Science of Reading: The Podcast

Back to School '23, Interlude episode 2 (Part 1): Embracing the complexity of learning to read with Dr. Reid Lyon

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Dr. Reid Lyon is one of the leading experts in reading research. After years working for and with the highest levels of the U.S. government, Dr. Lyon stepped away from his reading research. But in May 2023, Dr. Lyon released his "Ten Maxims: What We've Learned So Far About How Children Learn to Read." And of course Susan jumped at the chance to invite him onto the podcast. In a wide-reaching interview, Dr. Lyon traces his life story from the Vietnam War to the National Institute of Health. He also offers an expansive overview of what we know about teaching reading, how children learn—including a discussion of whole language vs. phonics—and his response to educators wondering what reading actually is and what methodology of teaching students to read is most effective.

Be on the lookout for Part 2 of our interview with Dr. Reid Lyon, being released next week.

Show notes:

Quotes:

“Phonics—that is, looking at letters, letter patterns, learning how to bring sound to associate to those letters—is absolutely essential, non-negotiable. It has to be learned. But it in no way is sufficient to be able to comprehend, which is the goal of reading.” —Dr. Reid Lyon

“Reading is a complex behavior subserved by multiple systems in the brain that integrate and inform each other.” —Dr. Reid Lyon

“It’s a symphony of neural activity that undergirds this very complex behavior of just learning how to read. So when people boil reading down into phonics or whole language, it’s just a false characterization.” —Dr. Reid Lyon

“People somehow conflated this natural ability of oral language to develop—just expose kids, just shower them with language—to reading. And reading is by no means natural. It has to be taught. It does not reside in the brain systems.” —Dr. Reid Lyon

“We’re hampered by the teacher-knowledge issue. That’s not a teacher’s fault. That’s a college of education system that is bereft of responsibility. It operates on philosophical foundations. It operates on belief systems. It’s very politicized. It looks at reading as a right, which it is. But it doesn’t look at the instruction of reading as methodology—strategies, direct and comprehensive programs that can help most kids learn to read.” —Dr. Reid Lyon




Susan Lambert:

This is Susan Lambert, and welcome to a special edition of Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify, where the science of reading lives.

Dr. Reid Lyon:

Before we can appropriately change our children's reading behavior in this nation, we must help adults change their behavior.

Susan Lambert:

This is sound from a 2001 press conference hosted by the U . S. Department of Education. It's about a report on fourth grade reading levels. And the man speaking is Dr. Reid Lyon.

Dr. Reid Lyon:

Specifically, the results suggest that the converging evidence obtained from the research on how children learn to read, why many kids have difficulties learning to read, and how teachers can best improve reading skills has not been provided to the majority of our nation's teachers, and is not informing practice in the classroom.

Susan Lambert:

At the time, Dr. Lyon worked as the chief of the Child Development and Behavior branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. By that point, Dr. Lyon had spent years explaining to government officials and the public, the science of how children learn to read

Dr. Reid Lyon:

It is enormously complex, doesn't occur naturally. Teachers have to understand this complexity, have to understand how to present information with clarity to kids who don't see it Initially,

Susan Lambert:

In 2005, Dr. Lyon left his role at NIH. He went back to a university setting, and eventually his primary focus moved on from reading.

Dr. Reid Lyon:

I had stepped aside from the reading, what I thought was just constant adult nonsense, you know, the kids were definitely not in the discussion.

Susan Lambert:

And for nearly a decade, the man who was once speaking at government press conferences moved out of the limelight when it came to the discussion about literacy instruction. Then just a few months ago, Dr. Lyon authored a new piece. It's called, "10 Maxims: What We've Learned So Far About How Children Learn to Read."

Dr. Reid Lyon:

The maxims put into words the amalgamation of years of science and evidence and are designed to provide the beginning of a common language when we talk about reading.

Susan Lambert:

When we saw the piece, we immediately invited Dr. Lyon on to the podcast, and we were pleasantly surprised to get a yes. What followed was a multi-hour conversation about his life and research, his reasons for authoring this new piece, and his thoughts about the current movement.

Dr. Reid Lyon:

You know, I can predict, you'll have to hold me to this with a pretty good degree of certainty, <laugh> , that if there is this overemphasis on one component of the constellation of reading development and reading instruction, there will be little change in kids' reading capabilities.

Susan Lambert:

The conversation was too expansive to share all at once. So we've broken it into two parts. Part one, which you're about to hear, covers everything from Dr. Lyon's life story to what I half-jokingly called a degree in reading science. Part two, which will be in your feed just next week, delves into Dr. Lyon's hopes and fears about the current movement. I hope you'll learn as much as I did from this conversation with Dr. G. Reid Lyon. Well, thank you, Reid, for joining us on today's episode.

Dr. Reid Lyon:

Well, it's great to be with you.

Susan Lambert:

This is just really an honor for me to talk with you and bring your story and message to our listeners. I'm sure that there are many of them out there that perhaps weren't even born during the time period that we're going to talk about. But before we jump in, I would love if you could tell us just a little bit about yourself and how you came into this world of literacy.

