S1-09. The cognitive science behind how students learn to read: Carolyn Strom

Carolyn Strom, Professor of Early Childhood Literacy and Innovation at NYU, discuss her research and interviews with pre-school teachers and how students learn to read, her view on the science of reading and the cognitive science behind it all. She shares her insights on the importance of neuroscience, culturally responsive teaching and dives into Linnea Ehri’s four phases of learning how to read.

Quotes:

“Our brains are not wired to read…we have to do a neurological backflip to teach our brains to read."

“You can’t think about a tree without thinking of its environment the same way you should not be thinking about a kid’s reading development without thinking of their environment.” 

Resources:

Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read by Stanislas Dehaene

Carolyn Strom NYU Bio

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Transcript

Susan Lambert: Hey, listeners, double up on your professional learning by subscribing to our sister podcast, Beyond My Years. On the new season, host Ana Torres is talking to leading researchers and thinkers like Dr. Angela Duckworth, author of the bestseller Grit, about phone policies and leveraging the science of self-control in the classroom.

Angela Duckworth: My number one piece of advice is that you should alter your physical environment like a designer would.

Susan Lambert: New episodes drop every other Wednesday, perfectly filling the weeks between your Science of Reading episodes. Subscribe now to Beyond My Years wherever you listen to this show.

Susan Lambert: What if a change in classroom practice could lead to change in reading outcomes? What should reading instruction include to ensure all students have the opportunity to succeed? What does cognitive science tell us about learning to read, and why aren't those learnings applied in our classrooms? Welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast. I'm your host, Susan Lambert from Amplify Education. Join us every two weeks as we talk with Science of Reading experts to explore what it takes to transform our classrooms and develop confident and capable readers. Carolyn Strom is our guest today, a researcher at NYU who is currently leading an initiative in New York City for preschool teachers called Cortex to Classroom. As a former classroom teacher, Caroline is super-invested in bridging the gap between research and practice, particularly in the early grades. Today, Carolyn and I talk about everything from classroom practice to reading research to cognitive science to neuroscience. I know you'll enjoy listening to this episode as much as I enjoyed the conversation. There's really a lot to glean here. So welcome, Carolyn. We're super-excited to have you on the episode today.

Carolyn Strom: Thank you. I'm psyched to be here.

Susan Lambert: We always like to start by asking a bit about background. Maybe tell us a little bit about your background and how you ended up in this early literacy space.

Carolyn Strom: Yeah. Well, in college, I took a class in public education. Actually. I was an English major, and there was a class you could take on public education and English, teaching English, what it means to teach English. And I really learned all about the system of inequity in our public education system. It was really about that, and about how the education that you have access to in this country often falls along the tax base and racial lines.And it was sort of the first time I knew about this. And I got passionate about this. Especially having grown up feeling like I had had a really strong public education. And I sort of couldn't believe it, you know. It felt to me like, this is not the land of opportunity kind of thing. I was really idealistic. And so I sort of said, “Really, It's just crazy.” And so after college, I decided to teach in a high-poverty area, sort of to address this inequity, right? Like, I wanna give back. and so I taught in Compton, California. First grade, first and second grade. And it was a high-poverty area, with all of the challenges that under-resourced schools have. And then, you know, there was just a lot of challenges in the community. A lot of my students' parents were incarcerated or homeless or lived in temporary housing. And I had to teach them how to read.

Susan Lambert: Wow. So you just dove right into what you were passionate about.

Carolyn Strom: Yeah. I said, “You know, I know about this problem. So maybe I can use this opportunity at 22 years old to do something about it.” I was sort of, yeah, idealistic, and there was an emergency credential system in Compton at the time. They were giving out emergency credentials, 'cause there was a teacher shortage.

Susan Lambert: Got it.

Carolyn Strom: So I didn't even realize there was a teacher shortage until I took this class in college. No one tells you, like, in our country, we have a teacher shortage. The system that's in place to educate kids has a teacher shortage, by the way. That's one of the first problems. And so I said, “Okay, great. So I'm gonna do this.” And yeah, I guess I dove right in.

Susan Lambert: Wow. So you weren't one of those people that thought, “Oh, you know, when I grow up, I'm gonna be a classroom teacher.” This wasn't even in your sort of realm of possibility at that point.

Carolyn Strom: No, no. I did Teach for America. And it wasn't until I sort of took this class and heard about all of these statistics and the state of inequity and then heard about Teach for America, which at the time … it's changed a lot. But at the time, 20 years ago, it was a very grassroots movement, to take people who wouldn't ordinarily go into teaching, who didn't have an undergraduate degree in teaching. I wasn't getting certified in my undergraduate. Take people like that, who didn't have an interest in teaching and … I don't know; they understood these aspects of inequity that I'm talking about, and so the organization spoke to me in that way. Their mission was to ensure that all children in this country have access to a high-quality education. That was the mission at the time. And I was like, “Yeah, I'm down.” So they placed you in school. They placed, at the time, in schools where people had emergency credentials they needed. Do you know what I'm saying? They needed teachers who qualified for emergency credentials ‘cause there was a shortage.

