Science of Reading: A Critique

A Bilingual Educator’s Critique of the Science of Reading Movement

Jill Kerper Mora

UPDATE: Opposition to California Assembly Bill AB 2222

The Science of Reading is a hot topic on the internet and in the media these days. A plethora of Facebook groups and other social media venues advertising themselves as Science of Reading for XYZ group of educators have sprung up recently. These groups are drawing considerable interest and lots of members with hundreds of comments daily. One example is a Facebook group that calls itself Science of Reading for Bilingual Education. Many of the posts in this group are by dual language teachers who are seeking information about whether the instructional programs they are using in their classrooms are “Science of Reading-aligned.” These queries reflect a genuine concern among teachers who seek confirmation and validation that their instructional approaches are maximally effective for the students they teach.

The issue with these social media that tout their bilingual credentials is that there is often no way for teachers to verify the bona fide expertise of group administrators or participants who comment in the group on the Science of Reading (SoR) research. This is especially problematic for teachers in dual language programs who implement instruction for bilingual and biliteracy learners. This concern is what prompts me to post this analysis and critique of the SoR. My purpose is to challenge the claims made in these groups by self-proclaimed “experts” regarding the research on literacy instruction in Spanish/English dual language programs. I present this critique of the SoR as it applies to bilingual learners based on my 40 years of experience as a bilingual teacher, teacher educator and researcher.

This analysis makes an important distinction between the Science of Reading and the Science of Reading Movement (SoRM). Bilingual educators who visit my website do so with trust in my advocacy for biliteracy learners and their teachers, families, and communities. The term Science of Reading is a global descriptor of research from multiple academic disciplines that informs literacy program design and instruction (reading and writing). In and of itself, the term is not problematic. However, determining the extent to which research meets the criteria for claiming that it is “science” or “scientific” very quickly becomes problematic. Much of what is touted as the Science of Reading does not meet the criteria that the research community sets for itself to ensure the credibility and legitimacy of research and the interpretation and application of research findings. A concern is that the term “science” is being used as a cudgel to marginalize and discredit certain theoretical perspectives and bodies of data that have a track record confirming their legitimacy and credibility, while some other research frameworks claim to be “more scientific than thou.” When we go below the surface, we discover misuse and abuse of the notion of scientific research in service of ideological and political agendas.

Click here for information about the blocking of Science of Reading legislation in California, Assembly Bill 2222 (Rubio) based on a rationale as to why educators and the public should oppose this bill.

Purpose of the Critique of the Science of Reading (SoR) Movement

The purpose of this critique of the Science of Reading is to accomplish the following:

Review criteria for judging the legitimacy and credibility of claims made in the name of science.
Identify misrepresentations, misinterpretations, and misapplications of scientific research that lead away from, rather than toward, effective literacy instruction.
Examine what neuroscience research tells us about the bilingual brain and literacy learning to articulate the implications of bilingual brain research for effective instruction for multilingual learners.
Present the research that documents the “common thread” of metalinguistic skills between decoding and language comprehension that challenges the SoR proponents’ arguments against “cueing” from the applied linguistics and psycholinguistic perspectives on the relationship between the two components of the Simple View of Reading.
Debunk false claims that are unscientific and without a credible evidence base in the research literature made by proponents of the Science of Reading to avoid perpetuating inequities in language and literary education for multilingual learners.

The format for this analysis is a presentation of a summary of an argument that I make with a link to further elaboration of the argument on a separate webpage. I begin with an analysis of the media’s portrayal of the Science of Reading perspective of the Reading Wars. I elaborate on how journalists are framing an argument around particular teaching strategies for the purpose of promoting fear and distrust of teachers and publishers of instructional programs to promote policies and regulation to mandate more teaching of phonics in the public schools. I present the reasons why this media campaign is detrimental to public education, and specifically to language minority students. I point out that despite claims of “science” as the basis for the policies that the Science of Reading Movement promotes, the media’s portrayal of reading research and the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of certain instructional practices do not qualify as scientific. The SoR Movement seeks to politicize rather than professionalize the teaching of reading and writing in the public schools. The purpose of this analysis is to empower teachers to combat the abuse of the term “science” and to respond with knowledge and expertise to false claims and misrepresented research from the SoR Movement.