Dr. Reid Lyon:

Well, I was born in Tokyo, Japan. My father was in the military, served in Europe during World War II, then was on MacArthur's staff, and so moved to Holyoke, Massachusetts, and started school early 'cause of my birthday. So I started first grade at five years of age. And I could not read at all five years, six years going on into seven years. I didn't learn how to read. And my mom tried to teach me to read. She helped me sound out words, but would get very frustrated. So it became kind of a faint painful process for me. But eventually I began to read better, and then I became a voracious reader. But I'll always recall how difficult that was for me and how that made me feel in school and how I would just kind of become invisible, 'cause the other kids would make fun of me and stuff when I struggled reading. And my go-to was music. I played drums for many, many years and <laugh> , you know, played on the East Coast and the West Coast. But eventually I became a good reader. But I was not a good student in high school. So , in 1967, this is why a lot of the people that listen to this weren't even on or near the planet. <laugh>. I joined the Army and I knew I was going to Vietnam, and so I volunteered for the best training I could get. So I was a young paratrooper and a reconnaissance guy and I searched tunnels in Vietnam and saw a lot of combat and was in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive, and that was pretty extreme. But , you know, I lost a lot of friends in Vietnam, and I had a lot of friends who were wounded, and when I visited them when I got home, in the military hospital, some of them had received bullet wounds to the head, or shell fragments to the head. And what interested me was, it wasn't interesting, it saddened me, but it also piqued my interest, is they had lost the ability to read. And despite the fact that they had fairly good language, albeit not like they did before, but excellent problem-solving capabilities, but they could not pull the print off the page. And , you know, I was still in the service, and then after I got out-- the one thing the military did is it paid for all my schooling, which overall amounted to about 10 years of schooling. And I gravitated toward neuroscience because of that experience, and I gravitated toward applying neuroscience to reading because I had that emotional attachment to reading, and I figured there were a lot of other kids out there that may have felt the way I do, may have been struggling with print. And so I combined the two. And what fascinated me once I began doing my research--back then, we used electrophysiology and neuropsychological kinds of measures--and what I was wondering is whether there was one place in the brain that seemed to be responsible for reading or, you know, my hunch was--and people had found this out before me, I just wasn't the literature well enough--but there are several systems in the brain that combine coalesce in their cooperation with one another to allow someone to pull the print off the page, that is decode words, that also activate in fluency teaching reading very quickly.

Susan Lambert:

Mm - hmm .

Dr. Reid Lyon:

Comprehension is observed by other systems, but it's a symphony of neural activity that undergirds this very complex behavior of learning how to read. So, you know, when people boil reading down into phonics or whole language, it's just a false characterization, primarily biologically it doesn't work that way. And those kinds of experiences in my life , my love for neuroscience and research and my application to what I thought was a clinical area where a lot of little guys and girls were hurt , would be something I wanted to pursue. So that's how I got into early literacy and then later literacy.

Susan Lambert:

Hmm. Well, first of all, thank you so much for your service. I'm sure many of our listeners out there would say the same to you. And what a very interesting story to bring those two things together to drive your curiosity about what happens. So, really interesting. And I wanna ask a follow-up question to you. You said something about when we talk about whole language and when we talk about phonics, that it's a little more complicated, it just doesn't boil down to that sort of dichotomy. Can you say a little bit more about that?

Dr. Reid Lyon:

Yes. First of all, like any complex cognitive behavior, if the goal of reading is to comprehend or understand what you read, yes, you need to look at letters, look at words, decode those letters to sound, and then do that automatically after a period of time. But that alone in no way will allow one to comprehend. So I'm just going to take the phonics issue first. So, phonics that is looking at letters, letter patterns, learning how to bring sound to associate to those letters, is absolutely essential, non-negotiable. It has to be learned. But it in no way is sufficient to be able to comprehend, which is the goal of reading. To comprehend other neural systems and circuits melding the information from those systems have to be in play because we can read words all day long, but if in fact they are not read quickly and automatically, the reader is gonna bog down. It was like me when I was a little kid. Jeannie Cha used to tell me it was like barking at the print. And that's what I was like, and when I was working with a lot of kids, that's what they sounded like. And so it's absolutely essential, but unless you become automatic and fluent with bringing that print off the page, then you can't remember what the heck you read, you're gonna get frustrated. You're gonna start guessing at words. And I'll say that again. Poor readers are the ones that use guessing strategies, not good readers. And so that's still not enough. You can decode, you can do it quickly, but you also have to have vocabulary and background knowledge, which is another system in brain, several systems in brain that allow you to place linguistic material in memory. Because when you're reading, no matter how accurate with words, and no matter how fluent you are in bringing those words to your mind, if you don't have any idea what the words mean, it's like me reading astrophysics and reading the words well and quickly. But I don't have the vocabulary and I have no idea what I just read, <laugh>. So that may happen to a number of the listeners when they're assigned something for the first time, and it's jargon and there's no understanding. And we also have learned that other systems in the brain, primarily prefrontal and in frontal systems, allow us to organize as thinkers. So when we're reading, we intuitively relate what we're reading to our own background experience. If we have the vocabulary, that's much, much easier to do. When we're reading, if we don't do it automatically, the kids need to be taught how to read and say, "Have I ever been in this situation?" Or to read and predict, if you will, what might be happening next. The reader, in a sense, is being active with the information. And being active, it takes on much more salience as an important set of informational concepts. So phonics started that out, but even before phonics, you don't really have a good idea of how to break words into their pieces and decode them to sound, unless in our language, in other alphabetic languages, you have the capacity to understand that the words coming by our ears are composed of smaller sounds. And the reason that's difficult is because as you and I are talking, and let's just say I say the word big, and I ask you, how many sounds do you hear in the word big? Now, before you were schooled, if you were in this particular activity, you might say one, one sound, but there's actually three. And the brain here gets us into a little trouble because as we're listening to language, we say the first letter, and then the other letter sounds fold up into the first letter. Otherwise, you and I would be talking and I would be going, oh, that is b--i--g. It's called coarticulation. And so the medial sounds and the final sounds fold up into the initial sound and come by as one bolus of energy. And people say, well, why is it so difficult for these kids to be able to put sound to this and that, in terms of decoding. And it's because they don't understand that the words they hear are composed of smaller sounds, which then become the grist for the phonics mill.

