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.
Thirty years ago, I wrote a paper, titled The Missing Foundation in Teacher Education: Knowledge of Spoken and Written Language, to vent my frustration at the inadequacy of teacher preparation. The paper was published in Annals of Dyslexia and then picked up by the American Federation of Teachers, who—to my surprise—were in tune with the chord I had struck. Subsequently, many of my colleagues in the research community validated my initial observations with high quality research that a) validated the knowledge gaps in most licensed teachers, b) documented the same gaps in the teachers of those teachers (e.g., university faculty), c) recorded the paucity and inadequacy of the textbooks used for teacher training, d) showed that teacher knowledge affects teaching behavior, and e) linked teacher knowledge of language to growth in student achievement.
So is there evidence that the “science of reading” campaign has caused a noticeable improvement in the way language-based skills are taught in the average classroom? My take is that we still have a long way to go before typical instruction capitalizes on the lessons of reading and language science. Ultimately, to achieve alignment between science and practice, the field will have to reconceptualize what should be taught to developing readers and writers, develop a science of teacher learning on which to base pre-service and in-service training programs, and develop much better-informed standards for the instructional programs and materials prioritized for classroom use.
What is the central idea that is missing from current reform initiatives? It is that reading is language. “Oral language” is not just a component of literacy instruction that was overlooked by the National Reading Panel and sometimes added onto the list of the five essential components (phoneme awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension). Almost all factors shown to affect literacy development are dependent on and facilitated by language. Early language development before age three predicts reading achievement more reliably than any other developmental variable. Early intervention targeting language development from birth onward is the most well-validated approach to successful prevention of reading disability. Multi-linguistic word recognition instruction has the strongest research support; when we show students that our orthography represents sound, meaning (morphology), word history (etymology), and a word’s syntactic role, English spelling can make sense. Comprehension of text is primarily dependent on two linguistic capabilities: knowledge of the meaning of the words and the ability to rapidly decipher the complex syntax in academic writing.
Given that reading is bootstrapped onto language, are teachers getting the message? If so, what are they able do to ensure that their students can read, spell, write, and comprehend? This very central issue—that literacy instruction is language instruction—has yet to receive the attention it needs. Let’s consider what is typical for early elementary classrooms that I and many colleagues have observed. The “five components” of the National Reading Panel are taught without connection to one another. Teachers in the early grades are given a manual for teaching phoneme awareness that has no connection to the phonics lesson. A separate list of “sight” words is to be memorized by rote. The readings given to students do not provide enough practice applying the taught patterns to meaningful text reading. Spelling is taught as a visual memory exercise, without the information about word structure that would help students make sense of the way words are written.
Certainly, the inclusion of phoneme awareness and phonics components in most instruction is a step in the right direction. What we want, however, is an integrated, multi-linguistic approach that helps students understand that the written language represents sound, meaning, word origin, and usage, and to recognize that our orthography has many patterns and letter order constraints. Phoneme awareness exercises should enable students to distinguish confusable words such as met and meant or half and have so that those words can be mapped to print. Phoneme awareness instruction should draw students’ attention to both the sounds in words and the articulatory gestures that are producing those sounds. Phonics lessons should include more than phoneme-grapheme correspondences. The spellings of many words seem obscure or illogical until word history and word meaning are invoked. Irregular words are not learned “by sight”; they are learned by the same process of orthographic mapping as more transparent words. We can help students by exploring every reason why the word is written the way it is. Do, done, and does, for example, and go, goes and gone are words of Old English origin that each comprise word families with the same base. A word like exciting should be taught as three morphemes (ex + cite + ing) along with other “cite” words like recite and incite that take Latin prefixes and suffixes. Yet at present, we are very likely to see vocabulary like this taught in isolation.
As we read, not only must we decipher the words and connect them to meaning, but we must group words into phrase units and process the underlying syntactic structure of each sentence. Comprehension occurs one sentence at a time. Yet in our work with teachers, we find that very few are comfortable alluding into grammar and syntax by way of extracting meaning from text. Very few can recognize or anticipate when sentence structure may be interfering with comprehension. Yet, without explicit instruction on features such as passive voice, logical connectors and subordination, or the identity of a sentence’s subject, many students are stymied by the demands of linguistically complex material.
In my view, knowledge of language is still the missing foundation in the education of the educators, even though three more decades of evidence has accrued showing that reading is dependent on language. When we finally act on the science, we will prepare every teacher with required courses on language development and language structure, show them how linguistically informed instruction is carried out, and equip them with programs of instruction that address all aspects of language in an integrated and comprehensive manner. Certification requirements of speech/language therapists and reading/literacy teachers will have considerably more overlap. Every teacher of literacy will think of themselves as a teacher of language.