Here I list the related webpages that together present a thorough analysis and critique of the applications of the Science of Reading to language and literacy instruction for multilingual learners.

California Assembly Bill 2222: The Latest Battlefront in the Reading Wars

The Science of Reading Media Campaign

Fact-checking the Science of Reading: A Dual Language Educator’s Perspective

Neuroscience Research: Literacy Learning in the Bilingual Brain

Miscue Analysis Research: The Ghost of Whole Language

The Structured Literacy Approach: Implications for Multilingual Learners

Lexical Inferencing: The Truth About Cueing

Science as Metaphor: Debunking the More-Scientific-Than-Thou Argument

Simple View of Reading

Is Reading Natural? A Metalinguistic Perspective

California’s Reading Wars: A Brief History

Science of Reading Legislation: Unconstitutional Laws and Indecipherable Policy

Let us examine together the claims and counterclaims that arise from the new battlefront in the Reading Wars

The Media Portrayal of the Science of Reading

An article in a supplemental edition of the Reading Research Quarterly (MacPhee, Handsfield & Paugh, 2020) titled “Conflict or Conversation? Media portrayals of the Science of Reading” provides an analysis of the media uses strategic metaphorical framing to politicize the teaching of reading. Emily Hanford of APR Reports is one of the journalists’ writing that these reading researchers reviewed to illustrate how the media use discourse intended to perpetuate conflict over conversation. Hanford has authored eight articles between 2017 and 2020 portraying the Reading Wars as a public policy crisis in education. Hanford’s reports carry titles like “Hard to Read” and “Sold a Story” and “Hard Words: Why aren’t kids being taught to read?” MacPhee et al., (2021) express their concerns about media portrayals of the science of reading with this statement: “The media have asserted a direct connection between basic research and instructional practice that, without sufficient translational research that attends to a variety of instructional contexts and student populations, may perpetuate inequities.” (p. S145).

Remember that the title of American Public Media’s reporter Emily Hanford’s podcast series about the Science of Reading is “Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong.” When I listened to Hanford’s podcast, the question I asked myself is this: How does a journalist get the teaching of reading so wrong, all the while claiming that highly respected literacy pioneers are wrong? How can a journalist who obviously knows so little about academic research consider herself qualified to critique literacy researchers?

Anti-cueing Legislation

On May 10, 2023 Sarah Schwartz of Education Week published an update on the fate of “three-cueing” in Science of Reading mandates. Schwartz reports state legislatures in Arkansas, Louisiana and Indiana “cueing” is now officially banned in public schools. See ‘Science of Reading’ Mandates (edweek.org)

“Most of these laws promote the adoption of evidence-based practices. But some legislation also bans methods that researchers have called into question. The new Indiana law takes aim at one particular instructional practice—a technique often referred to as “three cueing.” … The term refers to one method for reading instruction and assessment that’s included in popular curriculum materials and often taught to teachers in preparation programs. It teaches that students can rely on multiple sources of information, or cues, to figure out words. They might look at the letters to sound the word out, but they could also rely on context or pictures to make a guess. … Many reading researchers have warned against the practice, saying that it can discourage children from putting their phonics knowledge into practice and teach them to rely on ineffective strategies.”

The lack of identification of the “many reading researchers” who have warned against “cueing” and “three-cueing” that is allegedly a theoretical model of reading is itself problematic. This is because other researchers cannot challenge their claims since we are unable to access the empirical studies on which they allegedly base this “warning.” Nor can their fellow researchers dialogue with these “many reading researchers” to offer their own perspective on logical coherence of these warnings, which they allegedly base on scientific research themselves. So perhaps these “many reading researchers” are simply using the term “science” as a metaphor to lend credibility to their ideological assertions.

