The five pillars of reading

Where do the five pillars come from?

In 1997, Congress asked for a panel to review the research on teaching reading. The National Reading Panel noted that about 100,000 reading studies had been published since 1966. It set strict standards, kept only the studies that met them, and ran meta-analyses on each topic. Its report came out in April 2000.

The panel organized its findings into five areas. Schools, states and publishers soon called them the five pillars, or the big five. The panel itself never ranked them or claimed they were a complete list.

What are the five pillars, briefly?

What did the panel find about phonemic awareness?

Teaching it helped both phonemic awareness and later reading and spelling. The best results came from teaching one or two skills, such as blending and segmenting, rather than many at once. Using letters during the practice helped more than oral work alone. Small groups did better than whole classes or one-to-one.

Total time mattered less than people expect. Programs that totaled between about 5 and 18 hours did best. That works out to a few minutes a day, not a long block.

What did it find about phonics?

Systematic phonics beat non-systematic or no phonics, with an average effect of 0.41 across 66 comparisons. The benefit was larger for kindergarten and first grade and for students at risk of reading difficulties. It helped spelling as well as reading.

The panel also warned that phonics is a means, not an end. Students need to apply it in real reading, and phonics should be part of a full program that includes the other four areas.

What did it find about fluency?

Guided repeated oral reading, where a student reads a passage aloud several times with feedback from a teacher, parent or peer, improved fluency, word recognition and comprehension. That finding held across grades.

Programs that simply encouraged more silent independent reading did not show clear benefits in the studies the panel reviewed. The panel was careful to say this did not prove independent reading is useless, only that the evidence was not there. Most teachers still give time to it, for good reasons.

What did it find about vocabulary and comprehension?

No single vocabulary method stood out. Direct teaching of words helped, and so did repeated exposure, rich contexts, and active use of new words. The panel recommended using several methods together.

For comprehension, the panel found good evidence for teaching specific strategies: monitoring your own understanding, using graphic organizers, answering and asking questions, recognizing story structure, and summarizing. Teaching several strategies together, in natural reading, worked best.

What do the five pillars leave out?

• Writing and spelling as their own areas, though phonics covered some spelling.
• Oral language, which the Simple View of Reading treats as half of comprehension.
• Background knowledge, now seen as central to comprehension.
• Motivation and engagement.
• English learners, whom a separate panel reviewed later.

Use the five pillars as a checklist that your reading block covers the basics. Do not treat them as equal shares of time. In kindergarten, phonemic awareness and phonics need the most daily time. By grade 3, vocabulary and comprehension take a larger share.

How do the pillars fit into one day?

The pillars are not five separate lessons. A well-built reading block touches most of them every day, with the weight shifting as students grow. Here is one way the time can be split in two grades.

These numbers are a starting point, not a rule. A kindergarten class that is ahead on phonemic awareness can drop it to three minutes. A grade 3 class with many weak decoders needs more phonics time, often in a separate intervention block. Use a quick check of each pillar to decide.

Notice that comprehension time grows as phonics time shrinks. That is the Simple View of Reading at work: once students decode, language and knowledge decide how much they understand.