Scarborough's reading rope, strand by strand

What is the reading rope?

Hollis Scarborough drew it in a 2001 chapter on how early language and literacy predict later reading. She was explaining to parents and teachers why reading is so hard to learn, and the drawing caught on. Today it hangs in staff rooms and appears in most teacher training on reading.

The rope has two bundles. The top bundle is language comprehension, with five strands. The bottom bundle is word recognition, with three strands. At the left the strands are loose. At the right they are twisted tight into one rope labeled skilled reading.

What are the strands?

Why are the strands twisted?

Because skilled readers use them together, all at once, without thinking about each one. A beginning reader works each strand separately. They sound out a word, then think about what it means, then hold it while they decode the next word. That is slow and tiring.

Over years of practice, the word recognition strands become automatic. The reader no longer notices decoding. That frees attention for the language strands, which become more strategic: the reader notices when something does not make sense, connects ideas, and draws on what they know.

How does the rope relate to the Simple View?

It is the Simple View with more detail. The word recognition bundle is the decoding part, and the language comprehension bundle is the language part. The rope shows what each part is made of, which helps when you need to find the exact strand that is weak.

For example, a student weak in language comprehension might have a big vocabulary but little background knowledge about the topic. Another might know the topic but lose track in long sentences. The rope names these as different strands, so you can plan different teaching.

How do you teach the word recognition strands?

Directly, in order, with lots of practice. These strands respond well to explicit teaching.

• Phonological awareness: two to five minutes a day of blending and segmenting spoken words, tied to letters as soon as possible.
• Decoding and spelling: a phonics sequence, one new pattern at a time, with reading and dictation every lesson.
• Sight recognition: comes from decoding words correctly many times. Teach irregular high frequency words by sounding out the regular parts and marking the odd part.

Expect sight recognition to lag behind decoding. A student may decode "rain" correctly for two weeks before reading it instantly. That is normal mapping, not a sign the teaching failed.

How do you teach the language comprehension strands?

Slowly, through talk and books, over years. These strands cannot be finished in a unit. A few practices help most.

• Read aloud every day from books above the students' reading level, chosen to build knowledge on a topic for several weeks.
• Teach a few words from each read-aloud with a student-friendly meaning and examples.
• Talk about sentences: who did what, and why the author put this part first.
• Ask inference questions that need thinking: "How do you know she was nervous?"
• Show how different kinds of text work: stories, how-to texts, letters, poems.

What is the rope often misused for?

Two mistakes are common. The first is treating each strand as a separate subject with its own block of the day. The strands grow together, and a good lesson often works several at once: a read-aloud builds knowledge, vocabulary and language structures in the same ten minutes.

The second is using the rope to argue that phonics is only one of eight strands, so it deserves one-eighth of the time. The strands are not equal weights. In kindergarten and first grade, word recognition is the bottleneck for most students and deserves a large share of the reading block.

How can you check the strands quickly?

You do not need a test battery. Ten minutes covers the basics. Have the student read a short list of real and made-up words for the word recognition bundle. Then read a passage aloud to them and ask four questions: one about a fact, one about a word's meaning, one that needs an inference, and one about how the passage is organized. Those answers point to the weaker strands.