These days I hear a lot of reading authorities talking (and writing) about disciplinary literacy, but they really mean adolescent literacy or content area reading and writing. They don't understand the distinction that is being made.

           Disciplinary literacy refers to the specialized or somewhat unique texts or text features in those texts that are the province of a particular field of study and the specialized approaches to reading and writing texts used by experts in a field of study. Thus, historians, because they create, communicate, and evaluate a different kind of knowledge than scientists, use different kinds of text and have different ways of reading such text than scientists. 

           There are various ways that one can study the information in text to remember it for a test or something, and that probably doesn't vary much across contents. But disciplinary literacy refers not to those student or learning concerns, but to the ways of reading/writing that are specialized to the actual fields of study. There is nothing wrong with addressing how to teach reading better in a social studies class or how to teach students to learn better from a social studies textbook… that just isn't what we mean by disciplinary studies.

           Thus, if someone is talking about how to read like a scientist, they are dealing with disciplinary literacy. But if they are talking about how to do story problems in math, how to memorize terminology in a science class, or the most pedagogically sound textbook to use in social studies, they are really talking about something else. If it is about being a better student or learning to read more effectively, it is not about disciplinary literacy (though I suspect if teachers focused more on apprenticing the students into the disciplines they would become better students).  

           The Common Core State Standards and the Indiana and Texas standards all attempt to address disciplinary literacy. They want their students to read literature the way that a literary critic would, or to read a history book the way a historian would.

           I hear often from graduate students seeking information about disciplinary literacy. Towards that end I am providing the following partial bibliography. I think this could be helpful both to researchers and teachers.

Disciplinary Literacy Bibliography

Abel, K. L., and Exley, B. E. (2008). Using Halliday's functional grammar to examine early years worded mathematics texts. Australia Journal of Language and Literacy, 31,227–241.

Akkus, R., Gunel, M., and Hand, B. (2007). Comparing an inquiry-based approach known as the science writing heuristic to traditional science teaching practices:  Are there differences. International Journal of Science Education, 29, 1745-1765.

Amos, L. B. (2014). Disciplinary literacy in action:  Epistemological resources for reasoning with domain-specific texts in history and the social sciences disciplines. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL.

Anderson, J. R. (1983). The architecture of cognition. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Anthony, R. J., Tippett, C. D., and Yore, L. D. (2010). Pacific Crystal project: Explicit literacy instruction embedded in middle school science classrooms. Research In Science Education, 40, 45-64.

Ashby, R. (1993). Pilot study on students' use of evidence. Unpublished study, Essex,

England.

Ashby, R., and Lee, P.J. (1987). Children's concepts of empathy and understanding in

history. In C. Portal (Ed.), The history curriculum for teachers. London, England: Falmer Press.

Anzai, Y. (1991). Learning and use of representations for physics expertise. In K. A. Ericsson and J. Smith (Eds.) Toward a General Theory of Expertise - Prospects and Limits (pp. 64-92). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Ashby, R. (1993). Pilot study on students' use of evidence. Unpublished study, Essex, England.

Ashby, R., and Lee, P.J. (1987). Children's concepts of empathy and understanding in history. In C. Portal (Ed.), The history curriculum for teachers. London, England: Falmer Press.

Bazerman, C. (1985). Physicists reading physics: Schema-laden purposes and purpose-laden schema. Written Communication, 2, 3–23.

Bazerman, C. (1998). Shaping written knowledge: The genre and activity of the experimental article in science. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Berkenkotter, C., Huckin, T.N., and Ackerman, J. (1988). Conventions, conversations, and the writer: Case study of a student in a rhetoric Ph.D. program. Research in the Teaching of English, 22, 9-44.

Berland, L. K., and Reiser, B. J. (2009). Making sense of argumentation and explanation. Science Education, 93(1), 26- 55.

Brill, G., Falk, H., and Yarden, A. (2004). The learning processes of two high?school biology students when reading primary literature. International Journal of Science Education, 26(4), 497-512.

Brozo, W.G., Moorman, G., Meyer, C.,  and Stewart, T. (2013).  Content area reading and disciplinary literacy:  A case for the radical center.  Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 56(5) 353-357.

