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The Making of a Reader
This volume helps parents and early childhood educators understand the nature of early literacy at home and at school. Ways in which nursery school structures support and extend childrens's literacy are explored. This volume, based on an 18-month ethnographic study of story reading and other literacy events in nursery school, describes parents' attitudes, beliefs, and values about literacy, nursery school organization of time and space, how reading and writing is used by nursery school participants and how story reading events help children learn to make sense of books and use books to learn about the world.
290 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
31 people want to read
About the author
Marilyn Cochran-Smith
37 booksMarilyn Cochran-Smith is the John E. Cawthorne Professor of Teacher Education for Urban Schools at the Lynch School of Education, Boston College, where she served as Director of the PhD Program in Curriculum & Instruction from 1996-2017. Cochran-Smith is widely known for her work about teacher education research, practice and policy and for her sustained commitment to teacher education for social justice with inquiry as the centerpiece. She is a frequent presenter nationally and internationally.
Dr. Cochran-Smith and the BC research group, Project TEER (Teacher Education and Education Reform), will publish Reclaiming Accountability in Teacher Education (Teachers College Press) in April, 2018. Cochran-Smith has written nine other books, five of which have won national awards, and more than 200 articles, chapters, and editorials related to teacher education. She is a founding co-editor of the Teachers College Press book series on Practitioner Inquiry, which has published more than 50 books about practitioner inquiry or by teachers and other education practitioners.
Dr. Cochran-Smith is the Principal Investigator for a Spencer Foundation-funded study of teacher education at new graduate schools of education (nGSEs) in the U.S. She is co-founder of Project RITE (Rethinking Initial Teacher Education for Equity), a two-country research project at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is also the Chair of the International Advisory Panel on Teacher Education for NOKUT, Norway’s government agency for Quality Assurance in Higher Education.
Cochran-Smith is a past president of the American Educational Research Association, an inaugural AERA fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Education. She has received many awards, including AERA’s Research to Practice Award, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Literacy Research Association, the Carl Grant Research Award from the National Association of Multicultural Education, and all of the major awards from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), including the David G. Imig Award for Achievement in Teacher Education, the Margaret B. Lindsey Award for Research in Teacher Education, and the Edward C. Pomeroy Award for Outstanding Contributions to Teacher Education.
Dr. Cochran-Smith and the BC research group, Project TEER (Teacher Education and Education Reform), will publish Reclaiming Accountability in Teacher Education (Teachers College Press) in April, 2018. Cochran-Smith has written nine other books, five of which have won national awards, and more than 200 articles, chapters, and editorials related to teacher education. She is a founding co-editor of the Teachers College Press book series on Practitioner Inquiry, which has published more than 50 books about practitioner inquiry or by teachers and other education practitioners.
Dr. Cochran-Smith is the Principal Investigator for a Spencer Foundation-funded study of teacher education at new graduate schools of education (nGSEs) in the U.S. She is co-founder of Project RITE (Rethinking Initial Teacher Education for Equity), a two-country research project at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is also the Chair of the International Advisory Panel on Teacher Education for NOKUT, Norway’s government agency for Quality Assurance in Higher Education.
Cochran-Smith is a past president of the American Educational Research Association, an inaugural AERA fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Education. She has received many awards, including AERA’s Research to Practice Award, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Literacy Research Association, the Carl Grant Research Award from the National Association of Multicultural Education, and all of the major awards from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), including the David G. Imig Award for Achievement in Teacher Education, the Margaret B. Lindsey Award for Research in Teacher Education, and the Edward C. Pomeroy Award for Outstanding Contributions to Teacher Education.
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November 9, 2025
It would be interesting to hear what people who advocate the science of reading might say about a book like this. I guess one of the first things they might say is that the research is qualitative and not a randomised controlled trial – what they like to call the ‘gold standard’ of research. And yet, it isn’t at all clear how you could investigate some of the questions raised by this research using this gold standard. The main conclusion from this research is that people teach their children to read by making reading a normal and expected part of communication with their children. I’ll discuss this more later. But first, let’s start with what those who advocate the science of reading have to say about reading.
One of the things that they say is that the techniques they use have been proven by science to be the most effective and efficient. The actual proof for this is not as black and white as they claim, something you can see for yourself if you read Bower’s review of the evidence https://link.springer.com/article/10....