Susan Lambert: Right. So how did you get from classroom teacher to what you're doing now?

Carolyn Strom: So, I was a first-grade teacher and I got really fascinated about teaching reading in particular, because that's what you teach in first grade, primarily. And watching these kids read, and being in charge of teaching these kids to read, made me really curious about how it worked. And seeing the words that they struggled over, seeing the kinds of spellings they made, seeing the way that they were trying to make sense of these swivels on a page and match them to sounds to form words? It was fascinating, intellectually, for me. And [00:07:00] also practically, 'cause I needed to know how to do it! And it was amazing: Some kids did really well; some kids struggled. There were a bunch of kids who were learning English as a second or third language; maybe they spoke two different languages at home. And then, kids who were coming in who had trouble paying attention or who were, you know, living in a shelter, so each night they're living in a different place. And kids brought emotional baggage to this complex task, and to that whole system in general. I really was like, “Oh my gosh, I am fascinated by this. I'm passionate about this. And actually doing it with kids is super-fun.” And we were given a really strong curriculum, at the time, because California had had this influx of curriculum materials. So I learned a lot from teaching Open Court, which is a systematic [unintelligible]. So, I taught for a while, and I'm spending time on that because it stayed with me. That's why I stayed with it for 10 years. It's something I became really interested in, and wanted to learn more about. So I pursued graduate school, a master's in reading development and then a Ph.D. to really learn as much as I could about this. Because I felt that I learned everything there was to know about the classroom. … Over the course of 10 years in reading, I learned a lot, but I felt like there were kids I couldn't reach, particularly kids with dyslexia, and I wanted to learn more. So I ended up studying it, and then doing some of my own research, but also becoming interested in the gap between all of the research that exists and what's actually playing out in classrooms, and how teachers are prepared and trained. Like, that sort of blew my mind, because I entered graduate school as a teacher and then I discovered all of this research. And I had been teaching for 10 years and I was doing a pretty good job, 'cause we had a strong curriculum, but I didn't understand the background. And a lot of my research focused on interviews. Interviewing kids about reading, interviewing parents about reading, interviewing teachers and trying to understand what they know about reading and reading development, to sort of figure out what the gaps are, right? And their thinking and their mindsets versus what we know, and bringing these two worlds together … that's how I ended up here.

Susan Lambert: Yeah, I remember one of the first conversations we ever had together was about that, was about all the work that you do with talking with teachers, and talking with parents, and, yeah, just closing that gap. So, in this course of conducting all of those interviews, what have you learned?

Carolyn Strom: There's been lots of different sets of interviews over the last couple of years, ‘cause it's a method I really believe in. But I think when it comes to the most recent stuff, it’s been interviewing preschool teachers and parents of preschoolers about what they know about reading, and how they think reading develops. And there's sort of these three common ideas I've come up with in analyzing the interview data. The first is: A lot of teachers and parents believe that words are learned as like wholes. As a whole pattern. Almost like we learn to read a word as a picture. We learn to read words instantly, by sight, and that's just how you learn to read. So that's one thing that keeps coming up in the data. Preschool teachers will say, “I gotta teach them sight words, 'cause that's gonna prepare them for kindergarten.” So you'll see in a preschool room a little sight word wall and lists that go home. As though that's how we learn to read. When we really know that, eventually, yes, you want kids to be able to read words automatically, but they first have to learn to decode. So that's been one of the areas that I've been working on. And then the second sort of thing that's come up in the interviews is that preschool is all about discovery and play, and there's no room for direct instruction. Because direct instruction is somehow antithetical to preschool. When really, what we know from the research is that direct instruction is a very strong method of teaching. It yields good results. And also it can be super-fun,

Susan Lambert: If done in the right way. 

Carolyn Strom: If done in the right way. And then, a lot of my work has been on modeling and coaching teachers on how to make it fun and exciting.

Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah.

Carolyn Strom: And that's sort of, I think, where the most interesting work gets done: when we talk about these understandings and then try to communicate what's going on in the research, those conversations with teachers and parents I learned so much from. And you know, the third thing that comes up a lot in interviews that I've done, and in the conversations that I've ended up having, is this idea that reading is a natural capacity, and develops spontaneously. A llot of preschool teachers, you know, if you ask them, “How do kids learn to read?” They'll say, “You have to read aloud to them. Reading aloud is the key.” Right? And we know that reading aloud is really important, and it's super-important for vocabulary and comprehension development, but that's not enough. Right? There are kids that are read to every single night since the day they were born, three books a day, who still have dyslexia. 