Burke, K.A., Greenbowe, T.J., and Hand, B.M. (2006).  Implementing the science writing heuristic in the chemistry laboratory, Journal of Chemical Education, 83(7), 1032-1038.

Cavagnetto, A. R. (2010). Argument to foster scientific literacy: A review of argument interventions in K-12 contexts. Review of Educational Research, 80, 336-371.

Chapman, S. C. (2015). Disciplinary literacy: A study of the cognitive, social, and semiotic practices of disciplinary experts. Unpublished dissertation, University of Florida.

Cherner, T., Kelley, A., and Norris, M. (2015). Disciplinary literacy: Teaching students to read as historians chapter. In T. N. Turner, J. Clabough, and W. Cole (Eds.), Getting at the core of the Common Core with social studies (pp. 153-166). Charlotte, NC, US: IAP Information Age Publishing.

Chi, M. R. H., Feltovich, P. J., and Glaser, R. (1980). Categorization and representation of physics problems by experts and novices. Cognitive Science, 5, 121-152.

Christiansen, L.M. (2007).  Legal reading and success in law school:  An empirical study.  Seattle University Law Review, 30, 603-649.

Christiansen, L.M. (2008). The paradox of legal expertise:  A study of experts and novices reading the law.  Brigham Young University Education and Law Journal, 53, 53-87.

Deegan, D.H. (1995).  Exploring individual differences among novices reading in a specific domain:  The case of law.  Reading Research Quarterly, 30(2), 154-70.

de La Paz, S. (2005). Historical reasoning instruction and writing strategy mastery in culturally and academically diverse middle school. Journal of Educational Psychology, 97, 139-156.

de La Paz, S., Ferretti, R., Wissinger, D., Yee, L., and MacArthur, C. (2012). Adolescents' disciplinary use of evidence, argumentative strategies, and organizational structure in wriitng about historical controversies. Written Communication, 29, 412-454.

de La Paz, S., and Wissinger, D.R. (2015). Effects of genre and content knowledge on historical thinking with academically diverse high school students. Journal of Experimental Education, 83, 110-129.

Donovan, M. S., and Bransford, J. D. (2005). How students learn. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

Drew, S. V., Olinghouse, N. G., Faggella-Luby, M. W., and Megan, E. (2017). Framework for disciplinary writing in science Grades 6–12: A national survey. Journal of Educational Psychology, 109, 935-955.

Driver, R., Newton, P., and Osborne, J. (2000). Establishing the norms of scientifc argumentation in classrooms. Science Education, 84, 287-312.

Duhaylongsod, L., Snow, C., E., Selman, R., l., and Donovan, M.S. (2015). Toward disciplinary literacy: dilemmas and challenges in designing history curriculum to support middle school students. Harvard Educational Review, 85, (4), 587-608.

Dunkerly-Bean, J., and Bean, T. W. (2016). Missing the "Savoir" for the "Connaissance": Disciplinary and content area literacy as regimes of truth. Journal of Literacy Research, 48, 448-475.

Faggela-Luby, M.N., Graner, P.S., Deshler, D.D., and Drew, S.V. (2012). Building a house on sand: Why disciplinary literacy is not sufficient to replace general strategies for adolescent learners who struggle.  Topics in Language Disorders, 32, 69-84.

Fang, Z. (2012). Language correlates of disciplinary literacy. Topics in Language Disorders, 32, 19-34.

Fang, Z. and Schleppegrell, M. (2008). Reading in second content areas: A language-based pedagogy. University of Michigan Press.

Fang, Z., and Schleppegrell, M. J. (2010). Disciplinary literacies across content areas: Supporting secondary reading through functional language analysis, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 53, 586-597.

Felton, M., and Kuhn, D. (2001).  The development of argumentive discourse skill.  Discourse Processes, 32(2 & 3), 135-153. 

Fitzgerald, J.C. (2011). Comprehending historical narratives: Exploring the relationship between causal language and students' mental representations of history. Unpublished dissertation, University of Pittsburgh.

Flury-Kashmanian, C. (2016). Engineers reading disciplinary texts: Skimming for "shiny objects" and tapping into knowledge and experience. Unpublished State University of New York at Buffalo. 

