Why Guessing Isn’t Reading

Two Different Journeys in Teaching Children to Read

Learning to speak happens naturally for most children. They soak up language from the world around them, without needing lessons or effort.

Reading, though, is a very different story. Our brains aren’t built to read automatically — it’s a skill we have to learn carefully, step by step. Children need explicit teaching, plenty of practice, and strong support to make sense of the written word. Without it, far too many are left to struggle, missing out on one of the most powerful tools for their future learning.

At the heart of early reading instruction, teachers can find themselves standing at a crossroads, with two distinct paths ahead. One follows the Three Cueing System; the other is grounded in a robust body of research, informed by the work of Marilyn Jager Adams and others, and deepened over time by cognitive science. Choosing the right approach is not simply a professional decision — it has profound implications for every child’s future relationship with reading.

Understanding these two journeys is key to giving every child the opportunity to become a confident and capable reader.

Journey One: The Three Cueing System

The Three Cueing System emerged through the work of Ken Goodman and Frank Smith. Goodman famously described reading as a ‘psycholinguistic guessing game’, suggesting that readers use various types of information to predict unknown words. Marie Clay later incorporated the three cueing approach into her Reading Recovery intervention, which is designed to support children struggling to learn to read.

This approach encourages readers to draw on three types of cues when they come across a word they don’t know:

• Semantic cues – Does it make sense?

• Syntactic cues – Does it sound right?

• Graphophonic cues – Does it look right?

(Five from Five: The Academy for the Science of Instruction)

Teachers using three cueing often prompt children with questions like

• ‘Look at the picture. What might make sense here?’

• ‘Skip the word and read on — what fits?’

• ‘Think about what would sound right in this sentence.’

• ‘Does the word look like it could be...?’

You might recognise posters such as these which support three cueing:

(Five from Five: The Academy for the Science of Instruction)

At first glance, this method feels child-centred and intuitive. It frames reading as a flexible process, encouraging children to draw on all available information. However, there is a critical flaw: it leans too heavily on guessing from context rather than teaching children to decode words accurately.

Instead of helping children systematically connect letters to sounds and blend them into words, three cueing often results in children substituting, skipping, or misreading words. For struggling readers, this can be especially damaging, as they miss out on the explicit instruction they need to build a secure foundation for word recognition.

Research shows that children taught through cueing strategies may appear to read fluently in the early stages — particularly when books rely heavily on pictures and predictable patterns — but their difficulties become apparent when they encounter richer, more complex texts (Moats, 2020). As Moats reminds us, ‘Guessing is not reading.’

In essence, teaching children to guess is like giving them crutches when they should be building muscle.

Journey Two: Building Skilled Readers with Cognitive Science and Evidence-Based Practices

The second, more evidence-based journey is rooted in decades of research into how the brain learns to read. Central to this approach is the work of Marilyn Jager Adams, whose influential book, Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print (1990), drew together insights from cognitive psychology, linguistics, and education.

Adams demonstrated that reading is not a matter of guessing but a highly skilled process requiring strong, interconnected knowledge of several key areas. Her model highlights that skilled reading depends on the coordination of four major processing systems in the brain:

• The Phonological Processor — handling the sounds of spoken language

• The Orthographic Processor — recognising letters and spelling patterns

• The Meaning Processor — connecting words to their meanings

• The Context Processor — using the broader sentence or text to refine understanding, once a word has been accurately identified

Importantly, while the Context Processor plays a role in comprehension, it is not intended as a substitute for decoding. In Adams’s model, context supports understanding after a word has been read correctly, helping readers interpret multiple possible meanings based on the situation.

Building these foundations requires systematic, explicit instruction across the following domains:

1. Phonology: The Sound System

Children must learn to hear, distinguish, and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) in words — like the /b/ in bat or the /sh/ in ship. Without strong phonemic awareness, linking spoken language to written letters becomes a struggle.

2. Orthography: The Written Code

Orthography is the system of spelling patterns and rules that represent sounds. Children must move beyond simply memorising words to understanding letter-sound correspondences — for instance, recognising that -igh often represents a long /i/ sound as in night.

This process, known as orthographic mapping, enables readers to store words efficiently in their memory for quick recognition. This concept, developed through the influential work of Linnea Ehri, highlights that fluent reading is not a matter of memorising whole words or guessing based on context. Instead, it depends on children connecting the pronunciation of a word, its spelling, and its meaning in memory. Through repeated successful decoding experiences, children gradually store thousands of words for immediate retrieval.

3. Meaning: The Purpose of Reading

The ultimate aim of reading is comprehension. But comprehension relies on accurate, fluent word reading — not predicting from pictures or partial clues. Accurate decoding frees the mind to think about meaning. When decoding becomes automatic, children can focus their full attention on making inferences, drawing connections, and engaging deeply with the text.

4. Context: Refining and Deepening Understanding

Context becomes critical once a word has been accurately decoded. Many words in English have multiple meanings, and it is the surrounding text that helps the reader determine the correct interpretation.
For example, the word bat could refer to a flying mammal or to a piece of sports equipment, depending on the context of the sentence. Similarly, wind could mean a breeze (The wind is strong today) or the action of turning something (Please wind up the clock).

In Adams’s model, readers first decode the word accurately, and then use context to fine-tune their understanding — not to guess the word in the first place.

Beyond the Blog features an excellent video by Melissa Strickland explaining this model and the process in more detail.

What to Do Instead of Three Cueing

1. Teach decoding explicitly
   Focus on helping children understand how letters map to sounds. Systematic phonics instruction gives children the tools to actually read words—rather than guess them.

2. Use meaning and syntax as a support, not as the main strategy
   Syntactic and semantic knowledge still matter, but they should be used after decoding to confirm meaning or resolve confusion—like distinguishing between ‘lead’ (a metal) and ‘lead’ (to guide). This cross-checking reinforces comprehension without bypassing decoding.

Why the Choice Matters

The research evidence is clear: guessing is not reading.

The path we choose when teaching reading carries long-term consequences. When we teach accurate decoding, we equip children to become independent readers, capable of engaging with rich, complex texts throughout their lives. When we replace guessing with informed, systematic instruction, we are not only teaching a skill but also securing every child’s right to read with success.

Yet the belief that guessing strategies are helpful remains widespread, and myths about how children learn to read continue to shape classroom practice. As part of this Misconceptions May series, I’ll be exploring some other persistent misunderstandings: why they matter, how they impact children’s reading development, and what the research really says. Next up: Beyond Memorising Words: The Real Science Behind Skilled Reading

Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear your thoughts — feel free to leave a comment, question, or idea in the ‘Comments’ box below.

References:

• Adams, M. J. (1990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. MIT Press.

• Ehri, L. C. (1995). Phases of development in learning to read words by sight. Journal of Research in Reading, 18(2), 116–125. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9817.1995.tb00077.x

• Five from Five: The Academy for the Science of Instruction. (n.d.). The Three Cueing System: An explanation and critique. Retrieved from

  https://fivefromfive.com.au

• Goodman, K. S. (1967). Reading: A psycholinguistic guessing game. Journal of the Reading Specialist, 6(4), 126–135. https://doi.org/10.1080/19388076709556976

• Moats, L. C. (2020). Teaching reading is rocket science: What expert teachers of reading should know and be able to do (2nd ed.). American Federation of Teachers. Retrieved from https://www.aft.org/rocket-science-2020

• Smith, F. (1971). Understanding reading: A psycholinguistic analysis of reading and learning to read. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

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Beyond the Blog: Three Cueing