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By Stephanie West Ed.D., Using the Science of Reading in an Everyday Classroom
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05/29/2025
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Across education, we are hearing the phrase "science of reading." We are learning that the science of reading incorporates research across disciplines including developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, cognitive science and educational psychology. This research has become a global movement and is seen in all cultures and languages
The science of reading is not only a movement but demonstrates the best practices and methods to help children learn to read, starting in the earliest steps of language to the successful skills of decoding unfamiliar words.
As we learn more and more about the science of reading, we need to move from research to implementation.
The research into the science of reading has identified the following five components that are key to reading success:
Historically, reading instruction was a step-by-step process along with incidental teaching moments — or the “aha!” moments. When implementing the science of reading instruction, we need to be more intentional and systematic. We need to focus our instruction on dedicating blocks of time for literacy, where phonics is taught clearly and sequentially from an identifiable curriculum.
We need to progress our teaching of comprehension skills through leveled reading groups, where small groups of students visit the teacher for round-robin reading practices. Instead, we can use rich, complex text for all students in a class. During these types of reading blocks, we provide multiple reads of the same text, beginning with modeling and then moving to opportunities for student practice. By including small group and partner reading strategies for repeated readings, our students develop increased fluency.
As educators, we want to hear student voices, along with teacher-student high-quality conversations about rich, complex texts that focus on language, structure, and deepening comprehension. Let’s look at strategies that can be used in each of the five components of the science of reading.
Phonemic awareness is the idea that phonemes (sounds) correspond to graphemes (letter sequences that signify sounds). The goal of phonemic awareness, usually accomplished in grades K-1, is to teach students the skills needed for them to independently start to decode unfamiliar words using the skills they have developed through the application of phonics instruction. The following activities can be easily implemented into your phonemic awareness instruction.
Based on the research, there are three key elements needed for effective phonics instruction:
Below are a few activities using these key elements:
Vocabulary is the foundation of language development, along with playing a critical role in reading comprehension. Vocabulary is essential to the improvement of not only reading skills, but communication skills. Expanding students’ vocabulary impacts their overall writing, reading, listening and speaking skills. Below are some fun activities that can be included in any vocabulary instruction.
Reading comprehension, or finding meaning from what we read, is the ultimate goal of reading. The process of comprehension is both interactive and strategic. Instead of passively reading text, students must analyze it internalize it, and make it their own. To read with comprehension, developing readers need to read with some proficiency and then be explicitly instructed through comprehension strategies.
The most important comprehension strategies that we teach extensively in most teaching preparation programs are using prior knowledge and previewing, predicting, identifying the main idea and summarization, questioning, making inferences and visualizing. Below are a few other strategies that can be used to strengthen these general strategies in any comprehension instruction.
Reading fluency involves comprehension, speed, accuracy and prosody, or reading with expression. Here are a few favorite fluency activities that can be easily implemented into any classroom.
The next time you hear educators discussing the “science of reading” we hope you feel comfortable joining in the discussion or sharing some strategies for the classroom.
As educators continue to learn about the science of reading, we will build confidence in our abilities to progress beyond research to implementation. Hopefully you will soon feel poised to teach reading by addressing the five components of the Science of Reading Instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension and fluency.
Want more? Check out all of the articles from Teaching Tuesday and return each week for a new post. Learn more about Grand Canyon University’s College of Education and our degree programs and join in our efforts to elevate the education profession.