Ford, M.J., and Wargo, B. M.  (2012). Dialogic framing of scientific content for conceptual and epistemic understanding.  Science Education, 96(3) 369-391.

Foster, T. C. (2003). How to read literature like a professor. New York: Harper.

Fulda, J. S. (1989). Material implication revisited. American Mathematical Monthly, 96, 247-250.

Fulda, J. S. (1992). Material implications. American Mathematical Monthly, 99, 48.

Fulda, J. S. (2009a). Rendering conditionals in mathematical discourse with conditional elements. Journal of Pragmatics, 41, 1435-1439.

Fulda, J. S. (2009b). Towards a unified theory of "ifs"—the theory of conditional elements: Further evidence from conditionally self-falsifying utterances. Journal of Pragmatics, 41, 1440-1448

Goldman, S. R., Britt, M. A., Brown, W., Cribb, G., George, M., Greenleaf, C., Lee, C.D., Shanahan, C., and Project READI (Submitted). Disciplinary literacies and learning to read for understanding:  A conceptual framework of core concepts and processes.

Goldman, S.R., Lawless, K., Yukhymenko, M., Britt, M.A., Wallace, P., George, M., \ Pellegrino, J.W., Litman, C., Emig, J. Fortune, A., James, K., Burkett, C., and Project READI. (2016).  Efficacy Study of 9^th Grade READI Biology:  Design, Assessment Strategy, and Findings.  Presented at the American Educational Research Association.

Grant, M.C., and Fisher, D. (201). Reading and writing in science: Tools to develop disciplinary literacy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Greene, S. (1994). The problem of learning to think like a historian: Writing history in the culture of the classroom. Educational Pscyhologist, 29(2), 89-96.

Greenleaf, C., Hanson, T, Herman, J., Litman, C., Madden, Rosen, R., Boscardin, C. Schneider, S., and Silver, D.  (2009).  Integrating literacy and science instruction in high school biology: Impact on teacher practice, student engagement, and student achievement (Final report to NSF, Grant #0440379). 

Guzzetti, B. J., Snyder, T. E., Glass, G. V., and Gamas, W. S. (1993). Promoting conceptual change in science: A comparative meta-analysis of instructional interventions from reading education and science education. Reading Research Quarterly, 117-159.

Halliday, M. A. K. (1994). An introduction to functional grammar (2nd ed.). London: Edward Arnold.

Halliday, M.A.K. (2004). The Language of Science. London: Continuum.

Halliday, M. A. K., and Martin, J. R. (1993). Writing science: Literacy and discursive power. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Hand, B. (1999). A writing-in-science framework designed to enhance science literacy.International Journal of Science Education, 21, 1021–1035.

Hand, B., Wallace, C., and Yang, E.M. (2004).  Using a Science Writing Heuristic to enhance learning outcomes from laboratory activities in seventh?grade science: quantitative and qualitative aspects, International Journal of Science Education, 26(2), 131-149.

Hillman, A.M. (2017). Disciplinary literacy: A case study on how secondary teachers engage students in disciplinary discourses. Unpublished dissertation University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Hillocks, G., and Ludlow, L.H. (1984).  A taxonomy of skills in reading and interpreting fiction. American Educational Research Journal, 21(1), 7-24.

Hynd, C. R., and Alvermann, D. (1989). Overcoming misconceptions in science: An on-line study of prior knowledge activation. Reading Research and Instruction, 28, 12-26.

Hynd, C. McWhorter, Y., Phares, G., and Suttles, C. W. (1994).  The role of instructional variables in conceptual change in high school physics topics.  Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 31(9), 933-946.

Hynd, C. R., Stahl, S. A., Carr, M., Glynn, Shawn, M. (1998). Learning from text across conceptual domains. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Hynd-Shanahan, C., Holschuh, J.P., and Hubbard, B.P. (2004). Thinking like a historian: College students' reading of multiple historical documents. Journal of Literacy Research, 36, 141-176.

Hynd-Shanahan, C., and Shanahan, T. (2008). Content-area reading/learning: Flexibility in knowledge acquistion. In K. B. Cartwright (Ed.), Literacy processes: Cognitive flexibility in learning and teaching (pp. 208-233). New York: Guilford Press.

