I am honored that a version of my blog post about my shift in thinking on phonemic awareness has been published in the latest Nomanis. Do check out this newer version for the research goods. And a big thank you to Tiffany Peltier for pushing my thinking on the matter and sharing much of the research that I cite in that piece. Check out her blog for sound guidance on phonemic awareness instruction.

Along with this criticism against phonological awareness practice without letters, two recent pieces have addressed critiques against David Kilpatrick’s “phonemic proficiency hypothesis” and against advanced phonemic awareness in general as well:

• Tim Shanahan’s blog post, “RIP to Advanced Phonemic Awareness,” in which he lays out the state of research alongside of a conversation directly with David Kilpatrick, and two important takeaways emerge: 1) Kilpatrick no longer uses the terminology “advanced phonemic awareness” himself, and instead uses “phonemic proficiency”; and 2) Kilpatrick’s “phonemic proficiency” hypothesis remains just that, and still needs to actually be tested. Oh, and also, read the comments on this post. A number of researchers add their thoughts on this, and Kilpatrick himself jumps in to address some of their points.
• In addition to that post, a pre-print pushes the conversation yet further in “They Say You Can Do Phonemic Awareness Instruction “In the Dark”, But Should You? A Critical Evaluation of the Trend Toward Advanced Phonemic Awareness Training.” In this piece, the “empirical and theoretical basis for advanced phonemic awareness training” is evaluated and they find that “at present, there is no evidence that targeting phonemic awareness separate from print differentially benefits reading skills over integrating phonemic awareness activities with letters.”
• UPDATE 2/10/22: David Kilpatrick, Louisa Moats, and others posted a response to the Clemen’s et al. pre-print and gave some pretty poignant critiques that tell us we should wait to read the peer-reviewed version before drawing any firm conclusions. Main takeaway: phonemic proficiency is about orthographic mapping, not decoding.
• UPDATE 2/25/22: Clemen's et al. posted a rebuttal to Kilpatrick et al.'s response
• UPDATE 10/1/23: I think it's important to highlight that the Clemens et al. remains a pre-print and has not yet been published after peer review, to my knowledge. This further suggests the pre-print should be taken with a strong grain of salt. If and when it does make it through peer review, please let me know so I can update it here.

To continue on the phonological tip, David Share, most well known for his “self-teaching” hypothesis of reading, also has a recent piece, “Common Misconceptions about the Phonological Deficit Theory of Dyslexia” that provides some further food for thought on the relation of phonology to print and to dyslexia. There’s a lot of interesting tidbits in this paper — one of the takeaways I had was the insight that dylexia only becomes “‘visible’ in literate societies.” In a pre-literate world, we didn’t need to recall “addresses, telephone numbers, the days of the week or months of the year, foreign names and places,” for example, so spoken-language phonological weaknesses may have existed, but don’t surface until the sub-lexical work needed for print. In other words, the “phonemic awareness” problem children with dyslexia have isn’t just about phonemic awareness, it is related to a phonological issue that only becomes most evident in the demands of phonemic awareness required for reading with an alphabetic system.

He also has a great passage on learning the “infrastructure of the orthography”:

“In addition to learning the specific symbol-sound mappings of the orthography being learned, the learner must “get inside words”, go below the level of meaning and penetrate their sound structure. This phonological analysis or “meta-linguistic” awareness is an inescapable pre-requisite for literacy learning enabling the learner to exploit the combinatoriality of writing, decipher novel letter strings, match up spellings and pronunciations, and begin the process of building the orthographic lexicon by unitizing or chunking sub-lexical symbols into higher-order meaning units—the key to rapid automatic word recognition. It follows that any difficulties that a novice reader may have in processing speech sounds (e.g., hearing loss) or difficulties (in the absence of hearing impairment)) in processing the nuances of phonology (speech sound disorder, dyslexia) will almost invariably impair learning to read. Here, the evidence is incontrovertible and goes well beyond phonological awareness to early pre-literate spoken language competencies in processing (receptive and expressive) the sounds of speech as discussed earlier. Phonology, therefore, is necessarily a major source of variability in reading ability and hence a core deficit (or at least one core deficit) among struggling readers whether dyslexic or non-dyslexic.” [bold added]

There’s much more to say on phonemic awareness — David Share has another recent piece in ILA, “Is the Science of Reading Just the Science of Reading English?” well worth unpacking, but I’ll leave that for a separate post.

