR, children learning to read under transparent orthographic systems where mastery of orthographic coding skills would come relatively early, would be expected at an earlier age to successfully comprehend through reading any passage they could comprehend if it was read to them. That is, their reading comprehension would be limited only by their language comprehension, not by their word recognition, which, as we have discussed, is typically the case for those learning to read in more opaque orthographies (e.g., English). But it is important to remember that automaticity in word recognition is still under development even for

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those learning to read in transparent orthographies. Further, as we have discussed (Chap. 6), such development is largely based on exposure to print. Thus, these children need to continue to read challenging texts as a mechanism for developing both word recognition and language comprehension; focusing only on the latter to boost reading comprehension, especially if done only through oral language, would miss the opportunities such children need to build automaticity in word recognition.

7.6  Summary In this chapter we discussed how the Cognitive Foundations Framework could provide a general understanding of reading within writing systems that represent the phonology of a language. We described phonologically-based systems as those where each individual written symbol (or symbol combination) represents an individual unit of the written language’s phonological system, and we distinguished two basic types, syllabaries and alphabetic systems, which represent syllables or phonemes, respectively. We briefly discussed pure logographic systems, where each individual written symbol represents a meaningful unit within the written language, but whose phonological properties are not represented within the logographic symbol itself. We described three critical properties of phonologically-based writing systems: the written symbols employed, the phonological units represented, and the relationships between the two. The first concerned the number and character of the symbols employed, including the intricacy and distinctiveness of each symbol in relation to other used symbols. We also discussed that in some of these systems, the symbols may not be arbitrary, but structured to systematically represent phonological features. We discussed that the phonological units represented in these writing systems are generally syllables or phonemes. Within the former systems, we distinguished syllabic and alphasyllabic syllabaries based on the type of information contained in the written units, namely, syllabic information only or syllabic information augmented with phonemic information, respectively. We also discussed alphabetic systems, whose characters represent individual phonemes, with some also capturing information at the distinctive feature level within phonemes. Finally, we discussed the character of the relationships between the written and phonological units, captured within the notion of orthographic depth, which ranges from shallow (where each written unit corresponds to a single phonological unit) to deep (where each written unit can represent several distinct phonological units). We next presented a generalized version of the Cognitive Foundations Framework to accommodate reading in other non-English phonologically-based writing systems. The model remained based on the SVR, but in the underlying foundations, those of the Cognitive Foundations of Reading Acquisition, some definitional changes were made. The components treating language comprehension were unchanged as these are universal elements underlying natural language, but some of the definitions of the knowledge-skill sets under word recognition were broadened to accommodate differences in the orthographic characteristics of

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phonologically-­based writing systems and the phonological levels to which orthographies are mapped. These latter adjustments included the following: • letter knowledge became knowledge of the orthographic units, the ability to recognize and manipulate the units of the orthography; • phonemic awareness became phonological awareness, the ability to consciously recognize and manipulate the phonological units represented in the orthography; • knowledge of the alphabetic principle became knowledge of the orthographic principle, the explicit understanding that there is a principled correspondence used in the writing system to link the relevant orthographic and phonologic units; and • alphabetic coding skill became orthographic coding skill, the ability to map the orthography of the writing system onto the phonology it represents. We closed with a discussion of how the Cognitive Foundations Framework could help us understand learning to read in a second language, focusing on issues influencing second language reading when some level of reading skill had already been acquired in another known language.

7.7  Questions for Further Thought The set of questions that follow are designed to extend your understanding of how the Cognitive Foundations Framework can be used to aid your understanding of reading in other writing systems. As with the earlier sets of questions presented, we believe these will be most helpful when discussed with colleagues, leading to even deeper understanding. 1. In what ways does reading through a writing system based on a syllabary differ from reading through one based on an alphabet? How are these different, in terms of both reading comprehension and word recognition, from reading through a pure logographic system? What about differences with hybrid logographic systems? 2. If transparent orthographies allow words to be easily recognized through their orthographic-phonological-semantic linkages, why are orthographic-semantic linkages still important to learn in becoming a successful reader? 3. In a language written through a transparent orthography, what would you expect the reading comprehension skills to be for children who have weak language comprehension skills but who quickly master the orthographic-phonological relationships of the writing system? 4. If learning the orthographic units of a given written language involves a great deal of time and effort (e.g., because of the number or complexity of those units), how would you think about the distribution of teaching resources across the various skills needed for learning to read in that language? 5. In what ways can learning to read a second language be facilitated by already being a reader in a first language? How might such learning be complicated by that circumstance rather than facilitated?

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6. For an individual with no reading comprehension skills, what are the implications of trying to learn to read in a second language (which is also the language of instruction) that is much weaker than the known first language?

7.8  What’s Next In this chapter we diverged from our previous focus on reading in English to consider reading in any phonologically-based writing system regardless of the language written. We now return to an exclusive focus on reading in English for the remainder of the book. We also now turn away from our focus on understanding the cognitive structures required for reading to explore how this knowledge can be used in practice to support those learning to read. We start with a brief overview of the three main tools used in the teaching of reading, following with a chapter devoted to each one of them.

References Aro, M., & Wimmer, H. (2003). Learning to read: English in comparison to six more regular orthographies. Applied Psycholinguistics, 24, 621–635. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0142716403000316 Bright, W. (1999). A matter of typology: Alphasyllabaries and abugidas. Written Language & Literacy, 2, 45–55. https://doi.org/10.1075/wll.2.1.03bri ∗Ehri, L. C. (2005). Development of sight word reading: Phases and findings. In M. J. Snowling & C. Hulme (Eds.), The science of reading: A handbook (pp. 135–154). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470757642.ch8 Florit, E., & Cain, K. (2011). The simple view of reading: Is it valid for different types of alphabetic orthographies? Educational Psychology Review, 23, 553–576. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s10648-011-9175-6 ∗Joshi, R. M., Tao, S., Aaron, P. G., & Quiroz, B. (2012). Cognitive component of componential model of reading applied to different orthographies. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 45, 480–486. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219411432690 Kiefer, M. (2012). SAS encoding: Understanding the details. Cary, NC: SAS Institute. Lervåg, A., & Aukrust, V.  G. (2010). Vocabulary knowledge is a critical determinant of the difference in reading comprehension growth between first and second language learners. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 51, 612–620. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/j.1469-7610.2009.02185.x ∗Moats, L. C. (2000). Speech to print: Language essentials for teachers. Baltimore, MD: Brookes Publishing. Proctor, C. P., Carlo, M., August, D., & Snow, C. (2005). Native Spanish-speaking children reading in English: Toward a model of comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 97, 246–256. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.97.2.246 Rayner, K., & Pollatsek, A. (1989). The psychology of reading. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Taylor, I., & Taylor, M. M. (2014). Writing and literacy in Chinese, Korean and Japanese (Rev. ed.). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins. Verhoeven, L., van Leeuwe, J., & Vermeer, A. (2011). Vocabulary growth and reading development across the elementary school years. Scientific Studies of Reading, 15, 8–25. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/10888438.2011.536125

Chapter 8

Overview of the Main Tools Used in Teaching Reading

8.1  Introduction Having concentrated to this point on specifying the cognitive skills that underlie reading and learning to read, we now focus on the application of this knowledge to teaching and learning. In the remaining chapters of this book (Chaps. 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13) we show how reading professionals can use the Cognitive Foundations Framework to build coherence in their reading practices. This involves explicitly linking what students must learn to become readers to the tools reading professionals have available to support such learning. These are the tools of standards, assessments, and curriculum and instruction. A brief overview of what these contain and how they are generally used follows; each will be discussed in detail, respectively, in the three chapters that follow this one.

8.2  The Discipline to Connect Teaching and Learning Remember that the big picture in this book is that knowledge that links teaching and learning will improve educational coherence by helping reading professionals make more informed and consistent decisions in practice, which will improve teaching effectiveness and learner outcomes. Importantly, the general focus in this book is intended to go beyond the specifics of the information it contains about reading and the tools available to support reading development. Over time our understanding of the cognitive skills that underlie reading will grow and the tools that reading professionals use to support learning will improve in step with this growth in knowledge. But the discipline to connect these to build coherence can be sustained along with such growth, which is our broader goal. We ask that reading professionals adopt the practice of making the linkage between the cognitive foundations of reading and the © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 W. A. Hoover, W. E. Tunmer, The Cognitive Foundations of Reading and Its Acquisition, Literacy Studies 20, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44195-1_8

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tools they use in practice to advance reading skills, moving beyond the specific linkages that are currently being made. Doing so will help them think more critically about their efforts to support reading development in individual students.

8.3  Standards, Assessments, and Curriculum and Instruction Standards for learning specify what students should know and be able to do, usually by grade level within given content areas (e.g., language arts, mathematics, history) or behavioral domains (e.g., social interactions). Higher-level standards in education generally represent broad outcomes that a community holds to be important for students to achieve, and they are typically accompanied by more detailed standards that describe a sequence for what should be learned to reach the stated outcomes. Standards are used in education practice to guide decisions about what should be both taught and assessed. Assessments, as applied in education, are instruments designed to provide information about student skills or knowledge that can be used to serve decision-making. Under one classification scheme, which we will discuss in more detail, reading assessments can be used for screening students to identify those that might encounter difficulties learning to read, for diagnosing the specific problems of students who encounter difficulties, for monitoring the progress of students in programs to determine whether they are learning as intended, and for evaluating outcomes to determine if long-term goals are being met. At a broad level, curriculum and instruction are teaching tools to support student development, with the curriculum providing the specifics of the content that is to be taught (being much more detailed regarding the content of teaching than any associated set of standards) and instruction specifying how such teaching is to be delivered. For reading there is generally a core instructional program that specifies what and how all students will be taught. However, if some students do not show adequate progress under the core instructional program, then other programs may be provided either as a modification, addition, or replacement to the core instructional program. These instructional adjustments (or tiers) are used by teachers based on how individual students respond to the instruction provided.

8.4  Gaining Coherence in Using Teaching Tools The main application of the Cognitive Foundations Framework is to help reading professionals gain coherence in practice through the tools they typically use to support students learning to read. The tools themselves generally cannot bring such coherence to this work because they tend to serve disparate purposes, are based on

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divergent knowledge bases, and make different assumptions about both teaching and learning. But the most salient reason for this lack of coherence across tools is that each one is designed to address a different question about reading – what should be known, what should be measured, and what should be taught and how. Tools designed to address these questions do not explicitly answer the question of why1 they address what they do, at least not for their intended users: • Standards address what children should know and be able to do, but not why specific children should learn the contents of a set of standards, learn them through a specific sequence, or learn them at a particular time. • Assessments address what aspects of student performance should be measured and when, but not why specific children should be assessed with specific assessments at specific times to support their individual development in reading. • Curriculum and instruction address what should be taught and how, but not why specific children should receive specific instructional sequences at specific times to support their individual development in reading. Cohesion across these tools can come from knowing why things are done, and an evidence-based framework depicting the cognitive skills underlying reading and learning to read can support such understanding by linking each tool to the knowledge and skills needed to master reading. Such a framework can also guide thinking about the issues behind poor reading performance. Unfortunately, we, as a profession, have not done enough to help reading professionals gain such cohesion in their practice, either through pre-service or in-service mechanisms. In the chapters that follow we link the cognitive requirements of reading to education tools through a set of maps. Each map takes the elements of a tool (e.g., individual standards, assessments in portfolios or subtasks within individual assessments, curricular activities) and depicts if, where, and the degree to which those tool elements address the cognitive components underlying reading (i.e., the elements of the Cognitive Foundations Framework). Looking across a map provides a view of how well the mapped tool content aligns to the hierarchy of cognitive requirements underlying reading, as well as revealing the cognitive domains not addressed through the content, and the degree to which the mapped content addresses other areas seen as not critical to the cognitive domains of reading. This information can be used to reflect on the likely adequacy of the content to support reading development when used in practice. In short, the maps serve as analytic devices for reflecting on the likely utility of a given tool’s content in addressing the cognitive components of reading when viewed from a broad perspective. Beyond mapping the content of tools, we also provide maps of key expert panel reviews of research focused on improving instruction. In these, we map the specific practice recommendations the expert panels draw from both their review of research and their practice experiences, showing, as with the tool maps, if, where, and the 1  We use the convention of italicizing key concepts and distinctions for emphasis, but we also italicize words, phrases, or sentences when denoting them as linguistic objects. In both cases, the context we provide should suffice to determine the particular use being served.

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degree to which those recommendations address the cognitive components underlying reading.

8.5  What’s Next With this brief introduction, let us now turn to the applications of the Cognitive Foundations Framework to the tools used by reading professionals to develop reading skills, demonstrating how these can be linked to create coherence. We will give specific examples under each tool and we will focus each of these examples at the early elementary school level to highlight connections across tools. We will start with standards.

Chapter 9

Standards and the Cognitive Foundations Framework

Acronyms CCSS Common Core of State Standards SVR Simple View of Reading

9.1  Introduction In this chapter we first discuss what standards are and why making links to the cognitive requirements of reading are critical for their effective use in practice. We then introduce a standards map, define its structure, and apply it to two sets of standards drawn from the most widely used reading standards in the United States, the Common Core of State Standards. The first set we map is the multi-strand reading-­ relevant standards taken from one grade level (5 strands containing a total of 57 standards at the kindergarten level) and the second set is the standards from one of these strands taken across six elementary grades (a strand containing a total of 53 standards across Grades K-5). Our goals are twofold: (1) to show how standards can be related to the Cognitive Foundations Framework and the reasoning behind the placements of individual standards within that framework; and (2) to discuss what the mapped relationships overall reveal across an entire set of reading-relevant standards at one grade level, and for one strand, across all the elementary grade levels to which it applies. After presenting each map we comment on what it shows as well as its limitations. We discuss how the maps can be used to strengthen coherence in practice, and we end with a summary of the chapter and a set of questions for further thought.

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9.2  Defining Standards Standards play an important role in reading education, especially in the United States, yet they are not explicitly tied, at least for their users, to what we know from cognitive science about reading. That is, such standards describe what students should1 know and be able to do, and, by implication, what should be taught to students who lack such knowledge and skill, but their links to cognitive science (where there are such) are not made transparent. This can leave reading professionals uninformed about the underlying cognitive structures students must develop to successfully master reading (and why) and how what is to be taught is intended to support that development. Without such understanding, the ability of reading professionals to make informed decisions based on student response to the instruction being provided is greatly impeded. Education standards addressing what students should know and be able to do in a given content domain can be seen to be research-based in two broad ways: (1) individual standards can represent the skills or knowledge sets that research supports as essential components of mastering the domain (i.e., a focus on the parts) or (2) research supports a claim that learning based on the overall set of standards (as opposed to some other set of standards) results in achieving mastery of the domain (i.e., a focus on the whole). Our discussion of standards as research-based is grounded within the first perspective. Note that a standard stating that students should be able to understand read text material of a specific complexity by a set age or grade level is not in itself a research-­ based standard (e.g., one of the third-grade standards discussed below is Read grade-level text with purpose and understanding). It simply expresses a goal a community desires its students achieve, perhaps accompanied by evidence that such a goal can be achieved by its students or that achieving it is related to other desired outcomes. However, what would make the set of standards that contain it research-­ based (in the first sense discussed earlier) is that other standards are included that are grounded in rigorous research specifying the skills or knowledge sets needed to meet the stated community standard (e.g., standards addressing mastery of alphabetic coding skills as a required component for achieving fluent word recognition, which is required for reading and understanding connected text). It is possible to map standards onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework as an analytic tool to help make the connections between standards and the cognitive development of reading skills explicit. Here, we can take a given set of standards (e.g., national, state, district, building, classroom) and cross them with the components of the framework to provide an analytic account of what components are (and are not) addressed through the standards.

1  We use the convention of italicizing key concepts and distinctions for emphasis, but we also italicize words, phrases, or sentences when denoting them as linguistic objects. In both cases, the context we provide should suffice to determine the particular use being served.

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An example of such a mapping is presented below to show how framework linkages with standards can be made. When reviewing the maps, keep in mind that they are intended only as examples. Our overall goal in presenting them is to show how the mapping structure can be used to build understanding of the linkages between standards and the cognitive requirements of reading. Through the example, our audience of reading professionals will learn to use the provided structure to map the standards in play in their local contexts onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework.

9.3  S  tandards for English Language Arts in the United States Launched in the United States in 2009, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers partnered to develop the Common Core of State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy, more frequently referenced as the Common Core or CCSS (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010). The standards were derived through regional hearings and comments that came from a variety of sources; they were not separately vetted for consistency with available research. Thus, these standards represent a distilled perspective taken across an interested set of varied individuals and organizations on the knowledge sets they deemed essential for students in the United States to succeed in reading. The Common Core effort promised that the standards, if appropriately taught and mastered, would produce students who upon completing secondary education would be either (1) college ready with no need to take remedial course work or (2) prepared to enter the workforce and successfully undertake workforce training programs. The CCSS cover kindergarten through Grade 12 and are built around a broad set of core college- and career-ready anchor standards. Grade-level standards translate these into more specific end-of-year expectations that yield an overall progression of expectations through the grades toward achieving the anchor standards. In previous practice, individual states (or even school districts) within the United States had their own standards – and several still do. But since many states (41 to date) have adopted the CCSS or adapted them with only small modifications, we will use them as the focus of our discussion on standards as tools.

9.4  Mapping a Portion of the Common Core State Standards In this section we present sample mappings of the reading-related CCSS onto the components of the Cognitive Foundations Framework. As stated above, the CCSS cover children enrolled in kindergarten through Grade 12, but since this is but an example of how such maps operate and the uses they can serve, we only present maps for the five strands of reading-relevant standards at kindergarten. In a later

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section we will present a map of one of these strands across the six grade levels to which it applies, kindergarten through Grade 5, as a further example. The relevant standards by strand, reprinted for kindergarten below, can be found at: http://www. corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/. (Note: All CCSS standards cited in this chapter were retrieved from this site on December 4, 2019.) The maps list the standards down the left column following the order used in the CCSS reference document. The maps list the framework components across the top presented left to right, moving from higher to lower levels in the hierarchy under the three constructs of the Simple View of Reading (SVR) – reading comprehension, language comprehension, and word recognition. Note that the top horizontal heading portrays the hierarchical representation of the framework components so that the user can keep in mind the relative positioning of each standard within the framework. The maps cover the five strands of reading-relevant CCSS excluding the strands for Writing and for reading and writing in the content areas (i.e., Literacy in History/Social Studies and Literacy in Science and Technical Subjects). The listed standards contained in the kindergarten maps follow the standards’ four-level labelling convention as follows: • Part One – Strand Code (five strands): –– –– –– –– ––

RL: Reading Standards for Literature RI: Reading Standards for Informational Text RF: Reading Standards for Foundational Skills SL: Speaking and Listening Standards L: Language Standards

• Part Two – Grade Level: Kindergarten through Grade 12 (K through 12) • Parts Three and Four – Standard and Sub-levels (if any): –– Standard (number): 1 up through 10, as appropriate –– Standard sub-level, if applicable (upper-case letters): A up through G, as appropriate Thus, as an example, the label RF.K.1.A denotes Reading Standards for Foundational Skills. Kindergarten. Standard 1. Standard sub-level A. There are content clusters within each strand of standards, and these have one or more standards associated with them. While these clusters are specified in presenting each strand below, they are not noted within the maps themselves, as the associated standards they contain (which are all tabled) provide the detail about how the clusters are realized at the respective grade level. To make the maps more compact, we have followed the convention of using the three highest levels of the labelling convention (i.e., the strand, grade level, and standard number) to define the rows of the map. We then table under the framework component column that best represents the standard either (1) the standard’s sub-­ level letter, A up through G when the standard has sub-levels; or (2) an X when there are no sub-levels under the given standard. Every standard under the selected strand is tabled and any multiple sub-level entries placed within the same cell are displayed

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in alphabetic order, which matches the order in which they appear in the CCSS. When there are sub-levels within a standard, only the sub-levels are tabled, disregarding the overarching standard itself as its content is carried within the sub-levels, which are more specific. (Note, however, that the overarching standard is used to inform placement of its sub-level(s) under the cognitive components of the framework.) Standard placement within the framework hierarchy corresponds to the label contained either within or to the right of the first colored cell encountered in the heading when moving up the column from where the standard indicator (A up through G, or X) is placed. When a standard is judged to be fully relevant to a framework component its tabled entry (A up through G, or X) is bolded. In contrast, if a tabled entry is not bolded, then it is judged to have some relevance to the component but only in a partial fashion. If a standard is judged to be neither fully nor partially relevant to any of the framework components, then the appropriate tabled entry is placed in the far-­ right Other category, which, by definition, includes only bolded (i.e., fully relevant) entries. Note that a standard’s placement in the Other category does not mean the standard is unimportant for literacy learning, only that it is not critical for acquiring reading comprehension as that construct is defined in the Cognitive Foundations Framework. In the standard column, there are occasionally codes that appear in parentheses next to the standard label. These are taken verbatim from the Common Core State Standards for the selected standard and indicate the following: • NA: Not applicable under the strand • NA2: Not applicable under the strand until Grade 2 For the framework components, full or abbreviated names (appearing in parentheses below) are used as follows (these presented in their hierarchical position): • Reading Comprehension –– Language Comprehension Background Knowledge and Inferencing Skills (Bckgrnd Know) Linguistic Knowledge • Phonological Knowledge (Phono Know) • Syntactic Knowledge (Syntax Know) • Semantic Knowledge (Sem Know) –– Word Recognition Alphabetic Coding Skill • Concepts about Print (Print Concept) • Knowledge of the Alphabetic Principle (Alphabetic Principle) –– Letter Knowledge (Letter Know) –– Phonemic Awareness (Phonemic Aware)

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Finally, standards are assigned to components where they are judged to be a best fit, meaning that the skills or applications the standard describes (1) overlap with a substantial part of the cognitive component under which it is listed and (2) would not represent a better fit under a different framework component. Any standard that could fall under multiple cognitive components is placed only under the one judged to represent the singular best fit. Further, standards are placed in the lowest level of any given component hierarchy that is appropriate (e.g., a standard that focuses on alphabetic coding skill is placed under that component even though the skill covered would also be required for word recognition and reading comprehension). We discuss the reasons behind specific placements below and these discussions are intended to model the thinking and dialogue we hope will take place among the users of this work when mapping other standards. Overall, the maps are intended to support exploration of the following kinds of questions about how a set of standards relates to the cognitive components of reading: • Do the placements of each standard by component seem appropriate; should any of the standard placements be adjusted? Are there components that are not addressed by any standard and what is the implication of that for reading practices? Are there standards that do not address any component, and if so, are they important to address in literacy development and why? • For each cognitive component, how well is it addressed by the standards placed under it? Which components seem under-addressed by the standards associated with them (i.e., the associated standards do not seem to fully address all the cognitive dimensions contained in the component)? What might be required in terms of instructional effort or time to meet the standard associated with a given cognitive component? What are the implications for component development if only limited attention is directed at its associated standards? • Which components are addressed under several standards? Can those standards be applied in practice in a way that supports coherent component development? • Is there accessible assessment information that could help determine whether adequate progress was being made on meeting the standards under those components where they appear? • What is the vertical progression of focus (both within and over grade levels) for the standards that appear under a given component and does the progression seem appropriate for development of that component? Can those standards be applied in practice in a way that supports coherent component development? What do those standards imply about appropriate actions to consider when students struggle to acquire the relevant skills under any of those standards? • Is the corresponding focus of time and intensity within the curriculum that is devoted to each standard and its corresponding component appropriate? If not, can adjustments be made within the curriculum or in its sequencing? Within schools we believe these questions would be most productively addressed in group conversations of school personnel representing different grade levels and different areas of education expertise (e.g., curriculum, remediation, assessment). For

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classroom-level work, the outcomes to be sought through such conversations include whether adjustments to teaching would be warranted and could be made based on the intersections of curriculum, standards, and framework components, with follow-up designed and carried out that would allow critical looks at student performance relative to any adjustments made. With this introduction, let us consider our first set of CCSS maps, those based on the five strands of reading-relevant standards at kindergarten.

9.4.1  T  he Maps of the Reading-Relevant Common Core State Standards for Kindergarten The five reading-relevant strands of the kindergarten standards contained in the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy are mapped onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework components below. For each relevant strand, we first list the standards it contains (quoted verbatim) followed by the map of that strand of standards onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework. We then follow with comments about the placements of the individual standards within the framework and conclude with a discussion of what the map reveals overall about the strand and its relations to the cognitive framework components. After presenting the five strands and respective maps, we discuss the general picture of the kindergarten reading-relevant CCSS across the five maps. We begin our discussion of the relevant kindergarten CCSS with the Reading: Literature strand, which is focused on understanding the narrative text of literature. 9.4.1.1  Reading: Literature (Kindergarten) There are ten standards in this strand spanning four clusters (note that one of the standards does not apply to the literature strand). The clusters and standards are as follows2: Key Ideas and Details: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.K.1 With prompting and support, ask and answer questions about key details in a text. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.K.2 With prompting and support, retell familiar stories, including key details. 2  © Copyright 2010 National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers. All rights reserved. Reprinted in accord with the terms of its public license.

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CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.K.3 With prompting and support, identify characters, settings, and major events in a story. Craft and Structure: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.K.4 Ask and answer questions about unknown words in a text. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.K.5 Recognize common types of texts (e.g., storybooks, poems). CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.K.6 With prompting and support, name the author and illustrator of a story and define the role of each in telling the story. Integration of Knowledge and Ideas: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.K.7 With prompting and support, describe the relationship between illustrations and the story in which they appear (e.g., what moment in a story an illustration depicts). CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.K.8 (Not applicable to literature) CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.K.9 With prompting and support, compare and contrast the adventures and experiences of characters in familiar stories. Range of Reading and Level of Text Complexity: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.K.10 Actively engage in group reading activities with purpose and understanding. Table 9.1 presents the map of the nine applicable standards for this strand onto the components of the cognitive framework. First note that five standards under the Reading: Literature strand have been placed under the language comprehension component of the framework. In kindergarten we assume that typical students, with limited word recognition skills, will have accessed the linguistic content of the text material referenced in these five standards through their listening skills rather than their reading skills. At Grade 1 and above, the corresponding standards would be placed under the reading comprehension component assuming the linguistic content of the referenced text materials would more typically be accessed through student reading skills. If that is not the case for a given situation, then these placements would be moved to fall under the language comprehension component as in the relevant kindergarten maps. With that

X

X

X X X X

Reading Comprehension Language Comprehension Linguistic Knowledge Backgrnd Know Phono Syntax Sem Know Know Know Word Recognition Alphabetic Coding Skill Print Alphabetic Principle Concept Letter Phonemic Know Aware

X

X X

Other

Notes: Standard placement within the framework hierarchy corresponds to the label contained either within or to the right of the first colored cell encountered in the heading when moving up the column from where the standard indicator is placed. When a standard is judged to be fully relevant to a framework component its tabled entry is bolded; if it is judged to have some relevance to the component but only in a partial fashion, its tabled entry is not bolded. If a standard is judged to be neither fully nor partially relevant to any of the framework components, then the tabled entry is placed in the far-right Other category, which, by definition, includes only bolded (i.e., fully relevant) entries Abbreviations: Alphabetic Principle knowledge of the alphabetic principle, Bckgrnd Know background knowledge and inferencing skills, Letter Know letter knowledge, NA not applicable under the strand, Phonemic Aware phonemic awareness, Phono Know phonological knowledge, Print Concept concepts about print, RL.K. Reading Literature strand for kindergarten (with standards 1–10), Sem Know semantic knowledge, Syntax Know syntactic knowledge

Standard: RL.K.1 RL.K.2 RL.K.3 RL.K.4 RL.K.5 RL.K.6 RL.K.7 RL.K.8 (NA) RL.K.9 RL.K.10

Component:

Table 9.1  The map of the kindergarten Reading: Literature strand of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework components

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understanding, let us describe more fully the placements of the nine standards (as noted above, the eighth standard is not applicable in Reading: Literature but is included as a standard within Reading: Informational Text, which is discussed in the next section). For those standards placed under the language comprehension component, the first three deal with asking and answering questions about story details, retelling familiar stories, and identifying characters, settings, and major events in stories; the ninth standard calls for comparing and contrasting what characters in different stories are doing. These all deal with comprehending language represented in text (but as noted above, likely accessed through listening comprehension for those in kindergarten). The seventh standard is only a partial match under the language comprehension component as it focuses on describing relations between story illustrations and story text. While illustrations fall outside our notion of reading comprehension as they are not linguistic objects, the text of the story is clearly based in language, and thus, the indication of partial relevance in this placement. The fourth standard addresses whether children ask and answer questions about unknown words encountered in text. This is more appropriately placed under the semantic component of the framework rather than under a comprehension component (reading or language comprehension) given that it deals more with the meaning of individual words (vocabulary) than with connected text. The fifth, sixth, and tenth Reading: Literature standards have been placed under Other in the map. The first two deal with aspects of literacy that go beyond the definition of reading in the Cognitive Foundations Framework, focused on recognizing common types of texts and distinguishing the roles of author and illustrator in a story. The last standard addresses non-specific responsiveness in group reading activities, which has a focus that is more social and behavioral than cognitive. Overall, the content covered in this strand is focused on developing an initial understanding of literature, one more directly based in language comprehension than reading comprehension given the likely reliance on listening skills for kindergarten students with limited word recognition skills. The strand deals with understanding story details, including being able to identify characters, settings, and events, and being able to contrast content across familiar stories; it also touches on developing vocabulary. The content contained in the next CCSS strand parallels that of the strand just described but deals with informational texts rather than literature. 9.4.1.2  Reading: Informational Text (Kindergarten) As in the previous strand, there are ten standards in this strand (spanning the same four clusters); while one standard did not apply in the previous strand, they all apply here. The clusters and ten standards are as follows3: 3  © Copyright 2010 National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers. All rights reserved. Reprinted in accord with the terms of its public license.

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Key Ideas and Details: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.K.1 With prompting and support, ask and answer questions about key details in a text. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.K.2 With prompting and support, identify the main topic and retell key details of a text. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.K.3 With prompting and support, describe the connection between two individuals, events, ideas, or pieces of information in a text. Craft and Structure: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.K.4 With prompting and support, ask and answer questions about unknown words in a text. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.K.5 Identify the front cover, back cover, and title page of a book. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.K.6 Name the author and illustrator of a text and define the role of each in presenting the ideas or information in a text. Integration of Knowledge and Ideas: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.K.7 With prompting and support, describe the relationship between illustrations and the text in which they appear (e.g., what person, place, thing, or idea in the text an illustration depicts). CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.K.8 With prompting and support, identify the reasons an author gives to support points in a text. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.K.9 With prompting and support, identify basic similarities in and differences between two texts on the same topic (e.g., in illustrations, descriptions, or procedures). Range of Reading and Level of Text Complexity: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.K.10 Actively engage in group reading activities with purpose and understanding.

