Harriett Janetos, Reading Specialist
Author, From Sound to Summary: Braiding the Reading Rope to Make Words Make Sense
When Ed Young’s seven blind mice find a “strange something” in the pond, they set out to investigate, one by one, and proclaim—depending on which body part they touch—that the “something” is a pillar, a snake, a spear, a cliff, a fan, a rope. But the seventh mouse doesn’t just touch one part of the elephant: “She ran up one side and down the other. She ran across the top and from end to end.” In other words, she sampled all the parts systematically in order to identify the whole.
And that’s what decoding a word entails—systematically moving across the whole word from end to end, applying knowledge of grapheme-phoneme connections to produce a possible pronunciation and then, if necessary, exercising flexibility to change that pronunciation and listen for a known word that makes sense.
These blind mice did not have the benefit of the visual cues our students have when reading words, and yet many teachers have been conditioned to act as though their students are unable to see graphemes. Instead of teaching them how to use these visual cues, they ask them to explore the words and pictures on the page and form conjectures. Or—to invoke another folk tale—to do the word attack equivalent of nibbling carrots and chatting with friends as the hare does while the tortoise determinedly plods along, slowly but surely crossing the finish line by following the path, by—to analogize to reading—decoding the word from beginning to end. In the Seven Blind Mice parallel, the elephant represents the elusive word—not the picture, nor the sentence—just a single, solitary word waiting to be read.
These visual cues (along with syntax and meaning) are part of the oft-maligned three-cueing system, which in the past few years has morphed from white noise emitted from a well-positioned poster displaying animal advisors like Lips the Fish, Sharpy Shark, Eagle Eye, Chunky Monkey, and Skippy Frog on a classroom wall to a battle cry from those on both sides of the reading wars, each side staking out its territory and often yelling past the other.
The antics of the hare are analogous to darting from the word to the picture, then over to the whole sentence and back again—while the tortoise methodically moves from one end of the word to the other end. Claude Goldenberg echoes Pamela Snow’s lament that “schools get to choose their own adventure with respect to how they teach reading” and calls three-cueing a “choose your own adventure” approach to word recognition: It’s like giving learners a menu of options: ‘You might look at the pictures, look at the first letter, what would make sense here? Not sure? That’s ok, skip it then maybe try it later.’
This is, in fact, common classroom practice and not far from what Marie Clay herself said in Literacy Lessons Designed for Individuals, 2016: When the child stops at a new word, prompt him to look, selecting from: Do you know a word that starts with those letters? Look for something that would help you. What can you see that might help? Do you know a word that looks like that? What can you hear that might help? (p 152).
A choose your own adventure approach, indeed! For decades now, like the seven blind mice, we have been ‘touching’ the parts of these three cues without recognizing the whole—what the whole system entails, fully formed and functional—and how it can be used to either facilitate or fracture reading proficiency.
Molding Clay Through the Decades
In Getting History Right: The Tale of Three-Cueing, Jeff Williams states: Clay’s literacy processing theory is complex and multifaceted, and she cautioned that ‘if literacy teaching only brings a simple theory to a set of complex activities, then the learner has to bridge the gaps created by the simplification.’
As I consider Clay’s caution against simplification, it strikes me that the complexities in the brain when we read are similar to the complexities in the stomach when we eat. But similar to the difference between diet and digestion, there is a difference between the activities we provide our students while teaching reading and the activation in their brains while they are actually reading. Based on my understanding of the research, coupled with my many years of experience in the classroom, I contend that the former don’t have to match the complexity of the latter—we can teach with a simplicity involving straightforward routines that make both teaching and learning less complicated.
Donald Langenberg, Chairman of the National Reading Panel, famously stated in his presentation to the Senate: There is a recent report entitled ‘Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science.’ I am here to tell you that is a gross understatement. As an experimental physicist I spent much of my own career doing things much akin to rocket science, and I believe strongly that the teaching and learning of reading is a whole lot more complex and difficult than rocket science.
While this complexity may apply to reading as a whole as represented by Scarborough’s Reading Rope, the truth is that teaching decoding is more akin to cooking science than rocket science. I’m not just given a list of ingredients in a recipe book and asked to make sense of them. I’m given a process, systematic and straightforward. With regard to reading instruction, as research evolves, that process is refined. For example, there has been a recent recommendation to teach beginning readers using connected phonation instead of segmented phonation, which requires a simple vocal adjustment that is quickly and easily applied.
