The Evolution of Literacy Research:
A Historical Timeline
1974
1989
1972
1996
Philip Gough & William Tunmer
David La Berge & S. Jay Samuels
Allen Luke
Noam Chomsky
- Philp Gough served as Chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas, as Co-Director and Director of the Center for Cognitive Science, and as Editor of the Reading Research Quarterly.
- William Tunmer is Distinguished Professor of Educational Psychology at the Massey University Institute of Education, specializing in the areas of theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive development.
- Together Gough & Tunmer developed The Simple View of Reading. Their aim was to set out a falsifiable theory that would settle the debate about the relationship between decoding skill and reading ability.
- An American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism, Chomsky is sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics".
- Chomsky characterizes reading as tentative information processing where readers actively but tentatively construct meaning, make predictions and inferences that are used in sampling the text to get to meanings.
- Chomsky believes that language is a deep structure of meaning which shifts focus from eye and ear to brain process and use of information.
- Chomsky states: “Each language can be regarded as a particular relationship between sounds and meaning”. According to Chomsky, the mind bridges this gap via a ‘computational system’, which links the sounds of language up with meanings in the speakers’ minds.
- An educator, researcher, and theorist studying literacy, multiliteracies, applied linguistics, and educational sociology and policy, Luke's work on critical literacy, schooling, and equity influenced the fields of literacy education, teacher education, educational sociology, and policy for over three decades.
- Luke, with Peter Freebody, originated the Four Resources Model of literacy.
- In his work, Luke discusses the need for a contingent definition of critical literacy, given the increasingly sophisticated nature of texts and discourses. He refers to the term "critical literacy" to mean the use of technologies of print and other media of communication to analyze, critique, and transform the norms, rule systems, and practices governing the social fields of everyday life.
- La Berge & Samuels wrote an aritcle entitled: “Toward a theory of automatic information processing in reading”.
- They studied and wrote field-shaping scholarship regarding the role of fluency in reading comprehension.
- LaBerge was a neuropsychologist specializing in the attention process.
- Samuels was an educator that consulted with school districts, as well as state departments of education and with publishers on how to improve and measure reading fluency.
1996
1976
1952
1995
2018
2005
1930
1879
Gay Su Pinell & Irene Fountas
Hallie Yopp
Hollis Scarborough
Victoria Purcell-Gates
Jean Piaget
Richard Anderson
Lev Vygotsky
Emile Javal
- Yopp's research centers on language acqusition and development.
- She developed the Yopp-Singer Test of Phoneme Segmentation which provides teachers with a tool for assessment of phonemic awareness and identifying children who may experience difficulty with reading and spelling.
- Yopp has authored numerous books on phonemic awareness, literature based acitivites, and vocabulary instruction.
- Fountas & Pinnell are American educational theorists and professors of literacy education.
- They developed a whole language system of guided reading commonly known as the Fountas and Pinnell reading levels for teachers which assigns letters (A through Z) to students based on their reading ability and comprehension.
- Their work is known as leveled reading, and establishes guidelines to identify books for children by reading level.
- Pinell identified fluency as an important variable in the scholarship of reading.
- An educational psychologist, Anderson wrote a paper entitled Frameworks for Comprehending Discourse which applied schema theory to reading comprehension instruction.
- His most noted work, Becoming a Nation of Readers, is one of the most widely read works of all time on literacy.
- Anderson has published influential research on children's reading, vocabulary growth, and story discussions that promote thinking.
- An American psychologist and literacy expert, Scarborough has been a leading researcher in the area of reading acquisition, and has been involved with efforts to improve US national policy on the teaching of reading.
- Dr. Scarborough created the Scarborough Reading Rope using pipe cleaners to convey how the different “strands” of reading are all interconnected yet independent of one another. For many students, learning to read is a challenge. Scarborough's Rope captures the complexity of learning to read.
- Scarborough's Reading Rope is made up of lower and upper strands. When all these component parts intertwine it results in skilled and accurate, fluent reading with strong comprehension. The lower strands include: phonological awareness, decoding, alphabetic principle, letter-sound correspondences, and sight recognition. The upper strands include: background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge.
- A French ophthalmologist, Javal is considered a pioneer of eye movement research applying to reading as he is credited as the first person to record eye movements in reading.
- Javal suggested that saccades - rapid movements of the eye between fixation points - with a pause every 10th letter may reflect thought processes of individuals as they read.