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Table 9.2 displays the map of the above ten standards contained in this strand. As we saw in the Reading: Literature standards in kindergarten, the Reading: Informational Text standards, which are parallel in content save the focus on informational texts rather than literature, are also mostly tied to the cognitive components of comprehension. And again, these are listed under the component of language comprehension rather than under reading comprehension given access to the text material referenced in the standards in kindergarten is presumed to be gained through student listening skills rather than reading skills. For those six standards placed under the language comprehension component, the first three deal with asking and answering questions about the text, including key details, the main topic, and the connections between individuals, events, and ideas given in the text. The eighth standard, which was not applicable in the Reading: Literature strand, calls for identifying reasoning around points made in text, and the ninth standard concerns comparisons between two texts dealing with the same topic. These all deal with comprehending language represented in text (but as noted above, likely accessed through listening comprehension for those in kindergarten). The seventh standard is only a partial match under the language comprehension component as it focuses on describing relations between illustrations and the content of the text; the ninth standard is also only a partial match given that the contrasts between texts that are called for are allowed to be made on the basis of differences between illustrations. Again, while illustrations fall outside our notion of reading comprehension given that they are not rooted in language, the text itself is clearly based in language, and thus, the indication of partial relevance in these placements. As with literature, the fourth standard addresses whether children ask and answer questions about unknown words encountered in text. This is more appropriately placed under the semantic component of the framework rather than under a comprehension component (reading or language comprehension) given that it deals more with the meaning of individual words (vocabulary) than with connected text. And the fifth standard is placed under the concepts about print component (rather than under Other as it was in the previous strand), as it focuses on the ability of children to recognize basic parts of a book (e.g., front and back cover). The sixth and tenth standards have been placed under Other in the map. The first deals with identifying the author and illustrator and understanding their different roles, which as in the previous strand, goes beyond the definition of reading in the Cognitive Foundations Framework. The tenth standard addresses non-specific responsiveness in group reading activities, which has a focus that is less cognitive than social and behavioral. Overall, the content covered in this strand is focused on developing an initial understanding of text material based in language comprehension rather than reading comprehension. This strand deals with understanding the details contained in textual material, including being able to identify individuals, events, and ideas, and being able to compare and contrast content across texts treating the same topic. While the two CCSS strands just described focused largely on the language comprehension of kindergarten students, the next strand we consider is focused on skills underlying word recognition.

X X X

X X X X

Reading Comprehension Language Comprehension Linguistic Knowledge Backgrnd Know Phono Syntax Sem Know Know Know

X

Word Recognition Alphabetic Coding Skill Print Alphabetic Principle Concept Letter Phonemic Know Aware

X

X

Other

Notes: Standard placement within the framework hierarchy corresponds to the label contained either within or to the right of the first colored cell encountered in the heading when moving up the column from where the standard indicator is placed. When a standard is judged to be fully relevant to a framework component its tabled entry is bolded; if it is judged to have some relevance to the component but only in a partial fashion, its tabled entry is not bolded. If a standard is judged to be neither fully nor partially relevant to any of the framework components, then the tabled entry is placed in the far-right Other category, which, by definition, includes only bolded (i.e., fully relevant) entries Abbreviations: Alphabetic Principle knowledge of the alphabetic principle, Bckgrnd Know background knowledge and inferencing skills, Letter Know letter knowledge, Phonemic Aware phonemic awareness, Phono Know phonological knowledge, Print Concept concepts about print, RI.K. Reading Informational Text strand for kindergarten (with standards 1–10), Sem Know semantic knowledge, Syntax Know syntactic knowledge

Standard: RI.K.1 RI.K.2 RI.K.3 RI.K.4 RI.K.5 RI.K.6 RI.K.7 RI.K.8 RI.K.9 RI.K.10

Component:

Table 9.2  The map of the kindergarten Reading: Informational Text strand of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework components

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9.4.1.3  Reading: Foundational Skills (Kindergarten) In this strand, there are only four main standards (spanning four clusters), though three of these contain several sub-levels, which yield 14 standards in total. The clusters and standards are as follows4: Print Concepts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.1 Demonstrate understanding of the organization and basic features of print. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.1.A Follow words from left to right, top to bottom, and page by page. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.1.B Recognize that spoken words are represented in written language by specific sequences of letters. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.1.C Understand that words are separated by spaces in print. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.1.D Recognize and name all upper- and lowercase letters of the alphabet. Phonological Awareness: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.2 Demonstrate understanding of spoken words, syllables, and sounds (phonemes). CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.2.A Recognize and produce rhyming words. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.2.B Count, pronounce, blend, and segment syllables in spoken words. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.2.C Blend and segment onsets and rhymes of single-syllable spoken words. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.2.D

4  © Copyright 2010 National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers. All rights reserved. Reprinted in accord with the terms of its public license.

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Isolate and pronounce the initial, medial vowel, and final sounds (phonemes) in three-phoneme (consonant-vowel-consonant, or CVC) words.∗ (This does not include CVCs ending with /l/, /r/, or /x/.) ∗ Words, syllables, or phonemes written in /slashes/ refer to their pronunciation or phonology. Thus, /CVC/ is a word with three phonemes regardless of the number of letters in the spelling of the word. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.2.E Add or substitute individual sounds (phonemes) in simple, one-syllable words to make new words. Phonics and Word Recognition: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.3 Know and apply grade-level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.3.A Demonstrate basic knowledge of one-to-one letter-sound correspondences by producing the primary sound or many of the most frequent sounds for each consonant. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.3.B Associate the long and short sounds with the common spellings (graphemes) for the five major vowels. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.3.C Read common high-frequency words by sight (e.g., the, of, to, you, she, my, is, are, do, does). CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.3.D Distinguish between similarly spelled words by identifying the sounds of the letters that differ. Fluency: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.4 Read emergent-reader texts with purpose and understanding. Table 9.3 shows the map of the above 14 standards contained in this strand. Taking each standard in turn, the first and third sub-levels of the first standard (1.A and 1.C) address the ability of children to follow printed words over multiple pages and to understand that words in print are separated by spaces, which both fall under the concepts about print component of the framework. The second sub-level of this standard (1.B) is focused on awareness that spoken words are represented by specific letter sequences in print. This more closely tracks knowledge of the alphabetic principle than concepts about print, but the tabled indicator is not bolded as

Reading Comprehension Language Comprehension Linguistic Knowledge Backgrnd Know Phono Syntax Sem Know Know Know

ABD X

AC

B

D DE

Word Recognition Alphabetic Coding Skill Alphabetic Principle Print Concept Letter Phonemic Know Aware

ABC C

Other

Notes: Standard placement within the framework hierarchy corresponds to the label contained either within or to the right of the first colored cell encountered in the heading when moving up the column from where the standard indicator is placed. When a standard is judged to be fully relevant to a framework component its tabled entry (X for a single standard, A up through E for any sub-levels of the standard) is bolded; if it is judged to have some relevance to the component but only in a partial fashion, its tabled entry is not bolded. If a standard is judged to be neither fully nor partially relevant to any of the framework components, then the tabled entry is placed in the far-right Other category, which, by definition, includes only bolded (i.e., fully relevant) entries Abbreviations: Alphabetic Principle knowledge of the alphabetic principle, Bckgrnd Know background knowledge and inferencing skills, Letter Know letter knowledge, Phonemic Aware phonemic awareness, Phono Know phonological knowledge, Print Concept concepts about print, RF.K. Reading Foundational Skills strand for kindergarten (with standards 1–4), Sem Know semantic knowledge, Syntax Know syntactic knowledge

Standard: RF.K.1 RF.K.2 RF.K.3 RF.K.4

Component:

Table 9.3  The map of the kindergarten Reading: Foundational Skills strand of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework components

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this sub-level of the standard is judged to only represent a partial match to that component. The reason for the partial match is that the standard is not referencing the specific relationship between letters and phonemes as required under the alphabetic principle, but rather a more general relationship between letters in print and spoken words. The fourth sub-level of this standard (1.D) is focused on the letter knowledge component. We note that this standard entails naming all the letters in both upper and lower cases – and we remind the reader that naming per se is not what is important under this component, but rather the ability to recognize each letter even though naming is typically how such recognition is both taught and assessed. The second standard focuses on phonological awareness, where the first three sub-levels deal with rhyming words, syllables, and onset-rime segments (2.A, 2.B, and 2.C, respectively), while the last two (2.D and 2.E) deal with phonemic segmentation. The first three sub-levels of this standard are all placed under Other because these standards do not directly deal with phonemic awareness, but rather more broadly with phonological awareness and segmentation of linguistic units that are at higher levels than the phonemic level. Segmentation at these higher levels is not critical for learning segmentation skills at the phonemic level, though for those struggling to acquire this skill, learning segmentation at the higher levels may help learning at the lower levels. The last two sub-levels directly deal with phonemic awareness and are placed under this framework component accordingly. The third standard focuses on recognizing words, dealing with providing the sounds of each consonant, knowing the long and short sounds associated with the letters representing the major vowels, recognizing high frequency words, and distinguishing between similarly spelled words by recognizing the letters and sounds that are different between them. These have all been placed under the alphabetic coding skill component save the third sub-level of the standard (3.C) dealing with naming high-frequency words “by sight,” which has been placed under Other. The reason for this latter placement is as follows. As we have said learning to read in alphabetic systems requires learning the relationships between the orthographic and phonologic representations of words. Further, recall our discussion of the great difficulties that learning words as logographs represents, where arbitrary features in the printed word are associated with the spoken word, a non-generative strategy that is bound to fail as more words are encountered. Thus, if this standard (3.C) intends learning in this latter way, then it is not part of the cognitive skills required for learning to read. However, if what is to be learned here is how these high-frequency words represent exceptions to the alphabetic coding rules that are the focus of the other three sub-levels of this standard, then it could be relevant to alphabetic coding. However, there is no indication that this is what is intended under this standard and thus its placement under Other is to make it clear that identifying words by sight (i.e., without analysis of the underlying orthographic and phonologic structures) is not part of what is required for learning to read; indeed, it can be antithetical to it. Before leaving this discussion, it is important to address why the three relevant sub-levels of this standard (i.e., 3.A, 3.B, and 3.D) were not placed under knowledge

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of the alphabetic principle. The reason for instead listing them under alphabetic coding skill is that each sub-level standard deals with mastering specific grapheme-­ phoneme relationships instead of recognizing a generic relationship (as is the case in the second sub-level of the first standard, 1.B). The fourth standard (RF.K.4) is focused on reading texts with purpose and understanding, and at higher grade levels would be placed under the reading comprehension component. However, at kindergarten, where word recognition skills are typically low, it is better placed under the concepts about print component reflecting development of an understanding that print represents connected spoken language. Overall, the standards in this strand (notwithstanding those standards listed in Other) address the initial skills needed for mastering word recognition – concepts about print; letter knowledge, phonemic awareness, knowledge of the alphabetic principle; and basic alphabetic coding skills. While the standards in the strand are given as a list, note that the sequence from the first through the fourth standard shows a rough correspondence to the hierarchical relationships (lower to higher) represented within the word recognition component of the Cognitive Foundations Framework. The listing, however, gives no explicit sense of such relationships between the standards, which is a major drawback in their application. Further, there is no focus on language comprehension within this strand, which could leave the impression that only word recognition skills are foundational for learning to read. The three strands of standards just presented are the entire set of Common Core State Standards that are focused specifically on Reading within the broader domain of English Language Arts and Literacy. The next two strands are from the broader domain, the first focused on Speaking and Listening, the second on Language. We turn to these now. 9.4.1.4  Speaking and Listening (Kindergarten) In this strand, there are six standards (spanning two clusters), one with two sub-­ levels, thus yielding seven standards in total. The clusters and standards are as follows5: Comprehension and Collaboration: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.K.1 Participate in collaborative conversations with diverse partners about kindergarten topics and texts with peers and adults in small and larger groups. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.K.1.A

5  © Copyright 2010 National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers. All rights reserved. Reprinted in accord with the terms of its public license.

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Follow agreed-upon rules for discussions (e.g., listening to others and taking turns speaking about the topics and texts under discussion). CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.K.1.B Continue a conversation through multiple exchanges. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.K.2 Confirm understanding of a text read aloud or information presented orally or through other media by asking and answering questions about key details and requesting clarification if something is not understood. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.K.3 Ask and answer questions in order to seek help, get information, or clarify something that is not understood. Presentation of Knowledge and Ideas: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.K.4 Describe familiar people, places, things, and events and, with prompting and support, provide additional detail. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.K.5 Add drawings or other visual displays to descriptions as desired to provide additional detail. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.K.6 Speak audibly and express thoughts, feelings, and ideas clearly. Table 9.4 provides the map of the above seven standards contained in this strand. All the Speaking and Listening standards are centered on language usage and most have been tabled under the language comprehension component. These include standards focused on continuing conversations through multiple turns, confirming understanding of provided information and asking questions as needed to assure clarity of understanding, and describing what is understood and expressing what is thought, all supporting growth in using and comprehending language. There are two exceptions in the general placements, which include the following. The first sub-level of the first standard (1.A) calls for children to know and abide by rules for group discussions. Since this standard is focused on the rules to be followed in discussions rather than the language of such discussions, it is placed in the Other category. The fifth standard is focused on adding illustrations to descriptions, and while understanding any descriptive information given through language would be included under the language comprehension component, illustrating such information to add detail would not. As the focus of this standard is on providing illustrations, it has been placed under Other as well. Overall, the Listening and Speaking strand at kindergarten is generally focused on language comprehension, but more particularly in using and comprehending

X

B X X X

Reading Comprehension Language Comprehension Backgrnd Linguistic Knowledge Know Phono Syntax Sem Know Know Know

Word Recognition Alphabetic Coding Skill Print Alphabetic Principle Concept Letter Phonemic Know Aware

X

A

Other

Notes: Standard placement within the framework hierarchy corresponds to the label contained either within or to the right of the first colored cell encountered in the heading when moving up the column from where the standard indicator is placed. When a standard is judged to be fully relevant to a framework component its tabled entry (X for single standard, A up through B for any sub-levels of the standard) is bolded; if it is judged to have some relevance to the component but only in a partial fashion, its tabled entry is not bolded. If a standard is judged to be neither fully nor partially relevant to any of the framework components, then the tabled entry is placed in the far-right Other category, which, by definition, includes only bolded (i.e., fully relevant) entries Abbreviations: Alphabetic Principle knowledge of the alphabetic principle, Bckgrnd Know ackground knowledge and inferencing skills, Letter Know letter knowledge, Phonemic Aware phonemic awareness, Phono Know phonological knowledge, Print Concept concepts about print, Sem Know semantic knowledge, SL.K. Speaking and Listening strand for kindergarten (with standards 1–6), Syntax Know syntactic knowledge

Standard: SL.K.1 SL.K.2 SL.K.3 SL.K.4 SL.K.5 SL.K.6

Component:

Table 9.4  The map of the kindergarten Speaking and Listening strand of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework components

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155

language in the school environment. The strand does not deal with any of the individual subcomponents of language comprehension, though we will find some of these addressed in the Language strand that we consider next. 9.4.1.5  Language (Kindergarten) In this strand, there are six standards (spanning three clusters), with one standard not applying until second grade and four standards containing sub-levels, yielding 17 standards in total. The clusters and standards are6: Conventions of Standard English: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.K.1 Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English grammar and usage when writing or speaking. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.K.1.A Print many upper- and lowercase letters. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.K.1.B Use frequently occurring nouns and verbs. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.K.1.C Form regular plural nouns orally by adding /s/ or /es/ (e.g., dog, dogs; wish, wishes). CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.K.1.D Understand and use question words (interrogatives) (e.g., who, what, where, when, why, how). CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.K.1.E Use the most frequently occurring prepositions (e.g., to, from, in, out, on, off, for, of, by, with). CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.K.1.F Produce and expand complete sentences in shared language activities. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.K.2 Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English capitalization, punctuation, and spelling when writing. 6  © Copyright 2010 National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers. All rights reserved. Reprinted in accord with the terms of its public license.

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CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.K.2.A Capitalize the first word in a sentence and the pronoun I. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.K.2.B Recognize and name end punctuation. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.K.2.C Write a letter or letters for most consonant and short-vowel sounds (phonemes). CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.K.2.D Spell simple words phonetically, drawing on knowledge of sound-letter relationships. Knowledge of Language: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.K.3 (Begins in Grade 2) Vocabulary Acquisition and Use: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.K.4 Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases based on kindergarten reading and content. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.K.4.A Identify new meanings for familiar words and apply them accurately (e.g., knowing duck is a bird and learning the verb to duck). CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.K.4.B Use the most frequently occurring inflections and affixes (e.g., -ed, -s, re-, un-, pre-, -ful, -less) as a clue to the meaning of an unknown word. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.K.5 With guidance and support from adults, explore word relationships and nuances in word meanings. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.K.5.A Sort common objects into categories (e.g., shapes, foods) to gain a sense of the concepts the categories represent. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.K.5.B Demonstrate understanding of frequently occurring verbs and adjectives by relating them to their opposites (antonyms). CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.K.5.C

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Identify real-life connections between words and their use (e.g., note places at school that are colorful). CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.K.5.D Distinguish shades of meaning among verbs describing the same general action (e.g., walk, march, strut, prance) by acting out the meanings. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.K.6 Use words and phrases acquired through conversations, reading and being read to, and responding to texts. Table 9.5 gives the map of the above 17 standards contained in this strand. The Language strand addresses both the language comprehension and word recognition components of the Cognitive Foundations Framework; we discuss the latter first. The first sub-level of the first standard (1.A) is focused on printing letters and is placed under the letter knowledge component. The second standard has four sub-levels. The first two sub-levels of this standard (2.A and 2.B) are focused on the use of capitalization and punctuation in print; they are placed under the concepts about print component, though they go beyond the most basic concepts of print generally associated with this component. The remaining two sub-levels of this standard (2.C and 2.D) are focused on associating letters with the sounds and phonemes they represent in printed words, and these are both placed under the alphabetic coding skill component. Turning to language comprehension, four of the remaining five sub-levels of the first standard (1.B–1.E) deal with word usage in phrases or sentences (nouns/verbs, plurals, interrogatives, and prepositions, respectively), and the last sub-level (1.F) is focused on the production of complete sentences in discourse. These are all placed under the syntactic knowledge component as the targeted usage is focused on words used in phrases and sentences as opposed to usage in isolation. The two sub-levels in the fourth standard (4.A and 4.B) deal with word meaning, including recognizing new meanings for already known words and using inflections and affixes in deriving the meaning of new words. The four sub-levels of the fifth standard of this strand (5.A - 5.D) focus on vocabulary, specifically, learning categories and opposites (for nouns, verbs, and adjectives), connecting meanings to their use in everyday settings, and making fine distinctions between similar words. As these all deal with word meaning in isolation, they are all placed under the semantic knowledge component. Finally, the sixth standard is focused on using words learned through encounters with connected discourse, and thus is tabled under the language comprehension component. As stated at the beginning of this discussion, the strand on Language in kindergarten deals with both word recognition and language comprehension components, with substantially more focus on the latter. The few standards under word recognition address letter knowledge, concepts about print, and alphabetic coding skill; there is no explicit link to the Foundational Skills strand discussed earlier that deal

X

BCDEF

AB ABCD

Reading Comprehension Language Comprehension Linguistic Knowledge Backgrnd Know Phono Syntax Sem Know Know Know

CD

AB

A

Word Recognition Alphabetic Coding Skill Alphabetic Principle Print Concept Letter Phonemic Know Aware

Other

Notes: Standard placement within the framework hierarchy corresponds to the label contained either within or to the right of the first colored cell encountered in the heading when moving up the column from where the standard indicator is placed. When a standard is judged to be fully relevant to a framework component its tabled entry (X for single standard, A up through F for any sub-levels of the standard) is bolded; if it is judged to have some relevance to the component but only in a partial fashion, its tabled entry is not bolded. If a standard is judged to be neither fully nor partially relevant to any of the framework components, then the tabled entry is placed in the far-right Other category, which, by definition, includes only bolded (i.e., fully relevant) entries Abbreviations: Alphabetic Principle knowledge of the alphabetic principle, Bckgrnd Know background knowledge and inferencing skills, L.K. Language strand for kindergarten (with standards 1–6), Letter Know letter knowledge, NA2 not applicable under the strand until Grade 2, Phonemic Aware phonemic awareness, Phono Know phonological knowledge, Print Concept concepts about print, Sem Know semantic knowledge, Syntax Know syntactic knowledge

Standard: L.K.1 L.K.2 L.K.3 (NA2) L.K.4 L.K.5 L.K.6

Component:

Table 9.5  The map of the kindergarten Language strand of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework components

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159

with these same components. The far greater number of standards in this strand addresses language comprehension, and these are primarily focused on the components of syntactic and semantic knowledge that underlie linguistic knowledge. Within the Language strand there are no standards addressing phonological knowledge. Given that native speakers of English have largely mastered its phonology prior to school entry, this would be expected (but noteworthy if the standards are applied in situations with large numbers of English language learners). Also note that there is no focus on background knowledge, which would also be expected given that the strand is primarily focused on the components of linguistic knowledge rather than language comprehension. Having presented and discussed the individual maps for each of the five reading-­ relevant strands of the CCSS at kindergarten, let us discuss them collectively.

9.4.2  S  ome Overarching Issues in the Standard Maps for Kindergarten What do the standards maps overall reveal about the relationship between the reading-­relevant CCSS and the Cognitive Foundations Framework, at least at the kindergarten level? As we have seen, the Reading standards contained in the CCSS address three large segments of reading: Reading comprehension skills (but better thought of as language comprehension in kindergarten) for two different types of text, literature and informational texts, and foundational skills that underlie word recognition (concepts about print, letter knowledge, phonemic awareness, knowledge of the alphabetic principle, and alphabetic coding skill through a beginning focus on phonics). In addition, the Speaking and Listening and Language standards further address important aspects of reading comprehension, with a few focusing on the word recognition components underlying reading comprehension (concepts about print, letter recognition, and alphabetic coding skill), but most focused on language comprehension and on the domains of syntactic and semantic knowledge within linguistic knowledge. A crude but informative way to quantify the level of coverage is to simply sum the number of kindergarten standards we have discussed that fall under each component of our framework. In doing so we ignore whether a given standard is fully or only partially relevant to a given component (i.e., we ignore whether something has been bolded or not in one of the maps), though this will not greatly bias the results as very few standards (four) were characterized as partially relevant. Also, we note that giving equal weight to all 57 standards in such an analysis fails to address any differences in the amount of time and effort that may be devoted to them in actual practice. Nonetheless, through such an analysis we can get an overall sense of where the standards are focused relative to the cognitive components represented in the framework. The analysis is summarized in Table 9.6, which depicts the number of kindergarten standards we have discussed that fall under each component of the framework.

17

5

8

Reading Comprehension Language Comprehension Linguistic Knowledge Backgrnd Know Phono Syntax Sem Know Know Know

5

6

1

2

2

Word Recognition Alphabetic Coding Skill Print Alphabetic Principle Concept Letter Phonemic Know Aware 11

Other

Notes: Standard placement counts within the framework hierarchy correspond to the label contained either within or to the right of the first colored cell encountered in the heading when moving up the column from where the standard count is placed. Tabled entries are the number of kindergarten reading-relevant standards addressing each framework component, ignoring distinctions between fully and partially relevant standards Abbreviations: Alphabetic Principle knowledge of the alphabetic principle, Bckgrnd Know background knowledge and inferencing skills, Letter Know letter knowledge, Phonemic Aware phonemic awareness, Phono Know phonological knowledge, Print Concept concepts about print, Sem Know semantic knowledge, Syntax Know syntactic knowledge

Frequency:

Component:

Table 9.6  The distribution of the kindergarten reading-relevant Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy across the Cognitive Foundations Framework components

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First, note that almost 20% of the reading-relevant standards are focused on aspects of reading that fall outside the cognitive requirements we have specified (the Other category). Thus, the reading-relevant CCSS at kindergarten in general show substantial overlap (slightly over 80%) with the components of the Cognitive Foundations Framework. But let us look more deeply at the areas of overlap. On the language side, the table reveals that 30% of the reading-relevant standards are focused broadly on language comprehension. However, recall that many of these (indeed, half of them) are stated to have a focus on reading comprehension but were placed under language comprehension given that the text access they required likely would come through listening rather than reading for kindergarten students. The remaining standards here fall under two of the components of linguistic knowledge, with about 10% focused on syntactic knowledge and about 15% focused on semantic knowledge. Thus, almost 55% of the reading-relevant CCSS at kindergarten address components of language comprehension. Note that there are no standards associated with three of the cognitive components under language comprehension. As stated above, we would not expect a focus on phonological knowledge (assuming their use with native English speakers). And given the focus on syntactic and semantic knowledge, it is not surprising that we would not see linguistic knowledge addressed independently. Also, we might expect that knowledge of the world and inference making would be addressed in strands that deal with content (e.g., social studies). Such aspects of language comprehension can be addressed secondarily within the materials used to advance language comprehension (or reading comprehension in upper grades) through the other standards, but such materials and their use must be considered carefully to have them serve these purposes. And while these aspects of language comprehension may well be addressed either in later grades or in other standards, the important point here is to recognize they are not addressed in the reading-relevant kindergarten standards. Reading professionals need to be aware of this to avoid drawing the conclusion that teaching to the reading (or even the reading-relevant) strands in the kindergarten CCSS will cover all that is important to address in developing reading skills. On the word recognition side, about 10% of the reading-relevant standards are focused on each of two components, alphabetic coding skill and concepts about print, respectively. Less than 5% of the reading-relevant standards are focused on letter knowledge and phonemic awareness, respectively, and less than half of that on developing knowledge of the alphabetic principle. Thus, overall, about 30% of the reading-relevant CCSS at kindergarten address components of word recognition – a third focuses on concepts about print, a third represents an explicit focus on the alphabetic principle and its two sub-components, and a third attempts to initiate use of this latter knowledge in learning alphabetic coding skills. Recognizing the limitations of our analysis regarding the amounts of time devoted to each standard, it at least raises a warning that there may be too little focus on the foundational skills underlying alphabetic coding skills. In practice, if children encounter difficulty learning letter-phoneme relationships this could result from either not knowing the letters, not being aware of the phonemic units, or not knowing that the two are to be related in reading (knowledge of the alphabetic principle). And remember that

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learning the alphabetic principle does not come free with learning the letters and becoming aware of phonemes – all three of these aspects should be assessed for those students who struggle to learn alphabetic coding skills. Finally, note that there is no focus in these kindergarten standards on building skills in (automatic) word recognition, which is appropriate given that this skill depends on developing alphabetic coding skills, which are just beginning to be addressed in kindergarten. In sum, while the 57 reading-relevant standards of CCSS generally provide wide and appropriate coverage of the cognitive framework components at kindergarten, there are no explicit connections to why children in kindergarten must know what is represented in this set of standards to build reading skill. And beyond that, there are no explicit connections to how the cognitive skills being developed are related to each other, in either a hierarchical or reciprocal manner. The standards here appear as a list, which fails to show the connections between both strands and standards as well as between the cognitive capacities they target. But the linkages of the standards to the cognitive framework allows these explicit connections to be made and understanding them can help bring coherence to educational practice. Also, we must remind the reader that almost 30% of the standards under the kindergarten Reading: Foundational Skills strand is not critical for learning to read, these being the standards focused on segmenting speech at levels higher than the phonemic level and on learning sight words  – if these standards are blindly followed, they will lead to practices that are not supported in research. Having looked across all the reading-relevant CCSS for kindergarten, we now consider an example of how one strand of these standards applies across grade levels.

9.4.3  T  he Map of One Strand of the Common Core State Standards Across Grade Levels Here we take one of the reading strands, Reading: Foundational Skills, and provide a map that covers all the contained standards for each of the grade levels where this strand is addressed, namely kindergarten through Grade 5. This will allow us to show whether, and if so, how, support for the on-going development of cognitive skills might be represented across standards. We believe such development is difficult to track simply by reviewing standards across grade levels (e.g., understanding why an earlier focus in a strand is no longer pursued in the strand at subsequent grades); we believe an explicit mapping of these standards onto the cognitive framework will help build such understandings. Let us explore this in more detail. Within each of the six grade levels it addresses, the Reading: Foundational Skills strand contains four standards spanning four clusters (though the first two clusters only apply in the first two grade levels). The strand contains standards with varying sub-levels within each grade level, yielding 53 standards in total (14 in kindergarten, 15 in Grade 1, 9 in Grade 2, 7 in Grade 3, and 4 in each of Grades 4 and 5). The clusters and standards for each of the grade levels are as follows (note that we repeat

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the kindergarten standards here from our earlier presentation of them for ease of comparison with the other grade levels)7: 9.4.3.1  Reading: Foundational Skills (Kindergarten) Print Concepts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.1 Demonstrate understanding of the organization and basic features of print. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.1.A Follow words from left to right, top to bottom, and page by page. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.1.B Recognize that spoken words are represented in written language by specific sequences of letters. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.1.C Understand that words are separated by spaces in print. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.1.D Recognize and name all upper- and lowercase letters of the alphabet. Phonological Awareness: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.2 Demonstrate understanding of spoken words, syllables, and sounds (phonemes). CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.2.A Recognize and produce rhyming words. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.2.B Count, pronounce, blend, and segment syllables in spoken words. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.2.C Blend and segment onsets and rhymes of single-syllable spoken words. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.2.D

7  © Copyright 2010 National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers. All rights reserved. Reprinted in accord with the terms of its public license.

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Isolate and pronounce the initial, medial vowel, and final sounds (phonemes) in three-phoneme (consonant-vowel-consonant, or CVC) words.∗ (This does not include CVCs ending with /l/, /r/, or /x/.) ∗ Words, syllables, or phonemes written in /slashes/ refer to their pronunciation or phonology. Thus, /CVC/ is a word with three phonemes regardless of the number of letters in the spelling of the word. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.2.E Add or substitute individual sounds (phonemes) in simple, one-syllable words to make new words. Phonics and Word Recognition: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.3 Know and apply grade-level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.3.A Demonstrate basic knowledge of one-to-one letter-sound correspondences by producing the primary sound or many of the most frequent sounds for each consonant. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.3.B Associate the long and short sounds with the common spellings (graphemes) for the five major vowels. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.3.C Read common high-frequency words by sight (e.g., the, of, to, you, she, my, is, are, do, does). CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.3.D Distinguish between similarly spelled words by identifying the sounds of the letters that differ. Fluency: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.4 Read emergent-reader texts with purpose and understanding. 9.4.3.2  Reading: Foundational Skills (Grade 1) Print Concepts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.1.1 Demonstrate understanding of the organization and basic features of print.

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CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.1.1.A Recognize the distinguishing features of a sentence (e.g., first word, capitalization, ending punctuation). Phonological Awareness: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.1.2 Demonstrate understanding of spoken words, syllables, and sounds (phonemes). CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.1.2.A Distinguish long from short vowel sounds in spoken single-­ syllable words. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.1.2.B Orally produce single-syllable words by blending sounds (phonemes), including consonant blends. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.1.2.C Isolate and pronounce initial, medial vowel, and final sounds (phonemes) in spoken single-syllable words. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.1.2.D Segment spoken single-syllable words into their complete sequence of individual sounds (phonemes). Phonics and Word Recognition: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.1.3 Know and apply grade-level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.1.3.A Know the spelling-sound correspondences for common consonant digraphs. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.1.3.B Decode regularly spelled one-syllable words. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.1.3.C Know final -e and common vowel team conventions for representing long vowel sounds. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.1.3.D Use knowledge that every syllable must have a vowel sound to determine the number of syllables in a printed word.

