Seeing Stars with a Different Instructional Focus: Developing Reading Skills and the Cognitive Processes That Support Them

Like many structured literacy approaches, the Seeing Stars program systematically teaches the essential components of skilled reading, including alphabetic knowledge, phonics, phoneme awareness, orthographic mapping, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Instruction also incorporates evidence-based practices such as explicit teaching, cumulative review, blending, syllable instruction, morphology, syntax, and semantics. These instructional practices are effective for many students and are well supported by the science of reading.

Where Seeing Stars differs is in its instructional focus. In addition to teaching the content of reading, the program explicitly develops the sensory-cognitive processes that support reading, spelling, language comprehension, memory, and automaticity. This distinction is grounded in Dual Coding Theory, which proposes that literacy depends upon the interaction of verbal and nonverbal mental representations, rather than language alone. (Google Books)

As Sadoski and Paivio (2001) explain:

"Cognition in reading and writing consists of the activity of two separate coding systems of mental representation, one system specialized for language (the verbal coding system) and one system specialized for dealing with nonverbal objects and events (the nonverbal coding system)."

Mental representations are the internal forms of information stored in memory, while processing refers to the activation and interaction of those representations during learning, reading, and thinking. (Google Books)

Content Instruction vs. Process Development

One way to understand the distinction is to differentiate between what is being taught and how the brain processes what is being taught.

Traditional structured literacy approaches primarily organize instruction around the component skills of reading—phonics, decoding, spelling, vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and comprehension. Seeing Stars addresses these reading components while also directly developing sensory-cognitive processes that support skilled reading:

• Phoneme awareness – perceiving and manipulating the identity, number, and order of sounds

• Symbol imagery – creating stable mental representations of sounds, letters, and spelling patterns to support orthographic processing and automatic word recognition

• Concept imagery – creating mental representations for language to support vocabulary, comprehension, and recall. (Lindamood-Bell)

Example of Content-Focused Instruction

Below is an example of content-focused instruction (typical structured literacy approach) and process-focused instruction (Seeing Stars sensory-cognitive based).

Word Reading:

Content-focused instruction

• Learn syllable types.
• Apply phonics rules.
• Decode unfamiliar words sound by sound.
• Practice spelling patterns and word families.

Process-focused instruction

• Develop symbol imagery for sounds and letters.
• Visualize the sequence of letters within words.
• Manipulate phonemes and graphemes mentally (e.g., "Change the a in plant to i. What word do you picture now?")
• Store stable orthographic representations that support rapid, automatic word recognition rather than relying on repeated analytical decoding.

Here, phonics and decoding instruction is integrated with explicit development of the mental representations that support orthographic mapping and fluent reading. (Lindamood-Bell)

Why This Distinction Matters

For many students, explicit instruction in phonics and other reading components may be sufficient. However, too many students continue to struggle despite receiving high-quality structured literacy intervention. These students may have persistent weaknesses in sensory-cognitive processing, including phoneme awareness, symbol imagery, or concept imagery, that interfere with storing, retrieving, and integrating information during reading.  Despite explicit and systematic instruction, many students continue to decode words, sound by sound, and do not have automaticity and fluency in word reading necessary for reading comprehension.

Nanci Bell, co-founder and director of Lindamood-Bell and the author of Seeing Stars, observed in 1997:

“The complex skill of reading requires the integration and interplay of several component subskills of reading.  And it also requires an automatic, nearly unconscious performance of those subskills that is enabled by the activation of imagery at a conscious level.  Bringing imagery to consciousness with explicit instructional methodology will profoundly improve literacy skills.”

From the Seeing Stars manual, pps. 49-50.  1997, 2013.

For a sample of the Seeing Stars manual, click here.