What’s inside: In this episode, Katharine Pace Miles, Assistant Professor in Early Childhood Education at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.  Her research focuses on many different areas of literacy instruction including orthographic facilitation, sight word learning, assessment, and developmentally appropriate, highly engaging, explicit literacy instruction for emerging readers.

Dr. Miles also works closely with New York City’s Department of Education and Literacy Trust, an organization that supports literacy initiatives and research on factors that impact the city’s most vulnerable students. In this podcast, she talks to us about some really interesting implications of her research on sight word instruction, the intervention Reading Rescue, and the science of reading informed intervention software, Amira Learning. 

Here are some key takeaways:

• Teach Sight Words in Context and Review Lists with a Critical Eye:  In Dr. Miles’ paper on Learning to Read on Flashcards published with her colleague, Dr. Linnea Ehri, she uncovered the trouble that students have mastering commonly used classroom sight word lists (like Dolsch and Fry) that feature helping verbs like was, were, has, have, been. These words are harder for students to learn not just because they are phonetically irregular, but because they are non-lexical - meaning they don’t have independent meaning from the verb they are supporting. Dr. Miles found that trying to teach these words out of context of the sentence — in a sight word list, for example — is difficult and students did not perform well, especially second language learners. On the contrary, teachers can find greater success by teaching these words (both reading and spelling) within the context of the sentence that ties these words to the verbs they are supporting.

• Ensure Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Fluency, Vocabulary, and Comprehension is Present in all Literacy Instruction and Intervention: In Dr. Miles’ paper on the effectiveness of the reading intervention program Reading Rescue, she found that that the program was not only effective in bringing students to benchmark, but other students also benefited by having teachers in their school who were trained in the eight PD sessions offered to teachers who use the program. In addition, it’s important to use programs that are not only research-based but evidence-based. That means that the programs commit to research demonstrate evidence that the program is effective.

• Use Evidence-Based Intervention Software that Embeds the Science of Reading into the Curriculum: Dr. Miles chats about an assessment, screening, and intervention software called Amira that supports students with reading and writing instruction aligned with the science of reading.

Learn more about our guests and other items mentioned in the podcast: 

• Reading Rescue is a reading intervention for struggling first graders.

• Amira Learning is a reading app that supports students through assessment, screening, and intervention.

This podcast episode was sponsored by Heggerty Phonemic Awareness.