Susan Lambert:

Mm - hmm. That's great.

Dr. Reid Lyon:

So when you look at reading as a constellation of very complex skills in their own right, you've gotta have the sound structure. Without the sound structure, you're not going to be able to select sounds to lay onto print to decode. If you're slow and labored in that process, you don't have the memory for it. Not only is it frustrating, but you can't remember what you read. If you're coming to the task without the lexicon and the semantic vocabulary background, it doesn't mean anything. And if you're not organizing the information as you're reading it, it isn't very interesting, you can't remember it so forth. So we just looked at a series of complex interactions between brain and language, and we can actually see that , when we image the brain as kids are doing tasks, general reading tasks or phonological tasks or vocabulary tasks, we can confirm the finding that reading is a complex behavior subserved by multiple systems in the brain that integrate and inform each other. And then you have what later becomes automatic, fluent unconscious kind of reading. Like we lay in bed and read a book or something. We're not worried about sounds, we're not worried about any one word. So on the other hand, what I noticed in terms of this dichotomy was there were a number of scholars and individuals who felt that all of what we've just talked about, you know, putting focus on the letters, letter sounds, on the speed was actually harmful to children. That spending so much time looking at words, decoding them was a waste of time. Because human beings have this capacity to read with practice. And when they come across words, they don't know they try to predict what that word is from the surrounding context, from the vocabulary surrounding the unknown word, from the sentence structure, what word would fit in there, giving that context and given that sentence structure. And then the kids would predict that. And that was the method of choice for many, many years. And, you know, that had been called whole language. There are other terms for it, literature-based reading instruction, three queuing systems, reading instruction. All of those depend upon less emphasis on phonics and decoding and fluency and so on. So that's how that dichotomy, phonics, whole language, got started. And its false on its face just because of the complexity of all of the skills that interact to read. And it's also false on its face that whole language and its offspring was based upon the idea that reading was natural, that just by exposure to print, by surrounding kids with books, with reading to kids, you know, from childhood onward, would place the active reading within someone's repertoire pretty automatically. Now, I'm not sure where they got off the rails, but we certainly know that oral language, you and I talking to one another without print, is a somewhat natural phenomenon. By exposure to oral language, you and I were able to come along, hear language, internalize it, mimic it, and become fairly good speakers. And, you know, we can watch kids from birth up to six years of age, and it's fascinating to watch how they coo and then how they babble. And then they use single words, they can say single words, what we call holophrastic speech. Then they begin to string some words together, although the tenses are all over the place, <laugh> and so on. So you know, it's, it's a pretty predictable process. What's fascinating is that as kids are in the early stages of language development, their ability to make sounds--not perceive them, but to make sounds--is every person at that young, young age can make every sound that is used in every language in the world.

Susan Lambert:

Wow. That's amazing!

Dr. Reid Lyon:

Yeah. It's hard for people who are not Japanese speakers to actually speak Japanese because of some of the sound differences. And it's hard for Japanese people because they have confusions between "r" and "l" and so forth, but that's with another language. So I think people somehow conflated this natural ability of oral language to develop, just expose kids, just shower them with language to reading. And reading is by no means natural. It has to be taught. It does not reside in brain systems. The genetics that are working to provide brain systems for language aren't genetics for reading, they're genetics for those systems that pull sounds apart. That allow the brain to transfer information from one set of neuronal clusters to another set of neuronal clusters. So simply put, reading is not natural. That's nonsense. And, you know, it could be that people will say, "Well, wait a minute, now I've got many kids in my first grade, second grade classroom, or my own kids who did not need to be taught phonics and can read." Now, when we've looked at a lot of children who were described that way, it's pretty typical that you find the following. Number one, the parents had a rich linguistic interaction with their kids from birth onward. Some people would pump Tchaikovsky into the womb, you know, <laugh> . And, not only were parents interacting linguistically, but parents make a lot of funny sounds and they try to get the youngster to mimic. And the little games that parents and other people play with little ones like rhyming. People don't understand how helpful that is because let's rhyme a word. Let's say I wanna rhyme a word with big, and after a while the kid will be able, with modeling, be able to say, dig. So that's a good job. Now by saying, dig, there's some complexity here, because in order to rhyme with big, the brain has to slice off the phoneme and then replace it with another phoneme, "d," when the ear cannot hear the distinctions between the sounds. See it?