Also worth spending your time investigating — I highly recommend watching all three of Mark Seidenberg and Molly Farry-Thorn’s Miniseries on Phonemes and Phoneme Awareness. I found the first two especially enlightening and clarifying.

Enjoy geeking out in between some grog, coquitos, and COVID minimal family time, and wishing you a most restful and restorative break.

#phonology #phonemicawareness #research #dyslexia #Kilpatrick

Discuss...

The book is compellingly written, narrating an expansive overview of the history of the treatment of cancer, while at the same time painting portraits of individual researchers, clinicians, and patients that draws the reader in. It makes oncology research and clinical practice sound exciting, which is no small feat.

As I read Mukerjee’s book, I began drawing parallels between the slow but accumulating body of knowledge on cancers to research on literacy development.

Cancer, just like reading, has seen massive investments and nationwide commitments to improve outcomes, yet with seemingly little to show for all the rhetoric, money, and effort. And just as with reading, in the absence of clear evidence and knowledge, there have been ego-driven and problematic practices and treatments, and many strong assertions with little data.

Yet through Mukerjee’s telling, it becomes clear that however zigzagging and plodding and subject to the whims of character and fortune, science and knowledge has slowly advanced and that we now have an understanding of various forms of cancer that–while no silver bullets exist for all cancers–we do have an arsenal of screening and specific treatments for specific forms of cancer that we can wield, and that however incremental, the field is advancing.

In reading and literacy and language research, it can feel at times like the “science” is a matter of opinion, and that we know not much at all. There are many who discount the value of empirical research in the field of education completely. And yet, I think we would do well to heed the history of cancer to see not only the progress we have made and can make, but to at the same time bear greater cautiousness against overzealous claims by silver bullet enthusiasts.

One passage in particular, describing the endeavors of Henry Kaplan, a radiologist in the 1960s, got me started in thinking along these lines:

This simple principle—the meticulous matching of a particular therapy to a particular form and stage of cancer—would eventually be given its due merit in cancer therapy. Early-stage, local cancers, Kaplan realized, were often inherently different from widely spread, metastatic cancers—even within the same form of cancer. A hundred instances of Hodgkin’s disease, even though pathologically classified as the same entity, were a hundred variants around a common theme. Cancers possessed temperaments, personalities—behaviors. And biological heterogeneity demanded therapeutic heterogeneity; the same treatment could not indiscriminately be applied to all.

The insight described here is that while we use one term to describe the phenomena of “cancer,” researchers began to increasingly realize that different cancers manifested in incredibly diverse ways, and thus required similarly diverse approaches in treatment.

Prior to this insight, a silver bullet was sought against all forms of cancer, and all kind of ego-driven practices and over extrapolations of unclear research led to, for example, mastectomies that tore out nearly everything from the shoulder to the ribs, in the zealous belief that cancer would be rooted out.

How often do we hear “dyslexia” described as a general construct that requires a silver bullet solution? Yet increasing research demonstrates the genetic and biological variation in individual brain development that can manifest in difficulty with literacy or language — and may thus require differing forms of instruction and supports.

What are the implications for assessment? Here’s another passage that stood out on this idea of heterogeneity:

But although these alternatives did not offer definitive cures, several important principles of cancer biology and cancer therapy were firmly cemented in these powerful trials. First, as Kaplan had found with Hodgkin’s disease, these trials again clearly etched the message that cancer was enormously heterogeneous. Breast or prostate cancers came in an array of forms, each with unique biological behaviors. The heterogeneity was genetic: in breast cancer, for instance, some variants responded to hormonal treatment, while others were hormone-unresponsive. And the heterogeneity was anatomic: some cancers were localized to the breast when detected, while others had a propensity to spread to distant organs.

Second, understanding that heterogeneity was of deep consequence. “Know thine enemy” runs the adage, and Fisher’s and Bonadonna’s trials had shown that it was essential to “know” the cancer as intimately as possible before rushing to treat it.

I want to be careful about drawing too closely on an extended analogy between cancer and reading — but there is a similar need in schools to build more precise and accurate profiles of students to ensure the right form of instruction and intervention. We often land on the simple distinction of “students not meeting standards,” then rely on item analysis of standards (which are at a composite level of performance), rather than identifying the underlying literacy and language skills that could be targeted for further support.

