Multi-tasking: Rapid progress from phonics to comprehension

Children who can read fast but do not understand what they are reading have overachieved in terms of wanting to read well but they actually underperform in the long term and these diligent children may slip under the radar. And yes - they will be among the 25 per cent who step into secondary school in September unable to access the curriculum.

In the past 12 years of delivering the programme in schools I’ve seen really clear patterns in the data. Children improve in different but well-defined ways.

What I find most surprising is that there are conscientious children, who read diligently and come from supportive homes who struggle with reading. They have a reading age above eight years in terms of accuracy and they usually read quickly.

But something has gone wrong because their reading isn’t meangingful. It seems pointless - despite their best efforts. They think it’s their fault and it weighs heavily. Their reading comprehension flat lines and remains years behind their chronological age and their reading rate and accuracy scores.

More than anything, this pattern suggests that reading researchers have missed something basic. Learning to read is complicated because different skills need to flow together in a meaningful self-sustaining way. This is the topic of today’s post.

This topic matters because

• Reading fast and reading accurately isn’t enough because it does not necessarily lead to reading well with ease, fluency and understanding.

• It is heartbreaking that children who work hard, fail to take off as readers, do not really see themselves as readers and fall behind.

I see this pattern in year three and I see it in year 8.

Teenagers with this pattern assume they are not intelligent, but that is not the case.

When Intelligent children and adolescents do not reach their potential and think they are not enough they blame themselves. Today’s post is all about this issue and how we can reframe the way we support reading using rhythm.

Have we missed something important?

For as long as I can remember, we’ve been talking about 10 minutes a day, reading at home with your child, developing a culture of reading in school and yes all of this is great - but what if we’ve missed something important?

The sub skills of reading may be unbalanced. Let’s say that ‘John’ has clear strengths for example in vocabulary but weaknesses in visual memory. But for 'Jenny' there may be weaknesses in phonemic awareness but strengths in visual processing. Individual differences determine how each child will learn to read. If we rely on one single approach, this will not work really well for every child.

When 'Sally' tries to learn to read, no matter how hard she tries, she loses control of her attention and her focus scatters after only a few seconds. Deeper engagement with the text and the development of automaticity are out of reach. In this situation, context is likely to be of huge importance as the main support when she learn to read. But for 'Rupert', the opposite is true. Word reading has developed rapidly - he is always the ‘first’ in line or ready to listen in class. As a conscientious child, his word reading is so far ahead of of the way he processes context that his strengths in reading accurately and have become the only goal. There is no motivation to integrate context. By age 8, fast reading feels futile and he is losing interest in books.

So for children with strengths and weaknesses in their reading skills, is it possible that a rhythm-based approach can boost re-engagement with learning to read?

Can we use rhythm to re-ignite that spark of motivation when reading development that is not moving forward at expectation?

According to my recent conversation with the year 3 children’s teacher the answer to both these questions must be yes.

She pointed to a remarkable change in the children’s reading, which she thought was a result of doing, as she put it - a lot of things at once. Nothing focuses the mind like combining different actions at once while reading. After all, isn’t this what we do when we learn to drive, ride a bicycle or learn to play a musical instrument?

Let’s drill down…

In her wonderful book, 'Proust and the Squid', Maryanne Wolf refers to the work of Cat Stoodley when describing the parts of the brain that children deploy in the early stages of learning to read. The early stages of developing any skill involve a transition from the general to the specific, meaning that as children become more specialized and streamlined in their skill development, the activity in the brain also becomes more niched. An adult uses smaller and well-defined areas of the brain when reading.

The ‘Universal Reading System’ was named by Charles Perfetti - he is also the cognitive scientist known for setting out the ‘Bottleneck Hypothesis’.

It’s fascinating that reading involves not just one lobe, but all four of the main lobes of the brain. The occipital lobe area at the back of the brain is for visual processing and visual association, the parietal lobe just above and behind the left ear, is for meaning making and the frontal and temporal lobes in front of the left ear - one above the other, process the executive control, the sounds of phonemes and the meanings they represent.

There’s more. Reading is volitional - meaning that it is always an activity that we choose to undertake. However, as children become more skilled, the process of reading becomes automatic. The parts of the brain that are non-volitional - those parts that regulate the aspects of language processing, breathing, digestion, circulation and so on that are beyond our conscious control step into the frame and it’s as if the co-pilot takes over.

These sub cortical areas are more difficult to study because they are located deep inside the brain.We can appreciate their role in learning if we imagine for a moment how it feels to learn a skill - such as driving a car. At first we choose to move the controls in a specific sequence and we repeat the sequence until our body takes over and the sequence starts to flow. It becomes smoother and more efficient. It starts to feel as if we can leave the body to run the sequence, while we can attend to reading the road.

Similarly when we hold a conversation, our articulatory system, jaw movements and breath are coordinated with our utterances as an automated programme, and this means we can attend to reading the gestures, facial cues and attentiveness of the person we are speaking to. Are they following what we are saying -are they looking puzzled or nodding along? As teachers, we read our pupils’ receptivity to learning all the time.

In my opinion, there is a level of reading that we share with other mammals, for example those who live in social groups, and particularly where there is a social hierarchy. Also, I do think that long before we shared a system of squiggles on a clay tablet, we evolved to read natural cues - the direction of the wind, the tracks of animals, the formation of clouds, the behaviour of insects, animals and birds. It is well known that hunter gatherers communicated using certain ways of tearing leaves.

That said, our body automates the reading instinct using subcortical areas of the brain such as the cerebellum, the thalamus and the basal ganglia. These areas build efficiency, fluency and precision into reading and orchestrate the four lobes of the Universal Reading System with millisecond precision and timing. Yes, indeed. And this is why rhythm can make a huge impact to the development of phonemic awareness, reading fluency, reading comprehension - or simply the ease and flow in reading.

In the video I discuss the role of rhythm in the coordination of reading skills and language processes.

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