Three-Cueing and the Law
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literacy policy speech-to-print phonics 
16 November, 2024
34 Comments
Teacher Question: What is your thinking on teaching cueing systems?
Shanahan Response:
When I was a young boy, I learned about King Canute. He was the one who revealed the limits of his power by ordering the tides not to come in. They came in anyway. More about that later.
This question about cueing systems was posed to me a couple of weeks ago by a colleague I hadn’t spoken with in a long time.
I wasn’t surprised by his question. He knew I was a fan of explicit phonics instruction and over the past couple years some states have banned three-cueing.
I’ve written about three-cueing before but not since governors and state legislators warmed to the topic. Their actions make it worth revisiting.
What is three-cueing?
Three-cueing refers to how people recognize and read words. A cue is a signal that provides a hint as to how to read a word.
Three such word reading cues have been identified: semantics, syntax, and graphophonics. A semantic cue provides hints as to the meaning of the word you are trying to read. For example, ‘The sailor lifted the _______.” Semantically, it should be clear that the word refers to something that a sailor can lift. That would include any words that have an obvious connection to sailing like anchors, mainsails, or cargo, but it also points to items that anyone might lift (e.g., pens, coffee cups, magazines, spirits).
Syntax offers a second cue. Whatever is to be lifted by this sailor is a noun, reducing the population of possible words to one of the 80,000 English nouns.
Finally, there are the graphophonic cues – the letters or spelling patterns and the sounds or pronunciations that they signal. Readers might try to decode from print to pronunciation, but they could also look only at the first letter or two and, along with those other cues, to make an educated guess. In this case, “an----” would be a great hint for anchor, though sailors might lift some other items that begin that way such as anchovy.
Kenneth Goodman (1967), a noted psychologist, theorized that proficient readers would rely on print as little as possible, anticipating words based on those cueing systems. He thought that proficiency meant that the reader had become liberated from the print – relying on letters as little as possible to identify words.
Is there evidence that readers use those three cues when reading words?
There is. In that sense, three-cueing is a research-based idea. There are several studies showing that children as young as two-years-old expect print to have meaning (Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982; Harste, Burke, & Woodward, 1984). If you show them a cereal box and ask them to read the word “Kellogg’s,” they’ll tell you it says, “corn flakes” or “cereal.”
There is also extensive evidence from miscue analysis (Goodman 1967). These studies examine oral reading errors and reveal that when readers misread words, those miscues often fit semantically or syntactically.
Three-cueing theory is based on substantial amounts of such evidence. That evidence shows that readers, when trying to read words, will use whatever information is available to accomplish that. If you have any doubt have someone cross out some words in a text and see what you try to do.
What’s the problem?
The problem with that research is that it is based on misreading. When someone fails to read a word, they may rely on those semantic or syntactic cues, but not when they read the words.
Instead of readers becoming “unglued” from print as they gain proficiency, eye movement studies show that good readers look at all the letters when they read (Rayner & Pollatsek, 1989). Other studies show that as readers increase in proficiency, their reliance on those graphophonic cues increase, while their use of the other systems decline (Stanovich, Cunningham, & Feeman, 1984). In other words, poor readers rely on these cueing systems to help them to guess at the words they can’t read, while better readers focus as much as possible on the letters and sounds. Those other cueing systems aren’t reading – they’re a “work around” when for some reason reading isn’t working.
That’s probably why so many studies have found that phonics instruction is beneficial and that reading brains show a coordination of the visual and phonemic information. By way of contrast, in the 60 years since three-cueing was proposed, there is no direct evidence that teaching it improves reading.
Do you support the three-cueing prohibition laws?
No, even though I suspect that much of the three-cueing instruction is worthless at best and somewhat misleading at worst, I don’t. I think such instruction is a mistake, but these laws and regulations are more likely to undermine quality instruction than to encourage it.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:
“As used in this section, "three-cueing approach" means any model of teaching students to read based on meaning, structure and syntax, and visual cues.” This quote is from the Ohio version of the three-cueing prohibition.
This law not only seems to ban attempts to teach students to guess at words – which is a reasonable goal – but it neglects the nature of reading and what it means to teach reading.
This law bans the teaching of essential aspects of reading – elements included in the simple model of reading, Scarborough’s reading rope, and the recent Active Model of Reading.
It also forbids much of the reading instruction identified by the National Reading Panel, National Early Literacy Panel, National Literacy Panel for Language Minority Children or Youth, or what is recommended by the What Works Clearinghouse (which is the unit of the U. S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Science that provides practical guidance to educators). These sources identify key aspects of what we mean when we speak of the “science of reading.”
