Science of Reading: The Podcast

S10 E2: Orthographic mapping is a cognitive process, with Katie Pace Miles, Ph.D.

• Amplify Education • Season 10 • Episode 2

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In this episode of Science of Reading: The Podcast, Susan Lambert is joined by Katie Pace Miles, Ph.D., founder of The Reading Institute and director of the Advanced Certificates in Reading Science, Brooklyn College. An expert in orthographic mapping, Pace Miles explains why it’s a cognitive process, why that means it can’t be “taught,” and how we can instead leverage an understanding of it to inform instructional practices across reading, writing, and spelling to improve comprehension. Pace Miles outlines what it takes to develop good word-reading habits in emergent readers, and offers step-by-step advice on how to implement quick intervention when needed.

Show notes:

Quotes: 

 "You don't teach orthographic mapping, 'cause, again, that's a cognitive process, but you can facilitate support for long-term storage of words." —Katie Pace Miles, Ph.D.

"Never acquiesce to illiteracy. We all, as a community that supports all readers, have to figure out what instruction needs to be provided and what dosage over what duration of time … and it will happen." —Katie Pace Miles, Ph.D.

"If you're focused only on phonics and not on spelling, you are going to miss a whole bunch of decoding instruction, word analysis work." —Katie Pace Miles, Ph.D.

"You don't need a Ph.D. to have that knowledge. That should come in all teacher training. The complexity of the English language—every teacher I've ever met can handle it once we teach it." —Katie Pace Miles, Ph.D.

Episode timestamps*
03:00 Introduction: Who is Katie Pace Miles?
04:00 Beginnings as a teacher
07:00 Book: Making Words Stick: A four step instructional routine to power up orthographic mapping
10:00 The motivation behind the book
13:00 Orthographic mapping as a cognitive process
17:00 Can you teach orthographic mapping?
19:00 Research behind the theory of orthographic mapping
24:00 Developing good word reading habits with emergent readers
28:00 Reading-spelling connection
32:00 Rubberband analogy: Developing speaking and reading skills in tandem
34:00 Orthographic mapping can support or impede comprehension
39:00 Intervention
43:00 Activities and strategies from the book
44:00 Final thoughts
*Timestam

[00:00:00] Katie Pace Miles: Your ability to orthographically, map and store words in long-term memory for automatic retrieval winds up being the key to comprehension.

[00:00:12] Susan Lambert: This is Susan Lambert, and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify. We're now onto Episode 2 in our Season 10 deep dive into comprehension. On this episode, we're exploring one of the gateways to comprehension: orthographic mapping. And today's guest is an expert on this topic. She is Dr. Katie Pace Miles, associate professor and director of reading science advanced certificate at Brooklyn College City, University of New York. And along with Molly Ness, she authored the recent book, Making Words Stick. Before we jump into this episode, I want to give you a quick definition of orthographic mapping, and it comes right from the book at the center of today's episode.

[00:01:00] Susan Lambert: Orthographic mapping is a cognitive process that facilitates the storage of words in long-term memory by connecting a specific word spelling to its pronunciation and meaning. Basically what we're saying is we want to help students understand the sounds that they hear, the letters that are represented by that sound, and when you put those sounds together in a word, what that word means.

[00:01:28] Susan Lambert: The cognitive process of bringing sounds, words, and meaning together is called orthographic mapping. Remember, this season will be tackling your comprehension-related questions. Submit a question for me or our upcoming guests at amplify.com/sormailbag. 

[00:01:49] Susan Lambert: And now here's Dr. Katie Pace Miles

[00:01:54] Susan Lambert: I am so excited to have Katie Pace miles join us today on this episode of Science of Reading: The Podcast. Katie, welcome!

[00:02:02] Katie Pace Miles: Thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here.

[00:02:05] Susan Lambert: We are so excited to jump in and talk about this idea of orthographic mapping. But before we do that, I would love if you could introduce yourself to our listeners and give a little bit of your backstory.

[00:02:16] Katie Pace Miles: Sure. So I am a professor at Brooklyn College, which is a part of the City University of New York system. At the college. I'm the director of the advanced certificate in reading science, which is a one-year online deep dive into the Science of Reading, the research behind it. This degree is primarily for New York City public school teachers, but anyone can apply. There's full scholarships for that program.

[00:02:41] Susan Lambert: Wow, that's awesome.

[00:02:42] Katie Pace Miles: So yes, that's been something that I developed over the last two years and I'm just very enthusiastic about it. I'm also the co-founder of CUNY Reading Fellows. So again, CUNY stands for the City University of New York. We train, there's an incredible team that works at CUNY Reading Fellows, we train about 700 education majors each year. And they tutor over 2,600 New York City public school students in need of structured literacy, high-impact tutoring. And I am more recently the founder and president of a nonprofit called The Reading Institute, which provides low or no-cost reading interventions and professional development for teachers.

[00:03:22] Susan Lambert: Wow. You have a lot going on there in the world of teaching, reading, and reading science. How did you get interested in this whole idea of reading? 

