Kelden Formosa: Welcome back to school. Are your kids being taught how to read?

Millions of families across Canada sent their children back to school last week. With a nervous smile or a sigh of relief, parents kissed their kids goodbye and handed them off to schools and teachers, who promised to care for and educate them for six hours per weekday for the next 10 months. As a teacher, I love the first day—the excitement, the nerves, the promise of something new—and I’m always struck by how parents must feel as they pass their kids over. It’s an act of trust: parents place their faith in us, hoping that we will see their kids at least partly as they do, and that we’ll work every day to help their kids feel safe, happy, and challenged to learn as much as they can.

I’ve taught Grades 2, 4, 5, and now 8. But the responsibility of that first day has never felt any greater than when I taught Grade 2. It’s one of those three crucial years where kids are learning how to read, in most cases, from scratch. But I have worrying news about those years. The last few decades in reading instruction for young children should not fill parents—or policymakers—with any confidence that your average school will actually teach the kids how to read. Too many classrooms are led by teachers who know little about the science of reading—how to actually take a non-reader and turn him or her into a reader.

Don’t blame the teachers themselves. Many of us—though not me—are saints. If you pay attention, you’ll often see classroom lights on well into the evening, as teachers stay late to plan, grade, tutor, and coach. But for years, faculties of education at universities across North America have taught prospective teachers unscientific, discredited methods for teaching reading. Ministries of education, local school boards, and many a Pinterest board have kept these methods alive, and they may well still be what your child’s teacher is using in their classroom, often under the impression they’re doing the right thing. Parents of young children need to be aware so they can intervene. You do not want your child coming out of Grade 2 a guesser rather than a reader. The damage can last a lifetime.

The reading wars

In the education world, debates over how to teach kids to read are called the “reading wars.” They come down to this: Do kids actually need to be taught the sounds that various letters and letter combinations make? Or can they just be surrounded by interesting texts, engaged by teachers, and taught several, non-letter-based ways of guessing what unfamiliar words say? The former, more traditional approach is called phonics, while the latter is called whole language teaching, or, if you mix in a smattering of phonics here and there, “balanced literacy.”

You can see why the whole language and balanced literacy approaches had an appeal. During my undergraduate education degree, professors painted a beautiful picture of classrooms filled with excited, inquiring, self-directed six- and seven-year-old learners. The young scholar would pick up a book at their reading level, and then read it on their own, or perhaps with a partner, sitting on pillows in softly lit rooms, only gathered together when the teacher chimed a bell to invite her scholars to share what they had learned in the circle.

The trouble with this beautiful whole language vision is that it doesn’t work, as decades of controlled studies and cognitive science have shown. Most children can’t simply crack the code of the English language on their own. This has been the consensus among cognitive psychologists of learning for decades. So what does the science actually show? The National Reading Panel, assembled in 1997 by the United States Department of Education to resolve the reading wars through research, came down decisively in favour of systematic phonics instruction in their landmark 2000 report: Teaching Children to Read.

The panel reported that children need explicit and systematic instruction in how to decode words using phonics rules and patterns, and then to be given opportunities to practice the patterns they have learned. Week by week, month by month, students progress through hundreds of letter-sound correspondences, practicing until the patterns are firmly committed to their long-term memory. The minority of children with reading disabilities, such as dyslexia, require even more time and practice, while seemingly natural readers benefit as well, becoming stronger spellers and more confident writers once they understand how English words are formed.

How do we read?

To really understand why systematic phonics matters—and what happens when it’s missing—you need to know a bit about how the reading brain works. Let’s do some practice, using you, dear reader, as an example.

As you’re reading this article now, you’re relying on the incredible breadth and depth of the human long-term memory. You’ve encountered enough letter-sound correspondences and words that most of them just come naturally, without making you think at all. You read quickly, fluently, and your working memory is free to focus not on the letters or even the words, but on complete sentences and the actual points I’m making.

But say we introduce a new word, antidisestablishmentarianism.^{1The belief that the Anglican Church should not be disestablished as the national church of England.} Unless you’re involved in the Church of England, you’re unlikely to have ever encountered that word, and it sure is a long one. So you slow down, break the word apart into meaningful chunks that you can say aloud, and read it successfully. Congratulations, you’ve put your phonics knowledge to work. The example is even clearer with a nonword that mimics English sound patterns: gwextoint, for instance. It’s not a real word, and unlike the former, it doesn’t even contain meaningful affixes like “anti” and “ism.” But you can read it aloud, again, drawing on a lifetime of working with English letter-sound correspondences.