Inglis, M., and Alcock, L. (2012). Expert and novice approaches to reading mathematical proofs. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 43(4), 358-390.

Jacobson, R.  (1987).  Language in literature, Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press.

Jetton, T. L, and Shanahan, C. ((Eds.). 2012). Adolescent literacy in the academic disciplines: General principles and practical strategies. New York: Guilford Press.

Kerlin, S.C., McDonald, S.P., Kelly, G.J. (2010). Complexity of secondary scientific data sources and students' argumentative discourse. International Journal of Science Education, 32, 1207-1225.

Kuhn, D. (1992). Thinking as argument. Harvard Educational Review, 6, 155-179.

Kuhn, D., and Udell, W. (2003). The development of argument skills. Child Development, 74, 1245-1260.

Larkin, J.H. (1983). The role of problem representation in physics. In D. Gentner, and A. Stevens (Eds.), Mental Models. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Lee, C. D.(1995).  A culturally based cognitive apprenticeship:  Teaching African American high school students skills in literary interpretation.  Reading Research Quarterly, 30(4), 608-630.

Lee, P. (2005).  Putting principles into practice:  Understanding history.  In M. S. Donovan, & J. D. Bransford (Eds.). How Students Learn.  Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. 

Lee, P.J., and Ashby, R. (2001). Empathy, perspective taking and rational understanding. In O.L. Davis Jr., S. Foster, and E. Yaeger (Eds.), Historical empathy and perspective taking in the social studies. Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield.

Leinhardt, G., Stainton, C., and Virji, S. M. (1994). A sense of history. Educational Psychologist, 29(2), 79–88.

Lemke, J. L. (1998). Multiplying meaning: Visual and verbal semiotics in scientific text. In J. R. Martin & R. Veel (Eds.), Reading Science (pp. 87-113). London, UK: Routledge.

Lemke, J. L. (2002). Intertextuality and the project of text linguistics, TEXT 20 (2), 221-225. 

Lemke, J. L. (2004). The literacies of science. In W. Saul (Ed.), Crossing borders in literacy and science instruction: Perspectives on theory and practice, 33-47. Newark, DE: International Reading Association; Arlington, VA: National Science Teachers Association Press.

Levstik, L. (2002). Two kinds of empathy: Reasoned analysis and emotional response

in historical thinking. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, LA.

Marquez, C., Izquierdo, M., and Espinet, M. (2006). Multimodal science teachers' discourse in modeling the water cycle, Science Education, 90, 202-226.

Martin, J.R. (1992). English text: System and structure. Philadelphia:  John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Martin, J. R. (1993). Life as a noun: Arresting the universe in science and humanities. In M. A. K. Halliday and J. R. Martin (Eds.), Writing science: Literacy and discursive power (pp. 221-267). Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

McCarty, R. (2016).  Heuristics as warrants:  Leveraging sourcing and corroboration heuristics as warrants in the historical argumentative writing of 11^th grade students.  Unpublished dissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago.

McNeil, K.L., and Krajcik, J. (2007). Middle school students' use of appropriate and inappropriate evidence in writing scientific explanations. In M.C. Lovett and P. Shah (Ed.),  Carnegie Symposium on Cognition (pp. 233-265). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

McQuaid, K. K. (2017). Can you read me now? Disciplinary literacy reading strategies in the 7th grade science classroom. Unpublished dissertation, Grand Canyon University.

Megill, A. (1989). Recounting the past: "Description," explanation, and narrative in

Moje, E. B. (2007). Developing socially just subject-matter instruction: A review of the literature on disciplinary literacy. In L. Parker (Ed.), Review of Research in Education (vol. 31, pp. 1-44). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.

Moje, E. (2008).  Foregrounding the disciplines in secondary literacy teaching and learning: A call for change. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 52, 96–107.

Moje, E. B. (2015). Doing and teaching disciplinary literacy with adolescent learners: A social and cultural enterprise. Harvard Educational Review, 85, 254-278.

Moje, E. B., Stockdill, D., Kim, K., and Kim, H. (2011). The role of text in disciplinary learning.  In M. Kamil, P. D. Pearson, P. A. Afflerbach, and E. B. Moje (Eds.),Handbook of reading research (Vol. IV, pp. 453–486). New York: Taylor & Francis.