[00:03:35] Katie Pace Miles: I was a teacher. And... yes, and actually, my first, I started, my training was in second grade and I was a kindergarten teacher, a third grade teacher, and during those years I just became fascinated with how some students learn how to read somewhat effortlessly and for other students it was such a struggle. And you were providing the same level of instruction. These students were all intelligent. What was going on here? And I became a reading specialist. So I was a reading specialist for grades three through five, which is interesting. And I received that job because I had this training in the younger years and so many of these students, third through fifth grade, were in need of really like remedial, like they needed to go back. And there's always this debate about using the term remediation intervention, and this is a whole part of my world now, but during that time is when I really started seeking out more answers. I was thinking, "Why is my caseload for third through fifth graders so large?"

[00:04:49] Katie Pace Miles: Why are so many of these students coming to me in those years unable to read, in need of support, and I was so ill-equipped. I was doing my best as a teacher and then as a reading specialist, and I wound up doing my master's in educational psychology because I felt like I wasn't learning what I needed to help these students in the field of education. So my master's in ed psychology. 

[00:05:17] Katie Pace Miles: And that's when I found the work of Dr. Linnea Ehri. And my Ph.D. is in educational psychology learning development instruction with a specialization on the acquisition of literacy. My time with Dr. Linnea Ehri, my doctoral work is really what set the stage for what I do now.

[00:05:36] Susan Lambert: That's a really great story. I don't think that I've ever heard that part of what you did before. So thank you for sharing that. And it really brings to life the way that you organize the book and you really cover more than just K-2, which is typical in early reading, so we're talking about sort of a K-5 spread that you've included in this book.

[00:05:55] Susan Lambert: So with Molly Ness, which we've had on the podcast before, so shout out! You've written this book called, Making Words Stick: A Four-Step Instructional Routine to Power Up Orthographic Mapping. How did this come to be? And what about orthographic mapping? And why is it so critical? And to say it's a really hot topic right now that's often misunderstood. 

[00:06:17] Katie Pace Miles: It really is. And all the credit goes really to Dr. Linnea Ehri. I can't say this enough. So I mentioned my time with her, I had this privilege of being her student for five years over the course of my doctoral work on a fellowship where I could really immerse myself in her research.

[00:06:37] Katie Pace Miles: I remember reading her research from the '70s through the 2000s. And I read pretty much anything I could get my hands on. She has over 200 research articles, overwhelmingly experimental research articles. And I was able to read these and really build my own understanding of how this theory of orthographic mapping emerged out of her own pile of research.

[00:07:05] Katie Pace Miles: Now, the theory of orthographic mapping has also been substantiated by many other researchers and other troves of research. And simultaneously, while I was reading that, I was also then able to read her research and her other theory on the phases of word reading and spelling.

[00:07:25] Katie Pace Miles: And Ehri's theory of the phases of word reading and spelling, for me, it's a further applied—for teachers—understanding of the theory of orthographic mapping. So the theory of orthographic mapping is about how the brain, this cognitive process that goes on in the brain, which I'll talk about more in just a second, How that then moves through these phases of getting us from pre-alphabetic into accurate or consolidated word reading and spelling.

[00:07:56] Susan Lambert: Hmm. And for our listeners who haven't yet made a  connection, Dr. Ehri's phases of reading development are super important and super critical. Something every reading teacher should be aware of and know. And you do a great job in this book of sort of outlining that. And the theory of orthographic mapping was also coined by Dr. Ehri too, right? 

[00:08:23] Katie Pace Miles: Correct. It is. It's her theory of orthographic mapping. 

[00:08:23] Susan Lambert: Yeah. And so we'll talk a little bit about orthographic mapping as a cognitive process, but before we get there, I just want to say that I've read through this book twice now. It is very accessible, a really straightforward way to understand this, phases of reading development from Ehri and orthographic mapping.

[00:08:47] Susan Lambert: And so I just want to shout out and say thank you to you and Molly for making it accessible and simplified in a way that you get the background information on it and then you can apply it. So congratulations on that. 

[00:09:02] Katie Pace Miles: Thank you. I really appreciate that. I know Molly does too. That was our whole goal, is to ensure the teachers are able to understand the theory and apply it to best support their students.

[00:09:14] Susan Lambert: And just to go back a little bit about, you know, what motivated the two of you to do this. Did you see that teachers were not understanding what this was? Or like, why did you think there was a need for this book? 

[00:09:27] Katie Pace Miles: Yes, I was constantly getting questions and requests to give talks on orthographic mapping. And what was interesting is, so I took this body of research that I had actually conducted with Linnea from about 2015 until, about five years of research, experimental studies. At that time during COVID, there's a lot of requests for webinars, and people started asking, "Can you distill this concept of orthographic mapping? Can you make this come to life for a teacher?" And so you're taking all of these pretty heady articles and saying, "All right, well," and, and then going back to my roots, and really I'm a reading teacher at heart. It's like, what does the reading teacher need to know? 

[00:10:14] Susan Lambert: Yep. 

[00:10:14] Katie Pace Miles: Well, she needs to know these things. And they can become ... what I always say about Dr.

