Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition From Novice to Expert
By Anne Castles, Kathleen Rastle, Kate Nation. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 2018
1,050 citations recorded by the source corpus.
There is intense public interest in questions surrounding how children learn to read and how they can best be taught. Research in psychological science has provided answers to many of these questions but, somewhat surprisingly, this research has been slow to make inroads into educational policy and practice. Instead, the field has been plagued by decades of “reading wars.” Even now, there remains a wide gap between the state of research knowledge about learning to read and the state of public understanding. The aim of this article is to fill this gap. We present a comprehensive tutorial review of the science of learning to read, spanning from children’s earliest alphabetic skills through to the fluent word recognition and skilled text comprehension characteristic of expert readers. We explain why phonics instruction is so central to learning in a writing system such as English. But we also move beyond phonics, reviewing research on what else children need to learn to become expert readers and considering how this might be translated into effective classroom practice. We call for an end to the reading wars and recommend an agenda for instruction and research in reading acquisition that is balanced, developmentally informed, and based on a deep understanding of how language and writing systems work.
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Developmental and Educational Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f4f39e530b82e4c7a191f758b02e82eaf59b1e08
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Artificial Intelligence
In Developmental and Educational Psychology
- Katharina Galuschka
- Stefan Haberstroh
- Gerd Schulte-Körne
- F. Hermundsdottir
- Ruth Görgen
- Julia Kalmar
- M. Haga
- Kate Nation
Citations in the corpus
- How morphology impacts reading and spelling: advancing the role of morphology in models of literacy development (2020, background): “Certainly, we think that the morphological structure and regularities supports the transition from novice to expert reading (Castles et al., 2018), but we think that its”
- Children’s reading difficulties, language, and reflections on the simple view of reading (2019, background): “This is a slow process of building expertise through which children harness their powers of perception, memory and language to learn and to generalise (see Castles et al., 2018).”
- Passion, grit and mindset in young adults: Exploring the relationship and gender differences (2020, background): “This is supported by Castles, Rastle, and Nation (2018) who argue that it is crucial to create reading interest among boys and this can be done by giving them challenging books to read.”
- Effectiveness of spelling interventions for learners with dyslexia: A meta-analysis and systematic review (2020, background): “Considering the knowledge of phoneme–grapheme (and grapheme–phoneme) correspondences as a fundamental skill that affects higher order skills, such as the application of orthographic or morphological spelling rules (Castles et al., 2018; Share, 1995), we hypothesize that more severely impaired dyslex”