Susan Lambert:

Hmm. Yep.

Dr. Reid Lyon:

And these concrete kinds of ways, the language is being molded through early language interactions with parents rhyming games, you know, playing ubbi dubbi, you know, that kind of thing. Playing, what does dog say without the " d" sound? "Og," you know, all of that. So what you're doing is phonological gymnastics, and again, beginning to activate those systems and brain that handle that grunt work, that's, again, fodder for the comprehension mill. So one of the reasons of many that we have, a lot of youngsters from lower socioeconomic strata are not because the parents don't want their youngsters to read and succeed in school, but their parents may not have had the language and literacy interactions themselves, and thus they may not understand how best to do that with kids, although they want to. It could be not enough funds to populate the house with whatever literacy materials, but probably it's just not understanding--not that they can't--that a number of these interactions will help the kid develop the language that undergirds reading. At the same time, that's still not enough. You still have to teach kids how to read and spell. It just won't come automatically. You know, one of the things that a lot of people have reported is that if guessing strategies, queuing strategies are used to predict unknown words from context, there's only so many words that can be predicted from context.

Susan Lambert:

Oh, that makes sense.

Dr. Reid Lyon:

Yeah. About one out of eight to one out of six. And those are usually content words. But it's a very inefficient process. In fact, that's why if you're watching kids learn to read by these guessing strategies, you begin to see how rapidly they'll come off the task. Then they start to guess at any kind of facsimile. And as I mentioned before, you know, it's typically poor readers who guess. And that guessing idea is also based upon the fact that Ken Goodman and Frank Smith and other of these early reading scholars felt, was that kids by no means read individual words. So they definitely don't have to untangle the letters and the sounds, 'cause they don't even read words. I mean, they don't have to read every word. But Keith Rayner up at UMass Amherst was doing an ingenious set of studies using eye movement technology. And what Keith was interested in is what the heck are the eyes doing? If what it's reading, do the eyes flash across the text or gloss across the text? Or do the eyes actually focus and in milliseconds stay on the letters? And the latter is the case. Good readers read every word on the page, even though you don't know it. So, you're kind negating the tenets of a theory that reading is natural, that one can use surrounding context to better decode words without decoding them and comprehend that it will instill the love of reading, and people politicize it. And clearly the early whole language people , like Goodman and Smith, were looking at reading development as establishing social justice, you know? Reading was conflated into a view of the world rather than as a set of skills one could use to learn more about the world. You know, I'm simplifying. But that's the phonics whole language dilemma, which has always been false and always been superficial. And it wore me out trying to help people understand it's not even something you need to spend time on, 'cause it doesn't work that way. But, I hope I answered that question.

Susan Lambert:

You certainly did. I have a follow-up question for you. And this is tapping into your memory, so sorry, mine's not the greatest, but the eye movement studies, what years were those happening?

Dr. Reid Lyon:

Oh, Keith started those in the early eighties and late eighties, early nineties.

Susan Lambert:

So we've known this for a while.

Dr. Reid Lyon:

Oh. Big time. We've known a lot of stuff for a while. There's so many people that mentored me and molded my thinking and taught me what I know. Keith's work was one. Alvin Liberman at Haskins Laboratory, and Susan Brady at Haskins Laboratory, and Don Shankweiler at Haskins taught me speech science and the innerworkings of this amazing phonological code and how it all works. And I just had the privilege of being with so many people who taught me a great deal, and there's many more. But , people were working on these sublexical or these confidential processes that surround language. The very, very important specific pieces of language that must be developed to be able to eventually read fluently.

Susan Lambert:

Mm-hmm. Well, I'm gonna make a shift. Wow. You just gave us probably an entire maybe undergraduate degree in reading science right there, <laugh> in the first part of our podcast. So thank you. That's really amazing. I wanna switch a little bit, because you are really best known for your work at the National Institute of Health. How did you find yourself there at the NIH, and just give our listeners who weren't born yet , a little background and what your role was there.

Dr. Reid Lyon:

Sure. I had a couple of fellowships after my doctoral degree and my first job was at Northwestern University in Evanston. I had a lab there and I was looking at reading at that time. My dissertation in graduate school was identifying these multiple systems that are activated and need to work hard to be able to read and comprehend. So, my initial questions, I began to study those in my doctoral program. Went to Northwestern, worked with some of the pioneers in learning disabilities and reading disorders. And learned a great deal from Doris Johnson and Helmer Myklebust. If you do a Google, you'll see their contributions. While at Northwestern, I was recruited. Well, Chicago's really cold .

