Language’s vanishing act in early literacy education  

Students’ language comprehension plays an important role in their reading and writing abilities. Who would disagree? First, you decode the marks on the page or screen as recognizable word forms, then you comprehend the words as grammatically arranged items of vocabulary, as if you were listening to them being spoken, and thereby understand the meaning. Therefore, both of these abilities, fluent decoding and language comprehension, would seem necessary for effective reading and effective reading instruction. Yet, surprisingly, the instructional support required to foster strong language comprehension — particularly the practice-in-use of language to develop proficiency with it — is underemphasized in, or disappearing from, the primary grades literacy education curriculum. This is evident in early grades state literacy standards no longer requiring attention to oral language (e.g., in Kentucky) or in what were formerly primary grades language standards moving to intermediate grade levels (e.g., in Indiana). Instead, early literacy expectations for reading have come to focus almost entirely on decoding (print concept, phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency).  

At the same time, demands for structured literacy instruction, in which decoding is similarly conflated with reading in its entirety (e.g., Hanford, 2018; Stark, 2019), have furthered the curricular marginalization of language comprehension. Advocates for students with dyslexia, as well, are pushing legislation to place these children into scripted and pre-paced programs for sounding out letters and meaningless pseudo-words, avoiding comprehension of language lest it distract the student from the task of rapidly and accurately making sounds (Elliott & Grigorenko, 2014).  

Even when policy does not explicitly favor decoding over language development in the primary grades, the displacement of language instruction tends to happen by default: There are only so many hours in a day and so many dollars in the till, and resources devoted to one thing are always, in a sense, being denied to others. But why does language get placed on the back burner? The expressed rationale is that language, unlike decoding skills, develops “naturally” and will take care of itself (Moates & Tolman, n.d.). Were this true, it would be a waste of resources to devote early literacy instruction to anything other than decoding — “learning to read” — with the result that “reading to learn” (and language comprehension development) gets forestalled until late 3rd grade or beyond.