I could start this piece repeating the glum statistics you already know: too many kids in the United States of America can’t read proficiently, there are great disparities between the literacy rates of subgroups by race and ethnicity, and both of these things have been greatly exacerbated by the fact that way too many of our schools were closed to in-person learning for well over a year.
Oh, and things not only haven’t improved since, like, the 70s—they’ve even gotten worse.
But I’ll start instead with something more personal. I taught students with disabilities for 7 years in the Bronx, and then supported schools across the Bronx with literacy instruction for 4 more. And now I support schools across New York City with literacy instruction for multilingual learners.
And yet I will admit I barely knew anything about the foundational skills of language and literacy and how reading and writing develops until around 3 years ago, when along with many others, I listened to Emily Hanford’s reporting and felt my stomach drop as I realized she was describing practices I literally witnessed each day as I visited different classrooms. I began doing some more of my own reading of books like David Kilpatrick’s Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties, Mark Seidenberg’s Language at the Speed of Sight, and others. Since then, I’ve read an increasing volume of literacy and language research, and it’s now a large part of what I consume on a daily basis.
What I’ve learned is that while there are ongoing debates about reading at just about any level you can scratch, there’s also a remarkable consensus -- at least among those who either engage in empirical research themselves or pay close attention to it -- that teaching foundational literacy skills in a structured and systematic way is a key lever to improve literacy outcomes.
The other area of consensus is that foundational literacy skills are necessary, but not sufficient.
Language learning begins almost the moment we can hear or feel or move. When you were in the womb, your mother’s heartbeat, sonorous voice, and burbling digestive system bathed you in constant aural stimulation and sparked the rapid development of neural connections in your brain. You began to attune your budding awareness to the prosody of human speech. You began to distinguish the voices of different speakers and between the sounds of different languages.
After we have entered into the world and the umbilical cord has been cut, language is the interstitial tissue that binds our interactions to the people and objects around us. We cry and wave, we grab and we coo, we point and laugh and babble and shriek.
We are born to communicate with and learn from one another, to gesture, to imitate, to assign names and labels, to array things and events and actions into discourse. This amazing ability to learn and communicate is our universal birthright.
But the languages we use, how and when we use them, and who we use them with are incredibly diverse. Some children speak one language within their family and community, but learn a new language in school. Other children use only one form of language across all of their contexts and have minimal exposure to other languages. And some children speak different languages within their own family, another language in their community, and learn yet a new form of language in school.
When our children first come into our schools, whether in pre-K or in kindergarten, they already come with a wealth of unique experiences with language. However, not all have had the same level of exposure to the language of written text, a language that tends to be more syntactically complex, with greater use of specialized and infrequent words, greater requirements for inferencing, and glimpses into realms of inquiry that lie beyond the immediate and concrete. The academic term for this type of language is “decontextualized” or “abstract” language, and children are exposed to this language whenever an adult reads books aloud to them and talks with them about what they read (“extra-textual talk”). These early shared reading experiences improve later reading outcomes and motivation to read.
Rather than shaming and blaming parents and families for not reading enough to their children, we need to ensure that every home has books in the languages they speak, and every family has access to books even when their homes may be temporary. We furthermore need to support educating parents in shared reading techniques, as well as supporting continued adult literacy development – reading difficulties run in families, and some parents may have trouble reading fluently themselves. Our society seems to so easily forfeit commitments to ensuring all families have a rich home and community literacy learning environment, yet somehow all families have a giant T.V., cellphones, and other accoutrements of modern life that all too easily afford opportunities to otherwise spend time, money, and attention. These misplaced societal priorities have lasting negative repercussions on generations of families.
Yet as all too many parents know, you could read to your children dutifully since the moment they were born, send them off to school, and suddenly discover one day in 3rd, or 4th, or 5th grade–even into middle school–that your child is having difficulty reading, even though he has great ability to communicate. Because language ability is only one part of becoming a strong reader and writer – the other part is the ability to instantaneously recognize a word in print, which develops from accurate and fluent decoding of letter sequences and knowledge of morphological patterns. When a child takes additional time and effort recognizing words in print, this impedes their reading development.
In a recent
"word reading and phonological decoding skills are underdeveloped in students performing below NAEP Basic, particularly for students in the below NAEP Basic Low subgroup." https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/subject/studies/pdf/2021026_2018_orf_highlights.pdf
“Overall, 36 percent of fourth-grade public school students performed below NAEP Basic, but 51 percent of Black fourth-grade students and 46 percent of Hispanic fourth-grade students performed below NAEP Basic.Here we have reported the observed percentages for the ORF study sample, which are very close to the percentages for the operational NAEP sample. For Black students in the operational NAEP sample, the percentages of students performing below NAEP Basic were 50 and 53 for 2017 and 2019, respectively. For Hispanic students in the operational NAEP sample, the percentage of students performing below NAEP Basic was 46 in both 2017 and 2019.
We found that Black students were also overrepresented in the lowest below NAEP Basic subgroup—i.e., below NAEP Basic Low. As shown in table 1, while 26 percent of the White students performing below NAEP Basic were at the lowest level of below NAEP Basic, 40 percent of the Black fourth-graders and 37 percent of the Hispanic fourth-graders who performed below NAEP Basic fell into this subgroup. Because 51 percent of Black students were in the below NAEP Basic group, this finding means that 20 percent of Black fourth-grade students (or one out of every five Black fourth-graders) performed at the lowest end of below
NAEP Basic (51 percent × 40 percent = 20 percent). Similarly, 17 percent (or one out of six) of Hispanic fourth-graders were in the lowest below NAEP Basic group, below NAEP Basic Low (46 percent × 37 percent = 17 percent).
The 2018 ORF study reveals that for an estimated 1.27 million12
12 This number refers to 36 percent of 3.54 million (the number of public school, fourth-graders represented in the 2018 ORF study sample) = 1.27 million.
fourth-grade public school students performing below NAEP Basic, and particularly for an estimated 0.42 million13 13 This number refers to a third of 1.27 million fourth-grade students who performed below NAEP Basic. Recall that students performing below NAEP Basic were evenly divided into three groups based on the NAEP reading score distribution. fourth-grade students in the below NAEP Basic Low subgroup, fluent reading of connected text—sufficiently fast and accurate reading of sentences and passages—can be a major challenge. The study also shows that word reading and phonological decoding skills are underdeveloped in students performing below NAEP Basic, particularly for students in the below NAEP Basic Low subgroup.
Students in the below NAEP Basic Low subgroup not only have difficulty reading the words in the text quickly and accurately but also show a lack of appropriate expression in reading out loud, which is an indicator of poor comprehension.”
Many of our Black children come into our schools speaking a dialect of English termed African American Vernacular English or Black American English. This is a dynamic dialect that drives many pop cultural adoptions of new words. This form of English is “fierce,” in the words of linguist John McWhorter, a form of English that has its own rules and can be even more complicated than Mainstream American English. And yet, within a few years of entering our schools, our Black children begin
https://kappanonline.org/russo-ebonics-coverage-65649-2/