The Science of Reading: Literacy Knowledge - What EdLeaders Need to Know
In the first blog post of this series, I spent time introducing the Science of Reading. If you have not read that post or listened to the corresponding episode on the EdLeader podcast, I would like to encourage you to spend a few moments with it as it grounds the series and undergirds the deconstruction of Reading Comprehension that I am attempting. If you are looking for that episode on your favorite podcast player, it is episode 69 on the EdLeader playlist.
Previous blog posts in the Science of Reading series have focused on the strands of fluency, background knowledge, sight word recognition, and verbal reasoning. With this post, we are passing the halfway mark in deconstructing the reading rope.In this blog post, I am pulling out the strand of literacy knowledge. Literacy knowledge is a powerful concept, but one that I am afraid that educators may not think about teaching because assumptions are made that students just inherently know it or perhaps picked it up along the way. Most often, that just isn’t the case. I am looking forward to breaking it down here.
Before focusing on this blog post’s topic, please let me again highlight the foundation for this series.
The Science of Reading is undergirded by theories of how students learn to read and comprehend text. At the very basic level is the Simple View of Reading Theory which states that there are two elements that combine to result in Reading Comprehension. The Simple View of Reading formula states:
Decoding x Language Comprehension = Reading Comprehension
From this grew Scarborough's Reading Rope as conceived by Dr. Hollis S. Scarborough. Dr. Scarborough believed that the elements of Word Recognition and the elements of Language Comprehension all weave together into the rope of Reading Comprehension. Just like a true rope, the more strands present and the stronger each strand is, the stronger the rope is. It is surmised that if a student is weaker in one strand, the strength of the other strands can still help the student comprehend what she is reading.The strands of Word Recognition include Decoding, Phonological Awareness, and Sight Word Recognition.
The strands of Language Comprehension include background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge.
In this series of blog posts, my goal is to peel apart the individual strands of reading comprehension and build our shared understanding of what EdLeaders need to know about learning to read.
So metaphorically, we grab Scarborough’s reading rope and separate the strands of Word Recognition and Language Comprehension. Within the Language Comprehension strands, we find the strand of literacy knowledge.
Literacy Knowledge encapsulates the understanding and mastery of print concepts, such as a book’s layout. This includes everything from pre-reading skills like turning pages from right to left, reading words on a page from left to right, and top-to-bottom. It also includes more advanced skills like understanding the text features of a nonfiction book like an index, table of contents, and list of exhibits in order to efficiently find information. It also includes concepts like genre and the author’s purpose.
Literacy Knowledge is clearly important and I certainly understand why Dr. Scarborough listed it as a separate strand in her reading rope.
As you might imagine, literacy knowledge moves from very simple understandings to much more complex ones. Early on, readers learn to differentiate between letters versus words. They learn that letter order matters, about 1:1 correspondence, the spaces between written words, and about reading left-to-right and top-to-bottom. Later, they will learn to distinguish among genres of literature by text features.
Literacy knowledge can be broken down into three main elements: print awareness, phonological awareness, and text structures or features. These elements translate into writing as well as reading. Often students may not even realize that they are leaning into their literacy knowledge as they read and write. Some researchers add writing as a fourth stand-alone element of literacy knowledge.
The first identified main element of literacy knowledge is print awareness. Quite simply, print awareness means understanding the organizational concepts of printed text. Printed text is organized in a specific way. We read from left to right and top to bottom. In English, we turn pages from left to right. In other languages, text may be read the opposite direction, from right to left.
At the most, basic level print awareness is recognizing when one is looking at text as opposed to pictures. This awareness comes as young children come into contact with books. As they are read to and as they begin to pretend to read, they also begin to understand the structure of text. Young children who are not read to or who may not have grown up in a print-rich environment, have not had the same opportunities to develop this understanding. Educators cannot assume that a child understands how a book works. For someone who is teaching an adult to read for the first time, the lessons begin with the rules of reading, like which direction to use as you travel across the page.
