As a long-time instructor of remedial math at a community college (among other things), I've always felt strongly that our discipline is closely tied to basic natural-language literacy, and to the teaching of reading and writing.
Teaching basic symbolic math is fundamentally the ground-floor of a particular writing language for the sciences. If a student entering an algebra class can't read a sentence (either to follow a direction, answer a word problem, or see the parallel with algebraic equations), attend to fine structure, or understand assertions about symbolic parts-of-speech, then they will flounder. I've written about this here multiple times (see: The War on Structure and Phonics and Bases). Note the subtitle of the blog with its essential spotlight on clear expression.
Two articles in American Educator in the last year so give some hope that the science of structurally-focused reading instruction, with phonics instruction as a key part, may (with great struggle) finally be making a comeback. Both are by reading researchers who have been at the wheel for many decades.
The first is by Louisa C. Moats in Spring 2023, Creating Confident Readers. Moats has developed and taught a program for graduate-program service teachers called LETRS (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling) in some form since the early 1990's. It leans into service teachers becoming knowledgeable about how sounds are articulated in the mouth, how they vary across languages, how they map to written graphemes in English, and how students can decode new texts on their own when necessary.
I think that Moats put the most interesting part at the end of her article (perhaps out of a sense of gently downplaying the section that might be considered the most inflammatory), which I'll highlight here:
Teachers often experience complex emotional reactions as they learn more about the science of reading and the structure of language. Some teachers express grief and regret over their past use of ineffective (but widespread) practices and anger that their prior opportunities to learn about teaching reading were inadequate or even misinformed. A common reaction of participating teachers to their experience in LETRS is, “Why didn’t anybody teach me these things before?” The value of the information is readily apparent when students begin to make progress. Student growth quickly validates teachers’ efforts to teach language, reading, and writing explicitly.
I immediately recognized this comment about “Why didn’t anybody teach me these things
before?” — I've gotten this exact response from students in remedial algebra courses, at key moments where I was identifying and trying fix broken understandings that their K-12 teachers had hopelessly mangled. Moats continues:
In translating concepts and guidance from research, we encourage teachers to confront and abandon ideas, practices, and programs that many have used or been taught—often under district or state standards and requirements—that do not align with current understandings grounded in evidence. For example, many districts are still wedded to programs and approaches based on “cueing systems,” a tenet of guided reading that does not recognize the central role of phonology or phonic decoding in learning to read and spell. An underlying assumption that reading is primarily a visual imprinting activity drives other misconceived but all-too-common practices, such as posting “sight” words on an alphabetic word wall regardless of the beginning sounds in the words (e.g., posting out, once, only, and often under o). Many district and state standards require kindergarten and first-grade readers to memorize dozens of words on flash cards or spell lists of words by rote visual memory, even though in reading science, all words are eventually learned “by sight” through a process of speech-to-print mapping, beginning with phoneme-level processing. Turning away from common but unsupported practices poses dilemmas for teachers and schools because the misconceived ideas have been established in reading education for so long. Many published programs have yet to catch up to the science...
We can see here implications of the primary mistake that proponents of the catastrophic "whole word" approach made — they thought about how proficient readers function (mostly identifying familiar, known words on sight), and assumed students could jump directly to that level without passing through the scaffolding phases that naturally occur beforehand (connecting spoken sounds to written symbols). Moats says this more directly elsewhere:
The ability to recognize printed words out of context, quickly and accurately, is gained not by a visual imprinting process, but by building a mental map connecting speech with print. By learning incrementally how graphemes (letters and letter combinations) represent speech, novice readers and spellers gradually build a mental storehouse of known words that can be instantly recognized and recalled. Every phase of this process depends on the ability to recognize and mentally manipulate the phonemes or speech sounds that make up words (phoneme awareness). From pre-alphabetic, to partial alphabetic, to full alphabetic, and then to consolidated word recognition and recall, children must gradually differentiate the sounds in spoken words and map them to letters and letter sequences.
And another interesting observation:
When teachers have not had ample opportunities to learn how to explain words’ spellings, they are much more inclined to believe—and teach—that the English writing system is chaotic and nonsensical. Believing that is the case too often leads educators to rely on “sight” word methods such as “using your eyes like a camera,” drilling with flash cards, telling students to look at pictures and use context to guess an unknown word, or reciting letter sequences to memorize words.
One central goal of LETRS is to put meaning over rote memorization. That’s why part of the phonics lesson plan is working with the meanings of words that students are learning to decode or spell. Our theoretical frameworks emphasize the importance of connecting sound, meaning, and spelling while the mental code-mapping process is under construction...
On the same theme, another article appeared by Linna C. Ehri in Fall 2023, Phases of Development in Learning to Read and Spell Words. In large part, she reiterates the same natural structure noted by Moats above: (1) pre-alphabetic, (2) partial alphabetic, (3) full alphabetic, and (4) consolidated alphabetic phases. The thing I want highlight here is the rather unsettling introduction of the word "phonics" in a tone that suggests trained K-12 reading instructors have likely never heard of it (!):
To move into the full alphabetic phase, children need to acquire the major letter-sound (grapheme-phoneme) relations of the writing system. They need to acquire decoding skill to sound out letters and blend the sounds to form words. The type of reading instruction that helps children master these skills is called phonics. In systematic phonics instruction, teachers follow a “scope and sequence” chart to teach the major letter-sound relations; they also teach segmenting sounds, decoding words, and spelling skills. Phonics instruction can reduce the time that students spend in the partial alphabetic phase and move them quickly into the full phase, typically by the end of kindergarten or in first grade. The skills children acquire help them store words in their memory for reading by sight and spelling words correctly.
Given that, phonics is the cornerstone to the conclusion of the piece:
In school, children benefit most from systematic phonics instruction to acquire these skills. One great way to support your child’s growth at home is to create lots of opportunities for them to practice reading—and to talk about what you’ve read together to boost their comprehension. And if your child is not progressing through the four phases, be sure to go to their school to ask for additional supports.
I thought that both of these articles were well worth the time spent reading them. If only solid, structural reading skills were taught, we could see widespread benefits not just in language arts, but in other important subjects like math, science, logic, computing, and other technical fields.
