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Ep. 164: Misconceptions about Learning to Read with Carolyn Strom

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Ever wondered why reading isn't as natural as speech? Carolyn Strom, an accomplished early literacy expert, reveals that unlike speech, reading doesn't come naturally. In fact, it requires well-structured, explicit instruction which we'll discuss in this episode.

The importance of a structured approach to teaching reading cannot be understated. We'll be taking a deep look at the role of decodable texts, progress monitoring, phonemic awareness activities, and the necessity of a proper scope and sequence. And for those who believe that word memorization is the ultimate key to learning to read, prepare to have that myth debunked. Carolyn introduces the concept of mapping – associating the visual form of a word with its sounds and meaning, a vital aspect in learning to read.

As we delve further into the episode, we look into how critical practice and spoken language are in the reading process. Discover how word games can transform skill drills into an engaging and exciting experience for kids. We also have valuable insights for those working with bilingual or multilingual learners, as we discuss the significance of building spoken language and conceptual knowledge, which play a major role in comprehension. Finally, we'll discuss creating a conducive environment for students to learn and provide resources for further exploration. Join us for this captivating and educational journey into the world of early literacy.

Resources 


We answer your questions about teaching reading in The Literacy 50-A Q&A Handbook for Teachers: Real-World Answers to Questions About Reading That Keep You Up at Night.

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Lori:

You're listening to Melissa and Lori Love Literacy. Join us as we focus on learning about dyslexia this October. Today we'll be talking to Carolyn Strom about three misconceptions about how the brain learns how to read. Misconception one reading is taught, not caught. Misconception two we map words. We don't memorize them. Misconception three the idea that reading clicks without practice. What's wrong with practice? Welcome teacher friend. I'm Lori and I'm Melissa. We are two literacy educators in Baltimore.

Melissa:

We want the best for all kids and we know you do too. Our district recently adopted a new literacy curriculum, which meant a lot of change for everyone, Lori and I can't wait to keep learning about literacy with you today.

Lori:

Hi everyone. Welcome to Melissa and Lori Love Literacy. Today we're so excited because we are here with a guest who's going to tell us about three misconceptions about how the brain learns how to read. Yep. So we have.

Melissa:

Carolyn Strom here today, who is a professor in the Education Department at New York University and she's an early literacy expert who I actually got to see present at the reading league last year at the conference and she made this really tough topic really easy to understand. So I'm very excited to talk to her today.

Melissa:

So welcome Carolyn, thank you, thanks for having me All right so we wanted to jump right in because, just like us, you were a teacher, and not all the time when you have a professor of education, where they necessarily a teacher in the classroom. So we're really curious about how you went from a classroom teacher to becoming interested in studying, so specifically how the brain learns to read.

Carolyn Strom:

So, yeah, I started my career as a first grade teacher in Compton, California, and anyone that's taught first grade knows that reading is nothing Right. We really want kids reading by the end of first grade and I really fell in love with the process of teaching reading. I was lucky enough to have an explicit phonics program open court at the time. California had this mandate around open court and my kids were reading and it is a really amazing experience being a first grade teacher, having kids transform into readers, so I fell in love with it. That's really what kept me in the classroom for about 10 years and during that time obviously went to tons of PD and tons of and I had a master's degree.

Carolyn Strom:

But I realized that after several years of teaching I didn't really understand what was going on in the brain, even though I was teaching kids to read right, I was doing all the things and my kids were readers and I felt like a strong teacher. But when a mom actually said to me I see my kid working so hard to sound out a word, what is going on? I see him staring at these words, sounding them out what's happening in the brain, and I couldn't tell the parent. I didn't know, even though I knew how to teach reading, I would have been making it up. I realized that after all these hours of PD and a master's degree, I knew how to teach reading well, but I didn't really know what was going on inside the brain and that just didn't feel right to me in terms of a professional base, and that's why I decided to go to graduate school and get a PhD and really understand the research about how kids learn to read.

Melissa:

But probably true for most teachers right that they know the moves to make in the classroom, but I couldn't have said what was happening in the brains of my students when they were learning for sure.

Carolyn Strom:

Right, and when you begin to understand really how something works, like how a system works, then you can figure out what's not working. You know the mechanisms and I didn't really feel like I understood the mechanisms and that even became clear when I was working a lot with dyslexic students right after during my graduate work and I was like I wouldn't have been able. I don't feel like I would have been able to do that if I didn't have a deeper understanding of how the brain learns to read and why the sound processing is so important. So there's a lot there. It's so rich, and I think that sometimes the neuroscience especially is really dense and written for people with a background in neuroscience. And I don't believe that educators and families necessarily need a deep background in neuroscience. They just need to understand the basics of what's going on in the brain, in the same way that we would want our physical therapist to understand anatomy. Right, it's just understanding a little bit of what's going on inside. That really intrigued me. It still intrigues me to this day.

