Best of: The future of reading

0:00Hey everyone, it's your host Russ Altman from the Future of Everything. It's still summer, but many children and teachers are back in school or preparing to return to the classroom very soon. About a year ago, I sat down with Rebecca Silverman, a professor of education, to discuss the complex process of learning how to read. Professor Silverman unpacks the challenges of decoding and comprehension, the two things that are vital for reading instruction to be successful. Whether you're supporting a new reader or just curious about the hurdles new readers have to overcome, I hope you'll tune in to this conversation again.

0:34Before we get started, a reminder to follow The Future of Everything in whatever app you're listening to right now so you're always clued in on the future of everything.

0:49You know, reading is key to life and to learning. We read all the time. We see signs. We automatically read the words that are presented to us. But most of us learned how to read as a kid. And there's huge variability in that experience. Some kids learn very early, remarkably early. Others take some time. Others may struggle with it for much longer periods of time. Different cultures have different challenges in learning how to read because they have different letters. Some cultures have easy letters. Some cultures have more difficult to read symbols. and that can affect the speed at which people learn to read.

1:26But really, reading is not just, yes, I can read, no, I can't read. It's a lifelong experience of getting better and better at decoding the words and then understanding what the author is trying to tell you. Well, Rebecca Silverman is a professor of education at Stanford University. She's an expert at literacy, child development, and how people learn how to read. She studies this from the perspective of the students, of the teachers, of the families, and of the technologies that are becoming available to help kids and others learn how to read. Rebecca, how should we think about reading? Like, it's more than just looking at letters and coming up with a word.

2:06I think, and your research has shown this. So as we start this conversation, how should I think about the process of reading and acquiring the ability to read? So I think as adults, many of us think of reading as just almost second nature. It's just something we can't, we almost can't help but read the signs on the street. We can't help but, you know, read the magazine covers in the grocery aisle. But when we think about kids learning to read or even adults who've never read before, it is an incredibly complex task. And so I think the way we should think about it is one of the hardest things that kids learn to do in school that is actually not very natural for them and is kind of a huge hurdle for them to overcome and actually allows them to access everything else in school.

2:59You know, math has word problems in it. Science, they need to read the textbook. Social studies, they need to, you know, understand source documents so that in order for them to access the rest of education, they really need to be able to unlock this very complex problem of learning to read. And it's intimately connected, I believe, and I think you've written about this. It's connected to their understanding of like narrative and stories. It's not just decoding single words, but it becomes decoding sentences at a time. So how do you break down the elements of reading when you try to study it kind of scientifically?

3:34Yeah, so research has kind of gelled on this very simple model of reading. It's kind of a way to think about reading as the combination of decoding and linguistic comprehension. So decoding is putting together those letters and sounds. Linguistic comprehension is understanding the meanings of the words and concepts that those sounds create. And so when you put those together, you've got reading, essentially. What we know and what we have figured out pretty well is how to teach the connecting letters and sounds. It's a fairly constrained process. There's only so many letters, only so many sounds we need to learn.

4:17And once we've done that, we've become automatic and we can decode. The comprehension part of it is a lot more challenging. The way that we put together words into sentences, the way that words mean different things in different contexts, all of that is incredibly complex and takes children a lifetime to learn. We're still learning words even this day. New words are being invented as we speak. So all of that, you know, creates a huge kind of challenge. And one of the things that we've discovered in education is that reading comprehension is one of the most difficult things to change in terms of, you know, being able to do an intervention and change that trajectory for kids.

4:56So we're still trying to figure it out. We've got the decoding down pretty well. We kind of understand what we're doing there. There's a lot less consensus on the linguistic comprehension part of things. Yeah. So tell me more about that, because I'm not even sure I know what it means to say you would change somebody's reading comprehension. Do you mean that their depth of understanding of the text that they're reading? And when you say it's difficult to change, do you mean over time? If they're not great at it, it's harder to get them to become great at it? Right. So with decoding, when we're teaching the letters and sounds, we can teach those in a fairly linear trajectory.

5:33We can do that over a fairly constrained period of time. And then once kids know that, they become fluent and they take off. With reading comprehension, you're involving things like understanding word meaning, understanding how words change in different contexts, understanding how sentences are put together, how those sentences combine to make paragraphs, how those paragraphs combine to make larger text. And then you need text structure, you need background knowledge, you need all of this stuff to put those ideas together. And that intervening on that, you know, kind of when kids have challenges with that, we can't do it in a few weeks, we can't do it even in a few months.