Susan Lambert: Right. 

Carolyn Strom: Or who still struggle to break the code.

Susan Lambert: Right.

Carolyn Strom: And we know that our brains are not wired to read. This is something from the neuroscience that we know, right? Our brains are not wired to read written language. And you know this, and probably your listeners know this, but written language is a relatively new, recent invention. It's only five to six thousand years old. Whereas spoken language is much older, and we have been speaking for tens of thousands of years and only writing for five or six thousand years, and we're not wired for it. We actually have to do what I call a neurological backflip to teach our brains to read. And, the fact that we know that, and then preschool teachers and parents of preschoolers and kindergartners say things like, or have been taught that reading is natural and develops if you're just surrounded by print and you read and talk to your child? All of those things are important, but we also know that it doesn't develop naturally. It's not a natural capacity. We're not wired for reading. And that's really important. 

Susan Lambert: We're gonna talk about the Science of Reading and your view on it in just a minute. But what's really interesting is the focus on preschool teachers and the focus on parents. What led you to talk to those folks?

Carolyn Strom: Yeah, it's a good question. Several reasons. But one, I think … the other thing we know from the research is that early intervention is best. It's really good to intervene early if you know from predictive statistics that a certain segment of the population is gonna struggle with reading. [00:15:25] If kids are in Head Start, if they're three or four years old, all of these kids, they're at risk, right? We know that. We really need to start there. That's one reason … I've worked with too many second, third, fourth grade teachers who say that the kids are coming to them not reading well. If we know that the earliest skills—phonemic awareness and letter-sound correspondence—those two skills are so important, and they can be developed in three-,  four-, and five-year-olds, then that's really where our focus should be. and I think, with education, we think about K12 so much, and preschool teachers get left out. The preschool realm gets left out, 'cause we think of, like, K12, K12. But no, it should be, like, pre-K is so important. And then K12. And so, that's why I focus on that. Preschool teachers. I also feel, you know, preschool teachers typically don't get access, certainly, to the research. We complain that K12 teachers don't know the Science of Reading, but preschool teachers are always—often, not always—but often left out of rigorous professional development activities. And, there's often paraprofessionals teaching kids, who need additional training. So again, it's this area that kids we know are at risk for reading failure. and yet we're not giving them a lot. And if you work with preschoolers, or you have preschoolers, or you knowpreschoolers, their parents are a big part of their life. And almost all the decisions about their lives are being made by parents. So, their parents. … So, if you want to reach these kids, you're gonna have to involve their families and go with their parents. You can't really, you know…if you've walked into a preschool, you know it's all about kids and families. So we can't … in order to bridge this gap in the Science of Reading with preschool teachers and preschoolers’ parents like we have, we have to work with their parents. So that means we have to translate this into other languages. That means we have to use more visuals; we're now communicating this for parents. If we're serious about … I hate the term early intervention, but if we're serious about early intervention.

Susan Lambert: It seems like it's a great prevention conversation, right? 

Carolyn Strom: Yes. So the earlier we can start, the better off we are in terms of making it happen for kids. And now, you know, it's really about applying the science. Like, if you look at the reading science, but also look at the science of early childhood, we know that if you, if you do home visits, if you integrate all these different kinds of rich experiences early, it pays off for the kids and for society. And for families. So like, let's do it early!

Susan Lambert: Yeah. Well, let's talk about that Science of Reading, then. So it'll be interesting for us to hear it from your point of view. If you were going to give our listeners just the Carolyn Strom version of the Science of Reading, how would you explain it? 

Carolyn Strom: Interesting. Well, I would say that right now, the term Science of Reading is being used, I think, mainly to describe studying reading in a systematic, scientific way. Right? So, looking at research that is done systematically and scientifically. That's how I believe people are talking about it. We need to look at the science, at what's been proven, in order to, you know, make sure we're doing right by our kids. That science should inform practice. That's, I think, the sort of general understanding right now. But I would say that the Science of Reading needs to include and does include the neuroscience, which is really not just experimental data or looking at studies that are on reaction times and reading, but that is looking at the structure of our brain and how reading is mapped in the brain and how we measure that using FMRI data. And the Science of Reading is sort of taking advantage of what we know from brain imaging now, and having that inform what we know.

Susan Lambert: That's great, because I think a lot of the conversation of Science of Reading, we're talking about the Simple View of Reading, which really comes out of the cognitive science world.

Carolyn Strom: Exactly. 

Susan Lambert: Yeah, and let's maybe focus on that side of it first, and then we'll get to the neuroscience part of it. But I know in your interviews with teachers and things, you've done some work with helping educators sort of develop an alternative visual metaphor. I think we all know about Scarborough. We can talk about that for a minute, too, if you want to. But you've done some expanded work around that.

