The Science of Reading in High School ELA

What do you need to know about the Science of Reading in high school ELA?

I (Lauralee) want proficient readers, and I know my audience does too. Literacy instruction, phonological awareness, and scientific research is in the news currently, and with good reason. As function members of a democratic society, adults want confident readers with strong foundational reading skills.

Now, I teach high school and encourage literacy knowledge in my room. Still, as the components of the Science of Reading circulate, I want to improve my teaching practices: What can I do to increase reading comprehension and to provide effective reading instruction?

I shared my concerns online one day, and Allison reached out to me. We chatted back and forth about the Science of Reading in high school ELA, especially ways to implement those ideas in different contexts.

Allison is a secondary English Language Arts teacher with some ideas about the Science of Reading research, and much how I love talking about grammar, she wanted to share best practices concerning strong reading skills with older students.

Below is an abbreviated version of our discussion.

What is the science of reading in high school ELA?

Reading is the heart of what ELA teachers do. A cursory search reveals that it includes phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The parts that are most important to high school teachers come from the fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension strands.

Unfortunately, I’m afraid a lot of teachers just read texts with their students and assume that discussing the universal themes is all they need to do to help the students comprehend. I know I thought that way before I really learned how to scaffold comprehension. Our students don’t comprehend things the way we do, as expert readers. We have to teach them how, one little step at a time with systematic instruction.

Science of Reading in high school ELA

English teachers and SoR.

I do think that there are plenty of us, in the secondary ELA realm, who don’t know about the science of reading in high school ELA and research. I did not learn about it in college either. In fact, I took one “methods for teaching reading” class that was geared towards content area teachers. With that being said, I think it is even more important to spread the word about SoR because what little WE know, our content area colleagues probably know less.

Effective instructive supports.

The Science of Reading refers to the body of research that explains how our different parts of the brain learn to read. It isn’t new. It’s been around for a couple hundred of years, actually. Dyslexia was first theorized back in the 1800s and since then, researchers have been making strides in understanding how the brain works, especially in relation to language. Some really important studies to look into in order to understand the science of reading are The Simple View of Reading (1986) and Scarborough’s Reading Rope (2001). I also highly recommend the book The Knowledge Gap by Natalie Wexler. It offers a truly fascinating history of how our reading instruction has changed throughout the last couple of centuries.

New research is ongoing. We might have to ask our districts for professional learning opportunities to have a more active view of reading.

Misconceptions about SoR.

A lot of people assume that SoR is just for elementary school. And it does focus, strongly, on systematic and explicit phonics instruction. However, when we zero in on the simple view of reading, we remember that phonics is not the end all, be all of learning to read. If children can decode words, that is only half of the battle.

They need to understand written language as well, which is when Scarborough’s reading rope comes into play. Written language looks way different than spoken language and being able to comprehend all of those elements that we don’t see when speaking, are things that we must systematically and explicitly teach, just like elementary school teachers teach phonics.

Our educational practice must include latest research into teaching word recognition skills, verbal reasoning, and other literacy skills.

the science of reading with older students

What strategies can we implement in our secondary classrooms?

I learned a ton of “comprehension strategies” in college and as a new teacher, frantically googling how to teach my students (because I didn’t actually learn what I needed to in college) BUT the Science of Reading provides us with a Science of Comprehension too! Scarborough’s reading rope maps out exactly how to help students comprehend. For English teachers, it includes a bunch of things that we know are important but probably leave for the last minute or say things like, “I don’t have time for all that.” Let’s face it, things like grammar, spelling and writing usually get left until the very end of a unit, are taken completely out of context of the reading or are just plain left out. But these are things that truly aid in comprehension, so much more so than “predict what will happen” or “make a connection to the text.”

Explicit instruction.

Instead of teaching those strategies like they are a bandaid that will fix all of our struggling readers’ problems, we need to be teaching them exactly what the comma means in a sentence like this one. We need to be pointing to the word “those” as evidence that they will have to make a local inference. We need to point out that the “instead of” means they need to look at the second clause to really grasp what the sentence is saying.

A lot of people would say that these are things that good readers will learn and start to do no matter what but I would argue that they are things that we can teach, if we know how, so that everyone can be a good reader!

(Lauralee’s note: Understanding language structures empowers readers and helps with language comprehension. There is not a negative to understanding basic ELA content knowledge like sentence structure or punctuation use!)

Final thoughts about the Science of Reading.

I want to thank Allison for answering my questions and writing this post. For years, I have argued that grammar (as the study of language) should NOT be taught as “what is wrong with this sentence.” Instead, understanding how words can function in different situations is a higher-order thinking practice that leads to a deeper understanding of language and thus, improves reading.

You can find Allison on her Science of Reading blog or on Instagram.