The science of reading or SoR is trendy educational jargon. Let me explain concisely what it is all about.
The science of reading is certainly a hot educational buzz phrase, so you may be surprised to learn that according to reading expert Timothy Shanahan, there is no agreed upon definition. Reading researchers have not managed to reach a consensus on the actual role of instructional research and the scope of the reading instruction it covers. For teachers, that lack of agreement sounds familiar.
When I began teaching nearly forty years ago, the experts were simply unable to agree upon the most effective methods for teaching reading. School districts would generally adopt curriculum every handful of years hoping that the new materials would produce better results than the last set they adopted. In the early days of my career, I learned to teach reading through a phonics-based approach and experienced great success with my students. Later, I was expected to teach using the “whole language” method which was being touted by many reading experts at the time. I always thought it was like teaching reading only to the students who could already read.
The origins of the science of reading can be traced back to government intervention during the 1990s which identified scientifically based reading instruction (SBRI) practices. Scientists were brought on to determine which instructional approaches had actual research to support their use, and teachers were encouraged only to use the practices supported by research. This eventually led to the recommendation for the explicit teaching of phonemic awareness, phonics, oral reading fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension.
About the same time neuroscientists and cognitive scientists, such as Stanislas Dehaene and Maryanne Wolf, began using cutting-edge research to explore the reading brain. Their findings supported the recommendations made by the government. Thus, some people use the phrase science of reading to refer to the extensive neurological research that has taken place over the past several decades that explains how human brains process written words and its implication for reading instruction. For these scientists, there is no longer a debate about best practices in reading; it’s an established fact.
My personal working definition for the science of reading is the educational practices in reading instruction whose use is supported by scientific research. These recommendations continue to evolve as additional practices are identified by ongoing research, such as with the new emphasis on encoding or spelling as an important component to an effective reading program.
The vast majority of children will require explicit phonics instruction to successfully learn how to read. Based on my experience, I suspect the same is true for teaching our children how to spell. What shouldn’t be lost in all of this is that our students all have unique needs, and our instruction must be tailored to meet those needs, whatever they may be.
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