[00:10:19] Katie Pace Miles: Ehri's theory of orthographic mapping is that it is my North Star. Everything I do, I'm kind of looking and letting the theory of orthographic mapping guide me. So I started consolidating this research into talks that hopefully were engaging for teachers, relevant, and from there, I continued to conduct more research and analysis on lists of words and how lists of words interact with phonic scope and sequences or student phonetic knowledge.

[00:10:51] Katie Pace Miles: And long story short, Molly and I are close colleagues, we have a lot of fun together, and we thought, "Okay, instead of giving these disparate talks here, there, and to certain teachers get the information, others don't, maybe we could put this out there in a way... we really challenged ourselves and we held each other accountable for doing what you just said, which is ensuring that it's written for teachers who have to go into the classroom the next day, and use this knowledge to make a difference for the lives of all readers. 

[00:11:22] Susan Lambert: I know when we talked in our pre-call, I said that listeners to this podcast really like to listen to and hear some of the research behind it. Maybe some of a little more nerdy than what you've written in the book. So I wonder if we could get to that place of orthographic mapping, and you note that it's a cognitive process, can we talk about what both of those things mean in the theoretical sort of space? 

[00:11:54] Katie Pace Miles: Sure. Yes. So we'll, we'll start, if it's okay, we'll start with this, like it's a cognitive, you just said it's a cognitive process. Like, what does that even mean, right? 

[00:12:03] Katie Pace Miles: So what? And I'm not going to get crazy into like, this part of the brain and that part of the brain, that's in the book if you want it. And also, I understand when teachers are like, "I don't want that part. I don't want that." I'm totally like, "Absolutely." What we all need to understand is that the cognitive process is referring to the concept of the reading brain, which, think of it as a set of neural pathways, and these neural pathways are activated when you're trying to read and spell words, right? And it has to do with whether or not you're seeing the word, saying the word, hearing the word, trying to do something with the meaning of the word. 

[00:12:42] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. 

[00:12:42] Katie Pace Miles: And everyone knows this, there's different parts of their brain that deal with each one of those things. And there's got to be connections made between those. Emergent readers or striving readers have inefficient pathways that have been created. Or those connections require like a lot of blood flow. It's just not happening effortlessly. And what we do as instructors, as teachers, is what we're trying to do is build stronger neural connections so that it becomes more efficient. And when it becomes more efficient, it becomes less effortful.

[00:13:19] Susan Lambert: Hmm. 

[00:13:20] Katie Pace Miles: And by it, I mean reading and spelling words. When that becomes less effortful, you have more mental energy. We're going to talk about comprehension, we can review this when we talk about that. You have more mental energy for the most important thing, which is understanding what you're reading and building knowledge.

[00:13:38] Susan Lambert: Hmm. Yeah. We will get to that in a minute. And I just want to do a follow up with this. So essentially what we're talking about is the process that helps develop automaticity or, what I've heard referred to as instant word recognition, when you see a word, you can't unsee that word and you instantly recognize what it is. Is that right? 

[00:14:01] Katie Pace Miles: That's perfect. Yeah. Ehri uses the term automaticity, automatic retrieval, all the time. In schools, we often use instant retrieval. And that gets us into a little bit of a tricky place. I probably shouldn't go there yet, but you can follow that, like instant retrieval, we start thinking sight words.

[00:14:19] Katie Pace Miles: Susan Lambert

[00:14:20] Katie Pace Miles: Oh yeah. Right.

[00:14:20] Katie Pace Miles: Katie Pace Miles

[00:14:20] Katie Pace Miles: But I'm going to pull us back a little bit from that. And, if we stay in the researcher realm, it's all about automatic retrieval from long-term memory. And we get the words into long-term memory through making these very strong connections. I always go like this, 'cause I think of Ehri's diagrams of connecting the spelling to the pronunciation of the word, and it's an actual mapping of the letters to the sounds. And each word is going to have this distinct mapping between the spelling and the pronunciation and a distinct mapping to its meaning. 

[00:14:55] Susan Lambert: And what listeners can't see you doing is sort of connecting your fingers with that, which is great. In the book, there's a great diagram of what that looks like, and I think listeners will recognize that because we often see it, basically the word pulled apart with, you know, the sounds and mapping the letters. 

[00:15:11] Katie Pace Miles: Ehri calls that an, amalgam.

[00:15:13] Susan Lambert: An amalgam. 

[00:15:14] Katie Pace Miles: Just to throw that... I always like to think of it like, I always draw a circle, and now I'm drawing a circle in the air, right? You have this mapping. My fingers are connecting. I have this arrow to the meaning, and I'm circling the whole thing. I'm like, this is the amalgam that is stored in long-term memory.

[00:15:39] Katie Pace Miles: And back to your point that it is then eventually, when those connections are strengthened, so bringing it to the neural pathways, when those connections are strengthened and you've had a lot of practice mapping and storing the word rain. I always use the example of rain. It's going to rain outside. I know that that's spelled r-a-i-n, instead of the reign of a ruler. Then eventually it can be automatically retrieved whether you want to read it or spell it. 