Lori:

Yeah, I think, as we dive into what's going on inside the brain, you highlighted in our pre-call three misconceptions about how the brain learns to read and I think you just put them so clearly that you're right. Like, even though I don't have a background in neuroscience, I can still understand what you're sharing. Is there a way to kind of just start off with the first misconception and then we will ask you questions that pop up along the way?

Carolyn Strom:

But maybe if you could start with that first misconception and just kind of explain to us what are some misconceptions about how the brain learns how to read, so I've encountered these misconceptions over the last five or 10 years sort of working with teachers and working in schools around change and early literacy, and realized that a lot of the families and educators had these misconceptions and that was kind of where some of the misguided practices were coming from. Right, it's that they held these sort of misconceptions and the first one I'm sure we're all very familiar with is that reading is natural. So there's this misconception out there that, just like kids naturally learn to speak right, If we immerse them in spoken language, then if we immerse them in print, we immerse them with books, then they'll learn to read right. And that's very prevalent. You know, don't push the kid right, they don't necessarily need instruction, it will come naturally. And that's just simply not true.

Carolyn Strom:

Learning to speak is very different than learning to read, and we can see all over the world millions of people develop spoken language and millions of people don't learn to read right, Because it doesn't just happen spontaneously. It requires schooling, it requires instruction and it's a code. It's an invented code. That's what the alphabet is, right, it's these squiggles, lines and dots that represent sounds that we came up with only five or 6,000 years ago. Right, it's a very new invention. So there's just no way that it's something that occurs naturally.

Carolyn Strom:

But what that ends up leading to, if we believe, right, that reading is natural and it occurs just like spoken language, and all we need to do is submerge kids in print, then we're really sort of turning away from the importance of explicit instruction, right. So that's sort of the outcome of this misconception is that we say, oh, it'll occur naturally, let's wait, right. Sometimes it's called the wait and see approach or the maturation perspective. They'll just evolve into that. But actually, like, that just takes away from how important explicit instruction is. Right, I often say that reading is taught, not caught. For some kids it does, it feels like it's caught, right, but really for most kids it must be taught and that's if we believe it's natural, then we're not gonna believe that right, Like we'll just believe it will be caught and we don't have the luxury to think like that.

Melissa:

That's such an important point that it does actually kind of happen like that for some kids, some students, but that's not the norm.

Carolyn Strom:

Right and for the kids that it happens with, it may be that they got a lot informally early on with their phonemic awareness, for example, right and or their early writing Like they may have had. It may seem like it just popped on right or clicked, but in fact there's other things that inputs they got that we can't see.

Melissa:

Yeah, I just saw an anecdotal story somewhere, probably on social media, where someone said something like that Like, yeah, their second child just kind of picked it up. They don't know where it came from, but it was actually because they watched a lot of what was going on with their older, their older child, like bringing home homework and working with them on things, and they just saw some of those things happening that they picked up on those. Yeah, it wasn't just a natural thing, it actually still had the input, right?

Carolyn Strom:

From somewhere else. Right, exactly. But I think it's a romantic. It's a romantic version of literacy that like surround kids with books and surround kids with conversation and they'll fall in love with this process and they'll naturally learn to read. And that's just not. It's just not true. We're not wired for this. It's not going to work like that and it requires structure.

Lori:

What would you say to parents or teachers who do say that, like, oh, I just turned around and you know my child can read. Or oh, my child really struggled last year but they stepped into a classroom this year and it seems like they've really got it?

Carolyn Strom:

I mean, then I just say more power to you, like that it's awesome, your kid is reading, your kid is not my concern, honestly, like I'm concerned about the kids who are not reading and who everyone's saying, oh, they'll just get it, but I do say, yeah, it may. I say what I said before, like it may seem like that, right, but it's likely that there was actually a lot of phonemic awareness built in somewhere in their life. Right, and it's. There are some kids that process of building a circuit is easier, right, but for most kids we need to teach it and it really doesn't hurt anyone to actually be explicitly teaching and monitoring progress, right, and it doing sort of very specific moves that are going to promote building a reading circuit, because that is what we're doing, right, we're building a circuit. It's not we don't come with a center for reading, so we ought to build it.

Melissa:

Yeah, do you want to dig in a little bit more there? I mean, you've already mentioned several things, but we wanted to ask you about what are the implications here for teachers and for parents. Like, what do we need to do if not just parents hear that all the time? Just immerse them and read to them. It'll be great, you know, but what does this really mean for parents, and especially our teachers of our youngest students?

