Moving from Reading Instruction to Language Literacy Development: Bruce Howett Talks About the Changing Face of Reading Instruction by Sam Bommarito

I’ve often spoken to Bruce Howett and his colleagues. I’ve also interviewed Jan Wasowicz and Nora Chahbazi.  Bruce is a researcher/practitioner. He is on a quest to end the reading wars. As he tells us in his biography below, his current efforts attempt to shift reading instruction to language-literacy development by unifying the four major aspects of spoken language with orthography. Let’s have a look at that biography.

BIOGRAPHY

Bruce Howlett hated reading instruction because nothing alleviated his reading disfluency, accuracy, spelling, and sentence writing difficulties until he began working with a speech therapist at age 42 while building phonemic, and fluency interventions and software. All it took was a few months of weekly sessions before reading, writing and listening became enjoyable.

Bruce loved science and after attending four colleges in five years he graduated with a degree in Biology. He later worked in biological research at Cornell University, where he learned the nuances of scientific research and the importance of continuously questioning current knowledge.

After 12 years, Bruce went to teach science at a residential school for teens with combined learning and emotional regulation difficulties. There he realized that his students’ literacy difficulties weren’t that different from his students. Bruce then started a 20-year project to create literacy enrichment, and intervention lessons based on current research.

His current efforts attempt to shift reading instruction to language-literacy development. Sparking the Reading Shift: Language-literacy Development unifies the four major aspects of spoken language with orthography. Each lesson has the student reading, spelling and writing words, phrases and sentences that include multisyllabic and poly-morpheme words. See ReadingShift.com for more information.

Here are the timed stamped talking points for the interview (so, you can go to the sections that interest you the most first)

Here is a link to the U-Tube Interview:

A Slide from Seidenberg’s presentation at the SLL Summit this summer:

Link to Seidenberg’s slides LINK.

Final Thoughts:

First, keep in mind the four components of spoken language that Bruce uses in conjunction with orthography:

• Phonemic awareness
• Morphological awareness
• Semantic awareness
• Syntactic awareness

Then, keep in mind the importance of what Seidenberg is saying about the current state of SOR. My take is that he is saying that there is a time and place for direct instruction at the start, but then there needs to be a shift to what he calls implicit instruction. That involves the students using what they learned in the explicit instruction stage and using that to teach themselves what they need to know reading and how to read. He says, “The purpose of instruction is to enable the child to achieve escape velocity, not to take them all the way to the moon.”

When I first visited Nora Chahbazi at EBLI, this was when she already had a fairly large following. My biggest takeaway from that visit was that she wasn’t taking years and years and years to teach kids how to break the code. Her folks were doing that in a matter of months, usually in less than a year. She used the speech-to-print method that Bruce Howett used. Her success with that explains the remarkable growth of EBLI over in the years since that first visit. Along with several different organizations, EBLI organized the Accelerate Literacy a Structured Linguistic Literacy Summit (SSL) this summer to spread the word about the many effective practices folks now employ. Seidenberg’s presentation was part of that conference.

The upshot of things is this. There are major changes afoot in the world of SOR. What Bruce called SOR 1.0 is being replaced by something new. Folks like Jan Wasowicz are giving folks like Bruce a platform to talk about new ways of doing things. How does all this affect the reading wars?

For the past five years, I’ve strongly favored a centrist approach that uses ideas and practices from all sides of the great debate in reading. It seems to me that the things Bruce and other SOR advocates are saying include many of the things missing in SOR 1.0. Most importantly, they bring meaning into reading instruction from the get-go. As a centrist, this gives me hope that it will be possible to identify common ground, assuming we are willing to use common sense to do so. Dare to dream!

Next week I’ll have more to say about the implications of Seidenberg’s latest thinking.

So, until next week, Happy Reading and Writing.

Dr. Sam Bommarito (aka, the guy in the middle taking flak from all sides)

Copyright 2024 by Dr. Sam Bommarito. Views/interpretations expressed here are solely this author’s views and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other person or organization.

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