Episode Airs 4/19/24
Host = Kristy Duggan
Guest = Dr. Teddy Roop
Host - The Teachers College at Emporia State University presents How We Teach This a podcast where we talk with experts and educators. Welcome to the podcast, how we teach this. Our guest today is Teddy Roop and she is a professor at Emporia State University. And we're going to talk about the science of reading. Would you introduce yourself? Tell us a little bit about how you came to be especially interested in this topic.
Roop - Of course, it's great to be here. I have always loved reading even as a child. But as I entered the teaching profession and began working with elementary students, I found that my passion really lived in the area of struggling readers or striving readers. So I was curious to know how to support them, how to best support my striving readers. And so I became a reading specialist or employee state's reading specialist program and really found some ways to support my students in the classroom.
Host - That is cool. Thank you and welcome to the podcast. We're going to do a couple different episodes. Our first one for today. We're going to be defining the science of reading and getting into the depth of what it actually is. And then we're going to have some future episodes if you're willing to come back and join us and we'll talk more about the strategies. At the elementary level and maybe even secondary higher ed level of how you might implement these things in the classroom. So I'm really looking forward to this. Being able to read is an essential life skill everyone needs to be able to read. Why do teachers need to know about the science of reading?
Roop - Well, when I became a reading specialist, I really found out that reading is a science. That's where we need to start. Reading is very different from our idea of what literature is or English classes. So reading is a science, and it really draws from several disciplines such as cognitive psychology, neurobiology, neuroscience, speech pathology. When we think of reading and when we talk about reading in this podcast, we really need to think about it as a science. It is important to address it that way because as you mentioned, reading is an essential life skill. It's not something that we only teach for academic purposes. We want our students to be successful in life, whether it is filling out a job application or communicating with others, receiving messages, information from others, being able to understand that message or just enjoying a good book. So it is important that our students become skilled readers and we prepare them not just for academic purposes, but also for life skills.
Host - A science, I guess I never thought of reading as a science before, so that's very interesting. Yes. Can you tell us a little bit about what has happened with the history of the strategies over time that we've used to teach reading? You know, I'm thinking back in my classroom experience. You know, there was a time when we taught phonics and then we taught whole language. And and there seems to be shifts and changes in how we teach students to read. Can you can you tell us a little bit about that and how that affects where we are today?
Roop - Absolutely. Basically, there's what we know is the reading wars. And the reading wars occurred back in the probably early mid eighties. Really, the argument was over whether we should implement whole language, which you mentioned, and that was a very popular approach to teaching reading at the time, or should we really immerse students in phonics? So that really gave birth to the balanced literacy approach. So scholars basically agreed that we could have some whole language where students are exposed to print and you know, the more of that incidental learning and have phonics instruction embedded into the curriculum. So that is where balanced literacy came about. And currently the shift has been to structured literacy. A lot of the opinions, professional opinions that are out there, a lot of the literature that's really coming out is basically saying that balanced literacy was more like language and that that really did not help students learn to read. There is this better approach called structured literacy. And structured literacy is a very systematic, explicit, cumulative instruction. It's diagnostic, it's based on data. It really emphasizes foundational skills, but it also looks at some of the language skills. And I can talk more about that as well. As we move on,
Host - I was hoping that you might give us some examples of what a balanced literacy is compared to structured literacy.
Roop - You have an example that kind of describes that, yeah, with balanced literacy, you don't have as much of a direct, explicit instruction. There is that it is structured differently from structured literacy. You still have a lot of the whole language. Concepts embedded into the instruction. While structured literacy really is not a whole to part approach. It is more of a part to whole approach. So we start with those foundational skills and we build from there very systematically and explicitly.
Host - Okay, I'm curious. So in my experience, I am not a language arts teacher. I taught exploratory or social studies at the higher level, so I don't have any prior background knowledge on this topic, just other than General having been a college student or been in school. And I'm curious, where does memorizing site words fit into this? Is that something that's currently a strategy or not?