Carolyn Strom:

So of course, like yes, we want books in the home, we want access to libraries. You do want tons of books, right, and texts, and you do want to be reading to your kids and you also want to be pointing out environmental print, right, you also want to sort of make kids not only aware of books but of print in the environment. Stop signs, any kind of signs, the signs at your school logos, cereal boxes, right. Pointing out the print in the world is definitely important, right. All of that are, I guess, quote unquote natural right, using what is in your environment, and we want to have a print rich environment, of course. But also realize that we need to be explicit, right, and make sure that kids are involved in some kind of instructional program that has a scope and sequence, for example, right, that doesn't just assume kids are going to pick up the letter patterns in our environment, right, because it's not intuitive and it's not natural. So when you're thinking about the instruction your kid is receiving, is there a scope and sequence? Right. Is there a plan for progress monitoring? Is there a plan for practice? Right. Are there decodable texts? I mean I'm getting like super in the weeds here, right, but like, these are like the Okay, great, great, so you want it.

Carolyn Strom:

You want there to be these structures, these specific structures involved, right, and I'm not saying that at three years old, you're doing letters, sound flashcards, right, that's not what I'm saying, right, but you're following some kind of scope and sequence around either phonemic awareness, right, and then awareness of sounds and then moving into letter sounds. There's a plan for writing, right? There's a plan for teaching handwriting. There's a plan for how we handle irregular words, right. So, if we take this misconception that reading is natural and we accept no, it's not, it needs to be taught, well, then there's, like all science of teaching reading, right, and that's the biggest implication of accepting that we're not wired for reading and it's not natural.

Melissa:

Yeah, that's really helpful and I think I'm hearing both from like. If I'm a teacher at a school, these are things I should be looking for in curriculum in my training. I should be looking for to have these and, if not, advocating for them and same with parents, right as you're either choosing a school or signing up for a school, like looking and asking for what is that? What is the structure? How's literacy being taught? What's the scope and sequence? Those seem like the right questions to be asking.

Carolyn Strom:

Yes, and as you're speaking, yes, exactly. And as you're speaking, I'm just like wait, there's a caveat though. Right, because we're talking about early childhood, we get into talking about early childhood, right Three to five year olds, three to six year olds. So there is also the. We're not put. You don't necessarily need to push right If a kid three years old. Right For a kid to be reading and writing.

Carolyn Strom:

Some kids with certain inputs are going to pick it up at that age, but it is okay to be. We want to be developmentally appropriate, right? So the letters and sounds and structures there should be for three and four year olds, right? So that's going to be different than for five and six year olds. Does that make sense? Right, it's going to be more, even more playful and more song based and much more phonemic awareness. So when I say prescribed and scope and sequence, I really mean just like a plan, right, a plan that's developmentally appropriate, but that there is a plan, not just a spontaneous. We're going to surround them with print and they're going to begin to pick up how print and sounds work together.

Melissa:

That's so funny. I have a four year old who just started in pre-K and they sent home a paper that said what are your goals for your student this year? And I started to go kind of. I was like ready to write down all the things of all the letter sounds and this and that. And then at the end I was like I'll still like have fun. I want him to have fun and he's a kid still.

Carolyn Strom:

And I have a four year old who just started preschool too. That's so funny and I've yes, I'm totally with you. I'm totally with you. You know, and yeah, exactly, you do want them to have fun. You want them to have 20 to 30 minutes of symphonemic awareness and letters out, you know, you want, you want them to have some of that, but really you do want them to have fun and it is fun. I mean, we'll get into that. But phonics and phonemic awareness is fun. You know, there's this kind of like dichotomy out there that like, oh, phonics is the boring stuff, it's the mechanics. You got to just get through it to get to the meaning. And like, teaching phonics is very fun, right, you can make it super engaging, it's so fun. Kids get so excited, right, when they learn all the tricks of our language and they learn the way it works. And it's a pattern, it's a code, so it can be fun. It is fun, right. So, and that sort of connects us to some of the other misconceptions.

Lori:

But yeah, I mean I just. I have one last question about it, though. If I'm a parent or a teacher listening and I am hearing you say explicit instruction with a systematic scope and sequence, but I'm not sure what that means, do you have any recommendations? Because I think there's really good stuff out there and there's not so great stuff. So, like I can start with an example. So I've been seeing all the hubbub about you fly, so I ordered myself a UFly manual, right, and it is very clear in the if you're reading this UFly manual exactly what the scope and sequence is. And then I'm also going to say that I live in a district that has Readers Writers Workshop. They have the phonics. It's very clear that that phonics program was input like kind of like backdated right, so it was like so okay. So if I'm in a district and I'm seeing like a systematic scope and sequence, I'm looking for specific things, and if I'm a parent, I probably have zero idea, right, who's what I'm looking for?

