In this video, reading specialist Lois Letchford shares her personal journey teaching her dyslexic son Nicholas and other highly vulnerable students, framing her insights through Tim Shanahan’s discussion of the Simple View of Reading (decoding + comprehension). She explains why decoding alone is insufficient, emphasizing the language‑comprehension component—knowledge of abstract vs. concrete words, homophones, and vocabulary depth—as a critical limiter of reading growth. Letchford describes diagnostic tools she uses (e.g., probing understanding of TO/TWO, FOR/FOUR) and instructional strategies that have worked for her students, such as using poetry to create memorable, rhyming contexts and employing the explicit decoding program “Hear It, See It, Say It, Do It.” She stresses the importance of intensive one‑on‑one instruction, reflective practice, and continuously asking what is limiting a child’s recall of words. The talk concludes with a call to action: readers are invited to explore her memoir Reversed, engage with the community, and watch future videos on how decoding and comprehension must intertwine to develop skilled readers.
Chapters
Hello, I'm Lois Letchford, talking about dyslexia and the science of reading. Last week I read Tim Shanahan's blog about reading and reading instruction. What are we wanting from reading instruction? An excellent blog. And worth reading. My background— before I go into talking about what Dr. Shanahan talks about, I'll give you my background. My background comes from teaching the most vulnerable students. I began with my son Nicholas when he was 7. He ended up with a label. of the worst child I've seen in 20 years of teaching. That puts me teaching the most vulnerable students. A child like Nicholas who failed first grade, who'd had an evaluation at the end of first grade that said he could do nothing, puts me in a position of teaching the most vulnerable. From there, I became a reading specialist And I went on to teach other children who had failed numerous reading programs. Many of them were in phonics-based reading programs for years on end, and they came out non-reading. So I'm coming to reading from a particular viewpoint, from those children who have failed again and again and again. That's where I come from. I do a lot of reading academic literature and I read a wide variety. So, but what did Tim Shanahan say about what kinds of early reading instruction and intervention should we provide? And to do that, he goes back to the Simple View of Reading. And the Simple View of Reading includes decoding, Plus comprehension. It comes from Gough and Tunmer, published in 1986. So the decoding component is obvious because if you cannot decode, you can't do anything. The reading component The reading component, the comprehension component. That's a little more challenging, and my question comes up: What does he mean by comprehension and language? And that's where the language and the learning becomes to me fascinating, because it's not that my students. Have been taught to decode. My students have spent years in programs where all they have been taught to do is decode. So what does Dr. Shanahan mean by decoding plus comprehension? And what are the components of comprehension that limit a child's growth? And how do we then teach children the language, the comprehension component. When I teach my students, what's in the back of my mind is always what is limiting their recall of this word. I'll repeat that. What is limiting the recall of this word or these words? And so I then use my background. Is the word abstract? Is the word concrete? Can they remember it or can they not remember it? What stops them? Is the word abstract or concrete? Is the word something they know or is it an unknown word? Is that word not in their language? And that's what Shanahan keeps coming back to. What is— what does he mean by language? What's the understanding of language? That's an interesting question to me because I think it's something that we ignore. Limited knowledge and all we think about doing is decoding, decoding, decoding and decoding. Because I taught my son in such a— I could say unruly setting, a setting where teaching of decoding through standardised text did not work. Nicholas had no memory for letters, for sounds, or for words. That allowed me to go, what else do I have to do? And that's when I started writing poetry. The poetry is something he could remember. And once you've got the poetry, you can remember every word, you can look at the rhyming words. We're always creating a picture for him. And it was through the poetry that I was able to teach decoding. And then the decoding we taught explicitly through a series of books called Hear It, See It, Say It, Do It by Mary Atkinson, who works with Bev Hornsby. So all of those things were really important in my understanding of how we teach the most vulnerable students to read. And once I taught Nicholas, then you could look at how he was being taught in classroom and how I took that onto teaching other students. Learning through failure is equally as important as learning through success. I failed to teach some students to read when I first started, and I asked myself again and again and again, why? What stopped me? What stopped them? And when we as teachers start to question our practices, then that's when we are learning. When was I effective as a teacher? I was effective as a teacher when I was given one-on-one situation and told, teach the child to read. And as the literature says, you're given adequate time, adequate one-on-one instruction to work with a student. And that was significant because then I can look at what has the child done in the past? What do I have to do? How do I have to fill those gaps so that this child learns to read? And since he had been taught decoding and failed to learn it effectively, what else was going on? What else limited his growth? And that's when we as teachers start to teach not only that child, but every other child in our care to read. And that to me is what reading instruction is all about. And as I show every single week, the braid of literacy, that language comprehension and word recognition are critical. And it goes to say, what is language comprehension? What do you as a teacher understand by language comprehension? Is your idea the same as my idea? Or when we teach comprehension, do we just ask questions and accept the child's answer? Or is it a discussion? There's so much going on when we teach reading, particularly to the most vulnerable students, that we as teachers, particularly reading teachers, have to be diagnostic and we have to be thinking and reflecting every single time, every single day. What is working? What's not working? Because this language component of literacy is huge. It's huge. My question to you again is, what do you understand by language? The language component of teaching decoding. What do you understand by comprehension? Because I have specialised with these children, I have diagnostic tools within my toolbox to say, what does the child understand? So when a 16-year-old comes to me that's totally non-reading, My first question is, does he understand the difference between TO and TWO? Does he understand the difference between FOR and FOUR? Very few of my students can answer those questions accurately. And that's what I mean by language comprehension. The failure to understand words with multiple meaning. And that opens another can of worms. What else does that involve? And if you don't get these basics right, if you're not building the house correctly, there's— if you want the basement to go in, that basement has got to be solidly built. And that's where I work from before I go to anything else. That's when my students start to read effectively, when they are thinking effectively and understand what is going on, not only with decoding, but with the language. And the language component impacts the decoding component. That's what I have found again and again and again. That's why my students have failed, because they have been taught decode, decode, decode without understanding how the written language works. And this whole area of language instruction, decoding and the comprehension with language, They are 2 completely separate identities that have to work together to teach the most vulnerable students to read. Why is it important? Because the students who succeed manage to do it, make these jumps with such ease and such speed, we do not see them happening. That's critical. So for us then to untangle it, untangle what's going on, What is the child seeing? What are they not seeing? What is limiting their growth is the question that I ask continuously. So the braid of literacy is there. What else is going on with to teach our most vulnerable students to read? I'm Lois Letchford, the author of the book Reversed: A Memoir. Please pick up a copy, look at it, read it, ask questions. Ask me, contact me. Why did it work? Why didn't it work? Why have you come to the viewpoint that you have? And ask yourself the same questions. And I'll be back next week talking about more about language and the, the Simple View of Reading and how decoding and comprehension must work together to create a skilled reader. Thank you. Hit like, hit subscribe, share it, talk about it with all your colleagues, your other parents, and your students.
