Featured Research

Over a century ago, scientists discovered that our eyes are constantly moving from point to point, and perceived information is only sent to the brain when the eyes are still. This had big implications for the study of reading; the community was flipped on its head! Whereas previously philosophical approaches predominated our understanding of reading, now reading scholars were asking more scientific questions, and working to answer them using machines that would lead to advances like the modern-day eye tracker. In short, the study of reading became a science.

Since reading is in many ways essential for navigating the world, it is important that we understand how it works. This is particularly true when it comes to teaching young kids how to read: Unlike language, reading doesn’t come naturally through exposure, so understanding how the reading process works is essential for helping young learners acquire this important skill. However, despite over a hundred years of science-based reading research, the educational community has been slow to adapt to research-based practices. This has been to the detriment of many young students, leading to the current “Science of Reading” movement, which aims to bring insights from reading research into practice [1]. In this article we touch on some aspects of this movement and the research that motivates it and discuss how it provides a case study for why it is important to integrate research into our educational practices.

Our understanding of how reading works is the result of research from multiple disciplines, including psychology, education, communication sciences, neuroscience, and linguistics [1]. One of the important insights we have learned from reading science is that, unlike language, reading is “unnatural” and “artificial” [2]. What this means is that reading is something that must be learned through explicit instruction, as a skill. Science has taught us that children cannot learn to read simply through exposure to books, and they must be given tools to make sense out of the print in front of them. Research has shown quite clearly that understanding how sounds connect to letters (e.g., ‘a’ is for apple, ‘b’ is for bananas) is essential for reading [1]. In some languages, like Spanish, this relationship is fairly straightforward, while in others, like English it is less so. (See our fun piece in this newsletter for more on this!)

Despite the knowledge that connecting letters and sounds is essential for reading, for decades, predominant ways of teaching reading have left explicit instruction on this fundamental aspect of reading out of the curriculum. Instead, reading curricula used in most schools have focused on encouraging children to use context and other elements of the text to figure out what a word says [3]. However, it has now become clear that ignoring the science in this regard has been to the detriment of many emergent readers. In recent years, this has led to a ‘revolt’, led in large part by families and individuals who feel they were sold short by a school system that ignored results from science and therefore failed them in their reading instruction [4]. The science of reading movement emerged from this, as a demand to pay attention to the science and integrate research-based practices into how we teach reading.