Carolyn Strom:

I mean, I'm glad you mentioned UFly. I mean UFly. So for any school that I work with pretty much you know, we either made the transition to UFly or are making the transition to UFly away from some other phonics programs, because UFly is so efficient. It's efficient and it's very, it's very much like you can use it tomorrow, right, it's, and there's a tons of support, very easy and games, and I mean a really great social media community. The Facebook UFly group is wonderful and so, and UFly is basically free. You just pay for the teacher's guide, right? So it's such a great program and I think it's a great model, right?

Carolyn Strom:

So when I'm thinking about, like, the one of the things I love about UFly is like it's 128 lessons, right? So no matter what grade, it's always this. That is like an amazing scope and sequence. We really know how it's organized, right, and you don't cover all 128 in any grade, right, there are some you skip. There's an order for each grade, but that's what we mean by a scope and sequence we know the scope of what's being covered and we know the sequence.

Melissa:

All right, Carolyn, can you tell us about the second misconception?

Carolyn Strom:

Yeah. So the second misconception that you know I've experienced in my work with educators and families is around this idea of how we actually learn to read words from memory, right, how we remember words, how we store them. And there's this misconception sometimes that we memorize words right, especially irregular words. So a word like laugh, right, l-a-u-g-h. But you know, you might tell a child like, oh, you just have to memorize it, english is so tricky, english is so irregular. There's this like memorization perspective out there which leads to looking at words as holes, that we memorize words as holes somehow. That's a flash card as flash cards, yep, and the word shape method, right, and that's just a real misconception about how learning happens, how we store words in memory.

Carolyn Strom:

It really happens through mapping, not memorizing, and by mapping I mean like we're mapping the specific letters to sounds or letter patterns to sounds, right, that's what we see. We see that in all of the brain research especially right. We've talked about how we have no center for reading, we have to build the circuit. And if we look at how we build the circuit, what we're doing is we're connecting the visual form of the word what you see with your vision, perception, right, with your vision, to sounds and then to meaning. So there's three primary areas of the brain. Lots of other areas of the brain that are involved, but these three primary areas that make up, like, the neural form of a word, right, and that's what we mean by mapping. We're mapping a word's pronunciation right To the way that the letters are, to its letters and to its meaning.

Melissa:

So that's when you say mapping real quick, that's literally what's happening in our brain, like those things that you're talking about.

Carolyn Strom:

You're connecting, like the. There are neurons right that specialize for vision to recognize faces and objects, right, and so we're re-tuning those neurons right so that they recognize letters of a specific script and then can map those letters to a sound, right. That's the first level of mapping. You have to map these letters, these squiggles, lines and dots, right. They don't mean anything, they're complete abstractions, they don't mean anything. We have to map them to sounds, right. And once we do that, we map, let's say, the S and the H right to shh and the I to N and put in rep shh.

Carolyn Strom:

If you've mapped the letters and sounds. But now you need to map that pronunciation and that letter sequence to something, to a ship, right to what that means. And now those three, those three representations, if you will, are connected right, the what a ship is, how a ship sounds and then what the letters look like in sequence. And the more you do that right we say the neurons that fire together, wire together, the more that you connect those, map or connect those three representations, the more that you're, you're, you're beginning to store, because it creates like a little neural address For that word, kind of in what's eventually stonis-less-to-han calls the letter box is is an area that we develop. Experienced expert readers develop that is really specialized for recognizing words and letter sequences within words. But the first level of mapping is letter to sound or symbol to sound right, and then we map the letter sequences to the pronunciation and the meaning.

Melissa:

I'm curious about because Because the goal of that is that if that becomes so automatic, right that you see ship and it's like you don't even have to think about it. You know the sounds, you know the word, you know everything very quickly. Yeah, that where the misconception comes from about memorizing that it feels like we're memorizing it because it eventually becomes so quick.

Carolyn Strom:

I Think that I think that's right. I think I'm not sure exactly where the misconception comes from, but People have suggested that it comes from this idea of like the experts blind spot. Right, so all of us are expert readers. We read with automaticity, we don't think about it, all of our cognitive energy can go towards meaning, right, it's something we're doing. And so, for expert readers, we forget actually how, what our brain was like before we could read, and it does feel to us that we're just, you know, memorizing the letter sequence. But there's tons of studies to prove that that's not what we're doing. Although it was, it was an early misconception and early reading research as well. But that's not what we're doing. We, we map right. Even even when part of a word is irregular, we're still mapping it.

Lori:

Yeah, it's like taking apart something that you can do so fluently to to almost like try to break it down to Be less fluent so that you could figure out how you got so flu. It's like really an impossible task for an expert to do.