Reading comprehension is an important aspect of reading and it depends on using “meaning, structure and syntax.” Perhaps the political types don’t think Ohio’s children should be taught to comprehend.
But isn’t that law focused specifically on word reading?
No, actually, it isn’t. I checked Ohio’s definition of reading instruction, and it includes comprehension. That means if Ohio teachers try to teach reading comprehension, they had better not use any approaches focused on “meaning, structure and syntax.”
Kind of like protecting baseball by prohibiting any use of bats.
Are you saying that the problem is that this law may be overgeneralized to include more than decoding?
That’s a problem. But not the only one. This kind of ban on three-cueing may have unfortunate negative consequences for the best explicit decoding instruction, too.
The problem here is that parents, journalists, social media types who advocate for such legislation don’t really understand phonics instruction or decoding – despite their advocacy.
Successful decoding in reading is a two-step process. It involves more than translating the letters into phonemes – though that is the starting point — and, as such, students should be taught to perceive the phonemes, to link them to letters, to pronounce spelling patterns, and to break words into syllables.
Because of the complications of English spelling there is more to it than that, however. Perhaps no one has had as deep an understanding of our spelling system as the late, Richard L. Venezky, the author of The Structure of English Orthography and The American Way of Spelling. Here is how he explained that second step in the decoding process:
“If what is first produced does not sound like something already known from listening, a child has to change one or more of the sound associations (most probably a vowel) and try again. The result, however, should make sense in the context in which it appears.”
That simply means that when we decode words we need to monitor our success – and we do that by evaluating our pronunciations against “meaning, structure and syntax.”
Of course, Ohio has mandated that students only be taught the first part of the decoding process. They now prohibit the second part – the part where readers may determine that their first try wasn’t right and that they must consider other alternative sounds or pronunciations. (No, when their first attempt at decoding fails, students shouldn’t be taught that guessing from context is the next step). Ohio kids are required to figure out what to do about such failure on their own. Teachers, apparently, can no longer teach that.
Teaching three-cueing is a bad idea. I agree with that. Students shouldn’t be taught to use pictures, meaning, context, or syntax to guess at the words.
They should be taught to decode words.
But that doesn’t mean banning three-cueing is sensible.
Canute couldn’t stop the tides. But, of course, he didn’t have the power to control the moon.
Readers must decode.
Politicians can’t change that.
Unfortunately, they can prevent teachers from teaching all the skills needed for students to learn to decode proficiently.
When politicians try to legislate a science of reading, they should consult with scientists not journalists, social media experts, or representatives of special interest groups.
References
Ferreiro, E., & Teberosky, A. (1982). Literacy before schooling. Exeter, NH: Heinemann
Goodman, K. S. (1965). A linguistic study of cues and miscues. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED011482
Goodman, K. S. (1967). Reading: A psycholinguistic guessing game. Journal of the Reading Specialist, 6(4), 126-135.
Harste, J., Burke, C., & Woodward, V. (1984). Language stories & Literacy Lessons. Exeter, NH: Heinemann.
Rayner, K., & Pollatsek, A. (1989). The psychology of reading. Englewood Cliffs, MJ: Prentice Hall.
Stanovich, K. E., Cunningham, A. E., & Feeman, D. J. (1984). Relation between early reading acquisition and word decoding with and without context: A longitudinal study of first-grade children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 76(4), 668–677.
https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.76.4.668
Venezky, Richard L. (1999). The American way of spelling. New York: Guilford Press.
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Great read as always.
Was it not Canute who ordered the tides to not come in? As an Englishman I wanted to throw that out there.
Tom-
Where were ye when you were needed? You point out the danger of old men working from memory. Indeed, Canute, it is and will be from now on. I have made the correction. Thanks for the help.
tim
This is nonsense. But I definitely believe you when you say that our entrenched systems will refuse to change for the better and use a bad faith and erroneous reading of legislation to do it.
A thought provoking post. As you noted, the “visual” information in the three cueing system is the graphophonic information… “the letters or spelling patterns and the sounds or pronunciations that they signal.” This is information used for decoding words in text.
When effectively taught, this system develops readers who decode words, monitoring meaning and syntax as they decode.
Instead of banning instructional practices, legislators should provide funding for effective professional development, so teachers don’t have to guess at how to teach, or worse—read scripts as they lead students in rote “learning” activities.
What Are your thoughts?
Leave me a comment and I would like to have a discussion with you!
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