A Multilingual Educator Fact-Checks SoR Claims: Executive Summary
Fact-checking 10 Science of Reading Claims: A Multilingual Education Perspective
Executive Summary
Jill Kerper Mora, Ed.D.
San Diego State University
Click here for Dr. Mora’s Multilingual Education Perspective on SoR Ten Claims
Statement of Purpose
The purpose of this analysis of the 10 Claims of the Science of Reading (SoR is to provide the perspective of a bilingual teacher, teacher educator and researcher with 40 plus years of experience in language and literacy education of multilingual learners on bodies of research literature that tend to be omitted and/or discounted from the research identified as The Science of Reading. A pivotal issue in this argument is the issue of population validity. Population validity is a type of external validity which describes how well the sample used can be extrapolated to a population as a whole. However, my concerns about population validity of SoR research center around the applicability of SoR claims to determining the components and characteristics of effective literacy instruction for students who are learning to read in English as a new or second language who have not yet acquired a proficiency in English equivalent to their native-English speaking age and grade-level peers. Clearly, the pedagogical implications for curriculum and instruction must recognize and accommodate the differences between students who are learning to read in a second language and learning to read a second language. The same set of assumptions on which literacy instruction is based do not apply universally to emergent bilingual learners whose English language proficiency is developing across the span of elementary school grades. In addition, the SoR Movement appeared to discount the literacy acquisition trajectory and advantages stemming from biliteracy instruction for emergent biliteracy learners who were in dual language immersion programs. Consequently, advocacy organizations for language minority students opposed several of the policy initiatives supported through legislation by the SoR Movement (Mora, et al., 2024).
At the time of this writing, the California Assembly was voting on a bill, AB 1454 (Rivas) introduced on May 6, 2025 titled “Pupil literacy: administrative services credential program standards and professional development: instructional materials.” This legislation was proposed as a compromise bill resulting from negotiations between multiple organizations that represent different constituencies of stakeholders in literacy education policy for California’s linguistically and culturally diverse student population. According to Californias Together, 40% of California’s students speak a language other than English in the home (Buenrostro, 2024). It is within the context of proposed legislation mandating the Science of Reading, as defined in Assembly bills during the year from March 2024 through May 2025 that I, Dr. Mora, have undertaken this analysis of the 10 Claims examined in “Fact-checking the Science of Reading: Opening up the Conversation (Tierney & Pearson, 2024). The purpose of the 10 Claims of the Science of Reading (SoR) as Professors Tierney and Pearson state this:
“Our concern is that the central claims employed by advocates of the SoR, especially in popular and social media, exceed the evidence supporting them. (p. 4) The SoR is an important story. And while it is a force for good in the sense that it ensures an emphasis on important foundational skills, it is also responsible for prompting practices that outstrip the evidence supporting them, such as limiting the range of phonics options available to teachers, overemphasizing phonemic awareness or decodable text, or denying access to context clues for unlocking unknown words. Likewise, it should not ignore other pathways to being literate and learning to read especially those that intermesh with reading for meaning via an orchestration of knowledge and language cues. (p. 19)” “As our fact-checking indicates, SoR discussions to date appear to fall victim to narrow definitions of reading development.” (p. 21)
The Science of Reading Narrative
This author agrees with this critique of the rhetoric surrounding the Science of Reading as it applies to the claims that the SoR Movement makes in order to further a political and policymaking agenda. It needs to be stated clearly that this critique, and my own, are not a critique of the SoR research itself, but rather, of certain interpretations and applications of the research findings. All research studies must be interpreted. A foundational principle of research is that no singular study, collection of selected studies or meta-analysis of a number of studies can render a definitive and unequivocal interpretation of a theory or data set. This is the very nature of research, which is conducted and disseminated for the purpose of validating and enhancing knowledge. In the case of research into curriculum and instruction, the purpose of research is to inform educators’ pedagogical knowledge base. As Tierney and Pearson observe:
“Ultimately, neither the SoR claims nor our fact-checked versions of them should be recognized as the last word on learning to read. Rather, we hope our fact-checking opens a conversation—by illuminating the SoR arguments and drawing upon the sources that clarify, complement, temper, or challenge the theories, practices, or policies they espouse and imply.” (p. 21)
The Science of Reading Movement is an ideological, political movement that seeks to establish literacy education policies based on a narrowed selection of research studies from among the many themes and trends in the research literature. Differences in interpretation of the value of the databases and findings of research studies among academic researchers are not problematic in and of themselves. In fact, researchers often disagree on the interpretations of other researchers’ findings as the authors of a published study present them in peer-reviewed journal articles. This is common practice and a positive outcome of research endeavors as these discussions and debates contribute to the overall knowledge base for literacy education. However, when a group of researchers and their policy making constituency attempt to use a select body of studies on a particular facet of literacy learning and teaching (reading) to mandate a regulatory schema through legislation, members of the research community have a right and a responsibility to question these initiatives by calling out a misuse of research. Therefore, the multilingual education research community has objected to the SoR Movement’s legislative initiatives, relying on the vast body of research on literacy acquisition and instruction that support and promote high levels of academic achievement of multilingual learners.