- Gates held a Canada Research Chair in Early Childhood Literacy at the University of British Columbia. Her research focused on studying literacy as it is practiced across different cultural groupings and the relationships between cultural practices of literacy and literacy learning and instruction in schools.
- She is a former president of the National Reading Conference and a member of the Reading Hall of Fame.
- Using both qualitative and quantitative research methods, Dr. Purcell-Gates' research interests include the social and cultural literacy practices experienced by both children and adults. Her interests also include designing early literacy instruction that builds on young children's linguistic, cognitive, cultural, and social models for reading and writing acquired within their home communities..
- She led an ethnographic study focusing on the cycle of low literacy in which she questioned how an individual's cultural literacy experiences influence print literacy development. This research led to the Grawemeyer Award winning book, "Other People's Words: The Cycle of Low Literacy" (1997).
- Piaget was a Swiss psychologist known as "the great pioneer of the constructivist theory of knowing".
- He developed the Cognitive Development Theory which focused on the intellectual development of children.
- Through Piaget's work, educators began to understand how children learn through adaption of schemas.
- Piaget's work inspired the transformation of European and American education, including both theory and practice, leading to a more 'child-centered' approach.
- As a Soviet psychologist, Vygotsky is best known for his work on psychological development in children and creating the framework known as cultural-historical activity theory.
- Vygotsky believed that social interaction plays a critical role in children's learning as it is a continuous process that is profoundly influenced by culture. Imitation, guided learning, and collaborative learning feature prominently in his theory.
- Vygotsky introduced the concept of the Zone of Proximal Development which refers to the gap between a child's current level of development and the level they are capable of reaching with tools provided by others with more knowledge.
1955
1893
1978
2003
1997
1983
2018
Rudolf Flesch
Ernst Meumann
Marilyn L. Chapman
Donald Graves
Paul Glister
Patrick Manyak
Deloris Durkin
- Chapman is a professor at University of British Columbia, and has authored numberous articles, books, and book chapters. Much of her research centers around phonemic awareness.
- In Phonemic Awareness: Clarifying What We Know, Chapman describes a research-based developmental sequence to help educators determine age-appropriate expectations about phonemic awareness and related concepts. Chapman also discusses classroom-based strategies for fostering children's phonemic awareness and related phonological skills through meaning-centered classroom activities that help children connect these skills to real reading and writing, particularly the importance of language play and the use of invented spelling.
- Origins of the contemporary understanding of digital literacies are typically traced back to the work of Paul Gilster.
- Glister claimed that digital literacy is about ‘mastering ideas, not keystrokes’.
- Glister described the basic thinking skills and core competencies learners need to thrive in an interactive environment so fundamentally different from passive media such as television or print.
- He defined digital literacy as the ability to understand, evaluate, and integrate information in multiple, computer-delivered formats and a critical skill in a technology-driven world.
- Flesch was a readability expert, writing consultant, and author who created the Flesch Reading Ease test and co-created the Flesch–Kincaid readability tests.
- In his most famous book, Why Johnny Can't Read: And What You Can Do About It, Flesch critiqued the then-trendy practice of teaching reading by sight (the "look-say" method).
- Flesch advocated a revival of the phonics method, the teaching of reading by teaching learners to sound out words using rules.
- Meumann was an educational psychologist and German educator who researched the functions of memory, immediate and permanent retention, and attention.
- He emphasized the importance of analyzing words into their constituent sounds and of articulatory awareness as a precondition for the firm establishment of connections between graphemes and speech sounds.
- Durkin was a professor and researcher who performed observational studies of classrooms.
- Through research, she found that very little reading comprehension was taking place in US classrooms. Teachers appeared more intent on assessing reading comprehension than on providing students with support to boost comprehension.
- She wrote several books and spoke publicly about her findings bringing attention to reading comprehension and encouraging change to instructional practices in the classroom.
- Graves was a pioneer in literacy education who ultimately revolutionized the way that writing is taught in the United States and around the world.
- Graves' research transformed writing instruction and launched professional books for educators.
- His bestselling book, Writing: Teachers and Children at Work, challenged teachers to let children’s needs and interests, not mandates, guide instruction and influenced reading teachers to make shifts to integrate writing and reading.
- A teacher, professor, and researcher, Manyak has maintained a 30-year focus on the language and literacy development of Spanish-English emergent bilinguals. His early research repositioned the children’s sociocultural experience as a valuable resource for acquiring literacy, and established bilingualism as a special emblem of academic competence.