Carolyn Strom:

It's really bad and people have written about it with musicians, right, professional musicians who, like, don't remember what it was like before they could do. They can't describe what they do because it's so in their body and it's so automatic, right, and exactly that's that's for for readers. We have to, like we, we have to imagine what it's like to not have this skill right in order to understand how difficult it is. But the cool thing about our brains is that we have this capacity for automaticity. That's what I think is so amazing, right, like if you look at a script that you've never seen before, like I do this with Korean, right, I don't, I can't read Korean, but if I look at something in Korean, it truly just looks like lines, just squiggles and lines to me, right, and it's amazing to me that, you know, I could theoretically learn to read that, so that it would add it to it, to a place of automaticity.

Carolyn Strom:

It's incredible. So we have this capacity for automaticity. So then it feels like we've just memorized everything, but we haven't. We've mapped it right, and I think the power of understanding the mapping, especially at the, at the letter level, is, like, if you understand what our brain has to do, right, in order to recognize letters. It's pretty phenomenal because we're using an area of our brain I think I mentioned before that that is specialized for really recognizing faces and objects, right, not letters, and so that's why we see things like mirror invariance, so, which is when kids confuse B and D and P and Q, right, that's evidence of the fact that they're using this part of their brain that recognizes objects, and when objects are flipped, they're still the same object, right. So we're reusing this part of our brain that actually sees mirror images the same Right and we have to unlearn that in order to really acquire an alphabetic literacy.

Lori:

That's so neat. So what? Like? What could parents and teachers do? Like, what are the implications for parents and teachers listening in regards to memorizing versus mapping misconception?

Carolyn Strom:

So much, okay. So first, when we think about Teaching kids letters and sounds, right, we want to make it meaningful. And you know, if you think of a W, there's no reason why a W like the zigzag W would say whoop would make the whoop sound. There's no reason why when we want to write whoop water, we would spell it with a W, because the W starts with D, right, it doesn't you, right? So there's no correlation, right, and? But when you use a method called embedded pictures or embedded picture mnemonics and maybe you turn the W into a worm and A kid, and the W is in the shape of a worm and a worm is in the shape of a W, I don't know, it's visual, so I don't know if I'm making any sense. But, um, then a kid looks at that, right, and they think what worm, and so they associate the shape of the W With a, what worm, and that's an embedded, embedded alphabet method. That is really, really beneficial for young children, even more beneficial if the characters are engaging, right, and there's songs to go along with it and and rhymes and handwriting.

Carolyn Strom:

Yeah, and the program that I like to use with preschools is called letter land. We've used that with a bunch of preschools. It's one embedded picture mnemonic method, but there are others. I know that Spellphabet has one online I think they're based out of Australia and it's just cards that have embedded embedded pictures in the alphabet, and so I guess my main takeaway here, and why I spent a little time on it, is that's what makes sort of learning the alphabet can be fun, I Right. So we want to make this sort of abstract process it's called paired associate learning, when you're looking at a symbol and connecting it with a sound, right? We want to make that meaningful and fun, and one way to do that is by embedded embedding pictures into the alphabetic symbols.

Melissa:

I was just going to say. I see a lot of flags on those, so I think sometimes you have to be a cautious consumer, right Of like. I've seen one, even where I'm not even making this up, that the K example was a knight like K-N-I-G-H-T and I was like that is the worst example. There is not even a K sound in there at all. So, yeah, they're not all that bad, but I know that some of them do have some Right.

Melissa:

Right, Of course of course, just make sure they're good ones, and so letterland is one that there's.

Carolyn Strom:

Yes, there's a bunch of research around letterland, which is why that's the one I always recommend. So, yeah, definitely a conscious consumer. And just because a letter is next to an object does not make it embedded right, it actually has to be embedded in the letter's shape if that makes sense. And yeah, so the other thing I wanted to say about mapping, not memorizing the implication of understanding that we're not memorizing, we're mapping, is really for spelling.

Carolyn Strom:

So with spelling, the only way to spell right is sequentially right, take left or right, taking it sound by sound. That really helps set up the mapping in our brain. And so over time, yes, it's going to come automatic right. Your hand or your fingers on the keyboard are going to become automatic with that right. But if we understand that we're not actually just like memorizing the spellings of these strings, we're initially mapping them all to sounds, and that mapping them to sounds really helps us set up those letter sequences in our brain, then we'll, you know, I think people will pay more attention. I'm hoping people will pay more attention to the role of dictation and the role of handwriting, because we know that sort of the motor area of our brain. I call it the handwriting hub, but the motor area of our brain. When we involve that area of our brain in learning to read right, it really helps build the circuit more effectively.

Melissa:

I see this question a lot too. That comes up where someone will say their student or their child you know they can read right, they seem like they're reading really well, they're decoding words, but then their spelling is really not great and the answer I always see which you can correct me if I'm wrong is like well, they've memorized words. Then and that's like I mean, okay for right now, but that's going to be a problem in the long run.