The reality is that for decades there has been an acknowledgement that different strands of scholarly research support the pedagogical knowledge base for language and literacy instruction of emergent bilingual learners (Mora, 2024). The National Reading Panel Report (2000) was a meta-analysis of reading research that generated a degree of controversy among multilingual literacy researchers because it included very few studies on language minority populations. However, publication of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth (August & Shanahan, 2006) six years later allayed concerns about whether the perspective of biliteracy and second-language literacy would be accepted and respected as a parallel body of research on literacy in its own right. Then, in 2012-2014, the California State Board of Education published a compendium of research-based policy and curriculum documents as guides to implementation of the Common Core State Standards: The Common Core en Español: State Standards Initiative Translation Project Linguistic Augmentation (CCEE) (San Diego County Office of Education, 2012) and the English Language Arts/English Language Development Framework (2014). The Common Core en Español states this: ”The purpose of the linguistic augmentation is to address points of learning, skills and concepts that are specific to Spanish language and literacy, as well as transferable language learnings between English and Spanish where students are instructed in both languages. Together, these curriculum documents provide a comprehensive and well-articulated transdisciplinary research base for language and literacy education of multilingual students in California. In their daily lesson planning and instruction, teachers need only to be guided by the curriculum standards required by their state department of education.
In response to a critique of their fact-checking of the Science of Reading (SoR) 10 claims (Goldenberg, 2024), Tierney and Pearson responded to Professor Goldenberg with the following:
“We wanted to fact-check the claims we saw as driving policy and practice in the media and statehouses in the US and several countries. As we, Claude, and others have emphasized, the science is not settled and should be discussed vigorously and respectfully among scholars, practitioners, and policymakers in the interests of students, parents, and teachers.” (p. 3)
Fact-checking SoR Claims: A Multilingual Education Perspective
This author concludes that it is important to address claims made by the SoR Movement because of their impact on policy and practice in light of the specific research literature that is excluded through the focus on research on reading with populations of monolingual native speakers of English who learn to read and write in their first language (Snow, 2006):
“Finally, a key issue that needs more attention in both research and theory on biliteracy is the difference between learning to read in a second language and learning to read a second language. Learning to read for the first time in a second language is arguably a difficult task, particularly for children who have limited oral skills in that language and limited emergent literacy skills in any language. For such children, the task of literacy development is unsupported by a well-developed understanding of the nature and purposes of literacy, and the potential for self-monitoring and self-teaching (Share, 1995) is absent because these processes presume access to meaning via decoding.” (p. 646)
There are multiple academic disciplines and bodies of research literature that contribute to the knowledge base for teaching multilingual learners that comprise practitioners’ expertise and professionalism. Disciplinary knowledge empowers a teacher to engage in deep thinking about curriculum questions such as what to teach and why with regard to the students’ characteristics, needs and experiential backgrounds. The transdisciplinary knowledge base for language teacher education provides a framework that reflects distinct yet compatible theoretical perspectives that together bridge the theory-practice divide. The view of pedagogical content knowledge as transdisciplinary justifies teachers’ opposition to critics who attempt to invalidate certain methods of inquiry and empirical databases for educating multilingual students (Johnson, 2019). These disciplines include second-language acquisition research, second-language reading and writing research, metalinguistic knowledge development and cross-linguistic transfer facilitation research. Biliteracy instruction is also based on research in linguistics and psycholinguistics on the language-specific features of learners’ native/first language orthographies because these students learn to read and write in two languages with distinct forms and features that are represented through print. The pedagogical knowledge base for emergent bilingual students also draws from neuroscience of the bilingual brain that investigates the functioning and modes of processing print in multiple languages of the bilingual brain. Furthermore, the socio-cultural and sociolinguistic aspects of literacy learning in multilingual and multicultural schooling contexts are examined through research that does not focus solely on the learning and teaching of reading (Mora, 2024).