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CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.1.3.E Decode two-syllable words following basic patterns by breaking the words into syllables. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.1.3.F Read words with inflectional endings. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.1.3.G Recognize and read grade-appropriate irregularly spelled words. Fluency: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.1.4 Read with sufficient accuracy and fluency to support comprehension. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.1.4.A Read grade-level text with purpose and understanding. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.1.4.B Read grade-level text orally with accuracy, appropriate rate, and expression on successive readings. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.1.4.C Use context to confirm or self-correct word recognition and understanding, rereading as necessary. 9.4.3.3  Reading: Foundational Skills (Grade 2) Print Concepts (none after Grade 1) Phonological Awareness (none after Grade 1) Phonics and Word Recognition: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.2.3 Know and apply grade-level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.2.3.A Distinguish long and short vowels when reading regularly spelled one-­ syllable words. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.2.3.B Know spelling-sound correspondences for additional common vowel teams.

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CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.2.3.C Decode regularly spelled two-syllable words with long vowels. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.2.3.D Decode words with common prefixes and suffixes. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.2.3.E Identify words with inconsistent but common spelling-sound correspondences. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.2.3.F Recognize and read grade-appropriate irregularly spelled words. Fluency: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.2.4 Read with sufficient accuracy and fluency to support comprehension. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.2.4.A Read grade-level text with purpose and understanding. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.2.4.B Read grade-level text orally with accuracy, appropriate rate, and expression on successive readings. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.2.4.C Use context to confirm or self-correct word recognition and understanding, rereading as necessary. 9.4.3.4  Reading: Foundational Skills (Grade 3) Print Concepts (none after Grade 1) Phonological Awareness (none after Grade 1) Phonics and Word Recognition: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.3.3 Know and apply grade-level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.3.3.A Identify and know the meaning of the most common prefixes and derivational suffixes. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.3.3.B

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Decode words with common Latin suffixes. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.3.3.C Decode multisyllable words. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.3.3.D Read grade-appropriate irregularly spelled words. Fluency: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.3.4 Read with sufficient accuracy and fluency to support comprehension. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.3.4.A Read grade-level text with purpose and understanding. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.3.4.B Read grade-level prose and poetry orally with accuracy, appropriate rate, and expression on successive readings. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.3.4.C Use context to confirm or self-correct word recognition and understanding, rereading as necessary. 9.4.3.5  Reading: Foundational Skills (Grade 4) Print Concepts (none after Grade 1) Phonological Awareness (none after Grade 1) Phonics and Word Recognition: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.4.3 Know and apply grade-level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.4.3.A Use combined knowledge of all letter-sound correspondences, syllabication patterns, and morphology (e.g., roots and affixes) to read accurately unfamiliar multisyllabic words in context and out of context. Fluency: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.4.4 Read with sufficient accuracy and fluency to support comprehension. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.4.4.A

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Read grade-level text with purpose and understanding. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.4.4.B Read grade-level prose and poetry orally with accuracy, appropriate rate, and expression on successive readings. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.4.4.C Use context to confirm or self-correct word recognition and understanding, rereading as necessary. 9.4.3.6  Reading: Foundational Skills (Grade 5) Print Concepts (none after Grade 1) Phonological Awareness (none after Grade 1) Phonics and Word Recognition: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.5.3 Know and apply grade-level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.5.3.A Use combined knowledge of all letter-sound correspondences, syllabication patterns, and morphology (e.g., roots and affixes) to read accurately unfamiliar multisyllabic words in context and out of context. Fluency: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.5.4 Read with sufficient accuracy and fluency to support comprehension. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.5.4.A Read grade-level text with purpose and understanding. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.5.4.B Read grade-level prose and poetry orally with accuracy, appropriate rate, and expression on successive readings. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.5.4.C Use context to confirm or self-correct word recognition and understanding, rereading as necessary. Table 9.7 presents the map of the above 53 standards contained within this strand across the six grade levels, kindergarten through Grade 5.

Standard / Grade K: RF.K.1 RF.K.2 RF.K.3 RF.K.4 Grade 1: RF.1.1 RF.1.2 RF.1.3 RF.1.4 Grade 2: RF.2.3 RF.2.4 Grade 3: RF.3.3 RF.3.4 Grade 4: RF.4.3 RF.4.4 Grade 5: RF.5.3 RF.5.4

Component:

ABC

ABC

ABC

ABC

ABC

Reading Comprehension Language Comprehension Backgrnd Linguistic Knowledge Know Phono Syntax Sem Know Know Know

A

A

ABCD

ABCDEF

ABCDEFG

ABD

X

X

AC

B

D

ABCD

DE

Word Recognition Alphabetic Coding Skill Print Alphabetic Principle Concept Letter Phonemic Know Aware

ABC C

Other

Table 9.7  The map of the kindergarten through Grade 5 Reading: Foundational Skills strand of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework components

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Notes: Standard placement within the framework hierarchy corresponds to the label contained either within or to the right of the first colored cell encountered in the heading when moving up the column from where the standard indicator is placed. When a standard is judged to be fully relevant to a framework component its tabled entry (X for single standard, A up through G for any sub-levels of the standard) is bolded; if it is judged to have some relevance to the component but only in a partial fashion, its tabled entry is not bolded. If a standard is judged to be neither fully nor partially relevant to any of the framework components, then the tabled entry is placed in the far-right Other category, which, by definition, includes only bolded (i.e., fully relevant) entries Abbreviations: Alphabetic Principle knowledge of the alphabetic principle, Bckgrnd Know background knowledge and inferencing skills, Letter Know letter knowledge, Phonemic Aware phonemic awareness, Phono Know phonological knowledge, Print Concept concepts about print, RF. Reading Foundational Skills strand (with standards 1–4 in Grades K-1 and 3–4 in Grades 2–5), Sem Know semantic knowledge, Syntax Know syntactic knowledge

9.4 Mapping a Portion of the Common Core State Standards 171

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9.4.4  S  ome Overarching Issues in the Foundational Skills Map Across Grade Levels There are several highlights to discuss in the kindergarten through Grade 5 map of the CCSS Reading: Foundational Skills strand, acknowledging the limitations of such analyses as described above (namely, ignoring a standard’s degree of relevance and assuming equal instructional weights across all standards). First, note that no additional standards have been placed in the Other category beyond those discussed earlier in the kindergarten set. Further, note there are no standards that address reading comprehension or language comprehension within any of the six grade levels. These observations emphasize the point that foundational skills for the CCSS focus exclusively on word recognition and do not address language comprehension, which, as we saw with the reading-relevant CCSS in kindergarten, is covered under its other strands. Within this focus, three standards address the development of automaticity in word recognition in each of Grades 1–5 (as stated earlier, a single corresponding standard in kindergarten is best placed under concepts about print); these constitute about 30% of the strand’s standards. This subset of standards deals with reading connected text from grade-level materials with the needed accuracy and fluency to support successful comprehension. One could argue that these standards would be better placed under reading comprehension, but their focus is on supporting successful reading comprehension through automaticity in word recognition rather than on achieving such comprehension. Hence these standards have been placed under word recognition given that the outcome sought is accurate and fluent word recognition, not successful reading comprehension. Across the remaining standards, we note there is no focus on letter recognition after kindergarten. Further, there continues to be a substantial focus on phonemic awareness in Grade 1, but nothing more in subsequent grade levels. And the focus on phonemic awareness in Grade 1 is much more directed at the phonemic level than was true at kindergarten (where the focus was more on the higher-level phonological units of rhymes, syllables, and onset-rimes). A single standard in Grade 1 deals with more advanced notions of concepts about print than dealt with in kindergarten, but nothing more in this area appears in subsequent grade levels. Also, there is no focused attention devoted to the alphabetic principle, save the partial focus of one standard in kindergarten (though, again, this can be addressed as part of alphabetic coding skill). By far, the largest percentage of standards (about 40%) is found under alphabetic coding skills, with progressively fewer standards focused on this component over the grade levels past kindergarten (i.e., 3, 7, 6, 4, 1, and 1 associated with Grades K, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, respectively). All these latter standards deal with using grade-level phonics and word analysis skills (e.g., knowledge of prefixes) to correctly identify individual words in text. Thus, the overall picture for the CCSS Reading: Foundational Skills strand shows an early-grade focus on the lower-level skills required for word recognition (namely, concepts about print, phonemic awareness, letter knowledge, and

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knowledge of the alphabetic principle), giving way to a focus on alphabetic coding skills that steadily declines from Grade 1 forward and which is coupled with a sustained focus on building fluency and accuracy within word recognition. In sum, this strand of standards provides good coverage of the cognitive capacities that students must develop to master word recognition, save the earlier issues raised around phonemic awareness and knowledge of the alphabetic principle that we discussed under the kindergarten strand. (And these divergences from what research holds about reading might be expected given the process used to produce the CCSS as discussed earlier.) Further, it is important to note that if children are found to be lacking in alphabetic coding skills at the end of first grade, addressing knowledge of the alphabetic principle (and its two underlying foundations) could be critical in spite of its absence from the standards in succeeding grades. Despite the coverage provided by the CCSS Reading: Foundational Skills strand, there are two issues that should not be ignored. The first deals with understanding the standards in the strand and the second with understanding the development of reading skill through them. For the first, we believe that reading professionals will fail to understand the relations between the standards in this strand by simply reviewing and applying the list of 53 standards in practice. To reiterate from our earlier points, the standards in and of themselves do not explicitly reveal the cognitive foundations they target nor the relationships between those foundations. The list of standards is designed to convey what must be known but not why such knowledge is required. For the second issue, we believe that reading professionals might exclusively focus on developing word recognition skills in the early grades and ignore the importance of language comprehension and its complexities (e.g., knowledge of the world and inference making) in teaching reading. Under such a scenario, we would expect to find many students in the upper elementary grades who were capable of “reading” the printed words on a page but much less capable of fully understanding the text so read. For both these issues, we believe that explicitly linking the standards to a cognitive model of reading, as the maps above do in connecting the CCSS to the Cognitive Foundations Framework, provides a mechanism for gaining understanding of both what must be learned to master reading and why it must be learned to achieve mastery. And knowing these is a key to building coherence in reading practice.

9.5  Select Issues in Standards There are four issues we wish to discuss regarding standards in general. First, while we have seen that the reading-relevant CCSS provide broad coverage of the critical cognitive requirements for reading and learning to read, the specificity of any set of standards as a guide to instruction must also be examined. That is, beyond coverage, standards need to also provide enough detail to guide instruction so that reading professionals can make informed decisions about appropriate instruction. We

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believe that by themselves the CCSS would not provide the needed guidance and that connecting them to the cognitive requirements for reading would be a positive support. To take one example, we saw in the kindergarten CCSS Reading: Foundational Skills strand there was an explicit focus on segmentation of the speech stream at the rhyme, syllable, and onset-rime levels as well as at the phonemic level. Segmentation at the first three levels is not critical for learning to read English but may be helpful in guiding students toward awareness at the critical phonemic level if they are struggling with it. Given that the knowledge base behind the standards is not explicitly stated within them, this would not be apparent from just reviewing the standards themselves. To take a second example, the standards addressing word recognition in the late elementary grades do not focus on the volume of reading needed to support the development of fast and accurate word recognition skill. Again, developing an understanding of reading as captured in the framework, where alphabetic coding skills and word recognition skills are not synonymous, would help the reading professional realize such a distinction. Second, moving back to our four select issues, we saw that there were some standards within the CCSS that did not fall within the Cognitive Foundations Framework. These emphasized other aspects of literacy beyond what is cognitively required to learn to read. These are not problematic in themselves for they represent important aspects of literacy – for example, being able to connect text with the illustrations that may accompany it – they are just ones not focused on the cognitive requirements of mapping print onto language. Such standards could become problematic if they consumed so much instructional attention that they severely limited focus on the key cognitive requirements of reading (e.g., alphabetic coding skill) or they were pursued in teaching under the belief that they were advancing skills in the systematic connection of print to language. Third, looking at standards across grade levels can provide a sense of the changing expectations from one grade level to the next. The difficulty is that any sense of such progression is missed for an individual who focuses only on the standards of a specific grade level. In such a case, the perspective from the set of standards for what is appropriate for students who are exceeding or falling below grade-level expectations is absent. This can be critical, for using grade-level standards to address those who are not “at grade-level” will likely be counterproductive, even harmful. By using the framework, the standards that are the focus of any grade level can be viewed in relation to the skills that should have been developed to that point as well as those that are to be developed in the future. Finally, standards are different from the content of teaching but they serve to guide it. One can examine whether what is being taught is consistent with what the applicable standards hold that students should know and be able to do. But even when coupling standards to curriculum and instruction, the question of why such teaching is important can remain unanswered. And without an understanding of that, making informed decisions on how to adjust teaching in response to student performance is much more difficult.

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9.6  Summary In this chapter we discussed standards as descriptions of what students should know and be able to do. As applied to reading, we argued that the utility of such standards for teaching was more limited if there were no explicit ties to the reasons why students should know the content captured in the standards. We argued that such standards by themselves typically do not provide information about the underlying cognitive structures (including their interrelationships and reciprocal nature) that students must develop to successfully master reading. We further argued that this knowledge was critical for reading professionals to understand if they were to effectively support reading development. We argued that mapping standards onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework was one mechanism for providing such linkages between what students should know to master reading and why. As an example of such a linkage, we took the reading-relevant Common Core State Standards at kindergarten and mapped them onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework. We discussed the reasoning behind the placement of each standard, which was an exercise we recommended that reading professionals undertake in their work with standards. From those maps we showed that the relevant CCSS addressed three large segments of reading through its Reading standards: Reading comprehension for two different types of text and the foundational skills that underlie word recognition. We showed that the CCSS Speaking and Listening and Language standards addressed language comprehension broadly as well as the syntactic and semantic knowledge components under linguistic knowledge. To get an overall sense of the coverage of the reading-relevant CCSS at kindergarten we presented a tally of the number of standards tied to each cognitive component in the framework. The analysis showed broad coverage of language comprehension and of the syntactic and semantic components of linguistic knowledge, but a lack of any specific focus on phonological knowledge, linguistic knowledge overall, or knowledge of the world and inference making. The main foci within word recognition were on developing fluent word recognition, alphabetic coding skill, concepts about print, and phonemic awareness (though issues were found there), with more limited coverage given to letter knowledge and knowledge of the alphabetic principle. We noted there were no explicit statements about why children must know what is represented in these standards to master reading nor was there any explanation of the relationships between the standards, either within or between strands, or between the cognitive skills the standards targeted. To explore standards across grade levels, we presented a map of the CCSS Reading: Foundational Skills strand across the six grade levels to which it applied, kindergarten through Grade 5. The overall picture of that strand over six grade levels showed a focus on the lower-level skills required for word recognition in the early grades (namely, concepts about print, phonemic awareness, letter knowledge, and knowledge of the alphabetic principle). This gave way to a focus on alphabetic coding skills, which steadily declined from Grade 1 forward, coupled with a sustained focus on reading fluency and accuracy. In general, the strand showed good

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coverage of the requirements for developing word recognition skill, but again provided no justifications for the standards, for their relationships within or between grade levels, or for the relationships between the cognitive skills targeted. We concluded that mapping standards onto a cognitive framework could strengthen coherence in reading practice by linking what must be known to master reading to why such knowledge was necessary. Finally, we discussed four issues around standards, including their specificity, the implications of covering content not included in the Cognitive Foundations Framework, the limitations of trying to understand reading development by looking at standards across grade levels and how to address over- or under-achieving students within grade levels, and the difficulty of using standards to guide instruction without explicit information regarding cognitive development.

9.7  Questions for Further Thought We have posed the set of questions below to extend your understanding of how the Cognitive Foundations Framework can be used to aid your use of standards in reading practice. As was true with the other sets of questions we have presented, we believe these will be most helpful when discussed with colleagues, leading to a deeper understanding of the issues raised. Also, the questions below compliment the ones we posed earlier when introducing the set of CCSS maps. 1. Having completed a map of a set of standards onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework, what steps could be taken to assess its accuracy and recognize its limitations? 2. If a map of a set of standards shows there are significant areas of reading development that are unaddressed, what should be done to assess the impact of such standards on practice? If those identified areas of reading development are found to be addressed in practice, what would that circumstance imply about the standards being used? If those identified areas of reading development were found to be unaddressed in practice, would you adjust your standards, and if so, how? 3. For a given cognitive component addressed by a set of standards, how might you go about determining if the time and effort devoted to those standards in practice were appropriate? 4. How might knowing the cognitive skills needed for learning to read (and their interrelationships) help you understand the standards being used in practice? How might those standards help you understand the cognitive skills needed for learning to read? 5. If the standards in use provide adequate coverage of the cognitive requirements of reading yet significant numbers of students are not becoming successful readers under the use of those standards, what steps would you recommend be taken to address the standards being used, their implementation, and student performance?

Reference

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9.8  What’s Next Having seen how standards can be linked to the Cognitive Foundations Framework, we next consider how assessments can be so linked to improve coherence in reading practice.

Reference ∗National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers. (2010). Common core state standards for English language arts and literacy in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects. Washington, DC: National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers.

Chapter 10

Assessments and the Cognitive Foundations Framework

Acronyms Daze DIBELS DORF FSF LNF NWF PSF SVR

DIBELS maze comprehension Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency First Sound Fluency (DIBELS) Letter Naming Fluency (DIBELS) Nonsense Word Fluency (DIBELS) Phoneme Segmentation Fluency (DIBELS) Simple View of Reading

10.1  Introduction In this chapter we discuss assessment mappings onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework, providing two examples to show how they are structured in their different contexts and how they can be used to inform assessment issues in reading. Our goal in presenting them is to help reading professionals learn to apply the mapping processes so they can use them to map assessments used in their local contexts. The first mapping is of a United States school district’s entire set of reading-relevant assessments; the second is a mapping of one of the assessment batteries used in the district to assess student reading skills in the elementary school years. For each we discuss how the assessment information is placed within the framework, what the resulting patterns reveal, and what the mapping limitations are. As with the other substantive chapters, we close with a discussion of select issues concerning assessments, a chapter summary, and a set of questions to guide further thought.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 W. A. Hoover, W. E. Tunmer, The Cognitive Foundations of Reading and Its Acquisition, Literacy Studies 20, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44195-1_10

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10.2  Defining Types of Assessments Assessments, another set of tools available to reading professionals that can support their educational practices, are instruments designed to provide information about student skills or knowledge sets that can be used to serve decision-making. To be useful, an assessment must have high levels of reliability (i.e., yield consistent results under repeated administrations) and validity (i.e., measure the construct it was designed to measure). But the trustworthiness of an assessment, the degree to which a user can have confidence in the information provided as a basis for education decisions, also depends on evidence about its use that varies by the purpose to be served. One categorization of assessments based on intended use is as follows, along with the kinds of evidence needed to determine trustworthiness (Kame’enui et al., 2006; Tunmer & Greaney, 2008): • Screening1: These are assessments designed and used to identify weaknesses in reading or reading-related skills that are highly predictive of future reading achievement (e.g., letter naming and phonemic awareness in kindergarten as predictive of later elementary school reading comprehension). These assessments are generally brief and administered at the beginning of the school year to all students to identify those that may need special support to avoid future problems in reading. Important evidence regarding the trustworthiness of these assessments addresses their specificity (i.e., the degree to which the assessment can isolate the specific skills of interest) and sensitivity (i.e., the degree to which the assessment can detect real differences in skill levels), which are both relevant to defining appropriate actions that can be taken based on the data provided. • Diagnosis: These are assessments used to make judgements about specific strengths and weaknesses in a set of reading skills so that targeted instructional options may be exercised in response to any weaknesses identified. These are generally only administered to children known to be struggling in reading and often result in the creation of a reading profile for individual students that focuses the instructional approaches to be employed. Important evidence for determining the trustworthiness of these assessments addresses breadth (i.e., the degree to which the assessment adequately covers the set of needed skills) and the effectiveness of mechanisms for assigning remedies based on test results. • Progress monitoring: These are generally regularly repeated assessments that are used to judge whether improvements in a set of reading skills are advancing at an appropriate rate in response to provided regular-classroom or supplemental instruction. Important evidence concerning the trustworthiness of these assessments includes the ability to support alternative forms that can capture performance changes over short periods of time and justifiable criteria for what counts as significant change and progress across the entire time period of interest. 1  We use the convention of italicizing key concepts and distinctions for emphasis, but we also italicize words, phrases, or sentences when denoting them as linguistic objects. In both cases, the context we provide should suffice to determine the particular use being served.

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• Outcome evaluation: These are assessments generally given at the end of a school year or after completion of a long-term intervention to assess whether an overall expected result was achieved. The trustworthiness of these assessments depends on how determinations of grade-level performance expectations are made and what counts as significant improvement toward those expectations. For informing practice when instructional decisions are to be based on a student’s learning profile, one challenge of appropriate use is making sure that both the profile and its accompanying assessments are of high quality. That is, the profile must capture the known, critical cognitive constructs of interest (and their interrelationships) and the measurements of those constructs must be trustworthy indices of the knowledge-skill sets the constructs embody. For instance, assessments of reading comprehension based on asking a set of questions about read material would be of limited utility if many of the questions asked could be correctly answered without having read the material at all (see Keenan & Betjemann, 2006, for a discussion of such passage-independent questions used in reading comprehension assessments). Beyond these considerations, any instructional options based on the results of high-­ quality assessments need to have an evidence base demonstrating their efficacy in advancing the targeted knowledge-skill sets when used with students the assessments have identified as needing additional support. We will address these instructional options in Chap. 11, which focuses on curriculum and instruction, following our discussion of assessments. The Cognitive Foundations Framework can serve as a valid learning profile for reading, allowing results from assessments (or subtasks of an assessment battery) to be linked to the cognitive components underlying reading development. And given the hierarchical structure captured by the framework, assessment results mapped onto it can help reading professionals make informed decisions about the specific reading needs that exist and the instructional options that might best address them. But in addition to mapping individual assessments and their results, the Cognitive Foundations Framework can also be used to map an entire set of assessments used in a specific context thereby providing a description of the coverage of cognitive skills provided through a portfolio of assessments. We present and discuss a portfolio map first, then a map of an individual assessment.

10.3  The Map of an Assessment Portfolio The assessment portfolio map given below presents a grade-level inventory, by cognitive component, of the reading-relevant assessments that were used in a mid-sized United States school district as reported by its reading leadership team. The map is organized by individual assessment instruments across the top (generally arranged left-to-right by the grade-level sequences covered, earlier to later grades) and by the components of the Cognitive Foundations Framework down the left side (listed in a hierarchical arrangement under the main components of the Simple View of Reading

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(SVR)). The abbreviated names of the assessment instruments used across the top of the map are fully identified in the index that appears in the lower half of the map (alphabetically arranged), with the publisher of the indexed assessment listed in parentheses. The map provides the number of district administrations per year for each listed assessment under the top heading and then tables the grade levels of the students assessed beneath them for any cognitive component the administered instrument assesses. There are several constraints that apply to the portfolio map: • For any listed assessment that contains subtasks, only those subtasks that are both relevant to the cognitive skills given in the framework and administered in the district are tabled (thus, for some assessments the mapping could be incomplete in the sense that it does not necessarily table all subtasks contained within the assessment, only those that are relevant and administered). • Assessments and their subtasks are assigned where they best fit, meaning that the knowledge-skill sets they purport to measure are at least a part of the framework component in which they are listed and there are no other knowledge-skill sets that the given assessment may measure that would fit better under a different framework component. • In placing an assessment, no judgement is made about its quality (in terms of its reliability, validity, or trustworthiness) in measuring only the knowledge-skill sets within the component it is assigned. • No information is included about when an assessment is given in the academic year, although the number of administrations is indicated as was mentioned earlier. • Information is presented on whether an assessment is given to all students in a grade level, indicated by bolding the tabled grade level(s), or only to a subset of targeted students in a grade level, indicated by not bolding the tabled grade level(s). The labels used in the map for the hierarchically organized components of the Cognitive Foundations Framework are as follows (these presented in their hierarchical position), employing abbreviated names when needed (these appear in parentheses below): • Reading comprehension –– Language comprehension Background knowledge and inferencing skills (Background knowledge) Linguistic knowledge • Phonological knowledge (Phonology) • Syntactic knowledge (Syntax) • Semantic knowledge (Semantics) –– Word recognition Alphabetic coding skill

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• Concepts about print • Knowledge of the alphabetic principle (Alphabetic principle) –– Letter knowledge –– Phonemic awareness

10.3.1  Q  uestions to Explore Through the Assessment Portfolio Map Along with providing an overview of the district’s reading-relevant assessments and the cognitive components of reading they address, the portfolio map is intended to support exploration of the following questions (coupled with additional information in some instances): • Which students are to be assessed, how often and when, and under what circumstances? • How are the data from each assessment to be used (by whom and for what purpose)? • What is the quality of each assessment and is it acceptable given its intended use? • How much assessment redundancy exists within grade levels for each reading component and is that redundancy needed and helpful, or is it unnecessary? • Are there gaps in the assessment portfolio by grade level and component, and if there are, what are the implications of having such gaps? • Given the typical development of reading-related skills, are the assessments sequenced in a way that would allow timely, appropriate responses from those using the assessments? • What resources are expended for each administration of an assessment (e.g., financial, staffing, and time) and do the uses of the results provided justify those expenditures of resources? Serving as an example, the map of the reported reading-relevant assessments used by one school district in the United States is presented in Table 10.1. A discussion of the map follows its presentation.

10.3.2  S  ome Overarching Issues in the Assessment Portfolio Map Before exploring the map remember that the Cognitive Foundations Framework provides a developmental view of reading. Its building blocks depict a developmental hierarchy and it would be inappropriate and inefficient to assess every component skill whenever any other component skill was being assessed. Thus, one should

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Table 10.1  The map of one school district’s reading-relevant assessments by the grade levels tested onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework components Assessment: GOLD TELD DSC CKLA DIBELS Core5 WRET DSA CORE STAR Administrations (per year): 3 3 1-3* On1 1 3 1 On4 Component (below): going going Reading comprehension 3 1-5 1-5 Language comprehension PK PK-K K-2 K-5 Background knowledge K-2 Linguistic knowledge PK Phonology PK-K Syntax K-5 Semantics PK-K K-2 K-5 1-5 Word recognition 2-3 2-5 1-2 1-5 Alphabetic coding 1 K-5 1-2 2-3 1-5 Concepts about print PK PK-K Alphabetic principle PK PK-K 1 K-5 Letter knowledge PK PK-K K K-5 1 Phonemic awareness PK PK-K K K-5 * 3 times/year in PK and 1 time/year in K ** 1 time/year in Grades 4-5 and 3 times/year in Grades 6-9

SRI 3 2-11

iSTEEP Bnch 1-3** 3

State 1

3-11

3-11

4-9

4-9 2 2 2 2

Notes: Table entries are the grade levels of students tested, including pre-kindergarten (PK), kindergarten (K), and Grades 1–11; entries are bolded if all students are tested within the grade level(s) indicated and not bolded if only a subset of students are tested within the grade level(s); CKLA On-going and CORE On-going are adaptive tests where a student is assessed across the grade levels tabled until mastery is achieved Abbreviations of assessments (and publisher): Bnch Benchmark English Language Arts (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers), CKLA Core Knowledge Language Arts Scope and Sequence (Core Knowledge Foundation), CORE (including Phonics Survey and Graded High-Frequency Word Survey) Consortium on Reaching Excellence in Education (Consortium on Reaching Excellence in Education, Inc.), Core5 Lexia Core5 Reading (Lexia Learning), DIBELS Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) Next (University of Oregon), DSA Developmental Spelling Assessment (Guilford Press), DSC Developing Skills Checklist (CTB/McGraw-Hill), GOLD GOLD Assessment of Objectives for Development and Learning (Teaching Strategies, LLC), iSTEEP (including Advanced Literacy, Smart Cloze, and Maze assessments) System to Enhance Educational Performance (iSTEEP, LLC), SRI Scholastic Reading Inventory (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), STAR Standardized Test for the Assessment of Reading (Renaissance Learning), State State Assessments (State Department of Education), TELD Test of Early Language Development (PRO-ED), WRET Word Reading Efficiency Test (Dr. David Paige)

not conclude that the more blank cells the matrix map contains the more problematic the assessment portfolio must be! Without addressing any issues about the adequacy of the tabled assessments (and it is critical to consider these in practice), what are some of the main points to draw from the map in Table 10.1? Let us start with the subskills underlying alphabetic coding skill. Here, there are multiple assessments (both observational and performance-­ based), some administered on multiple occasions, for all pre-­ kindergarten and kindergarten students covering concepts about print and the alphabetic principle, as well as its subcomponents of letter knowledge and phonemic awareness. Thus, in the early grades, if the tests are trustworthy, there is a large amount of information available about the levels of student skill in the foundations underlying alphabetic coding skill. Further, these skills continue to be assessed

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through Grade 5 if mastery is not indicated in earlier assessment administrations. But caution is needed here, for any student who has difficulty as indicated by these assessments beyond Grade 1 needs very intensive support coupled with frequent monitoring of the progress being made. On-going difficulty with these skills will prevent such a student from being able to take advantage of the self-teaching mechanism that is so critical in learning to read English, without which, the chances of ever catching-up to peer-level reading skills are very small. Alphabetic coding skill itself is assessed in kindergarten through Grade 2 for all students using multiple assessments, though there are single administrations of these in kindergarten and Grade 1. For students identified as struggling, testing is much more extensive and frequent, especially in Grades 1–2, less so in Grades 3–5. Given the critical nature of alphabetic coding skill in learning to read as well as the need to master this skill early in the elementary years, this regimen places tremendous pressure on the two single-administration assessments used in Grade 1 (namely, DIBELS Next and Core5). Any struggling students that these assessments fail to identify will not be assessed again (at least through the inventoried assessments) until the following year, making such students less likely to receive any of the increased learning supports that may be warranted and available. Thus, the results of these assessments require careful, timely review. Word recognition is assessed for all students in Grades 2–3 using two assessments, each given on a single occasion. For those struggling, multiple assessments are given at multiple times, but in Grades 4–5, skill for all students is only assessed through a single instrument (and nothing thereafter), though multiple assessments are administered on multiple occasions for those who continue to struggle. Again, given that there is but a single measure of word recognition in Grades 4–5 for all students (namely, Core5), careful, timely review of its results are critical to better ensure that students who need additional support receive it. On the components underlying language comprehension, there is generally one assessment subtask given per linguistic knowledge component over all students at pre-kindergarten and kindergarten. The employed assessment is generally administered on multiple occasions, though syntactic knowledge is not as strongly assessed as phonological and semantic knowledge. Subsequently, semantic knowledge is all that is assessed (and this is generally limited to vocabulary), done so through administrations of two different assessments (three in Grades 1–2) for all students through Grade 5. There is a single instrument used to assess background knowledge, and it is only used with students in kindergarten through Grade 2; its administration is on-­ going through those grade levels. Language comprehension itself is assessed in pre-kindergarten and kindergarten through multiple assessments administered multiple times for all students, but the assessments drop off in frequency at Grades 1–2, and then are only done once per year at Grades 3–5. Thus, in general, the assessment of language comprehension is limited, especially in later grades, and, as we saw in Chap. 6 through the lens of the SVR, language comprehension sets the upper limits on reading comprehension as word recognition is mastered. This would suggest that the district think about whether language comprehension (including background knowledge) is an issue

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with students in Grades 3 and above as it may be limiting their reading comprehension results for those grade levels. (Such assessments of language comprehension would be critical for any students found lacking in word recognition in these grades.) Reading comprehension is assessed through many measures, most carried out on multiple occasions, for all students from Grades 1–11. The uses of these measures are important for those students identified as struggling, though for purposes of intervention design a determination would be needed of whether their struggles largely come out of word recognition or language comprehension difficulties (or both). Note that the map does not identify the purposes for which the listed assessments were designed and used. One modification to remedy this would be to list only those assessments that serve specific purposes, say, for example, diagnostic assessments (color-coding table entries by assessment purpose might also be helpful). Such a map would reveal whether there were information sources available at the appropriate grade levels to sufficiently diagnose critical skills. Given the assessment portfolio map and discussion, we now turn to mapping individual assessments. Following that presentation, we will discuss how portfolio and individual assessment maps can advance coherence in educational practice.

