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Reading Theory
Read Right's Success is Grounded In New Assumptions.jpg)
Which is more important to excellence in reading: Each and every word on the page, or all of the complex cognitive processing that the human brain must do to make sense of text? For decades, when students developed a reading problem, they were assisted with methods that focused their attention on the letters and the words on the page. “Sound out that word” and "what is that word" are common directions and approaches associated with most reading intervention programs.
Read Right tutoring never uses these phrases. Instead, our tutoring methods focus on implicit procedural learning in the context of sentence and passage reading.
In 2010, Education Northwest, an independent research firm, conducted a well-controlled, well-designed study (as verified by independent experts at the National Center on Response to Intervention) examining the effectiveness of Read Right's tutoring methods. Significantly, the methods were found to be exceptionally effective, producing rapid reading improvement. The exemplary success of the methodology suggests that word attack strategies that focus a struggling reader’s attention on the individual words on the page are likely not as effective as once believed. Another way to look at the new research: old assumptions about reading do not work as well to correct reading problems as new assumptions.
Read Right Tutoring is Fully Grounded in New Assumptions
Read Right tutoring—delivered at school sites or through our new Online Tutoring Service—operates on the assumption that the development of excellence in the core skill that makes reading useful (comprehension) requires that readers figure out all of the "implicit" aspects of the reading process. What are the “implicit aspects”? Consider this parallel example: When a child learns to ride a two-wheel bike, he must at a subconscious level figure out which muscles to move and when, and how to stay balanced. All kinds of “implicit” neural processing (below the level of conscious awareness) must occur as the child figures out how to make every aspect of the complex process work together. This makes perfect sense, doesn't it? Similar to bicycle riding, new and struggling readers must figure out all of the implicit aspects of the reading process—and these cannot be explicitly taught. The development of reading excellence requires a process of experimenting, failing, and making new attempts until success is achieved in the context of sentence or passage reading, NOT individual word identification. As the reader experiences authentic success with sentence or passage reading over and over again, reading excellence becomes automatic. Again, the focus: Sentence or passage reading, NOT individual word identification.
Is Read Right methodology effective? For more than a decade, schools using our methods have pre-tested and post-tested their students, using the Gates MacGinitie Reading Test. The data consistently documents that Read Right tutoring is highly effective. In 2010, the first independent, gold-standard study of our methods verified that the methods work extraordinarily well—and they work quickly. The reading field rarely sees results as significant as these for reading's most critical component: comprehension. In July 2011, the National Center for Response to Intervention (NCRTI) gave the research examining Read Right exceptionally high marks for reliability. See the ratings here.
Read Right methodology is uniquely different, as demonstrated by the assumptions and theoretical constructs that underly the methdology and account for its effectiveness.
Read Right Assumptions |
Conventional Assumptions |
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Assumption 1: The Source of Reading Problems |
NEURAL NETWORKS Neural networks guide all of the processes we perform—walking, talking, reading, bicycle riding, etc. Reading problems are caused when an individual builds a flawed neural network for guiding the integrated process of reading, which requires the coordination of numerous neural systems. |
BASIC SKILLS Reading problems are caused by lack of explicit knowledge in basic skills: phonemic awareness, phonics and decoding, word identification, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension.
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Assumption 2: Addressing Reading Problems |
IMPLICIT PROCEDURAL LEARNING The only way to eliminate a reading problem is to compel the brain to remodel the neural network that, in struggling readers, is guiding the reading process inappropriately. Because all processes are learned and operate implicitly—below the level of conscious awareness—they cannot be explicitly taught. No one has control over or access to what the brain must do to make reading happen any more than they can access or control what the brain must do to make bicycle riding happen. Fortunately, brains are "plastic," meaning: we can build and remodel neural networks to guide the processes we perform. To eliminate reading problems, the educator must design an environment that will compel the student’s brain to remodel the neural network through experimentation, whereby it figures out all of the implicit aspects of the process. As the brain figures it out, it will begin to produce effortless comfortable reading that sounds like conversational speech with accurate construction of the author’s intended meaning every time it interacts with text. |
EXPLICIT TEACHING AND LEARNING Teachers must bring students to mastery by explicitly teaching skills and strategies required for successful reading. When students have mastered these discrete skills and strategies, they will have become excellent readers.
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Assumption 3: The Main Event of Reading |
ANTICIPATING MEANING Anticipating the author’s message is the foundational strategy of excellent readers—not word identification. The brain does not have to identify individual words and mediate through oral language to ‘get to’ the meaning. The brain is capable of operating directly from meaning. It does this by using cognitive anticipation (creating anticipatory sets) relative to the meaning of the text. In other words, the brain’s job when reading is to use a predictive strategy to anticipate the author’s intended meaning. How does the brain do this? We can’t precisely know because it occurs below the level of conscious awareness. It is extremely complex! But we can create an environment in which the highly efficient and wonderfully adaptive human brain implicitly figures it out. This view explains how it is possible to quickly and efficiently read scrambled paragraphs such as this one:
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WORD IDENTIFICATION The foundation and main event of reading is individual word identification.
The same core ideas about reading (word-by-word reading involving decoding, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension) have existed for about 150 years. The perceived foundation and main event of reading, therefore, is figuring out what the words are via decoding, word attack, and sight word recognition. It is widely believed that, if highly skilled individual word |