[00:16:10] Susan Lambert: Yeah. That's great. And to link our listeners to a previous podcast, we had Dr. Jane Ashby on, who did a lot of talking through eye tracking technology and how some of this has been...

[00:16:23] Katie Pace Miles: oh yeah.

[00:16:23] Susan Lambert: Yeah. And some of this has been better understood. So listeners, if you haven't listened to that one, go back and re-listen. It's a great link. Alright. So why does this idea of it being a cognitive process actually matter? And I might say, I often hear people saying, "How do you teach orthographic mapping?" It's not really a teachable process, right? Like you don't teach orthographic mapping. It's a process that happens. Can you help us with that distinction?

[00:16:52] Katie Pace Miles: That's right. That's right. So we've discussed the cognitive process that happens. That can happen efficiently, it can happen less efficiently, but then as we know as teachers, instruction plays a role, right? So there is this overlay. There are some students who will naturally move through this process of orthographically mapping words and storing them in long-term memory. That is a very small percentage of students, and, and I work overwhelmingly in the reading intervention space. 

[00:17:21] Katie Pace Miles: And the majority of students, as we all know, they need explicit systematic instruction. And it becomes like, "Okay, well explicit systematic instruction in what?" Well, in order to facilitate the cognitive process of orthographically mapping words, there needs to be instruction that draws students' attention to the spelling and pronunciation, mapping, and meaning of the words. And again, that needs to be done in a systematic way.

[00:17:49] Katie Pace Miles: You're not just grabbing at words and concepts because this all, what this builds is over time and, and really simply, this is like what phonic scope and sequence are you going to use? How extensive is that phonic scope and sequence? Each time you go to instruct on a phonetic concept what types of activities are you doing?

[00:18:12] Katie Pace Miles: It's one thing to have a phonic scope and sequence, and it's another thing to actually instruct into that, teach to that scope and sequence with activities that actually help facilitate the process. So you don't teach orthographic mapping, 'cause again, that's a cognitive process. But you can facilitate, support long-term storage of words.

[00:18:32] Susan Lambert: That makes sense. It makes sense. Can we talk a little bit about the research that undergirds this theory of orthographic mapping?

[00:18:42] Katie Pace Miles: Definitely. So there are loads of experiments. It's hard for me to even pick one. But I, I mentioned that I started reading experiments that Dr. Ehri and others had conducted in the '70s. And they were randomly assigning students to receive, and these are all overwhelmingly, the studies that I was reading of hers were with emergent readers. They were randomly assigning students to receive either instruction that supported the students in seeing the word, the spelling of the word, or not seeing the word.

[00:19:16] Katie Pace Miles: Sometimes the students would see the word and hear the word pronounced in context, or they would see the word and hear the word pronounced in isolation. 

[00:19:27] Katie Pace Miles: Anyway, there are loads of these studies and overwhelmingly what, what these series of studies shows over time is that drawing students' attention to the spelling of the word, providing the mapping, and some support for what does that spelling result in regarding the pronunciation of the word, if there is some activity that can be done in addition to just basic drawing students' attention or providing an example or model, those were all ways to measure, well, does that support the short-term and then longer term retention for the ability to read and spell the word. 

[00:20:05] Susan Lambert: Hmm. Okay. And so, so if we're thinking about the ones paying attention to the word, it's, it's not the whole word then, it's the, is it the parts of the word, so we're actually looking more at a phonics process? Would that be right? 

[00:20:21] Katie Pace Miles: Yeah. It's more of like, it's more the process of mapping what that word's spelling composition, how it relates, to its phonetic representation. 

[00:20:29] Katie Pace Miles: And one, one, there's another interesting series of studies that Ehri has going to her phase theory, where she would take students that she would pre-assess to determine whether they were in the pre-alphabetic, partial, full, or consolidated alphabetic phases.

[00:20:46] Katie Pace Miles: And she would have an experimental design where let's say these were partial alphabetic readers. She would then take these students, randomly assign them to two instructional groups: One group would receive this explicit instruction on letter sound relations and how we're going to use that knowledge to decode or dispel the words, and the other group would not receive that.

[00:21:09] Katie Pace Miles: And then what she looked at post-test was not only this retention of the words that were taught in the experiment, but the student's ability to then apply those new skills to other words, which demonstrated this movement into the full alphabetic phase for the one group of students that received that type of instruction.

[00:21:30] Susan Lambert: Hmm. Fascinating. 

[00:21:31] Katie Pace Miles: Those series of studies are just incredible. Maybe some other time I could come back and we could just talk about phase theory. 

[00:21:39] Susan Lambert: Yeah, for sure. 

[00:21:40] Katie Pace Miles: It's a remarkable body of research by Ehri. 

[00:21:43] Susan Lambert: And this is, this is relevant, especially relevant now as we're thinking about what states are doing across the country and talking about things like the queuing system, is it's not allowed in. It's against the law in many states. It's not allowed in reading instruction in many states. And what you're talking about is a series of studies that actually demonstrated that this queuing approach kind of thing doesn't work. Right? 