Although the evidence isn’t as black and white as is generally claimed, it is useful to give an overview of their arguments. The first is that learning to read is actually much harder than people generally assume. One of the key players on the science of reading side is Louisa Moats, who wrote a book called 'Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science'. The reason why learning to read is so hard, when compared to learning to speak, is because humans have been speaking for a very long time, while they have been reading for a very much shorter time. This is particularly true if you look at ‘evolutionary time’ as your scale. There has been a lot of time for humans to have evolved brain structures that help them to speak – but simply not enough time for them to have evolved structures that would help them to read. This means that we need to hack structures that have evolved for other purposes to enable us to read at all. The dice are loaded against this – and so, we need to use science to understand how we have made use of these other structures and to structure learning to read in ways that makes the best use of these. None of this is obvious – in fact, some of it is counter-intuitive – which means that teaching reading is in fact rocket science. It is hard and it requires experts who know the science and therefore the best techniques to ensure it happens. Almost all children can learn to read, but because some teachers are tied to their intuitions on how children learn, they follow ineffective ways of teaching and these ultimately hinder (and sometimes stop entirely) children from actually learning. The methods that work do so for all children – since all children have the same evolved brains as their peers – and while social and cultural differences between children are interesting, they are ultimately irrelevant when it comes to learning to read.
Because speaking is natural, learning to read should lean heavily upon this. The process is that children learn to speak. This builds their vocabulary and their sense of their language’s grammar. This is where ‘meaning’ resides. The person who wants to teach reading, then, must focus upon decoding letters to sounds, sounds to words, words to sentences. Since the children can speak, they can use the skills they acquire in decoding written language into spoken language and therefore meaning will become transparent to them. This is why we must start with ‘phonics first’ – since reading is essentially decoding written text into speech – and since speech is easy (and evolutionary), the hard part is the decoding part, which, as I said, requires the hacking of brain structures that evolved for quite different purposes.
Having said all of that – what has this book to say about this? Well, first of all, it was not really written to address these arguments, if you do want a good book to read on that, I would recommend Fact-Checking the Science of Reading https://literacyresearchcommons.org/w...
Rather, this book challenges some of the fundamental assumptions of the Science of Reading by the premises of this research itself. It shows that children are encouraged to learn to read when they see that it is a meaningful activity that is engaged in by people in their community. That it is a normal and expected part of human interaction and communication. In this sense, reading is ‘taught’ to some children in much the same way as speaking is taught – incidentally and as part of everyday contextual communication. That is, not as a rigorous ‘science’, but as literacy events that might not be understood as such, even by the parents and teachers that engage children in these events.
The research occurs at a pre-school centre in a middle class neighbourhood in the US. The parents generally read to their children every night at bedtime. There are very distinct differences between spoken and written language, and one of the best ways to ‘teach’ these is by hearing written language read aloud. Written text is simply not identical to spoken language – and few people can put in words what those differences are. But just as you don’t need to know the difference between a noun phrase and a verb phrase to teach a child to speak, you don’t need to be able to explain nominalisation to be able to teach written language either. The parents would often bring their children to the local library and allow the children to select and borrow books they had chosen. They would read these books to their children and other books that might be read on high rotation that they children themselves asked to have read to them. They would engage with these books, asking questions of the children about aspects of the story and so on. It is important to note that the parents rarely saw this as ‘teaching their children to read’, but rather as an activity that both they and their children loved. A quiet time that brought joy to both.
The Science of Reading would say that this is all well and good, but it does nothing to actually teach the children to read – since reading is about decoding written symbols into speech sounds. You might enjoy doing it, but ultimately, it misses the point of what reading actually is. I would say the opposite – that since reading is an inherently meaningful activity, such shared joy lays the foundation for why children might want to learn to read in the first place. Also important is the fact that the children also got to see their parents reading to themselves – so that reading was something the parents themselves did, not just something they did with their children. That is, it was a normal part of life, not something only done at school or only done under sufferance.
As you can see, the difference between the view of reading discussed in this book – as a cultural life skill that is a completely expected outcome of growing up, in much the same way as learning to talk is – is quite different from that proposed by the advocates of the Science of Reading – a set of decoding skills that must be explicitly taught and until they are learned in sequence reading is almost impossible to acquire. I am not saying that there is no value in teaching phonics or systematically helping children who are struggling with learning to decode letters to sounds and beyond. However, humans rarely learn things just because they are ‘good for them’ – we learn what is meaningful to us. My problem with the Science of Reading is that it assumes reading is a set of discrete skills that, once acquire, means you can read. Whereas, I believe reading is a deeply social and cultural means of communicating and to acquire this skill requires it to be taught in ways that are also deeply social and cultural. As such, talk of the evolutionary foundations of reading, even if they are completely correct, basically miss the point. Rather than showing the Science of Reading is settled science, it shows those advocating for it are looking in the wrong place for what is most important in this deeply human endeavour.
One of the things that they say is that the techniques they use have been proven by science to be the most effective and efficient. The actual proof for this is not as black and white as they claim, something you can see for yourself if you read Bower’s review of the evidence https://link.springer.com/article/10....
