This article illustrates the essential insights from the Science of Reading that are crucial in shaping our reading instruction. Read on to find out more.
“What then is the Science of Reading? Placed in a larger context of Learning Sciences, it is a comprehensive field of study that draws insights from various disciplines such as psychology, linguistics, education, and neuroscience. The Science of Reading provides theory-grounded and evidence-based insights that we should incorporate in our approaches to reading instruction.”
Table of Contents
- Reading is no easy feat
- 1. Reading comprehension is fundamentally constructed by two separate components
- 2. There are only 2 main pathways in moving from decoding to linguistic comprehension in the brain. Almost all readers of any language in the modern context use both routes under normal circumstances (e.g. no learning difficulty).
- 3. Reading Development can occur in recognisable stages, though it may be challenging the pinpoint the exact point of development.
- 4. Certain factors have found to be highly correlated with reading comprehension for typically developing learners. Some are within the realm of families, while some within reading instruction.
- 5. Reading has a large effect on vocabulary acquisition, especially in the building of the mental lexicon that is not commonly found in speech.
- 6. Speed Reading is more a marketing mimic – reading fluency is not all about speed.
- 7. Reading Aloud has its place in reading instruction while Silent Reading is far from being silent.
- 8. Not all Languages are made equal when it comes to reading (and Reading Instruction).
- 9. Reading requires instruction and practice.
- Conclusion and Recommended Books (Science of Reading)
- Recommended Readings
- References
Reading is one of the key tenets of language education. Success in reading, or the lack thereof, has profound impact on an individual’s educational and life outcomes (Mulcahy, Bernardes & Baars, 2016). This is why reading instruction is a critical component of education and should be given the utmost attention.
What then is the SCIENCE OF READING? Placed in a larger context of Learning Sciences, it is a comprehensive field of study that draws insights from various disciplines such as psychology, linguistics, education, and neuroscience. The SCIENCE OF READING provides theory-grounded and evidence-based insights that we should incorporate in our approaches to reading instruction.
Reading is no easy feat
As literate adults, reading may seem effortless that we have forgotten our experience as early readers, not to mention the processes where our reading ability actually develops. For one, I could only recall myself viewing many pictures in books (or comic strips) before any actual real processing of words begin.
Yet, as I observe my children now, I can imagine the difficulty I had back then. My wife and I read to and with our children as a pre-sleep routine, and I remembered this experience that took place a couple of weeks ago vividly.
My eldest daughter M1 (aged 8) was just beginning to read “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” silently at one corner. From time to time, she would grunt and comment on how silly Dudley is, and how Harry has to put up with the Dursleys despite already knowing magic.
At the other corner, my second M2 (aged 6) and third one M3 (aged 4) were reading “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt”. This is one book which my wife and I have read to them for “n” number of times, although this was the first time that my second daughter was reading it aloud independently.
Word by word, she read. Because she was reading aloud, we could observe trying to figure the pronunciation of every word she encounters, some of which she could read quite efficiently – read at the sight of the word – while some others she took much more effort – syllable by syllable.
I deliberately paused her in between pages, pointing to random words and testing M3 (who was only passively listening). M3 stared hard for a few seconds, and just smiled sheepishly with her tongue out. When guided further, she could recognise some letters and the phonemic pronunciation (e.g. ‘a’ as possibly “??”). However, she was not able to piece them together to really read any word.
In this one event, my 3 daughters exemplified the different stages of reading ability. M1 was already processing the written language with a certain level comprehension; M2 was starting to demonstrate emergent recognition of words, albeit some more efficient than the others, though her ability to completely comprehend what she read might be limited; M3 was only starting to develop some awareness of pronunciation associated with the alphabet.
Notwithstanding, the key insight I had was: from M3 to M1, there are so many layers of learning before reaching that level of expertise. From M1 to where I am, how many layers are still required?
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1. Reading comprehension is fundamentally constructed by two separate components
Essentially, this is the theoretical position of the SIMPLE VIEW OF READING (Gough & Tunmer, 1986). Despite its name, the Simple View of Reading is far from being simple. It is one of the most fundamental, yet extremely influential, models of reading.