Carolyn Strom: Yeah. So what I've found is, you know, whenever I do professional development with teachers or teach my students at NYU, my undergraduate and graduate students, obviously, we talk about the rope, right? The Simple View of Reading and understanding that reading has these two strands. These two core strands with sub-strands. And every time that I have presented it and then we discuss it, a lot of teachers will push back and say, you know, “Where is the environment that the kid is growing up in? This is a theoretical model. I get it. But what does that mean for Juan? What does that mean for Keisha? What is the connection between this?” And sometimes they shut down, because it seems a little bit … it's a simple idea. It's a Simple View of Reading. But it is still a theoretical construct, right? There's nothing in that that takes into account what kids are dealing with. So what I've done is, I have changed … it's hard to describe, 'cause it's a visual. But I've taken the rope and I've sort of turned it into these two roots of a tree, explaining that this tree grows in soil and soil is the environment.

Susan Lambert: Okay. So, for our listeners that haven't maybe gotten the visual of Scarborough's rope or Scarborough's braid in their mind now, we're talking sort of these two elements of word recognition and language comprehension, that sort of weave together over time, to build this rope. So that's sort of the theoretical  piece that you're talking about, right?

 Carolyn Strom: Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. Exactly. And so, the idea is that in order to read, you must have word recognition skills. You need to be able to lift the words off the page, but you also need to understand what you're reading. And so word recognition is absolutely essential, but it's not enough to become a reader. You need both. 

Susan Lambert: And so, then you turned that around and put it into something different.

Carolyn Strom: Yeah. Well, the teachers I'm working with, they get it. They get that idea. They get that idea. But they also will tune out if you deliver professional development without acknowledging their realities. Right? That actually, when a kid is learning words, they're impacted by the words they're hearing in their environment. The vocabulary they know is impacted by their environment. All thought—all of the kids’ learning—is rooted in their environment. And the Simple View of Reading doesn't really account for environment. And I think that if we want to reach teachers, we need to present them with models that reflect their day-to-day realities.

Susan Lambert: Yeah. And that tree visual—I can see it in my head right now—sort of makes sense. So if you are in an environment that's literature-rich or reading-rich, I would say, so you get lots of rain and you know, lots of leaves on the trees and everything's really lovely and green. But if you're in the environment of a desert, it's a little more complicated.

Carolyn Strom: Yes. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And that's actually funny that you mentioned that, ‘'cause that's actually how I came up with it, in a way. Because I was in a car going over the Brooklyn Bridge a couple years ago and I saw this little tree, sort of on the side. It was an entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge, and it was this tree that had no leaves. It was all short and sort of struggling to exist, it looked like. And I think I had just come from Oregon with my family, where we had these huge trees. You know what I mean? And I was like, “Oh my God. I can't even believe that these are both called trees. You know, this Oregon forest, all these places you can take tree baths and be around these amazing trees, and now here's this sad little urban tree.” And, I, I just thought to myself like, “Context matters.” And oh my gosh, this is the metaphor that makes sense for teachers. Because when you tell them, you know, here's how reading works and context matters … we need to explain things using, metaphor. Real metaphors. And I think the tree metaphor makes a lot of sense, 'cause you can't think about a tree without thinking about its environment in the same way that you really should not be thinking about a kid's reading development without thinking about the environment. 

Susan Lambert: So how do we help teachers? What does that mean in the classroom? So how can we take those different trees, if you will, in different environments and, and sort of apply it to what teachers can do in the classroom from that?

Carolyn Strom: Right. Okay. Well, so it's gonna depend on the age, let’s say, of the kids. Because that's the environment. Take preschoolers, for example, For preschoolers … who is a preschooler? What are they dealing with? And what is going on in their local community? Well, one thing we know about three- and four-year-olds is that they aren't gonna pay attention for very long if it's not super-fun or engaging. Right? That's typical of a four-year-old; that's the four-year-old's world. So when we talk about word recognition and phonological awareness and phonics, we have to make it extremely engaging and extremely fun. And use words that they know and use words that they find fun and that they connect to. And when we're taking a word apart into its individual phonemes, use objects that get them excited and appeal to them. So I guess that's a small and very specific example, but … it sounds so simple to be like, “Get to know who your students are.” But you really have to get to know who your students are if you wanna connect with them.

Carolyn Strom: Right. So you can't just be like, “Okay, I'm teaching in this research-based way. Research says that 20 to 30 minutes a day of phonemic awareness is important and it is important to manipulate phonemes and I'm gonna do that now.” Like, you're teaching preschool! You need to do this in a way that's really engaging or the kids are gonna shut down.

Susan Lambert: Yeah. I think there's an environment that happens outside of the classroom, but you're actually talking right now about making the context of what we can control within the classroom really, really rich environments that speak to that kid.

Carolyn Strom: Yes. And I think both of those environments are really important.

