Reading Research Leading to Teaching Practice

Julie Christensen welcomes the arrival of the science of reading into more of our classrooms

For years, research into how students learn to read has progressed without really making its way into the classrooms where that learning is happening. Certainly, we’ve made progress. When my parents learned to read in the 1940s, reading was often taught using a “look and say” method. For example, students were shown the word cat and were simply told the identity of the word, leaving fledgling readers to memorize words or decode for themselves how letters come together to form them.

Teachers offer better guidance these days, but the science of reading has yet to make it into the classroom in an optimal way, largely because those in many higher learning institutions haven’t committed to it as the most effective way to teach reading. Research has not been widely translated into practice.

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