Click here for an analysis of Indiana Senate Bill No. 1558 that is intended to outlaw “cueing” and “three-cueing” in literacy instruction in public schools.

Cueing: The Scapegoat Du Jour

We must note that reading researchers who have created a large database of the oral reading performance of hundreds of students do not use the term “cueing” as a verb. Nor do they use the term “cueing” or “three-cueing” to describe the instructional strategies that teachers use. This is because the “cueing systems” in research studies are subsystems of language. Each language subsystem provides “cues” to the meaning of the language that an author uses to communicate his/her ideas through written text. What Emily Hanford and Sarah Schwartz describe as “cueing” is, in actuality, direct, explicit and systematic instruction through transactional feedback that a teacher provides an individual student as the learner reads a passage orally with the teacher, one-on-one. The reader’s process of making meaning from language is inherent in producing and comprehending language, whether it is oral or written language. Therefore, the process of “cueing” in reading continuous text must be based on the linguistic cues or signals available from the printed language of the text.

If we were to eradicate the terms “cue” and “cueing” from all literacy education research, programs and instructional materials, or even totally from the English language, the reality of the signaling function of the multiple subsystems of language is unaffected. This is because “cueing” is the way language works to convey meaning and teachers must teach students how to discern and utilize these cueing systems of language in order to read and write. Therefore, misguided policymakers may ban teachers from using “cueing” as an instructional practice, but they cannot ban language from cueing meaning through its multiple cueing subsystems. “Cueing” is merely a scapegoat used by the Science of Reading advocates in an attempt to discredit the research base and pedagogy of psycholinguistics and cognitive science (Mora, 2023).

Void for Vagueness

I am the daughter of two lawyers. Conversations about the Rule of Law were a daily event at our family dinner table. One thing I learned from Mom and Dad was about how laws are often found to be unconstitutional because they ruled to be “void for vagueness.” This is because, according to my dear parents, a law must clearly define what conduct is prohibited in order for an average person to modify his/her behavior so as not to run afoul of the law. So, teachers must ask whoever is claiming that the “3-cueing strategy” should be banned from their classroom, exactly what behavior (as a teacher) s/he must not engage in to avoid getting busted by the Strategy Police in their school. One of the points I am making in my LM article is that if semantics as a “cueing system” are banned, vocabulary teaching is banned. If syntax as a “cueing system” is banned, then grammar teaching is banned. The only “cueing system” left out of the three is grapho-phonics. Is this pedagogical censorship really going to improve reading comprehension since semantics and syntax are both necessary for listening comprehension (understanding speech)?

Arkansas, Indiana and Louisiana are among a number of states that have passed legislation with provisions that ostensibly ban 3-cueing. Now a bill in California has been proposed that lifts language from the Ohio Science of Reading legislation. The language of AB 2222 defines the science of reading and requires that instruction “Does not rely on any model of word reading based on meaning, structure, and syntax, and visual cues…” (Section 60011-(b)(5). In some cases, the language of the states’ legislation explicitly stating that the reason for this is that “3-cueing” is a Whole Language theory (which it is not). Teachers must point out that if the State bans certain instructional strategies without being clear on exactly what is banned, teachers will simply stop giving students any “corrective feedback” whatsoever when they are listening to them read orally. These bans should be declared void for vagueness. It’s like banning books, which has actually happened as a consequence of bans against theories, models and approaches to literacy instruction. Many teachers have removed their entire classroom libraries to protect themselves from inadvertently allowing their students to read a book that has been banned. And then there is this consideration: What business does the State, specifically state legislatures have telling teachers how to interact one-on-one with their students? Isn’t this external interference with their duties and obligations in their employment as teachers, who are, after all, credentialed by the State to perform these duties? And what about use of “three-cueing” for assessment purposes, to determine what explicit, direct instruction will be most helpful in supporting reading comprehension for the students in the teacher’s own classroom?