Susan Lambert: Yeah,

Carolyn Strom: It’s thinking about what they're bringing, what language they're bringing, if they're speaking Spanish at home or they're speaking Arabic at home or they're speaking Hindi at home—which many kids that I work with are speaking all these different languages—their word recognition is going to be different. Their word recognition trajectory. And they're gonna be struggling with certain phonemes if they don't have those phonemes  in their language. So that's one example of the external environment, but then, yes, the internal environment of the classroom, and knowing who your kids are, developmentally, and what they're interested in and what they know, that's huge. Both environments are critical.

Susan Lambert: That makes sense, because what we don't wanna do is, we don't wanna use home environment as an excuse to say, “Well, this kid can't learn how to read or write.”

Carolyn Strom: Yeah. Quite the opposite. We wanna know what they're bringing and what their strengths are and what their resources are. To kids who are in preschool that are learning two languages, one at home and one in school, I always tell them, “I'm so impressed. That is hard work.”

Susan Lambert: Right.

Carolyn Strom: “I only speak English. I can understand Spanish and I can decode Hebrew, but I can't speak another language!” That's incredible, that they're three or four years old and they're gonna speak two languages! That's huge! So we should use their words, you know, in our classrooms. That's kind of what we call culturally responsive teaching, when you use what the kids are bringing from home in your lessons. And I think culturally responsive teaching is often somehow seen as separate from the Science of Reading. 

Susan Lambert: Right. 

Carolyn Strom: And that's not good. Because all teaching should be culturally responsive. You should always be responding to who your students are, as human beings in a culture, and getting to know them. And you should also always be basing [00:30:00] your instruction in the Science of Reading and what we know about reading.

Susan Lambert: That makes so much sense to me. Because even when I talk to educators now about the Simple View of Reading, I always remind them that “simple” and “easy” are not the same thing. Just because we have this model of the Simple View of Reading from cognitive science that has helped us, there's a lot of other complicating factors in the classroom. 

Carolyn Strom: There are. That's a really great point. And also I think it was a mistake to call it “the Simple View of Reading.” I really do. I think it should just be called, like,” the two components of reading.” And the research is often called “the component view.” Sometimes. It’s the model that is framing reading as having two components.

Susan Lambert:  Right. That makes sense. 

Carolyn Strom: And we know that reading has more than two components. Obviously. Motivation plays a part, and all this other stuff. But the quote, “simple view” is really the view that talks about two components. I think “simple” turns people off. And it's not simple! It's obviously very complicated! 'Cause people are spending a lot of time and energy on it!

Susan Lambert: Right. But I love  the fact that you're using that as a foundation. That's still a foundation for what you're doing. But then paying attention to all of these other factors in the classroom that, when individuals come to us, we have to pay attention to.

Carolyn Strom: Yes, exactly. And I think for the field, the research field, too, we need to merge these two perspectives. That's what I did in my dissertation. It's really trying to bring these two worlds together, because both are extremely important, but they're two different theoretical frameworks, which has really hampered, I think, the research world. And they just need to come together, for kids.

Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Earlier, you talked a little bit, too, about neuroscience. Let's make that shift. For one thing, for me, when I was trained as an elementary teacher, in my undergrad program, I never knew anything about cognitive science. So there's one thing. But the other thing now, to make a leap from cognitive science and use that as a framework, but also neuroscience … what's up with that? 

Carolyn Strom: So, neuroscience is a relatively recent field. For those studying it, it's only been around, you know, since the ‘90s. So it’s a relatively recent field, 20 or 30 years old, and it's crazy; there's a lot written about in neuroscience about reading. And I didn't learn that, either, in my teacher preparation. I really came to it in my Ph.D., sort of beginning to understand the different areas of the brain and how they work together to make reading happen. So I guess that's a long way of saying it makes sense that you wouldn't have come across it, because it's still a relatively new field. We're still trying to get cognitive science into teacher prep programs. It's like neuroscience. I guess we'll have to wait a lot longer, but we shouldn't. Right? We shouldn't, because it's really important. As I often tell teachers, “You guys are on the front lines of building children's brains. You should know what's going on inside them.” We should know what we're building here if we're building brains. And you don't need to know all the official names of the areas. I think we've made a mistake … like, we don't need to know all the different lobes and how the lobes work and all these other things. But there are a couple key ideas from the neuroscience that I think all teachers should know. And I guess for me, when I came across the research, I was blown away that we know so much about how reading works inside the brain. The book that really changed my view on things was— I'm sure you know the book— Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read, by Dehaene.

[00:34:15] Susan Lambert: We'll link our listeners in the show notes to that book.

Carolyn Strom: It's a great book and it's written beautifully. He's a brilliant, brilliant French neuroscientist, and he wrote this book, now about 10 years ago … exactly 10 years ago. And it really deconstructs the neuroscience of how we learn to read. 