According to this theoretical model, reading comprehension is the product of two separate components “DECODING” and “LINGUISTIC COMPREHENSION”. Based on the model, reading comprehension is not possible without either component.
“DECODING” generally refers to the ability to perform orthographic-phonological and orthographic-semantic mapping, or simply the ability to connect the written linguistic symbols (e.g. letters, graphemes) with the sounds (e.g. phonemes, syllables, morphemes). The skilled decoder is one who can “read isolated words quickly, accurately, and silently”.
On the other hand, “LINGUISTIC COMPREHENSION” refers to the ability to take the semantic meaning of recognised words (or lexical information) to construct sentence-level and/or discourse-level interpretation. LINGUISTIC COMPREHENSION is the composite knowledge of many linguistic components in interaction: semantics, pragmatics, syntax and discourse. Arguably, background knowledge is also an important predictor here.
The SIMPLE VIEW OF READING suggests that if a person struggles with reading, it is likely due to a deficit in one or both of these components. Evidence for this model comes from the study of dyslexia, hyperlexia and garden-variety (or general) reading disability.
The SIMPLE VIEW OF READING has been widely cited in literature and underpins the constructs of reading in many studies on reading. More complicated models of reading may also find traces to this model. A recent meta-analytic review of studies conducted using this model (Hjetland et al., 2020; Taylor, 2022) has also validated the model to be highly efficacious in explaining variation in reading comprehension.
For language educators, especially those focusing on reading instruction, the SIMPLE VIEW OF READING provides a framework to design targeted interventions to help improve reading.
2. There are only 2 main pathways in moving from decoding to linguistic comprehension in the brain. Almost all readers of any language in the modern context use both routes under normal circumstances (e.g. no learning difficulty).
Taking reference from findings in numerous studies on reading and the brain in skilled readers, illiterates and people with reading disability (e.g. surface and deep dyslexia), reading scientists have generally converged on the understanding that the transition from “decoding” to “linguistic comprehension” is mainly achieved via two pathways: the PHONOLOGICALLY MEDIATED PATHWAY and the more DIRECT SEMANTIC PATHWAY (Dehaene, 2009; Seidenberg, 2017; Taylor, 2022; Willingham, 2017).
The PHONOLOGICALLY MEDIATED PATHWAY basically refers to a mapping from orthography to phonology (e.g. print-to-sound), before mapping to semantic meaning (sound-to-meaning). When using this pathway, readers connect the letters/characters or graphemes they see to the sounds they represent (e.g. phonemes) to link up the representations of the words in both dimensions. After that, they then map it to the semantic meaning of the words to discern the exact word to which the print is referring (e.g. bear vs bare, hair vs hare).
Unsurprisingly, the PHONOLOGICALLY MEDIATED PATHWAY is usually heavily utilised by novice readers, where the learners are actively linking up the printed language to the speech words that they could have heard in their daily lives or early learning.
The DIRECT SEMANTIC PATHWAY, in contrast, skips the mapping from orthography to phonology and moves directly from orthography to semantic meaning. In this sense, words become recognised upon “sight” – words become sight words, where the connection to the mental lexicon is direct.
In the past, it was believed that sight words were only those that were frequently used or had unusual spellings. However, it has been discovered that any word can be committed to memory as sight words through sufficient exposure and practice (Ehri, 2014, 2015). The perks of acquiring sight words are that it makes reading easier by eliminating the need to slow down and figure out individual words, allowing attention (e.g. more working memory capacity) to instead focus on the meaning of the text.
Since the DIRECT SEMANTIC PATHWAY is more efficient, should reading instruction just focus on transforming every single word to become sight word? Experts argue otherwise (Dehaene, 2009; Ehri, 2015; Farrall, 2012; National Institute of Child Health and Human, 2000; Seidenberg, 2017; Wolf, 2007) as “decoding” serves multiple purposes for readers. It provides a way for them to pronounce newly encountered words, and it also provides means of verification and establishing new grapheme-to-phonemes representations. In other words, phonics instruction is still very much necessary.
