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Basic Facts about Reading (page 14 and 15)
If learning to read were as natural as acquiring spoken language, human beings would have invented writing systems many thousands of years before we did, and everyone would learn reading as easily as ducks learn to swim. The prolonged, gradual, and predictable progression of acquiring skill in print translation attests to the difference between processing spoken and written language. Although surrounding children with books will support reading development, and a “literature-rich environment” is highly desirable, it is not sufficient for learning to read. Neither will exposure to print ordinarily be sufficient for learning to spell, unless organized practice is provided.

Thus, teachers must be reflective, knowledgeable, and intentional about the content they are teaching—that is, the symbol system (orthography) itself and its relationship to meaning.

Good readers do not skim and sample the text when they scan a line in a book. They process the letters of each word in detail, although they do so very rapidly and unconsciously. Those who comprehend well accomplish letterwise text scanning with relative ease and fluency. When word identification is fast and accurate, a reader has ample mental energy to think over the meaning of the text. Knowledge of sound-symbol mapping is crucial in developing word recognition: the ability to sound out and recognize words accounts for about 80 percent of the variance in first-grade reading comprehension and continues to be a major (albeit diminishing) factor in text comprehension as students progress through the grades (and students’ background knowledge and vocabulary become ever-larger factors in comprehending academic texts).

The ability to sound out words is, in fact, a major underpinning that allows rapid recognition of words. (This recognition is so fast that some people mistakenly believe it is happening “by sight.”) Before children can easily sound out or decode words, they must have at least an implicit awareness of the speech sounds that are represented by symbolic units (letters and their combinations). Children who learn to read well are sensitive to linguistic structure, recognize redundant patterns, and connect letter patterns with sounds, syllables, and meaningful word parts quickly, accurately, and unconsciously. Effective teaching of reading entails these concepts, presenting them in a sequence from simple and consistent to complex and variable.

The Mental Processes Involved in Learning to Read Are Hidden (page 11)
What drives the mind of the reader is neither self-evident nor easy to grasp. Consequently, many years of interdisciplinary scientific inquiry have been necessary to expose the mechanisms of reading acquisition. On the surface, reading appears to be a visually based learning activity, when in fact it is primarily a language-based learning activity. Proficient reading requires unconscious and rapid association of spoken language with written alphabetic symbols. For adults who are skilled readers and who learned to read long ago, relying on introspection, intuition, or logic to understand how reading is taking place can be misleading.

Reading requires sufficient visual acuity to see the print, but the act of translating alphabetic symbols into meaning is only incidentally visual. Rather, the recognition of printed words depends first on awareness of the speech sounds (phonemes) that the alphabetic symbols represent and then on the brain’s ability to map sounds to letters and letter combinations (graphemes). As reading develops, the mapping of speech to print includes recognition of letter sequences, including syllable patterns and meaningful units (morphemes). The reading brain gradually builds neural networks that facilitate rapid processing of symbol-sound and sound-symbol connections. Once these networks for mapping speech to print are developed, the brain can recognize and store images of new printed words with little conscious effort.

Superficial visual characteristics of printed words, such as their outline or configuration, have no bearing on this process. That is why we can read many fonts and many kinds of handwriting. Printed words are not learned as wholes but rather as letter sequences that represent speech sounds and other aspects of language. What appears to be whole-word learning or whole-word retrieval is, under the surface, dependent on a rapid, letter-by-letter and sound-by-sound assembly of linguistic elements.

Skilled reading happens too fast and is too automatic to detect its underlying processes through simple introspection. We read, but we cannot watch (or intuit or deduce) how our minds make sense out of print. Once we can read, the linkage of sounds and symbols occurs rapidly and unconsciously. The linguistic units that compose words—the single speech sounds (phonemes), syllables, and meaningful parts (morphemes)—are automatically matched with writing symbols (graphemes and their combinations) so that attention is available for comprehension. Because our attention is on meaning, we are not aware of the code translation process by which meaning is conveyed. Until we are faced with a class of children who are learning how to read symbols that represent speech sounds and word parts, we may never have analyzed language at the level required for explaining and teaching it. Similarly, we may not know how a paragraph is organized or how a story is put together until we teach writing to students who do not know how to organize their thoughts. Thus, to understand printed language well enough to teach it explicitly requires disciplined study of its systems and forms, both spoken and written.