What Neuroscience Really Tells Us About Reading Instruction
Sally E. Shaywitz and Bennett A. Shaywitz Educational Leadership, February 2007
To read, a child has to develop the insight that spoken words can be pulled apart into the elemental particles of speech (phonemes) and that the letters in a written word represent these sounds (Shaywitz, 2003). Such awareness is largely missing in dyslexic youth and adults (Bruck, 1992); Shaywitz, 2003; Torgesen & Wagner, 1995) Results from large and well-studied populations with reading disability confirm that in young school-age children (Fletcher et al., 1994; Stanovich & Siegel, 1994) as well as in adolescents (Shaywitz et al., 1999) a deficit in phonology represents the most robust and specific correlate of reading disability (Morris et al., 1998; Ramus et al., 2003). Such findings form the basis for the most successful and evidence-based approaches to reading instruction and to interventions for struggling readers (National Reading Panel, 2000)
Effective reading instruction and intervention programs provide children with systematic instruction in each of five crucial components of reading:
- Phonemic awareness (the ability to focus on and manipulate phonemes, or speech sounds, in spoken syllables and words)
- Phonics (understanding how letters are linked to sounds to form letter-sound correspondences and spelling patterns);
- Fluency
- Vocabulary; and
- Comprehension strategies
The goal is for students to develop the skills that will enable them to read and understand the meaning of both familiar and unfamiliar words they encounter so that they may learn to read effortlessly and look forward to a lifetime of enjoyment as readers.