Furthermore, research has also found that even expert readers utilise both pathways in their reading – though in patterns different from the early readers and different across languages. People may argue that different writing systems (of various languages) can result in more exclusive use of a certain pathway, taking the example of Chinese. However, people may not have understood that the writing system of Chinese languages is logosyllabic, where Chinese characters can code for both sounds and meaning.
This important finding thus highlights the importance of phonics instruction, even for phonetically inconsistent languages like English and French. For the Chinese, early readers are also taught the Hanyu Pinyin system (official romanisation system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China) to support early word recognition – the scaffold removed when readers are able to acquire a critical mass of sight words.
3. Reading Development can occur in recognisable stages, though it may be challenging the pinpoint the exact point of development.
In general, reading scientists have consolidated different approaches in describing the stages of development. These different frameworks can help our language educators identify the specific characteristics of our learners at any point in time and facilitate decision-making on the next course of teaching.
One simpler framework is Frith’s model of reading acquisition (1986) which focuses on the main strategies learners typically use in any stage. It comprises 3 typical stages of development: logographic, alphabetic and orthographic. While 3 stages are named, they are not necessarily separated and is mainly a “theoretical simplification” (Dehaene, 2009).
The LOGOGRAPHIC STAGE is somewhat a pre-reading stage, where the learners can attain instant word recognition due to the identification of the salient visual features of specific words (e.g. words “Burger King” when presented in the logo) but may fail to recognise the same words when those visual features are missing or a new form is presented (e.g. “BURger KiNg”). In other words, recognition is inconsistent across contexts.
When a learner progresses to the ALPHABETIC STAGE, he/she starts to develop phonemic awareness – the system of grapheme-to-phoneme (e.g. letter-to-sound) mapping. In this sense, the learner begins to understand words are constructed of individual sound components with different written representations (e.g. f, ph, th). He/she recognises those components and are able to put them together to “evoke the word” in speech.
By the ORTHOGRAPHIC STAGE, the system of grapheme-to-morpheme mapping (e.g. letter or letters to meaning) develops. The learner starts to link the same written representations which were mapped to sound earlier, to meaning. For example, “s” can denote the meaning of plural or more than one when affixed to a singular noun (e.g. boy à boys).
Another model, as presented by Wolf (2007), focuses on the characteristics of learners and consists of 5 stages: (1) emerging pre-reader, (2) novice reader, (3) decoding reader, (4) fluent comprehending reader, and (5) expert reader. The table below illustrates the typical characteristics of the learner at each stage.
Stage
Typical Characteristics
EMERGING READER
(PRE-READING)
- Cumulatively exposed to spoken and written language
- Develops the foundational skills needed for reading, such as phonological awareness and vocabulary
- Deposit a variety of concepts, images, stories into cognitive bank
- Builds up knowledge of print (e.g. notion of books, words have printed forms, words in a language can be printed from left to right or right to left or top to bottom)
NOVICE READER
- Develops phonemic awareness (e.g. understands that specific letters are linked to specific sounds of the language), especially that of the most common letter patterns
- Sets up foundation to learn the major ropes of decoding (e.g. grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules, letters pieced together to form words which represent some semantic meaning)
- Recognition of familiar words, incl. some eventual sight words that do not follow phonological rules (e.g. who, have)
DECODING READER
- Beginning to demonstrate episodes of fluency, though inconsistent and dependent on texts read
- Gains a deeper understanding of the structure of words (e.g. stems, roots, prefixes, and suffixes)
- Becomes familiar with common bound morphemes (e.g. “s” and “ed”), recognising these morphemes as “sight chunks” (the morpheme-equivalent of sight words)
- Develops awareness that many words have similar roots that convey related meanings, despite the different renditions (e.g. link, links, linking, linked, linkage, unlink)
- Emerging capacity to relieve decoding cognitive load to do actual comprehension
FLUENT, COMPREHENDING READER
- With decoding becoming more automatic and efficient, more time and space is targeted at comprehension in the reading process
- Engages texts more cognitively and affectively, with integration of more metaphorical, inferential, analogical, affective background and experiential knowledge (e.g. empathises with characters in stories, synthesis of information presented in informational texts, draw inferences during and after reading, repair faulty comprehension)
EXPERT READER
- Reading happens at extreme high speeds (One half second is all it takes the expert reader to read almost any word)
- Reading is characterised as the “almost instantaneous fusion of cognitive, linguistic, and affective processes”
- Uses a complex combination of comprehension processes in reading
- Develops a transformational relationship with reading, where personal experiences are connected to the written material, and the material can alter our perception of life
Note that Wolf’s model (2007) does not contradict Frith’s model (1986) though it is much more nuanced, especially at the fluent and expert levels. Another note worth mentioning is that not everyone progress through these stages in the same way or at the same pace, and some may even be stalled at a certain stage due to a wide range of reasons (e.g. dyslexia, lack of instruction).