10.4  The Map of an Assessment Instrument: DIBELS Next In addition to the map of the assessment portfolio just described, we also can look at how particular assessments map onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework. As an example, we will provide a map of the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) Next assessment battery (Good & Kaminski, 2012), which contains six subtasks, each constituting an individual stand-alone assessment. The school district’s considerations of the grade levels to be tested that are provided in the map are from the same mid-sized school district that provided the assessment portfolio data described earlier in this chapter. As in the previous table, the tabled entries here are as reported by the district’s reading leadership team. (Note: DIBELS Next assessments recently changed in name to Acadience Reading, but we will continue to reference these assessments as DIBELS Next herein; relevant materials and information can be obtained at the following site: https://acadiencelearning.org/.) The map constitutes a matrix organized by the components of the Cognitive Foundations Framework down the left side and the DIBELS Next subtasks across the top (generally arranged left-to-right by the grade-level sequences covered, earlier to later grades). The tabled entries under the subtasks represent the grade levels of the students that the district considered testing with the subtask; they do not represent those tested in the district, as was the case in the assessment portfolio map. This was done so district leadership could better see the assessment options available. Once assessments have been selected, the map could be adjusted to reflect tested students only. The following constraints apply to the map:

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• Only those subtasks that are relevant to the cognitive skills given in the framework are tabled (and all six DIBELS Next subtasks appropriate for Grades K-6 are: First sound fluency, letter naming fluency, phoneme segmentation fluency, nonsense word fluency, DIBELS oral reading fluency, and DIBELS maze comprehension). • DIBELS Next subtasks are assigned where they best fit, meaning that the knowledge-­skill sets they purport to measure are at least a part of the framework component under which they are listed and there are no other knowledge-skill sets that the given subtask may measure that would make for a better fit under a different framework component. • If there are distinct performance measures taken in a subtask that provide indices of skills in distinct framework components, then the subtask will have multiple framework component assignments in accord with the best fit criterion. • In placing a subtask in the framework, no judgement is made about its quality in terms of its reliability, validity, or trustworthiness in measuring only the knowledge-­skill sets within the component it is assigned (for technical information about quality indices of the DIBELS Next, see Dewey, Powell-Smith, Good, & Kaminski, 2015). As in the assessment portfolio map presented earlier in this chapter, the assigned framework components are given in a hierarchical format that accords to the Cognitive Foundations Framework (i.e., the components of the SVR and their subcomponents). The components, with abbreviated names where needed (these appear in parentheses below), are as follows (presented in their hierarchical position): • Reading comprehension –– Language comprehension Background knowledge and inferencing skills (Background knowledge) Linguistic knowledge • Phonological knowledge (Phonology) • Syntactic knowledge (Syntax) • Semantic knowledge (Semantics) –– Word recognition Alphabetic coding skill • Concepts about print • Knowledge of the alphabetic principle (Alphabetic principle) –– Letter knowledge –– Phonemic awareness

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10.4.1  Q  uestions to Explore Through the Assessment Instrument Map The map is intended to support exploration of the following questions (coupled with additional information on occasion), which can be applied to the mapped DIBELS Next instrument as well as to other reading assessments: • Which students can be assessed, when, and how often? How are the data from each subtask to be used (by whom and for what purpose)? • What is the quality of each subtask and is it acceptable given its intended use? • How much subtask redundancy exists within the assessment and is that redundancy helpful or unnecessary? Is there redundancy with other assessments that might be used and is that redundancy helpful or unnecessary? • Are there gaps in the assessment within and across grade levels and components, and if there are, what are the implications of having such gaps? • Given the typical development of reading-related skills, are the subtask assessments sequenced in a way within or across grade levels where they might be used that would allow timely, appropriate responses from those using the assessments? • For atypical students, how might the assessments be administered and how would the data from them be used? How would these be adjusted for the particular issues a given student is facing? • What resources would be expended for each administration of the assessment (e.g., financial, staffing, time) and do the uses of the results it would yield justify the resources expended? The DIBELS Next map is presented in Table 10.2 as an example of how an assessment can be mapped onto the components of the Cognitive Foundations Framework; we encourage reading professionals to make maps of the assessments they use and to explore the questions above in their individual settings.

10.4.2  Some Details in the DIBELS Next Assessment Before discussing some general issues revealed in the assessment map, let us look at each of the six DIBELS Next subtasks in more detail to get a better sense of how they measure and inform progress in student reading skills, and how each subtask was placed within the map (for reviews of DIBELS, see Carlson et  al., 2010; Shanahan, 2005).

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Table 10.2  The map of the DIBELS Next assessment subtasks by the grade levels considered for testing onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework components Assessment: Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) Next Assessment subtask: FSF LNF PSF NWF* DORF* Component (below): Reading comprehension 1-6 Language comprehension Background knowledge Linguistic knowledge Phonology Syntax Semantics Word recognition 1-6 Alphabetic coding K-2 Concepts about print Alphabetic principle K-2 Letter knowledge K-1 Phonemic awareness K-1 K-1 *Multiple entries under a subtask represent distinct performance measures

Daze* 3-6

3-6

Notes: Table entries are the grade levels of the students considered for testing (kindergarten, Grades 1–6) under the given assessment subtask Abbreviations of subtasks: Daze DIBELS maze comprehension, DORF DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency, FSF First Sound Fluency, LNF Letter Naming Fluency, NWF Nonsense Word Fluency, PSF Phoneme Segmentation Fluency

10.4.2.1  First Sound Fluency (FSF) In this subtask, students listen to a word read by the assessor and are to respond by saying its first sound. What is intended through these directions is to pronounce the phone that is associated with the first phoneme of the word read by the assessor. The subtask is timed and limited to one minute. Two points are given for a correct response and one point for a partially correct response (e.g., the first two sounds are given instead of just the first sound). The subtask purports to measure phonemic awareness, but there are several cautions. First, some 40% of the words contained in the subtask begin with consonant stops (e.g., /t/2 in top), and their phonetic ­counterparts (e.g., the phone [t], to continue the example using top) cannot be pronounced in isolation – indeed, they can only be pronounced with a following open articulatory track, steady-state sound (e.g., a vowel), which is produced as the

2  We follow the standard convention of using arrow brackets (< >) to denote written characters and character combinations, slash brackets (/ /) to denote phonemes and phoneme combinations, and square brackets ([ ]) to denote distinct speech sounds (phones) and phonetic combinations. To reduce the burden on the reader, we use letters to indicate phonemes and phones rather than the symbols used in the International Phonetic Alphabet, clarifying in text as needed.

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articulators are released. Thus, a single sound response, which would merit two points, is not possible in such cases, though assessors are to accept a response that consists of the initial stop consonant followed by the neutral schwa (e.g., responding [tuh] for the first sound in top) as a two-point response. A response of [taw] would receive one point as it contains the initial two sounds of the presented word, but a response of [tee] would not receive any points, as the vowel it contains is neither the neutral schwa nor the vowel in the presented word (and further, this response could also indicate the child was inappropriately responding with the letter name corresponding to the first sound of the presented word). Thus, the two-sound responses of [tuh], [taw], and [tee] are all scored differentially as two-, one-, and zero-point responses, respectively, yet each represents a two-sound response where a single-sound response is sought. The consequential issue is whether any such responses are indicative of phonemic segmentation as opposed to segmentation at the level of consonant-vowel (e.g., a syllable). Note these issues are not generally present in items like sad, where the response [s] earns two points, [sa] earns one point, and any other earns no points (though [suh], due to the scoring rule that allows a following neutral schwa response, earns two points even though the initial sound of the test word can be given in isolation). A second issue to keep in mind is that this subtask is minimally adequate given our definition of phonemic awareness (see Chap. 4) since it deals with only initial sounds and requires no manipulation of them beyond isolation. Much more difficult tasks that would yield stronger evidence of phonemic awareness would be to listen to a word, delete an interior phoneme, and produce the resulting syllable (e.g., say [stop] without the second sound, resulting in the response [sop]) or rearrange the phonemes in the presented word (e.g., say [stop] and switch the second and last sounds, resulting in the response [spot]). 10.4.2.2  Letter Naming Fluency (LNF) In this subtask, students are presented with a page containing printed upper- and lower-case letters (randomly arranged) and are asked to say the name of each letter in succession. The subtask is timed with a one-minute limit. To be successful in this task, students must not only be able to reliably recognize each letter, but they must also know the name of each one. Of course, being able to reliably name each letter requires reliable recognition of the same, but not vice-versa. And as we stated in Chap. 4 when discussing the components of the framework, letter recognition is what is important in acquiring the alphabetic principle, not letter naming, though the latter can help students acquire the alphabetic principle as many letter names (e.g., bee as the name of the letter ) begin with the phoneme the letter typically represents. Thus, success on this subtask would indicate successful mastery of letter recognition; however, for the student that is unsuccessful, some other assessment (e.g., one assessing the ability to discriminate letters from non-letters) would be needed to determine the most appropriate instructional response.

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10.4.2.3  Phoneme Segmentation Fluency (PSF) In this subtask, the assessor reads a word aloud and asks the student to say, in succession, each of its component sounds (e.g., the student is to say [s]-[o]-[puh] for soap). The subtask is timed, with a one-minute maximum, and the score assigned is the total number of sounds correctly produced. As with the First Sound Fluency subtask, many of the words in this subtask contain consonant stops, and their phonetic counterparts cannot be pronounced in isolation, again, making it difficult to determine if responses in this subtask are indicative of phonemic awareness. Further, this subtask does not require any manipulation of phonemic units only their segmentation, and as discussed above (and in Chap. 4), both aspects of phonemic awareness are needed to advance alphabetic coding skills. With these issues in mind, this subtask is best thought of as a limited indicator of skill in phonemic awareness. 10.4.2.4  Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF) In this subtask students are asked to read nonsense words as wholes (e.g., mip), but if unable to do so, are asked to give any constituent sounds of the nonsense word (e.g., [m]-[i]-[puh]). The subtask is timed with an upper limit of one minute. The number of nonsense words correctly read as wholes provides an index of alphabetic coding skill while the number of sounds correctly given when whole nonsense word responses are not made provides an index of knowledge of the alphabetic principle. Note that there is no issue with stop consonants in this subtask as segmentation is not what is asked for, just whether all the phones that should be included in the spoken nonsense word are correctly included in the response. Given that these two measures assess distinct framework components they are entered in the map above separately under the two components assessed – this is an instance where multiple distinct measures drawn from student performance under one subtask provides information about multiple framework components. 10.4.2.5  DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency (DORF) In this subtask students read aloud a series of grade-level passages, each under a one-minute time limit. While reading, the assessor captures word reading accuracy and subsequently calculates the number of words read correctly per minute (i.e., adjusted for incorrect responses). This provides an index of the ability to accurately and quickly read words in connected text, and thus provides an assessment of word recognition fluency. But in addition to reading aloud, students are asked to retell the passages they have read when they are finished reading, and the assessor counts the number of words contained in the retell that are related to the passage read. This provides a measure of reading comprehension, assessing what students understand from their reading, though it is a crude comprehension measure as it does not track recall of any higher-level structural units represented in the passage, only individual

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words. Thus, the DORF provides indices of two skills, word recognition and reading comprehension, and the subtask is placed in the map above under the two respective components of the framework reflecting the two separate performance indices it allows. 10.4.2.6  DIBELS Maze Comprehension (Daze) In this subtask, students are given up to three minutes to silently read a passage that contains word choices to be made every seven words or so. Upon encountering the choices, students are to select the one correct word choice (from three) that best fits the meaning of the text read thus far. Measures are taken of both how far students get through the passage as well as how accurate their word choice selections are. The assessor calculates the words read per minute, inferred from how far the student advanced in making word selections in the time allotted for reading, as an index of word reading fluency; the assessor also calculates the number of correct word choices made as an index of reading comprehension. As with the DORF, these two measures appear under the framework components of word recognition and reading comprehension. Note that the reading rate calculated will generally be a lower estimate of student reading rate given that students must suspend their reading to make the word choice responses the subtask requires.

10.4.3  S  ome Overarching Issues in the Assessment Instrument Map Overall, as seen in the map, the DIBELS Next subtasks provide indices of many of the components needed for success in learning to read, especially those needed to master word recognition. As mentioned above, almost all the subtasks have limitations, and these argue that those subtasks should not be used as the only indices of whether students have mastered a given component. Importantly, also note that each subtask is constrained by both time requirements (generally, a minute) and limited materials, both of which must be considered when thinking about uses of the information provided (e.g., inappropriate for high-stakes decisions). Indeed, users of any measure should go through the sorts of analyses presented above to determine the limitations of the measures being used and to evaluate the implications of those limitations on the decisions to be made that rely on those measures. Beyond the placements of subtasks in the cognitive components of the framework, the map shows that DIBELS Next provides no independent information about (1) the concepts about print component under word recognition or (2) the language comprehension component or any of its subcomponents. Thus, to get a more complete understanding of a given student under the Cognitive Foundations Framework additional assessments would need to be selected and administered.

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The lack of information about language comprehension is critical for the following reason. Recall from our discussion of the SVR that if word recognition skill was high, then reading comprehension skill would largely track language comprehension skill. That is, in a case of high word recognition skill, if reading comprehension skill was largely low, mid, or high level, then language comprehension skill would be predicted to be largely low, mid, or high level, respectively. In short, separate assessments of both language and reading comprehension would be redundant. But what if word recognition skill was low, as is the more typical case? Here, reading comprehension skill would be predicted to also be low, but language comprehension skill could be either high, mid, or low level. In short, separate assessments of language and reading comprehension would not be supplying redundant information. Applying this to DIBELS Next, if performance for a given student on either the DORF or Daze subtasks revealed a low score in word recognition skill, then we could not determine whether that student only needed help in word recognition or the components that underlie it, or if help in language comprehension was also needed – additional information would be required to make an appropriate instructional response. So how do the assessment maps support building coherence in reading practice? Both the assessment portfolio and instrument maps, across and within assessments, respectively, show which assessments are relevant for which cognitive skills at which grade levels. These allow a view of whether there is adequate coverage of the underlying reading skills to answer questions about whether students know what is needed to advance their skills (e.g., having an adequate awareness of phonemes in place for learning the alphabetic principle and advancing alphabetic coding skills). Second, by showing the grade levels of the students assessed, the maps provide a way to see if assessment information is available at the grade levels where skills are typically developed and if on-going assessment is available for those that might struggle. Third, the maps show whether there are multiple sources of information available for a given knowledge-skill set at a given grade, which supports decision-­ making about whether these constitute redundant information that is needed or unnecessary. (And these decisions would also need to consider the purposes for which the assessments were designed and their proposed use, which we have not described in our examples.) All these contribute to having and using assessment information that is linked to the cognitive skills needed for mastering reading, which can be used with other information (e.g., standards) similarly linked to the same cognitive skills. By tying these distinct sources of information together through a singular cognitive framework, coherent reading practices can be built.

10.5  Select Issues in Assessments There are three issues we wish to discuss regarding assessments in general. First, while we have shown how individual assessments can be mapped onto the framework, we have not given an example of how the results from an assessment can be

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similarly mapped. This could be done by taking the instrument map (see Table 10.2), placing assessments (or subtasks) across the top within months of administration (say, September through December for fall semester), and tabling scores (either raw, percentiles, or criterion) by the cognitive component assessed. Such a chart could then be used to gauge for a given component whether there were indications that appropriate progress was being made in it, whether development of any lower-level skills that it depended on appeared to be adequate, and whether any higher-level skills that depended on it were at appropriate levels. All these relationships should be considered in making decisions on what a given student might need to make further improvement in reading skills. These decisions cannot be based on a mechanised response process for several reasons, including the varying trustworthiness of the assessments, the uneven distribution of assessment administrations across time, missing test results, the reciprocal development between cognitive components, and the uncertainty about instructional history, to name just a few. The map of an individual student’s results would be used by reading professionals to make informed judgements about what appropriate actions might be taken under a given profile. Further judgements would be made about whether student responses to the actions taken yielded the intended results in student learning for the targeted components of reading. A second issue concerns the practical and administrative constraints of assessments. Here we must recognize that there is a natural tension between the time needed for assessment and instruction. Different assessments serve different purposes, are given at different times in the year, and require different amounts of time to both administer and use. There are no easy ways to balance these tensions, but we urge reading professionals to use the assessment data available to understand where their students stand with respect to the cognitive foundations, to make decisions based on those data coupled with their professional judgement, and to then check on the effectiveness of those decisions based on additional data and professional judgement. Third, we know there is a scarcity of data available in general about the fidelity of test administrations (Reed, Cummings, Schaper, & Biancarosa, 2014) and assessment trustworthiness, especially when thinking about differing domains (i.e., cognitive components of reading) and assessment purposes (Kame’enui et al., 2006). For instance, research has shown that measuring reading comprehension is particularly difficult with some tests based more on language comprehension skills, others on skills in word recognition (Keenan, Betjemann, & Olson, 2008). While we wait for the studies needed to address these difficulties and for the development of new assessments, we urge reading professionals not to abandon the use of what is available. Rather, we urge that these be used with caution in conjunction with professional judgement and an eye toward student impacts.

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10.6  Summary In this chapter we focused on mapping assessments onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework to further build coherence in reading practice. We provided examples of two kinds of assessment maps, an assessment portfolio map of the reading-relevant assessments used in a school district and a map of the subtasks of one assessment instrument, DIBELS Next, used in the same district. In the assessment portfolio map we described how the map was constructed, detailed the placements of the individual assessments within the set of cognitive foundation components, and provided a summary of what the portfolio map revealed for the district’s assessment program. That summary indicated that (1) caution was needed about the limited follow-up assessments of word recognition skills for students initially deemed to be successful in these skills in the early elementary grades; (2) there were limited assessments of syntactic knowledge, background knowledge, and language comprehension in later elementary grades; and (3) the many assessments of reading comprehension for all students from Grades 1–11 created the potential need for additional assessments of word recognition and language comprehension for those students identified as struggling in reading comprehension. In the assessment instrument map of DIBELS Next, we described how the map was constructed, how decisions were made about the placements of individual subtasks within the framework’s cognitive components, and what the map revealed overall. The summary indicated that (1) DIBELS Next provided indices of many of the components needed for success in mastering word recognition, but given the subtask limitations that were described, additional data might be needed for any high-stakes decisions that might be made based on them; and (2) DIBELS Next provided no assessments of language comprehension or any of its subcomponents, which would be needed for a more complete profile of student reading skills and further identification of potential difficulties in reading comprehension. We also discussed how the maps contributed to building coherence in reading practice by showing (1) which assessments were relevant to which cognitive skills at which grade levels, thus allowing determinations of whether there was adequate, overall coverage of the underlying set of reading-relevant skills; (2) the grade levels of the students assessed to see if appropriate assessment information was available at those grade levels where skills were typically developed and if on-going assessments were available for those found to struggle; and (3) whether there were multiple sources of information available for a given knowledge-skill set at a given grade to support decision-making about whether those constituted redundant information that was needed or unnecessary. We argued that linking reading-relevant assessment information with other information (e.g., standards) to the cognitive skills needed for mastering reading provides a mechanism for building coherence in reading practices. Finally, we discussed three general issues regarding assessments, including mapping individual student assessment results, dealing with the practical and administrative constraints of assessments, and coping with the general lack of information on the fidelity of test administrations and the trustworthiness of assessments.

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10.7  Questions for Further Thought Below are a set of questions to further your understanding of how the Cognitive Foundations Framework can be used to aid your use of assessments in reading practice. As with the other sets of posed questions, we believe these will be most helpful when discussed with colleagues, leading to a deeper understanding of the issues raised. Also, the questions below compliment the two sets of questions we gave earlier when introducing the assessment portfolio map and the assessment instrument map, respectively. 1. How would you think about using data from an assessment with unknown trustworthiness? What about data from an assessment you knew to be untrustworthy? What about using student profiles based on results from a combination of assessments that represented various levels of trustworthiness? 2. How might you think about checking on assessment results in the context of reading instruction, for example, by asking students to read narrative text aloud or by responding to questions from text read to students? 3. What are the perils of ignoring assessments altogether when planning and delivering instruction? Are there ways to minimize those perils? 4. If you assessed a child’s skills in reading comprehension, language comprehension, and word recognition, and results indicated that reading comprehension and language comprehension performance met grade-level expectations, but that word recognition performance was substantially below grade-level expectations, how would you think about the discrepancy? What if language comprehension and word recognition performance met grade-level expectations, but reading comprehension was substantially below grade-level expectations?

10.8  What’s Next Having discussed both standards and assessments as tools that can be linked to the Cognitive Foundations Framework, we next consider how curriculum and instruction, another tool used by reading professionals to support the development of reading skills, can be linked to the framework to help build coherence in reading practice.

References Carlson, J.  F., Römhild, A., McCormick, C., Chin, K., Geisinger, K.  F., Shaw, L., & Foley, B. P. (2010). Evaluating reading tests for the state of Florida: Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, 6th Edition (DIBELS) and Florida Assessments for Instruction in Reading (FAIR). Lincoln, NE: Buros Center for Testing. Dewey, E. N., Powell-Smith, K. A., Good, R. H., & Kaminski, R. A. (2015). DIBELS next technical adequacy brief. Eugene, OR: Dynamic Measurement Group.

References

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Good, R.  H., III, & Kaminski, R.  A. (2012). DIBELS next assessment manual. Eugene, OR: Dynamic Measurement Group. ∗Kame’enui, E. J., Fuchs, L., Francis, D. J., Good III, R., O’Connor, R. E., Simmons, D. C., ... Torgesen, J. K. (2006). The adequacy of tools for assessing reading competence: A framework and review. Educational Researcher, 35, 3–11. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189x035004003 Keenan, J. M., & Betjemann, R. S. (2006). Comprehending the Gray Oral Reading Test without reading it: Why comprehension tests should not include passage-independent items. Scientific Studies of Reading, 10, 363–380. https://doi.org/10.1207/s1532799xssr1004_2 ∗Keenan, J. M., Betjemann, R. S., & Olson, R. K. (2008). Reading comprehension tests vary in the skills they assess: Differential dependence on decoding and oral comprehension. Scientific Studies of Reading, 12, 281–300. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888430802132279 Reed, D. K., Cummings, K. D., Schaper, A., & Biancarosa, G. (2014). Assessment fidelity in reading intervention research: A synthesis of the literature. Review of Educational Research, 84, 275–321. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654314522131 Shanahan, T. (2005). Review of the DIBELS: Dynamic indicators of basic early literacy skills, 6th Edition. In R. A. Spies & B. S. Plake (Eds.), The sixteenth mental measurement yearbook. The Buros Institute of Mental Measurement: Lincoln, NE. ∗Tunmer, W. E., & Greaney, K. T. (2008). Reading intervention research: An integrative framework. In G. Reid, A. Fawcett, F. Manis, & L. Siegel (Eds.), The Sage handbook of dyslexia (pp. 241–267). London, UK: Sage. https://doi.org/10.4135/9780857020987.n12

Chapter 11

Curriculum and Instruction and the Cognitive Foundations Framework

Acronyms CAI NRP PGFS PGRC SVR

computer-assisted instruction National Reading Panel Practice Guide for Foundational Skills Practice Guide for Reading Comprehension Simple View of Reading

11.1  Introduction In this chapter we first discuss core instructional programs, focusing on the early elementary school grades where reading is largely taught. We contrast two main types of programs and describe what is known about instructional program effectiveness. We then turn to instructional components. We revisit the work of the National Reading Panel and its study of the evidence underlying certain instructional components, providing an update of its findings and recommendations based on two subsequent reviews that considered more recent research. We also provide maps of the instructional recommendations from each of the three reviews onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework, summarizing the recommendations made and how they address the cognitive components of reading. We then describe some of the specific ways the review panels gave for implementing their recommendations. We follow this with an example of a curriculum map, which takes a one-week instructional sequence from a kindergarten supplemental curriculum and maps it onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework. We close with a discussion of some select issues in curriculum and instruction, a chapter summary, and some questions for further thought. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 W. A. Hoover, W. E. Tunmer, The Cognitive Foundations of Reading and Its Acquisition, Literacy Studies 20, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44195-1_11

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11.2  Defining Instructional Programs and Components Reading curriculum deals with the content of the reading program and instruction with how program content is taught. Together we more succinctly reference these as just instruction. In our discussion we distinguish between instructional programs1 and instructional components. Instructional programs are broadly focused on the large enterprise of teaching all aspects of reading. They represent core reading curricula and how they are to be delivered, which provide comprehensive approaches to teaching reading designed to serve all children within a given grade-level sequence or age range. Instructional components are more narrowly focused as specific interventions targeting specific outcomes that relate to specific segments of reading or teaching reading. Reading professionals could adopt instructional components as supplements to, or replacements within, an instructional program (or core reading curriculum), but they would be inappropriate in serving as an entire reading program given their lack of comprehensiveness. Unfortunately, while we know much about the effectiveness of instructional components, we know much less about the overall effectiveness of instructional programs (Seidenberg, 2013).

11.3  Core Instructional Programs for Reading As discussed in Chap. 6, for typical children, word recognition is the initial limiting factor that prevents them from reading at the level of their relatively much-more-­ developed language comprehension skills, and thus becomes a primary focus of early-grade instruction. But, as we have seen, language comprehension, including the background knowledge and inferencing skills on which it draws, must not be ignored as it becomes for typical children the limiting factor in reading comprehension in later years once word recognition approaches mastery. Note that in schools, language comprehension skills are generally taught through the language arts curriculum rather than the reading curriculum, which has its primary focus on word recognition skills (but this separation can be problematic as we will discuss later). A critical feature of reading instruction designed to develop student word recognition skills is the degree of attention paid to making explicit the connections between the orthography and phonology of printed words. There are two main instructional traditions for this that anchor the ends of a continuum. Phonics-based programs focus on explicitly teaching letter-sound relationships within words (as a way of enabling the learning of letter-phoneme relations), which these programs regard as providing the primary access to a word’s identification. Whole

1  We use the convention of italicizing key concepts and distinctions for emphasis, but we also italicize words, phrases, or sentences when denoting them as linguistic objects. In both cases, the context we provide should suffice to determine the particular use being served.

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language-­based programs tend to limit the direct teaching of letter-sound correspondences, addressing them only incidentally as they maintain a focus on the use of meaning as the primary mechanism to identify words. We will see that each approach has both positive and negative consequences for learning to read.

11.3.1  The Core Continuum With the above context in mind, the core instructional program for reading is designed to teach typical students all (grade-appropriate) aspects of reading. If there are students who prove to be atypical (i.e., who fail to adequately progress in reading through the instruction intended for all students) then their instruction needs to be adjusted. Such adjustments can come either through altered instruction within the core program, supplemental instruction given in addition to the core program, or other instruction that replaces some (or all) of the core program. In this chapter our primary focus is on instruction for typical students; we take up issues of supporting struggling readers in Chap. 12. As noted above, one dimension of teaching word recognition within the core instructional program can be viewed as a continuum that runs from explicitly linking the orthography and phonology of printed words, to doing so only incidentally. This dimension is correlated with a focus on the role of language comprehension in identifying words that goes from secondary to primary, as well as one regarding learner autonomy, which ranges from teacher-dependent to teacher-independent practices. For our purposes, we will mainly focus on the explicitness of teaching the relations between orthography and phonology in individual words. We will first discuss phonics, with its emphasis on explicitly teaching orthographic-phonologic relations (and its more language-comprehension-as-secondary and teacher-­ dependent approach). We will follow with a discussion of whole language, with its approach of incidentally teaching these relations (and its more language-­ comprehension-­as-primary and teacher-independent approach). We will conclude with a description of a middle ground, the metacognitive approach. In this discussion, we will not provide a detailed description of the instructional approaches but will give a broad perspective on key differences. 11.3.1.1  Phonics Traditional phonics programs explicitly teach letter-sound correspondences, which, as we have seen, can be critical components of establishing alphabetic coding skills. There are two main methods for teaching phonics – synthetic and analytic. Both teach letter-sound relationships in a systematic fashion, but the former stresses blending taught individual letter-sound correspondences to create words while the latter teaches those correspondences by having children decompose whole words into their component parts. While the question of which is more effective is

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unsettled (for example, the National Reading Panel did not find significant differences between the two methods in its review), what is clear is that both teach lettersound relationships explicitly, and this is most critical. (An example of a phonics approach to recognizing an unknown word is given in Box 11.1.)

Box 11.1 A Typical Phonics Approach for Teaching Children to Recognize Words In phonics approaches to teaching word identification what is most critical is making explicit the correspondence between a word’s printed letters and the phonology underlying them. An example described in the educator’s practice guide Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade (Foorman et al., 2016) asks students to use both a sounding out and blending approach to identify a word. Here a student confronted with a novel word like hat would be asked to say in succession the individual sounds that correspond to the letters it contains, or [huh]2 followed by [a] followed by [tuh]. Having successfully identified the individual sounds the teacher would then ask what word results when those sounds are combined (or blended). Through such explicit instruction the student is expected to learn to link the underlying phonemes in hat (namely, /h/, /a/, and /t/) to its three constituent letters. But phonics programs that explicitly teach letter-sound relationships generally suffer from two major shortcomings. First, they tend to be strongly teacher-centered and have curricula that are rigid with the same skill lesson given to every child in the same sequence regardless of student need. Such an approach to teaching beginning reading conflicts with the basic principles of differentiated instruction (which are described in Chap. 12) and is either inefficient or ineffective for many children depending on their specific levels of development across the set of reading component skills. Second, most phonics programs incorrectly assume that children can only acquire knowledge of letter-sound patterns through direct instruction in which the teaching of letter-sound correspondences is explicit and systematic. The major difficulties with this assumption are (1) there are simply too many letter-sound relationships in written English for children to acquire by direct instruction, probably several hundred (Gough & Hillinger, 1980); and (2) as we have seen, the underlying relationships that must be acquired entail abstract units (i.e., phonemes) and are

2  We follow the standard convention of using arrow brackets (< >) to denote written characters and character combinations, slash brackets (/ /) to denote phonemes and phoneme combinations, and square brackets ([ ]) to denote distinct speech sounds (phones) and phonetic combinations. To reduce the burden on the reader, we use letters to indicate phonemes and phones rather than the symbols used in the International Phonetic Alphabet, clarifying in text as needed.

