The Distance Between Scientific Theory and Reflective Practice
Scientists of reading are not always teachers of reading
Dr. Hollis Scarborough1, a developmental psychologist who published research on language development, including reading, for decades, addressed the Wisconsin chapter of the Reading League in 2020. As you know, the Reading League is a political organization with state chapters working to enact legislative mandates for explicit, wide spectrum, systematic phonics instructional materials meeting specifications approved by Reid Lyon2. I cite the url for the YouTube of this session below. The event precipitating this address is the first anniversary of the launching of the Facebook website for the Science of Reading which, according to the introductory speaker, at the time had 40,000 followers.
Hollis Scarborough is the creator of a bona fide famous visual metaphor, the Reading Rope, which she calls a historical artifact, an image depicting the strands of cognitive processing one must master in order to read as a mature reader. Scarborough sketched the rope in the early 1990s as a way to reduce the complexity of her developmental model for non-scientists. In her address she disavows any connection between Tunmer and Gough’s (1986) publication about the simple view of reading and her rope.
Indeed, she asserts that reading is very complex—that’s why she needed the infographic to simplify reading for lay people. In an earlier Wisconsin chapter “introduction to SoR” YouTube, the Wisconsin chapter previously referred to her rope as a vertical rope which readers climb hand over hand from bottom to top, from decoding to comprehension, suggesting that reading pedagogy must organize itself from bottom to top. Eyeballs on letters, then words, then sentences, then blast off.
Scarborough clarified in this address that her rope is best viewed horizontally across time with nothing to say about instruction; it depicts cognitive processes at the cutting edge of individual development as it unfolds. She goes to great length to disassociate herself from the Reading Wars and to express her admiration for the work teachers do.
In the following audio excerpt of her address, Scarborough makes clear that her research is not about pedagogy. She asserts that she knows nothing about teaching reading. She says the quiet part out loud, the subtext: The part of the science of reading researched by psychologists and neurobiologists has nothing to say about teaching. Digit naming speed may be useful in clinical diagnosis of a learning disability, but its usefulness ends there. The part of the science of reading that researches the outcomes of pedagogy takes over. In my view, that part of the science of reading is canonically sociocultural and must satisfy itself with natural experimentation in vivo.
https://dyslexiaida.org/scarboroughs-reading-rope-a-groundbreaking-infographic/
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/comments-lucy-calkins-retreat-phonics-dr-reid-lyon-mark-shinn