[00:22:10] Katie Pace Miles: That is exactly it. And if there is evidence needed for that, right? Why it doesn't work, you can go directly to these studies about what moves students into the next phase of development. That's absolutely right. And in my work and my, again, holding orthographic mapping as this North Star in my intervention work, I always say like, what are the things that are needed for emergent readers? One of the number one things is when they first begin to learn to apply their letter knowledge to word reading, it's about developing good word reading habits. So these habits that form in kindergarten.

[00:22:50] Katie Pace Miles: If the habit is formed early on, that we don't try to sound out the word, that we don't have to slow down, use our letter sound knowledge and apply it methodologically. If we don't do that with young children, these bad habits form. And we all know as adults how difficult it is to break bad habits. 

[00:23:13] Susan Lambert: I love how you said that. And developing habits is often difficult, right? So I hear lots of teachers saying, "Oh, but the kids, they get frustrated. It's hard work to learn how to decode words. It is, isn't it?

[00:23:26] Katie Pace Miles: It is! Oh, you just saw me light up. I'm like, oh my gosh! That's the best thing a teacher could say. That actually shows, and that should be celebrated, when the teacher sees, particularly in kindergarten and first grade, how difficult this is. That really should be celebrated both at the teacher, between and amongst the teachers, and between and amongst the students. That tells you that you're doing something right. It's only by going through this arduous phase of having that—this is really like the partial into the full alphabetic phase, my favorite transition point— it's only when you go through that that you're primed and ready for that efficient automatic word retrieval that you mentioned before. And you really have to go through the growing pains of it. 

[00:24:16] Susan Lambert: Yeah. And you know, I don't want, I don't want anybody, any of our listeners to get the sense that we want classrooms to be like, work harder, work harder! But I'll tell you. Yeah. I'll tell you. It is hard work.

[00:24:33] Susan Lambert: But to see, and you know this too, to see a kindergartner's eyes light up when they can read a decodable passage that adults say, "this is a boring passage," but that kindergarten kid is like, "but I just read this!" 

[00:24:49] Katie Pace Miles: Oh! It's the joy of my career. I mean, this is, again, this is really what I do now in my intervention programs. And we just live in this space of experiencing these moments for whom the students are primed and at that phase and ready to move on. And we often also work with older students, taking me back to my roots, older students who never had the instruction or enough time in the instruction that they needed to form more efficient pathways. And they, you know, that joy that you're just saying, that confidence that is built, oh, it's just, it's the best of teaching. It's like what, what we're all as reading, you know, support people here, what we're all in it for. 

[00:25:37] Susan Lambert: For sure. And I'm glad you brought up the, and mentioned the idea of some kids just don't have enough time, because what we do know is, all kids sort of acquire this, this efficient mapping at different levels, and particularly with kids with neurodivergent such as dyslexia, it does take more time and more practice.

[00:26:00] Katie Pace Miles: That's exactly right. And it will happen. It will happen. You know, we never, I always have this saying like, we never acquiesce to illiteracy. Don't acquiesce to it. We all as a community that supports all readers, we have to figure out what instruction needs to provided and what dosage over what duration of time, and it will happen.

[00:26:24] Katie Pace Miles: And it will happen to, you know, at different points. All, all of these things. You know, I was just working, you know, I'm in and out of the New York City public schools and I was just sitting next to a seventh grader who was working on... he just moved out of our instructional levels on CDC word reading and was moving into blends. And I saw incredible work happening in this tutoring session, and this student was getting it and they just needed more time, more direct instruction, more modeling, more examples, and they needed a really safe environment to be who they are as a reader and to build on their skills. 

[00:27:09] Susan Lambert: Hmm. Yeah. That's encouraging, isn't it? When you can see the support for that. You've been talking a lot about the connection too. This isn't just about reading, but you importantly say this is a reading-spelling connection. Why do you think that's a critical connection to make, especially for teachers that are doing this work every day? 

[00:27:31] Katie Pace Miles: Absolutely. It, I, I, we become, myself included, so focused on reading that we may at times forget about the reciprocal relationship between reading and spelling. As Dr. Ehri calls it, it's two sides of the same coin. And there's a very high correlation in the social behavioral sciences between reading and spelling, and that means that they support one another.

[00:27:54] Katie Pace Miles: So it's not just that reading supports spelling, which is, I think we kind of get, kind of obsessed, like we think that that's the way it goes. It's also that spelling supports reading. 

[00:28:07] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. 

[00:28:08] Katie Pace Miles: And so you really are working on these two, or should be working on these two, in tandem. I see so much more reading instruction happening in schools and far less spelling instruction. And you know, if you're only focused on phonics and not on spelling, you're going to miss a whole bunch of decoding instruction. Word analysis work.

[00:28:29] Susan Lambert: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you do mention the fact that spelling is actually harder than, than reading. And why is that? 