6:16For many children, we need to focus on this year after year after year to give them support in understanding how language connects and is constructed in order to make meaning in text. So it's a big project. Makes perfect sense. And I even see it, you know, teaching undergraduates at Stanford University how to write, that they come in with very different abilities to make the mappings that you were just discussing. Yeah, absolutely. And it is hard to move them, although we can move them. That's why we're teachers. We're committed to the idea that we can help our students get better. Okay, my head is exploding with questions.

6:49So I want to go back to a few basic things. How much variability do we see in the acquisition of reading in typical children? So of course, there will be children with disabilities. And I don't know if you want to include them or put them aside. But for children who don't have obvious disabilities, how much variability do we see? And what are the sources of those variability? So we see huge variability. Some children, we estimate like roughly 5 to 20 % of kids learn to read fairly quickly. They comprehend things fairly easily. Another, say, 40 to 40 % of kids, they struggle a little bit, but they need some instruction.

7:27And then you've got a good 20 to 30 % of the kids who really have difficulty. And those difficulties could come from decoding, could come from linguistic comprehension. It could also come from a variety of other things like their memory ability, their executive functioning ability, their motivation, their engagement, their socio-emotional context. So there's so many things that go into what it takes to become a reader that the individual variation is quite large. And so when my daughter entered kindergarten, she didn't know how to read very well. She was learning her letters and sounds like most kindergartners.

8:08But there was a kid in her class of the same sort of socioeconomic background who was reading chapter books. You know, this is in kindergarten. So, you know, you just think of the range that is in any given class, any given group of kids. And it's huge. And it's a huge challenge for teachers, too. I'm sure it is. And do they have a knowledge about how much of this is environmental versus kind of inborn? And I don't even know how relevant that question is, but I'm sure people have shown some interest in it. Yeah, absolutely. It's kind of like a nature-nurture interaction. There's a certain extent to which kids are born with certain linguistic abilities, certain memory capabilities, those kinds of things that are going to feed into their ability to learn to read.

8:52And then there's the environmental part. How much exposure do they have to text? How much language do they have in their environment? How many conversations are they having about books? All of these things. And so when you combine those two things, you get lots of different combinations. And so that's why we can't, you know, we can't say just because somebody is in this environment, they're going to be this kind of reader or just because they're born this way, they're going to be this kind of reader. It's really the interaction between the two. What about cross-culturally? Do we see the same kind of timing and acquisition of reading skills?

9:22I'm thinking of, you know, Chinese and Hebrew and then European languages. They're all very different, even in terms of what the letters look like and left to right, right to left, whether they're pictures or whether they're phonetic. Tell me about the global picture of reading. Sure. So those two basic components that I talked about, the decoding and the language comprehension, we found that those are consistent across languages and cultures. So those are kind of basic building blocks, basic elements. However, the trajectory of those things is going to be different across languages. So some languages are what we call very transparent.

9:58The letters kind of clearly match the sounds. And so kids don't spend a whole lot of time on the decoding part and can move very quickly to the comprehension part of things. That would be a language like Finnish, for example. Children in Finland learn to read, learn the decoding part pretty quickly because that language is very transparent. Other languages are much more opaque. English is very opaque because we borrow language combinations and spellings from all kinds of languages. So it takes much longer for kids that are speaking English to learn to read. And then you have, I think, in an even more difficult level, when you have kids who are learning symbols and putting those symbols to sounds, that's an even more opaque kind of language and takes perhaps longer for kids to learn to read and write with characters.

10:51So you've got this kind of trajectory, but the same basic components are there across the languages. What are the present research challenges that an expert like you is focusing on? There's so much of this. There's so many ways to attack this. So how do you choose to spend your time? What are the big questions that you ask in your work? So the two probably biggest things I think about are how do we identify which kids are having difficulty specifically with either decoding or language comprehension or both? And so in that space, I think about how do we develop measures to identify these kids? How do we develop systems to identify these kids?

11:31And then on the other hand, it's once we've identified them, how do we support them through intervention? And so different kids are going to need different things. They might need more of the decoding, more of the language comprehension. And then when we get to the language comprehension for kids who have difficulty with that, really, how do we break that down for them? How do we support them in understanding all of the things that they need to know in order to be able to understand text? And so some of the intervention work that I do is involved. We kind of break down language. You know, what do words mean?

12:06How are words built? How are sentences built? And then we go all the way up to a very macro level. How do we think about ideas? How do we debate different perspectives? And so even fourth and fifth graders are doing this like really big work, just like college kids, in order to become readers. Okay, so those are great questions. And maybe we can go back and just take them one at a time. So the first one, the first challenge is identifying the kids who might have challenges. How do we do this? What is the state of our ability? I mean, I remember, you know, growing up, it was, you know, this was a long time ago.