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4. Certain factors have found to be highly correlated with reading comprehension for typically developing learners. Some are within the realm of families, while some within reading instruction.
I have mentioned earlier how decoding and linguistic comprehension have been good predictors of reading comprehension. Reading scientists have also studied other related factors specifically and below are some prominent ones that can have an effect on the level of reading expertise.
A. LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT during the early years of childhood (e.g. during the stage as emergent pre-readers) plays a crucial role in setting the stage for later reading expertise. What this means is that the linguistic experience and wealth that a child accumulates before any actual reading or reading instruction starts can have an effect on the subsequent reading expertise.
This is unsurprising, after we have realised what is required of reading as illustrated earlier. LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT preceding reading will mainly involve the development of spoken language, albeit with the added dimensions of vocabulary (thus the size of the mental lexicon for later mapping) and syntax (thus the ability to string separate words in a sentence to form a coherent meaning).
Sufficient exposure to the spoken language also enables the learner to receive a large sample of contrasting sounds within the speech of the language. This then provides the reference data bank to which the learner can then map the printed letters and words.
B. PHONEMIC AWARENESS
Somewhat related to language development, and which is also affected by language development, is PHONEMIC AWARENESS. This refers to the understanding that spoken language can be separated into smaller units of sound called phonemes. PHONEMIC AWARENESS lays the foundation for grapheme-to-phoneme mapping.
Particularly, PHONEMIC AWARENESS has been shown to strongly predict reading success in different age groups, even in older students. As such, the belief that reading skills can be naturally developed later in life can be misinformed.
While PHONEMIC AWARENESS is facilitated by an essential amount of acquired spoken language, reading scientists generally agree that purposeful deliberate instruction (e.g. rhyming activities) is still required to nurture it in learners. Of course, the “language educators” here need not be trained teachers but can also include the parents or caregivers of the learners.
C. RAPID AUTOMATIC NAMING
RAPID AUTOMATIC NAMING can be defined as the skill of quickly and accurately naming aloud a series of objects, such as letters, numbers, pictures, or colors. This ability is tested through various naming tasks which may appear easy but are actually quite complex.
The speed at which children can perform RAPID AUTOMATIC NAMING has been shown to be a strong indicator of their future reading abilities, taking into consideration other factors such as phonological awareness, intelligence, and current reading level.
Controversies still lie in the explanation of how RAPID AUTOMATIC NAMING relates to reading, as to whether it is a reflection of phonological processing or more correlated to the speed of orthographical representations. The more relevant relationship for language educators, though, is that RAPID AUTOMATIC NAMING is correlated to the ability to perform spelling.
D. SOCIO-ECONOMIC BACKGROUND
To claim that SOCIO-ECONOMIC BACKGROUND causes variation in reading levels will be frivolous. However, SOCIO-ECONOMIC BACKGROUND variables do have a moderate correlation with reading comprehension (Hjetland et al., 2020).
I have earlier mentioned how fluent and expert readers bring background knowledge to the text, which can affect their understanding and engagement with the text. Learners from more privileged SOCIO-ECONOMIC BACKGROUNDs have the luxury of a wider range of experiences to thus better comprehend what is being written.