- Over the last decade, Patrick has led a series of formative experiment research projects focused on multifaceted vocabulary instruction in grades K-5.
- In The Multifaceted, Comprehensive Vocabulary Instructional Program: Quantitative Findings from a Three-Year Formative Experiment, Manyak reports on a three-year formative experiment involving the implementation and testing of a long-term, multifaceted vocabulary instruction program in fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms in three demographically distinct schools.
1979
1967
2020
2014
1999
1988
1956
Defining Movement Coaltion
Louisa Moats
Ken & Yetta Goodman
1863
1908
Allan M. Collins
Ann Haas Dyson
Guy Bond & Robert Dykstra
- The “Science of Reading: A Defining Movement” is a coalition of educators, policymakers, education advocates and academics who come together to develop a shared definition of the term “science of reading.” The Defining Movement coalition’s sole intent is to protect the integrity of their findings so that their promise of successful reading outcomes for almost all children is realized.
- The Reading League gathered nationally renowned experts to create a plan to protect and honor the body of knowledge considered the science of reading, clarify the definition, and provide a comprehensive guide for stakeholders.
- The science of reading is a vast, interdisciplinary body of scientifically-based research about reading and issues related to reading and writing. This research has been conducted over the last five decades across the world, and it is derived from thousands of studies conducted in multiple languages. The science of reading has culminated in a preponderance of evidence to inform how proficient reading and writing develop; why some have difficulty; and how we can most effectively assess and teach and, therefore, improve student outcomes through prevention of and intervention for reading difficulties.
George A. Miller
- As a researcher, speaker, consultant, and trainer, Moats developed the professional development program LETRS for teachers and reading specialists and is a nationally recognized authority on how children learn to read and why some fail to learn.
- In addition to LETRS, she authored and coauthored books including Speech to Print; Straight Talk About Reading; and Basic Facts About Dyslexia. Her instructional materials include Spellography and Primary Spelling by Pattern. She also has published numerous peer-reviewed journal articles, chapters, and policy papers, including the American Federation of Teachers’ Teaching Reading IS Rocket Science, the Learning First Alliance’s “Every Child Reading: A Professional Development Guide,” and Reading First’s “Blueprint for Professional Development.”
- Ken & Yetta Goodman were the founders of the whole-language view of reading.
- They published “A Whole Language Comprehension Centered Reading Curriculum Program” and documented reasearch on miscue analysis.
- Yetta consulted with education departments and spoke at conferences throughout the United States and in many nations of the world regarding issues of language, teaching and learning with implications for language arts curricula.
Edmund Burke Huey
Wilhelm Wundt
- Bond & Dykstra published The First Grade Studies report in Reading Research Quaterly.
- Their study was one the earliest comprehensive studies in the history of how young children begin to learn how to read, and influenced the research of beginning reading for the next 30 years.
- Bond and Dykstra found that classrooms using an integrated approach, which combined systematic phonics with reading for meaning and writing, far surpassed those using mainstream basal programs of the 1960s.
- Dyson's fields of study are literacy, pedagogy, and contemporary, diverse childhoods. She states that her research centers on the intersection of literacy and childhoods.
- Using qualitative and sociolinguistic research procedures, Dyson examines the use of written language from children's perspectives within their social worlds, and as they engage with popular culture.
- Books she has published include: The Brothers and Sisters Learn to Write, Popular Literacies in Childhood and School Cultures, Writing Superheroes, Contemporary Childhood, Popular Culture, and Classroom Literacy, Social Worlds of Children Learning to Write in an Urban Primary School, Multiple Worlds of Child Writers: Friends Learning to Write.
- An American cognitive scientist and professor, Collins' research is recognized as having a broad impact on the fields of cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, and education.
- As a foundational member of the field of the learning sciences, Collins has influenced several strands of educational research and development.
- He conducted numerous projects investigating the use of technology in schools and developing educational technologies for assessing and improving student learning.
- Collins argued for an orientation to learning that was situated and embedded in the social and helped to create the communities of learners (CoL) model which require teachers and students to engage in new modes of inquiry.
- Huey's volume The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading serves as the first compendium of research and thought on the reading process.
- Huey studied and wrote on the importance of font size, paper quality, and appropriate lighting to the reading process.
- He observed reader's eye movements in studying the eye-brain relationship.
- George Miller was an American psychologist who was one of the founders of cognitive science, writing one of three key papers on the subject.
- Miller linked language and cognition, especially in terms of how language is used and understood and its indeterminate nature.