10 Claims Analysis
Claim 1 Tierney and Pearson: Explicit systematic phonics instruction is the key curricular component in teaching beginning reading.
Claim 1 Multilingual Education Research
Multilingual educators are not opposed to phonics instruction. In fact, in the case of biliteracy instruction, dual language educators teach phonics in two languages (Ex. Spanish/English biliteracy). This instruction entails attention to language and literacy universals, applicable equally to both languages of texts and to language-specific features of texts’ orthography and linguistic forms and features. However, second-language reading and writing instruction require differentiation of instruction according to students’ levels of acquisition of second-language proficiency. The explicitness and systematicity of phonics instruction must be modified according to students’ first-language linguistic competencies and their development levels of metalinguistic knowledge and skills with oral and written L2 language and literacy competencies.
Claim 2: Tierney and Pearson: The Simple View of Reading (SVR) provides an adequate theoretical account of skilled reading and its development over time.
Claim 2 Multilingual Education Research
The Simple View of Reading (SVR) is based on the premise that there is a measurable relationship between decoding and comprehension. The implication of this relationship is that whatever knowledge and skills for decoding the language of a text enhances comprehension, and vice versa, readers’ ability to comprehend text enhances their ability to decode text. Consequently, the development trajectory of L2 readers of a language (most commonly L2 English) must be considered in setting goals and standards for L2 literacy learners’ achievement in reading and writing. The SVR supports literacy instruction with a focus on meaning making through reading and writing of authentic text rather than decontextualized decoding instruction. This consideration is especially important for interpreting standardized reading achievement test scores based on a grade-level range criterion. This is because standardized tests do not disaggregate decoding skills from comprehension as variables in the test scores of individual students or distinct populations of students.
Claim 3 Tierney and Pearson: Reading is the ability to identify and understand words that are part of one’s oral language repertoire.
Claim 3 Multilingual Education Research
There is no consensus among researchers about the definition of the term word recognition. Is a word recognized when the reader is able to pronounce the word by sounding it out (phonological decoding) or when the reader is able to determine the meaning (semantics) of the word? L2 readers may be able to determine the meaning of a word based on its visual representation alone without being able to render a pronunciation of the word mentally because the word is not in their L2 oral repertoire and/or mental lexicon. Many research studies find that L2 readers’ ability to recognize words is highly dependent on their knowledge of L2 vocabulary. L2 syntax is also a determinative variable in L2 reading because syntax provides cues to the meaning of words in the context of phrases and sentences that are essential to their accurate decoding. This is especially true of English words that are semantically context-dependent such as homonyms, homophones and verbs.
Claim 4 Tierney and Pearson: Phonics facilitates the increasingly automatic identification of unfamiliar words.
Claim 4 Multilingual Education Research
The utility of knowledge of phonics for achieving automaticity in reading text in a particular language varies according to the orthography of the language of the text. Students’ native language may be more orthographically transparent than English, which allows for higher levels of cross-linguistic transfer of decoding skills. For example, Spanish has a highly transparent and regular orthography. If a reader has knowledge of letter-sound (phonetic-graphemic) relationships which are regular and predictable and understands the significance of the orthographic rules for use of diacritical marks, the emergent reader can decode any word encountered in print. Decoding unfamiliar words is no more difficult than decoding familiar words in Spanish. Consequently, for L2 readers and emergent biliteracy learners, instruction in strategies for decoding and constructing the meaning of unfamiliar English words is not controversial. However, multilingual researchers generally oppose legislative mandates that ban or restrict teachers’ instruction of the use of metalinguistic knowledge of contrastive linguistics for L2 readers to develop their full range of strategies to acquire automaticity and fluency in reading English as a second language.
