Charlotte Mason and “The Science of Reading”
The phrase science of reading has become a common buzzword in education. Educational resources and curricula often claim to be “science of reading aligned.” More and more schools are requiring training in the science of reading. There is a plethora of conferences, organizations, websites, social media pages, and podcasts dedicated to “the science of reading.” But what is it and why does it matter? Let’s explore what the “science of reading” is, why it matters to the Charlotte Mason mama, and how it aligns with Charlotte Mason’s methodology and philosophy.
What is “the science of reading”?
According to The Reading League, the term “science of reading” refers to the scientific research about how people learn to read and write. It includes research from the past fifty years in a variety of fields of study, countries, and languages. Although this is obviously a large body of research, the main tenets are listed below:
• Reading instruction must be explicit to build necessary neural pathways for reading in the brain.
• Both word recognition skills and language comprehension skills are crucial for reading comprehension. Lacking skills in either word recognition or language comprehension will affect an individual’s ability to read, regardless of how strong their skills are in the other.
• Language comprehension includes background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge.
• Word recognition includes phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition. (The Reading League [TRL], 2022)
Why does the science of reading matter?
Having such a large body of research, from many different disciplines, over an extended period of time, allows parents and teachers to make highly informed decisions about reading instruction, methodology, and curriculum. We are better equipped to teach our children and make decisions for their education when we know how the brain works and what teaching strategies have been proved across multiple studies and fields. We are fortunate to have the ability to make evidence-based decisions and to have access to so much scientific literature.
If you have read Charlotte Mason’s books, you know that she read the brain science and educational research available during her day. She read widely, thought critically about what she read, and implemented what she believed to be valuable into her teaching methodology. Those wanting to educate their children according to her philosophy of education should not be afraid to do the same.
What are its limitations?
However, there are some things that cannot be measured. In a society that idealizes the scientific method, we must not forget that it is not the only source of truth, or the only thing that should be used to make decisions. Scientific research is an extremely valuable tool for educators, but it is not our only tool. As you make decisions for your children and students, do not forget Charlotte Mason’s first principle: children are born persons. We must teach our children in a way that honors their personhood. Research studies that reduce people to “subjects” and data points cannot fully inform humane educational practice. If you have read Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, you know it is a fearful thing to become a Mr. Gradgrind, relying solely on facts and data to inform your educational methods, and an even more fearful thing to be his pupil or child.
How does Charlotte Mason’s methodology agree with current research?
The science of reading research proves the importance of phonological awareness and phonics skills in reading instruction. Simply put, phonological awareness is knowledge that words can be broken into units of sound, and phonics is the knowledge of the letters that represent those sounds. The research overwhelmingly supports the need for these skills in developing strong readers.
While she does not use those terms, Charlotte Mason is essentially describing a way to develop and teach phonological awareness and phonics skills to very young children in Home Education. She places a high emphasis on letter recognition and sound-letter correspondence, nursery rhymes and word play, the importance of hearing individual sounds in words, and the connection between spoken language and reading/spelling. For example, during a game of word-making, Charlotte Mason writes, “Require him to pronounce the words he makes with such finish and distinctness that he can himself hear and count the sounds in a given word” (Home Education, pg. 203). She also emphasized the importance of teaching letter sounds as you teach letter recognition (Home Education, pg. 201). This fostering of phonological awareness and phonics aligns well with more modern research on how reading skills are developed.
As for the language comprehension piece of reading development, The Reading League recommends “read-alouds from a variety of complex texts to build knowledge and vocabulary” and “robust conversations to develop students’ academic language (e.g. narrative and inferential language)” (TRL, pg. 23). Charlotte Mason’s writings frequently encourage parents and teachers to use high quality, more complex literature instead of what she terms “twaddle,” the “much-diluted stuff too often put into children’s hands” (Home Education, pg. 294). Additionally, narration is one of the key elements in a Charlotte Mason education, which is when the child retells the story he has just read. I believe that both of these practices (complexity of literature and narration) are supported by the science of reading research.