- Miller's work spurred psycholinguistic models of reading and gave credence to notions of hypothesis testing, risk taking, predicting, and child-directed learning.
- An experimental reading research pioneer, Wundt is considered the father of psychology.
- He used the term "apperception" to described the focus of attention within the field of consciousness and applied this research to reading processes.
- He formulated a two-stage theory of word recognition.
- Pschyolinguistic research grew out of Wendt's work.
1979
1998
2022
1967
1999
2010
"the learning and uses of literacy are among the most advanced forms of intelligence, and, compared to other forms, depend more on instruction and practice" (1983, p. 2)
1956
John Flavell
Lita Ericson & Maria Juliebo
The Impact of COVID-19 on Education:
A Meta-Narrative Review
Bozkurt A, Karakaya K, Turk M, Karakaya Ö, Castellanos-Reyes D.
James Paul Gee
Douglas K. Hartman
Jeanne Chall
Benjamin Bloom
- Ericson & Juliebo authored a handbook that offers a practical and comprehensive means of teaching and monitoring children's development of phonological awareness in the classroom.
- The handbook was based on research studies that clearly showed that even informal phonological awareness activities, such as the natural and spontaneous word play found in stories, songs, and games, can result in positive gains in reading and spelling achievement.
- Ericson and Juliebo identified a sequence of phonemic awareness learning as well as instructional strategies.
- A professor of technology, learning, and literacy with appointments in Teacher Education and Educational Psychology and Educational Technology, Hartman's research focuses on the use of technologies for human learning in a number of domains (e.g., school, community, work, sports).
- Hartman has published almost 100 articles, chapters, and technical reports.
- Hartman's current research interests focus on technologies and their use for human learning as well as the history of teaching & learning.
- Flavell was a developmental psychologist who specialized in the cognitive development of children.
- He conducted extensive research into metacognition and the child's theory of mind.
- Flavell's Metacognition Theory introduced the notion of reading strategically across a range of situations independently.
- Flavell's research has brought about a shift to strategic reading and development of student metacognitive skills and strategies so they can employ them independently and in different circumstances.
The rapid and unexpected onset of the COVID-19 global pandemic has generated a great degree of uncertainty about the future of education and has required teachers and students alike to adapt to a new normal to survive in the new educational ecology. In this context, the aim of this study was to conduct a bibliometric analysis of the publications covering COVID-19 and education to analyze the impact of the pandemic. From a total of 1150 publications, seven themes were identified: (1) the great reset, (2) shifting educational landscape and emerging educational roles (3) digital pedagogy, (4) emergency remote education, (5) pedagogy of care, (6) social equity, equality, and injustice, and (7) future of education. Moreover, from the citation analysis, two thematic clusters emerged: (1) educational response, emergency remote education affordances, and continuity of education, and (2) psychological impact of COVID-19. The overlap between themes and thematic clusters revealed researchers’ emphasis on guaranteeing continuity of education and supporting the socio-emotional needs of learners. From the results of the study, it is clear that there is a heightened need to develop effective strategies to ensure the continuity of education in the future, and that it is critical to proactively respond to such crises through resilience and flexibility.
- James Paul Gee is an American researcher who has worked in psycholinguistics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, bilingual education, and literacy.
- He redefined literacy as encompassing social practices and constituting a set a technical skills.
- Gee used the term "New Litercy Studies" and argued that literacy was something people did in the world and in society, not just inside their heads, and should be studied as such. The New Literacy Studies saw literacy as primarily a sociocultural phenomenon, rather than a mental phenomenon.
- Authored The New Literacy Studies and the "Social Turn" which defines the "social turn" as a philosophy focused on interaction and social practice, and states that it was fostered in the New Literacy Studies movement.
- A psychologist, writer, and literacy researcher for over 50 years, Chall believed in the importance of direct, systematic instruction in reading in spite of other reading trends throughout her career.
- Her research would go on to influence generations of educators particularly through her books Learning to Read: the Great Debate and Stages of Reading Development. Her research and writing caused major textbook publishers to react by emphasizing more phonics earlier in their series.
- As a seminal researcher on the developmental stages of reading, Chall was among the first to delve into complex and widely debated ideas on how children learn to read and how stressors like poverty impact their ability to do so.
- An American educational psychologist who made contributions to the classification of educational objectives and to the theory of mastery learning, Bloom is particularly noted for leading educational psychologists to develop the comprehensive system of describing and assessing educational outcomes.