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context sensitive, and instruction can only lead children to uncover these relationships rather than provide them directly. Further, many phonics programs fail to appreciate that success on learning the relations underlying letter-sound relationships depends on understanding the alphabetic principle, which may not be included as an explicit instructional objective in the given phonics approach. Much, if not most, of what children learning to read in English come to know about its orthographic-phonologic relationships is acquired through implicit learning, especially knowledge of context-sensitive correspondences that depend on position-specific constraints or the presence of other letters (Bryant, 2002; Tunmer & Nicholson, 2011; Venezky, 1999). As discussed in Chap. 4, as the word reading attempts of beginning readers who have letter knowledge, phonemic awareness, and a firm understanding of the alphabetic principle become more successful, the orthographic representations of more words become established in lexical memory. From these, additional orthographic-phonologic relationships can be induced without explicit instruction. The letter-sound correspondences acquired by direct phonics instruction are largely context free, involving one-to-one correspondences between letters and phones or syllables (e.g., represents [s], represents [buh]). In contrast, letter-sound correspondences acquired by implicit learning are mostly context sensitive, as they depend on position-specific constraints or the presence of other letters (e.g., represents one sound in the context of debit but not in debt). As children continue to develop in reading, they begin making greater independent use of orthographic-phonologic relationships to identify novel printed words in text. Once this point is reached, print exposure can become an effective way for children to achieve further progress in learning to read, as reading itself can provide practice opportunities for building fluency and for facilitating implicit learning of additional orthographic-phonologic patterns (Stanovich & West, 1989; Tunmer & Nicholson, 2011). Although children must rely increasingly on induction to acquire the orthographic-­ phonologic relationships necessary for learning to read, explicit phonics instruction plays an important role in helping to kick start the process by which beginning readers acquire untaught relationships through implicit learning. Phonics instruction is therefore best thought of as a means and not an end itself. Because of the nature of English orthography, one of the main functions of phonics instruction is to provide beginning readers with a process for generating approximate phonological representations of novel printed words that gets them close enough to the correct phonological forms that, with context, allows correct word identifications to be made. Children learn to use their knowledge of the relationships between orthography and phonology acquired through phonics instruction to produce partial phonological representations for unfamiliar words encountered in print, especially those containing irregular, polyphonic, or orthographically complex spelling patterns. These approximate phonological representations provide the basis for generating alternative pronunciations of target words until one is produced that matches a word in the child’s lexical memory and makes sense in the context in which it appears. Additional relationships, especially context-sensitive patterns, can then be induced from the stored orthographic representations of words that have been correctly identified (Venezky, 1999).

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Thus, phonics instruction is useful not so much because of the specific letter-­ sound correspondences taught (which are limited in number), but because it instils in beginning readers a firm grasp of the alphabetic principle and gives them practice in looking closely at word spellings (Snow & Juel, 2005). Some explicit phonics instruction may therefore go a long way in facilitating the process by which children induce untaught orthographic-phonologic relationships (Juel, 1991). For children encountering difficulty in developing the ability to perceive more intuitively the redundant patterns and connections between print and speech, explicit instruction in alphabetic coding skills is crucial (Brady, 2011; Hattie, 2009; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000; Snow & Juel, 2005; Tunmer & Arrow, 2013) – but such instruction has been found to be more effective under some conditions than others. Providing beginning and struggling readers with explicit and systematic instruction in letter-sound patterns and word identification strategies outside the context of reading connected text is more effective than only teaching word analysis skills incidentally (i.e., as the need arises) during text reading, as is common in the whole-language approach to teaching beginning reading (Morris, Tyner, & Perney, 2000). There are likely two reasons for this. First, instruction in word analysis skills that is deliberately separated from meaningful context allows children to pay full attention to the letter-sound patterns being taught, as well as avoid having their text reading overly disrupted. Second, isolated word study helps to ensure that beginning readers see the importance of focusing on word-level cues as the most useful source of information in identifying words. This helps them overcome any tendency they may have to rely primarily on sentence context cues in identifying novel printed words rather than using context to supplement word-level information. Indeed, one of the major distinguishing characteristics of readers struggling with word recognition is their tendency to rely heavily on sentence context cues to compensate for their deficient alphabetic coding skills (Stanovich, 1980). Although beginning readers should receive explicit instruction in letter-sound patterns outside the context of reading connected text, they should also be taught strategies on how and when to use this information during text reading through demonstration, modelling, direct explanation, and guided practice. This includes teaching children to adopt a set for diversity in which partial decoding attempts are used to generate alternative pronunciations of target words until one is produced that matches a word in their vocabulary and is appropriate to the sentence context (Tunmer & Chapman, 2012). In general, better outcomes are achieved when phonics instruction is accompanied by rich and varied opportunities for children to practice and receive feedback on applying their newly acquired word analysis skills while actively engaged in the processes of reading and writing (Hatcher et al., 2006; Mathes et al., 2005). In short, phonics instruction needs to be fully integrated within the literacy curriculum, not segregated from it. In sum, the strength of phonics is its emphasis on learning letter-sound relations; its major weaknesses are in (1) failing to recognize that knowledge of the alphabetic principle is necessary for learning relationships between orthography and phonology and (2) its assumption that the only way children can learn these

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relationships is through direct instruction. Let us now move to the other end of the reading instruction continuum for teaching word recognition. 11.3.1.2  Whole Language Whole language has been a driving force in reading education since the 1960s (Goodman, 1967; Smith, 1971). It is as much a philosophy of teaching as it is an instructional regimen. (As a contrast to the phonics example given above, an example of a whole-language approach to word recognition is given in Box 11.2.) Whole language rests on two basic (but faulty) assumptions, one concerning how we learn to read, the other concerning how we read (Gough, 1996, February; Tunmer & Nicholson, 2011). Let us briefly describe each assumption and the difficulties faced in turn. Box 11.2 A Typical Whole-Language Approach for Teaching Children to Recognize Words In whole-language approaches to teaching word identification what is most critical is making an explicit link between the printed word and the meaning surrounding it provided by what has been understood thus far (regardless of the source of that understanding). In using this approach, a student may read a story aloud but hesitate on the word hat when reading the sentence He was cold on top with no hat on his head. The teacher might ask if the student could think what word that might be given the understanding of the sentence and story thus far. Here the word would be recognized based on the meaning surrounding it rather than the constituent letters and phonology underlying it – the later relationships might then be induced implicitly rather than having been taught explicitly. But in whole language these relationships are not emphasized under the view that the main driving force in word identification is meaning. Whole language assumes that learning to read follows a path that is like the one for learning a native language, namely, that reading is accomplished by exposure to print without the need for explicit instruction. With that, it holds that learning to read should focus on meaning, just as the learning of one’s native language does, rather than on the cognitive components that allow it to be accomplished. Hence, in this view children should be immersed in print with a focus on what print means with no explicit instruction on the enabling processes (e.g., phonemic awareness, alphabetic coding skill), which would only act as distractors impeding the understanding of meaning. If one focuses on meaning, the whole-language approach argues, then the underlying competencies with print will be induced without the need for instruction – one will learn to read by reading. There are several difficulties with this view.

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First, if children learn merely through induction via immersion, then we should not expect to see many children fail to master it in the elementary years, just as we do not see many children who enter school lacking competence in their native language. Yet some 15–20% of children in New Zealand fail to read by the end of first grade (Tunmer & Nicholson, 2011) and a third of fourth grade students in the United States are found to fall below basic reading skill levels (National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2020, January 25). Second, very few children come to school already knowing how to read despite being raised in print-rich environments prior to school entry. The reason for these circumstances is that learning to read in fact is not natural (Gough & Hillinger, 1980). Whereas language is universal among human communities, reading is anything but universal. And as we discussed in Chap. 4, children who attempt to read words by the natural strategy of using partial visual cues will not become successful readers until they adopt the fully analytic strategies that relate orthography and phonology, such generally requiring explicit instruction at least initially. This leads us to a second assumption within whole language, which concerns how reading is accomplished. Whole language, with its focus on meaning and away from the structural relationships between orthography and phonology, assumes that readers predict what words are coming next in running text – reading via a “psycholinguistic guessing game” (Goodman, 1967)  – then use minimal word-level information to confirm their predictions. In this view, children who would be readers must learn to use multiple cues in identifying words in text. These include meaning-based text cues (e.g., picture cues, semantic sources of information, syntactic sources of information, preceding passage context, prior knowledge activated by the developing meaning of the text) being mostly used to generate hypotheses about the text yet to be encountered and letter-sound information generally being used for confirmation and self-correction. Children in whole-language programs are therefore urged to use sentence context cues as the primary source of information in identifying unfamiliar words, with letter-sound cues being used only very sparingly and mainly to confirm language predictions. (Note that this is the Searchlight model used in the United Kingdom that was critically examined in Rose (2006).) The major shortcoming of this assumption about how reading works is that it stresses the importance of using information from many sources in identifying unfamiliar words without recognizing that skills and strategies involving phonological information are, as we have seen, of primary importance in beginning literacy development. Recall our earlier discussion of reading Japanese kanji (Chap. 4), where recognizing just 2000 logographs takes 10–12 years of study, while the average high schooler reading English can read quickly and accurately some 25,000 words. The same cues are available to the reader in either system – picture cues, word shape cues, sentence context clues, preceding passage content, activated prior knowledge – save one, orthographic-phonologic cues. And these latter cues account for the huge difference in learning to read in the two orthographies. Another shortcoming of this assumption about how we read concerns the predictability of words in text. While whole language holds that words in text are

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highly predictable within the developing meaning of text, research has demonstrated that the words that can be predicted in running text are typically the frequently occurring function words that children can already recognize rather than the less frequently occurring that are the more meaningful content words. Indeed, it has been shown (Gough, 1983) that the average predictability of content words (e.g., nouns, verbs, and adjectives) in running text is less than 10% compared to about 40% for function words (e.g., articles, prepositions, conjunctions, and pronouns). As such, the meaning of a passage depends disproportionately on the meanings of its least familiar and least predictable words. A further disadvantage of any assumed reliance on context to predict words is that not only would this strategy result in missed learning opportunities when context is insufficient to make a prediction, but it would also result in misleading learning trials when a prediction is contextually appropriate yet incorrect. Such deficient and misleading data would almost certainly impede progress. In sum, the strengths of whole language are its recognition of the importance of implicit learning and of understanding text. Its major weaknesses are in (1) undervaluing the role of the orthographic-phonological connection in recognizing words while overvaluing the role of predicting words based on the developing meaning of text and (2) failing to understand that some explicit instruction is generally necessary around the alphabetic principle and alphabetic coding before implicit learning of orthographic-phonological mappings can be successfully undertaken. 11.3.1.3  Metacognitive Approach Given the limitations just described of phonics and whole-language approaches for facilitating the development of word recognition, there is a middle ground approach that avoids them. We call this the metacognitive strategy approach, which is situated mid-way along the continuum of teaching approaches that range from the explicit, isolated skill approach of phonics to the incidental, meaning-based approach of whole language. The metacognitive strategy approach emphasizes the importance of developing self-teaching mechanisms for learning orthographic-phonological relationships, supported by both explicit instruction at the word level (a positive feature of phonics) and implicit learning from exposure to text (a positive feature of whole language). The continuum of approaches from phonics to metacognitive to whole language, along with some key characteristics of each approach, is presented in Table 11.1. A criticism of the metacognitive strategy approach (as well as of phonics programs) is that English orthgraphy contains so many irregularities that focusing too much attention on teaching alphabetic coding skill not only wastes valuable instructional time but possibly even confuses children and impedes progress. Those who claim that English orthography is too irregular to be of much use typically argue that children should be taught to use mulitiple cues in identifying words in text. But consider the results of the following study that examined the relationship between beginning readers’ reported strategies for identifying unknown words in text and

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Table 11.1  Contrasts of key features across a continuum of teaching approaches for facilitating the development of alphabetic coding skill Instructional Isolated skill approach: approach Key views of reading Atomistic acquisition: Reading broken down into several subskills Teaching subskills Key instructional in isolation emphases for learning to recognize words: Much seatwork and use of workbooks

Metacognitive strategy approach Dynamic Child seen as active learner Developing self-­ improving strategies for recognizing words Developing skills in how and when to use learned strategies

Whole language approach Natural process that is meaning driven “No meaning, no gain”

Minimal work on word analysis activities Word analysis only incidentally and only in the context of reading connected text

their later reading achievement (Tunmer & Chapman, 2002). Five-year-old beginning readers participating in a three year longitudinal study of early literacy development in New Zealand were divided into three groups according to their responses to the following question asked at the end of their first year of school: When you are reading on your own and come across a word that you don’t know, what do you do to try to figure out what the word is? The majority of children (52%) reported using word-based strategies, 34% reported using text-based strategies, and 14% of the children did not provide a response. Typical examples of word-based strategies reported by the children included the following verbatim responses: • • • • • • • • • • •

Sound it out. Think of the sounds. Say the letters. Do the sounds of it. Make the sounds. Hear all the letters. Listen to what the letters are. You try and get the letters right. You hear the letters. Say out the sounds in the word. Sound it out, dad says so.

Typical examples of text-based strategies reported by the children included the following verbatim responses: • • • • •

Guess. Think, guess what the word is. Read it over again. Read on. Have a look at the picture.

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• • • • • •

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Keep on going, then go back and see what the word is. I leave it. Think about the word. Try to guess what it is. You just read it back again. Go back to the beginning, then you read it again. Miss it and go to the end and go back and guess a word that makes sense.

All the teachers of these students employed text-based learning strategies in their reading instruction, and these results indicate that the text-based learning strategies emphasized by them were not necessarily reflected in the conscious word identification strategies that most children reported using in learning to read. Of greater importance, the results further showed that the first year beginning readers who reported using word-based strategies strongly outperformed the children who reported using text-based strategies on all reading and reading-related measures taken in the middle of their third year of school. Moreover, these children were six times less likely to enter a remedial reading approach (namely, Reading Recovery) in their second year of school than the children who reported relying on text-based strategies the previous year (6% versus 37%). These findings support the importance of using letter-sound relationships to identify unfamiliar words in print while reading. As noted in Chap. 4, when examined at a deeper level, English orthography is not nearly as irregular as often claimed. Moreover, no word in English is completely phonologically opaque. Even irregularly spelled words like stomach, castle, spinach, and friend provide phonological cues to their identity (Joshi, Treiman, Carreker, & Moats, 2008). Indeed, learning to read would certainly be a much more difficult task if spoken words like stomach were represented in the orthography as a random sequence of letters (e.g., omtshca) rather than as irregular spellings. When beginning readers apply their developing knowledge of letter-sound relationships to irregular words they have not encountered in print before, the result will often be close enough to the correct phonological form that sentence context can be used to arrive at a correct identification, provided that the word is in the child’s vocabulary. Indeed, not only is alphabetic coding skill necessary for learning to read irregularly spelled words, it is even necessary for taking advantage of the constraints of sentence context in identifying novel printed words in text. Only children who have begun to acquire alphabetic coding skill are able to benefit from sentence context (Tunmer & Chapman, 2006). For children with limited alphabetic coding skill, context provides little or no help in identifying previously unseen words, as the words are largely unanalyzed. For example, beginning readers when confronted with the word stomach who are able to generate the regularized pronunciation [sto]-[mak] (rhymes with attach) are more likely to identify the word when it appears in an appropriate sentence context (e.g., The football hit him in the stomach) than children who fail to identify any (or only a few) of the sounds of the word. Having discussed some distinguishing characteristics of instructional programs in reading, let us now turn to what is currently known about their effectiveness.

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11.3.2  E  vidence Concerning the Effectiveness of Core Instructional Programs As discussed above, core reading programs are designed to provide comprehensive reading instruction across one or more grade levels for all students. Given their breadth and varied details, understanding effective core programs may not be as helpful in understanding what might make any one program more effective than another. Nonetheless, knowing the types of programs that have been found to be effective helps our understanding of the general character of effective reading instruction. We will discuss two best-evidence syntheses addressing the effectiveness of reading programs, one focused on initial, non-remedial reading programs for students in kindergarten and first grade, the other similarly focused but on students in Grades 2–5, both conducted by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Data-Driven Reform in Education. In the first review (Slavin, Lake, Chambers, Cheung, & Davis, 2009), both core and supplemental reading programs for students in Grades K-1 were identified for study, the latter being programs designed to serve all students (like core programs) but to be used in addition to a core program rather than as a substitute for it. In this review, programs were classified under four categories: • Reading curricula: These employed basic reading textbooks (basals) for teaching reading (e.g., McGraw-Hill’s SRA Open Court Reading, a curriculum featuring phonetic readers, direct instruction, and scripted teacher manuals). • Instructional technology programs: These used technology in some manner to support reading development, running from computer-assisted instruction (CAI) provided in computer labs featuring self-paced instruction to supplement classroom instruction (e.g., Waterford Institute’s Waterford Early Reading Program, a CAI program designed to develop emergent literacy skills), to those that included technology provided support within traditional lessons (e.g., Reading Reels, a supplemental program that embedded video content within teachers’ daily lessons). • Instructional process programs: These focused on providing professional development to teachers to adopt effective strategies for teaching reading (e.g., Orton Gillingham, a phonological awareness training program). • Combined curriculum and instructional process programs: These combined the specific content of a curriculum with extensive professional development on instructional strategies for delivering that content (e.g., Success for All, combining a phonics-based curriculum with a cooperative learning instructional strategy). All studies included in the review’s final analyses had to meet the following criteria: • randomly assigned or well-matched experimental and control groups with a minimum of 15 students and two teachers per group; • interventions that lasted a minimum of 12 weeks and began in either kindergarten or first grade;

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• use of valid reading assessments (e.g., standardized or state tests) that were independent of the experimental intervention; and • testing at the end of first grade or later to gauge the impacts on reading outcomes. A broad search of the research literature for relevant studies completed during the period of 1970–2009 yielded 63 studies that met the criteria above, including 7 studies of reading curricula, 13 of instructional technology programs, 17 of instructional process programs, and 26 of combined curriculum and instructional process programs. Meta-analytic statistical procedures gave pooled effects for distinct programs (e.g., within the reading curricula programs, Open Court Reading and phonics programs) and for the four program categories. Evidence of effectiveness was defined as strong, moderate, limited, or insufficient.3 Findings indicated there were only 3 programs that evidenced strong effects, 0 with moderate effects, 12 with limited effects, and 48 with insufficient effects. Those programs with strong effects included Success for All and Peer Assisted Learning Strategies, both combined curriculum and instructional process programs focused on phonics and cooperative learning. The third program, Reading Reels, was an instructional technology supplemental support program for Success for All. Common aspects of these three programs included a focus on phonological awareness and phonics, cooperative learning where children work with other children on structured activities, and extensive professional development and follow-up. Importantly, the synthesis suggests that programs providing curriculum, instructional technology, or instructional processes alone are not effective  – these must come with adequate support for their use in the classroom if they are to have a positive impact on children’s reading achievement. A similar best-evidence synthesis approach to the one just described was used to study classroom-based non-remedial reading programs for students in Grades 2–5. In this review (Slavin, Lake, Cheung, & Davis, 2009), programs were classified under three categories: • Reading curricula: These included programs that used core reading textbooks and curricula (e.g., Scott Foresman’s Reading Street, a revised basal textbook series with increased focus on phonics and phonemic awareness; Harcourt’s Rigby Literacy Program, a whole-language literacy approach using levelled non-­ phonetic books, detailed lessons, and guided reading assessments), as well as those that used supplemental texts (e.g., Scholastic’s Fluency Formula, focused on building oral reading fluency through levelled books used in reading activities for about 15 minutes per day). • Computer-assisted instruction programs: These included reading programs that incorporated some aspect of instructional delivery, of which there were three

3  Strong: weighted mean effect sizes across studies of at least +.20 standard deviations, with combined sample sizes covering at least 500 students or 20 classrooms; Moderate: effect sizes of at least +.20 with combined sample sizes covering 250–499 students or 10–19 classrooms; Limited: effect sizes of +.10 to +.19; and Insufficient: effect sizes less than +.10.

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types – supplementary programs such as those employing computer labs (e.g., Jostens/Compass Learning, using extensive assessments to place students in individualized instructional sequences for 15–30  minutes per day), computer-­ managed learning systems (e.g., Accelerated Reader, using computers to assign readings and assess progress), and innovative technology programs (e.g., Lightspan, providing linked home and school learning opportunities provided through Sony PlayStations). • Instructional process programs: These focused on providing professional development to teachers to adopt effective strategies for teaching reading (e.g., Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition, a cooperative learning program designed to help students develop metacognitive strategies for comprehending narrative and expository text). All studies included in the review’s final analyses had to meet the following criteria: • randomly assigned or well-matched experimental and control groups with a minimum of 15 students and 2 teachers per group; • interventions that lasted a minimum of 12 weeks and began in Grades 2–5 (or Grade 6 if it was part of an elementary school); • use of valid reading assessments (e.g., standardized or state tests) that were independent of experimental treatments; and • testing at the end of second grade or later to gauge the impacts on reading outcomes. From the literature search undertaken, 80 studies were identified that met the above criteria: 16 studies of reading curricula (7 core curricula and 9 supplemental programs), 31 studies of instructional technology programs (26 supplementary programs, 2 computer-managed learning systems, and 3 innovative technology programs), and 33 studies of instructional process programs. Following similar procedures to those described in the earlier study, meta-analytic statistical procedures were applied to the studies for distinct programs and for the three program categories, and pooled effects were computed; evidence of effectiveness was defined as strong, moderate, limited, or insufficient in a similar manner to that given earlier. Findings indicated that no set of studies showed strong effects, 3 showed moderate effects, which were all instructional processes programs (namely, Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition, Cross-Age Peer Tutoring and Strategy Instruction, and Same-Age Peer Tutoring and Strategy Instruction), 14 had limited effects, and 62 had insufficient effects. As with the earlier best-evidence synthesis, these findings highlight the importance of students working in small groups to help one another master cognitive and metacognitive skills. Further, what seems to matter most in advancing student achievement in reading through theses programs are approaches that fundamentally change classroom practices for teachers and students. And these are programs that are characterized by extensive professional development in classroom strategies intended to maximize students’ participation and engagement, give students effective metacognitive strategies for comprehending text, and strengthen student phonics skills.

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What do these research reviews on core instructional programs tell us about the importance of developing the cognitive foundations that underlie skilled reading? There are two important findings: (1) strengthening alphabetic coding skills is critical to advancing success in reading, and programs that focus on such (e.g., phonics programs) are more effective than those that do not; and (2) strengthening comprehension is critical to advancing success in reading, and programs that focus on skills that do this (e.g., those that focus on metacognitive skills in comprehension) are more effective than those that do not. While outside the reach of the framework, these research reviews suggest that key aspects of the success of such programs beyond their focus on the important cognitive skills underlying reading are on-­ going professional development that supports changes in classroom practice and the use of small, cooperative learning groups in supporting student development. Overall, given the scarcity of evidence on the effectiveness of entire reading programs, let us turn to the evidence concerning specific instructional activities that are contained in instructional programs, an area with a much larger evidence base.

11.3.3  Characteristics of Effective Reading Instruction There has been much research, especially when compared to that carried out on entire programs, on the instructional activity that may be found within such programs. Below we summarize the findings from three panels in the United States that looked at the available evidence on instructional practices linked to student achievement in reading. We follow this with a discussion of specific strategies recommended by the panels for teaching language comprehension and word recognition, including the component skills underlying each. 11.3.3.1  T  he Maps of Findings from Three Expert Panel Reviews of Research on Reading Instruction In Chap. 2 we mentioned the Report of the National Reading Panel (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000), or NRP, and the five instructional components studied. The NRP is the first of the three panel review efforts we will describe in this section, and we will say a bit more here about its work and findings. Report of the National Reading Panel The five instructional components studied by the NRP were derived from five regional hearings held across the United States in 1998. The comments received at these hearings became the focus of internal panel discussions, which led to the final selection of the five instructional components and their associated questions for

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study. Once these were determined, the NRP searched for relevant studies under each component that met a set of requirements, the most critical being whether a study under consideration was designed and carried out in a manner that allowed support of causal claims (i.e., the studied practice could be causally linked to the outcomes observed). This was important as the NRP was looking for evidence-­ based practices that justifiably could be widely adopted to improve reading achievement. Studies that met the requirements were analyzed and subjected as a set to a meta-analysis, which statistically assessed the degree to which the study practice led to changed student achievement. The NRP described the evidence it found in support of each instructional component as insufficient, minimal, moderate, or strong. We stated in Chap. 2 that the five instructional components studied by the NRP could be mapped onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework, and below we provide that map, which is structured like the standards maps presented in Chap. 9. The map lists the five instructional components down the left column following the order in which the NRP presented them: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. (Note that at the bottom of the table, each of these instructional components is described along with the strength of the evidence the NRP found in supporting it.) The framework components are listed across the top presented left to right, moving from higher to lower levels in the hierarchy under the three constructs of the Simple View of Reading (SVR) (i.e., reading comprehension, language comprehension, and word recognition). Tabled under the framework component column that represents the best target of the instructional component is one of four symbols that represents the strength of the evidence found for the recommendation made: (1) an upper-case, bolded X if the panel reported it had found relatively strong empirical support for the effectiveness of the instructional component recommended; (2) an upper-case, non-bolded X if the panel found more moderate empirical supporting evidence; (3) a lower-case, non-bolded x if the panel found minimal supporting evidence; and (4) a ? if the panel found there was insufficient evidence to make an assessment (e.g., due to a lack of studies meeting its review criteria). Note that if an instructional component is judged to be irrelevant to any of the framework components, then the appropriate tabled entry is placed in the far-­ right Other category. An instructional component’s placement in the Other category does not mean it is unimportant for literacy learning, only that it is not critical for acquiring the cognitive aspects of reading comprehension as those constructs are defined in the Cognitive Foundations Framework. All five of the NRP instructional components are tabled and placement within the framework hierarchy corresponds to the label contained either within or to the right of the first colored cell encountered in the heading when moving up the column from where the instructional component indicator is placed. For the framework components, full or abbreviated names (appearing in parentheses below) are used as follows (these presented in their hierarchical position):

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• Reading Comprehension –– Language Comprehension Background Knowledge and Inferencing Skills (Bckgrnd Know) Linguistic Knowledge • Phonological Knowledge (Phono Know) • Syntactic Knowledge (Syntax Know) • Semantic Knowledge (Sem Know) –– Word Recognition Alphabetic Coding Skill • Concepts about Print (Print Concept) • Knowledge of the Alphabetic Principle (Alphabetic Principle) –– Letter Knowledge (Letter Know) –– Phonemic Awareness (Phonemic Aware) Finally, instructional components are assigned to framework components where they are judged to be a best fit, meaning that the skills to be taught under the instructional component (1) overlap with a substantial part of the cognitive component under which it is listed and (2) would not represent a better fit under a different framework component. Any instructional component that could fall under multiple cognitive components is placed only under the one judged to represent the singular best fit. Further, instructional components are placed in the lowest level of any given component hierarchy that is appropriate (e.g., an instructional component that focuses on alphabetic coding skill is placed under that component even though the skill covered would also be required for word recognition and reading comprehension). The map appears below as Table 11.2. Regarding positive impacts of instruction on reading outcomes based on their review of the then available research, the NRP found strong evidence for the efficacy of teaching phonemic awareness and phonics, minimal evidence for the efficacy of oral and silent reading, and insufficient evidence for assessing the teaching of vocabulary and comprehension strategies. With these findings in mind (which we will come back to later) we consider the work of a second panel that considered research completed since the NRP investigation reported in 2000. Practice Guide for Foundational Skills The United States Department of Education recently expanded the NRP analysis, which was based on studies conducted prior to 2000, by examining similarly focused studies completed during 2000–2014. That analysis provided the basis for four recommendations included in an educator’s practice guide entitled Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade (Foorman et al., 2016). We shall reference this as the Practice Guide for Foundational Skills, or PGFS, for

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Table 11.2  The map of the research review findings from Report of the National Reading Panel by strength of evidence onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework components Reading Comprehension Language Comprehension Backgrnd Linguistic Knowledge Know Phono Syntax Sem Know Know Know

Component:

Instructional Focus: Phonemic awareness Phonics Fluency Vocabulary Comprehension

Other Word Recognition Alphabetic Coding Skill Print Alphabetic Principle Concept Letter Phonemic Know Aware X X

x ? ?

Phonemic awareness: Children who received specific instruction in phonemic awareness showed improved outcomes in reading relative to those who did not (strong) Phonics: Receiving explicit phonics instruction benefited students from kindergarten through sixth grade, but was especially effective at kindergarten and first grade (strong) Fluency: Guided oral reading had a positive impact on reading but impacts of silent reading and other related methods could not be adequately assessed (minimal) Vocabulary: Recommended that vocabulary be taught both directly and indirectly but effectiveness could not be adequately assessed (insufficient) Comprehension: Teaching reading comprehension strategies could lead to improvements in reading but effectiveness could not be adequately assessed (insufficient)

Notes: The five instructional focus areas are those identified in Report of the National Reading Panel (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000). Placement of instructional focus indicators within the framework hierarchy corresponds to the label contained either within or to the right of the first colored cell encountered in the heading when moving up the column from where the focus indicator is placed. For instructional focus recommendations judged to be fully relevant to a framework component, tabled entries indicate the strength of evidence reported by the panel: (1) an upper-case, bolded X if the panel found relatively strong empirical support; (2) a lower-case, non-bolded x if the panel found minimal supporting evidence; and (3) a ? if the panel found there was insufficient evidence to make an assessment (e.g., due to a lack of studies meeting its review criteria). If an instructional component is judged to be irrelevant to any of the framework components, then the appropriate tabled entry is placed in the far-right Other category Abbreviations: Alphabetic Principle knowledge of the alphabetic principle, Bckgrnd Know background knowledge and inferencing skills, Letter Know letter knowledge, Phonemic Aware phonemic awareness, Phono Know phonological knowledge, Print Concept concepts about print, Sem Know semantic knowledge, Syntax Know syntactic knowledge

short. The recommendations it contained were based on both the evidence reviewed as well as the expertise and experience of the expert panel members who undertook the study and authored the guide. The level of evidence for a given recommendation varied from minimal, to moderate, to strong, and was based on the following factors: • internal and external validity – the degree to which the reviewed research concerning the recommendation contained high-quality research designs that permitted causal inferences to be made, and the degree to which there were multiple internally valid studies based on populations on which the recommendation was focused, respectively; • effects on relevant outcomes – the degree to which the research evidence surrounding the recommendation was consistently positive without contradictory evidence; • relevance to scope – the degree to which the studies reviewed were relevant to the context, sample, and outcomes on which the recommendation was focused; • relationship between research and recommendations – the degree to which the reviewed research represented a direct assessment of the interventions that were the focus of the recommendation;

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• panel confidence – the degree to which the panel had confidence in the effectiveness of the practice that was the focus of the recommendation; and • role of expert opinion – the panel’s belief in the practice based on its interpretations of theory when there was only minimal evidence to support the recommendation. Table 11.3 presents the map of the PGFS instructional component recommendations onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework. The map is structured in the same manner as the map of the NRP findings previously presented with one expection. The PGFS contained four relatively complex recommendations, each covering several facets of reading instruction (unlike those of the NRP, which more narrowly focused on single instructional facets). For each of the four PGFS recommendations, every instructional facet included within the recommendation is tabled under the cognitive component representing the best fit for that facet (as opposed to one best fit for the entire recommendation).

