Summary
In this episode, the hosts discuss the five pillars from the National Reading Panel and their history. They explore the confusion that can arise from viewing these pillars as a model of how reading works. The role of fluency and the importance of differentiating instruction for the five pillars are also discussed. The conversation concludes with a reevaluation of the five pillars and a key takeaway to look beyond them. The next episodes will cover three other reading models.
Takeaways
Resources
We wrote a book! The Literacy 50-A Q&A Handbook for Teachers: Real-World Answers to Questions About Reading That Keep You Up at Night
Don't miss an episode! Sign up for FREE bonus resources and episode alerts at LiteracyPodcast.com
Helping teachers learn about science of reading, knowledge building, and high quality curriculum.
Summary
In this episode, the hosts discuss the five pillars from the National Reading Panel and their history. They explore the confusion that can arise from viewing these pillars as a model of how reading works. The role of fluency and the importance of differentiating instruction for the five pillars are also discussed. The conversation concludes with a reevaluation of the five pillars and a key takeaway to look beyond them. The next episodes will cover three other reading models.
Takeaways
Resources
We wrote a book! The Literacy 50-A Q&A Handbook for Teachers: Real-World Answers to Questions About Reading That Keep You Up at Night
Don't miss an episode! Sign up for FREE bonus resources and episode alerts at LiteracyPodcast.com
Helping teachers learn about science of reading, knowledge building, and high quality curriculum.
You're listening to. Melissa and Lori Love Literacy. Most of you are probably familiar with the National Reading Panels five pillars. Have you ever wondered how the panel decided on the pillars of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension? Researcher and professor at Florida State University, Hugh Catts will share some of the history of the National Reading Panel and will help us understand the benefits and limitations of thinking about reading as five separate pillars. Hi teacher friends, I'm Lori and I'm Melissa. We are two educators who want the best for all kids and we know you do too.
Melissa:We worked together in Baltimore when the district adopted a new literacy curriculum.
Lori:We realized there was so much more to learn about how to teach reading and writing.
Melissa:Lori and I, can't wait to keep learning with you today.
Lori:Hi teacher friends, happy new year. We are excited to break down some popular reading models with you in the next three episodes.
Melissa:And we're so excited to have a returning guest. Hugh Catts is back with us and he's here to help us make sense of these complex reading models. So welcome back, hugh.
Hugh Catts:Yeah, it's nice to be with you guys again.
Lori:Yeah, thank you. Well, we know we're starting a series here and it's just a brief one, just three brief episodes. But we're kicking off today discussing the five pillars from the National Reading Panel, and many of our listeners are familiar with the National Reading Panel. But, hugh, can you share a little bit about how the history of the National Reading Panel and the pillars came to be?
Hugh Catts:Yeah, it was. In the late 90s.
Hugh Catts:The Congress asked the director of a group from NIH and Department of Education to put together a panel of experts to kind of give the status of research and reading, particularly as it related to best practice and instruction.
Hugh Catts:So they put together a group of reading researchers and educators and the educators looked at the literature and initially started with dividing the literature up into three different areas alphabetics, fluency and comprehension.
Hugh Catts:But as they began to and they divided the teams up and as they began to look at the research, they saw that within alphabetics there was research at focus primarily on phonological awareness and research on phonics, and in the area of comprehension there was research that focused on vocabulary and also work that considered text comprehension, particularly strategy research. So when they finished doing their evaluation of literature they had chapters for those five different areas and in addition to that they had a chapter on teacher education and one on computer involvement in reading instruction. And from that a number of years later these turned into the five components of reading, which is known as the big five or the five pillars of reading, and they've worked themselves through the educational system and have now become part of public law in some states. States require that you have to teach the five components of reading. They're also in reading programs, so vendors advertise that their particular reading series includes instructions in the five pillars of reading.
Melissa:Thank you, so just to clarify here, the five pillars that came out of that in a kind of roundabout way, were phonemic awareness or phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. Yes, right, is that correct? So we see them all the time and sometimes they're, you know, in the actual five pillars, like people have made a graphic of five actual pillars and written each one of them on a pillar, and I think that I know where we know it came from. Now, right, like you just said. But sometimes that can cause some confusion because it's not really like a model of how reading works. There are just these five pillars side by side, so can you dig into that a little bit and tell us about what confusion can come from it?
Hugh Catts:Yeah, I mean it's basically not a model like other models that we use to describe reading processes, and that's what a model does is it's just a visual description of some phenomenon, in our case, reading. The word of five pillars are really, you know, just a listing of five aspects, if you will, about reading, and it's really kind of problematic for two different reasons. One reason is it seems to indicate that these different so-called components are independent. All right, and we know they're not independent. That phonological awareness and phonics should be taught in an interactive way. I can talk about that a little bit more in a minute. Same thing with vocabulary Vocabulary should be taught in the context of comprehension.
Hugh Catts:The other problem is that they're all treated to be somewhat equal in the visual depiction of them. Right, and there's five pillars and there's even one graphic of the five. The big five, it says. And comprehension is this little box at the top right, and what it does is it suggests visually that these five components are equal in terms of their complexity and malleability. Now, we know they're not, but the way things are presented makes a big difference in the way that we think about it and they can lead us to some false assumptions about teaching reading right. We know that comprehension is a much more complex phenomenon than alphabetics and fluency. In fact, it's probably the most complicated thing we do on a daily basis.
Lori:Hugh, I'm wondering if you can dive in a little bit to how we look at these and how that affects what we interpret.