Susan Lambert:

<laugh> . It is.

Dr. Reid Lyon:

And I thought maybe I'd like warmer weather, but that wasn't the case because I was recruited by the Stern Center for Language and Learning in Burlington, Vermont. That's cold.

Susan Lambert:

It's cold there too. <laugh>

Dr. Reid Lyon:

Yeah. And also, I went on the faculty of the Department of Neurology at the University of Vermont Medical School. Because my specialty and my publications at that time were in looking at neuropsychological systems that have to develop and work together to provide the brain a foundation to pull print off a page related to what you know and comprehend, the National Institutes of Health was beginning to want to study reading as a complex behavior. A fellow by the name of David Gray , who was a geneticist at NIH, was a real visionary and pioneer, 'cause he knew how many kids were having a tough time learning to read and he wanted to understand the mechanisms, the basic mechanisms that seemed to be associated with that reading difficulty. So, David persuaded Duane Alexander, a pediatrician at NICHD, National Institute for Child Health and Human Development within the NIH. NIH has 20 something institutes. So NICHD, which I'll use instead of the whole phrase , was the home for this burgeoning thinking about how reading can inform us about the brain. It's a good vehicle to understand complex brain function. So David Gray knew of my work, and he brought me down from Vermont for a year-long, what's called an expert appointment. Now that's a little overblown , < laugh > , that's what they called it. And so I went down for one major reason, I had a background in neuroscience and I had been applying it to reading.

Susan Lambert:

What year was that, that you went down and did that expert assignment?

Dr. Reid Lyon:

1991.

Susan Lambert:

Okay.

Dr. Reid Lyon:

And when I was there, I had contributed to developing a research program which asked particular kinds of questions. And I'll take you through those in a minute. But while I was there during that 1991 year, Duane Alexander asked me if I would like to come to NIH full time. And NIH is a magical place. It's different. You know, as a university professor, and I've been a professor at a couple of places, NIH is somewhat dissimilar in the sense that the main focus is science, is research, no teaching involved other than grand rounds and those kinds of things. NIH has some of the internal academic squabbles that go on. People quacking at each other, but nothing like universities. So NIH could turn on a dime. So if we saw something, we could shift research and funding to get after what we thought was a critical piece we hadn't seen before. So anyway, when I got there, I was basically given a carte blanche to think about how we could develop programs that could get after the complexity of reading. At the same time, I was made a branch chief, and as the chief of the Child and Behavior branch, I had a number of other programs that I had to oversee, some of which I also developed. I had programs in cognitive neuroscience and developmental neuroscience, behavioral pediatrics, cognitive social and emotional development, school readiness, Spanish to English reading. A lot of these we developed. So each of those programs that I was responsible for, I could bring in to inform what became the NICHD Reading Research program. So what I had noticed in my own research and in the field as a whole, was that the research was not integrated well. So within my mandate, I had to really think hard. And I knew that in order for that integration to take place and for people to work together, which is fairly rare and academic circles, I had to come up with some very specific compelling questions. And so I thought, and thought and thought, and I thought, well, simplicity is probably the order of the day. It's called occam's razor, and that's the simpler you can make something, the more useful it's gonna be. The four questions were, number one, how do children learn to read? Now you get into the guts of that. What are the genetics, neurobiological factors, language development factors, environmental factors, and instructional factors that coalesce to allow someone to pull print off the page in an alphabetic language and comprehend it. So how do children learn to read? As you just heard, is that very complex arena. But that was question number one. The second question is, why are some children having difficulty learning to read? Which of those factors, neurobiology, genetics, instructional , environment, instructional strategies, cognition, memory, which of those are impeding the developmental reading process? Because if we can map what it takes, we can map what's going on when it doesn't take. The next question was, how do you prevent this from happening? Are there ways to measure these factors which we've isolated in questions one and two, how can we measure them somewhat rapidly and simply for little kids to be able to predict who might have difficulty later on. At the time we were doing this research, the children who were being identified with reading difficulties and receiving then specialized care were basically nine and 10 years of age. And the reason was there were some lousy definitions of learning disabilities and reading disorders. But be that as it may, I won't bore you with that, it wasn't until eight or nine that the kids were actually formally identified. By that time, the probability of them ever reading was at about 15%.

Susan Lambert:

Oof. Ouch.

