One of the joys of being a teacher is that every day is different and new. No child is the same and, although there are general principles we use when teaching, there is never any guarantee that children will learn in the way we expect.
Writing in a blog, reading researcher Professor Mark Seidenberg points out that some people assume that children will only learn something if it is explicitly taught to them, and so, “if they aren’t explicitly taught everything that’s relevant to reading, they won’t learn it”.
This is not true. There is complexity in how children learn.
When something is complex, we have a tendency to try to simplify it. We break it down into manageable chunks. We put these into what we consider to be a logical sequence and assume that everyone will understand.
But something like reading is not easy to simplify. As methods of scientific enquiry become more sophisticated, we develop different ways of understanding what happens when we read. New technologies, such as eye-tracking or MRI scanning, are providing researchers with deeper insight into the reading process.
However, this does not necessarily help us in the classroom with the practicalities of teaching.
We know that phonemic awareness (being able to hear and manipulate the phonemes in a word) is important and that reading nonsense words can be interesting and helpful when assessing children’s phonemic knowledge - but this does not necessarily mean they are helpful things to teach.
We also know that explicit teaching of some specific aspects of reading is not essential in the grand scheme of learning to read. For instance, developing phonemic awareness is something that happens as children learn about how sounds and letters work.
At the same time, though, we know that exploring phonological awareness (phonemes, rhymes, syllables and other chunks, like suffixes and prefixes) in a way that helps children to understand how words and texts work has an impact. Helping children to notice and understand how suffixes and prefixes work is useful, for example.
Ultimately, there is a difference here in who needs to know what: teachers undoubtedly need to be aware of phonemes, graphemes and morphemes and other linguistic features in order to be able to explain them to children.
But knowing about these things in detail, and being able to identify them, does not mean you can read - in order to read you must be able to use these things, rapidly and unconsciously.
In the same way, it can be helpful and important to have the vocabulary in a new text introduced and explained before reading, but the goal should be for children to be able to learn new vocabulary from reading and work out what it means.
Seidenberg and colleagues (2020), therefore, suggest that our approach to teaching reading should consist of two halves. We must help children to establish the building blocks of reading for understanding, while also being aware that they will learn things for themselves, as they read.
They describe this as explicit and implicit learning. Both are important. We can teach both.
The goal here isn’t balanced literacy, or balanced schemes; the goal is learning to read with understanding and meaning. As Seidenberg comments, it’s balanced learning (learning to read and learning from reading) that makes the difference.
Megan Dixon is director of research at Holy Catholic Family Multi-Academy Trust
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