Carolyn Strom:

Exactly, and they must have very. They have a very good visual memory, right. Not all kids have that kind of visual memory. If they, sorry, they must not have very good visual memory, right? Students who seem to pick up spelling, like you said, I think later they have a strong visual memory. But some kids don't right, and they really need to learn those, those mappings, really systematically. So and I often say you know a lot.

Carolyn Strom:

So there are some people that say, oh, my kid can read, they don't need kind of an explicit phonics. But first of all, it's usually only 20, 30 minutes a day, it's not like the whole day. And second of all, it really helps them develop spelling pattern, like correct spelling, so important, so important. And we should be careful because you know there's a there's a different kind of continuum between spelling mastery of decodable words and spelling mastery of irregular words. Right, it can take some kids very long way past first grade, right, to remember the sequence and map sort of irregular words like laugh or through THROUGH, right. But they will be able to recognize when they see them. They'll be able to read them but not spell them. But with decodable words, right, that are multi-syllabic, like napkin, right, we can master that much earlier than we can master a longer irregular word for spelling.

Lori:

Carolyn, if, like what you just said, the kids might be able to read it but not spell it as easily, for example the word THROUGH like an irregular word, can you say more about that, like why that is, and, as teachers or parents, is there anything we can do to help?

Carolyn Strom:

Yeah, so you know. The research answer would be well, the representation is not fully established right in their circuit, right, so they can recognize it right and they can ratchet to pronunciation and maybe they know the meaning right. But until you can like really spell the word and you've internalized the letter sequences and really tied these three representations together along with your motor memory, it hasn't been fully established right. And I think it probably goes back to the fact that recognition is much easier than production, right? So in the same way that, like receptive language, it develops faster than expressive language, right, Reception and sort of recognition of a word is much easier for, like your memory, than production and actually creating the letter string. But I don't think there's a name for that phenomenon. When they can read it and not spell it, I think it's like the representation isn't fully secure.

Melissa:

All right, carolyn. Is there anything else you want to tell us about the second misconception before we move to the last one?

Carolyn Strom:

Yeah, I think the one thing I would just add on this idea about we map words, we don't memorize them right is I want to emphasize that we're really mapping the how, like letter, right. Letter and letter strings to the sounds and to meaning, right. So when we're teaching early word reading and decoding, it's also important to talk about that meaning of the word, right. Decoding isn't just mapping, like blending sounds together right, it is attaching to meaning. So there's a place, a very important place, for vocabulary development and word knowledge within decoding instruction Right. So an early word like CVC word, right, Pen Right, there's multiple meanings of pen. Right, there's pen where animals are, there's pen you write with. So there's ways to embed sort of multiple meaning and more advanced vocabulary work with decoding even simple word or CVC words.

Carolyn Strom:

So I just want to make sure that you know, with this emphasis on decoding words, I just want to also emphasize that the meaning of the words is important.

Melissa:

We usually separate that vocabulary and comprehension like it's a separate, totally separate bucket of work. But I mean it's very, very basic comprehension but, it is still comprehending that. That one single word. What does it mean?

Carolyn Strom:

Yes, we do want to map these words right Once we've read them now, map them to meaning and that really helps secure the representation in our brain right. So we don't want to ignore the role of meaning in word level.

Melissa:

All right, the last misconception.

Carolyn Strom:

Yeah.

Carolyn Strom:

So the third misconception that I've observed is this idea kind of related to the misconception one like that I'm learning to read is natural, but it's this idea that, like reading will click right. It just kind of like clicks without practice, right, and so a lot of people say, oh yeah, one day, you know, I really think they'll just pick up the right book and be motivated and and it'll click, it'll all come together, this whole complex thing will come together and it's sort of like this click and then like off, away you go, or something, and that really undermines the role of practice. So if we know that reading is not natural, if we know it's a mapping process and we need to do it to automaticity, right, so we can free up our cognitive energy and our working memory for meaning, then we know we have to get to, we know we need practice in order to get to a place of mastery. And to think or believe or conceive of reading is something that's just like with the right book or the right teacher, it's just going to click, all come together really doesn't give proper sort of attention to the importance of building skills and I think that sometimes that comes from this idea that like oh, to focus on skills implies like you're doing some sort of drilling kill approach, like you're drilling them and scaling them and that's that's just killing the motivation and the meaning right in the joy. And I prefer to think of it as like drill skill and thrill is the more that you embed practice. I mean drilling is just practice. There's. There's what's wrong with practice, right, and so, like, the more that you practice, the more skills you're going to get and the more thrilling it's going to be for you to do this skill. And we can see that if you've ever seen a five or six year old learning to read, even if it's very simple words, it is thrilling, it is exciting. You can see them feeling that independence, right, and a lot of times the way you can practice foundational skills very skill really. But a lot of the foundational skills really lend themselves to very playful, engaging, dare I say, thrilling practices, right.

