Editor’s note: This essay is an entry in Fordham’s 2025 Wonkathon, which asked contributors to answer this question: “What needs to happen next—at the state, district, and school levels—for the science of reading revolution to fulfill its promise and ensure that far more children learn to read well?” Learn more.
Each learner is unique. Children from diverse language backgrounds, a variety of ethnic families, and from a culture of varying economic situations have individually unique learning needs that can only be realized with a multi-variable approach to instruction. Our education system, at the state, district, and school levels, has responded to a current many faceted learning crisis by varying instructional materials, curricula, classroom structure, and teaching strategies. Has the education system, however, done enough to respect the learning characteristics of each young child? Each learner possesses an unimaginably intricate human brain that is capable of modifying itself to respond to an ever-changing world. Each child is equipped with neurological richness through thoughts, plans, memories, and feelings. What could we understand about student learning that could revolutionize schools into more effective learning environments, beginning with very young developing readers?
Dedicated teachers undertake a huge challenge when they strive to understand how children learn in general, and specifically how children learn to read. Teachers orchestrate a delicate balance of instruction, student engagement, conversation, and reading practice, so their students are able to read with a natural amount of effort and with an obvious outcome, enjoyment.
Reading research has a solid background
Current materials for teaching reading reflect the National Reading Panel’s findings. Conclusions in this report resulted from a rigorous set of research methodologies while reviewing 300 studies, selected from two databases, PsycINFO and ERIC. The Panel’s findings were publicized in 2000 and remain applicable and continually acknowledged today. What we know from the science of reading is based on this report from the turn of the century (Report of the National Reading Panel).
Building the young reader through language development
The preschool years prepare children to enter first grade. Whether the child enters school at the transitional kindergarten level or much earlier with a preschool experience, there are certain phases for oral language development that must take place prior to reading instruction. If these language experiences are lacking, teachers, even at first grade, must fill in with playful, yet serious language interventions. Many states have mandated programs for four-year-olds called universal preschool. Other states continue to work on plans and policies for universal access, as of early 2024. Current information is not available. Think about it, if school districts have made room and developed programs for very young children: What oral language experiences must be included to prepare children for reading? At this young age, teachers’ work is serious business.
The topics for very young children, beginning with playful conversations and repetitions, become critical as children continue oral language conversations with real words nested in real sentences. The listening and speaking pathways in the child’s brain develop spontaneously. This statement means preschoolers are programmed to become consumers and speakers of oral language. However, to develop the ability to recognize symbols (letters) representing words that can be spoken or read silently is not naturally a part of what the human brain is designed to do. It is tough work for most children.
Between the ages of four and six, young children transition into full-fledged students. With this change the serious work of phonological processing, conceptual formations, access to memory systems, and development of reading and writing develop in rapid succession. Teachers must be aware of children’s cognitive abilities: attention, concentration, short- and long-term memory systems, and the ability to access memory to respond to questions and problem solve. Teachers who are aware of the cognitive load children are bearing know when to stop and regroup when the work gets too hard. Remembering the importance of play at this young age, learning can become fun, like a game, music, dancing or singing.
From an oral language pathway to a reading pathway
Many do not realize how much a “rich language environment” beginning at birth can impact reading proficiency, comprehension, and fluency. Research continually validates the importance of phonemic awareness for future reading success. Speech is composed of individual sounds, phonemes, which are essential for learning to read. What has been validated recently is that students with reading disabilities often lack the ability to hear and manipulate phonemes, even a child who has average or above average intelligence can be delayed in this area. The science of reading confirms that preschool children benefit from age-appropriate, explicit instruction in areas of phonemic and phonological processing to remediate and overcome reading difficulties before they materialize. It is known that playing with sounds actually forces the learning process to access all the brain structures needed to build and construct a new pathway designated for reading.
Phonemic awareness is a part of phonological processing
A distinction exists between the terms phonemic awareness and phonological processing. Phonemic awareness is the understanding that spoken language is made up of identifiable units or sounds and being able to break words into their tiniest parts. Phonological processing is a broader umbrella term that includes phoneme activities, such as counting the number of phonemes in a word, blending phonemes, or distinguishing phonemes for onsets and rimes. Phonological activities also include perception, recall, and production at all levels of the speech-sound system.
Developmental levels of phonological processing—terms defined
Phoneme: Smallest unit of sound in spoken language. There are 26 letters in the alphabet of the English language and 44 phonemes. Included are consonant sounds, digraphs, short and long vowel sounds, diphthongs, and r-controlled vowels.
Phonemic awareness examples—teaching alliteration and rhyming
The simplest or most basic level of phonemic awareness, beginnings and endings, involves not much more than being able to hear and recognize the smallest sounds of words. For the onset, alliteration means to identify similar beginning sounds and rhyming finds words that end with like sounds. Alliteration activities can begin simply. Playing with friends’ names—Happy Henry or Marvelous Megan—or tongue twisters, such as Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, are fun ways to introduce a four-year-olds to alliteration and increase their ability to articulate and distinguish between similar phonemes at the beginning of a word.
The effectiveness of rhyming and alliteration can be strengthened by adding music. Young children have an amazing capacity to remember not only musical tunes but also words of songs and nursery rhymes they’ve learned.
Phonological Processing: The over-arching umbrella or structure to include: identifying alliteration; onset; rhyme; adding, substituting, and deleting sounds; and phonemic awareness areas of segmentation, blending, and manipulation. Phonological activities are an integral part of learning to read through orthographic mapping.
Orthographic Mapping: A process the child’s brain uses to permanently store words in long-term memory, available for recall automatically.
Phonics: While phonemic activities focus solely on sound, when letters for sounds are introduced, the activity is identified as phonics. Phonics explores the connection between spoken sounds and words and the letters that identify those words.
Alphabetical Awareness becomes Print Awareness
Print is everywhere. From cereal boxes to McDonald’s and road signs, children are surrounded by letters combined in a myriad of ways to form thousands of words. At some point, it is essential for children to understand print as a code translation process through which meaning is understood. One transitional principle is pairing an object or picture with a word. A simple matching game can introduce or reinforce the association between the actual item, a picture of the item, and the printed word. This transition is HUGE: real life item to picture to word recognition.
Developmentally Appropriate Principles of Print
Meta-linguistically, what children need to learn about print can be placed into developmental milestones. Print interest is attained when the child shows that print is stimulating and worthy of attention. Next, the child develops recognition that print provides meaning, which becomes print function. The organization of print, print conventions, functions to recognize that there is an organizational scheme of left to right, and ways unique to a variety of genres or categories. There are letter groupings for words, story titles, or even for words that are names of people they know. Closely associated with conventions of print is print form. Here, the child realizes that print units, letters, and words have names and are organized in specific ways. The last stage is print part-to-whole relationships. At this stage, a child sees that letters can be combined to make words and words are grouped together to create larger meaningful units, sentences. (Pence & Justice, 2008.)
This paper introduces a sampling of the important activities that need to be included in a language rich classroom for young children. As districts review reading materials, teachers with specific knowledge of oral language development can be aware what critical aspects of oral language development must be a part of the curriculum. Need it be said? All teachers must understand how children learn to read: by building a strong oral language pathway that allows the critical development of a pathway to reading. A proficient reader for most of our student population, must be strategically built from oral language proficiency followed by explicit instruction in all the nuances of learning to read.