Susan Lambert: So what do you tell your students, then, about the key things from neuroscience that we need to understand about how the brain learns to read?

Carolyn Strom: Great question. Well, we always start the class [with] this overarching idea that we're not wired for reading, like I mentioned earlier. That's the first big idea. And actually what has to happen is we're gonna recycle and our brains are gonna recycle an area of our brain that is really designed to recognize faces and objects. We're wired to recognize faces and objects, but not wired to assign sounds to symbols and sort of extract meaning from print. That's the first big idea that you have to understand. In the research, it's called the neuronal recycling hypothesis. Because you're recycling or repurposing an area of your brain that was designed to recognize faces and objects. It was not designed to recognize words.

Susan Lambert: Interesting.

Carolyn Strom: There is no neuron for every word. We don't have a reading center. We're not born with a biological specialization for reading. We have to construct this circuit.

Susan Lambert: And that's probably new learning to a lot of people, wouldn't you say?

Carolyn Strom: Yeah. It is. It is new learning to a lot of people. And I’ve found that people are really interested in it, kind of fascinated by it. And it's interesting, right? Reading is something we all take for granted, if you can do it. And many people don't remember how they learned to read. They don't remember what it was like to not be able to read. And they just take it for granted now. So when you begin to explain to people, “Well, actually, this skill that you do so automatically and unconsciously, it's really, really hard for a lot of kids. When you're learning to read, it's difficult, and when you're struggling to learn to read, it's really difficult. So not only is it difficult for kids, but it's difficult for a lot of people who struggle with reading. And people are interested in that. So when you start to be like, “Yeah, it's difficult because, A, we're not wired for it, and B, when you're learning to read in English, we have only 26 letters, but we have 44 sounds—that is another challenge. Those are the two biggest challenges. Our brain is not wired to do this. And we have this code, this alphabetic code, that has 26 letters and 44 sounds, and when letters come together, they make new sounds. And there's all these different relationships between these letters. If we just had 26 letters and 26 sounds, it would be fine. But yeah, this is new learning, and I think people are interested in it when you present it in the right way. I always say, “We should just be amazed that we can do this. Look at what our brain has to do. It has to create highways! White-matter highways between areas of our brain that are not wired!” The three main areas of our brain—the occipital lobe, where we're taking in visual information, and then areas of the brain that are responsible for speech [00:38:00] processing and areas of our brain that are responsible for making meaning, and then the areas of our brain that translate symbols and sounds and turn symbols into sounds. … Over the years, I have spent a little less time having students memorize— “this is the parietal lobe; this is the angular gyrus”—all the official names. I used to think that that was important. I used to think, “Oh, if I'm training teachers, and talking to parents, I have to show models of the brain and FMRI and label them scientifically.” But again, what are parents supposed to do with that? So I explained to them, “I have a version of the brain that is sort of an animation of what's going on in a child's brain over the course of three to four years,” and explaining developmentally, “This is what you can expect of each phase and what's happening in the brain. And how the speech and language areas come first. How spoken language develops first. And everything else related to reading is built on top of the spoken-language network.” That's the first network that must be built, because it is essential to the whole reading circuit. If you don't build the speech areas, the phonemic processing and the meaning-oriented areas, oral language, then you're gonna be at such a disadvantage to build the reading network, because it's a fundamental part of the reading network. And so I do this over time, and I joke a lot of times with parents: You know, when you're having a baby, there's a book, What To Expect When You’re Expecting? And when, then when you have a baby, you're like obsessed with, “Oh, this is what they should be doing by three months and this is what they should be doing at six months. At six months, they should have solid food. And by one year old they should take a first step.” And all this stuff. And then somehow, with reading, it's like, “Read to them. They'll learn to read.” But actually, there's these fundamental phases of reading that all kids go through, and we know that—from the neuroscience and the cognitive science—that there are three main phases. You can also see them as four. There's three to four phases, I should say, of reading that kids go through. And I always say there should be a book called What to Expect When You're Expecting a Reader. 

Susan Lambert: That's a great one.

Carolyn Strom: “This is how we do it in phase one; it's all about spoken language.” It's the pre alphabetic phase. It's what I call the pictorial phase. When kids are just in this world of seeing everything as images and pictures. And they're learning to read based on visual cues. So they might recognize Starbucks or they might recognize McDonald's because of the colors. And because of the environmental print or logos. But they're not actually reading.

Susan Lambert: Right.

Carolyn Strom: Right. But that's the beginning of it. So there are these four phases of reading. And we know, and I feel that parents should know, this is as basic as What To Expect When You're Expecting. These are the phases that kids are gonna go through. And we know that this is talked a lot about in tons of research, but it's also talked about in the book I mentioned, [Reading in the Brain:] The New Science of How We Read.