Claim 5 Tierney and Pearson: The Three-Cueing System (orthography, semantics, and syntax) has been soundly discredited.
Claim 5 Multilingual Education Research
Science of Reading advocates’ claim that something they term as the “three-cueing approach” has been discredited is a strawman argument. Cueing is what language does: Both oral and written language. Among multilingual educators, there is no such approach to instruction as “three-cueing.” The concept of “three-cueing” is derived from the use of a Venn diagram that displays the three subsystems of possible origin of oral reading miscues presented in the database of miscue analysis: Grapho-phonics, semantics and syntax. These categories of miscues are derived from an extensive number of empirical studies conducted by linguistic, psycholinguistic and neuroscience researchers. The term “cueing” has become a scapegoat for SoR’s attacks on instruction, stemming from an ideological non-acceptance of the legitimate and credible body of confirming research. Instruction in phonics, including phonological and phonemic awareness is a subset of metalinguistic knowledge and skills that are essential to literacy acquisition in any language, universally and in students’ learning to read and write in any language through its specific linguistic forms and features. Legislative bans that prohibit teachers’ use of guided questioning and scaffolding strategies to support readers’ natural response to and utilization of the subsystems of language are not supported by any substantial body of empirical, scientific research.
Claim 6 Tierney and Pearson: Learning to read is an unnatural act.
Claim 6 Multilingual Education Research
The first observation in response to this claim is that it is puzzling that advocates for the Science of Reading consider an unnatural act to be a topic for scientific investigation, given that science is the systematic study of natural phenomena. The SoR claim emphasizes the differences between spoken and written language processing. However, the “unnatural” claim is based on arguments for a need for explicit instruction in such subskills of reading as phonemic awareness. The claim does not address the nature of first and second language learning through implicit knowledge acquisition as well as explicit learning as a result of explicit and direct instruction in alphabetics. The content of explicit, direct instruction is metalinguistics, which is about how language conveys meaning through its multiple subsystems in different modalities (auditory, visual, tactile). SoR fails to identify cognitive processing and acquisition/learning factors that definitively distinguish literacy learning from natural mental processes for accessing meaning, particularly in the language and learning processes of emergent bilingual learners.
Claim 7 Tierney and Pearson: Balanced Literacy and/or Whole Language is responsible for the low or failing NAEP scores we have witnessed in the U.S. in the past decade.
Claim 7 Multilingual Education Research
Science of Reading advocates attempt to attribute reading achievement test scores to specific instructional approaches, methods and strategies. These approaches are given names with common terms like “balanced” and “structured” are suggestive but ambiguous. The lack of definitive definition of an approach and identification of its critical components that are required for the approach to be implemented with fidelity is highly problematic for valid and reliable research on dependent and independent variables. The SoR Movement fails to identify problems in studies of the effectiveness of approaches and methods with population validity such as description of participants, descriptions of instruction, sample size and sampling strategies, and descriptive statistics for each relevant variable. This is especially problematic for emergent bilingual learner populations because of assumptions about homogeneity of language background and second-language proficiency. Furthermore, there is no valid and reliable research methodology for measuring the effectiveness for special populations of isolated and decontextualized instructional strategies.
Claim 8 Tierney and Pearson: Evidence from neuroscience research substantiates the efficacy of phonics-first instruction.
