Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children
	Catherine E. Snow, M. Susan Burns, and Peg Griffin, Editors
	Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children, National Research Council
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Preface

"Few things in life are less efficient than a group of people trying to write a sentence" (Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle, 1996). The decision that a group of people should write a report of this size clearly was not motivated by the goal of efficiency; it was motivated by the goals of comprehensiveness and accuracy and made feasible by the expectation of compromise and consensus. The field of reading is one that has long been marked by controversies and disagreements. Indeed, the term "reading wars" has been part of the debate over reading research for the past 25 years. The unpleasantness of the conflicts among reading researchers was moderated, if not eliminated, by the realization that all the participants are primarily interested in ensuring the well-being of young children and in promoting optimal literacy instruction.

The study reported in this volume was undertaken with the assumption that empirical work in the field of reading had advanced sufficiently to allow substantial agreed-upon results and conclusions that could form a basis for breaching the differences among the warring parties. The process of doing the study revealed the correctness of the assumption that this has been an appropriate time to undertake a synthesis of the research on early reading development. The knowledge base is now large enough that the controversies that have dominated discussions of reading development and reading instruction have given way to a widely honored pax lectura, the conditions of which include a shared focus on the needs and rights of all children to learn to read. Under the treaties that have recently been entered into, furthermore, the focus of attention has shifted from the researchers' theories and data back to the teacher, alone in her classroom with a heterogeneous group of children, all awaiting their passports to literacy.

From the perspective of the teacher, our task can be conceptualized as cutting through the detail of partially convergent, sometimes discrepant research findings to provide an integrated picture of how reading develops and how reading instruction should proceed. It may come as a surprise to the reader to find that consensus in achieving that integrated picture, among the members of this diverse committee, was not difficult to reach. All members agreed that reading should be defined as a process of getting meaning from print, using knowledge about the written alphabet and about the sound structure of oral language for purposes of achieving understanding. All thus also agreed that early reading instruction should include direct teaching of information about sound-symbol relationships to children who do not know about them and that it must also maintain a focus on the communicative purposes and personal value of reading.

In this report, the committee makes recommendations for practice, as well as recommendations for further research that needs to be undertaken. Our discussions also explored how people need to start thinking about reading and reading instruction. This turned out to be harder to formulate, because it evokes the often frustrating and familiarly academic position that "this is an incredibly complicated phenomenon." Although we can see the readers' eyes rolling at the predictability of this claim, we nonetheless persist in the contention that much of the difficulty in seeking real reforms in reading instruction and intervention derives from simplistic beliefs about these issues, and so one step in improving matters involves making the complexities known.

Not only the first-grade teacher, but also the parent, the pediatrician, the school administrator, the curriculum consultant, the textbook publisher, the state legislator, and the secretary of education need to understand both what is truly hard about learning to read and how wide-ranging and varied the experiences are that support and facilitate reading acquisition. All these people need to understand as well that many factors that correlate with reading fail to explain it, that many experiences contribute to reading development without being prerequisite to it, and that there are many prerequisites, so no single one can be considered sufficient.

The focus of this report is prevention. We thus try to sketch a picture of the conditions under which reading is most likely to develop easily--conditions that include stimulating preschool environments, excellent reading instruction, and the absence of any of a wide array of risk factors. Our focus on trying to provide optimal conditions does not mean that we think that children experiencing less than optimal conditions are in any sense doomed to failure in reading; many children from poor and uneducated families learn to read well, even without excellent preschool classroom experience or superb early reading instruction. Nonetheless, with an eye to reducing risk and preventing failure, we focus on mechanisms for providing the best possible situation for every child.

We submit this report with high hopes that it may indeed mark the end of the reading wars and that it will contribute to the successful reading development of many children. It is the collective product of the entire committee, and it could not have been produced without the selfless contributions of time, thought, and hard work of all members, or without their willingness to confront with integrity and resolve with grace their many productive disagreements with one another.

Catherine Snow, Chair
Susan Burns, Study Director
Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children

Addition to the Third Printing

Since its release in March 1998, Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children has captured considerable attention. While it is, of course, gratifying to have the work of the committee validated, the carefully crafted message of the book has sometimes been represented in a way that is somewhat simplified or even, in some cases, distorted. Thus we take this opportunity to restate with emphasis what we see as the core message concerning reading instruction: that reading instruction integrate attention to the alphabetic principle with attention to the construction of meaning and opportunities to develop fluency.

The committee's position has often been presented as one endorsing "balance" or "some phonics and some whole language." "Balance" is not the right metaphor to carry our message, and we certainly did not suggest an approach that involved "a little of this and a little of that." "Balance" could mean splitting one's time evenly across activities designed to practice the alphabetic principle and activities designed to support comprehension. "Integration" means precisely that the opportunities to learn these two aspects of skilled reading should be going on at the same time, in the context of the same activities, and that the choice of instructional activities should be part of an overall, coherent approach to supporting literacy development, not a haphazard selection from unrelated, though varied, activities.

A list of developmental accomplishments typical of children at various ages was included in the report, with some diffidence. We cautioned that these were "neither exhaustive nor incontestable" and that "the timing of these accomplishments will to some extent depend on maturational and experiential differences between children." Thus, finding some of these developmental accomplishments written into the Head Start reauthorization bill as bases for judging the adequacy of Head Start classrooms was somewhat surprising; we can only hope that the net effect is to improve the consistency of attention to genuinely enriching language and literacy experiences in Head Start, and not to penalize programs or children who fail to meet the expectations.

The value of a report like this one is that it represents a solid platform of consensus across a wide array of perspectives, from which collaborative efforts at educational improvement can be undertaken. The consensus achieved is not permanent; research will continue to refine our views of how skilled readers function, of what factors contribute to skilled reading and constitute risks to its easy development, and of the features of excellent reading instruction. Nonetheless, the consensus achieved has already been taken advantage of in national and several state-level efforts at reading reform, and as such has proved its value in deflecting attention from conflicts about reading methods to a concerted effort to prevent reading difficulties. Still, the report outlines important challenges. Although it concludes that a knowledge base for greatly improving reading outcomes already exists, it also suggests that substantial improvement in the preparation, support, and ongoing professional development of early childhood and primary educators is needed. We argue in the report that teacher education needs to be rethought and redesigned in quite radical ways, if the goal of minimizing the incidence of reading difficulties is to be achieved. Members of the committee have been energetic in bringing the message of the report to professional organizations, to school districts, and to sites for professional development of classroom teachers, but structural changes that go far beyond these efforts are clearly needed. We welcome this third printing as evidence that interest in preventing reading difficulties is widespread among American educators.

December 1998