America’s Challenge
Phonemic awareness, phonics and decoding (for word recognition), fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension: These five “explicitly taught” skills were identified in 1999 as essential for reading development by the National Reading Panel. The five skills are the foundation of what is now associated with a body of hand-picked studies called the “science of reading” (or SoR).
IS THE SCIENCE OF READING WORKING FOR THE MAJORITY OF U.S. STUDENTS? NO. But many in the K-3 reading field say, “Yes.” Then they urge parents to do all they can at home to make sure children get progressively better at reading. Incidentally or on purpose, this shifts the responsibility for the success of SoR away from the efficacy of the science itself. By the time children reach Grade 4 and are state and/or nationally tested, 2 out of 3 American students read at a basic level or below–insufficient to guarantee success in college and many careers.
What, then, gets the blame when children arrive at Grade 4 struggling to read? Schools are blamed for not applying SoR correctly. Who might schools blame? Parents and children for not stressing the importance of reading enough at home!
Read Right’s Effectiveness Suggests the Science of Reading is Wrong
Whereas the science of reading has, to date, produced only 1 out of 3 students in Grades 4 – 12 who read at a proficient level or above, Read Right methodology produces the majority of students (Grade 1 through adult) who read proficiently, with total comprehension and oral fluency. We encourage you to explore the Read Right website. Explanations, data, and testimonials from parents, students, teachers, and school administrators abound.
WHAT IS READ RIGHT AND HOW DOES IT WORK? The science of reading insists that early readers must become proficient decoders before reading ability can develop. Importantly: Read Right methodology NEVER asks young, developing readers or struggling readers to decode a single word. Read Right methods stand out from the science of reading by relying on (1) only strategic and stable phonics information explicitly taught and used actively by readers to anticipate meaning, (2) Read Right’s unique and proprietary Cycling & Judging Excellence Component to ensure that every developing reader knows from the beginning what excellent reading is and is not, and (3) a highly structured Coached Reading Component that helps readers discover the right strategies to construct meaning rather than name single words.
WHO DEVELOPED READ RIGHT? Dee Tadlock, Ph.D., developer of Read Right methodology, delved deeply into learning theory and a host of emerging brain science 40 years ago as she sought to answer this question: What does the brain do when it reads excellently (producing full comprehension and oral fluency)? This is significantly different from the question reading experts associated with SoR sought to answer: What must K-3 teachers teach to help children acquire basic reading skills?
Dr. Tadlock’s path led her to explore Jean Piaget’s seminal learning theories that are, to this day, highly respected in early childhood education–but routinely over-looked by K-12 experts. Her deep dive also led her to brain science that was, at that time, promising but in its infancy. That science has since become highly respected and sufficiently validated. It’s rather amazing that, four decades ago, Dr. Tadlock successfully applied emerging knowledge of executive function, the brain’s multiple memory systems, and the construction of neural networks by the brain to guide all of the complex processes that humans perform to methods for more effective reading development! In effect, she discovered that the reading field has focused for 170 years almost exclusively on the explicit aspects of reading (the words on the page) and failed to apply the emerging neuroscience that explains the fundamentals of efficient brain function.