Furthermore, learners from more privileged SOCIO-ECONOMIC BACKGROUNDs generally have a larger wealth of access to books, language development and reading experiences prior to any formal reading instruction. The gap between the privileged and the under-privileged can be summarised into “thirty million words” – the difference in the number of words heard in children by end of three years old from professional homes and those from welfare homes in the US (Suskind, 2015).
5. Reading has a large effect on vocabulary acquisition, especially in the building of the mental lexicon that is not commonly found in speech.
While reading comprehension can be influenced by the size of the mental lexicon, the relationship is bidirectional: reading also plays a crucial role in VOCABULARY ACQUISITION. The more someone reads, the more opportunities they have to encounter new words, which increases the likelihood of expanding their vocabulary.
As children grows older, the difference between the vocabulary found in writing and speaking becomes increasingly important. During infancy, adult speech provides a lot of new words to acquire, but they will mostly learn the words that are used frequently by those around them, such as their parents, caregivers or preschool teachers. While teachers and parents can opt to use more infrequent words, this may be difficult to implement for older children who already know a lot of words. For them, reading moderately challenging material will be the primary way they encounter new words and enhance the richness of their mental lexicon.
As learners progress in formal schooling, their understanding of new words increasingly comes from reading rather than spoken language. Written texts, regardless of fiction or non-fiction, often contain more uncommon words than natural conversations, and the act of decoding printed words while reading can help to solidify the link between the word and its meaning in memory.
In summary, reading is considered a critical factor in VOCABULARY ACQUISITION as it provides exposure to new words from a wider range of contexts.
6. Speed Reading is more a marketing mimic – reading fluency is not all about speed.
One major misconception of READING FLUENCY is that it is all about speed. That is one reason why there might be many commercial approaches or ironically misguided guidebooks that perpetrate speed reading techniques as routes to READING FLUENCY.
READING FLUENCY is not just about how quickly one can read, but rather the ability to utilise all the information the reader has about a word – its letters, patterns, meanings, and grammar – in a fast enough manner to allow for comprehension. The goal of fluency is to truly read and comprehend.
Many proponents, or self-proclaimed speed-reading expert/entrepreneurs, tend to rely on personal testimonials to market their courses, guides or techniques, while avoiding close cross-examination from reading scientists. However, claims such as those that declares the ability to read over “30,000 words per minute and comprehension level of 95 percent” are not supported by reading science.
One critical characteristic of reading starts from our visual system, and the scope of perceptual information it can take at any moment. In simpler words, there is a hard limit in the number of words that can go into your eyes physically at any time (unless you are a superhuman from the comics). These fundamentals would have invalidated those claims – they are just not plausible.
The basic “truth” behind the speed reading industry, thus, lies in skimming. All of us read for different purposes, and adults that hope to gain speed reading capabilities are probably those that will want to consume large amount of texts not for leisure, but for other functional purposes – directed by some explicit identifiable objectives. These facilitates skimming – reading for gist by sampling texts without the need to make a lot of fixations and focused zooming, and thus compromising in comprehension where details are concerned.
Of course, skimming is useful for its purpose for those who employ it, but that is not the READING FLUENCY that we are more interested in. While speed is one factor in READING FLUENCY, we also need to note that READING FLUENCY is also about the ability to read texts effortlessly, accompanied with accurate comprehension and deeper engagement with the text.
7. Reading Aloud has its place in reading instruction while Silent Reading is far from being silent.
The instructional activity of READING ALOUD can sometimes be ridiculed by its opponents, citing its disempowering effects (e.g. making nervous learners read aloud texts that they are completely unconfident of reading). While the pedagogy in implementing an activity of READING ALOUD can definitely be further improved, reading scientists have identified it to be a useful aspect of reading instruction.
Remembered the story I told about my daughter reading? It was only through READING ALOUD that my wife and I could observe her current reading level and her struggles, providing us explicit leverage points we could use to improve her reading skill. READING ALOUD reveals what a learner knows or doesn’t know about words, and provides important evidence of learning progress to which language educators or parents can respond.
Research has also found READING ALOUD to be closely connected with reading expertise. If children who have difficulty reading texts aloud are simply left to read silently, they will not improve their reading expertise. Their struggles will only become less noticeable, rather than being resolved. They become handicapped with the inability to use the phonological pathway to reading.