Click here to read more about the research on readers’ miscues in oral reading referred to as miscue analysis. Keep in mind that this is actually the body of research that Hanford and Swartz claim has been “disproven” and “debunked.”

Click here for further debunking of the media’s claims against “three cueing” as a strategy for reading instruction based on the multidisciplinary research in second/foreign language acquisition on lexical inferencing.

When the Science of Reading is Not Science

Yet another example of the SoR Movement’s attack on “three cueing appeared in the February 2023 Language Magazine in an article by Kari Kurto titled “Clarifying the Science of Reading.” Kari Kurto is the National Science of Reading project director at The Reading League. Ms. Kurto’s argument against certain pedagogical practices without citing any scholarly scientific theoretical framework or empirical research illustrates the very core of the problem with the “Science of Reading.” First, Ms. Kurto makes this claim: “The scientifically based research on reading instruction is a critical understanding that has not been historically provided to educators.” No citation is provided here, so we must conclude that this is Ms. Kurto’s opinion. On what basis does she make this claim? Is this claim true? Based on what evidence? If so, who is it that has allegedly withheld this “critical understanding” from educators? And why would the culprit have done this? What could the motive possibly be for withholding “scientifically based research on reading instruction” from educators?

Next, Ms. Kurto makes this sweeping claim, again without citing any scientific research studies: “Currently, practices that run counter to how the brain processes print and language, such as three-cueing and leveled literacy, are still widely used in classrooms.” Ms. Kurto provides no citation from any “reading scientists” as an authoritative source of scientific research to support her claim that a certain “practice” called “three-cueing” and a certain commercial program called “leveled literacy” run counter to neuroscience research on how the brain “…processes print.” Since Ms. Kurto provides no citations, as a researcher myself, I have no way to look up the studies that may have empirical data to support this claim, if such data exists. It is unclear what it is that teachers are being told to stop doing by the reading scientists, but it sure seems like that’s what the Director of the SOR project for the Reading League expects to happen.

Are we in the academic research community expected to simply take Ms. Kurto’s word for it? Ms. Kurto is speaking in code here to followers of the media campaign against scientific research that does not fit the SoR Movement’s definition of “scientific.” The claim that certain reading instruction practices or strategies run counter to brain research is patently false. There are overtones of this argument in this article by Kari Kurto of The Reading League. Yet, Ms. Kurto of the Reading League does not cite Emily Hanford as the authority for the rejection of “three-cueing and leveled literacy” in her article in Language Magazine. Click here for an explanation of the findings of the neuroscience research on literacy.

Are journalists really qualified to declare a theory about reading to have been disproven? Are they qualified to pick winners and losers in the Reading War? Let us compare the media theories of reading that are claimed to be based on science with what neuroscientists themselves say about reading in the brain through their peer-reviewed published research. A frequently referenced theory about reading is called the Simple View of Reading (Hoover & Gough, 1990). Kurto (2023) cites this study in the Reading League article, calling the SVR theory “…the research that the framework used to describe the reading process is built upon…” (p. 34). The theoretical framing and research on this theory can inform our understanding of the two sides of the Reading Wars debate. Click here for a description and analysis of the theory of the Simple View of Reading.

Theory in Education Policy and Practice

The nature of the problem posed by dubious claims made in the name of the Science of Reading is that the education community and the academic education research community expect SoR proponents and advocates to themselves adhere the standards for scientific research to support their claims. Professor Jim Cummins in his book titled “Rethinking the Education of Multilingual Learners” (2021: 136), describes the process in the mainstream of scientific inquiry for ensuring the legitimacy and credibility of claims.

