Learning to Read: A Call from Research to Action

The psychological, social, and economic consequences of reading failure are legion. It is for this reason that the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) considers reading failure to reflect not only an educational problem, but a significant public health problem as well. A large, well-coordinated network of 18 NICHD-supported research sites across the country has been working extremely hard to understand:

1. The critical environmental, experiential, cognitive, genetic, neurobiological, and instructional conditions that foster strong reading development;
2. The risk factors that predispose youngsters to reading failure; and
3. The instructional procedures that can be applied to ameliorate reading deficits at the earliest possible time. Some of the NICHD studies have been continuously ongoing since l965. The majority, however, were initiated in the early and mid-l980s with youngsters at five years of age, and have studied these children longitudinally over the succeeding years.

Some children learn to read and write with ease. Even before they enter school, they have developed an understanding that the letters on a page can be sounded out to make words. Some preschool children can even read words correctly that they have never seen before and comprehend what they have read. Research has shown that some of these children, before school, and without any great effort or pressure on the part of their parents, pick up books, pencils, and paper, and they are on their way, almost as though by magic.

However, the magic of this effortless journey into the world of reading is available to only a relatively small percentage of our nation's children. The research literature suggests that about 50 percent learn to read relatively easily once exposed to formal instruction, and that youngsters in this group learn to read in any classroom, with any instructional emphasis.

Unfortunately, the other half of our nation's children find learning to read to be a much more formidable challenge. It is one of the most difficult tasks that they will have to master throughout their life. Reading skill serves as the major avenue to learning about other people, about history and social studies, the language arts, science, mathematics, and the other content subjects that must be mastered in school. When children do not learn to read, their general knowledge, their spelling and writing abilities, and their vocabulary development suffer in kind. Reading skill serves as the major foundational skill for all school-based learning, and without it, the chances for academic and occupational success are limited indeed.

Because of its importance and visibility, particularly during the primary grades, difficulty learning to read squashes the excitement and love for learning that many youngsters have when they enter school. It is embarrassing and even devastating to read slowly and laboriously and to demonstrate this weakness in front of peers on a daily basis.

It is clear from our longitudinal studies that follow good and poor readers from kindergarten into young adulthood that our young poor readers are largely doomed to failure. By the end of the first grade, we begin to notice substantial decreases in their self-esteem, self-concept, and motivation to learn to read if they have not been able to master reading skills and keep up with their age-mates.

As we follow the children through elementary and middle school grades, these problems compound, and, in many cases, very bright youngsters are unable to learn about the wonders of science, mathematics, literature, and the like because they cannot read the grade-level textbooks. By high school, these children's potential for entering college has decreased to almost nil, severely limiting their occupational and vocational opportunities. These individuals repeatedly tell us that they hate to read, primarily because it is such hard work, and their reading is so slow and laborious. As an adolescent in one of our studies remarked recently, "I would rather have a root canal than read."

While failure to learn to read adequately is much more likely among poor children, among non-white children, and among non-native speakers of English, recent data suggest that reading failure cuts across all ethnic and socioeconomic strata. Studies summarizing national trends including Whites, African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Pacific Islanders, and American Indians showed that many 4th graders were reading below basic levels. A striking 32 percent of the fourth grade children across the nation who were reading below the basic levels were from homes where the parents had graduated from college. These data underscore the fact that reading failure is a serious national problem and can not simply be attributed to poverty, immigration, or the learning of English as a second language.