Roop - Yeah, that's a perfect example of part tool and whole to part differentiating between the two. So we don't want students to necessarily memorize whole words. And that's more of a whole language balanced literacy approach with structured literacy would begin with sounds that we connect to letters. So we have that sound simple relationship. And then we move to building words with those letters and sounds. And look we look at syllables and then we look at whole words. It's that part two whole approach that's a big difference between whole language balanced literacy and structured literacy.
Host - Okay, so what about spelling lists? How do they fit into these two different models?
Roop - Absolutely. Spelling is still part of structured literacy and just like it was with balanced literacy. However, we move from again, from from sound to print, we look at the connection between a sound and how it's represented in print by a letter or combination of letters. And we look at the the spelling patterns, if you will, rather than memorizing whole words for spelling.
Host - Well, so I'm curious, as we look at the structured literacy, what is the simple view of reading and why is this the current recommended model for reading?
Roop - The simple view of reading. It was developed by Goth & Tunber and it actually has been updated several times by the authors. But it basically states that in order to have reading comprehension, a reader must be able to recognize words and they also have to have strong language comprehension. So the two the two factors of reading comprehension are word recognition and language comprehension. From there, Scarborough's reading rope breaks each one of those factors down. So when when I talk about word recognition, we really want to develop those skilled readers that are automatic with recognizing words to have that fluency as they read. So we want them to have sight word vocabulary. We want them to be able to have some decoding strategies, abilities when they encounter a known words. And we also want readers to have sufficient background, knowledge, vocabulary, concepts of print, knowledge of the syntax of the language. These are skills that are part of the language comprehension strand of Scarborough's rope. And this is where we want readers to become increasingly strategic. All of these sub skills, if you will, within the rope contribute to skilled reading.
Host - In the skilled reading, what are SBIR factors?
Roop - The factors, and I mentioned those earlier, they are the word recognition and the language comprehension. Mm hmm. And I think it's super important to recognize that someone who reads words accurately and fast enough, that's not enough to achieve reading comprehension. So if we think of it as a math equation, if word recognition is a factor of one, but language comprehension is a factor of zero, then the product is going to be zero. Okay. And vice versa. If we have someone who has very strong language comprehension skills, the background knowledge to have very rich vocabulary, but they struggle to read the words on a page and read them with appropriate fluency. Then you have a zero for word recognition times one for language comprehension. That's two equals zero. Really, when we think of these, we have to think of them as they both have to be strong. Both factors have to be strong word recognition and language comprehension in order to achieve reading comprehension.
Host - So I'm picturing my son who has. Some learning disabilities and he actually has good reading comprehension, except sometimes his word recognition is a little off and it causes him to misunderstand things. And his spelling is a weak area, so it causes him troubles when he needs to produce writing. How does the science of reading interact then with that producing content?
Roop - Mm hmm. So when we think of reading, that is one we probably talk about decoding. When we think of writing, that is when we talk about encoding. But at the root of it all really is that sound simple relationship connecting the sounds or the phonemes to the printed symbols or the letters. So when we read, we are looking at the letters and we have to connect those letters to sounds. And when we are spelling, when we're I'm not using writing, but when we're strictly spelling. Mm hmm. We have to think of again sounds and what symbol we have to write down, what letter we have to write in or combination of letters in order to write a word down. And these are, again, sounds simple relationship related. And the reader or the speller has to be automatic enough with connecting the sound to the symbol to make that process fluent. There is a theory called Theory of Automaticity or automaticity theory. That's back from the seventies, Labarge and Samuels, that basically talks about if we're spending so much time trying to decode a word. So trying to put the sound to the letter, then we don't have enough cognitive energy left for comprehension.
Host - Good point.
Roop - So if we have someone who is trying to figure out just how to read the word, there's just not enough cognitive energy left for them to comprehend what they're reading.
Host - And that makes sense. Yeah, it does. All right. So what are the five pillars of reading instruction?