To unpack this further, one key explanation is that READING ALOUD challenges the learner to bring the print-to-sound mapping into explicit awareness – essentially what we say phonemic awareness. In that sense, READING ALOUD becomes a simplified term for the concept “phonological recoding”, where learners build the connection between speech and print. The habit formed becomes an important strategy for learners to do their own “self-teaching”.
On a related note, SILENT READING has also been discovered to be far from being silent. Research has found the recovery of the phonological aspects of the text (e.g. think about reading conversations in print) is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the reading process, which is also explained by the pathways to reading I have shared earlier. In that sense, skilled SILENT READING (and not those reading but suffering in silence) is actually packed with silent prosody and noise.
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8. Not all Languages are made equal when it comes to reading (and Reading Instruction).
Perhaps one question that has been lingering all this while is whether or not reading is qualitatively different in various languages. Prior to discussing this, we need to reinforce a few core findings from reading science: reading comprehension is fundamentally made up of “decoding” and “linguistic comprehension”; and the routes between both has been understood to be limited to two pathways: the phonologically mediated pathway (e.g. grapheme-sound-meaning) and the more direct semantic pathway (e.g. grapheme- meaning). These findings hold regardless of languages.
However, there are certain languages that lend themselves quicker for reading acquisition, notably because of the writing systems adopted. Scholars who studied writing systems have coined a concept – transparency – of writing systems.
TRANSPARENT LANGUAGES refer to those which writing systems comprise simple rules governing spelling-to-sound. Examples of such languages are German, Italian and Spanish. In such languages, letter-to-sound conversion rules are simple where every distinctive grapheme represent a distinctive phoneme with little exceptions. In other words, if you can pronounce the letters accurately, you can generally pronounce any word in that language accurately.
OPAQUE LANGUAGES, on the other hand, are less straightforward. Every letter in the alphabet may represent a range of phonemes – or what we usually describe as “phonetically inconsistent”. English is one such language, where “ea” (bear, dear, each, mean) and “ough” (tough, though, through) are classic examples of inconsistency. In such languages, while there are still general letter-to-sound conversion rules, but learners will have to deal with the many other exceptions – they need to learn many as “sight words”.
At the extreme end of OPAQUE LANGUAGES are Chinese and Japanese where logograms are used in the writing system. In such languages, readers must memorize a large number of characters (for example, around 7,000 are necessary for everyday reading in Chinese, while up to 40,000 are used in literature). They must also learn to associate each character with its corresponding spoken word.
Due to the different challenges involved, children of the various native languages tend to attain varying levels of reading expertise systematically at different ages. Unsurprisingly, learners of transparent languages tend to be able to achieve independent reading faster. Regardless of these differences, it is important to note that most learners will still gain fluent reading expertise given proper reading instruction regardless of languages (except those with learning difficulties).
9. Reading requires instruction and practice.
Congratulations! If you have not skimmed the article and made it this far, you have completed a great deal of reading here. It might be difficult to reimagine yourself as a reader in the earlier stages, when you were still spending loads of memory space in decoding – that probably happens quite some time ago.
Unlike vision and speech, reading is not a natural process. It has to be taught and conditioned. Reading to children does not guarantee that they will learn to read. Children learn spoken language through exposure and use, but learning to read requires more structured guidance and feedback than what is typically provided through casual reading to children.
“Children who are read to until the cow jumps over the moon can still have difficulty becoming readers.”
Seidenberg, 2017
Unlike vision and speech, reading is not a natural process. It has to be taught and conditioned. Reading to children does not guarantee that they will learn to read. Children learn spoken language through exposure and use but learning to read requires more structured guidance and feedback than what is typically provided through casual reading to children.
Many aspects of language education are essential to the development of reading expertise: word recognition skills (e.g. phonics to facilitate letter-sound mapping), explicit vocabulary instruction, comprehension skills, etc. These would be beyond the scope of this article, but the key message is that reading is not an organic skill that can be acquired through practice (without intervention and feedback).