Table 11.3  The map of the research review findings from Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade by strength of evidence onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework components Reading Comprehension Language Comprehension Backgrnd Linguistic Knowledge Know Phono Syntax Sem Know Know Know

Component:

Instructional Focus: Academic language Link sounds-letters Decode words Read connected text

x

Other Word Recognition Alphabetic Coding Skill Print Alphabetic Principle Concept Letter Phonemic Know Aware

x X

X

X

X X

X

Academic language: Teach students academic language skills and vocabulary knowledge (minimal) Link sounds-letters: Develop awareness of the segments of sounds in speech and their link to letters (strong) Decode words: Teach students to decode words, analyze word parts, and write and recognize words (strong) Read connected text: Ensure each student reads connected text every day to support reading accuracy, fluency, and comprehension (moderate)

Notes: The four instructional focus areas are those identified in Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade (Foorman et al., 2016). Placement of instructional focus indicators within the framework hierarchy corresponds to the label contained either within or to the right of the first colored cell encountered in the heading when moving up the column from where the focus indicator is placed. For instructional focus recommendations judged to be fully relevant to a framework component, tabled entries indicate the strength of evidence reported by the panel: (1) an upper-case, bolded X if the panel found relatively strong empirical support; (2) an upper-case, non-bolded X if the panel found more moderate empirical supporting evidence; and (3) a lower-case, non-bolded x if the panel found minimal supporting evidence. If an instructional component is judged to be irrelevant to any of the framework components, then the appropriate tabled entry is placed in the far-right Other category. Also, every instructional facet included within the recommendation is tabled under the cognitive component representing the best fit for that facet (as opposed to one best fit for the entire recommendation) Abbreviations: Alphabetic Principle knowledge of the alphabetic principle, Bckgrnd Know background knowledge and inferencing skills, Letter Know letter knowledge, Phonemic Aware phonemic awareness, Phono Know phonological knowledge, Print Concept concepts about print, Sem Know semantic knowledge, Syntax Know syntactic knowledge

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Note the overlap between the maps presenting the NRP findings and those from the PGFS: Both found strong evidence in support of teaching phonemic awareness and alphabetic coding skills, some evidence in support of fluency instruction, and little evidence in support of teaching vocabulary and comprehension. With the findings from these two panels in mind (which we will revisit later), let us consider a third panel that worked between the two time periods the first two panels were active and which focused on reading comprehension. Practice Guide for Reading Comprehension A third panel reviewed relevant reading research and created a practice guide entitled Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade (Shanahan et  al., 2010), which we will reference as Practice Guide for Reading Comprehension, or PGRC, for short. This panel also expanded the National Reading Panel analysis by examining studies focused on advancing reading comprehension in the early grades that had been completed over the period 1989–2009. The recommendations were based on a similar rubric to the one described above for the Practice Guide for Foundational Skills in judging the level of supporting evidence for a given recommendation as minimal, moderate, or strong; and the expertise and experience of the authoring panel members were again used in determining the set of recommendations put forward. Table 11.4 presents the map of the five instructional component recommendations contained in the PGRC, along with an indication of the level of evidence upon which they were based, onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework. The map is structured in the same manner as the map of the PGFS findings previously presented. Note that the tabled indicators, if relevant, all fall under the cognitive component of reading comprehension as opposed to language comprehension. The indicators are not placed there as the research reviewed focused specifically on the outcome of reading comprehension and generally did not address whether the instructional practice studies also assessed impacts on language comprehension. As shown in the map in regards to cognitive components, there was strong evidence for the efficacy of teaching reading comprehension strategies and moderate evidence for teaching text organizational structures. The three other practices, one having moderate evidence of impact and the other two bearing minimal evidence, are placed under the Other category. The reason behind these placements is that these three practices do not specifically target a student competency like the other two (i.e., learning comprehension strategies or text organizational structures) but rather focus on teacher competencies (i.e., guiding students through discussions of text, selecting texts to support the development of comprehension, and establishing a motivating context for teaching comprehension).

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Table 11.4  The map of the research review findings from Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade by strength of evidence onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework components Reading Comprehension Language Comprehension Linguistic Knowledge Backgrnd Know Phono Syntax Sem Know Know Know

Component:

Instructional Focus: Using comprehension strategies Using text structures Discussing text meaning Selecting texts Establishing teaching context

Other Word Recognition Alphabetic Coding Skill Print Alphabetic Principle Concept Letter Phonemic Know Aware

X X x x X

Using comprehension strategies: Teach students how to use reading comprehension strategies (strong evidence) Using text structures: Teach students to identify and use the text’s organizational structure to comprehend, learn, and remember content (moderate evidence) Discussing text meaning: Guide students through focused, high-quality discussion on the meaning of text (minimal evidence) Selecting texts: Select texts purposefully to support comprehension development (minimal evidence) Establishing teaching context: Establish an engaging and motivating context in which to teach reading comprehension (moderate evidence)

Notes: The five instructional focus areas are those identified in Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade (Shanahan et al., 2010). Placement of instructional focus indicators within the framework hierarchy corresponds to the label contained either within or to the right of the first colored cell encountered in the heading when moving up the column from where the focus indicator is placed. For instructional focus recommendations judged to be fully relevant to a framework component, tabled entries indicate the strength of evidence reported by the panel: (1) an upper-case, bolded X if the panel found relatively strong empirical support; (2) an uppercase, non-bolded X if the panel found more moderate empirical supporting evidence; and (3) a lower-case, non-bolded x if the panel found minimal supporting evidence. If an instructional component is judged to be irrelevant to any of the framework components, then the appropriate tabled entry is placed in the far-­right Other category. Also, every instructional facet included within the recommendation is tabled under the cognitive component representing the best fit for that facet (as opposed to one best fit for the entire recommendation) Abbreviations: Alphabetic Principle knowledge of the alphabetic principle, Bckgrnd Know background knowledge and inferencing skills, Letter Know letter knowledge, Phonemic Aware phonemic awareness, Phono Know phonological knowledge, Print Concept concepts about print, Sem Know semantic knowledge, Syntax Know syntactic knowledge

Summary of Panel Findings With these brief explanations of the findings of the three panels, what can we say about what they found overall and how their findings relate to the Cognitive Foundations Framework? Table 11.5 combines the information from the last three tables to more easily compare findings across the three panels. As shown, there was (1) strong evidence in support of teaching phonemic awareness and alphabetic coding skills (two panels), and in teaching knowledge of the letters and the alphabetic principle (one panel); (2) some evidence in support of fluency instruction (two panels); (3) mixed evidence in support of teaching comprehension or comprehension strategies (one panel finding insufficient evidence, one finding moderate evidence, and another finding strong evidence); and (4) moderate evidence for teaching text organizational structures (one panel). Also, there was little or insufficient evidence in support of teaching vocabulary (two panels) or academic language (one panel).

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Table 11.5  A combined map of the research review findings from three expert panels by strength of evidence onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework component Reading Comprehension Language Comprehension Linguistic Knowledge Backgrnd Know Phono Syntax Sem Know Know Know

Component:

Instructional Focus: National Reading Panel: Phonemic awareness Phonics Fluency Vocabulary Comprehension Foundational Skills Panel: Academic language Link sounds-letters Decode words Read connected text Reading Comprehension Panel: Using comprehension strategies Using text structures Discussing text meaning Selecting texts Establishing teaching context

Other Word Recognition Alphabetic Coding Skill Print Alphabetic Principle Concept Letter Phonemic Know Aware

X X x ? ? x

x X

X

X

X X

X

X X x x X

Notes: The three sets of instructional focus areas are those identified in three reports: Report of the National Reading Panel (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000), Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade (Foorman et  al., 2016), and Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade (Shanahan et al., 2010), respectively. Placement of instructional focus indicators within the framework hierarchy corresponds to the label contained either within or to the right of the first colored cell encountered in the heading when moving up the column from where the focus indicator is placed. For instructional focus recommendations judged to be fully relevant to a framework component, tabled entries indicate the strength of evidence reported by the respective panel: (1) an upper-case, bolded X if the panel found relatively strong empirical support; (2) an upper-case, nonbolded X if the panel found more moderate empirical supporting evidence; (3) a lower-case, nonbolded x if the panel found minimal supporting evidence; and (4) a ? if the panel found there was insufficient evidence to make an assessment (e.g., due to a lack of studies meeting its review criteria). If an instructional component is judged to be irrelevant to any of the framework components, then the appropriate tabled entry is placed in the far-right Other category. Also, every instructional facet included within a recommendation is tabled under the cognitive component representing the best fit for that facet (as opposed to one best fit for the entire recommendation) Abbreviations: Alphabetic Principle knowledge of the alphabetic principle, Bckgrnd Know background knowledge and inferencing skills, Letter Know letter knowledge, Phonemic Aware phonemic awareness, Phono Know phonological knowledge, Print Concept concepts about print, Sem Know semantic knowledge, Syntax Know syntactic knowledge

Thus, over the three panels, we find relatively stronger evidence in support of developing the components of word recognition and relatively weaker evidence in support of developing the components of either language comprehension and its subcomponents, or reading comprehension as a whole. This of course reflects the charges of the panels, the grade levels studied, and the timeframes for the research reviewed, but it gives an indication of where beginning reading research has focused over the last fifty years as well as what experts hold to be important in advancing student reading skills based on their sense of research and practice, which is:

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• strong expert recommendations and relatively strong evidence in supporting instruction on word recognition and the skills that underlie it (phonemic awareness, letter knowledge, knowledge of the alphabetic principle, and alphabetic coding skills); and • strong expert recommendations but less evidence for instruction on strengthening comprehension skills by (1) developing academic language and vocabulary, (2) developing understanding of text structures and comprehension strategies, and (3) expanding reading of connected text. Overall, these recommendations and evidence track the cognitive skills laid out in the Cognitive Foundations Framework. Importantly, there are no other cognitive skills identified from either panel expertise or the research evidence – all such skills that are identified fall within the framework (save those associated with teacher rather than student competencies as explained earlier). Before leaving these findings, in the sections that follow we will discuss some of the specific ways the different panels put forth for carrying out the instructional component recommendations they made. Our intent is not to fully describe the activities suggested but rather to briefly indicate what they cover, asking that the interested reader return to the panel documents themselves for more detailed descriptions as needed. 11.3.3.2  D  etails of Panel Recommendations for Facilitating Language Comprehension As discussed in Chaps. 4 and 6, most children come to school with (relatively) highly developed skills in their native language, acquired quite naturally through exposure to that language within engaging, real-world settings. Though children may differ in syntactic and phonological skill when they begin school, most variations in language comprehension will be in the areas of vocabulary, knowledge of academic language, and background knowledge. As just reviewed, two of the expert panels addressed the importance of vocabulary development and all three panels discussed growth in comprehension, mostly as that capacity is strengthened through a focus on reading comprehension rather than language comprehension. We highlight the recommendations of the expert panels for improving each of these. Vocabulary There has been much research on vocabulary development, and it generally supports the notion that the meanings of most words (with estimates as high as 90%) are not acquired through explicit instruction at school, but rather implicitly through exposure (Beck & McKeown, 1991). Further, for children in the later elementary grades and beyond, this exposure mainly comes through reading rather than oral discourse (Stanovich, West, Cunningham, Cipielewski, & Siddiqui, 1996). Recalling

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our discussion of vocabulary knowledge from Chap. 4, remember that such is not acquired on an all-or-none basis, but is built piecemeal with nuances of meaning added to the understanding of words by encountering them in new contexts used in new ways. Thus, while explicit instruction in vocabulary can be very helpful (Beck, McKeown, & Kucan, 2013), insuring that children have time to read and that the reading materials they have can advance their vocabulary development by containing academic words with supporting context is critical. Though it found little research that met its criteria for study inclusion, the NRP recommends the following instructional supports be used for vocabulary development: (1) direct instruction of vocabulary words that are central to understanding a specific text of study, (2) multiple exposures of important vocabulary words in a variety of contexts, (3) use of rich contexts capable of highlighting different aspects of meaning in important vocabulary words, and (4) use of structured vocabulary learning tasks that require active student engagement and employ a variety of teaching methods. Like the NRP, the PGFS recommends direct teaching of vocabulary, though it too found minimal evidence for this recommendation. As an example of such instruction, the PGFS recommends introducing elementary school students to words they will encounter in the materials they read. Instruction on such words can occur before, during, and after reading, with reinforcement of their use throughout the year, which can help students understand subtleties of meaning and how these operate in different sentences, contexts, and knowledge domains. Language and Reading Comprehension The NRP, though unable to conduct a meta-analysis on the studies it collected regarding text comprehension instruction as too few met its quality criteria, states that instruction on the following appear to be most effective in supporting student comprehension: (1) monitoring one’s own level of comprehending a text, (2) using cooperative learning to develop text understanding in teams, (3) using graphic and semantic organizers, (4) learning and applying knowledge of story structures, (5) answering teacher questions about studied texts, (6) generating one’s own questions about textual material, (7) summarizing text, and (8) employing multiple strategies for building text understanding (rather than relying on a single one). Concerning the development of academic language (the knowledge of more formal, decontextualized language), the PGFS recommends that teachers engage students in open-ended discussions that use academic language. Such would focus on using inferential language (e.g., predicting events, proposing hypotheses, solving problems) in discussions of both informational as well as narrative text. These could be based on text read by students or on read-aloud activities led by a teacher, with the aim of strengthening language comprehension, including knowledge of academic vocabulary and grammatical structures. Such activities need not be restricted to blocks of time devoted to literacy instruction per se but could be integrated into other content areas and use of associated texts such as in science and social studies

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instruction, which can build domain knowledge as well as linguistic knowledge. The PGFS also recommends explicitly engaging students in developing narrative language skills, including understanding and use of (1) the components of story grammar (e.g., characters, settings, goals, plots, resolution) that build meaning across sentence boundaries, and (2) complex grammatical structures (e.g., compound sentences, subordinate clauses, adverbial clauses, prepositional phrases) that go beyond what children typically use in informal conversation. Beyond these, the PGRC recommends explicitly teaching the common structures of informational, expository texts (e.g., description, sequence, problem and solution, cause and effect, and compare and contrast). And the PGRC also strongly recommends direct teaching of reading comprehension strategies, intentional mental actions designed to improve reading comprehension that include: • activating prior knowledge (or predicting) – consciously bringing to bear what the reader already knows about the topic in the material being read; • questioning – actively raising and answering questions during reading; • visualization – building mental images of what the text being read is portraying; • monitoring, clarifying, or fixing-up – reflecting on whether what is being read is also being understood; • drawing inferences – actively making inferences about the situations in the text that are allowed by it but not explicitly stated; and • retelling – summarizing what has been read. Note that all of these can be applied to language comprehension as well as reading comprehension – that is, these are comprehension disciplines that are not restricted to either print or speech. Reading is the product of word recognition and language comprehension under the SVR, and this means that if you are carrying out instruction to improve reading comprehension you are necessarily working to either improve word recognition or language comprehension (or more likely, both). That is, in this view you cannot improve reading comprehension but for improving these two components, as there is no reading comprehension skill that emanates from something other than these two component skills – nor is there some independent skill in reading comprehension that will not be contained within either word recognition or language comprehension skill. The PGRC provides several activities for teaching students all the (reading) comprehension strategies just listed, both singly and in combination, and in individual and group settings; it also discusses how teachers can use gradual release techniques to shift responsibility for deploying them from the teacher to the student over time. In similar fashion to vocabulary development, background knowledge is developed through exposure and interaction with new knowledge sources. This can come both from reading and from engagement in other activities (e.g., active interchanges with teachers and other adults as well as with fellow students, school coursework, and field experiences), and should not be given short shrift in an effort to find more instructional time for work on word recognition (Hirsch Jr., 2003). What must be recognized is that developing knowledge is the sine qua non of education, and any improvement in knowledge that can be represented in language, regardless of how gained, will improve (language and reading) comprehension.

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11.3.3.3  D  etails of Panel Recommendations for Facilitating Word Recognition Both the NRP and the PGFS cited strong evidence in support of developing skills in recognizing words. We discuss below the recommendations each panel made for supporting the development of word recognition and the skills underlying it. Letter Knowledge, Phonemic Awareness, and the Alphabetic Principle One of the most strongly supported component recommendations from the NRP concerned teaching phonemic awareness, which was further supported by the PGFS in its review that included more recent studies. The NRP identified several types of phoneme manipulations (namely, isolation, identity, categorization, blending, segmentation, and deletion) and found that phonemic awareness instruction may be most effective when (1) children are taught to manipulate phonemes using letters, (2) instruction is explicitly focused on just one or two phoneme manipulations rather than more, and (3) teaching is done in small groups. The PGFS confirmed and expanded the NRP recommendations, stating the importance of (1) teaching students to recognize and manipulate segments of sound in speech, (2) teaching letter-sound relations, and (3) using word-building activities to link students’ knowledge of letter-sound relationships with phonemic awareness. As we have seen, these are the skills underlying the alphabetic principle, which is critical for children to acquire in order to develop alphabetic coding skills. The PGFS provides descriptions of activities for helping children learn to identify words in sentences, manipulate compound words, develop onset-rime awareness, and, finally, isolate and manipulate individual phonemes in words – as we said in Chaps. 4 and 6, the former segmentation skills may help those struggling to acquire the latter set of segmentation skills, which are the critical ones. Developing knowledge and skills in the three areas just discussed allow students to begin to acquire alphabetic coding skills, which we discuss next. Alphabetic Coding Skill The NRP and PGFS both found strong evidence to support teaching students to decode words, analyze word parts, and write and recognize words. The NRP reviewed studies that allowed comparisons of three types of phonics programs: (1) synthetic phonics approches, which teach students to convert letters into sounds and to blend the resulting sounds to form words; (2) larger-unit phonics approaches, which emphasize blending larger word subparts (e.g., onsets, rimes, phonograms) as well as letter sounds; and (3) miscellaneous phonics programs that teach phonics differently than either the synthetic or larger-unit approaches. The NRP found that each of the three types of phonics programs resulted in greater student achievement

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gains (mostly in word reading outcomes) than did their comparison groups that did not teach phonics, and that none of the three phonics approaches differed in effectiveness from each other. The PGFS gives activities for helping students (1) blend letter sounds and sound-­ spelling patterns from left to right within a word to produce a recognizable pronunciation, (2) learn common sound-spelling patterns, (3) recognize common word parts, (4) read decodable words, (5) read regular and irregular high-frequency words, and (6) read low-frequency, non-decodable words. Developing alphabetic coding skills enables students to develop automatic word recognition skills, which were discssed in both the NRP and PGFS reports. Word Recognition The NRP, while finding minimal supporting evidence regarding fluency instruction in general, did find that guided, repeated, oral reading procedures (i.e., where students read passages aloud repeatedly and receive guidance and feedback on their reading) had a moderate impact upon reading achievement, including performance in reading accuracy, reading fluency, and reading comprehension. In further strengthening reading skills, the PGFS recommends, based on moderate evidence, that each student read connected text everyday to support reading accuracy, fluency, and comprehension. In this recommendation the PGFS calls for teachers to (1) model word identification strategies, scaffold, and provide supportive feeback during student oral reading; (2) teach self-monitoring and self-­correction of errors in word reading; and (3) provide opportunities for oral reading practice to develop fluent and acccurate word recognition. We have briefly discussed the evidence concerning both the effectiveness of core instructional programs as well as the characteristics of effective instruction within core instructional programs. In our review we have found a close correspondence between the focus of instruction found to be effective and the components of the Cognitive Foundations Framework students must master in becoming readers. We now turn to how an instructional program itself can be mapped onto the framework and how that can be used to inform instructional decisions.

11.3.4  T  he Map of a Small Portion of an Instructional Program: SRA Open Court Reading In this section we map a small portion of an instructional program, a supplemental lesson set from the McGraw-Hill’s SRA Open Court Reading Foundational Skills Kit, onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework. We first provide an overview of the instructional sequence to be mapped, followed by a set of questions to explore in the map, a presentation of the map, and a discussion of what the map reveals.

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We have selected a one-week kindergarten sequence from the SRA Open Court Reading Foundational Skills Kit (retrieved on November 11, 2018 from https:// s3.amazonaws.com/ecommerce-prod.mheducation.com/unitas/school/explore/ sites/ocr/samples/GRADE_K_TEACHERS_GUIDE/files/res/downloads/book. pdf). The sequence mapped is the Grade K, Unit 1, Lesson 2 sequence that covers five days of instruction. We have selected this sequence for several reasons: (1) it is from a widely used curriculum in the United States; (2) it is focused at the kindergarten level, allowing ready comparison of its emphases with our maps of the reading-­relevant Common Core State Standards (Chap. 9) and the DIBELS Next assessment (Chap. 10); and (3) it is available online at no charge, which allows our readers to review it in its entirety. Further, according to the publisher, this instructional program has broad application as it can (1) serve as a complement to any core reading instructional program to help strengthen student reading skills and provide opportunities for additional practice on those skills, (2) supplement any guided reading or levelled reader program to link reading with essential foundational skills, and (3) effectively serve any student as a stand-alone program. The map is structured like the Common Core State Standards maps presented in Chap. 9. It lists the main, ordered instructional activities by day down the left column. The framework components are listed across the top presented left to right, moving from higher to lower levels in the hierarchy under the three constructs of the SVR (i.e., reading comprehension, language comprehension, and word recognition). As in the standards maps, for the framework components, full or abbreviated names (appearing in parentheses below) are used as follows (these presented in their hierarchical position): • Reading Comprehension –– Language Comprehension Background Knowledge and Inferencing Skills (Bckgrnd Know) Linguistic Knowledge • Phonological Knowledge (Phono Know) • Syntactic Knowledge (Syntax Know) • Semantic Knowledge (Sem Know) –– Word Recognition Alphabetic Coding Skill • Concepts about Print (Print Concept) • Knowledge of the Alphabetic Principle (Alphabetic Principle) –– Letter Knowledge (Letter Know) –– Phonemic Awareness (Phonemic Aware) An X is tabled under the framework component column that represents the target of the instructional activity. When the activity is judged to be fully relevant to a framework component, its tabled entry is bolded; when the activity is judged to have

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some relevance to the component but only in a partial fashion, then it is not bolded. If an activity is judged to be neither fully nor partially relevant to any of the framework components, then it is tabled in the far-right Other category, using the bolded indicator, since, by definition, only fully relevant entries pertain to the Other category. Note that an activity’s placement in the Other category does not mean it is unimportant for literacy learning, only that it is not critical for acquiring the cognitive aspects of reading comprehension as those constructs are defined in the Cognitive Foundations Framework. Instructional activities are assigned to the framework components where they are judged to be a best fit, meaning that the skills an activity addresses (1) overlaps with a substantial part of the cognitive component under which it is listed and (2) would not represent a better fit under a different framework component. But as with the expert panel recommendations presented earlier in the chapter, instructional actitives are likewise fairly complex and may cover several facets of reading. Thus, in the instructional program map, every instructional facet included within an activity that is judged to be relevant to a cognitive component is tabled if it represents a best fit for that facet (as opposed to only representing one best fit component for an entire activity). Finally, instructional activities are placed in the lowest level of any given component hierarchy that is appropriate (e.g., an activity that focuses on alphabetic coding skill is placed under that component even though the skill covered would also be required for word recognition and reading comprehension). We discuss the reasons behind specific placements below and these discussions are intended to model the thinking and dialogue we hope will take place among the users of this work when mapping other instructional activities or program sequences. Before turning to the map, let us describe the instructional activities contained in the selected five-day kindergarten SRA Open Court Reading Foundational Skills Kit sequence. We give an overview of the distinct activities undertaken, including the rationales for their placements within the map, following the daily order in which they appear. Each day’s work begins with a set of Warm Up activities to get students settled and ready for the activities to come. Some of these activities are not directly relevant to reading (e.g., Telling Time) but others are. In particular, Classify and Categorize involves a grouping activity of exemplars (e.g., dogs, cats, and cows as animals that use four legs for walking, or dogs and cats as pets). This work can expand understanding of word meaning by making categories explicit and by highlighting various characteristics that exemplars possess. As such, when the activities are used, they are placed under Semantic Knowledge in the Cognitive Foundations Framework. Following the Warm Up activities on each day are a set of activities designed to advance Phonological/Phonemic Awareness. There are three types of such activities: • The Listening for Sounds activities are generally focused on helping children become aware of the positions of sounds, including non-speech sounds (e.g., identifying the order of three environmental sounds) and words (e.g., identifying the word order in three-word sentences or phrases). These are placed under Other

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in the map as they are not focused on students becoming aware of the phonemic properties of segments within the speech stream nor do they require phonological awareness for success, which, if they did, would make them partially relevant for placement under Phonemic Awareness. • The Listening activities involve whispering a word in succession from one student to the next to focus attention on word awareness. These, too, have been listed in the map under Other for the same reasons given above under the Listening for Sounds activities. • The Rhyming activities have students listen for rhymes in exemplar sentences and then generate a rhyme either in response to a sentence frame or by replacing the final word in a sentence. Other activities involve identifying the one non-­rhyming word contained in a short list of teacher-read words. All these activities are listed under Phonemic Awareness, but only as partially relevant, since the segmentation required for success in these activities is at the onset-rime level and not the phonemic level. As discussed under the Reading: Foundational Skill standard map presented in Chap. 9, some students may benefit from segmenting speech at these higher phonological levels before moving to a focus on the phonemic level. Following the Phonological/Phonemic Awareness activities are a set of Alphabetic Knowledge activities, including Letter Names, Letter Shapes, Alphabet Book, and Penmanship/Handwriting. The details underlying these activities are as follows: • The Letter Names activities ask students to identify the upper- and lower-case versions of a letter pair, and then identify presented words that contain those letters. These activities are all placed under Letter Knowledge in the map. • The Letter Shapes activities have students trace named, printed upper- and lower-­ case letter pairs (e.g., and ); these too are placed under Letter Knowledge. • The Alphabet Book activities show students a printed rhyme with an illustration, asking them to either identify all the words that contain a given letter or all the words that do not contain the letter. These are also placed in the map under Letter Knowledge. Further, in some (but not all) of the Alphabet Books, scripts are given for additional activities, covering the following: –– The teacher is to read the rhyme contained in the book and point to each word as it is read, which supports student knowledge about how print works; these activities are tabled under Concepts about Print. –– The teacher is to read the rhyme emphasizing the rhyming words it contains, which might be helpful for some students in acquiring phonemic awareness. This is only partially relevant to acquiring such awareness, for the reasons stated above, and these activities are tabled as such under Phonemic Awareness. –– The teacher is to read the rhyme and engage students in discussions of any unknown words (e.g., in the Kk Book, words like koala, kimono, and kapok), which advances vocabulary. These activities are placed under Semantic Knowledge. –– The teacher is to read the rhyme and explore the relationship between the accompanying picture and the meaning of the rhyme, thus advancing compre-

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hension. These activities are tabled under Language Comprehension (as opposed to Reading Comprehension) as the students are not reading the text themselves but listening to it being read by the teacher. Further, they are only partially relevant as the activity involves understanding the relation between a picture (a non-linguistic object) and the text. • The Penmanship/Handwriting activities generally have students trace the motions used to print a named upper- and lower-case letter following the teacher’s lead, or they are to complete the writing of a letter that is only partially represented. These activities help build knowledge of letters and are tabled under Letter Knowledge. Following the Alphabetic Knowledge activities are either a set of Print and Book Awareness activities or a Reading a Pre-Decodable activity. The Print and Book Awareness activities include: • The Pickled Peppers book contains rhymes with accompanying illustrations, and children are asked to confirm the book title on the front cover and to use the table of contents to locate the rhyme for the coming activity. These activities relate to understanding how printed matter operates and are placed under Concepts about Print. • The rhymes appearing in the Pickled Peppers book (e.g., Jack and Jill, Humpty Dumpty, Little Bo Beep) are titled, and students are to use the title to identify the rhyme, which is relevant to Concepts about Print. When the teacher reads the rhyme aloud, stressing the rhyming words, this activity is relevant to Phonemic Awareness, but as a rhyming activity, only partially so as explained above. Further, reading the rhyme aloud and discussing its relationship to the picture is relevant to Language Comprehension but only partially so, also as discussed above. The Reading a Pre-Decodable activity includes the following: • In High Frequency Word activities, the teacher takes a word like a or the, explains its use, and asks students to both identify it in printed text and use it in a phrase. There is no attempt at decoding the word as it is to be memorized as whole, and thus it is tabled under Word Recognition (though we acknowledge there is likely no alphabetic coding skill upon which it is based). Also, given the work on understanding the meaning of these words, the activities are also placed under Semantic Knowledge. • The Reading the Pre-Decodable activities involve students looking at their illustrated books and predicting what the story will be about, followed by the teacher reading the book aloud (relevant to Language Comprehension), pointing to and naming rebus pictures as they are encountered, and pointing to each word as it is read (relevant to Concepts about Print). • Checking Comprehension activities call for students to find a target high frequency word in the story (relevant to Word Recognition), retell the story in ordered sequence to one another (relevant to Language Comprehension), and discuss how the story connects to their prior knowledge about its content (relevant to Language Comprehension).