Beginning readers go through the same process, but for much easier words. Let’s take that word: easier, which is actually quite difficult. The six-year-old who encounters it needs to know that ea produces the “long e” sound, that the s sounds more like a “z,” that the i is another “long e” sound, and that the second e is controlled by r to produce the “er” sound: “ē / z / ē / er” is pretty tough.

In my phonics-based Grade 2 classroom, I taught these rules explicitly and then gave my students plenty of time to practice them. We would sit on the carpet with mini whiteboards and markers, and I would say things like: “Write sheep. Now change the /sh/ to /sl/. What’s the new word? That’s right, sleep.” Once the students had the hang of it, they would be paired up to decode short, non-illustrated stories that allowed them to further practice the rule—imagine a sentence like, “Bo Peep tells the sheep to go to sleep”—thereby helping to encode the idea that ee makes the “long e” sound in their long-term memories. Then we’d move on to new phonics rules, reviewing the “ee” rule as it came up, eventually producing confident little decoders who could spend less time sounding out and more time getting into the meaning of a text.

But in a whole language or balanced literacy classroom, children would not be taught how to decode words as systematically as above. They would instead be given books where they could guess what a word says from a combination of brute memory, looking at the picture, and predicting what might make sense next—what teachers call the three-cueing method. For example, a story might go, “I play with a dog” on the first page, coupled with an illustration of the dog. On the next page, “I play with a kangaroo,” again with a picture. The child won’t have been taught how to sound out “kangaroo,” but it can seem like they’re reading when they’re really just guessing.

The popularity of this method helps explain the sad phenomenon of children who seemed to be good readers in the primary grades struggling when they encountered books without pictures in Grades 3 and 4. The cues they relied on to hide their inability to decode have been removed, so they get stuck. I’ve seen it before. It’s tragic. Nine- and 10-year-olds who now need to go backwards and be taught explicitly, for the first time, years too late, how to crack the code of the English language.

Why don’t all teachers know? 

Many readers here may be surprised to learn that this is what’s going on in many classrooms. But I know from experience that it is. When I graduated with my bachelor of education in primary/junior education from the University of Ottawa in 2015 and received my certificate to teach in Ontario, I knew very little of what I’ve described above. I simply wasn’t taught it as a teacher candidate. Instead, my methods for primary/junior reading instruction courses focused on assessing student reading, assembling diverse and culturally-responsive classroom libraries, and arranging my class into centres so that I was rarely teaching the whole group. At my Grade 1/2 practicum site, we would start every day by having the kids pick a book at their assigned reading level. They would struggle through their own levelled books independently, and then we would move them up to the next level if they somehow figured out a way to read the book fluently enough to us—whether by guessing, inferring the relevant phonics, or by sheer force of memory.

I don’t recall one explicit lesson in phonics from six weeks in a Grade 1/2 class. My mentor teacher was excellent. She was caring, hardworking, and thoughtful, but she was just doing what she—and I—had been taught. Never be the “sage on the stage,” teaching your students from a position of authority; always be the “guide on the side,” helping individual students discover at their own levels. I look back on that class with regret. How many of those kids got stuck in third or fourth grade, put into remedial programs because they simply were not taught the code?

In hindsight, I probably should not have been certified to teach—and most of my fellow teacher candidates shouldn’t have been either. We weren’t given the requisite knowledge or skills to teach beginning readers well. There is a bad guy in this story: university faculties of education, which generally did not start teaching the science of reading until the last few years, and even then, only spottily. For policymakers, a solution to this presents itself: make passing a test on the science of reading a mandatory condition for receiving a teaching certificate. Force faculties of education to prepare teacher candidates to teach little kids how to read.

In my case, I didn’t get deeply into the science of reading until I was teaching Grade 5 in British Columbia. The provincial ministry of education was—and still is—pushing their redesigned “inquiry” curriculum, creating a cottage industry of educational consultants who hector good, experienced teachers for instructing their students rather than setting them free to inquire independently. I wanted to teach this new way. It sounded exciting, fun, and motivating. But it didn’t work. Many kids didn’t have the basic skills to inquire in any genuine way because they hadn’t been given them. Others had those skills, but only because their parents had sensed that something was going wrong and enrolled them in tutoring programs like Kumon, which use traditional teaching methods, including plenty of direct instruction and opportunities to practice.

