How to Change a House into a Horse

“The Three-Cueing Systems Model is a flawed literacy instructional practice that teaches students to read based on meaning, structure and syntax, and visual cues—collectively known as “MSV.” While this sounds wonky, it can be boiled down to this: Teachers using this method instruct students to guess” (source 2024¹).

This passage was written by Tom Green² who writes on behalf of ExcelinEd in Action as the National Legislative Director. According to his online bio, Tom Green taught high school social studies courses for five years. Undoubtedly an expert policy analyst, he holds a Masters degree in Public Policy from USC.

It’s not immediately clear what qualifies Tom to open his post with certainty that this strategy is “flawed.” He feels no impulse to provide evidence—I wonder if he wonders precisely what he is saying. It doesn’t seem to bother him. He seems not to expect any resistance to his position, diminishing its complexity with the dismissive adjective “wonky.”

Tom Green’s last sentence is troubling. He seems to take delight in ridiculing teachers. Who but an idiot would try to teach a child to read by guessing? As a knowledgeable reader of his text, I’m at a loss to understand his what is in my eyes arrogance. The topic is too wonky to bother trying to understand yet so important it’s worth advocating for phonics legislation. Eh?

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Lexia Learning, a commercial supplier of phonics instructional material, published some online text arguing on Tom Green’s side of the issue.³ The anonymous corporate voice in their posts did not denigrate nor ridicule teachers. In fact, this voice went to the trouble to write substantively about the cueing systems. I sensed a weaker version against Green of the anti-cueing argument, suggesting the writer may know a little bit about the “wonky” theory—enough to maybe earn a C- on a test in a reading methods course. Here’s the explanation offered:

This writer has an accurate account of the linguistic definition of each concept. At the risk of boring you, I want to explain the bankrupt understanding of cueing system pedagogy revealed above. Naming and defining cueing systems are one thing. Explaining the pedagogy is something else.

First of all, a teacher might simply say “check it” at the end of the sentence, asking the reader to go back and take another pass. If the reader self-corrects, the teacher might say, “horse, great! How did you fix it?” This pedagogical approach teaches readers that we read to make sense. The teacher did the monitoring and asked the child to do the reading work. That the child figured out horse alone on a minimal prompt is important assessment data. When something doesn’t make sense, we try fix-up strategies.

Another approach might be to focus the reader’s attention on the first sound of the word “horse.” If the child doesn’t know, the teacher might produce the phoneme and ask the child to do so. “Start here at the beginning of the sentence. See if you can think of a word that begins with the sound “h” that would fit in this spot.” As a last resort, the teacher might ask “What would be in the barn that eats hay and starts with the sound “h”? Then attention to phonics would follow.

The explanation of teaching the syntactic cueing system shows a clear lack of understanding. No Reading Recovery teacher, a graduate of the cueing-system establishment blamed for turning reading into a guessing game, would ask a struggling reader to think about the subject position in a sentence. That’s nuts.

But cueing system teachers know that decoding words in isolation is a completely different experience than decoding words in context. The word “horse” in this sentence has a function in relation to the other words just because of its position, irrespective of its meaning or spelling. In this instance the child used a noun to substitute for another noun. This behavior suggests the student is using the syntactic cueing system; no good reading teacher would mindlessly turn to syntactic cues when the child’s miscue was syntactically appropriate.

Cueing system vision in teachers is highly valuable but hard to develop to an expert level. Once teachers have a deep understanding of each system and their contribution to the reader, the best of them are uncanny in their ability to improvise and innovate fascinating and impactful pedagogical moves in real time. It’s almost as if they can see the wheels of decoding the message mesh together to process meaning from printed words in context.

Cueing system pedagogy focuses on integrating the three systems which must operate together to make meaning from language. Reading introduces a different style of data input vis a vis listening, but language ordinarily comes whole—meaning, sound-symbols, grammar. Words in context differ from words in isolation, and teaching children to integrate sound, sense, and syntax while reading silently IS teaching reading. No matter how you slice it, phonics is not teaching reading.

Cueing system pedagogy rests on several fundamentals which any scientist studying reading would agree:

A. Readers learning to read must develop the mindset that the goal of reading is to makes sense.

B. Reading is a language process and integrates the core components of language in recursive loops.

C. Reading is not the same activity as listening. Though the end product may be pragmatically the same, the intermediate steps are fundamentally different. Readers must learn to bring knowledge of speaking to reading, but they must read silently for meaning to learn to draw on knowledge of speech.

D. Readers must develop the ability to monitor comprehension and to fix up mis- or non-comprehension as a self-regulating agent. This capacity becomes an engine that drives vocabulary and knowledge-building throughout the elementary grades and beyond.

E. As readers mature and develop fluency, they usually rely less and less on grapho-phonics and more and more on morphology, on linguistic, semantic, and textual structures to comprehend texts. Beginning to read situated in pedagogical routines that integrate awareness of syntax, semantics, and spelling is not encouraging guessing. It’s encouraging reading.

Neither Tom Green, the policy analyst who earns a living by advocating for legislation, nor the anonymous Lexia corporate voice have enough understanding of the cueing systems to make such authoritative statements. They are blind to the fulsome differences between listening and strategic comprehension of natural language in text using language affordances to “grasp” meaning in the moment through every scrap of information available.

Lexia makes the following pitch for its products. I’m going to need your help working through the semantics of the final sentence. I can say all the words, I know what they mean, I understand their relationships within the sentence. But I can’t grasp its point. I think they mean they do their own research on their products. This, friends, is a huge red flag in my mind, if I’m right.

“Lexia’s products are evidence-based and designed from the best literacy and language research available, such as the science of reading and Structured Literacy. While many of our competitors can claim their products are research-based, Lexia puts in the extra time and effort to ensure our programs are both research-based and evidence-based.”

Expert reading teachers really do have the professional judgment to adjust pedagogy in the moment during the heat of learning, and these teachers don’t work from scripts, algorithms, or recipes on autopilot. They take their lead from their learners and find ways to take the reader by the hand without doing the thinking for them. Vygotsky would be proud.

1. https://excelinedinaction.org/2024/01/10/from-policy-to-action-why-8-states-banned-three-cueing-from-k-3-reading-instruction/?utm_source=perplexity

2. https://excelinedinaction.org/people/tom-greene/

3. https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/sound-it-out-the-shifting-landscape-of-literacy-from-three-cueing-to-science-based-reading?utm_source=perplexity