Just to clarify: teaching decoding is a straightforward process guided by a well-structured phonics scope and sequence chart—a process that is emphatically advantageous, but also entirely insufficient to achieve reading proficiency. The decoding process provides an end in itself: an articulated word. And yet, it is only the starting point for accessing all the other components woven within the strands of Scarborough’s Rope. The end of the phonics lesson is the beginning of its application to vocabulary, morphology, syntax, writing, and whole text analysis: a simple part of a complex orthography that permeates the complexity of all literacy lessons. We simply teach the decoding process, sure and steady—not endless speculation about choices that children might want to make. We just tell them the most efficient and effective ways to proceed and guide them in how they apply those methods to reading words.
One of the ten of Reid Lyon’s maxims about how children learn to read states: All good readers are good decoders. Decoding should be taught until children can accurately and independently read new words. Decoding depends on phonemic awareness: a child’s ability to identify individual speech sounds. Decoding is the on-ramp for word recognition.
To help us understand how to simplify the three-cueing system, here’s a timeline of statements related to the process:
Marie Clay, The Early Detection of Reading Difficulties, 1972: From the theory of reading behind these recovery procedures there are four types of cues any two of which may be cross-checked to confirm a response (pp 58-59).
Keith Stanovich, Romance and Reality, 1993: It was the less-skilled readers who were more dependent on context for word recognition . . . Scientifically the results are uncontroversial. However, they are still not welcomed by some reading educators who would perpetuate the mistaken view that the emphasis on contextual prediction is the way to good reading.
Richard Venezky, The American Way of Spelling, 1999: If what is first produced does not sound like something already known from listening, a child has to change one or more of the sound associations (most probably a vowel) and try again. The result, however, should make sense in the context in which it appears.
Marilyn Adams, Two Solitudes, 2004: If the intended message of the three-cueing system was originally that teachers should take care not to over-emphasize phonics to the neglect of comprehension, its received message has broadly become that teachers should minimize attention to phonics lest it compete with comprehension.
Linnea Ehri, Reading Rescue: An Effective Tutoring Intervention Model for Language-Minority Students Who Are Struggling Readers in First Grade, 2007: Students were encouraged to decode unknown words by relying on their letter–sound knowledge and then cross-checking with meaning and pictures to confirm the identities of the words.
Timothy Shanahan, Is it a good idea to teach the three cueing systems in reading, 2017: Multiple cueing systems for word recognition are simply too cumbersome and slow to be a part of proficient reading (Greene, 2016). Good readers don’t try to guess words with a minimum of orthographic information but look at all the letters when they are reading (Rayner & Pollatsek, 1986). Good readers are the ones who figure out how to use those orthographic-phonemic cues to read (Lonigan, et al., 2018).
Sharon Vaughn and Nathan Clemens, Misunderstandings of the Science of Reading, 2024: All students need to be able to read the words on the page, and the three-cueing system is ineffective for teaching students to read words. This is true for ELs as well.
Claude Goldenberg, Tierney & Pearson reply (III): On 3-cuing, 2024: The same procedure for word reading and recognition—decode unknown words using letter–sound knowledge; cross-check with context to confirm—applies to English speakers as well as to English learners.
Appearance vs. Reality
For some, surprisingly, three-cueing remains an elusive concept. In fact, Jeff Williams all but tells us that what we’ve been arguing over doesn’t actually exist at all. Without getting into the weeds of whether three-cueing is a theory or a model or just a diagram, the truth is that this educational pachyderm—thick-skinned and impervious to decades of attacks by researchers—has had a persistent impact in the balanced literacy classroom in three significant ways: through its presence in predictable books for beginning readers; through a reluctance by teachers to embrace decodable books; and through a failure to teach systematic and explicit phonics lest we create ‘word callers’ who simply ‘bark at print’. However, a blind devotion to meaning-making at all costs can, in fact, lead students off the beaten path of best practices to meander around print rather than systematically tackling text.
Fortunately, when I asked my K-1 colleagues to replace the Level A-D predictable books from the Benchmark Assessment System with decodable versions I had created, they readily agreed, understanding that they needed to know whether their decoding instruction was having the impact they intended it to have. They understood that predicting a word based on the picture provides the appearance of reading by mimicking the process, while the reality of reading proficiency is quite different. Discovering our kindergartners can’t read ‘nap’ is a lot more useful than discovering that they can’t read ‘sleeping’. And the same is true for the other substitutions I made in the Level C text Socks, which I renamed Tab—changes such as, wake up to get up, window to bench, door to mat, and purr to yum.