Stanislas Dehaene, one of the leading researchers on how the brain learns, recommends playing with words and their sounds (syllables, rhymes, and phonemes), working on letter recognition, tracing letters, learning how letters correspond to sounds, teaching the parts of words, and ending each “reading period” with “reading words or sentences that can be easily understood and that the child can repeat, summarize, or paraphrase” (Reading in the Brain, pg. 228-229). Charlotte Mason makes extremely similar recommendations: she recommends word play in the early years, working on upper and lowercase letter recognition, tracing letters in sand or drawing them in the air, teaching children how to listen for the sounds in words and what letters correspond to those sounds, completing reading lessons with a real and engaging text, and incorporating narration and diction. Both Dehaene and Mason recommend texts without a lot of distracting visual stimulation. They also both recommend allowing children to take the time they need to learn how to read without being rushed.
Where do Charlotte Mason and the science of reading differ?
The science of reading has debunked what is called the “whole-language” approach to reading, which is an approach that emphasizes memorizing whole words instead of learning sound-letter correspondence to read. Charlotte Mason’s reading-at-sight lessons that are described in Home Education could easily be accused of being a whole-language approach to reading aquisition. However, as described above, Charlotte Mason actually believed children should have strong phonological/phonemic awareness and phonics skills before beginning reading-at-sight lessons, so she does not actually exclude sound-letter correspondence from her lessons or methodology. On the other hand, she does say the following: “We could, if we liked, break up a word into its sound, or put certain sounds together to make a word. But these are efforts of mind beyond the range of children. First, as last, they learn to know a word by the look of it, and the more striking it looks the easier it is to recognize; provided always that the printed word is one which they know very well by sound and by sense” (Home Education, pg. 211).
While Charlotte Mason does understand the importance of knowing the “sound and sense” of a word, the first part of this statement actually contradicts what the reading research shows: individuals learn to read by breaking up a word into its sounds and parts, and familiarity with the global shape of a word does not in fact improve our ability to be able to read it. In his book Reading in the Brain, Stanislas Dehaene writes, “…there is no longer any reason to doubt that the global contours of words play virtually no role in reading. We do not recognize a printed word through a holistic grasping of its contour, but because our brain breaks it down into letters and graphemes” (Reading in the Brain, pg. 224).
Charlotte Mason recommends giving children engaging and interesting texts, and teaching words in those texts regardless of their complexity. Researchers like Stanislas Dehaene disagree: “The words given to beginning readers must be analyzed letter by letter in order to ensure that they do not contain spelling problems that are beyond the child’s current knowledge” (Reading in the Brain, pg. 230).
Charlotte Mason also argues that word length does not affect reading ability (Home Education, pg. 209), while research has shown that for young children learning to read, word length does in fact affect a child’s reading time. For adults, “our visual system simply processes all letters simultaneously and in parallel rather than one after the other,” but children process each letter individually (Reading in the Brain, pg. 223). To be fair to Charlotte Mason, she does not actually ask the child to discount the individual letters and sounds in the words the child is learning to read. Her methodology involves building each word being learned, letter-by-letter, with a moveable alphabet. Parents and teachers who want to use Charlotte Mason’s methods and evidence-based practices can use this part of her process to teach a child to look closely at the parts of the word that are making up the whole.
Why does it matter?
Current reading research is teaching us more than ever about how we learn to read. This information can and should inform our teaching methods and educational decisions. However, as noted at the beginning of this article, not everything is measurable. Regardless of the methods we choose to teach our children to read, whether we do it Charlotte Mason’s way or not, we should all heed her warning: “…consider what an abuse of his intelligence is a system of teaching which makes him undergo daily labour with little or no result, and gives him a distaste for books before he has learned to use them” (Home Education, pg. 207). Educational philosophy and methods matter, so let’s use all that is available to us to inform our own.
Kristi Schauer 2024
References
Dehaene, S. (2009). Reading in the Brain. Viking.
Mason, C.M. (2017). Home Education. Living Book Press.
The Reading League. (2023, May 30). Science of Reading: Defining Guide. https://thereadingleague.org/what-is-the-science-of-reading/
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