I met Andrew Watson at a post Research Ed pub event in Philly a few years back. I’m an introvert and not terribly excited about talking to strangers in noisy settings, and saw Andrew standing there looking aloof, so he seemed like someone good to chat with. I had no idea who he was, just recall him saying something about neuroscience something or other and conferences, he may have had a card. I probably, in my naiveté, thought he was shilling for a company or something (lol). Anyway, I later followed him on Twitter, and over time began to really appreciate his wise and often sardonic takes on education and research, and made a note to check out his book, The Goldilocks Map.

I do take a while to get around to education related books, but I’ve been reading more and more research these days, and it seemed like high time to finally pick up his book, as I am a complete amateur in understanding methods or anything, really, beyond the abstract of most papers.

And I’m really glad I did, and I recommend you do, too. He’s got a dry wit that can make you laugh out loud, while at the same time dropping critical knowledge throughout in a clear and concise way.

The Goldilocks Map is about striking a just right balance of openness to new evidence-based teaching methods, while at the same time maintaining a disciplined skepticism to ensure that you are not jumping into the latest edu brain fad that will waste your, your colleagues’, and your students’ precious learning time.

Watson gives classroom teachers a step-by-step process for determining whether or not to listen to the latest wisdom bestowed upon you in a PD, starting with asking any source of a new practice, “What’s the best research you know of that supports it?” How your source responds to that question can immediately tell you whether or not to go further.

I’ve taken up this quest since reading his book, and I had a really great interaction with a well-respected researcher, in which he acknowledged that a particular passage in one of his papers may have been a bit over-emphatic, and pointed to some more nuanced research findings that complicated the issue. Boom. He has thus become a trusted source for me. As Watson puts it in his book, “Trustworthy sources want us to want more information.” Indeed.

Watson gives us questions, tools, and shortcuts for digging deeper into real research, and actually, part of the fun of reading his book is watching him surgically dissect key studies over the course of the chapters. It’s a tour de force.

One interesting personal takeaway I had from reading his book was that my purpose and methodology in reading education research is a bit different than some of these approaches–and that’s OK. I read research more like the former English major that I am — I typically read for thematic patterns, well crafted ideas, and arguments that accumulate across papers. And for my purposes — as someone now outside of the classroom less interested in specific practices I can apply tomorrow, and more interested in key frameworks and models that can help to inform district and school-wide approaches, as well as classroom practices, that can make sense.

That said, I took away sharp and insightful understandings and approaches to reading research with a more informed and critical eye. Watson is not afraid to get technical, and I’m going to need to go back and re-read the book to really internalize and apply some of his methods.

I highly recommend picking up this book and adding to your collection.

#bookreview #research #PD #evidence

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Here is my Yule time gift to my fellow reading nerds:

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

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In my last post, we looked at a wonderful paper, “Universals in Learning to Read Across Languages and Writing Systems“, that outlines operating principles of reading and writing across languages, as well as some key variations. Continuing on this theme, I wanted to highlight another recent paper, “The universal language network: A cross-linguistic investigation spanning 45 languages and 11 language families.”

The project is cool — the researchers have started a cross-linguistic database of brain scans, and their initial findings demonstrate a strong universal neural basis for language across multiple languages. Here’s the key finding that stood out to me:

In summary, we have here established that several key properties of the neural architecture of language—including its topography, lateralization to the left hemisphere, strong within network functional integration, and selectivity for linguistic processing—hold across speakers of diverse languages spanning 11 language families; and the variability we observed across languages is lower than the inter-individual variability. The language brain network therefore appears well-suited to support the broadly common features of languages, shaped by biological and cultural evolution. (Ayyash et al., 2021)

I found out about this paper from this Twitter thread from one of the researchers, Ev Fedorenko, and her thread also provides a neat summary of the project.

As this database of brain scans across languages is built out, it will be interesting to see what specific variations between languages and neural architecture may arise. For example, another recent paper, “Difference Between Children and Adults in the Print-speech Coactivated Network,” examined the brain scans of native Chinese speakers and found some variations from past studies in the brains of developing readers, most likely due to the difference in writing systems in terms of the lack of grapheme-phoneme correspondence for Chinese characters, as well as how a single pronunciation can have many different meanings represented by different visual characters.

Taken together, our findings indicate that print-speech convergence is generally language-universal in adults, but it shows some language-specific features in developing readers. (He et al., 2021)

Overall, it’s fascinating to see how current research converges on the significant universality across languages in terms of how literacy develops, and exciting to see that specific differences between languages and writing systems are beginning to be studied with greater specificity.

As Perfetti and Verhoeven tidily pointed out in their paper:

The story of learning to read thus is one of universals and particulars: (i) Universals, because writing maps onto language, no matter the details of the system, creating a common challenge in learning that mapping, and because experience leads to familiarity-based identification across languages. (ii) Particulars, because it does matter for learning how different levels of language – morphemes, syllables, phonemes – are engaged; this in turn depends on the structure of the language and how its written form accommodates this structure. (Verhoeven & Perfetti, 2021)

#speech #language #literacy #universal #reading #multilingualism #orthography #brain #neuroscience #research

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