Susan Lambert: Great. Maybe we can just outline those really quickly, those four phases, and not leave everybody just wondering what they are.

Carolyn Strom: Great. I kind of felt like I was going on and on about it and I wasn't sure. 

Susan Lambert: No, let's talk about 'em! Let's talk about the four phases. 

Carolyn Strom: Great. Yeah. So, Linnea Ehri, E-H-R-I—it's really her phases. She's done the research on this—cognitive research, cognitive science research, really rooted in experimental psychology—and has found these four phases of learning to read. That first phase I talked about is called many names. It can be called the pre-alphabetic or the logographic, or I call it the pictorial. And it's really before kids learn letter sounds and before they have any kind of refined phonemic awareness. And the second phase is really when kids…and again, I have a visual for this. and it's easier in some ways—much easier—to show it with a visual. But, the second phase is when kids move into what's called the partial alphabetic phase. So now they're not just using visual cues or how words look; they're actually using alphabetic cues. So they'll see a word, and they'll look at the initial sound or they'll look at the final letter, but they often have confusions in that. Like they'll see the word “look,” L-O-O-K, and they might call it “like,” or they might call it “lake,” or they might call it “lick,” because they're really only attending to the first and the final consonants in words. So you might see this with kids, when kids come to a word like…any word that starts with P is “puppy.” Or any word that starts with P is “pig.” Right? 

Susan Lambert: Right. 

Carolyn Strom: So they're just looking at the initial sound. and you really see this in their spelling, which is really interesting. So in this second phase, called the partial alphabetic phase, it's really where kids begin to create inventive or temporary spellings. They'll write “love” “L-V.” They'll write “like” “L-K.” Right? 

Susan Lambert: Got it. 

Carolyn Strom: They'll write “Mommy” “M-E.” Something like that. So they won't be representing all the sounds that they hear; they'll only be representing some sounds. And as they get older, and they have instruction, they move into the third phase, which is the full alphabetic phase. When kids can actually…they're attending to all the sounds and words, not just the  initial and final consonants. They're attending to the vowels. And especially to vowel digraphs, which are when two vowels come together and make one sound. Like “O-O” says “oo,” or “O-I” says “oy.” That's really what gets kids stumped in that third phase. where they're trying to read a whole word and really struggling with those vowel digraphs. And we see that, in their spelling as well. By that third phase, kids are moving beyond just writing initial and final sounds. They're really writing out all the sounds in a word, but they might not be spelling it wrong.

Susan Lambert: So that's where the explicit instruction comes in…or that's where we're starting to do more of that mapping in our brain for those multiple combinations of sounds and letter combinations.

Carolyn Strom: Yes. Yes. Yeah. In the beginning phases, phases one and two, the explicit instruction should be about letter-sound correspondence and about phonemic awareness. 

Susan Lambert: Got it. 

Carolyn Strom: But by phase three, that's when you're really using explicit phonics to teach all the more complex mappings that exist in English. Like consonant digraphs and vowel digraphs. And then in the fourth phase, what kids should be taught and are typically working on are multisyllabic words, and beginning to build up their fluency. And so, these phases occur over, over many, many years. And we know from what's going on in the brain, what's paralleling all of this, is that when you're learning to read, in phases two and three and four, you're really relying on the phonological root. In phase four, you begin to automatically map these words. You're not sounding them out. Which is what's going on in the phonological route in your head: You begin to recognize them more rapidly, and in a process that's called orthographic mapping. So we know that we can see these phases in the brain. In the sense that in the very beginning you're really working on individual letters and sounds, and over time you're building on whole-word representations.

Susan Lambert: Yeah, it's really interesting. I got a visual in my head right there about road construction. If you don't have a good foundation when you're building a road, the road falls apart. And I'm from the Midwest, so I saw it all the time, right? With the winters and everything. But it sounds like a similar sort of idea there.

Carolyn Strom: Yeah, exactly. And then once you go over one road many times and you know where the speed bumps are, you get better at navigating the road. 

Susan Lambert: That's right.

Carolyn Strom: So what we see in the brain is that the more words that you hear—sorry, that you read—the more times you've seen a word, you're more likely to recall it the next time.

Carolyn Strom: And so you're not gonna always have to decode a word. You're not always gonna stumble with it. It's not always gonna be difficult for you. But you do have to decode it in order to begin to store it more efficiently.

Susan Lambert: Yep. That makes sense. Well, I don't know … I'm sort of going back to why preschool is important, why parents are important. This sort of brings us full circle to, “You gotta start early and you need to help parents understand.” I think you should work on writing that book for parents, actually.

Carolyn Strom: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, yes, I've been working on that. And also working on getting these visuals out to parents, you know, because I think parents are busy, and they may or may not have the time to sit down and read a book, always, on this? But I think that visuals can really—not just infographics, but animations and all kinds of creative ways of communicating with parents—I think is how we're gonna really bridge this gap. I don't know if it's always about a book. That's sort of how I've been thinking about reaching parents.

