Reading Research

This page is for people who want to dive deeper into the Science of Reading and explore its implications for effective reading instruction. 

Recent Research

1. Mark Seidenberg: Reading at the Speed of Sight. The following videos deal with the material in the book. It requires close reading, but is very insightful. The following videos discuss the contents and implications for effective teaching. 

        Language at the Speed of Sight, Video 1: Chapters 1 - 3

        Language at the Speed of Sight, Video 2: Chapters 4 - 6       

       Language at the Speed of Sight, Video  3: Chapters 7 - 9

       Language at the Speed of Sight, Video  4: Chapters 10 - 12

       Language at the Speed of Sight, Video 5: Wrap-up Session

2. Where Does the Science of Reading Approach Go From Here? by Mark. S. Seidenberg. An updated perspective by a scholar that helped get the movement off the ground and has had a major impact on my tutoring. 

3. The Writing Rope, components needed for fluent reading and writing 

4. Unraveling Scarborough's Reading Rope, August 4, 2020. 

5. Marcia K. Henry: Morphology 60 Years of Reflection. Dr. Henry has had a big impact on my teaching for many years. Here is her excellent essay, "Organizing Decoding Instruction." My paperback  Beyond Blend Phonics: English Morphology Made Easy  was an early effort to incorporate her work in my teaching. My most recent work is Beyond Basic Phonics: English Morphology Macde Easy: Free pdf and Free Videos. 

6. Learning to Read: Is it a Visual Memory Task? by Dr. Maria S. Murray.  

7. The Science of Reading: Evidence for a New Era of Reading Instruction. A good summary with visuals.

8. Summary of Emily Hansford's reporting "Discovering the Science of Reading."  

9. Building Brain Words in Second Through Sixth Grades by Richard Gentry and Gene Oullette. Chapter 7 from Brain Words.  I have experience teaching Dr. Gentry's Zaner-Bloser Spelling Connections to a third grader and consider his program second to none.

10. You Were Probably Taught to Read Wrong An excellent short video. 

11. How the Brain Learns to Read (Part 1-4) RCOE Instructional Services. A good overview. 

12. "Why Not Phonics and Whole Language" (1990) by Marilyn Jager Adams. Dr. Adams gave me permisson to publish this back in 2008. It is still relevant and valuable. 

13. Making Sight Words: Teaching Word Recognition from Phoneme Awareness to Fluency - How to help children read words effortlesly without memorization (2012 1st edition, on Archive) by Bruce Murray. A very easy-to-understand introduction to recent research and best-practices.  There is a 2020 2nd edition, but it is not available on Amazon. Notice the subtitle, "-without memorization." 

14. Differentiating High Impact Phonics Routines (2024) by Wiley Blevins.  Here is the book. 

15. Orthographic Mapping in the Acquisition of Sight Word Reading, Spelling Memory, and Vocabuary Learning (2014) by Linnea C. Ehri. It is important to remember that word recognition is more than decoding. Word recognition refers to the mental binding of the words to the letters to the sounds they represent to the word's meaning. This is why we ALWAY use the words in sentences when introducing the decoding. For beginning reading material, I prefer the older look-say basals such as Alice and Jerry for beginning, bilingual, and remedial students. Mary Pecci's At Last! Developmental Readers are also excellent.  

16. Making  Sense  of Phonics: the hows and whys (2nd ed., 2014) by A. I. Beck and Mark Beck. Basically the same  approach as Hazel Loring's Blend Phonics and the 1913 Beacon Phonics program that was popular before Dick and Jane. 

Older Research - Prior to 1990

1. A Critical Examination of the Psychology of the Whole Word Technique (1966) by Raymond Laurita

2. Frustration and Reading Problems (1972) by Raymond Laurita

3. Phonics for First Grade: A  Comparison of Two Methods (1959) and Two Methods of Teaching Phonics: A Longitudinal Study (1964) by David. E. Bear. I published these two reports together. The studies proved that teaching reading with direct phonics was more effective than indirect phonics, especially for slower students. In these studies, Dr. Bear compared the results of teaching the Alice & Jerry basal (1937/1957) reading program featuring analytical phonics in the workbooks with and the same program taught with by replacing the workbooks with the Hay-Wingo Reading with Phonics a phonics-first primer. The results proved the phonics gave the slower students an advantage. I teach the Alice & Jerry program with my Natural Phnoics Primer and the Alice and Jerry workbooks, for what I see as superior results. 

4. Creating Dyslexia: It's as Easy as Pie by Samuel L. Blumenfeld. I taught Mr. Blumenfeld's Alpha-Phonics program many times over the years. In fact, here are my Lesson Plans for a very successful year teaching it to a 2nd grade bilingual class. I used the 1987 Riverside basal reading program to teach vocabulary and comprehension. I did not have the workbooks. The results were the same as Bear's study in #3 above. My students experienced stellar succss. 

5. The  Whole-Word and Word-Guessing Fallacy (1961) by Helen R. Lowe. 

6. Commentary: Letter-Name Values in Reading and Spelling (1980) Donald D. Durrell

7. A Century of Miseducation of American Treachers. Robert W. Sweet, Jr. wrote this in 1996. There is a note at the end that he sent me in 2016. It was from this speech that I learned of Hazel Loring's Reading Made Easy with Blend Phonics for First Grade - that simplified and transformed my phonics instruction. 

8. To pass up Geraldine Rodgers' three volume History of Reading in America would be tantamount to passing up St. Peters on a visit to Rome. 

9. Reading, Teaching Beginners by Henry Suzzalo, 1913. This article is important for introducing the Reading Triangle.

10. My mentor, Samuel L. Blumenfeld, discussiong the Reading Reform Foundation. I have a complete set of the RRF Reading Informers and Conferences Reports that Mr. Blumenfeld sent me. I have republished numerous articles from the RRF on my www.donpotter.net website. 

11. Improving Reading Instruction (1955) by Donald Durrell. In spite of its age, this book contains information I have found valuable. Durrell's earlier Improving Basic Reading Abilities (1940) is also contains useful information. 

12. Forget the Bell Curve (2003) by Dr. Bob Rose. This is the book that influenced me to test all my tutoring student's handwriting fluency. The universally dismal results are a serious indictment of the current lack of good handwriting instruction, which I consider a major cause of reading disablities today.

13. Here are 3  chapters from Edward Dolch's 1951 Psychology and Teaching of Reading. It is more of historical than practical interest since it was written before recent discoveries in the Science of Reading. He got some things right and some things wrong. 

14. English Orthography: its graphical structure and its relationship to sound (1967) by Richard Venezky. Venesky's study revealed the weakness in Thedore Clymer's 1963 The utility of phonic generalizations in the primary grades. 

15. M. Herbert Weiss, The Science of Reading and Spelling (1945) and Sure Steps to Reading. I reproduced this long-vowel first method to show how the a long-vowel first approach can be structured.