Editor's Note: This article is adapted from our live webinar, "3 Ways to Accelerate Achievement Throughout the Year" featuring Dr. Lucy Hart Paulson, literacy expert and co-author of LETRS for Early Childhood Educators.
💡 Want to watch the full discussion? Access the on-demand webinar recording here.
Almost 90% of students who need support with foundational reading and writing skills have an underlying weakness in the phonological processing system. That figure comes from decades of research by Sally Shaywitz and Bennett Shaywitz, and Dr. Lucy Hart Paulson returned to it during our recent Lunch and Learn session for a reason.
The phonological processing system is part of the oral language system. Which means the levers that move reading achievement are not mysterious, and they're not new.
Dr. Paulson named three of them: talking, reading, and writing. Her point is that these three are not separate subjects competing for minutes in your day; they are one system in the brain, and teaching them together is what accelerates achievement.
- Reading is language, and writing is language. The brain regions that develop for talking are recycled for reading and writing, so oral language work is reading instruction.
- Vocabulary and syntax are the two highest-value language targets. Research points to word meaning plus sentence structure as the aspects of language that matter most for later achievement.
- Every word you read, you pronounce, out loud or silently in your head, which is why phonology sits at the center of skilled word reading.
- Orthographic mapping, not visual memory, explains "sight words." Words get glued into memory through the connection between spelling, pronunciation, and meaning.
- A book is only decodable to a student who has been taught that phonics pattern. Decodables work as practice for skills that were explicitly taught first.
- Writing belongs in preschool. Writing phases develop in parallel with word-reading phases, and adding letter formation to alphabet instruction strengthens both.
Why does Dr. Paulson say that reading is language?
Because the brain builds reading out of parts it already grew for talking. As Dr. Paulson explained during the session, the neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene describes the regions that control much of language as getting recycled for reading and for writing.
She walked the audience through it with their hands. Behind the ear, in the temporal lobe, is Wernicke's area, the meaning processor, where language and vocabulary are understood. Toward the front is Broca's area, where speech is produced and language is synthesized. At the top, like a headband, is the motor strip, which controls motor planning and sequencing.
Between meaning and speaking runs the arcuate fasciculus, the band that connects what a word means to how it is pronounced. Those connecting fibers begin to develop between roughly 18 and 24 months, exactly the window when young children experience their language explosion.
At the back, in the occipital lobe, is the orthographic processor, the visual cortex that takes in letters, words, and print. And the connection point that makes reading possible, sometimes called the word-form area, sits in the angular gyrus, where print is melded with meaning and pronunciation.
When you help children learn about the alphabet, include the writing. Letter learning connects to meaning, to production, and to the motor strip, because part of knowing a letter is knowing how it is shaped, which strokes, curves, and sticks build it.
How do you build vocabulary on purpose?
Teach a small number of key words explicitly, then give children lots of opportunities for implicit exposure. Children learn far more words than anyone could teach directly, so explicit instruction on important words does something different. It shows children how vocabulary and language work, which frees their statistical learning to pick up words on its own.
That means being intentional in word selection and building word meaning through knowledge networks rather than single definitions.
Her example of a network is the alphabet. A child needs the letter name, the uppercase and lowercase shapes, the sound the letter spells, the mouth shape that goes with the sound, an anchor picture connection, and the sixth piece, writing that shape. All six components integrate in the brain to build one connection.
Dr. Paulson's three-step routine
- Say the word and have children repeat it. Repetition triggers the production effect, which makes the word stickier.
- Give a child-friendly definition with a gesture attached, because the gesture is engaging, and it is one more connection point.
- Have children practice saying what the meaning is themselves.
What is the fastest way to strengthen sentence structure?
Ask for answers in complete sentences. When a child says "fine" in the morning, Dr. Paulson's response is "tell me that in a sentence," so children practice the more formal register they will meet in reading and use in writing.
From there, combine. Take two short sentences, "that boy's thirsty" and "the boy drank lemonade," and show children how they join: because the boy was thirsty, he drank lemonade, or the boy was thirsty, so he drank lemonade. Sentence combining makes the machinery of complex language visible.
What are Strive-for-Five conversations?
A Strive-for-Five conversation is a five-turn back-and-forth with one child, and Dr. Paulson called conversational turns one of the most powerful routines available for building children's brains. The sheer number of conversations children engage in early on correlates with their performance in middle school.
Here's one way to do it. Ask a lower-level question to establish understanding: What happened on this page? A child answers, "They look mad." Confirm and take the next turn higher: yes, she's pretty angry, how do you think she feels, and how do you think she should have acted when she got so upset? The child answers again, "she should have used her words." Comment, and the loop closes.
It does not have to stop at five, and it is not difficult to achieve. It builds language and a relationship with the student at the same time.
What is orthographic mapping, and how is it different from sight words?
Orthographic mapping is the process that bonds a word's spelling to its pronunciation and its meaning, and cements it in memory. Dr. Paulson credited the concept to Linnea Ehri, and said plainly that she hopes it replaces our understanding of sight words.
Orthography is the conventional spelling system of a language. When a child sees the word sun, the orthographic processor takes in the spelling, the phonology supplies the pronunciation, meaning attaches, and the three glue together. From then on, the word is instantly known.
The engine of that gluing is not looking. It is pronouncing. Every word you read, you pronounce, whether out loud or silently, and Broca's area activates either way. Look at the word happen without speaking, and it is still being pronounced inside your head.
What the research shows
Seeing the word matters, but the phoneme-grapheme representation of its pronunciation is what does the work. Words become instantly known through decoding and spelling practice, which is why the same children who cannot decode also cannot map.