[00:28:38] Katie Pace Miles: Well, it is this recognition versus retrieval situation that's going on, again, cognitively. When you are reading, the writer, the author, has provided you with the orthographic representation of the words, so you don't have to guess how you're supposed to, what representation of the long A sound needs to be used. When you're spelling, you hopefully  have stored many representations of the long A sound. Is it Ai? Is it A consonant E? We could go on and on. Is it AY? EIGH? And you have to retrieve the correct one out of this multitude of options that matches the word that you're trying to spell, with regards to which version of the word rain are you working on here. And then what is the accurate spelling of that word?

[00:29:28] Susan Lambert: Yeah. That makes sense.

[00:29:29] Katie Pace Miles: And, and this becomes strained over time. I talk about, Molly and I talk about in the book about this tension that builds, or that can build for some students between reading and spelling. And with my grad students over at the university, I use a rubber band. And it's like, think about a rubber band that's just you know, relaxed, laying on the table, and you have got your spelling skills, you've got your reading skills, and they're developing—I'm thinking of the earlier age students—and things are pretty okay usually, when we're in the one-to-one letter sound correspondence zone, kindergarten, you know, early first grade.

[00:30:13] Katie Pace Miles: And then as things become more complex, as we are dealing with representations where two letters make one sound, where three letters make one sound, where there's all these different vowel patterns, reading can continue to progress because again, it's an easier recognition process, and spelling may be lagging behind.

[00:30:32] Katie Pace Miles: And so a tension starts forming in that rubber band. And as an instructor, you want to keep an eye on how far behind is the spelling from the reading skills. And I always acknowledge like, yeah, there, there will be a tension because one is a more difficult thing to do than the other, but you've got to keep an eye to make sure that that tension doesn't become so intense that the rubber band could potentially snap. 

[00:30:59] Susan Lambert: Mm, yeah, that's a great analogy. And it's got me thinking about, well, English is not as irregular as people think it is. It's just very complex. It's a little, the sound spelling patterns are way more. So I'm trying to learn Spanish, and Spanish is much more transparent. And so, I've noticed that difference in, you know, just like actively thinking about that difference so much. 

[00:31:23] Katie Pace Miles: Absolutely. We have a really hard job as reading teachers. Right. We are dealing with one of the most opaque orthographies in the world. 

[00:31:35] Susan Lambert: Yeah. 

[00:31:35] Katie Pace Miles: And it's a very rich orthography because we have borrowed from so many other languages.

[00:31:40] Katie Pace Miles: It does require a level of training, particularly for our early elementary teachers, that I don't think we have provided. I know I never received it until I went and got my Ph.D. And I want to be very clear, you don't need a Ph.D. to have that knowledge. That should come in all teacher training. 

[00:32:03] Susan Lambert: Yeah. 

[00:32:03] Katie Pace Miles: As you said, the complexity of the English language, every teacher I've ever met can handle it once we teach it. 

[00:32:12] Susan Lambert: Yeah. It's important to teach it so people know.

[00:32:14] Katie Pace Miles: Sorry, that was a very long-winded way of saying...

[00:32:17] Susan Lambert: no, it's great. No, I totally get it.

[00:32:19] Susan Lambert: I want to take a step back real quick, because this season Season 10, is all about comprehension, right? And so why are we talking about orthographic mapping? Well, we know that orthographic mapping will either support or impede comprehension, so you can't even get to comprehension. Can you talk a little bit more about that for us?

[00:32:41] Katie Pace Miles: Sure. I'm going to kind of double down on some of the things that we mentioned before. So we're going to go back to this idea of the reading brain and that the circuits in the brain need to coordinate to read, spell, and make meanings of words. In the emergent reader, this circuit, or in this older striving reader, this circuit is inefficient. So it's taxing, it's laborious, it requires a lot of effort. Only through repeated practice reading and spelling these words—just like a sport, as I've mentioned—only through that do they require less effort, they become more efficient in order to code and spell words accurately, and this efficiency is what allows more mental energy to be available for reading comprehension or to focus on what you are reading. And the decoding kind of falls into the background and the comprehension comes to the foreground. When you're first learning to read, it's the decoding that's at the foreground and your comprehension is like, "uh, I don't, yeah, I kind of got the gist of that."

[00:33:48] Susan Lambert: Yeah. 

[00:33:49] Katie Pace Miles: And, and let me not neglect writing. That's the same with the relationship between spelling. If you have efficient spelling, you can put more time, mental energy into your writing composition. 

[00:34:00] Susan Lambert: Yeah. 

[00:34:00] Katie Pace Miles: Versus each word that you're about to put down on the page, worrying about, "Do I know how to spell that? Should I pick an easier word," et cetera. So your ability to orthographically map and store words in long-term memory for automatic retrieval winds up being the key to comprehension. Without it, a student won't have this sufficient retrieval, which impedes fluency. And as we know, students who are less fluent often read less.

[00:34:29] Katie Pace Miles: That's the Matthew effect. And when you read less, that impedes vocabulary because the more you read, the more vocabulary words you acquire, and it impedes comprehension. The more you read, the more background knowledge you're building. So it's not just about your comprehension in the moment, it's this compounding effect that a lack of automatic word retrieval has on your corpus of knowledge if you don't have other ways of obtaining knowledge, if you don't have a lot of people reading to you and audio books. 