Carolyn Strom:

So there's a lot of funny make awareness games where you play with sounds that are really you know can be very, very engaging and fun, fun with kids. One I do with preschoolers and what I've been doing with my daughter is fiddle with the middle right, where I say, okay, we got to go put on our sacks right, or we got to go put on our soups, right or no? No, oh, you're right. And she says socks, socks, right, and that's what I said. We have to go put on our seats, right.

Carolyn Strom:

So I just keep changing that vowel right, and it's just a quick fiddle with the middle game that you can play the kids love and what it's doing is tuning, tuning their ears into these medial vowel sounds. So that's just one small example right of how sort of we can build routines in are the importance of building routines in because practice and routines are so important? Because reading to mass, becoming a skilled reader, requires lots of practice, right, and if we just believe it's going to click and it's not going to require the hours and hours of practice and a lot of kids are not going to get to where they need to be, they're not going to reach automaticity because they're waiting for this click moment and it requires practice and and a lot of repeated practice and gamification of practice and engaging. You know there's ways to like, like get those dopamine hits while you're playing games related to building your, your foundational skills.

Melissa:

Yeah, I love that you brought up like that. This drill does get just a terrible connotation. You know, like, oh, people just use that word like, oh, you're just drilling kids. But I love that you brought up that it just means practice and we need it. But then also it doesn't have to just be boring, right that it doesn't have to just be worksheets. It doesn't, it shouldn't be necessary, especially for younger kids. No, no word games yeah we're looking at wordal.

Carolyn Strom:

Do people still play wordal?

Lori:

Is it wordal really?

Carolyn Strom:

popular. I mean people love wordal right, like they're playing with the sequences of words right as kids get older. That's a great, it's a great resource right Like just word games and sound games it's. It actually can be a very fun and analytical process and you know so. And also, I also say one way the best way to practice really early phonemic awareness and letter recognition is is is early handwriting right and experimental spelling and encouraging young children to write using sounds.

Carolyn Strom:

And that's not drilling them right. We're not having them copy books right onto paper, we're not drilling them in any way or form, but we're building in that practice right, that practice to build this circuit. That doesn't come naturally, that we don't come wired with. And one thing go back to UFly. One thing I love about I mean I love so many things about UFly. One of the things I love is that they have the rolling reads For every single skill. They have these rolling reads where you roll a dice, you read a word, and I think the classrooms where kids absolutely love playing this and they color it, I mean they're not bored, right. And when I was working with dyslexic kids and who need lots of practice at this, I mean the only way to do the practice with them was games that we're super engaging, right. So it's practice. We need practice, it's not gonna click.

Melissa:

Yeah, lori and I talk about this a lot that we send kids to sports practices to do just this. Right, they do these drills. And they love it because they're getting better at it and they can see it. I mean again, my child's only four, but he does go to basketball practice and he sees that when he does this over and over and over again he's getting better and that is what's motivating, is that he's like now I'm making it in the hoop, so I wanna keep doing it Exactly exactly.

Carolyn Strom:

And when you start to learn it's the same exact thing. When you start to learn the instrument you have to learn the scales, right, like there's these just basic skills that we do drill and we kind of want that in every other skill that we practice, auto-motivated. But somehow with reading this notion of having to drill it and practice things, it's become this like drill and kill and this awful sort of thing when it's exactly what we need and has to be refrained.

Melissa:

I will say when I was in first grade I remember doing worksheets and so I can see how it could have gotten a bad rap if that's all you're doing is worksheets.

Carolyn Strom:

Again, right, I totally agree with you. But there's a certain amount of the day right devoted to this stuff and it's like there are not all worksheets are created equal.

Carolyn Strom:

True to you Right, there can be a really good worksheet, which is really just a very good exercise, right, it can also be a task on a tablet, right, they're just exercises. Right, they're exercises. But I agree we don't want to overdo it with just passive, busy work. No one wants that, right. We want engagement, right. Without engagement I mean this is something Stannis Leicester-Hahn has talked about and proven a lot in his work that, like we need the engagement, without the engagement, we lose the brain, goes off track. Like that engagement is so important. So we need the drill in practice and, yes, it needs to be engaging and active. Kids need to be actively involved in it, not passive. Right, drill doesn't have to be passive. Maybe that's the. You know the way of framing it. I frame it as skill and thrill instead of drill and kill, because I like a good rhyme. But it really needs to be reframed.

Melissa:

Well, you've already given us several implications here for teachers especially, but is there anything else you want to share for what teachers can be doing in the classroom differently?