Hugh Catts:Yeah, I mean basically what it's suggesting that we should work on each one of these kind of individually right, so we would go work on phonological awareness for a bit of time and then we might. If we're beginning teaching the alphabet, we'll teach a little bit about the alphabet and then turn and work on reading comprehension for 30 minutes. Right? Teach a little vocabulary, teach a few strategies and so forth, and it's not teaching how one reads, it's teaching one about different aspects of reading, if you will. And I think if we wanted to use a model from the reading panel, we should go back to their original idea of alphabetics, fluency and comprehension and not think about comprehension as a component of reading. Comprehension, including vocabulary and text comprehension, have much more in common with other cognitive abilities like listening comprehension or either comprehension of media. Watching a YouTube video or a documentary or a movie have more in common with each other than they do with alphabetics and phonics Our alphabetics and fluency, sorry. So what some people have suggested one of my colleagues is that we needed to take a narrower view of reading and think about reading instruction as focusing on teaching alphabetics and phonics. Right, at least partly explicit instruction, but an explicit instruction to the extent that the child begins to understand how the alphabetic principle works and can use that to learn more about reading themselves. Most of what we know about words is learning implicitly after we have discovered the alphabetic principle and have had some practice using the alphabetic principle. Now that doesn't mean that you wouldn't do this in context, because you'd certainly want to teach fluency in the context of real reading material. But there's a portion of the instruction that is skill related. I mean we're teaching the child that a skill, or at least giving them enough information about how that system works so that they can utilize to get better on it themselves. And then comprehension would be taught with the purpose that's involved in comprehension.
Hugh Catts:Right, some people say that the purpose of reading is comprehension, but it's really not.
Hugh Catts:The purpose is why you're comprehending, and in school for the most part it involves learning or in literature, appreciating literature, enjoying literature, so forth.
Hugh Catts:And so we're moving toward teaching comprehension within the learning situation within the social studies curriculum or in the science curriculum, where the focus is on learning and how we understand language of a text, whether it's written, spoken or shown in a video, and how we would do that to form an understanding of that text and learn from that text. So it doesn't mean that we wouldn't teach reading comprehension explicitly we still teach kids how do you extract information from a text but it would be in the service of learning something at the end of reading that particular text. And my colleague, alan Kamai, calls this the narrower view of reading, and that's reading being alphabetics and fluency, and he introduced this idea about 15 years ago and I wrote another paper about the broad view of comprehension. And what it does is it allows us to think about comprehension as a broader phenomenon. That occurs with text, with lecture or in early grades, kind of mini discussion or visual presentation.
Melissa:Just curious where does fluency fall?
Hugh Catts:Well, the fluency would fall kind of in between to a certain extent, right, because part of fluency is understanding what you read. So your fluency is going to go down a bit If you release your speed. If you will will go down if you don't understand the text. But there's parts of that is a skill, to a certain extent as well, that can be practiced and transferred.
Hugh Catts:Comprehension is not a skill that you can learn how to do it and then apply it to different contexts, because it depends upon what you're reading, what the purpose of reading is. I've used the example. It's not like swimming, where you learn how to swim and then you can swim in any body of order. It's heavily dependent upon what it is you're reading and the purpose of that reading. And that's why I and others are beginning to argue that it's best taught within a meaningful context that in school involves learning or appreciating literature, understanding about how stories are told and what's involved in poetry or whatever it might mean. It's a meaningful context that where comprehension is best taught.
Hugh Catts:I like the idea of alphabetics, fluency and comprehension and within comprehension we would teach vocabulary and text, comprehension strategies and so forth. But by treating this comprehension the focus is on understanding for the purpose of learning or for the purpose of enjoyment, appreciation, whatever it might be there, and then alphabetics and fluency would still be taught. But the idea of five pillars to me introduces independence and it introduces the idea you teach this at one point, you move to this, you move to this, you move to that, and it's hard to get rid of that idea. I mean, it's so intermixed into education these days. But I think we would be better off going back to the initial way that the reading panel kind of divided up the literature.
Melissa:Yeah, I have to say I recently went back to the National Reading Panel and really like dove back into it and I was surprised. I was like, oh wow, these chapters are not what you think they are. Like, I thought they would be, those five pillars would be the chapters, and they're not what you just said the alphabetics and then fluency and then comprehension. And I was surprised myself. I was like, oh interesting, how did we get to the five pillars?
Hugh Catts:That's really Well, it's a nice graphic. I mean, we like visual images that help with understanding complex problems, but I don't think this visual image does us much good in terms of understanding how we might teach reading.
Lori:Yeah, Q, if you could leave our listeners with one thing to think about as they are looking at this graphic, which we'll link in the show notes, what would you leave them with? Like? What thoughts, what questions?
Hugh Catts:Yeah, don't think about the pillars as independent components of reading and move away from the idea of the independence of instruction, that one works on one aspect of reading and then can turn and do 30 minutes of another aspect of reading. I think it's more important to think about what the goal is of the instruction and in one case, the goal is going to be understanding how the alphabetic principle works and how to become more efficient at using that principle so that kids can learn to read more words, can be more fluent in their reading and then, with comprehension, focus on the purpose of the comprehension activity.
Lori:That's so helpful. Thank you so much for being here and for talking with us about this.
Hugh Catts:Sure.
Melissa:Yeah. So in our next two episodes we'll discuss three other reading models with you the Simple View of Reading, scarborough's Reading Rope and the Rand Model for Comprehension. We can't wait to keep learning with you. To stay connected with us, sign up for our email list at literacypodcastcom, join our Facebook group and follow us on Instagram and Twitter.
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Melissa:Just a quick reminder that the views and opinions expressed by the hosts and guests of the Melissa and Laurie Love Literacy Podcast are not necessarily the opinions of Great Minds PBC or its employees.
Lori:We appreciate you so much and we're so glad you're here to learn with us.