Although the evidence isn’t as black and white as is generally claimed, it is useful to give an overview of their arguments. The first is that learning to read is actually much harder than people generally assume. One of the key players on the science of reading side is Louisa Moats, who wrote a book called 'Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science'. The reason why learning to read is so hard, when compared to learning to speak, is because humans have been speaking for a very long time, while they have been reading for a very much shorter time. This is particularly true if you look at ‘evolutionary time’ as your scale. There has been a lot of time for humans to have evolved brain structures that help them to speak – but simply not enough time for them to have evolved structures that would help them to read. This means that we need to hack structures that have evolved for other purposes to enable us to read at all. The dice are loaded against this – and so, we need to use science to understand how we have made use of these other structures and to structure learning to read in ways that makes the best use of these. None of this is obvious – in fact, some of it is counter-intuitive – which means that teaching reading is in fact rocket science. It is hard and it requires experts who know the science and therefore the best techniques to ensure it happens. Almost all children can learn to read, but because some teachers are tied to their intuitions on how children learn, they follow ineffective ways of teaching and these ultimately hinder (and sometimes stop entirely) children from actually learning. The methods that work do so for all children – since all children have the same evolved brains as their peers – and while social and cultural differences between children are interesting, they are ultimately irrelevant when it comes to learning to read.
Because speaking is natural, learning to read should lean heavily upon this. The process is that children learn to speak. This builds their vocabulary and their sense of their language’s grammar. This is where ‘meaning’ resides. The person who wants to teach reading, then, must focus upon decoding letters to sounds, sounds to words, words to sentences. Since the children can speak, they can use the skills they acquire in decoding written language into spoken language and therefore meaning will become transparent to them. This is why we must start with ‘phonics first’ – since reading is essentially decoding written text into speech – and since speech is easy (and evolutionary), the hard part is the decoding part, which, as I said, requires the hacking of brain structures that evolved for quite different purposes.
Having said all of that – what has this book to say about this? Well, first of all, it was not really written to address these arguments, if you do want a good book to read on that, I would recommend Fact-Checking the Science of Reading https://literacyresearchcommons.org/w...
Rather, this book challenges some of the fundamental assumptions of the Science of Reading by the premises of this research itself. It shows that children are encouraged to learn to read when they see that it is a meaningful activity that is engaged in by people in their community. That it is a normal and expected part of human interaction and communication. In this sense, reading is ‘taught’ to some children in much the same way as speaking is taught – incidentally and as part of everyday contextual communication. That is, not as a rigorous ‘science’, but as literacy events that might not be understood as such, even by the parents and teachers that engage children in these events.
The research occurs at a pre-school centre in a middle class neighbourhood in the US. The parents generally read to their children every night at bedtime. There are very distinct differences between spoken and written language, and one of the best ways to ‘teach’ these is by hearing written language read aloud. Written text is simply not identical to spoken language – and few people can put in words what those differences are. But just as you don’t need to know the difference between a noun phrase and a verb phrase to teach a child to speak, you don’t need to be able to explain nominalisation to be able to teach written language either. The parents would often bring their children to the local library and allow the children to select and borrow books they had chosen. They would read these books to their children and other books that might be read on high rotation that they children themselves asked to have read to them. They would engage with these books, asking questions of the children about aspects of the story and so on. It is important to note that the parents rarely saw this as ‘teaching their children to read’, but rather as an activity that both they and their children loved. A quiet time that brought joy to both.
The Science of Reading would say that this is all well and good, but it does nothing to actually teach the children to read – since reading is about decoding written symbols into speech sounds. You might enjoy doing it, but ultimately, it misses the point of what reading actually is. I would say the opposite – that since reading is an inherently meaningful activity, such shared joy lays the foundation for why children might want to learn to read in the first place. Also important is the fact that the children also got to see their parents reading to themselves – so that reading was something the parents themselves did, not just something they did with their children. That is, it was a normal part of life, not something only done at school or only done under sufferance.
As you can see, the difference between the view of reading discussed in this book – as a cultural life skill that is a completely expected outcome of growing up, in much the same way as learning to talk is – is quite different from that proposed by the advocates of the Science of Reading – a set of decoding skills that must be explicitly taught and until they are learned in sequence reading is almost impossible to acquire. I am not saying that there is no value in teaching phonics or systematically helping children who are struggling with learning to decode letters to sounds and beyond. However, humans rarely learn things just because they are ‘good for them’ – we learn what is meaningful to us. My problem with the Science of Reading is that it assumes reading is a set of discrete skills that, once acquire, means you can read. Whereas, I believe reading is a deeply social and cultural means of communicating and to acquire this skill requires it to be taught in ways that are also deeply social and cultural. As such, talk of the evolutionary foundations of reading, even if they are completely correct, basically miss the point. Rather than showing the Science of Reading is settled science, it shows those advocating for it are looking in the wrong place for what is most important in this deeply human endeavour.
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