The Colorado State Department of Early Childhood has published the Colorado Early Learning and Development Guidelines to “provide practical tips and points of reference that anyone can use to help kids grow physically, intellectually and emotionally. The Guidelines support children with different cultures, languages, and abilities.”
In the guidelines, they have shared that a student demonstrating print awareness may:
- “Handle books respectfully and appropriately.
- Distinguish between upper and lower case letter shapes.
- Play guessing games using letter sounds (“I spy something that begins with sssss.”).
- Select alphabet letters that match with their sounds.
- Recognize the letters in own name.
- Know the name for many letters of the alphabet.
- Recognize how printed material connects to their world and daily life.
- Associate pictorial symbols with objects or actions (e.g., picture recipes, rebus stories).
- Recognize that print can tell people what to do.
- Understand that letters function to represent sounds in spoken words.
- Identify their name on labels or tags.” (Colorado Early Learning and Development Guidelines)
“In the context of literacy knowledge, this means that students who are phonologically aware recognize that those individual sounds in spoken words correspond to written sounds in words and that those sounds can be changed, taken away, or added to create new sounds and new words.” (www.braintrusttutors.com)
The Colorado Early Learning and Development Guidelines shared that a student demonstrating phonological awareness might:
- “Recognize the difference between words that sound similar.
- Break words into syllables (e.g., clap or tap them out with rhythm instruments).
- Recognize rhyming words and alliterations.
- Repeat rhythmic patterns in poems and songs through clapping, marching, or using instruments to beat syllables.”
Students learn text features of genres. For example, while fiction books may have fewer text features, they still have some, like a table of contents and chapter headings. Non-fiction texts typically contain more elements like an index, a glossary, captions, section headings and subheadings, and graphic illustrations, among other features. Knowledge of text features and structure allows students to navigate a book with little difficulty, allowing them to attend to the myriad other tasks that true reading comprehension requires.
The Colorado Early Learning and Development Guidelines shared that a student demonstrating knowledge of text features or text structure might:
- “Use drawing or drawing with captions to identify key characters or events in a story read aloud.
- Compare events in books to their own experiences.
- Use pictures to understand and make predictions about the topic or story in a book.
- Look at pictures, ask questions, and talk about information from books.”
Whether a stand-alone element of literacy knowledge or not, writing cannot be ignored in this strand of Scarborough’s Reading Rope. Writing as an element of literacy knowledge includes “familiarity with writing implements, conventions, and emerging skills to communicate through written representations, symbols, and letters.” (Colorado Early Learning and Development Guidelines)
Early on, students begin to experiment with writing tools and materials. They come to recognize that writing is a way of communicating for a variety of purposes, such as giving information, sharing stories, or giving an opinion. As they attempt to convey meaning through writing, they may use scribbles, shapes, pictures, and letters to represent objects, stories, experiences, or ideas.
The Colorado Early Learning and Development Guidelines shared that a student demonstrating knowledge of writing might:
- Begin to develop proper pencil grip.
- Communicate with others with a card or letter.
- Use shapes, symbols, and letters to express ideas.
- Talk about a picture or experience.
- Describe something learned about a topic (e.g., butterflies, frogs, snow) verbally or through representations.
- Ask questions and investigate topics of interest.
- Expose students to a wide variety of text types (novels, informational texts, graphic fiction, newspapers, magazines, encyclopedias, etc.)
- Model using text features, and have them go on “text feature scavenger hunts”
- Have students use graphic organizers to “map” text
- Compare texts in English with texts in other languages that do not follow the same directionality of text (like Arabic or Hebrew)
- Give students (especially in early grades) plenty of opportunities to discuss what they notice about the way a variety of texts are organized
References
Colorado Early Learning and Development Guidelines published by Colorado State Department of Early Childhood
Scarborough’s Rope Model of Reading by Evelyn Reiss
Scarborough’s Reading Rope: Literacy Knowledge posted at BrainTrustTutors.com
What Is Scarborough’s Rope and How Does It Explain Teaching Reading? by Jill Staake
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