This is where non-proficient readers get stuck. In Ehri's phases, children move from pre-alphabetic, where letters are known only rotely and visually, to partial alphabetic, where a child knows that m says its sound and can write part of man, to full alphabetic across kindergarten through grade two, to consolidated, where mapping is complete.
Students who are not proficient often stall at the partial alphabetic phase without solid letter-sound representations, and that stall shows up in their reading and in their spelling at the same time.
Why should writing start in preschool?
Writing development runs in parallel with word-reading development, phase for phase. Dr. Paulson's image for it is breathing: reading is the breath in, writing is the breath out.
The writing phases progress from pre-conventional, which includes scribbling, mock letters, and random letters, to semi-phonetic, then phonetic, and finally conventional. Each one matches an Ehri phase. Pre-conventional lines up with pre-alphabetic, where a string like O-M-T-C-L means nothing decodable. Semi-phonetic lines up with partial alphabetic, and she showed a child's "Y DA," where Y stood in for one because the child was mining the letter name for sound.
Phonetic writing lines up with full alphabetic. A kindergartner's spelling of space rocket is readable and conventionally wrong at the same time, which is exactly what that phase looks like.
Her instructional rule, from Virginia Berninger, is to focus on what children want to write first. Let them get their ideas down, and handwriting and spelling gaps become visible on their own, showing you what to teach next.
- Preschool and pre-K: the letters children are learning to recognize should include a writing component.
- Kindergarten and first grade: encoding and decoding should be practiced together, the words children learn to decode are the words they learn to spell.
- Second grade and up: encoding and decoding separate as reading outpaces spelling, so spelling patterns need to be illuminated and taught directly.
- Later grades: keep watching handwriting automaticity and legibility, phonemic awareness, and accuracy in word reading and spelling, then add keyboarding, which Berninger describes as bimodal and not fully on board until about adolescence.
How to Accelerate Achievement
Talk, Teach, Write. In That Order
Encourage language
Talk to and with children all day, and ask them to communicate in sentences. Teach a few key words with the say-define-practice routine, build knowledge networks instead of isolated definitions, combine short sentences into longer ones, and aim for five-turn conversations.
Try This: pick words with intention, and take one more conversational turn.Teach the code
If children cannot read the words, they will not understand what they have read. Teach letter-sound correspondences explicitly and systematically, then give children decodable text that practices the patterns you taught. Early decoders let children match a letter to the phoneme it represents, blend it into a word, and read a whole short story, which is where pride in reading starts.
Try this: follow a phonics progression, and choose text that matches it rather than running ahead of it.Include writing
Start in preschool, and help children feel like writers from the earliest years. Write the letters children are learning, spell the words they are decoding, and keep the connection alive through the grades as spelling becomes the harder of the two.
Try this: attach a writing component to the lesson itself, rather than scheduling it somewhere else.What does this look like in a real district?
Tomball Independent School District, Texas: Renee Tristan, ELA content specialist, led the shift from balanced to structured literacy.
A year in, teachers were trained, but something was still missing; they needed decodable readers to practice with.
The district gave every K-2 teacher Just Right Reader decodable libraries aligned with their phonics progression, strengthening Tier 1 rather than competing with it. Students behind grade level get intervention phonics lessons.
Mid-year, growth is already visible. She mentioned teachers text her about their small groups and feel confident for the first time!
Frequently asked questions
What are the three things that accelerate reading achievement?
Talking, reading, and writing. Dr. Lucy Hart Paulson frames them as encouraging language, teaching the code, and including writing. They work together because the brain builds reading and writing on the language systems it already developed for speech.
What is orthographic mapping?
Orthographic mapping is the process that bonds the spelling of a word to its pronunciation and its meaning and cements it into memory. It develops as children learn to decode and to spell, and it explains why words eventually become instantly recognizable without the visual memorization that sight-word instruction assumed.
Are sight words real?
The instant recognition is real, but the explanation has changed. Seeing a word matters, and the phoneme-grapheme representation of its pronunciation is what makes it stick. Skilled readers pronounce every word they read, silently in Broca's area, even when reading in their heads.
What makes a book decodable?
A book is only decodable to a student who has already been taught the phonetic pattern it contains. Decodable text is practice for skills that were explicitly taught first, which is why alignment between the text and the phonics scope and sequence matters more than the label on the cover.
How can I build oral language during a normal lesson?
Ask children to answer in complete sentences, teach a small number of key words with a child-friendly definition and a gesture, and practice combining two short sentences into one longer one. Aim for five conversational turns with a child rather than a single question-and-answer.
Should preschoolers be writing?
Yes. Writing phases develop in parallel with word-reading phases, beginning with scribbles and mock letters, and children benefit from knowing that their marks carry meaning. Adding letter formation to alphabet instruction also strengthens letter learning, because the motor strip is part of the network for letters.
Why do so many struggling readers have trouble with phonemic awareness tasks?
Almost 90% of people who struggle with learning to read have an underlying weakness in the phonological processing system, according to decades of work by Sally and Bennett Shaywitz. Higher-level tasks such as sound substitution and reversal also lean on orthographic skill, so children who cannot decode lack the spelling knowledge that skilled readers draw on to perform them.
When should spelling instruction become its own focus?
From second grade upward. Through first grade, decoding and encoding should be practiced together on the same words. After that, reading outpaces spelling, so spelling patterns need to be taught and reinforced directly even as children read words above their spelling level.
Dr. Lucy Hart Paulson
Literacy ExpertDr. Lucy Hart Paulson focuses on early childhood literacy development and on translating research into practical classroom settings, with particular attention to the foundational skills young learners need. She is a co-author of LETRS for Early Childhood Educators.
Watch the full webinar
Dr. Lucy Hart Paulson walks through the brain science, the vocabulary and sentence routines, and the writing samples in full, followed by Renee Tristan on Tomball ISD's shift to structured literacy.