Dr. Reid Lyon:

Connie Juel said it better than that in her longitudinal study. She said 67% of poor readers at the fourth grade will be poor readers throughout high school. So what can we measure that will predict someone having difficulty later in their early years so we can intervene very quickly. It's very difficult to change the trajectory after nine years of age or 10. You can, but it's pretty intensive. The next question was, okay, we missed a lot of kids. You know, these are eight year olds, nine year olds, 16 year olds. How does one turn that around at older ages? What are the conditions under which instruction that encapsulates all of the factors we've been talking about, can be provided to kids who probably have lost a lot of interest, are , somewhat turned off to school and on and on and on? So all of these questions revolve around a core of what are the conditions that have to be in place in order to identify kids early, identify why, and then ask what instructional program or combination of programs, methods, and strategies are most influential in building and integrating the complex set of components necessary for reading. So this is where I've always had some concern about reading programs that aren't flexible enough for teachers to first be able to ensure that they have the types of interactions and concepts that are encapsulated in the components necessary to read. And the ability to see which of those components may have not developed or the kids may be struggling in that particular set of components. Let me give you an example. And this really opened my eyes. So I was interested, this is the first time I'm learning about instructional stuff because I designed studies and asked the field to carry out studies that did address that question. Under what conditions are which instructional approaches, methods, and strategies most influential in developing reading skills? So we'll talk about what that meant nationally shortly. But in asking that question, what I saw were two things. Number one, the programs that were in place were either invalid or the strategies and philosophies in place were invalid--whole language, literature-based programs, queuing systems. Or they were too narrow, phonics-only, you know, decoding, little integration with other linguistic and oral language factors that are absolutely necessary. And that propagated more of the phonics whole language divisions, 'cause you were actually instantiating this dichotomy through programs and people could get their hands around the program. So in looking at that particular question, you had the program issue, but then you also had the teacher knowledge issue. I don't know any teacher that went into the profession, and I actually taught the third grade back in my early education, and I was terrible, but I do know how classrooms work. And what I do know is in the courses that I took, and this is just my own experience, for reading and for education in general, were not helpful. They typically were somewhat superficial coverage of pretty complex kinds of things. And I just didn't learn a great deal. And I think a lot of teachers, at least during that generation, were in the same boat. So as they're coming along, most of the colleges of education had shifted toward this literature-based whole language philosophical foundation. And most teachers were coming out of their training with those particular strategy. This was not anything that they did, this is what they learned. The colleges of education weren't as focused on the types of research methods that can actually tell you whether something works. Those have to be pretty objective, direct clinical trial kinds of studies. The concerning part was the colleges of education in the main, not all of them, not understanding what it takes to learn if something works, had an easy target to attack. And so the attacks were against this, you know, grunt science, this tearing apart reading into teeny pieces. And the best way you could understand reading was to use classroom observations and naturalistic approaches and those kinds of things, which are actually great. This ethnographic research is great for the questions that need to be asked that requires it. Those methodologies aren't effective for questions of, how does it work?

Susan Lambert:

Yeah.

Dr. Reid Lyon:

It just won't tell you. But people weren't into combining research methods and people weren't into combining different knowledge from different sources in understanding reading. And maybe that's the human condition. So we had two issues. One was, you got these programs where there's a good deal of financial reward at stake. And then you had the majority of people teaching youngsters not having had the opportunity to learn how reading develops, what goes wrong when it doesn't, how can we prevent it, and what can we do about helping kids at older ages who really can't read?

Susan Lambert:

Those four questions of yours. And would you say ... so when I talk about the Science of Reading and talk about how it's a preponderance of evidence that's interdisciplinary from all different disciplines that we look at. Would you say your four questions help to bring that together?

Dr. Reid Lyon:

Yes. You know, I clearly know that it wasn't random that I felt that there was a Science of Reading. As I mentioned, there were so many individuals and mentors that I had. Some of the most brilliant scientists around the country, way before my tenure, who knew that there were objective ways to figure this out. That we did not have to guess when we could apply the methodologies to understand how and why. And I mentioned a number of them, the Libermans at Haskins Laboratory, Marilyn Adams, who was at Brown University then, who really did a beautiful job reviewing the literature about the Science of Reading. Way back, I think, what was her publication? It was in the eighties.

Susan Lambert:

Was it the book , Learning to Read or something? I think it was, is that right?

Dr. Reid Lyon:

Yeah.

Susan Lambert:

Yeah. Yeah. That was before I was born too. No, I'm just kidding. <laugh>.

Dr. Reid Lyon:

< laugh > . One of my greatest friends and fellow scientist and mentor and co-author with me is Jack Fletcher. Now Jack is from the University of Houston, and I met Jack in Toronto, Canada when I was giving a talk on my quest to find subgroups of poor readers, you know, because of the systems model that I was using. And Jack was in the audience and after it was over--I had never met him, I knew his work--and he said, "you know, the problem is all of your findings cannot be replicated." And I said, "why not?" And he said, "well, you're using, or you're sampling school-identified kids, and that means that the kids coming into the sample differ massively across the criteria that the schools may have been using to identify them as reading disabled."

Susan Lambert:

Hmmm.