Roop - So the five pillars are reading instruction. Also known as the big five is something that we teach to all undergraduate students. And we go back to it again in graduate school. And the reading specialist program, the five pillars are basically what the National Reading Panel found in 2000 to be key components for reading instruction. And they went through this huge meta analysis. You know, we went through thousands of different studies to come up with these five pillars. And the five pillars are phonemic awareness. So being able to hear individual sound, hear and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words, phonics, which I think probably a lot of us are familiar with. So knowing those rules, knowing those sounds, simple relationships. So if I hear the sound, I know that I have to spell with the two letters C and H. Mm hmm. And then we have fluency. And fluency really has three separate components that that work together for what we call fluency. We have accuracy, automaticity or rate. So how quickly and how accurately a word is read. And also prosody, which relates to the expression, the the volume, the intonation, the phrasing, a reading, the fourth pillar is vocabulary. So we know the vocabulary is very important. When we read something, if there are words that we don't know, it's very difficult to comprehend something. So building that vocabulary. And the last one is comprehension. So being able to understand what we read, that's really the end goal of reading is to be able to get the message from what the author is telling us in print through comprehension. We really focus on being metacognitive. We focus on comprehension strategies, being strategic with reading before, during and after the reading.
Host - If we have people out there that are interested in learning more about the science of reading but maybe don't have as much background knowledge like me, what would your advice be to them? Where should they start?
Roop - I think as a parent and I'm going to talk as a parent just a little bit as a parent, I would certainly communicate with my child's teacher and find out, you know, what recommendations do they have for me as a parent to work with my child? I think that we all know the importance of immersing children in print and modeling that for them. But it's it's also, like I said, communicating with my child's teacher. As a practitioner, what I personally did is I decided to get my master's as a reading specialist and get that licensure. And definitely, I believe I've left a couple of links. Look at the professional resources that the International Literacy Association and the International Dyslexia Association has to offer. There are a lot of great journal articles that are peer reviewed. There are also some websites such as reading rockets that are wonderful for practicing teachers. They're a great resource to find some quick links to information that's also evidence based and well researched. So I think just continuing to educate yourself as a practitioner. Science is always changing what we know. The science of reading today may be changing within the next couple of years as new research is coming out, as we strive to support all learners and all readers. So I think that's what that's what I would suggest.
Host - Okay, great. And we will have the links that you've mentioned on our Web site for our listeners that they would like to go there and check out those resources that we get. Is there anything else that you would like to share with us about the science of reading?
Roop - I think that everyone should know about the science of reading as a practicing teacher. I think in my opinion and there may be some that disagree with me, but in my opinion, I think that every teacher is a teacher of reading some at the elementary level where perhaps more involved with that. But even at the secondary level, they are students who need your help. As a secondary teacher, you may be a science teacher or history teacher, but there are going to be students who are going to need that support. And it's essential that we support all learners.
Host - Would you be willing to give us a little preview of what we might expect on a future episode, talking more specifically for classroom teachers at the elementary or secondary level?
Roop - Yeah, I can do that. It's been great talking with you about the science of reading, and I'm looking forward to our next podcast session where we talk about teaching the science of reading for elementary level educators. As a former elementary teacher myself, I'm super excited about this one. We're going to talk about how to determine needs, how to look at data to improve reading instruction, and best support the needs of our readers. And also, we're going to talk about multisensory instruction and how that fits within the structured literacy framework. So I'm very excited to meet again.
Host - That sounds good. I'm looking forward to it. I appreciate you taking the time to be with us on the podcast tonight.
Roop - It's great to be here.
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Host - We hope you enjoyed this episode. Be sure to like and subscribe. This podcast is sponsored by the Teachers College at Emporia State University, featuring talks with experts and educators. We release new episodes every other Wednesday. Our guests provide more information on our website, www.emporia.edu Follow us and share an x with at hwtt_esu on Facebook and Instagram search for "how we teach this." If you would like to be a guest on our show or want to provide feedback, please send us an email hwtt@emporia.edu And I'm Kristy Duggan your host and executive producer. You've been listening to how we teach this. Thank you.