Susan Lambert: That makes a lot of sense to me. A lot. It's just great that you're thinking about this information from the point of view of parents, to really make sure that students are as prepared as they can be when they come to us as little ones, and ready to learn how to read.

Carolyn Strom: Also, something that I've learned from talking to parents is [that] parents need to know this. You know, not only to know what to do with their kid at home, but to know how to be a smart consumer of what's out there for their kid. Because the app world is full of “This will teach your child to read!” and all these products say, “This will teach your child to read!” The other day, someone actually told me in a toy store that crawling helps a child learn to read.

Susan Lambert: Oh. Okay.

Carolyn Strom: That is like the biggest myth! Wait, what is that even based on?! So, I just think it's really important to connect with parents.

Susan Lambert: Yeah, I agree. I agree.

Carolyn Strom: And have them realize what's good and what's not so good. Otherwise, they're vulnerable people. They're gonna believe whatever anyone says who pretends to be an expert.

Susan Lambert: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. 

Carolyn Strom: They should know the science themselves.

Susan Lambert: It makes a lot of sense to me. A lot of sense. Well, as we sort of wrap up and bring this to a close, I always like to end by asking, “What's the one thing … if you could think of one thing you want the listeners to take away from this episode, what might that be?”

Carolyn Strom: I would say, one thing. …

Susan Lambert: You can have two, if you need two!

Carolyn Strom: I guess … I mean, I think the people [who] are listening to this podcast probably know what's at stake here, right? We have two thirds of kids in our country who are not proficient readers by fourth grade. That's more than half. That's a lot of kids, right?

Susan Lambert: Yeah.

Carolyn Strom: So I'm just gonna assume that your listeners know that, or care about that, and that's kind of what's brought them here: To sort of learn more about reading and why we have this problem and what we can do about it and what's complicated about it. So that would be one thing that I think is important to realize: That this is a serious problem and we need all hands on deck to solve this problem. This is not right. It's been this way for 20 years. We've become numb to this. We have to look at the research. We have to look at the science. And we have to look at the latest science, which is the neuroscience. We have to put all of our heads together. That would be one of the things. And not to be scared of it, and to just really treat this as a number-one national problem. Public education is not working in one of the healthiest and wealthiest countries. If it's not serving two thirds of its kids and teaching them how to read! Like, the basics! And then the second thing, I think, is to make sure that we're making it fun, and we're making it engaging for kids. With all the seriousness, we end up, sometimes, adopting programs or approaching beginning reading in ways that are very dry, and just trying to, quote, “deliver instruction,” rather than think about how to design instruction in ways that are super-fun and interactive, with or without technology, but not ignoring technology. And remember that we're working typically with kids who are [the] ages when you're learning to read; you're, you know, three or four to seven or eight. And these are kids [who] really wanna play and have fun. And there's a way that we can teach the science, and teach phonics in particular, in ways that are fun and engaging. It doesn't have to be drill-and-kill boring.

Susan Lambert: That sounds like a great conversation for another episode, actually: how to make this thing fun.

Carolyn Strom: Definitely. Definitely. And we can do it, especially with phonemic awareness.

Susan Lambert: For sure. Right.

Carolyn Strom: Phonemic awareness has been so studied, but you know, it's also super-fun. It is a huge scientific construct, but it's extremely fun to play with words and to play with language, and kids love to do it.

Susan Lambert: Yeah. They sure do. 

Carolyn Strom: So give parents all of these strategies to play with language at home. They'll have fun with their kids, and they'll also be building the phonological route.

Susan Lambert: Well, we will put that in the queue for another episode to dive into: making that fun. But we surely appreciate you joining us today and helping us understand a little bit more of the Science of Reading.

Carolyn Strom: Thank you, Susan. This was really fun.

Susan Lambert: We are so grateful to our amazing guests today, and to all of you, making a difference in the lives of students every single day. Be sure to check the show notes for resource links from today's podcast, and we want to hear your stories and successes. Follow us on Facebook at Science of Reading: The Community, or send an email to SORmatters@amplify.com. Tell us what guests you think we should book or tell us about the research that really excites you, and be sure to hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app so you don't miss an episode. Until next time, I'm Susan Lambert from Amplify Education.

Susan Lambert: Hey listeners, we've got a lot more resources to help you support students when it comes to dyslexia. Get your free dyslexia support power pack now at our accompanying professional learning page, amplify.com/SORessentials. This bundle includes our dyslexia toolkit, Dyslexia: Fact Versus Fiction ebook and dyslexia infographic, all designed to empower you with the knowledge and tools to truly make a difference. Again, you can get that and other free resources at amplify.com/SORessentials.