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Given the above overview of the instructional activities contained in the five-day kindergarten instructional sequence, Table 11.6 presents the map of the activities onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework. Before discussing the map, let us consider the kinds of questions it is designed to entertain. 11.3.4.1  Questions to Explore Through an Instructional Program Map Overall, an instructional program map is intended to support exploration of the following kinds of questions about how instructional activities relate to the cognitive components of reading: • Do the placements of each activity by cognitive component seem appropriate; should any of the activity placements be adjusted? Are there components that are not addressed by any instructional activity; if so, what are the implications of not addressing those components for reading practices given the targeted instructional timeframe? Are there instructional activities that do not address any component, and if so, are those activities important to literacy development within the instructional timeframe? • Which activities address which cognitive components and how well? Which components seem under-addressed by the activities associated with them (i.e., the associated instructional activities do not seem to fully address all the cognitive dimensions contained in the component)? What might be required in terms of effort or time for the instructional activity to be beneficial in advancing its associated cognitive component? What are the implications for component development if only limited time or effort is devoted to the instructional activity? • Which components are addressed under several activities? Can those activities be implemented in practice in a way that supports coherent component development? • Is there accessible assessment information that could help determine whether the instructional activities associated with a component are adequately advancing it? • What is the vertical (temporal) progression of focus (both within and over grade levels) for the instructional activities that appear under a given component and does the progression seem appropriate for development of that component? Can those instructional activities be implemented in practice in a way that supports coherent component development? What do those activities imply about appropriate actions to consider when students struggle to acquire the relevant skills through the instructional activities provided? • Is the corresponding focus of time and intensity within the set of instructional activities devoted to each corresponding component appropriate? If not, can adjustments be made within the activity set or in its sequencing? We believe these questions would be most productively addressed in group conversations of school personnel representing different grade levels and different areas of education expertise (e.g., curriculum, remediation, assessment). For classroom

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Table 11.6  The map of a portion of the SRA Open Court Reading Foundational Skills Kit onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework components Reading Comprehension Language Comprehension Linguistic Knowledge Backgrnd Know Phono Syntax Sem Know Know Know

Component:

Grade K, Unit 1, Lesson 2: Day 1: Warm Up: Classify and Categorize Phonological/Phonemic Awareness: Listening for Sounds Listening Rhyming Alphabet Knowledge: Letter Names - Ii and Jj Letter Shapes Alphabet Book - Ii Alphabet Book- Jj Penmanship/Handwriting Print and Book Awareness: Pickled Peppers Jack and Jill Day 2: Warm Up: Classify and Categorize Phonological/Phonemic Awareness: Listening for Sounds Listening Rhyming Alphabet Knowledge: Letter Names - Kk and Ll Letter Shapes Alphabet Book - Kk Alphabet Book - Ll Reading a Pre-Decodable: High Frequency Word: a Reading the Pre-Decodable Checking Comprehension Day 3: Warm Up: Telling Time Phonological/Phonemic Awareness: Listening for Words Rhyming Alphabet Knowledge: Letter Names - Mm and Nn Letter Shapes Alphabet Book - Mn Alphabet Book- Nn Penmanship/Handwriting Print and Book Awareness: Pickled Peppers Humpty Dumpty Day 4: Warm up: Telling Time Phonological/Phonemic Awareness: Listening for Words Rhyming Alphabet Knowledge: Letter Names - Oo and Pp Letter Shapes Alphabet Book - Oo Alphabet Book- Pp Reading a Pre-Decodable: High Frequency Word: the Reading the Pre-Decodable Checking Comprehension Day 5: Warm Up: Classify and Categorize Phonological/Phonemic Awareness: Listening for Words Rhyming Alphabet Knowledge: Review Letter Names - Aa -Pp Review Letter Shapes Alphabet Book - Ii -Pp Penmanship/Handwriting Print and Book Awareness: Pickled Peppers Little Bo Peep Frequency:

Fully relevant Partially relevant

Other Word Recognition Alphabetic Coding Skill Print Alphabetic Principle Concept Letter Phonemic Know Aware

X X X X

X X

X X X X X

X X

X

X

X X X X

X X

X X

X X X X

X X

X X X

X

X X X X X

X X

X X X X X

X X

X

X X

X X X X

X

X X

X X X X

X X

X X X

X

X X

X X X X X X X

X X X

X 6 4

5

4

17

X 22

9 14

Notes: The lesson components are from a one-week kindergarten sequence from the SRA Open Court Reading Foundational Skills Kit (retrieved on November 11, 2018 from https://s3.amazonaws.com/ecommerce-prod.mheducation.com/unitas/school/explore/sites/ocr/samples/ GRADE_K_TEACHERS_GUIDE/files/res/downloads/book.pdf). Placement of instructional activity indicators within the framework hierarchy corresponds to the label contained either within or to the right of the first colored cell encountered in the heading when moving up the column from where the activity indicator is placed. Tabled entries (X) represent the degree to which a listed instructional activity is aligned with a framework component: When the activity is judged to be fully relevant to a framework component, its tabled entry is bolded; when the activity is judged to have some relevance to the component but only in a partial fashion, then it is not bolded; and if an activity is judged to be neither fully nor partially relevant to any of the framework components, then it is tabled in the far-right Other category, using the bolded indicator, since, by definition, only fully relevant entries pertain to the Other category. Counts of fully and partially relevant indicators across activities are given at the bottom of the table Abbreviations: Alphabetic Principle knowledge of the alphabetic principle, Bckgrnd Know background knowledge and inferencing skills, Letter Know letter knowledge, Phonemic Aware phonemic awareness, Phono Know phonological knowledge, Print Concept concepts about print, Sem Know semantic knowledge, Syntax Know syntactic knowledge

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level work, the outcomes to be sought through such conversations are whether adjustments to the curriculum are warranted based on the emphases the curriculum is placing on the various cognitive components of reading. To anticipate, we note that such an examination of the curriculum for warranted adjustments could be further informed by also considering the standards for what students should know and the results from assessments being used to track developing student knowledge – but more on this in Chap. 13. With these questions in mind, let us discuss some of the issues contained in our instructional activity map, limited in both time and scope as it may be. 11.3.4.2  Some Issues Revealed in the Instructional Program Map First, note that the tabled indicators only show whether a component is addressed by a listed activity. If information was available about the length of time devoted to activities, then these indicators could be adjusted to reflect time allocations, which would allow more fine-grained judgements about the appropriateness of given activities relative to the mastery levels expected and the developmental progression of children learning to read. Second, let us discuss the frequencies tabled at the bottom of the map that give an indication of the focus of the week’s activities. We start with those focused on the word recognition aspects of reading: • Letter knowledge and concepts about print are the most frequently addressed activities, which is appropriate for early kindergarten work on learning to read. • Phonemic awareness is also frequently a focus, but the activities are all only partially relevant. This too may be appropriate given student development in early kindergarten, but there are two cautions – students who already have some level of phonological awareness may not benefit from these activities (as they do not specifically advance phonemic awareness) and students who do benefit from them may need to move onto deeper levels of phonological awareness rather than continuing to focus on onset-rime awareness. • There is no focus on knowledge of the alphabetic principle, which may be appropriate while phonemic awareness is under development; but as letter knowledge and phonemic awareness advance, work on the alphabetic principle can begin. This would then lead to work on alphabetic coding skills. • There is some focus on recognizing high frequency words, which is appropriate given they usually represent some exception to letter-sound correspondences and are so frequent that rapid identification will be helpful in reading. • There are several Other activities, most focused on segmentation at the word level or on raising awareness about the order of words – these may be helpful in developing phonemic awareness for students struggling with segmentation but should not be over addressed once deeper levels of phonological awareness are attained. Turning to language comprehension, we see little focus there, save some activity on the development of vocabulary and on coming to understand story structure, both positive for reading development. There is no specific focus on building background

11.4 Select Issues in Curriculum and Instruction

233

knowledge (which may be the focus of other activities outside work on reading), or on inferencing or syntactic knowledge (both of which may come into focus as more complicated reading materials are considered in these activities subsequently). These are both things to keep in mind in future foundational skill efforts, which could be reviewed by aggregating weekly maps (e.g., tabling the weekly frequency counts) to create multi-month maps. Nonetheless, a map that provides a look at a single week is helpful in raising user awareness about what is and is not being addressed as planning for reading instruction continues.

11.4  Select Issues in Curriculum and Instruction There are three issues we want to raise regarding curriculum and instruction for supporting students learning to read. The first issue is on heeding expert panel recommendations where there is little supportive evidence, the second issue is on using a curriculum map to think about instructional decisions, and the third issue concerns the interaction of student characteristics and the instruction they are provided. As we saw across the three expert panel recommendations we reviewed regarding instruction, there were several recommendations made that had little evidence associated with them. In review, across the 14 recommendations made, 5 had strong support in research and 3 moderate support. This raises the question of how we should take the remaining recommendations with limited (if any) research support. We believe it is important to keep in mind that the panels contained both expert researchers and expert practitioners, and that their reports were subject to peer review as well. Thus, while those recommendations lacking strong evidence are made with less confidence regarding their impacts on improving practice and student learning, they are grounded and not simply speculative about what might be helpful. Further, the recommendations within panel reports cohere with each other to create an integrated approach to the instructional focus under study. These considerations should add to confidence in their use, though still recognizing the lack of strong evidence in support of them. Our second issue concerns using a curriculum map to think about instructional decisions. Beyond giving a view of which cognitive components are being instructionally addressed when, a time sequenced set of curriculum maps can help raise questions about whether instruction is appropriate at a given time. As the maps allow one to see what instruction is being offered, they can raise the question of whether what is to be offered might be appropriate given what other instruction has been offered. For example, if instruction is to be undertaken on alphabetic coding skills but little instruction has been offered on any of its lower-level prerequisites (e.g., knowledge of the alphabetic principle), then one should consider the appropriateness of moving forward with the instruction planned. Additionally, given limited instruction in lower-level prerequisites, one could assess whether student skills in those seemed sufficiently advanced for the instruction to be given.

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Our third issue concerns the interaction of student characteristics and the instruction they are provided. As an example, some students have characteristics (whether endowed or acquired) that allow them to gain insight into the alphabetic principle through their own accord. But others who do not possess such characteristics, require explicit instruction that focuses their attention on the relations between phonology and orthography in written language if they are to find any success in learning to read. For the former students, the curriculum offered is not as critical as they will likely learn despite the instructional program they receive, irrespective of its explicitness regarding alphabetic coding. But the latter students may fail to learn to read even when exposed to high-quality instruction, and they will almost certainly fail if they are required to infer the relationship that the former students grasp more easily. The developmental stage of children’s reading abilities can also interact with the instruction provided. Older students just entering the full alphabetic stage (Ehri, 2005) may find success with further reading development through a text-rich program like Reading Recovery (Clay, 1993) due to the opportunities afforded to apply their developing word recognition skills. However, children at the pre-alphabetic or partial alphabetic stage may not know enough about the connections between phonology and orthography to take advantage of the self-teaching opportunities provided by text, needing more focus on alphabetic coding skills than a program like Reading Recovery typically provides (Chapman, Tunmer, & Prochnow, 2001). Such instruction helps ensure that these children see the importance of focusing on wordlevel cues as the most useful source of information in identifying words, as well as helping them to overcome any tendency to rely on sentence context cues to identify unfamiliar words in text rather than using context to supplement word-level information. Whether students have the cognitive characteristics to induce the alphabetic principle on their own or not, they may have other non-cognitive characteristics (e.g., attentional, behavioral, motivational, or attitudinal) that may also interact with the instruction provided. Students with histories of failure in reading due to poor instructional programs who come to have access to high-quality programs might lack the motivation needed to apply their developing alphabetic coding skills when reading. This may lead to more negative outcomes for reading and must be considered when evaluating their progress.

11.5  Summary In this chapter we discussed curriculum and instruction, focusing on the early elementary school grades where reading is largely taught. We distinguished instructional programs, core reading curricula and instruction designed to teach all aspects of (grade-appropriate) reading to all students in a grade level or age range, from instructional components, curricula and instruction designed to address only specific segments of reading or teaching reading. We defined a continuum of the

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235

reading core curriculum based on the explicitness of the instructional focus on letter-sound (phone) relations, anchored by phonics-based and whole-language approaches at the two extremes. In further discussion we concluded that the strengths of phonics are its emphasis on learning letter-sound relations (as a way of enabling the learning of letter-phoneme relations) and on teaching those relationships explicitly, which is especially important for at-risk students. Its major weaknesses are in failing to recognize that knowledge of the alphabetic principle is necessary before instruction on letter-sound relations can be successful and its assumption that the only way children can learn the relations between orthography and phonology is through direct instruction. The strengths of whole language are in its recognition of the importance of implicit learning and of advancing text comprehension; its major weaknesses are twofold. The first is in undervaluing the role of the orthographic-­ phonological connection in recognizing words while overvaluing the role of predicting words based on the developing meaning of text. The second is failing to understand that some explicit instruction is generally necessary around the alphabetic principle and alphabetic coding before implicit learning of orthographic-­ phonological mappings can be successfully undertaken. We proposed a middle ground, the meta-cognitive approach, that incorporates the strengths of the two extremes and avoids their central weaknesses. This approach emphasizes the importance of developing self-teaching mechanisms for learning orthographic-­ phonological relationships, supported by both explicit instruction at the word level (a positive feature of phonics) and implicit learning from exposure to text (a positive feature of whole language). We discussed two best-evidence syntheses addressing the effectiveness of non-­ remedial reading programs, one focused on students in kindergarten and first grade, the other on students in Grades 2–5. We discussed two important findings from these: (1) strengthening alphabetic coding skills is critical to advancing success in reading and programs that focus on such (e.g., phonics programs) are more effective than those that do not; and (2) strengthening comprehension is critical to advancing success in reading and programs that focus on skills that do this (e.g., metacognitive comprehension skills) are more effective than those that do not. The research reviews also suggested that key aspects of the success of such programs, beyond their focus on the central cognitive skills in reading, are on-going professional development that supports changes in classroom practice and the use of small, cooperative learning groups in supporting student development. We discussed three research summaries on the effectiveness of instructional components, revisiting the work of the National Reading Panel and providing an update of its findings and recommendations based on two subsequent reviews that considered more recent research. We provided maps of the instructional recommendations from each of the three reviews onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework, summarizing the recommendations made, the strength of evidence behind them, and how they addressed the cognitive components of reading. Across the three research summaries, the maps showed there were shared expert recommendations and relatively strong evidence in support of instruction on word recognition and the skills that underlie it (i.e., phonemic awareness, letter knowledge, knowledge of the

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alphabetic principle, and alphabetic coding skills). The maps also showed there were less-widely-shared expert recommendations and less evidence in support of instruction on strengthening comprehension skills by developing academic language and vocabulary, by developing the understanding of text structures and comprehension strategies, and by expanding reading of connected text. Overall, the panel instructional recommendations and associated evidence (where it existed) closely tracked the critical cognitive skills laid out in the Cognitive Foundations Framework. We finished our discussion of this work by highlighting the panels’ suggestions for implementing instruction aligned with their recommendations. We next introduced a curriculum map, presenting an example of a mapping onto the Cognitive Foundations Framework of a small instructional sequence of an SRA Open Court Reading supplemental curriculum dealing with foundational skills. We first described the instructional activities contained in the mapped five-day sequence, giving an overview of the distinct activities to be undertaken. We then discussed the kinds of questions the curriculum map was designed to entertain, the most important being whether adjustments to teaching would be warranted based on how well the curriculum addressed the cognitive components of reading. We next discussed what the mapping example revealed. On aspects of word recognition, the predominant instructional focus was on letter knowledge, concepts about print, and phonemic awareness (though for this component the instructional activities were only partially relevant given that they did not specifically address skills at the phonemic level). We noted a lack of focus on knowledge of the alphabetic principle, some focus on recognizing high frequency words, and several Other activities, most focused on segmentation at the word level (or higher). We noted little focus on language comprehension, save some activity on the development of vocabulary and on coming to understand story structure, with no specific focus on building background knowledge, inferencing, or syntactic knowledge (noting that all could become a focus with the use of more complex reading materials in subsequently prescribed activities). Finally, we discussed the limitations of looking at only a week’s worth of activities that included no information about the time to be spent on individual activities. We argued that the utility of the map would be improved by aggregating weekly maps to summarize instructional activities over months. Nonetheless, we stated that having a detailed look at a single week of instruction could raise user awareness about what is and is not being addressed as planning proceeds for future work with students. We closed with discussions of three issues in curriculum and instruction, including heeding expert panel recommendations where there is little supportive evidence, using a curriculum map to think about instructional decisions, and the implications of the interaction of student characteristics with the instruction they are provided.

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237

11.6  Questions for Further Thought Below are a set of questions to further your understanding of how the Cognitive Foundations Framework can be used to support the effective use of curriculum and instruction in reading practice. As with the other sets of posed questions, we believe these will be most helpful when discussed with colleagues, leading to a deeper understanding of the applications and issues we have discussed in this chapter. 1. How would you think about whether changes in your instructional program for reading were needed – what would be the key factors you would consider? If you think your program could be more successful, what would lead you to consider replacing the entire curriculum, changing only parts of it, or supplementing it through additional instruction? If you think changes in the instructional program were not needed, how would you gather information to inform whether any future changes were needed? 2. Where do you think your curriculum falls along the core curriculum continuum we discussed? Given its placement, what modifications in your curriculum could be helpful in developing the reading proficiency of your students? 3. What do you think of the conclusions drawn about the strengths and weaknesses of phonics-based and whole-language approaches? Are there others you think are more critical? How would you think about whether the alternative meta-­ cognitive approach proposed would represent an improvement over your curriculum? 4. The research on instructional programs suggests that their success depends on both a focus on the underlying cognitive skills involved in reading as well as on-­ going professional development that supports changes in classroom practice. How would you describe your access to on-going professional development that could help focus your reading instruction on the important cognitive components of reading? If such is not available, how would you undertake securing such support? If such is available but unhelpful, how would you undertake seeking changes in it? 5. What suggestions made by the three expert panels regarding implementation of their instructional component recommendations could be helpful to you? How would you get any needed support for undertaking them? 6. If you think a map of the curriculum you are using would provide actionable information for improving your support of students, how would you go about creating it? How would you use it once it was completed?

11.7  What’s Next We have now discussed how each of the major tools reading professionals have for supporting reading can be linked to the Cognitive Foundations Framework. In these discussions we have largely addressed supporting would-be readers from the point

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of view of the typical student (e.g., providing an analysis of the kinds of instruction that should help such learners master reading). We now want to move beyond the typical student taught through the core curriculum, looking at ways to think about how best to support students who do not respond in the typical fashion to the typical instruction provided to them, but who struggle to make progress in reading.

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Chapter 12

Using the Cognitive Foundations Framework to Support Struggling Readers

Acronyms ASSR Assisting students struggling with reading: Response to Intervention and multi-tier intervention for reading in the primary grade RTI Response-to-intervention SVR Simple View of Reading

12.1  Introduction In this chapter we first discuss differentiated instruction and how it might apply to those who are not making progress in reading relative to their peers. We follow this with a discussion of response-to-intervention as a multi-tiered system of support and how the Cognitive Foundations Framework can help reading professionals think about using such approaches to assist those who struggle to learn to read. We end with a discussion of a few select issues on providing support to struggling readers, a chapter summary, and questions for further thought.

12.2  Differentiated Instruction The Cognitive Foundations Framework takes the view that learning to read follows developmental progressions in several knowledge-skill sets from pre-reader to skilled reader. These progressions are based on development that varies within the two main cognitive components underlying reading comprehension as well as within their respective subcomponents, which all follow distinct but overlapping phases. We have © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 W. A. Hoover, W. E. Tunmer, The Cognitive Foundations of Reading and Its Acquisition, Literacy Studies 20, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44195-1_12

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seen for instance that skill in comprehending written text depends (along with language comprehension) on the ability to recognize the words of the text accurately and quickly; that the development of such automaticity in word recognition in turn depends on the ability to make use of the relationships between orthography and phonology to identify words; and that the ability to discover orthographic-­ phonological mappings in turn depends on knowing how print works and on knowledge of the alphabetic principle, the latter depending on letter knowledge and phonemic awareness. The learning needs of beginning readers vary because of their differing standings within these developmental progressions  – they differ in the amount of reading-related knowledge, skills, and experiences they bring to the classroom regarding each of these components and this determines in broad strokes the focus, explicitness, and intensity of instruction they require to become skilled readers. These circumstances point to the potential importance of differentiated1 – even more narrowly specified as individualized  – instruction, where teachers use evidence-­based assessment procedures and instructional strategies to address the different literacy learning needs of beginning readers from the outset of schooling (Arrow, Chapman, & Greaney, 2015). The structure of the Cognitive Foundations Framework provides a basis for thinking about diagnostic reading assessment and instructional options in this way. If beginning readers are not progressing satisfactorily (i.e., at similar rates to their peers) in reading comprehension, is it because they are having problems recognizing printed words, problems understanding the language being read, or both? Weakness in word recognition skill may stem from a lack of automaticity or weak alphabetic coding skills, or the difficulty might lie with inadequate knowledge of the alphabetic principle, weak letter knowledge, weak phonemic awareness skills, or a failure to appreciate how print operates. Following a similar tack within language comprehension, children having difficulty understanding sentences may have weaknesses in vocabulary or syntactic knowledge, or perhaps weaknesses in phonological knowledge prevents them from hearing the differences between words with different meanings (e.g., thin and fin). Children having difficulty understanding stories and passages or making inferences may have weak background knowledge, difficulties in activating relevant knowledge, or weak understanding of the structures used in integrating meaning across sentence boundaries. Any of these circumstances could lead to specialized instructional activities that target the underlying cognitive skills. In support of differentiated literacy instruction from the outset of schooling is research indicating that the amount of explicit instruction in word-level skills needed to initiate the process of inducing untaught orthographic-phonologic relationships through implicit learning varies considerably across children (Byrne, 2005). Some beginning readers seem to grasp the idea after having had only a few letter-sound correspondences explicitly taught to them, whereas other children require a fairly structured and teacher-supported introduction to learning to read that covers a much longer time span (Connor, Morrison, & Katch, 2004; Juel & 1  We use the convention of italicizing key concepts and distinctions for emphasis, but we also italicize words, phrases, or sentences when denoting them as linguistic objects. In both cases, the context we provide should suffice to determine the particular use being served.

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Minden-­Cupp, 2000; Snow & Juel, 2005; Torgesen, 2004, 2005; Tunmer & Nicholson, 2011). This suggests that the benefits of instruction might be optimized by matching instructional approach to student characteristics – let us consider some supporting research around this idea. One team of researchers examined the effects of different instructional emphases on children possessing varying amounts of reading-related skills (letter knowledge, oral vocabulary, knowledge of letter-sound correspondences) at school entry (Connor et al., 2004). The researchers found that children who began first grade with belowaverage reading-related skills made greater reading gains in classrooms that provided greater amounts of teacher-managed, code-focused instruction throughout the year than those in classrooms where teachers provided greater amounts of child-managed, meaning-focused instruction (which included less instruction on word analysis skills and more reading of trade books and writing of text). In contrast, for children with higher reading-related skills at school entry, greater growth in reading was achieved in classrooms that provided lesser amounts of teacher-managed, code-focused instruction and greater amounts of child-­managed, meaning-focused instruction. A particularly important finding was that when student characteristics were appropriately matched with instructional approach, the improvement in end of year reading scores resulting from good fitting instructional patterns varied greatly between children with high and low levels of reading-related skills at the beginning of first grade. For high reading-related skills children, better fitting instructional patterns (i.e., child-managed, meaning focused instruction) resulted in about half a grade equivalent gain in end-of-year reading scores over less well-matched instructional patterns (i.e., teacher-managed, code-focused instruction). However, for low reading-related skills children, better fitting instructional patterns (i.e., teacher-­ managed, code-focused instruction) resulted in a difference of more than two full grade equivalents in end of year reading scores compared with poorly fitting instructional patterns (i.e., child-managed, meaning focused instruction). These findings underscore the importance of implementing differentiated reading instruction from the beginning of school, especially for those children with limited amounts of school entry reading-related skills. In implementing differentiated instruction in the core reading curriculum, teachers need to use assessment information to group students based upon skill levels and the type of support needed. For instance, students weak in vocabulary can work in small groups or in pairs to work on vocabulary items while other groups can be formed to work on comprehension strategies or word recognition. As students gain strengths, time for silent reading can be provided, with small group discussions of the materials read. For some groups, teachers may need to lead activities in order to provide the support needed; for others, students can be paired or work independently. As student skills change, additional assessment information is needed to modify groups and instruction. Having briefly considered differentiated instruction within the core curriculum, there are formalized mechanisms for determining when students may not be successful under the core curriculum (or are not being successful under it) and determining what instruction might be most appropriate to better support their learning. We consider these next.

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12.3  Response-to-Intervention Approaches Response-to-intervention (RTI) approaches are designed to both prevent and remediate reading difficulties. In prevention, RTI approaches seek to identify students at school entry who are at risk of experiencing reading difficulties were they to be taught exclusively through the core reading program. Those so identified are provided supplemental instructional support to help them avoid reading difficulties. Identifying at-risk students early avoids providing them with several years of core instruction before recognizing their struggle with reading. In those wait-to-fail approaches, like Reading Recovery (Chapman & Tunmer, 2018), reading difficulties are more difficult to successfully address because of the significant deficits in productive reading practice such students have accumulated during this period relative to their peers. In the case of remediation, RTI approaches identify students who are engaged in core reading instruction but who are having difficulties with that instruction, providing them with extra support to alleviate those difficulties. In supporting students learning to read, RTI approaches share the following main characteristics: • screening all students at the beginning of school on indicators that predict success in reading, identifying those who are likely to struggle with reading if they are only exposed to the core reading curriculum; • providing those identified at-risk students with additional intensive intervention(s) beyond the core reading curriculum; • determining whether any additional intervention(s) provided at-risk students advanced learning based on measured student responses to the intervention(s); and • deciding on next steps, which include either returning students to the core reading curriculum exclusively, continuing engagement in the current intervention(s), or providing even more intense intervention(s). RTI approaches are tiered to provide different levels of support to students based on their individual responses to the supports provided – the systems adjust instruction based on student need and on student response to what has been provided to date. Thus, they can be characterized as dual discrepancy approaches in that they consider both a student’s level of performance at one time (e.g., school entry) as well as growth rates in skills over time in response to the supports provided (Tunmer & Greaney, 2008). Typical RTI approaches have three tiers: • Tier 1 is the core reading curriculum provided to all students, and although not a requirement of RTI approaches, it should represent evidence-based, high-quality instruction (for if it does not, then many more children will likely fail to find success and will need support provided through the other tiers). • Tier 2 typically consists of evidence-based supplemental instruction, given in addition to the core reading curriculum, that is more explicit and extended, and often carried out in small groups, for those students either predicted to have, or found to have, difficulty with learning through the core reading curriculum.

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• Tier 3 (and above for multi-tiered programs with more than three tiers) is for those who continue to struggle even with the supplemental instruction provided, offering even more evidence-based, intensive, daily instruction of longer duration, often through one-to-one tutoring. (Students who continue to struggle despite being exposed to the individualized, high-quality instruction provided in this tier may be evaluated for placement in special education services.) What do we know about the effective use of these approaches? In general, the research is limited, but there is a practice guide that presents recommendations from an expert panel’s review of research and experience on using RTI to assist students struggling with reading: Assisting students struggling with reading: Response to Intervention and multi-tier intervention for reading in the primary grade, or ASSR, for short (Gersten et al., 2009). The recommendations made by the ASSR expert panel each carry a rating based on the strength of the research evidence underlying it, as follows: • Strong: Consistent and generalizable evidence that a program (or the set of program parameters within a recommendation) is causally linked to better outcomes. • Moderate: Evidence that either supports strong causal connections between programs (or program parameters) and outcomes but has limited generalizability to the population that is the focus of the recommendation (e.g., because of a lack of study replications, restricted samples of students studied, restricted program settings or contexts), or is more ambiguous about causal connections due to study designs that are generalizable but not fully experimental. • Low: Expert opinion based on theory and research where the available evidence is neither strong nor moderate (as defined above). The ASSR expert panel made five recommendations concerning RTI, which follow (with the panel’s rating of the level of supporting evidence given in parentheses): • screen all students for potential reading problems at the beginning of the year and again in the middle of the year (moderate level of evidence); • provide time for differentiated reading instruction for all students based on assessments of students’ current reading level (low); • provide intensive, systematic instruction on up to three foundational reading skills in small groups to students who score below the benchmark score on universal screening (strong); • monitor the progress of Tier 2 students at least once a month (low); and • provide daily, intensive instruction (Tier 3) that promotes the development of the various components of reading proficiency to students who show minimal progress after reasonable time in Tier 2 small group instruction (low). The main issues underlying these recommendations concern the characteristics of quality screening processes, the content of the support provided to students in their assigned tiers, and the progress monitoring processes used to determine next steps based on the levels of progress measured from the support received within tiers. The Cognitive Foundations Framework can be helpful in thinking about the

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details under each of these issues as well as with some overarching issues concerning reading interventions for struggling readers. We discuss these next.

12.3.1  Screening There are multiple considerations concerning the use of screening assessments. First, given that all students should be screened, the assessments used need to be efficient (i.e., be focused on the targeted skill, minimize administration time, and be straight-forward to score and interpret), reliable (i.e., be consistent and stable over time), and valid (i.e., show adequate predictive relations with future reading performance). These assessments need to be able to consistently discriminate between children who are at low risk for experiencing reading difficulties when taught through the core reading curriculum from those who are at high risk. But such identifications cannot be made perfectly due to the multiple factors (including those that are incidental to the skills being assessed) that converge to determine any assessment result. Further, given the high-stakes consequences of failing to identify those in need (viz., failure in learning to read), it is important to consider whether it is better to under-identify students classified as not at risk and over-identify students classified as at risk for reading failure. Extra resources would be expended in providing supports to some who don’t need them, but this might be a better trade-off than failing to provide supports to those that do need them, which would likely result in on-going, long-term difficulties in reading. Also, by screening all students twice a year and by continuing to monitor the progress of those students identified as at risk, the assignments of those students who have been misclassified could be adjusted in a reasonable timeframe thus minimizing their impact on additional instructional resources. Second, since all students are to be assessed at grade-level entry (e.g., kindergarten through Grade 3), the appropriate skills to be screened must vary with the developmental progressions discussed earlier in Chap. 6. In screening for word recognition difficulties, for the youngest children (Grades K-1), letter naming and phonemic segmentation tasks are appropriate (screening for the cognitive foundations of letter knowledge and phonemic awareness, respectively); for older children (Grades 1–2), nonword fluency (reading pseudowords in isolation) and word identification tasks (reading words in isolation) can be used (screening for alphabetic coding skill and automatic word recognition, respectively); and for even older students (Grades 2–3), oral reading fluency tasks (reading words in connected text) can be used (screening for automatic word recognition in the context of connected text, where both time and accuracy are important). These accord with the general hierarchical progression of skill development in word recognition as indicated in the Cognitive Foundations Framework. But as most assessment tasks can vary in difficulty, they must be selected and used judiciously:

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• Phonemic awareness tasks can range in difficulty from assessing performance on the relatively easy elimination of initial or final phonemes in words to the more difficult tasks of re-arranging constituent phonemes within words to produce different words (or nonwords). • The difficulty of nonword fluency tasks can vary from naming simple consonant-­ vowel-­consonant sequences to naming more complex, multisyllabic items. • Word identification tasks can vary from naming simple high-frequency words (both regular and irregular) to naming complex, multisyllabic, low-­ frequency words. • Oral reading fluency tasks can vary from reading aloud passages containing only simple sentences to those containing complex, compound sentences; and word complexity within sentences can vary as well. Thus, one cannot assume that success in one measure of a given skill will translate to success on a different measure of the same skill – the complexity of the task and materials must be considered in determining the appropriateness of the screening assessment. Screening for language comprehension skills is more difficult as there are few high-quality screening instruments. Assessing language comprehension as understanding connected text typically involves reading passages to children, asking questions about the material, and assessing the quality of responses – these all take time. More efficient assessments measure vocabulary knowledge, but it is also important to know if children have difficulty with the phonology or syntax of the language, as well as whether their knowledge of the world and inferencing skills are on level with their peers. Diagnostic instruments are available, and while testing with them is generally more involved, such should be considered if there are indications that a child is having difficulties in either producing or understanding language in the classroom. Remember from the Simple View of Reading (SVR), no matter the skills in word recognition, reading comprehension will be limited for children having difficulties with the language they are being taught to read. The third consideration with screening deals with cut scores, the performance levels on screening assessments used to place students into instructional tiers. Generally, screening instruments will provide cut scores in their technical manuals based on studies with representative samples of students. These will indicate the proportion of students below a score that have reading difficulties, which represent hits in terms of signal detection theory (Tanner & Swets, 1954), and the proportion of students above that score that do not have reading difficulties, representing correction rejections. If, however, the school or district serves significantly different populations from those used in establishing the cut scores, then internally generated cut scores may need to be established. Also, cut scores may need to be adjusted locally if they: • identify significant numbers of students as not being at risk for reading failure (by falling above the cut score) who need support (a miss), or • identify significant numbers of students as being at risk for reading failure (by falling below the cut score) who do not need additional support (a false positive).