Carolyn Strom:

We've covered a lot of ground. One area we haven't maybe covered as much is what happens with the multilingual or the bilingual brain as it's learning to read. So I just want to add you know, what we know is that it's good, it's a very good thing for us to engage right Our bilingual brains. We're all capable of learning more than one language, and it really has many benefits, right.

Carolyn Strom:

And we know that the importance is the development of spoken language, right. So when we were talking about building the circuit, you know the reading circuit is built on top of the spoken language circuit, right. So we have the spoken language circuit and the best thing we can do early on, right, is build our areas for spoken language, because the reading circuit is literally like built on top of it. And so building spoken language, building vocabulary, is so, so important for all learners, but especially for multilingual learners, right, because the strength in one spoken language transfers to another and we just really want to make that circuit so strong and it's founded in spoken language. And I think that that connects to something I've seen in the upper grades and middle grades around comprehension.

Carolyn Strom:

So, you know, I've seen this idea from some people that, like, comprehension is just about skills right, it's about finding the main idea, it's about inferencing. And we know, actually from a lot of the cognitive science and research on comprehension that actually it's grounded in knowledge, right, and conceptual knowledge. And we really need to build knowledge, to build comprehension, and not just think of it as just like a skill activity. And so I think that really ties into what I'm sort of saying about multilingual learners and bilingual learners that we really need to ground our lessons not just in skills but in knowledge, which inevitably includes vocabulary, and doing it in all those structured, engaging ways.

Melissa:

Yeah, that's so helpful. I'm really glad you brought that up, because at the beginning we kind of said reading is so different from speaking, right, but they do really tie together and it's really important that they come together.

Carolyn Strom:

So important. Yes, that's such a good point. Like it's yeah, like reading does not develop like speaking, but it's dependent on spoken language. Reading is absolutely dependent on our spoken language. You can't read unless you have a spoken language base. But totally, but at the same time they don't develop in the same way. I think that's a really important distinction.

Melissa:

And this knowledge building that you're bringing up can actually start even through just spoken language, from when they're really young.

Carolyn Strom:

Yes, yes, yes, and there's. Kids get so engaged. We all do, right, because we're people, that we're meaning making people, but kids get so engaged in knowledge, right, so engaged in learning about all the different kinds of snakes or where snakes live and what snakes eat, like there's, there's knowledge is very engaging and Anne helps us build our conceptual knowledge in our spoken language network. So when I think, you know, when people think of the science of reading, it's not just foundational skills, right, it's the, it's the importance of how we build comprehension and textual understanding, and so much of that comes from knowledge building and building concept knowledge.

Melissa:

Yeah, and it's. It's kind of wild how much young kids can take in, like I said, my four year old. Sometimes it's silly stuff, like Hot Wheels. I mean he knows all these names of all these Hot Wheels. But then sometimes I'm like thinking you know, one of the Hot Wheels is called Mohawk Warrior, and now he knows what a Mohawk is Like.

Carolyn Strom:

That's like I mean it's kind of silly but at the same time like he's building some of the knowledge there about the world that he and a whole memory network. You know he's really building.

Melissa:

I mean, he does some serious things too, not just Hot Wheels, but that is his thing at the moment.

Carolyn Strom:

Yeah, is he classifying them? Oh, I don't know. That's the next step.

Melissa:

Thank you for that pointer. You know, yes, grouping them together.

Carolyn Strom:

When kids are in that phase that it's like in the collecting phase, right, Having a lot of one thing, then organizing it. I mean not again, don't push it. If your kid is like my daughter, who's like no, I will not be organizing them any little minor task, extra task. I know, but some kids do like sorting and organizing and it's good practice.

Melissa:

Well, before we go, I just want to ask you. You know this was a really big topic. We just hit on some misconceptions today. I'm sure there's a million more things we could have asked you about the brain and how it learns to read, but do you have any suggestions for where people could learn more?

Carolyn Strom:

Yeah, so I have a newsletter. You can sign up for that on my website it's just carolinstromcom, or you can email me at hello at carolinstromcom. I believe there's still a poster on the website of sort of my conception of the brain. I'm working on a longer piece about it, but if you're curious in general about sort of more, I really recommend Stannis Leicester-Hahn's work Reading in the Brain. He's an amazing writer, an amazing researcher and is really the pioneer in the field, along with work of Marianne Wolfe I'm sure people have talked about her book on here before Prusa and the Squid. Sally Shewitz's Overcoming Dyslexia Also a great and accessible book about the brain. All sort of talking about the concepts we spoke about today. Great.

Melissa:

Well, thank you for those recommendations and thank you so much for sharing all of this wonderful information with us today. We're so thankful. Thank you for hosting this great podcast.

Lori:

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Lori:

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Melissa:

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Lori:

We appreciate you so much and we're so glad you're here to learn with us.