Here’s another passage on cancer screening, which certainly has some similarities to screening for reading and language difficulty in schools:

In cancer, where both overdiagnosis and underdiagnosis come at high costs, finding that exquisite balance is often impossible. We want every cancer test to operate with perfect specificity and sensitivity. But the technologies for screening are not perfect. . . .

No; merely detecting a small tumor is not sufficient. Cancer demonstrates a spectrum of behavior. . . To address the inherent behavioral heterogeneity of cancer, the screening test must go further. It must increase survival.

For screening in schools, it must increase literacy attainment. And this is where the rubber hits the road. Even when a school is drowning in data, it does not mean the needed action will be undertaken, either to improve core instruction across classrooms, or for putting in place the right interventions for the right groups of students at the right time.

The academic specializations that result in terminology so precise it is opaque to those outside of that domain may seem extremely distant from classroom practice, but I don’t see how we can make headway until we more fully unpack how, when, and where learning happens in the brain in relation to its body and its environment, while at the same time identifying the forms and use of language and literacy that are most fundamental.

Despite the great heterogeneity of cancer, scientists have begun to recognize some universal understandings that is leading to more effective treatments:

Biologists looking directly into cancer’s maw now recognized that roiling beneath the incredible heterogeneity of cancer were behaviors, genes, and pathways. . . . Notably, Weinberg and Hanahan wrote, these six rules were not abstract descriptions of cancer’s behavior. Many of the genes and pathways that enabled each of these six behaviors had concretely been identified—ras, myc, Rb, to name just a few. The task now was to connect this causal understanding of cancer’s deep biology to the quest for its cure . . . The mechanistic maturity of cancer science would create a new kind of cancer medicine, Weinberg and Hanahan posited: “With holistic clarity of mechanism, cancer prognosis and treatment will become a rational science, unrecognizable by current practitioners.” Having wandered in the darkness for decades, scientists had finally reached a clearing in their understanding of cancer. Medicine’s task was to continue that journey toward a new therapeutic attack.

We are beginning to recognize some universals and particulars of language and literacy, as well. We can improve literacy outcomes for our society. It just may be much more complex and progress much slower than we’d like to think.

I’m not being a Pollyanna here on either front, by the way. My father died of lymphoma last December after being diagnosed in October, and his doctors seemed just as surprised as us when his artery ruptured suddenly just as his 3rd round of chemo treatment began. Some forms of cancer will continue to kill us prematurely, despite our best efforts based on our current understanding of the research and the technological tools in our arsenal. And some children will continue to struggle to read and write fluently, despite the concerted efforts of many committed educators.

My sincere hope is that every casualty along the way provides new learning that can inform improvement. If we learn from every failure, than each failure will not be in vain.

#cancer #language #literacy #reading #dyslexia #screening #SiddharthaMukerjee #research #knowledge #heterogeneity

Discuss...

I'd also like to highlight that relatedly, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) and it's publications has a lot to offer to those of us getting into the Science of Reading.

Let me just give you a recent example: the “JSLHR Research Symposium Forum: Advances in Specific Language Impairment Research and Intervention” offers some really interesting and useful open access research. Here's some tidbits:

• There's a useful overview of dyslexia and DLD/SLI from Suzanne Adlof that stresses the need to screen and diagnose language for students who have demonstrated word reading problems because DLD and dyslexia often co-occur

“Considering the frequent comorbidity of dyslexia and SLI, all school-aged children who are identified with word reading problems should receive a thorough language evaluation.” —Suzanne Adlof

• Spaced retrieval practice has gotten a lot of attention from ResearchEd type folks over the last few years (as it should), and so this piece on its benefits to word learning for students with SLI will be further reaffirming.

• I found this one by Pamela Hadley on “Exploring Sentence Diversity at the Boundary of Typical and Impaired Language Abilities” especially useful, as while I am fully invested in explicit sentence-level instruction, I sometimes struggle to know exactly what to investigate and unpack in a sentence beyond the basics. In this paper, Hadley provides a neat way to think of linguistic development at the sentence-level:

”...as a series of four developmental steps: words, verbs, childlike sentences, and adult sentences.”

What she also highlights is how important verbs are as a developmental stage, given the complexity of the function of verbs in a sentence:

“Verbs carry information about the number of participants in an event and the semantic roles of those participants.”

And much more in there to think about!

#ASHA #speech #language #literacy #DLD #dyslexia #learning #children #multilingualism #research