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Confidence intervals (generally found in the screening instrument technical manuals) should be used in making instructional tier placements when there are small differences in a student’s performance either above or below a cut score. Scores falling within the confidence interval are, from a statistical point of view, the same. Decisions based on such scores should be reviewed in the early portions of the instructional programs to which those students are assigned to see if the placements in the programs are appropriate. Alternatively, a second screening measure can be administered to see if the same placement decisions would be indicated.

12.3.2  Content of Instructional Support Providing effective instruction is central to RTI approaches, and the first consideration for instruction is on the quality of the core reading curriculum. As discussed at the beginning of this chapter, such instruction should be high quality and evidence based (e.g., focused on effective teaching in the instructional components identified by the National Reading Panel – phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension). We also discussed earlier in this chapter the opportunities for differentiating instruction within the core reading curriculum. Both aspects of instruction were included in the ASSR expert panel’s recommendations listed above for Tier 1 instruction, though the evidence level rating for them was low. On the issue of the additional instructional supports to be provided, this clearly depends on the skills identified as weak through the screening process and the instruction that is being provided through the core reading curriculum. In Chap. 11 we reviewed a segment of the SRA Open Court Reading Foundational Skills Kit supplemental materials that focused on foundational skills taught in early kindergarten (with primary attention paid to those underlying word recognition). This curriculum would be appropriate as an intervention with students placed in Tier 2 programs who had been identified as lacking those skills. The ASSR panel recommends using an intervention or supplemental curriculum that is both compatible with the core reading curriculum and that focuses on no more than three foundational skills. Further, the panel recommends that the curriculum be used with all students initially placed in Tier 2, and that students receive at least five weeks of intensive, small group instruction in the curriculum, employing homogeneous groups of 3–4 students meeting 3–5 times per week for 20–40 minutes (with the shorter sessions for lower grade-level students and longer ones for higher grade-­ level students). The instruction provided in these sessions should be explicit (with clear instructions, explanations, and models), consisting of direct teacher-student interaction coupled with opportunities for practice and feedback. At the end of the five-week period, students should be re-evaluated on whether additional Tier 2 work is needed. In Tier 3 the focus is not on different skills to be mastered from those that were the focus in Tier 2 but on different instructional supports for mastering them. Given those students in Tier 2 that have not mastered a given set of skills through small

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group work in the periods of additional time provided, even more intense instruction (e.g., instruction that is more explicit, more deliberate, longer in duration, provides more opportunities for practice, and gives more individually focused feedback) is needed, which is generally provided through one-on-one tutoring sessions. The ASSR panel recommends that these sessions be given for an additional 45–120 minutes per week, and that progress be monitored monthly with re-assignment considered based on the level of student skill development. The ASSR panel notes that the focus of instruction may need to be narrowed to work on fewer foundational skills, moving to new ones only after mastery is achieved on those in focus. Further, while not all the work in Tier 3 needs to be done through one-on-one tutoring, the advantage is that the instruction, materials, and feedback can all be individualized. The Cognitive Foundations Framework can be used to think through instructional options in Tier 2 and Tier 3 for both language comprehension and word recognition. Given the reciprocal relations we noted between skills within the framework’s hierarchy, supplemental instruction can focus where needed on those under-developed, lower-level skills, working on them in isolation and then building the developing skills into instruction on the more advanced, higher-level skills while still working toward mastery on the targeted lower-level skills. The ASSR panel made the following recommendations regarding the skills the supplemental instruction should focus on by grade level, all of which are consistent with the developmental hierarchy represented in the Cognitive Foundations Framework: • Kindergarten: The primary focus here should be on gaining skill in the basic segmentation of phonemes contained in words. Secondary work should include identifying letters and learning the sounds (phones) associated with them, building an understanding of the alphabetic principle, gaining basic knowledge in blending letter sounds to form simple words, developing vocabulary, and advancing listening comprehension. • Grade 1: For students identified as in need, phonemic awareness should continue to be a focus aimed toward mastery of phonemic manipulation. Instruction in phonics should emphasize mastery of letter-sound relationships in one and then two syllable words, both used to emphasize knowledge of the alphabetic principle where that is lacking. Fluency in word recognition should be addressed by work to recognize high frequency words in isolation and then moving to work on reading words fluently in connected text. Work in vocabulary development and listening comprehension should also continue. • Grade 2: For students continuing to struggle, phonics instruction should focus on learning the more advanced letter-sound relationships (e.g., words with digraphs, diphthongs, and controlled R vowels), as well as work on multisyllabic words and on structural analysis skills (e.g., prefixes, suffixes, plurals, and tense formations). Fluency with recognizing words in connected text should be stressed as well. Instruction should continue to advance literal comprehension and use of comprehension strategies, while work on vocabulary and inferential comprehension might be more successfully taught through the typically more heterogeneous groups used in language arts blocks.

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12.3.3  Progress Monitoring Assessments used to monitor progress need to meet the same technical requirements of screening instruments discussed above, being efficient, reliable, and valid. Indeed, many assessments can serve both screening and progress monitoring functions. But given that progress monitoring may occur frequently, measurement reliability over relatively short time periods is a concern as well. The focus of progress monitoring should be on the skills that the supplemental instruction within the assigned tier is trying to build. The ASSR panel recommends focusing on progress monitoring measures for the following skills within grade levels: • Kindergarten: Phonemic awareness; • Grade 1: Fluent word recognition, nonword reading, and oral reading fluency; and • Grade 2: Fluent word recognition and oral reading fluency. Note that these all address aspects of word recognition  – within the Cognitive Foundations Framework these are focused on the components of phonemic awareness, alphabetic coding skill, and word recognition. If students in Tier 2 or Tier 3 are also working on relatively weak language comprehension skills (compared to their peers), then assessing vocabulary or text comprehension (orally as needed for both) would be appropriate. Also, as described above with screening assessments, task complexity can vary widely across instruments. In getting useful data for decision making, it is important to link the focus of instruction on a given skill within a tier to the task complexity within the progress monitoring instrument used to measure growth in that skill. If this is not done, the data obtained from a progress monitoring assessment may not prove helpful in understanding whether students have gained or lost ground in a foundational skill they need to master for success in learning to read. We now leave our discussion of RTI approaches and turn to a broader discussion of issues around interventions for struggling readers.

12.4  Select Issues in Supporting Struggling Readers There are several important issues that the Cognitive Foundations Framework can inform regarding any intervention for struggling readers: (1) the requirement for two tracks of support, (2) the instruction required of any supportive intervention, (3) the difficulty of inferring skill in language comprehension through an assessment of reading comprehension, and (4) the challenges of providing differentiated instruction. We take each of these in turn below. Our first issue concerns the requirement for two tracks of support for struggling readers. Knowing what skills to address, the options for addressing them, and

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whether they have been sufficiently addressed are important to the success of any intervention for struggling readers. There are no shortcuts in learning to read and those struggling to learn must master all the cognitive foundations underlying reading comprehension. Given these, a critical feature in providing instructional support in reading for struggling students, is that two tracks be available, one addressing word recognition difficulties and the other addressing language comprehension difficulties, with the likelihood that most struggling students will need support under both tracks. Recall from our discussion in Chap. 3 that the SVR provides a framework for defining three broad categories of reading difficulties – weaknesses in recognizing printed words, weaknesses in comprehending the language being read, or weaknesses in both. Most poor readers have mixed reading difficulties or disabilities. These students show weaknesses in word recognition and language comprehension, generally with evidence of both phonological processing deficits, which impede word recognition, and impairments in vocabulary, morphology, syntax, or discourse-­ level processing, which impede language comprehension (Tunmer, 2008). Consistent with this, research indicates that in addition to phonological factors (e.g., phonological awareness), non-phonological oral language factors (e.g., expressive vocabulary, sentence or story recall) are predictive of long-term reading outcomes (Leach, Scarborough, & Rescorla, 2003; Scarborough, 2005). This is likely why prevention programs for at-risk students with mixed deficits focusing mostly on teaching phonemic awareness and alphabetic coding skill initially show positive effects on reading achievement (e.g., when measured as word reading), but fail to maintain these positive effects in later grades when reading comprehension measures are used (Torgesen, 2004). It is also likely the reason why remediation programs involving upper elementary-school poor readers report gains for alphabetic coding skills that are consistently higher than those for reading comprehension skills. Both these findings evidence the important impact of language comprehension skills (Torgesen, 2005). What is critical then is that intervention programs be prepared to address difficulties in both word recognition and language comprehension as addressing only word recognition will likely be insufficient for long-term success in reading for many students. The second issue regarding support for struggling readers concerns the parameters of supportive intervention instruction. Children who struggle with word recognition require instruction that is highly structured and systematic, including instruction in word analysis skills provided outside the context of reading connected text. Unlike those who are not at risk for reading failure, these children are not able to discover the relationships between phonology and orthography as a by-product of more general reading, and they require more explicit instruction in alphabetic coding skill (Foorman, Francis, Fletcher, Schatschneider, & Mehta, 1998). Given our understandings of reading development it is not surprising that one of the most critical considerations of any intensive intervention to support children struggling with word recognition is the degree of explicitness in the instruction provided. We have seen that such children have difficulty coming to understand the alphabetic principle and its underlying foundations, especially that of phonemic

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awareness. Thus, these children need instruction that appropriately focuses their attention and teaches them explicitly what they have not been able to grasp. But in addition to the explicitness of instruction for those struggling with word recognition, the intensity of instructional interventions needs to be considered. Because at-risk and struggling readers are already behind in the development of reading and reading-related skills, they must improve their reading skills at a faster rate than their typically achieving peers to close the gap in literacy achievement (Torgesen, 2004). To achieve this outcome, preventive and remedial instruction must be more intense than regular classroom instruction, which can be achieved by increasing the duration of instruction or reducing group size. But note that there is evidence that individual instruction for struggling readers seems to offer no advantage over groups of 2–3 students (Vaughn & Linan-Thompson, 2003). Intervention programs addressing word recognition also need a balance between teaching new skills and providing practice in using them (Hatcher et  al., 2006; Mathes et al., 2005). In mastering word recognition, struggling readers need explicit instruction in making letter-sound linkages outside the context of reading connected text, but they also need to be taught how and when to use this information while reading text. Earlier in this chapter we discussed the kinds of instruction that can support students who have weaknesses in language comprehension. These included a focus on vocabulary, knowledge of academic language, and background knowledge. But there is an important caution about the immediate bearing these improvements in language comprehension might have on reading comprehension. Vocabulary, as an example, is one of the aspects of language comprehension that has been targeted in intervention instruction. Research shows that even after a 20-week vocabulary enrichment program, older at-risk children (third and fourth graders) show improved knowledge of word meanings but no improvement in reading comprehension (Foorman, Seals, Anthony, & Pollard-Durodala, 2003). Why might such improved knowledge not be revealed in reading comprehension? The likely reason is that the word recognition skills of such at-risk students have not become automatic as they have not had the years of practice reading text that their peers have had who recognize words fluently. As a result, the older at-risk students spend considerable cognitive resources to accurately recognize the words in text, which leaves fewer resources available for building an understanding of what is being read – their improved understanding of vocabulary cannot come into play in reading comprehension until their word recognition skills have become more automatic. Our third issue concerns estimating skill in language comprehension. On-going assessments in both word recognition and language comprehension are necessary to ensure that those being provided support in one track are not falling behind their peers in the other track. How might this happen? The most typical case is that those with weak word recognition skills fall behind in language comprehension because their limited word recognition skills mean less exposure to language through reading, this from the operation of negative Matthew effects (discussed in Chap. 6). Thus, students who initially show only weaknesses in word recognition may come

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to evidence weakness in language comprehension if their word recognition difficulties continue to persist over a lengthy period. As discussed in Chap. 3, the SVR holds that when word recognition has been mastered, reading comprehension is determined by language comprehension. And as discussed in Chap. 6, many studies empirically show strong correlations between language comprehension and reading comprehension at the upper elementary school levels where word recognition skills are typically high. This situation justifies using a reading comprehension measure as an indicator of language comprehension for expediency – if a student has mastered word recognition but is relatively weaker in reading comprehension than expected, then language comprehension (measurement error in reading comprehension notwithstanding) is very likely the area of need for additional support. However, if word recognition skills are lagging even to a small degree, then language comprehension skills cannot be inferred confidently from reading comprehension skills. In this case, an assessment of language comprehension would be needed to determine if it, along with word recognition, was also in need of additional instructional support. In sum, reading comprehension scores can be helpful in thinking about language comprehension skill for those who have strong word recognition skills but not for those who have weak word recognition skills. This is a caution to reading professionals seeking to determine appropriate instruction for students who continue to struggle with reading in the upper elementary grades. Our final issue regarding support for struggling readers goes back to our discussion of undifferentiated (e.g., whole group), differentiated, and individualized instruction. Under a goal of providing students what they need instructionally to advance their individual skills, we can see the promise of individualized instruction. But we must recognize the real constraints faced within classrooms where it is simply not possible to teach each student individually. A partial solution is to understand individual needs and then to address those through the best mechanisms available – heterogeneous small groups of students when they can learn from each other, homogeneous small groups of students that share the same learning needs and can benefit from the same instruction, and individualized instruction provided through one-on-one tutoring, technology supports where available and appropriate, and self-directed work where feasible. Using these to their best benefit requires on-­ going planning and time from reading professionals but they have the greater likelihood of positively impacting student learning when compared to undifferentiated instruction that is given to all students regardless of individual needs.

12.5  Summary In this chapter we discussed how best to support those who do not respond in the typical fashion to the typical instruction provided to students. Here we focused on reading interventions based on individual student need, including discussions of differentiated instruction and response-to-intervention approaches, and how the

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Cognitive Foundations Framework could serve such interests. We described the important advantages of individualized instruction, where reading professionals can use high-quality assessment procedures and instructional strategies to address the different literacy learning needs of beginning readers from the outset of schooling. We also discussed how the benefits of instruction might be optimized by matching instructional approach to student characteristics, presenting the results of some research supportive of this notion. We discussed the characteristics of response-to-intervention approaches, which serve to both prevent and remediate reading difficulties, and we described the three tiers of support they usually contain. We discussed the recommendations from an expert panel’s review of research and experience on using RTI, which were largely focused in three areas: the characteristics of quality screening processes, the content of the support provided to students in their assigned tiers, and the progress monitoring processes used to determine next steps based on the levels of progress measured from the support received within tiers. We discussed how the Cognitive Foundations Framework could be helpful in thinking about certain details within each of these areas, focusing on the content of its components and their hierarchical relationships. We next turned to discuss four issues around supporting struggling readers in general: (1) the requirement for two tracks of support, and why most struggling students likely need support in both language comprehension and word recognition; (2) the instruction required of any supportive word recognition intervention to be more explicit, intense, and balanced between teaching new skills and providing practice in using them; (3) the difficulty of inferring skill in language comprehension through an assessment of reading comprehension whenever there is evidence of weakness in word recognition skill, especially for students who struggle with reading in the upper elementary grades; and (4) the challenges of providing differentiated instruction in classroom settings, where we offered some thoughts on how that might be supported.

12.6  Questions for Further Thought Below are a set of questions to further your understanding of how the Cognitive Foundations Framework can be helpful in thinking about support for struggling readers. As with the other sets of posed questions, we believe these will be most helpful when discussed with colleagues, leading to a deeper understanding of the applications and issues we have discussed in this chapter. 1. What changes would be required in your practice to match important student characteristics with appropriate instructional programs? If you believe your students would benefit, what would be required to incorporate such changes into your current practice?

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2. Differentiated instruction requires information about important differences between students in their developing skills as well as instructional options for addressing any differences identified. If you think such instruction could significantly improve your practice, what assessment and instructional tools would you need for implementation? What would be needed to go even further to implement individualized instruction? 3. RTI approaches represent one form of differentiated instruction. If you are not using this in your practice, what challenges do you think its implementation would raise and how might those be addressed? 4. Successful RTI approaches rely on quality in three subsystems – screening processes, content of support provided to students in their assigned tiers, and progress monitoring processes. If RTI is used in your practice, how would you know whether these systems were functioning at high levels? How would you undertake any improvements you think were needed? 5. If your RTI approach was screening students based on skills in word recognition or its underlying components and assigning them to tiers based on those measures, how would you determine whether supports in language comprehension were also needed? 6. Regardless of the systems available to support struggling readers, all likely need to offer support in word recognition and language comprehension. How would you know if the systems of support in your practice are capable of adequately addressing both these needs? 7. How would you know if the supports being offered within any of instructional tiers where students were placed were effectively addressing both word recognition and language comprehension?

12.7  What’s Next We have discussed over the last five chapters how the tools of standards, assessments, and curriculum and instruction can be linked to the Cognitive Foundations Framework, including how those tools and linkages can be used to improve support for students learning to read and for those who struggle. We now conclude with a discussion of using these linkages to help build coherence in reading practice to optimize support for students. We end with some reflections on what this book has covered and what remains to be done.

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References Arrow, A. W., Chapman, J. W., & Greaney, K. T. (2015). Meeting the needs of beginning readers through differentiated instruction. In W. E. Tunmer & J. W. Chapman (Eds.), Excellence and equity in literacy education (pp. 171–193). London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi. org/10.1057/9781137415578_8 ∗Byrne, B. (2005). Theories of learning to read. In M.  J. Snowling & C.  Hulme (Eds.), The science of reading: A handbook (pp.  104–119). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. https://doi. org/10.1002/9780470757642.ch6 Chapman, J. W., & Tunmer, W. E. (2018). Reading recovery’s unrecovered learners: Characteristics and issues. Review of Education, 6, 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1002/rev3.3121 Connor, C. M., Morrison, F. J., & Katch, E. L. (2004). Beyond the reading wars: Exploring the effect of child-instruction interactions on growth in early reading. Scientific Studies of Reading, 8, 305–336. https://doi.org/10.1207/s1532799xssr0804_1 Foorman, B. R., Francis, D. J., Fletcher, J. M., Schatschneider, C., & Mehta, P. (1998). The role of instruction in learning to read: Preventing reading failure in at-risk children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 90, 37–55. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.90.1.37 Foorman, B. R., Seals, L. M., Anthony, J., & Pollard-Durodala, S. (2003). A vocabulary enrichment program for third and fourth grade African-American students: Description, implementation, and impact. In B. R. Foorman (Ed.), Preventing and remediating reading difficulties: Bringing science to scale (pp. 419–441). Baltimore, MD: York Press. ∗Gersten, R., Compton, D., Connor, C. M., Dimino, J., Santoro, L., Linan-Thompson, S., & Tilly, W. D. (2009). Assisting students struggling with reading: Response to intervention and multi-­ tier intervention for reading in the primary grades. A practice guide. (NCEE 2009-4045). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved from http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/ wwc/publications/practiceguides/ Hatcher, P. J., Goetz, K., Snowling, M. J., Hulme, C., Gibbs, S., & Smith, G. (2006). Evidence for the effectiveness of the early literacy support programme. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 76, 351–367. https://doi.org/10.1348/000709905x39170 Juel, C., & Minden-Cupp, C. (2000). Learning to read words: Linguistic units and instructional strategies. Reading Research Quarterly, 35, 458–492. https://doi.org/10.1598/rrq.35.4.2 Leach, J.  M., Scarborough, H.  S., & Rescorla, L. (2003). Late-emerging reading disabilities. Journal of Educational Psychology, 95, 211–224. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.95.2.211 Mathes, P.  G., Denton, C.  A., Fletcher, J.  M., Anthony, J., Francis, D.  J., & Schatschneider, C. (2005). The effects of theoretically different instruction and student characteristics on the skills of struggling readers. Reading Research Quarterly, 40, 148–182. https://doi.org/10.1598/ rrq.40.2.2 Scarborough, H.  S. (2005). Developmental relationships between language and reading: Reconciling a beautiful hypothesis with some ugly facts. In H. W. Catts & A. G. Kamhi (Eds.), The connections between language and reading disabilities (pp. 3–24). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. ∗Snow, C. E., & Juel, C. (2005). Teaching children to read: What do we know about how to do it? In M. J. Snowling & C. Hulme (Eds.), The science of reading: A handbook (pp. 501–520). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470757642.ch26 Tanner, W. P., Jr., & Swets, J. A. (1954). A decision-making theory of visual detection. Psychological Review, 61, 401–409. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0058700 Torgesen, J. K. (2004). Lessons learned from research on interventions for students who have difficulty learning to read. In P. McCardle & V. Chhabra (Eds.), The voice of evidence in reading research (pp. 355–382). Baltimore, MD: Brookes. Torgesen, J. K. (2005). Recent discoveries on remedial interventions for children with dyslexia. In M.  J. Snowling & C.  Hulme (Eds.), The science of reading: A handbook (pp.  521–537). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470757642.ch27

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Tunmer, W. E. (2008). Recent developments in reading intervention research: Introduction to the special issue. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 21, 299–316. https://doi. org/10.1007/s11145-007-9108-4 Tunmer, W.  E., & Greaney, K.  T. (2008). Reading intervention research: An integrative framework. In G. Reid, A. Fawcett, F. Manis, & L. Siegel (Eds.), The Sage handbook of dyslexia (pp. 241–267). London, UK: Sage. https://doi.org/10.4135/9780857020987.n12 ∗Tunmer, W. E., & Nicholson, T. (2011). The development and teaching of word recognition skill. In M. L. Kamil, P. D. Pearson, E. B. Moje, & P. P. Afflerbach (Eds.), Handbook of reading research (Vol. 4, pp. 405–431). New York, NY: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203840412.ch18 Vaughn, S., & Linan-Thompson, S. (2003). Group size and time allocated to intervention: Effects for students with reading difficulties. In B.  R. Foorman (Ed.), Preventing and remediating reading difficulties: Bringing science to scale (pp. 299–324). Baltimore, MD: York Press.

Chapter 13

Using the Cognitive Foundations Framework to Create Coherence in Reading Practices

13.1  Introduction There is a simple idea in what we are presenting in this book: Use what would-be readers must know to guide what reading professionals must do. The former is based on understanding the cognitive underpinnings of reading and its acquisition – it is about knowing what knowledge-skill sets are required in reading and learning to read and why some must be in play before others can be acquired. The latter is understanding the tools reading professionals have that can support student learning – it is about knowing the contents of those tools and how they can be applied. Coherence in reading practice is addressed by connecting the whys1 provided by understanding the required knowledge-skill sets underlying reading to the use of the whats that are the focus of the tools used in reading practice. This connection allows reading professionals to determine what would-be readers already know that is critical to their mastery of reading, which informs what their students still need to acquire. And this serves to guide what can be provided through the tools at hand to effectively address student needs. We take a summary look at all of these in this chapter.

1  We use the convention of italicizing key concepts and distinctions for emphasis, but we also italicize words, phrases, or sentences when denoting them as linguistic objects. In both cases, the context we provide should suffice to determine the particular use being served.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 W. A. Hoover, W. E. Tunmer, The Cognitive Foundations of Reading and Its Acquisition, Literacy Studies 20, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44195-1_13

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13.2  The Big Picture of Coherence in Reading Practice The Cognitive Foundations Framework depicts, through its definitions and graphic, the knowledge-skill sets that underlie reading and learning to read. Its components and their interrelationships are based in research, and they capture a broad view of reading and learning to read that helps illuminate our understanding of both successful and struggling readers. We have shown how the framework can be used to analyse the contents of tools reading professionals use in practice  – standards, assessments, and curriculum and instruction – to better understand where there is alignment between cognitive components and tool contents. Assuming that the framework continues to represent what is known about reading and learning to read, when alignment is not found or is not particularly strong, then the nonaligned or weakly aligned aspects of those tools can be examined to determine if adjustments in their use in practice might be made to more effectively support student needs. Of course, alignment by itself does not guarantee effective support as students may have already mastered the content of focus or failed to master other required content. Nor does alignment guarantee high-quality use of the tool in practice. But assuming we can effectively map reading tools, alignment will help us understand the degree of coherence within our practice (as well as the relative emphases our practice places on the various component skills of reading) and suggest areas where modifications in practice might best lead to significant improvements in student support and subsequent outcomes. As we have seen, individual maps for standards, assessments (portfolios and individual instruments), and curriculum and instruction allow reading professionals to assess how well a given tool used in their practice accords with research on the cognitive underpinnings of reading. In concert with maps of other used tools beyond the examples presented here, reading professionals can assess whether their practice consistently focuses its major resources on those things research identifies as being most likely to effectively support the success of their students in reading. In short, they provide the opportunities to address many salient questions that can improve practice: • Are the standards being addressed consistent with what students must learn to become successful readers? What are the implications of any mismatches – are any standards to be ignored, are student needs to be ignored, are both to be ignored or both addressed even knowing that there is some level of discord? • Are the assessments being used reflective of what students need to know to become successful readers? Are they reflective of what students are being taught? Are they being used to inform changes in practice for students or are they being ignored or left to serve other purposes? • Are curriculum and instruction consistent with what students have yet to learn to become successful readers? Are standards and assessments being used to inform learning needs so that instruction can be better focused?

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As an example, we can get a sense of how these might be addressed by looking across three maps we produced, one each addressing standards, assessments, and curriculum and instruction. These are summarized individually below (with a description of the content material covered and the chapter number where the map appeared given in parentheses): • Standards (the 14 standards from the kindergarten Reading: Foundational Skills strand of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy; Chap. 9): The standards in this strand address all the knowledge-skill sets underlying word recognition – concepts about print, letter knowledge, phonemic awareness, knowledge of the alphabetic principle, and alphabetic coding skills (though the details of these should be examined to better understand what they specifically cover beyond the summary given here). The 14 standards themselves do not provide any explicit sense of their interrelationships (or when they should be addressed), beg the question of whether high-frequency words representing exceptions to letter-sound correspondences (i.e., sight words) are to be taught in that context, and have no focus on language comprehension or any of its subcomponents. • Assessment (the four kindergarten-appropriate subtasks of DIBELS Next; Chap. 10): The subtasks prescribed for kindergarten provide indices of most of the components underlying word recognition – phonemic awareness, letter knowledge, knowledge of the alphabetic principle, and alphabetic coding skill. Notwithstanding the limitations in these measures, the assessment provides no independent information about concepts about print and language comprehension or any of its subcomponents. • Curriculum and instruction (the one-week kindergarten sequence from the SRA Open Court Reading Foundational Skills Kit; Chap. 11): For word recognition, the instructional sequence most frequently addresses letter knowledge, concepts about print, and phonemic awareness (but only indirectly in the latter case). There is no focus on knowledge of the alphabetic principle, some focus on recognizing high-frequency words, and several Other activities, most focused on segmentation at the word level or on raising awareness about the order of words (which may not be helpful for students with deeper levels of phonological awareness). There is little focus on language comprehension or any of its subcomponents, save some activity on vocabulary and understanding story structure. Over the three maps, even with their limitations, we see that language comprehension is largely unaddressed. And though language comprehension may be addressed elsewhere through other standards, assessments, or instructional programs, these maps highlight its absence in thinking about reading and its need to be addressed. Also, from these three examples, there do not appear to be any contradictions (notwithstanding the issue concerning sight words raised in the kindergarten standards)  – for example, places where standards are indicating one direction be taken while assessments or curriculum and instruction either ignore these or provide other directions. (You can imagine that this would not be the case had we considered a map of a whole-language instructional sequence.) However, we do see that

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knowledge of the alphabetic principle is a focus within both the standards and assessments we have mapped, but not in the (albeit time-limited) instructional sequence. Again, the latter is very limited in scope and perhaps future instruction would address this  – but the maps make any absences visible, and this can help ensure they receive thoughtful consideration about actions to be taken. We also see in Other curricular activities opportunities for at least examining instructional focus and affirming that these are not lost opportunities for further strengthening critical cognitive skills for reading. Finally, we could consider the sequences implied in the maps – while the standards address the cognitive components underlying word recognition, are they being represented in the assessments and instructional programs in an order that is consistent with their hierarchical positions in the framework? Putting these together, the maps allow a critical, data-based examination of the degree to which there is a coherent reading practice in place (and in its timing) based on what students are expected to know, what aspects of student knowledge are expected to be assessed, and what teachers are expected to teach. These can be used in not only looking at the entire practice, but also in thinking about interventions for struggling readers – are students being taught what they need to know, do we know how well they are learning, and if they are not learning, do we know what additional resources we need to provide? We know that gaining coherence in reading practices is not something that comes easily. Coherence is something that reading professionals must build for their own practice and for their professional communities. Doing this in the way we have proposed requires work – to understand both the framework and its application to used tools, and to make decisions about what is and is not appropriately being addressed in practice. And while there is benefit in having completed maps, the work in producing them provides even greater benefits – deeper understandings of both potential student needs and supportive resources, and how they can be effectively connected.

13.3  What Has Been Covered and What Remains to Be Done In this book we have described a framework that captures the major cognitive components underlying both reading and learning to read, including what is known about the general relationships between these components. The framework models reading written English, but we have shown how it can be extended to model reading in other phonologically-based writing systems. We have described applications of the framework to both typical reading development and atypical, difficult development (and reading disability). Further, we have shown how the framework can be linked to standards, assessment, and curriculum and instruction, giving detailed examples of such linkages, and describing how these tools can be better utilized through an understanding of those relations. We have also shown how those tools and their relationships to the cognitive foundations can be used in response-to-­ intervention approaches to build a differentiated view of reading difficulties and

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effectively deliver reading interventions. And finally, we have shown how the framework can be used to gain coherent usage of tools in teaching reading. But there are several efforts that remain to be undertaken, two of which we mentioned in Chap. 1. First, we have not presented a full picture of the evidence relevant to the framework’s components and structure, work that we plan to undertake in the future. Second, we have not transformed the contents of the book into effective professional development. As we know, changing practice is a long-term endeavor and will not come without extended professional development in practice settings. We also intend to work on building these resources. Third, we believe research is needed on whether professional development can advance understanding and use of the framework, and whether that improves coherence in practice that leads to improved outcomes for students. Finally, we believe the framework itself can be improved – not only through additional research on reading, but also in refining the specification of the components and their relationships (e.g., detailing what is known about the levels of complexity in the skills represented within components, providing information on the level of skill needed within components to enable advancements in connected higher-order components, representing metacognitive components within comprehension). Of course, the tools reading professionals use to support learning will also improve over time, and we urge reading professionals to continue to build the discipline to connect research knowledge to the tools they use to improve coherence in practice. Through such efforts, we think reading professionals will be in a much better position to provide appropriate support to help their students master this most remarkable ability of reading that is so critical to their individual, and our collective, futures.