- He has influenced the practices and philosophies of educators around the world from the latter part of the twentieth century.
- Bloom with collaborators published a framework for categorizing educational goals: Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Familiarly known as Bloom’s Taxonomy, this framework consisted of six major categories: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation.
1985
1984
2000
1977
1929
Marie Clay
Barak Rosenshine
J. Richard Gentry
Albert Bandura
- A New Zealand researcher and clinical psychologist, Clay was known for her work in educational literacy.
- Clay was committed to the idea that children who struggle to learn to read and write can be helped with early intervention.
- She developed the Reading Recovery intervention, a whole language programme in New Zealand, and expanded it worldwide.
William S. Gray
- As a professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois, Rosenshine's research focused on learning instruction, teacher performance, and student achievement.
- He published numerous articles on direct instruction, cognitive strategies, and teacher performance.
- Rosenshine identified five characteristics of teacher behavior--clarity of exposition, enthusiasm, task orientation, varied approaches, and opportunities to learn--that have since served as a framework for research on teacher performance.
- Rosenshine and Robert Stevens developed a six-function teaching model that describes the necessary sequence of instructional steps involved with learning new skills and created a model for direct instruction.
- An internationally acclaimed author, researcher, and educational consultant, Gentry is known for his ground-breaking work in education on topics such as early literacy, best-practices for reading, writing, and spelling, and dyslexia.
- He authored "A Retrospective on Invented Spelling and a Look Forward" in which he identifies invented spelling stages and offers his ideas about invented spelling in the classroom.
- Gentry designed the Gentry Developmental Spelling Assessment which tracks phases for individual students and leads to identifying phases of developmental spelling from precommunicative to conventional spelling.
- A Canadian-American psychologist, Bandura was responsible for contributions to the field of education and to several fields of psychology, including social cognitive theory, therapy, and personality psychology, and was also of influence in the transition between behaviorism and cognitive psychology.
- He is known as the originator of social learning theory (also known as the social cognitive theory) and the theoretical construct of self-efficacy.
- The social cognitive theory focuses on how behavior and growth are affected by the cognitive operations that occur during social activities. The key theoretical components of the social cognitive theory that are applied in education are self-efficacy, self-regulation, observational learning, and reciprocal determinism.
- Bandura's research shows that high perceived self-efficacy leads teachers and students to set higher goals and increases the likelihood that they will dedicate themselves to those goals.
- An American teacher and literacy advocate, Gray supported silent reading and the importance of a sequential program of reading instruction.
- He was known as "the acknowledged leader of, and spokesman for, reading experts for four decades" and has been called "the father of reading".
- He promoted the whole word method of teaching reading supported by attention to context, configuration, structural and graphophonemic cues.
- He authored over 500 studies, reviews, articles, and books on reading and instruction, and co-wrote the popular Dick and Jane series. In 1956, he wrote a review for UNESCO entitled: "The Teaching of Reading and Writing: An International Survey."
Predications of Future Topics:
Prediction: Assessment will continue to play a major role in education.
Reasoning: Because policymakers want to maintain a sense of control of education, summative assessment will be necessary. Because teachers will want to be sure that they are providing for the needs of students, formative assessment will be necessary.
Prediction: Psychology and cognitive science will continue to inform development of educational practice.
Reasoning: Because the understanding of child development and the science of learning has played such a critical role in the past, I predict that trend will continue into 21st century literacy.
Indications
of Future Topics
Prediction: Instruction will build on the social learning theory and will incorporate collaboration and interacting with peers.
Reasoning: Because of the global impact of the panemic and the fact that it forced education to involve more technology and less social interaction, I predict that researchers will be studying its effect on education into the 21st century.
Prediction: Research will continue to focus on how the COVID-19 Pandemic has affected education long-term.
Reasoning: Because there is ample evidence that children learn socially and because we have many examples of how social activity strengthens the learning process, I predict that learning will be increasingly social in the 21st century.
Reasoning: Because our society is so emersed and driven by technology, I predict that digital literacy will be imperative in preparing students for 21st century life.
Reasoning: Even as the "pendulum" swings from one side to the other, teachers are the ones monitoring student achievement, therefore I predict that teachers will take an eclectic approach to what works for them and their students.
Prediction: While there may still be argument on what is considered the best approach in reading instruction, teachers in the classroom will utilize an integrated, balanced approach combining phonics and comprehension instruction.
Prediction: Digital literacy will remain a focus of research and will continue to impact instructional practice.