[00:35:00] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. Wow. 

[00:35:01] Katie Pace Miles: If it's okay, I'll just mention this one other thing about, I know I mentioned this reciprocal relationship between reading and spelling. There's also this reciprocal relationship between efficiency in storing words in memory and comprehension that's evidenced by set for variability. So, I know on your podcast you've talked about set for variability.

[00:35:22] Susan Lambert: We actually haven't yet.

[00:35:23] Katie Pace Miles: Oh, okay. So this is a concept that's definitely, you know, floating around the reading science realm, very well established, this theory of set for variability, where when you have a word stored in memory, and you attempt to read a word—let's say you're attempting to read an unknown word, unknown via your ability to map the spelling to pronunciation—so you're trying to decode it for the first or one of the first times that you're working on this, where it doesn't have to be the first, right? As we know, emergent readers need lots of attempts.

[00:35:58] Katie Pace Miles: If you have the pronunciation of this word or the meaning of this word, to simplify, you've heard this word before. If you have that stored in memory, it winds up being critically important and quite valuable to your ability to decode the word. 

[00:36:15] Susan Lambert: Wow. 

[00:36:15] Katie Pace Miles: So I often use the word mitten. I'm in, I live in Brooklyn, we're wearing mittens all through the winter, right? The gloves are mittens. And I once saw this student decoding the word mitten, and they kept saying, " mit-ten. Mit-ten." And they're looking at the instructor, "mit-ten?" And he just, no clue. And this was a student who was new to New York and they had not heard the word mitten before.

[00:36:44] Katie Pace Miles: And if they had had the word stored as a vocabulary word through their oral language, they would've probably said, "mitten. Oh, mitten! Mitten! Yeah, I know what a mitten is." And then sense, it becomes kind of this thing of like, "Oh, cool. That's how you spell mitten. I got you." 

[00:37:02] Susan Lambert: That's great. Thanks for that example. It's super important and all that you're talking about, I mean, for listeners, if you need to be reminded of the importance of word recognition instruction and getting kids strong in the cognitive process of orthographic mapping, here's another reminder why it's so important on our quest for comprehension and deeper comprehension.

[00:37:26] Susan Lambert: I'm going to make a transition here to why it's so important to get intervention as quickly as possible. Can you talk a little bit about effective intervention and what it looks like? 

[00:37:40] Katie Pace Miles: I would be happy to, and you'll have to cut me off because this is really my passion.

[00:37:44] Susan Lambert: We will.

[00:37:45] Katie Pace Miles: Okay. You'll edit this out. I very much live in the space of emergent reading interventions. And I mentioned, we can avoid a lot of interventions if we start with good word reading habits. If we start with excellent, explicit systematic instruction that facilitates orthographic mapping, we can also, I think, prevent a lot of intervention once students have letter sound knowledge, that you start applying it.

[00:38:16] Katie Pace Miles: You don't have to have all of your letter sound knowledge established. You can establish some of it, and then you start applying it to word reading and spelling. So, a set of letters, S-T-A-P-I, right? You can make a whole bunch of words, and so it really should be around this batching of letter sound knowledge, applying it to word reading and spelling.

[00:38:38] Katie Pace Miles: I also mentioned no guessing. And then intervention is inevitable. Students will need, there're a certain group of students, well, I should be careful with what I'm saying here. There is excellent research that shows when this Tier 1 instruction is done rigorously, there are smaller groups of students who will need interventions.

[00:39:00] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. 

[00:39:01] Katie Pace Miles: I exist in a space where, up to this point, large swaths of students in the schools that I work need early reading interventions. So, whether you have a few students that need it, whether you have a lot of students that need it, reading interventions are going to be a part of what your school needs to provide to students.

[00:39:23] Katie Pace Miles: And what I have researched and what I know from my work in early literacy interventions is that these interventions need to be provided in what's called high impact ways. So that needs to be three to five days a week. And we have figured out how to do this through CUNY Reading Fellows and through my work at the nonprofit.

[00:39:43] Katie Pace Miles: These students, providing an intervention one to two days a week is not going to move the needle in the way that these students need in order to really catch up and reach benchmark. So it needs to be three to five days a week, and you need to think about how much time you're working with that student.

[00:40:00] Katie Pace Miles: Kindergartners or first graders, you're somewhere between the 20- to 35- minute zone. Twenty minutes can get the job done for a second-half-of-the-year-kindergartner. 

[00:40:10] Susan Lambert: Yeah. 

[00:40:10] Katie Pace Miles: A first grader might need 30, 35 minutes. A second grader might need 40 minutes. 

[00:40:15] Susan Lambert: Hmm. 

[00:40:16] Katie Pace Miles: The intervention must be structured literacy, multi-component. You're not just doing skills in isolation over and over. You're taking those skills in isolation, you're applying it to context, you're doing vocabulary building all the way through with whatever words the students don't know the meaning to. Also, you're really thoughtfully considering the text, so that in context for me, that is, you've got your decodable sentence that eventually builds a decodable book reading.