Notwithstanding such, following instruction deliberate practice is imperative to acquisition of reading expertise. Akin to skills like swimming and cycling, reading also requires practice over extended periods to achieve automaticity. Learners need to test out their representation of the rules in the both pathways of reading, even if they are not aware of it. Every time they encounter new samples of texts, they update their statistical representation and either discard previous hypotheses and form new ones; or reinforce and consolidate previous understandings.
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Conclusion and Recommended Books (Science of Reading)
This article has brought us on a journey through some of the most important findings from the SCIENCE OF READING. Reading is an important generative skill that is vital to language learning itself, and can also have considerable impact on other domains of life. As language educators, we have a key role to play in developing reading expertise in our learners.
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Recommended Readings
- Cowley, S.J. (2021). Reading: skilled linguistic action. Language Sciences, 84.
- Dehaene, S. (2009). Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention. New York USA: Viking (Penguin Group).
- Frith, U. (1986). A developmental framework for developmental dyslexia. Annals of Dyslexia 36, 67–81.
- Gough, P. B., & Tunmer, W. E. (1986). Decoding, Reading, and Reading Disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7(1), 6–10.
- Hjetland, H.N., Brinchmann, E.I., Scherer, R., Hulme, C., & Melby-Lervåg, M. (2020). Preschool pathways to reading comprehension: A systematic meta-analytic review. Educational Research Review, 30.
- Hoover, W.A., & Gough, P.B. (1990). The Simple View of Reading. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2, 127-160.
- McGuinness, D. (2005). Language Development and Learning to Read: The Scientific Study of How Language Development Affects Reading Skill. Cambridge USA: The MIT Press.
- National Institute of Child Health and Human. (2000). National Reading Panel. Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. Report of the subgroups. Washington, DC.
- Scarborough, H. S. (2009). Connecting early language and literacy to later reading (dis)abilities: Evidence, theory, and practice. In Fletcher-Campbell, F., Soler. J., & Reid, G. (Eds.), Approaching Difficulties in Literacy Development: Assessment, Pedagogy and Programmes (pp. 23 – 38). Milton Keynes UK: The Open University.
- Seidenberg, M. (2017). Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can’t and What can be Done about It. New York USA: Basic Books.
- Willingham, D.T. (2017). The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads. San Francisco USA: JosseyBass.
- Wolf, M. (2007). Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. New York USA: Harper.
References
Benischek, A., Long, X., Rohr, C.S., Bray, S., Dewey, D., & Lebel, C. (2020). Pre-reading language abilities and the brain’s functional reading network in young children. NeuroImage, 217.
Caravolas, M., & Samara, A. (2015). Learning to Read and Spell Words in Different Writing Systems. In Pollatsek, A., & Treiman, R. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Reading (pp. 326 – 343). New York USA: Oxford University Press.
Cowley, S.J. (2021). Reading: skilled linguistic action. Language Sciences, 84.
Dehaene, S. (2009). Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention. New York USA: Viking (Penguin Group).
Ehri, L.C. (2014). Orthographic Mapping in the Acquisition of Sight Word Reading, Spelling Memory, and Vocabulary Learning. Scientific Studies of Reading, 18(1), 5-21.
Ehri, L.C. (2015). How Children Learn to Read Words. In Pollatsek, A., & Treiman, R. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Reading (pp. 293 – 310). New York USA: Oxford University Press.
Farrall, M.L. (2012). Reading Assessment: Linking Language, Literacy, and Cognition. Hoboken USA: John Wiley & Sons.
Fox, E., & Alexander, P.A. (2011). Learning to Read. In Mayer, R.E., & Alexander, P.A. (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Learning and Instruction (pp. 7 – 31). New York USA: Routledge.
Frith, U. (1986). A developmental framework for developmental dyslexia. Annals of Dyslexia 36, 67–81.
Goswami, U. (2009). Reading, Dyslexia and the Brain. In Fletcher-Campbell, F., Soler. J., & Reid, G. (Eds.), Approaching Difficulties in Literacy Development: Assessment, Pedagogy and Programmes (pp. 9 – 22). Milton Keynes UK: The Open University.
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