Reading isn’t just about recognizing words — it’s about decoding a complex system of patterns and rules. In this bonus conversation, Kate Crist looks at the science of reading, from phonics and digraphs to why English spelling is so unpredictable. (Spoiler: Scribes bear some of the blame!). Plus, Kate shares practical tips for helping kids and adults build reading skills — because literacy isn’t a mystery, it’s a teachable skill.
Reading isn’t just about recognizing words — it’s about decoding a complex system of patterns and rules. In this bonus conversation, Kate Crist looks at the science of reading, from phonics and digraphs to why English spelling is so unpredictable. (Spoiler: Scribes bear some of the blame!). Plus, Kate shares practical tips for helping kids and adults build reading skills — because literacy isn’t a mystery, it’s a teachable skill.
Literacy rates:
Why do we have these low rates of literacy?
How can I help the readers in my life?
What is phonics?
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MIGNON: Greetings, Grammarpaloozians! We are here today with Kate Crist. We just finished talking about literacy in the main segment, and if you haven't listened to that already, definitely go check it out because she had all sorts of wonderful resources. Kate is a literacy specialist with more than 20 years in education.
She's been a classroom teacher, an instructional coach, and a program coordinator, and now she is currently the director of Education 4500, where she works in the United States to design and implement literacy programs and literacy instruction. She's also on the steering committee for the Project for Adolescent Literacy.
Kate, thank you so much for being here.
KATE: Thanks so much for having me.
MIGNON: Yeah, we talked in the main episode about the problem with literacy and how to help people who want to learn to read, but I'm very curious about the science of reading. You hear about phonics, and I remember I took … I remember phonics in seventh grade.
I thought it was really fun because I'm a little word nerd, and anything to do with language was really fun. But I also remember it was mysterious at the time. It was like learning a code, like a secret code language. What is the science today about what works to teach kids to read?
KATE: Yeah, I'm so glad you started the conversation with phonics. Oftentimes, we hear that reading instruction is just phonics. And we talked in the main section about this, but I'll start us off again that we know reading comprehension is two things.
It's what the words say and what the words mean. And that phonics is the ability to decode what the words are saying. And so when we think about little kids and learning how to read, we want to see lots of phonics instruction in their classroom. We often bundle phonics under something called foundational skills.
And they are — so we need a little nerdy — they are print concepts, so knowing that text moves from left to right, and you turn pages this way, phonological awareness, which is being able to hear the different parts of words and manipulate them. So hearing syllables, hearing the difference between "ch" and "juh" — that kind of stuff. And then phonics and word recognition is all those different … it's both encoding and decoding. So being able to spell correctly and being able to read and recognize words really quickly because you know that our controlled vowels "ar," "er," "ir" pretty much always say "er," you know that T-I-O-N always says "shun," right?
All of these sort of different rules about how we read and how we spell, and fluency. So the ability to read text and sound good, right? With a good pace and good expression because you recognize those words. And you can spend time thinking about how you're saying it. You're lifting your voice.
You're dropping your voice. You're pausing as needed because the text says you should. And so that's all the stuff around phonics that we usually say is phonics is really actually this whole suite of foundational skills.
MIGNON: And I remember that there was the alphabet, but then in phonics, there were different letters that were associated with sounds.
KATE: Yeah. So we think about, so I have a six-year-old, and he is learning how to read. And he's learning how to read because I am teaching him. He is just now learning that; he's always known that vowels have two sounds, right? So they say their name, and they say their sound. And to say their name in a one-syllable word, you need two vowels.
So two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking, or it's super E. The E jumps over one word. So we can think about like "bat" to "bate." So the E, if we add E on the end of "bat," we make that A say its name instead of its sound.
MIGNON: Oh.
KATE: About letters like C. C usually says "kuh," but if there's an I or an E after it, it says "ss."
We often call it the C train, right? So there's an I or E after a C. It's gonna say "ss" instead, like "circus." And two letters together, so T and H. T says "tee"; H says "aitch," but together they say "th." Those are digraphs. So two letters together will make a new sound, and English is complicated, right? There are a lot of patterns, but there are patterns.
It is not a guessing game, and oftentimes, in education circles, you hear, "English is just too hard; kids have to guess." And that's not true; kids shouldn't have to guess. Every now and then you gotta flex, right? Flex a vowel; it's called "schwa," right?
"Was" is spelled W A S because the vowel is flexed, and in English, one-syllable words with a short vowel, the N and S, we usually say "zz" instead.
"Was" is a hard word. So people say "was" is a sight word; you just have to memorize it. No. You have to know the rule about the final S, and you need to know that sometimes we flex a vowel. That makes things much more decodable. We can get through text if we can learn the patterns.
And I like to be really insistent about this idea that the English language decoding and encoding is just learning a code because then the problem that we see in literacy rates for kids and adults becomes solvable. If English is just guessing, and there's no hope, then this is an unsolvable problem. But it's not an unsolvable problem. It's actually quite solvable. And half of the solution is this stuff around foundational skills.
MIGNON: Yeah, one reason English is so complicated is because we bring in words from all these different languages: French, German, and Greek. When you're teaching kids, do you actually talk about that? Do you say, "This word follows these rules because it comes …"?
KATE: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just the other day, my son, also learning to read, is in speech therapy, and so he is working on his digraphs. Right now, it's "s," which is not a digraph; "sh," which is, and he came home with a lot of pictures matching. And so getting him to play games, to repeat words, to think about how his mouth feels, and how the sound is.