Dr. Reid Lyon:

So, in other words, I had a very biased set of children, and the reason is you could be learning disabled or reading disabled in Iowa, move to Kentucky and not be reading disabled because of the definitional criteria. So it would be very difficult to generalize those findings. My feelings were hurt < laugh > , but I listened to Jack, and Jack and I and Robin Morris, who was at Georgia State University, developed a collaboration which has lasted years and years and years. And Jack, of anybody, is probably one of the most important people in the Science of Reading, because Jack had the wisdom and the knowledge to design the studies we're talking about. And you can't go anywhere unless you have a wizard to listen to Lyon's questions, <laugh>, And design the science so it can answer those questions. So to be able to answer the questions at NIH, I had to develop a funding network where we could fund multiple sites around the country, to address parts of the puzzle.

Susan Lambert:

Meaning parts of those questions?

Dr. Reid Lyon:

Yeah. And you can't eat the elephant, as they say at one place. Although there were some sites that were really nicely integrated because I asked the reading scientific community or the, the scientific community in general to design studies that were longitudinal in nature.

Susan Lambert:

Okay.

Dr. Reid Lyon:

We needed to look at kids from early on over time. One big reason is the definitional issue I was talking about. If you wait until kids have difficulties and then bring them into your samples, they differ across so many different environments. So if we sample all children, you know, a population sample, follow them from five-years-of-age through nine, we have some kids now 25 who are still in the studies. One can see how you address, "what does it take to learn how to read?" Because you're measuring phonological processing, you're measuring decoding, you're measuring fluency, you're measuring vocabulary, you're measuring comprehension strategies, you're measuring the genetics that are associated with these kinds of achievements. You're measuring the neurobiology, you're measuring the instructional factors that are going on in the child's life and you're watching it over time. To be able to answer question number three, how do you prevent this? We could identify the tasks at five and six that predicted reading failure at seven, eight, nine,10, 11, 12. And a lot of the folks, brilliant folks in the network, Joe Torgeson and Richard Wagner and Barbara Foreman and this group at Florida State were instrumental in developing the measures that allowed us to predict who was at risk for reading failure and bring to bear interventions. Now, the latter part was after, you know, there were now 30 different sites working on the four questions or pieces of the four questions. So 30 sites across the country? Yes. Some of those sites, if I start up north, is Massachusetts, University of Massachusetts, Harvard University, Beth Israel Hospital, Yale University. Let me come down the Eastern Seaboard ... Johns Hopkins University, Georgia State University, the University of Florida, Florida State University, University of Texas, University of Houston, University of Colorado, University of Illinois, University of Washington, University of Oregon, University of California at Davis and UCLA. And I think, I don't know how many I named, but ...

Susan Lambert:

A lot! That was pretty good. <laugh>.

Dr. Reid Lyon:

So given all of that, and given the fact that after a couple years the longitudinal data were coming in, it then dawned on me that we could actually scientifically begin to study which type of intervention program or remediation program was most effective for which children that we had identified in the longitudinal studies. Which programs might do that? How do you configure the instructional interactions, the strategies one is using, are there already consolidated formal published programs that might be tested for that? Could we contrast different instructional strategies from different perspectives, whether it's literature-based, queuing systems, phonics-only, or comprehensive approaches, meaning it goes after all the components. Could we actually design studies that could ferret out all of the reasons kids couldn't read, and then which instructional interactions would help bring them to literacy proficiency? So the question I asked then, and it's a long one, and it's phrased in different ways, and it's not grammatical, I don't think < laugh > , but the question that I raised in my request for scientific sites across the country to think about and design studies was, for which children are which instructional programs, strategies, tactics, methods most beneficial at which ages, in which settings, classroom, blah, blah, blah--from which environments, socioeconomic, strata and so forth , with which language development factors and which motivational factors. Which program were most beneficial for kids across all those characteristics that could bring a youngster's reading proficiency significantly along. And the Florida State Group and the University of Texas Medical Center Group and the Houston Group were the sites that had the expertise to do that. And so they worked hard on that. And we had clinical trials going on in Houston, in Washington D . C. Actually Ginger Berninger at the University of Washington , Jack Fletcher, Barbara Foreman , just a whole host--I'm leaving many of these scientists out--but their job was to try to ferret out that question to elaborate on what might be going on. And so from that, you know, we learned that because reading is a confidential process, requiring knowledge of different confidential factors, you know, what was in those programs that seemed to move or increase reading pr oficiency. And in the Washington D.C. Study, which was the entire Washington D.C. set of schools, a nd randomly selected from those schools were a smaller set of schools. Very low socioeconomic status, primarily African American. We put in place a clinical trial that Barbara Foreman designed, and Louisa Moats oversaw. Now I recruited Louisa Moats when she was in Bedford, Vermont. And, you know, introduced her to Barbara, and Louise's work was burgeoning at that time. Brilliant, brilliant clinician. She's a Harvard grad and she had wonderful mentors, Jean Cha. She had good neuropsychological mentors, so she was a full package and she was in private practice in Bedford. I think, you know, she really had so much talent. But anyway, she directed onsite the study in Washington D.C. And that looked at, you know, different kinds of emphasis, instructional emphasis on literature-based kind of programs, more code emphasis programs and so on. We never could overturn or falsify, "this is a scientific way you look at it." Our job isn't to say we're right. Our job is to try to have an idea and then try to beat it down as much as we can. It's called falsifying the hypothesis. So, you know, what is coming from all these intervention sites is that direct systematic instruction, comprehensive instruction that look at components of reading, but in a very thoughtful, integrated way, that are clearly the most beneficial to both prevent and to remediate reading failure among quite a few children. Now, what the Torgeson group found, and Joe has written extensively on this, is that there are some youngsters, particularly as they get older, that he calls treatment resistors. That is, they do begin to develop pretty strong phonological skills, pretty strong decoding skills, pretty good vocabulary skills. But their fluency, the ability to look at letters, letter patterns, sentences, words, and decode them in a rapid automatic way, is very difficult to do for a lot of the kids. And he also found that youngsters who had a number of important skills but lacked the fluency, the automaticity, were kids that required substantially more time and intervention. You know, you're talking moving intervention time periods up to two hours, two and a half. And so it's pay now or pay later. That's the benefit of early identification and prevention. Older kids typically will struggle with the fluency and automaticity issues; typically not get a lot of pleasure out of that; typically not have the cognitive capacity or memory by the time you struggle through this to remember anything, so there's little motivation to read. So, to be sure there are many children out there that we have not been able to establish proficient reading across all components. And they typically reside in the older age groups and the more severe reading difficulties. But if we get to them early enough, most children can definitely learn to read and comprehend.

