Abstract
Stephen Parker is an educator and author who taught his own three children to read. In the 1990s, he became concerned about the whole language and balanced literacy approaches to reading instruction that were being used in schools. Although evidence for effective reading instruction supports a systematic synthetic literacy approach, many educators continue to use variants of a balanced literacy approach in which a child begins to “read” based upon memorized sight words, repetitive (predictable) books, and a guessing strategy ineptly called three cueing.
The three-cueing model says that skilled reading involves gaining meaning from print using three types of cues:
Semantic (word meaning and sentence context): Does the word [I plugged in] make sense?
Syntactic (grammatical features): Does the word [I plugged in] make sense?
Grapho-phonic (letters and sounds): Does the word look right?
This approach gives children easy options such as looking at pictures and guessing, which are understandably preferable to the hard work of decoding but result in dramatically different skill levels. Although children may identify many words correctly in the short term, giving the illusion of proficiency, they do not build the kind of foundation that will ultimately allow them to read at an advanced level. The three-cueing system is well known to teachers. What is less well known is that it did not arise as a result of advances in knowledge concerning reading development. Despite its largely uncritical acceptance by many within the education field, it has never been shown to have utility, and in fact, it is predicated upon notions of reading development that have been demonstrated to be false.
The reading instruction approach described in Parker’s books is based on “the science of reading” framework that advocates a systematic, structured phonics methodology to teach reading decoding. Parker’s program employs synthetic phonics instruction that focuses on teaching each individual letter sound and having kids try to sound each letter or letter combination one at a time and then try to blend those back into word pronunciations.
Analytic phonics approaches, which focus attention on larger spelling generalizations (like rimes: ab, ad, ag, ack, am, an) and word analogies (if game is pronounced with a long a, then came must be pronounced with a long a), can also be systematic. The National Reading Panel concludes that both synthetic and analytic phonics instruction conferred a learning advantage on young readers. The average effect size was somewhat higher for synthetic than analytic approaches, but not significantly so (it was so small a difference that one cannot say one is really higher than the other).
There are many commercially available materials for teaching systematic phonics. All three of Parker’s books provide the same free stand-alone resource for teaching children to read using synthetic phonics. Pamela Snow, a well-known, highly respected Australian speechlanguage pathologist (SLP)/psychologist, has written the introductions for Reading Instruction and Phonics and The Reading Crisis. All three books lay out the same 17-stage framework for teaching the soundsymbol/orthographic patterns of English. The book on teaching preschoolers to read includes a section on teaching the alphabet that is not in the other two books. The beginnings of each book vary in the level of detail for background information on issues related to reading. The book Reading Instruction and Phonics: Theory and Practice for Teachers would be most useful to SLPs. The first six chapters of this book describe the nature of the English alphabetic code, the simple view of reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986), the history of reading instruction, and discussion of the differences between synthetic phonics and balanced literacy. The content of these chapters provides useful background information for SLPs to explain to parents and school personnel the type of reading instruction children need and why.
Parker’s other two books are aimed at parents. (To use these book, parents would need to be good readers themselves.) The first two chapters of The Reading Disability Crisis: How Parents Can Reclaim Control describe the nature of the difficulty students with dyslexia have in learning to read and why they need a synthetic phonics approach to learning to read. Parker believes that with minor adaptations this book can be used by volunteers everywhere to teach reading to older children, teens, and adults. In the first three chapters of Teaching a Preschooler to Read: Phonics for Parents and Other Care-givers, Parker explains why parents should want to introduce reading to preschoolers and the emergent literacy concepts to teach.
The program is structured in such a way that for the initial stages you’ll be able to teach reading as though English were a perfectly phonetic language: one with no spelling irregularities or exceptions. You’ll be able to act as though each letter in the alphabet represents a single sound, and each sound is symbolized by a single letter. It is not until Stage 6 that “silent letters” and Q and X are introduced. Parker arranged the program this way because he wanted children to be convinced that reading is easy and logical—and therefore worth their effort. Once children believe they can read, it is easier to introduce the anomalies of English. Parker says it takes about 2 years to take a child through the entire program. Stages 1 through 6 can be covered in kindergarten; the bulk of the Advanced Code, consisting of Stages 7 through 16, can be covered in Grade 1. Stage 17 belongs to Grade 2, the consolidation year. By this time, students should be independent readers. Words introduced at this level are those with unusual spellings and morphological patterns (e.g., past tense, comparatives/superlatives, word families [er, ial, sion, ous, uous, cious]).
Reading and language disorders are common childhood conditions that often co-occur; both the decoding and comprehension aspects of reading are languagebased (Catts et al., 2017; Snowling & Hume, 2012). SLPs regularly work on aspects of language disorder that underlie oral and reading comprehension. They are also likely to assess phonological awareness skills and engage in activities to develop children’s phonology awareness. They are less likely to specifically teach phonics skills, yet such skills could easily be incorporated into speech and language therapy. Gillon (2018) recommends incorporating phonological/phonics activities in language therapy. Such inclusion promotes not only reading skills but also oral speech and language skills. Typically, if phonological awareness skills/phonics/orthographic knowledge is not part of the student’s Individualized Education Program (IEP) speech/language goals, they cannot be addressed by the SLP. Because language impairments are usually associated with reading deficits, I strongly encourage the SLP staff I supervise to include assessment of phonological/ phonics/ orthographic skills in their evaluations. It is easy to justify such assessment from the research literature on language and literacy disorders. Goals for these literacy areas can then be included in language therapy. I find the spelling inventories from Words Their Way (Bear et al., 2020) to be useful screeners to determine what students know about phonics and orthography. There are three Words Their Way spelling inventories: Primary, Elementary, and Upper Elementary. Each of these inventories has a list of words that increase in complexity of spelling skills. The primary inventory evaluates knowledge of short vowels, many consonants, diagraphs, blends, some long vowel patterns, and some inflected endings (-ed, -es, -ies, -ing). The elementary inventory evaluates more complex consonant and vowel patterns and more affixes and derivational patterns. Once the spelling inventory is given, you can use the Feature Guide to score and identify the student’s developmental level. The feature guides for these inventories can be downloaded free from: wordstheirway842.weebly.com/assessments.html. (Note: Sentences to use with students when asking them to spell the words in the inventories can be found at: https://www.warrencountyschools.org/userfiles/2185/Classes/160244/wtw%20spelling%20inventory.pdf?id=600944)