I’m much in favor of open access and I’m so glad this new review by Anne Castles, Kathleen Rastle and Kate Nation is free to read for everybody out there. Why is this great news? Well, this review is a very nuanced overview of anything related to reading acquisition. In a field that has known several reading wars, this is no little thing to try to achieve. But will it end the reading wars? Looking at the history described at the beginning of the article I’m not so sure, but if so those wars will continue despite this article.

Do note, because of the big scope of this article, it’s a really long read. But well worth of your attention.

Abstract of this review:

There is intense public interest in questions surrounding how children learn to read and how they can best be taught. Research in psychological science has provided answers to many of these questions but, somewhat surprisingly, this research has been slow to make inroads into educational policy and practice. Instead, the field has been plagued by decades of “reading wars.” Even now, there remains a wide gap between the state of research knowledge about learning to read and the state of public understanding. The aim of this article is to fill this gap. We present a comprehensive tutorial review of the science of learning to read, spanning from children’s earliest alphabetic skills through to the fluent word recognition and skilled text comprehension characteristic of expert readers. We explain why phonics instruction is so central to learning in a writing system such as English. But we also move beyond phonics, reviewing research on what else children need to learn to become expert readers and considering how this might be translated into effective classroom practice. We call for an end to the reading wars and recommend an agenda for instruction and research in reading acquisition that is balanced, developmentally informed, and based on a deep understanding of how language and writing systems work.