My own disappointment at the failure of the inquiry model pushed me to research better teaching on my own. I learned about the importance of background knowledge and cultural literacy to reading comprehension and about the decades of evidence that explicit, interactive teacher-led instruction is the most efficient way to help students acquire knowledge and develop skills.

I also learned about the science of reading, first through a massive, aptly named Facebook group for teachers, “The Science of Reading-What I Should Have Learned in College,” and then through the remarkable journalism of Emily Hanford, who translated much of the cognitive science of reading to a lay audience.^{2A good, later primer on her work is Sold a Story, a podcast that traces the reading wars and explains how a combination of ideology, profit, and politics kept the science of reading out of North American classrooms for half a century.} In the Canadian context, I benefited from understanding the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s Right to Read Inquiry Report, in which it ruled that the whole language and balanced literacy approaches in vogue in many Ontario schools were failing to uphold the rights of children with reading and other language disabilities, who are especially harmed by ineffective teaching. I also read the work of Ontario teacher Kim Lockhart and the University of Alberta educational psychologist George Georgiou, who have prepared practical tools to get the science of reading into classrooms.

The good news is I’m not the only one who’s learning. The tide is shifting, but not quickly enough—especially if your kid ends up in a class still taught with ineffective methods.

How you can make sure your child learns to read

I’ll wrap up with some practical tips for parents of young children. If you have a child in the primary grades, you should expect that their teacher is using an evidence-based program to teach them phonics, or, in Kindergarten and early Grade 1, phonemic awareness—the ability to manipulate sounds in words, even before they’re connected to letters. It’s not enough for the teacher to sprinkle in a bit of phonics here and there. Students should be getting 20-40 minutes of it every day, and the class should progress in a structured, logical way from easier to harder letter-sound correspondences, with plenty of practice so the kids can master each one. They should also be memorizing at least a dozen sight words—key words that don’t follow the basic phonics rules, like friend and their—every few months in those grades. They should be learning versions of the alphabet song that don’t just say the letter names but also the sounds they make: “The letter A goes a, a, a, but sometimes ay, ay ay.” If you see these things at your child’s school, that’s a good sign.

But watch out if your child is bringing home books that prompt them to guess rather than decode. It’s perfectly good practice to read books aloud to children that they can’t yet read on their own—a parent or teacher reading Charlotte’s Web to kids in Grade 1 builds a love of literature and develops vocabulary and background knowledge—but it’s educational malpractice to prompt them to guess instead of decoding words when reading on their own. Be especially on the lookout for the popular Fountas and Pinnell series of levelled readers, which are not typically based on students’ phonics levels and are especially notorious for prompting guessing.

If these kinds of books are being sent home, or it seems as though the teacher isn’t teaching phonics in a systematic way, set up a meeting. Gently, kindly, but persistently, ask questions about their plans for the year and how much they know about the science of reading. If they don’t use phrases like “phonemic awareness” or “blending and segmenting,” that’s a concern. But in my experience, most teachers want to do better, and so a suggestion that they check out the aforementioned Sold a Story series or read a shorter summary of the research into reading instruction can go quite far. If you still don’t see any progress, talk to the principal, the superintendent, or the trustee. Rally other parents, point to the Right to Read report, and insist that your child and their peers get evidence-based reading instruction that includes explicit, systematic phonics teaching.

But time is short, and your child’s ability to read is crucial. If the school is not providing what they need, you may have to step into the breach yourself. For children in older grades who can’t seem to sound words out, look into private Orton-Gillingham reading tutoring: it’s an intensive, almost 100-year-old method for teaching kids with dyslexia. But if your children are young and you have 20-30 minutes per day, you may be able to teach them at home: Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons is a classic for a reason.

The beginning of the school year is a beautiful time. But it’s also a time to get serious. Learning how to read is a joy if it’s taught properly. But for teachers and parents, it’s a serious responsibility. In schools and at home, children are relying on the adults around them to recognize that and then do the best they can to teach them well—let’s get to it.