I discovered Maryanne Wolf’s book Proust and the Squid through a recommendation from one of the professors in my reading specialist credential program. It confirmed the importance of code-based beginning reading instruction emphasized in the books by cognitive psychologist Diane McGuinness, which I had discovered shortly before entering my credential program. Wolf reminds us:
Three concepts are critical and emerge over this early period:
(1) that words represent things and thoughts
(2) that words are made up of individual sounds
(3) that these sounds are represented by letters, which when written together make words
But it also explained how we develop this code knowledge as a necessary precursor to knowing what Proust knew:
Reading is that fertile miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
In a recently published paper, Elbow Room: How the Reading Brain Informs the Teaching of Reading, Wolf takes her keen understanding of the reading process and connects research to practice, the translation we desperately need that is so often missing from our preservice programs and PD sessions. First, she describes the reading circuit:
I’ll begin as Emily Dickinson might have responded, had she been a neuroscientist instead of a poet: “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant; Success in Circuit lies.” In this paper, the circuit refers to the brain’s circuit for reading . . . The ‘slanted truth’ is that, unlike oral language, there is no genetic program for written language to unfold naturally in the child. Reading is not natural at all. Rather, it is an invention that the brain learns due to a wonderful design principle, which allows the developing brain to form new connections among its original, genetically programmed processes like language, cognition, and vision. In other words, when a child learns to read, the brain learns how to connect the multiple processes that contribute to a new circuit for written language.
It is one of the too little-sung miracles that young human beings can build a brand new circuit for reading that will elaborate itself over time with everything the readers read.
What is notable in this paper is how methodically and meticulously Wolf connects literacy components in order to rise above the war-ravaged reading camps which we have been entrenched in over several decades. She reveals how each camp can bring its particular strength to the discussion, allowing multicomponent instruction to prevail. From the Albert Shaker Institute’s introduction to the report:
Elbow Room is an invitation to move beyond false binaries in literacy debates and to see reading development as dynamic, requiring multiple emphases and areas of expertise in our teachers. The key for educators is knowing what to prioritize — when, and for how long — based on each learner’s strengths and needs . . . Wolf honors what educators already know, while inviting them to keep expanding that knowledge.
Therefore, please don’t read Wolf’s paper looking to find your particular thing that you prioritize in reading instruction, whether it be meaning-making at the expense of establishing foundational skills, or extensive phonics instruction without application to text, or knowledge-building that crowds out literature. Wolf states:
The key for a teacher’s ability to teach the majority of our nation’s children is a systematic expansion of knowledge about all the processes involved in decoding and comprehension, while never cherry-picking a few of the processes based on the teacher’s original method of teaching.
In my own 127-page instructional guide to reading, I use some version of the word integrate over a 100 times, which reflects my devotion to multicomponent instruction. However, once we democratize these literacy components, we also need to recognize that there is a time and place for promotion and practice of certain skills independently, instruction that evolves as children move through the grades. But like a close-knit family, the other literacy members are never far away and continue to act in supporting roles.
This point is central to the elegant elbow metaphor Wolf uses where she illustrates how the foundational skills forearm initially rests on the comprehension forearm to emphasize how the former has an active role in beginning reading instruction while relying on comprehension for support. Then, as the foundation is laid, this forearm slowly rises, allowing the supporting role of comprehension to switch places and assume an active role while the foundational skills arm acts as support. Wolf explains:
This is the visual depiction of the changing dynamic between the early emphases on the expanded foundational skills and fluency (left arm) and the gradually increasing emphases on more sophisticated comprehension processes (right arm). It is a visual mnemonic for the way the skills and processes change their emphases over time while always leaving room for the other to develop with the increasing demands of text content.
Moreover, rather than emphasize the National Reading Panel’s Big 5 (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension), both Wolf’s paper and my instructional guide reflect more elemental factors. My six chapter titles—Making Sense of Words We Hear, Say, See, Understand, Remember, Analyze—incorporate the components Wolf discusses under her acronym POSSUM (phonology, orthography, semantics, syntax, understanding, morphology). She writes:
Our understanding of foundational skills has changed over time from the more traditional view that was articulated by the National Reading Panel two decades ago . . . In a more expanded view, each of these areas is broadened, deepened, made more specific and more inclusive of spoken language processes.
This Is Now: Make Room for the Marsupial
View the original article and our Inspiration here