[00:40:47] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. 

[00:40:47] Katie Pace Miles: And you're very thoughtful about matching those decodable books to your phonic scope and sequence. And then over time, you are considering, when are we moving away from books that are 90% decodable to books that are 80, 70, then 60% decodable, which is really like loosening the reins on decodability over time.

[00:41:10] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. Very interesting. Well, I do know that, bringing it back to the book that you've written, that some of the activities and strategies that you include in there—which I love because they're by grade level— can be used both in Tier 1 and then extended and applied into intervention, which will actually help support. 

[00:41:30] Katie Pace Miles: That's exactly right. And some of these are interventions that are a part of reading intervention work that I do, and that Molly does, and others take it way beyond that. 

[00:41:40] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. 

[00:41:40] Katie Pace Miles: We want to make sure to note that we don't expect that these activities will be applied to every single word that you're ever going to teach. That's not reasonable. 

[00:41:51] Susan Lambert: Right. 

[00:41:51] Katie Pace Miles: But what we are supporting or attempting to support here is providing a corpus of activities that would help with this facilitation process, and then as students strengthen their ability to accurately decode and spell words, they are able to apply that knowledge and it extends beyond the words that they have just worked on in instructional time.

[00:42:15] Susan Lambert: Hmm. Makes a lot of sense. Well, any final thoughts that you'd like to share with our listeners about supporting students when it either comes to orthographic mapping or, you know, into comprehension? 

[00:42:28] Katie Pace Miles: Maybe we should end with this, which is that there's two non-negotiables that I know you're doing such a good job addressing on your podcast.

[00:42:36] Katie Pace Miles: There is comprehension building your knowledge that goes without saying, and the early years are so complicated when it comes to this because you have to carve out equal amounts of time to do knowledge building in subject areas. And you have to do this in all sorts of ways. I mentioned audio books, I mentioned read alouds, rich libraries in your classrooms, in your schools, in your communities. Getting parents involved is key and that really involves sending resources home to read out loud, sending digital text home, and I could go on and on. That is as important as what I've yammered on about in this podcast, which is this technical moment of lifting off into word reading and spelling. 

[00:43:26] Crosstalk: Mm-hmm.

[00:43:27] Katie Pace Miles: And for anyone not in the early childhood space, maybe you're realizing like, wow, or maybe you've been existing in the early childhood space and you haven't been giving yourself enough credit for how complex this is to get it right in the early years. Those two skill sets are building at the same time, and they are interrelated, interwoven, and critical for becoming a proficient reader.

[00:43:55] Susan Lambert: Yeah. And writer.

[00:43:56] Katie Pace Miles: And writer. Sorry. Oh my gosh. I've been so good until this very last minute of saying reading and writing. That's exactly it. 

[00:44:03] Susan Lambert: Yeah. This is so great. This has been so helpful, Katie. I appreciate you taking the time, talking with our audience and we will get a link in the show notes to the book.

[00:44:14] Susan Lambert: I'm sure people are already aware of it, but it's fabulous. And thank you for the work you and Molly did to bring this to life for our listeners. So, we appreciate you. 

[00:44:23] Katie Pace Miles: Thank you so much. I really appreciate the time to be on your podcast.

[00:44:29] Susan Lambert: That was Dr. Katie Pace Miles. She's an associate professor and director of reading science advanced certificate at Brooklyn College City, University of New York. Along with Molly Ness, she authored the recent book, Making Words Stick: A four-Step Instructional Routine to Power Up Orthographic Mapping. We'll have a link in the show notes.

[00:44:51] Susan Lambert: And please don't forget to submit your questions about comprehension. We'd love to address them in an upcoming episode, go to amplify.com/sormailbag. We'll also have a link in the show notes. Next time on Science of Reading: The Podcast, October is Dyslexia Awareness Month, and we'll be releasing a brand new edition of Science of Reading Essentials on Dyslexia. This episode will give you the critical foundational information you need to better understand dyslexia and to serve your students. 

[00:45:27] Nadine Gaab: We are largely focused, still focused on the reactive, deficit-driven, wait-to-fail model, instead of the development of preventive approaches or proactive approaches. 

[00:45:41] Emily Lutrick: The myth is still out there that it's not, we're not able to screen early for a risk of dyslexia.

[00:45:47] Tim Odegard: It's on a continuum of severity, which makes it very difficult to operationalize. 

[00:45:53] Susan Lambert: That's coming up next time. Also, our sister podcast, Beyond My Years, just launched its second season. After a Webby award-winning debut host, Ana Torres kicked off Season 2 by exploring the research on joy and laughter and how they can be leveraged effectively in schools. 

[00:46:12] Tracey Severns: Here's what the research also said: That humor can be used to elicit and maintain attention, improve retention and information, increase energy and enjoyment. 

[00:46:26] Susan Lambert: That's available now in the Beyond My Years podcast Feed. We'll have a link in the show notes, Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify.

[00:46:35] Susan Lambert: I'm Susan Lambert. Thank you so much for listening.