“In complex educational contexts, research findings become relevant for policy purposes only in the context of coherent theoretical models or frameworks. It is the theory rather than the individual research findings that permits the generation of predictions about program outcomes under different conditions. Research findings themselves cannot be directly applied across contexts. However, when certain patterns are replicated across a wide range of sociolinguistic and sociopolitical contexts, the accumulation of consistent findings suggests that some stable underlying principle is at work. This principle can then be states as a theoretical proposition or hypothesis from which predictions can be derived and tested through the accumulation of additional data…. This process is in the mainstream of scientific inquiry… observing phenomena, forming hypotheses to account for the observed phenomena, testing these hypotheses against additional data, and gradually refining the hypotheses into more comprehensive theories or models that have broader explanatory and predictive power.” (p. 136)

Professor Cummins (2021) offers three criteria for evaluating constructs and claims that are advanced under the rubric of the analytical processes common to all scientific inquiry:

Empirical adequacy—to what extent is the claim consistent with all the relevant empirical evidence?
Logical coherence—to what extent is the claim internally consistent and non-contradictory?
Consequential validity—to what extent is the claim useful in promoting effective pedagogy and policies?

Cummins suggests that these criteria “… enable us to distinguish between evidence-free ideological claims and evidence-based, logically coherent and pedagogically useful claims.” The criteria of empirical adequacy and logical coherence apply to all theoretical propositions, while the criterion of consequential validity is context specific” This is because “… isolated research findings become relevant for social policy and educational practice only when they are integrated into coherent theoretical frameworks.” (p. 191-192).

Click here for an analysis of the legitimacy and credibility of the arguments against “three-cueing” based on Professor Cummins’ criteria.

Also, please see this article in the June edition of Language Magazine that presents an analysis of the arguments against “three-cueing” based on Professor Cummins’ criteria for judging the legitimacy of claims about research. Mora, J.K. (June, 2023). To cue or not to cue: Is that the question? Language Magazine, 18-20.

Click here for an overview of why we bilingual educators understand and utilize the research base of the approach that became known as Whole Language.

Why Literacy Research Matters

The latest battle in the Reading War pits three identified approaches to literacy instruction against each other: Whole Language, Balanced Literacy and Structured Literacy. The Science of Reading Movement has taken the stance that the Structured Literacy approach is the only approach that is supported through “scientific” research. Consequently, this anonymous group of self-proclaimed experts is claiming to have the authority to determine what commercial programs and instructional practices meet their criteria for being “scientifically based” and effective. They are attempting to take on regulatory power and authority that is beyond the scope of identifiable government agencies and academic entities. We in the community of advocates for educational equity for multilingual learners must challenge this encroachment on our knowledge base and policy initiatives. Our knowledge base for multilingual literacy includes the legitimate and credible research from Spanish-speaking countries on literacy learning and teaching of monolingual Spanish-speaking student populations. Click here for Dr. Mora’s review of Spanish literacy research.

In conclusion, the claims and arguments of the Science of Reading Movement against multidisciplinary research on second/foreign language acquisition do not themselves meet the criteria for scientific research. For instance, the neuroscience of reading research provides evidence to affirm the applicability of the reciprocity of the components of the Simple View of Reading: decoding and comprehension. The neuroscience research does not delegitimize any particular approach to reading and writing instruction or nullify other research data bases. Instead, this extensive body of research leads to understandings of the universals of learning to read and write in different languages’ orthographies while highlighting language-specific features of their linguistic subsystems. Bilingual educators must be critical consumers of research who are vigilant in recognizing when research is being used for ideological and political purposes rather than to enhance teacher agency for supporting literacy learning for all students.

Please click on this link to view Dr. Mora’s CABE 2023 Conference presentation on the bilingual brain research titled El Cerebro Lector: Avoiding Anglocentricities in Appling Neuroscience Research.

Click here for my article in the Multilingual Educator 2024 CABE Conference Edition titled “Reaffirming Multilingual Educators’ Pedagogical Knowledge Base.”

Thank you for your attention. I invite your comments and feedback.
Jill Kerper Mora

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