Miraculously, my assessments now matched my instruction! I was teaching my students how to read through the word from beginning to end, not just to sample parts of it (or even worse, just look at a picture), and this revised assessment allowed me to see whether my instruction had been effective, while retaining the word count of the original story as well as the storyline. Born out of frustration over the massive mismatch between instruction and assessment, by making these changes I positioned myself to teach grapheme-phoneme connections and to assess each student’s ability to decode the connected text that contained them, thereby providing the necessary “on-ramp” for word recognition.
Certainty vs. Stability
How many five year-olds do you know who are fine with uncertainty? Some psychologists suggest that certainty helps children navigate the world by providing predictable patterns and an understanding of what to expect, which creates stability and reduces anxiety. My reading intervention students who come to me lacking decoding skills often display reading insecurity and anxiously scour the pictures looking for help in reading the words they are unable to decode.
Systematic and explicit phonics instruction—for most children—provides the stability they need to develop those reading skills. Ironically, predictable text may offer a quick fix for a reading roadblock by allowing students to complete a simple sentence just by naming the person or object pictured, but that’s not real reading, and it quickly turns into an unreliable method for decoding words as the reading passages increase in length. It is, in fact, the predictable grapheme-phoneme associations (not the pictures)—including the paradox of the predictable existence of spelling variations—that provide a reliable reading outcome.
Our opaque English language may not always provide certainty, but there are ways of teaching it that do provide stability. There is an inherent stability in systematic and explicit phonics instruction: the students know the routines, and the routines are reliable. However, although the routines may be reliable, the decoding results can be misleading due to variable pronunciations, so we must intentionally build in uncertainty by acknowledging multiple spelling variations for phonemes that require flexible pronunciations, and we must also teach high frequency words with irregular grapheme-phoneme representations.
This intentional uncertainty acclimates students to the lack of total predictability and warns them to be cautious about expecting the same regularity of spelling patterns within all books they encounter that they generally find in their decodable books. And this is why mixing in scaffolded stretch texts that challenge beginning reading is essential. The path to stability through predictable uncertainty may seem like a paradox, but if we adequately prepare students to apply established routines and to expect surprises, their anxiety is mitigated. If they have the decoding process under their belts, they are better equipped to face battle with an unknown word.
An Elephant Never Forgets
The science of learning is a hot topic right now, and for good reason: it helps us make sense of our instructional choices. In the new book, Just Tell Them, Zach Groshell reminds us of the importance of explicit instruction when establishing foundational skills, and this means just telling students what they need to know in order to accomplish what the decoding process entails. All good readers are good decoders. We need to teach our students how to decode a word and then explain how to apply the decoding strategies we’ve taught them to each and every unknown word because decoding is the on-ramp for word recognition. Reid Lyon really wants us to remember this!
The visual cues guide students through the entire word systematically, which is why the phonics chapter in my instructional guide is called Making Sense of Words We See. Reading is not a gestalt experience involving the universe of words that might start with a certain letter, or might have letters that look like the letters in the unknown word or might match the picture. It’s elemental, not universal. It’s Goldilocks stumbling upon a sentence that’s too big, a first letter that’s too small, and finally, a word in its entirety that’s just right for deliberate decoding. All roads lead back to kindergarten and the fairy tales we were told, infused with the reading instruction we were provided.
This is the problem that Jeff Williams doesn’t address: confusing the deliberateness of the decoding process with the serendipity of sampling puzzle pieces. If grapheme-phoneme connections are taught systematically and explicitly, students can methodically apply their knowledge, using flexible pronunciations to land on a known word. If they struggle with this process, either they haven’t learned what they’ve been taught, or the word is simply out of their instructional range. So just tell them!
We need to stop treating reading like a Rorschach test. Like the hare, the untrained reader is enticed by the three-cueing system to search for distractions on the page, seeking answers off the beaten path of best practices that simply guides them to apply their decoding skills to attempt an identification of a word, to be flexible with pronunciations, and to confirm their choice by checking the context of the sentence related to syntax and meaning. Here’s my three-cueing system:
- grapple with the graphemes
- flex the phonemes
- confirm with context
Apply as needed. It’s simple; it’s straightforward; it’s systematic. Most importantly, it facilitates self-teaching. The cues really do exist and really do have value, but their application in the classroom really has been problematic. Let’s fix that once and for all—and never forget it.