Dr. Robin Steed created and tested the Touchphonics system at Brigham Young University. She believes that all students do not neurologically acquire reading fluency the same way, and that teachers need to be given skills to explicitly teach phonemic awareness, phonics, and language structure to emergent readers across all student populations.

The following is taken from a taped interview with Dr. Steed, recorded in Riverside, California on August 3, 1994.

What is the condition of our educational system?
Our educational system, though adequate for some children, actually fails to meet the needs of more than a third of our students. Many of our little kids are just not doing well in school and as they get older their poor beginning is amplified, resulting in the high drop out rate we're seeing. The system must be corrected because literate, capable citizens are so critical for our country, for our world, and everything we do.

Why do you believe so many students are dropping out of school?
More than fifteen percent of our kids struggle in school because they don't read well. If you don't read well, you will remain behind all the way through school. It's like seeing that bus go over the hill and you're running to catch up. Reading is the biggest failure that we have in school. If you can't read, you can't do science and you can't do social studies and so many other things. If you can't read or write, if you're not literate, you can't become all that you could become.

What is the reason so many kids are struggling with reading?
I have found the biggest reason is because many kids don't really understand how words are put together or even how our whole language is put together. Basically they haven't figured out how we write down the words we say. Some kids figure out the code on their own. They can read and understand for themselves. The ones who haven't figured it out continue to struggle and can't keep up.

So you're saying the reading systems currently being used in most schools are . . .
inadequate. Very inadequate, particularly for the at-risk students.

What systems are being used in our schools?
We used to teach reading out of the basal readers, which were little groups of stories with a controlled vocabulary, not written the way we talk. The kids answered questions about what they read by filling in answers on worksheets. What we've been working on in the last ten years is more of a total language approach to reading. Reading is only one part of our total language approach. We also have listening, speaking, and writing. The total language approach integrates all four of these language modes in a natural interactive way, rather than teaching them as separate subjects and in isolation.

How did this total language approach come about?
Over the past 30 years, universities, governments, and industries have studied the process of reading and writing, the ways people learn, classroom presentation methods, and the various materials used to teach the language arts. The resulting research has given us a lot of valuable information about the process of reading. This is now guiding us in knowing how to teach it. A few years ago, four cueing systems were identified that help us use our language modes more proficiently.

What are the cueing systems?
There's the semantic or the meaning of words cueing system. There's the syntactic which deals with grammar, morphology, and the order of words. Third is the graphophonemic system. This involves the matching of sounds and symbols, better known as phonics. And the fourth is the pragmatic cueing system that deals with the social use of language.

How do you integrate these cueing systems into teaching?
We teach students to use the semantic cueing system to know what an unknown word is from the other words around it. In other words, by context. If the student's difficulty is in sentence structure, then we teach them how to use syntactic cues or what kind of word it should be. If the difficulty is in the appropriateness of the use of language, then we need to focus on the pragmatic cueing system. If the student's difficulty is in phonics, that is encoding and decoding the sounds which make up words, then we need to address word structure which is in the graphophonemic cueing system. The whole language proponents feel reading and writing need to be learned in a social context which is a more natural way to learn all facets of language. In this new movement we use authentic literature instead of controlled vocabulary books, and teach from context instead of teaching skills in isolation.

How is this new movement working?
It works well for some children. They are better writers and enjoy reading more, but for others it just doesn't work. Every child is different and no single way is best for all. That's why teachers find that over fifteen percent of their students are still at-risk and another ten percent are marginal. We've never really solved the problem. As I've worked with these kids who are struggling, I've wanted to know, "Where in the total language process is your problem?" And I find it's most often in word recognition using phonics, and in language sentence structure.

So phonics is . . .
the graphophonemic cueing system or structure of words. When we teach the structure of a word, we can also teach the structure of a sentence and of a paragraph and of a story, using the same principles. I can teach that a word is made up of segmented parts that you blend together in a sequence and that you can substitute those parts. Then I can show that a sentence is a group of segmented words that you blend together in a sequence and you can substitute the parts. So students can learn what makes a word a word, also makes a sentence a sentence. And what makes a paragraph a paragraph, makes a story a story, and so we find a circular structure in our language, the same principles apply throughout. But when we teach the structure of a word, we are teaching phonics and phonemic awareness.

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