The empowering legacy of Linnea Ehri
“Here’s the rub: people manage to be good at reading without knowing much about how they do it.”
Mark Seidenberg (2017)
The growing awareness among Australian teachers that there is a ‘Science of Reading’, and the gradual shift towards evidence-aligned teaching practices, is one of the more promising developments in education in recent years. Yet, many of us who teach reading have encountered the ‘rub’ that language and reading specialist Mark Seidenberg describes.
When we say we are following the Science of Reading, few of us are really following the original research, but rather the curricula and programs chosen by our school leaders -- hopefully on the basis of evidence that the programs do work.
Our school leaders, in turn, are working on the assumption that those in charge of program development, whether it be schoolteachers on a Science of Reading journey, or professional program writers, know more about how we read than the rest of us. Given the wave of Whole Language-cum-Balanced Literacy pedagogy that school leaders favoured for several decades, we know how flawed that assumption can be. The translation of research into practice is a hazardous route, and one that practitioners should navigate using our own in-depth knowledge of the research.
Linnea Ehri is an American expert on the development of reading
Linnea Ehri is an American educational psychologist and expert on the development of reading who has empowered us teachers of reading. Her legacy of theory and research has given us remarkably accessible insight into how we learn to read. She has bequeathed not a program to follow, but rather a set of sound, simple ideas that help us to understand how we manage to be good at reading. Her insight reflects a deceptively simple, but very powerful, theoretical model of the development of our mental ‘lexicon’ – the brain’s store of what we know about words.
Consider that each entry in our lexicon has a set of representations:
Semantic. We know what the words mean (sometimes only sort of, and sometimes perfectly clearly). This starts to develop in infancy and continues to build throughout our lifetime.
Syntactic. We know how to put the words into sentences. These skills develop quite early too, but often need sharpening up once we reach secondary school and are required to read and write complicated sentences.
Phonological. We can say the words, and we recognise them when we hear them spoken. In our early years, phonological representations are generally a bit imperfect, fuzzy and holistic, and they are very implicit. Very young children certainly aren’t capable of analysing words and talking explicitly about their separate component sounds.
And then, about school age, we start to learn to read and write. At this point a whole new feature of our lexicon develops: we know how words are spelt. This feature of our word knowledge is the orthographic representation (the term ‘orthography’ referring to our spelling system).
What Professor Ehri has done for us is account for how, for every word we know, our phonological and orthographic representations are inter-connected. They are, in a very clear neurological way (Dehaene, 2019), ‘bonded’, with the letters and letter groups mapped onto the sounds.
Orthographic Mapping
involves the formation of letter-sound connections to bond the spellings, pronunciations, and meanings of specific words in memory. It explains how children learn to read words by sight, to spell words from memory, and to acquire vocabulary words from print.
This is ‘orthographic mapping’
As is the case with all aspects of the lexicon, there are degrees of precision involved, and Professor Ehri’s theory of orthographic mapping outlines simply and clearly how this mapping process becomes more stable, precise, and accurate depending on both the explicitness of the phonological representations (children’s phonemic awareness) and the detail with which children attend to the letters (which is a useful outcome of systematic phonics teaching).
Thanks to Professor Ehri, we now understand one of the critical processes in the miracle that is learning to read and write. When we see a written word, the phonological representations are instantaneously activated, and when we hear a word spoken, we have a sense of how it is spelled. And all this is tied in with the semantic and syntactic knowledge associated with words in our lexicons. We are now literate.
Put simply, the process of orthographic mapping, as theorised by Professor Ehri, allows us to be good at reading words, which is the bedrock of literacy. All teachers should strive to build an understanding of the ‘science’ in the ‘Science of Reading’. This essential knowledge equips us to scrutinise curricula and programs, and any supporting research claims, and to plan lessons and adopt methods that have the best chance of ensuring our students become good readers.
This knowledge can help us all to be better teachers.
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Professor Linnea Ehri will appear as keynote speaker at two professional learning conferences hosted by learning Difficulties Australia in Melbourne on October 23 and Sydney on October 25.
For further details or to book go to LDA Events.
About our Guest Contributor
Dr Roslyn Neilson is a speech pathologist with extensive experience in research, teaching, and clinical practice in the area of children’s literacy. She is secretary of Learning Difficulties Australia.
References
Seidenberg, M. (2017). Language at the speed of sight.
Dehaene, S. (2019). Reading in the brain.