The Five Pillars of Literacy
The science of reading has taught us that there are five essential components of literacy:
- Phonemic Awareness
- Vocabulary
- Phonics
- Comprehension
- Fluency
Since 2000, reading specialists and teachers across the country have worked tirelessly to equip their students with these proficiencies. As you can see, the foundation of literacy is memory, attention, processing and sequencing, or in other words, MAPS skills.
To understand how vital MAPS skills are, let’s dive into each of those a bit further and examine their connection to literacy.
MEMORY
According to research by professors Shinmin Wang and Susan Gathercole, “Children with reading difficulties often have pervasive deficits in simple and complex span tasks and have poorer abilities to coordinate two cognitively demanding tasks. These findings indicate that reading difficulties may stem directly from working memory problems and a deficit in the central executive functions.”
Memory is the key to building letter/sound correspondence and remembering the meaning and pronunciation of words. Memory also allows us to connect earlier information to ideas we come across later, which is essential for learning.
ATTENTION
The ability to focus on specific information, sustain focus, and ignore distractions while carrying out a task is a necessary component of successful literacy. But for many students with executive function challenges, being told to pay attention doesn’t work because they can’t stay focused for any length of time. And this, of course, impacts reading ability.
Attention issues can start early and have huge educational impacts. During kindergarten and, especially, first grade, attention deficits can lead to children not acquiring early reading skills to the same extent as their peers, explains researcher and child clinical psychologist Dr. David Rabiner. On the flip side, a 2017 study on readers’ attention, fluency, and comprehension concluded that “attention in good readers who have grade-level reading skills is significantly associated with reading speed, prosody, reading comprehension, and word recognition.”
PROCESSING
Processing Speed: While processing speed is not the same thing as intelligence, and classroom activities should accommodate a range of processing types, it is undeniable that processing is a fundamental component of strong literacy.
Our processing ability allows us to interpret, digest, and integrate auditory and/or visual information.
Auditory Processing: Neuroscientist Dr. Paula Tallal studies how our brains learn to attach sounds to letters and how we put those sounds together to make words and sentences. She also looks at why some learners’ brains have such difficulty processing sounds. “Acoustically, ‘buh,’ ‘duh,’ and ‘guh’ are almost the same except for just tens of milliseconds difference at the onset,” she explains. “And if your brain has lumped together or has fuzzy edges between these different sounds, recognizing and hearing the differences will be challenging.
The bottom line is that if students can’t process the phonemes within words, they will have difficulty decoding, spelling, and reading. And down the road, they will also struggle to process the information they do manage to read, meaning they won’t be able to recall it, discuss it, or write about it in class the following day or week.
SEQUENCING
Rounding out our MAPS skills, we have sequencing, which is the ability to track the order of things, such as the sounds in a word, words in a sentence, sentences in a paragraph, or events in a story. Basically, reading = sequencing.
Research links sequencing to reading comprehension. A 2017 study showed that students with strong reading comprehension skills created more accurate sequences of a story than those who had lower comprehension levels.
Students start sequencing in preschool when we ask them to string beads, arrange tiles, or–wait for it!–build block towers following a specific pattern. Sequencing gets more complex as reading advances and students are required to recognize increasingly complicated patterns as words, paragraphs, and chapters get longer and sentence structure gets more intricate.
While it’s true that students with poor MAPS skills are likely to struggle with literacy, there’s hope on the horizon — and that hope starts with the brain.
For more information on building MAPS and reading skills, check out our solution.