12:42And even as a first grader, I could tell that this was very coarse. You know, it was like jets and turtles and rabbits or whatever. And like, that was it. And it was thinly veiled. how much confidence the teacher had in each of our abilities to read. Have we gotten any better? We have. We have, particularly with the decoding, there are really good measures that help us identify kids who are going to struggle with that, either because they have a hard time discerning the sounds of the language or because they have a hard time matching those sounds to letters. We have good measures of that. I think we're still at a point where we're trying to make sure that all schools are using those measures and using them consistently So there's sort of this like more systemic and policy level aspect to education.

13:28The measures of language comprehension, we're much further behind. And so we have a much harder time figuring out, is it, for example, because a child has a disability in the language comprehension area, or is it because maybe they speak multiple languages and haven't quite figured out English yet, for example. So we have a lot more of a challenge and a problem to solve in terms of how do we capture and how do we identify kids with comprehension based difficulties. Do they do they tend to be and forgive me for being so simplistic, but like read this passage and answer questions? Is that still where we are?

14:08Yeah, absolutely. Sometimes it's broken down a little bit more into like, what does this word mean? And you've got some multiple choice options. But we're pretty basic when it comes to how to measure those things right now. And so I think coming up with new ways to do that is really going to be important in the future. I had a very strange experience as a child where one of my teachers after a standardized test of reading came up to me and said, Russ, you're a much better reader than I thought. And even as a kid, I could tell he was saying it was my English teacher. I could tell he was saying, I thought you were not so good at reading and didn't understand.

14:46But evidently, this test is indicating that you do. And I remember being confused about what signals I was sending in class that he kind of thought I was not very strong. And he was so surprised by these test results. It's just like seventh grade. And he was a great teacher. So this is a much bigger discussion. But I want to ask you about technology and the role of technology. Is there data about the differences of reading on paper, on a tablet, on a computer? As an old guy, I am extremely aware that I am so much better with paper. And for serious things that I really care about, I know it kills trees, but I just have to print things out.

15:29And I don't know if that's just an anecdote or if there's actually data about this. Yeah, so there is research that looks at the complexity of reading on paper versus in a digital environment. And part of what you need to consider is that the actual act of reading in those two contexts is very different. In paper, you're turning pages. You can't really move around as much as easily. Whereas on a digital text, you kind of need to understand parts about the digital nature, like that you can move very easily from one place to another. Sometimes there's little pop-outs or hypertext that you need to pay attention to in order to understand what's going on.

16:09So yes, reading in a digital realm is more difficult and can be harder for kids. but it's something that kids can learn and it's something that we can teach them to do better. So I would say that, you know, when we're thinking about the world in the future, I think kids will be reading on on e-readers and on online and that kind of thing. And so part of our job is to teach them about how that might be similar and different from reading on paper. And I take it that most kids these days are still learning on paper. Not necessarily. I mean, to some extent, yes, they're learning in paper first, but they quickly moved to e-readers in a lot of contexts.

16:48There's been, particularly in the pandemic, there was a lot of exposure to technology. And so now there's a lot of tools where kids can access books online, which allows them to have this whole other library outside of their school that they can access. And so kids are reading online at a much earlier age and much more consistently than they ever had in the past. This is The Future of Everything with Russ Altman. More with Rebecca Silverman next.

17:29Welcome back to The Future of Everything. I'm Russ Altman and I'm speaking with my guest, Professor Rebecca Silverman, about how people learn how to read. In the last segment, we went over some of the key challenges in reading, decoding the words, comprehending the words, and a little bit about some of the technologies and techniques that are used to identify when it's going well and when it's a problem. In this segment, Rebecca will tell us about the role of technology in learning. She'll tell us about the role of families and family life. And she'll talk about teachers, the ones to whom many of these responsibilities fall in the end.

18:04Rebecca, I wanted to ask you a little bit more about technology. It's everywhere. We're seeing a boom in AI. I'm guessing that this is affecting readers, new readers, new learners, and their teachers a lot. So how is technology doing in the reading industry? So especially in the last few years, there's been a huge boom in educational technology, specifically focused on literacy. And so one of the things that we see is parents, families using a lot more technology in their homes, teachers using and accessing a lot more technology. I think one issue is that not all of these technologies have been explored and researched.

18:41So we don't know exactly how all of them play out. What we do know is that we need to teach kids how to use them and how to use them appropriately in order to get the learning that we want from them. We also know that some content is better than other content. So content that's built for specific purposes and that have really thought about how learners learn and instructional design, those tools are going to be better than tools that are just fun. And we also know that some tools do seem to have really positive effects and have had studies that have shown that, specifically, and this will tie back to what we were talking about before, in the area of decoding.