Claim 8 Multilingual Education Research
Educational neuroscience is ready to stand as a legitimate field of educational inquiry provided that our research colleagues in this field maintain high standards regarding the application of neuroscience to theory, research and practice. Some advocates for the SoR make claims based on neuroscientific studies that are not supported by evidence from the discipline itself. Others ignore the complexity and nuance of findings from neuroscientists who they themselves claim to be authoritative. SoR has promoted bans on instructional approaches and strategies through level legislation that are supported through neuroscience studies using multiple sources of triangulated data on students’ oral reading of authentic, continuous texts. Specifically, SoR advocates discount observational databases such as miscue analysis and eye movement research (EMMA) that support a constructivist theoretical framework for reading in the brain. Furthermore, some education researchers erroneously claim that research on the bilingual brain is irrelevant because the cognitive processes for comprehending text are universal, regardless of readers’ linguistic knowledge and experiences.
Claim 9 Tierney and Pearson: Sociocultural dimensions of reading and literacy are not crucial to explain either reading expertise or its development.
Claim 9 Multilingual Education Research
Research into the literacy achievement gap for language-minority students internationally reveals the intersecting roles of three broad sets of factors that sustain inequitable educational outcomes across social groups: language teaching/learning, socioeconomic status (SES) and societal power relations. The sociocultural dimension of literacy education must be taken into account because of its positive impact on academic achievement overall. These impact factors include students’ development of a bilingual identity, literacy engagement and attainment of cross-cultural competencies. Literacy teachers are sociocultural mediators. Teachers must not only determine how best to teach reading, but they must scrutinize the various reading practices and positions that are interactively built and privileged in the classroom by particular instructional activities. Literacy is socially constructed. Therefore, the sociocultural context of literacy teaching and learning are foundational to effective literacy instruction.
Claim 10 Tierney and Pearson: Teacher education programs are not preparing teachers in the Science of Reading.
Claim 10 Multilingual Education Research
Teacher preparation programs for teachers who instruct language-minority students are designed to equip teacher education students with the pedagogical knowledge base and grounded in the transdisciplinary research on the specific learning characteristics of multilingual learners. The transdisciplinary research that forms the pedagogical knowledge base for language and literacy instruction of multilingual learners includes research on second language acquisition, second language reading, metalinguistics, cross-linguistic transfer facilitation, and sociocultural factors in literacy learning, as well as literacy instruction methods for languages other than English. Program guidelines must be clearly articulated and enacted based on sound pedagogical principles and supported by research evidence of their effectiveness. The role of research is to provide teachers with a theoretical orientation toward language and literacy instruction that is congruent with the cognitive academic learning processes and the sociocultural dispositions of emergent bilingual learners in English-medium and dual language model programs. The Science of Reading is a body of research focused on only one of the domains of the language arts. Reading involves integrating a complex network of interactive processes, which must be studied using the lenses of different disciplines and explored through a range of theoretical models within each discipline. Therefore, SoR is inadequate for preparing teachers for the linguistic and culturally diverse student population for which they are responsible as educators.
REFERENCES Executive Summary
August, D., & Shanahan, T. (Eds.). (2006). Developing literacy in second-language learners: Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-minority Children and Youth. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Buenrostro, M. (2024). The state of English Learners in California public schools. Californians Together.
Goldenberg, C. (2024). What “Science of Reading” are Tierney and Pearson actually fact-checking?
Johnson, K. E. (2019). The relevance of a transdisciplinary framework for SLA language teacher education. The Modern Language Journal, 105(19), 167-174.
Mora, J. K. (2024). Reaffirming multilingual educators’ pedagogical knowledge base. Multilingual Educator, February(CABE 2024 Edition), 12-14.
Mora, J. K., Lampkin, E., Flores, B., & Flemington, A. (2024). Pushing back against Science of Reading mandates: The California story. CCTE Fall 2024 Research Monograph, 47-58.
National Reading Panel (2000). Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. U S. Government Printing Office.
San Diego County Office of Education (2012). Common Core en Español: State Standards Initiative Translation Project.
Share, D. L. (1995). Phonological recoding and self-teaching: sine qua non of reading acquisition. Cognition, 55, 151-218.
Snow, C. (2006). Cross-cutting themes and future research directions. In August, D., & Shanahan, T. (Eds.). (2006). Developing literacy in second-language learners: Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-minority Children and Youth (pp. 631-651). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.