Susan Lambert:

Mm - hmm. It's a great message.

Dr. Reid Lyon:

Yeah. The lesson for teachers is, know your stuff, know your kids, and stuff your kids with all this information as many times as you can. But we're hampered by the teacher knowledge issue. That's not a teacher's fault, that's a college of education system that is bereft of responsibility. It operates on philosophical foundations. It operates on belief systems. It's very politicized. It looks at reading as a right, which it is, but it doesn't look at the instruction of reading as methodology, strategies, direct and comprehensive programs that can help most kids learn to read.

Susan Lambert:

Yeah. I think that there's a movement right now to change that. I think there's a lot of efforts to say we need to better prepare our teachers to go out into the field to teach our students. So hopefully that momentum will continue.

Dr. Reid Lyon:

Well, I'm somewhat pessimistic. What you have on the college of education side, you know, the academic environment typically awards tenure for individual professors who have shown merit. If you have tenure, you basically can do anything you want to do. You cannot be told what to do unless the governor or something makes funding contingent on students being prepared with a foundational Science of Reading base. I'm not sure that's ever going to happen because as you may have noticed, and this is one of my cautions, the Science of Reading, as you can now see, had pretty deep foundations years before a lot of the listeners were born.

Susan Lambert:

Yeah.

Dr. Reid Lyon:

And they were objective foundations and cumulative foundations. Science just moves inch by inch. And I and my colleagues were very committed to not getting beyond the inches we had. So, it was hard work, and an iterative process where we have to be able to replicate our findings from one site to the other. If we can't replicate the scientific findings, then it's not a reliable finding, if you understand what I'm saying. So , this is a tough, tough intellectual and on-the-ground action kind of scenario. It's very tough work. But, you know, by the time we had gotten to 1996, we had most of the information you hear talked about today.

Susan Lambert:

And that was part of these research sites then, across the country that all this information was funneling in. And so by 1996...

Dr. Reid Lyon:

It was coming in and I was able to summarize it. I spent years reviewing and summarizing all of our information, And the replications were in place. So I was then able, with integrity, to testify in front of Congress and to work to try to establish national programs. And so what you will see in my 1998 Congressional testimony is the information we had on hand that was later found by the National Reading Panel, who reviewed a lot of the same information. So, Science of Reading, which I used to call scientifically based reading research, SBRR, has been in place for years and years.

Susan Lambert:

Right.

Dr. Reid Lyon:

And I was lucky enough, if I wanna say that, to have been asked to brief congressmen and congresswomen about what we were finding. Influential congressional members who had been hearing from their districts, why is it that all these kids are struggling to read?

Susan Lambert:

Thanks so much for listening to part one of my conversation with Dr. G. Reid, Lyon, neuroscientist and specialist in learning disorders. Check out the show notes for a link to his recent piece, "10 Maxims: What We've Learned So Far About How Children Learn to Read." In just one week, we'll be back with part two, which will cover many more interesting topics.

Dr. Reid Lyon:

I got a call from Governor Bush, George W. Bush in Texas, and he was very concerned that kids in Texas were struggling with reading. And the Science of Reading is not, "Here it is. This is what it is." The Science of Reading is cumulative. I have no expectation that what I'm saying or what I'm trying to relate will have any impact whatsoever, because my history says it won't.

Susan Lambert:

That's all coming up next week on Part 2. Make sure you catch it by subscribing to Science of Reading: The Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. You can find information on all of Amplify shows at amplify.com/hub. Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. For more information on how Amplify leverages the Science of Reading, go to amplify.com/ckla. See you next week for part two of my conversation with Reid Lyon. Thanks again for listening.