Single-Cueing Model of Teaching Reading

Most North American teachers believe in the “three-cueing model” of teaching reading, whereby skilled reading is dependent on the combined use of three different strategies: semantic cues (what makes sense based on what is known about the text and illustrations); syntactic cues (what makes sense based on the preceding words); and grapho-phonic cues (sounding out the words). This article clearly shows that the three-cueing theory is incorrect, and that beginning readers should instead simply be taught to sound out every single unknown word. It turns out that many of the strategies encouraged by the three-cueing theory (guessing, looking at the illustrations, skipping words, etc.) are not only unproductive, “they actually deflect students away from the path to reading facility. Sadly, many parents do not discover until about grade 4 that their children have been taught moribund reading strategies and, to their dismay, that recovery is unlikely.”

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