And one of the words is "chef," and it always has a little print of the letters underneath the picture. And he said, "I know that 'shh' is a soft sound, and it's spelled 'sh.' Why is this word 'ch'?" I said, "Ah, because it's French."
There are a bunch of words, like "chef," that we just borrowed from another language, so they're following that language's rules. There are also lots of really cool rules. "Love" should be spelled "luv," but because of something called the scribe's rule, it's "l-o-v-e." Right, because before there was the printing press, people had to write in cursive for every book until it was written out. "Luve" doesn't look distinguishable. The "u" and the "v" don't look disparate enough from each other, so lots of "u-v" words in English turn to "o-v-e." This was to make them readable when scribes were writing and then people were reading them. Those sorts of things, I think, are really helpful for kids to know, to understand, like, "Why is English like this?"
Oh, it's a scribe's rule, right? And then it helps them have a, they latch onto it. And then kids will need different amounts of practice, right? So there's a lot of research about, time and, time and attention. So how much instruction do you need and for how long? And kids are just wildly different. And some super smart kids need a ton of time and attention to learn how to decode, and some kids don't. And that's just the way it goes.
But in schools, we don't give a lot of time and attention. So kids like my son, he needs like a half hour a day. And I can give that to him a little bit in the morning and then a couple of things in the afternoon. But if he just had to read at school, he wouldn't learn. There's no way. And there's a lot of kids like him in schools without parents like me.
MIGNON: Some people just don't have the time.
KATE: It's a totally unreasonable expectation that parents are going to carry the burden for teaching their children how to read when we have a public school system. School should do it. It should happen there.
MIGNON: Do you find that it helps? I'm thinking about, he's "Oh, that's French." And I'm like, would it help if kids took a French class or a German…
KATE: Yeah, I mean there’s, yeah, I mean we know the more language you know, the more language you know. So knowledge begets knowledge. You know a lot; you can learn a lot. And the way our brains are wired, the more language we have and the more sort of orthographic mapping that's happening in our brains, the better off we are about learning more languages.
That being said, my brother and I, one of my brothers and I, he is like, he's obnoxious with language. He spends six weeks somewhere, and he's fluent. And I am, like, spending six weeks desperately trying to figure out language and get there and stumble my way through it. And so there are, people's brains are wired very differently for this kind of learning. And so yes, more language is always helpful, right? Being monolingual is not helpful.
MIGNON: Yeah. I guess I'm thinking, I think if my child was having trouble learning to read English, my first thought would not be, I should also try to teach them, the child French, and is that a, I just feel like is that a, weird idea, or is that a good thing that most people wouldn't think of?
KATE: I think, outside of the United States, most kids learn more than one language at the same time, and it usually works out. It's just English is complicated. And it's helpful to think about it this way: children who are brought up in bilingual homes in the United States—two parents, one speaking, both speaking Spanish and English—the child is exposed to both languages, mostly equally.
Those children have a spoken language delay. They might start speaking a little bit later because they are processing both languages simultaneously. And then when they start speaking, they usually speak both languages simultaneously.
There's some English and some Spanish in a single sentence for them. And then as they grow up, their language accelerates. It just explodes around the age of two and a half or three and a half, and they catch up to their peers, and they're fine. And there is great value in having more than one language.
If your child is struggling to read, the solution won't be another language. The solution will be getting them direct instruction in English.
MIGNON: Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Again, we're going to put all the great resources that Kate shared in the show notes. And now I want to wrap up, as we always do, with book recommendations. So I'm so excited. We were talking about reading; now, what are we going to read?
KATE: What are we gonna read? Yeah!
MIGNON: What are three of your favorite books that you recommend just to friends that you just love and…
KATE: So none of them are about literacy because that seemed like the kind move.
So, three books that I have probably read in the last decade, but I think are just excellent. One is "James," which is new by Percival Everett, and it's about Jim from "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." And it's his story, and it is such a good piece of literature. Like, it is just stunning. Full admission: I had to Cliff Note "Huck Finn" first because I was like, wait, what happened? I feel like there's going to be important stuff that I'm going to need to know. Oh, this is the other side of that story.
Another book is "The Sum of Us" by Heather McGee. It's about the way in which racism has a cost for all of us, right? So we often think about racism as really as institutional racism, as having stark impacts for particular groups of people that it's intended to affect, but it actually, she … to McGee's point, it actually destroys all of us and has this malefic effect on all of us.
And I think it's a really helpful book when thinking about sort of systems and structures and how to get all people to success.
And then the…
MIGNON: I read that book. Actually, I read that book, too. It was great. It's not often that someone recommends a book that I've also read.
KATE: Yeah. And then the last one is a book, "Heavy," by Kiese Laymon, who might be my favorite American writer right now.
I just think he's brilliant. He has another book, "Long Division," which I also really love. He's a great writer. I think he's at… I'm going to misquote; I think he's at the University of Mississippi, but I'm willing to be totally wrong about that. But he produces a lot of content, and he's always just beautiful and insightful and biting.
And I really appreciate him as a writer.
MIGNON: And what is "Heavy" about?
KATE: It's a memoir. Really, it's about him. It's really good. Really good. Yeah, I loved it.
MIGNON: Wonderful. Again, Kate Christ. You can find her on LinkedIn or on Instagram under educate4500. Literacy specialist, and her company is Education 4500. Kate, thank you so much for being here.
KATE: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.