19:21We know what it means to teach decoding, and we've kind of figured that out in the digital world as well, less so on the language comprehension side of things. Yeah, the comprehension seems to be a holy grail that has come up now a couple of times as we really, that's an area of focus in the future, it sounds like. Absolutely. And trying to figure out, there have been studies of how, say, instructional agents in a virtual world might be able to support learners in thinking about text or thinking about, you know, words and meaning in text. And so that's an area of kind of future growth. But I think that's definitely a realm of exploration in the future.

19:58Great. And then what about families? You mentioned families just now in your answer that families are bringing tools into the home and then new learners about reading or being exposed to these. Let's talk a little bit about the greater role of families. You know, people are always told it's critical to read to your kid, like even maybe even in utero, but certainly ex utero. We want to be sitting down, you know, even with kids who don't talk yet and having them look at the pictures and look at the words. What's understood about that process? And what are the best practices and the best advice these days about new parents and their child?

20:34So I think some of the same things are still there. We want to talk to kids. We want to read to kids. I think what's important for families to know is that they should do that in the way that is most comfortable for them, whether culturally or linguistically. So if families speak a certain language in the home and kids might learn a different language at school, that's fine. Speak to them in their home language. What we know is that developing that home language is crucially important for kids developing their language and literacy skills later on. And also in ways that are culturally appropriate.

21:06You know, some families do more storytelling than book reading. And that's OK. That's still setting up the same fundamental functions of, you know, using language to make meaning and to use for communication. And so I think great news. It's actually great news that telling stories and an oral tradition, you shouldn't feel bad about doing that. It's still contributing potentially even to the company. In fact, definitely to the comprehension part of the of this of the ledger. Absolutely. I think parents a lot of times feel like, you know, oh, I should be doing it this way. And it feels unnatural to them.

21:39It feels like they're engaging with their kids in a way that's not comfortable with them. And I think I would say to parents, you know, go back to what makes sense for you and your family. And most of the time, that's going to set kids up for success in school. You know, speaking about families, I want to ask a slightly off track question, but it was one that I had written down and I really wanted to know the answer, which is sometimes people, for whatever reason in their life, haven't learned how to read as a kid. And they take on the learning of reading as an adult. We know for languages, like there's a golden period where kids can learn languages, like speaking a new language, very easily.

22:14And that becomes much more hard. Is it the same situation for reading or is it different? So reading is going to be hard no matter when we do it. So it's going to be hard as an adult. It's going to be hard as an adult because it feels like we're doing something that kids can learn to do. And so in that sense, it is going to feel harder. But it's the same task, especially if adults have already developed a lot of the vocabulary skills and language skills that would help them understand things. Then what they're doing is really just figuring out how to break the code, how to connect letters and sounds.

22:50And so it's really fundamentally the same task. And, you know, as long as adults kind of recognize that it's going to be harder because they're older and it feels, you know, like something a child should be able to do, they can learn to read. So this is really good news. And it's not like language. You're always in the game for learning how to be a reader. Absolutely. So that's great news. OK, well, we've gone 21 minutes and we've hardly talked about teachers, but I think it's time. You've been a teacher of students, of small children. Tell me how this world is for teachers. I mean, I guess it's kind of, as you said, it's kind of first grade, maybe in kindergarten, but certainly in first grade, that becomes a main focus.

23:32And, you know, these are six-year-olds. There's so many things going on. I guess my first question is just to paint a picture for what it's like to be that teacher whose job it is to get this to start to happen. Sure. So, I mean, one thing is that I think that the range of teachers who are kind of focusing on literacy is much, much larger. So we think about early childhood teachers, teachers who are teaching two-year-olds, three-year-olds, and how they're already starting to think about how to support kids' foundational literacy skills. All the way up through elementary school and into middle and high school, you have teachers thinking about literacy.

24:08The thing is, because reading and literacy is so complex, and we talked about that earlier, teachers need to know a lot about what it takes to help kids become better readers. And so when they're thinking about what are all the skills that they need to focus on, how do I focus on them best, what does the research say, that's a huge task for teachers. And we spend a lot of time in teacher education doing that. Then, especially for early childhood and elementary school teachers, you also think about all of the other things that they need to be doing. They need to be doing classroom management, math, science, social studies, social emotional skills, all of those things.

24:43It's an incredibly tough job to be a teacher, and particularly in this day and age when the stressors are there. You know, we're coming out of a pandemic. There's a lot of challenges that kids and teachers face. It's a very challenging job. And unfortunately, we're losing a lot of teachers because of that. So I think in the future, we need to figure out ways to recruit teachers, train teachers, support teachers throughout their teaching profession so that we have the educators we need to support the children who are going to be the future of our generation. And I'm guessing, and you can tell me if I'm right, that a teacher in those early childhood years also has to assess each individual student.