Moje, E. B., Sutherland, L. M., Solomon, T. E., and Vanderkerkof, M. (2010). Integrating literacy instruction into secondary school science inquiry: The challenge of disciplinary literacy teaching and professional development. Unpublished paper.

Monte-Sano, C. (2011). Beyond reading comprehension and summary:  Learning to read and write by focusing on evidence, perspective, and interpretation. Curriculum Inquiry, 41, 212-249.

Monte-Sano, C., and De La Paz, S. (2012).  Writing tasks to elicit students' historical reasoning.  Journal of Literacy Research, 44, 273-299.

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Newell, G. E., Beach, R., Smith, J., VanDerHeide, J. (2011). Teaching and learning argumentative reading and writing: A review of research. Reading Research Quarterly,46,  273-304.

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Nurnberg, D. (2017). Writing-to-learn in high-school chemistry: The effects of using the science writing heuristic to increase scientific literacy. Unpublished dissertation, University of San Francisco.

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Rainey, E.C. (2016). What does it mean to read literary works? The literacy practices, epistemologies, and instructional approaches of literary scholars and high school English language arts teachers. Unpublished dissertation, University of Michigan.

Rainey, E.C. (2017). Disciplinary literacy in English language arts: Exploring the social and problem?based nature of literary reading and reasoning. Reading Research Quarterly, 52, 53-71.

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Wineburg, S. (2002). Historical thinking and other unnatural acts: Charting the future of teaching the past. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Wineburg, S. (2011). Reading like a historian: Teaching literacy in middle and high school classrooms. New York: Teachers College Press.

Wineburg, S., and Resiman, A. (2015). Disciplinary literacy in history: A toolkit for digital citizenship. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 58, 636-639.

Wissinger, D. R., and De La Paz, S. (2015). Effects of critical discussions on middle school students' historical arguments, Educational Psychology, Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/edu0000043.

Wolf, M.B.E., and Goldman, S.R. (2005). Relations between adolescents' text processing and reasoning. Cognition and Instruction, 23, 467-502.

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Zevenbergen, R. (2001). Mathematical literacy in the middle years. Literacy Learning: The Middle Years, 9(2), 21–28.

I often hear concerns about our students' poor spelling abilities and have been thinking about practical ways to address this issue.  Although we want to continue to steer away from memorized lists that are often not retained, I want to get your feedback about incorporating more word study in your ELA block.  I know what you are thinking~ there is no time!  I first want to hear your concerns about spelling, so we can determine a manageable way to address them. 

Teacher question:

What are the most appropriate types of texts to use for fluency practice both for young new readers and even older, struggling readers?

Shanahan responds:

Learning to read is a developmental process. What students need to master at one point along the learning continuum can be quite different than at some other point.

This is certainly as true with fluency as with decoding and morphology.

With beginning readers our “fluency” goals are quite different than they soon will be.

I’ve often thought that initially our purpose is to make kids disfluent readers, carefully pronouncing each word as it comes. In a way, it is reading connected text as if it is a word list.

Why would we want that?

Research has shown that young readers have little conception of written words and the little white spaces that separate them. They also, of course, are in the process of learning to read words (some high frequency words along with gaining purchase on the decoding of other simple words). Gaining accurate pronunciation of each word is a challenging chore and it tends to result in a choppy and anti-prosodic oral rendition of texts. That’s to the good. But only briefly.

Starting out we should stress activities like “finger point reading” in which children must determine which words to point to during reading— engaging in choral reading, memorizing texts and then trying to “read” them aloud, and so on.

When starting out, pretty much all texts are beyond a student’s reading level, since these children aren’t actually reading yet in any conventional sense. It really doesn’t matter which texts are used for this in terms of the language level, readability, or spelling patterns, though it is obviously helpful to have sufficiently large print, decent amounts of spacing between words, sentences, lines, and a scheme that presents entire sentences on single lines initially, but eventually breaks sentences across lines.

Starting out it is helpful to work with predictable texts. Usually, this term refers to texts with repeatable patterns. In this case, the key is texts that students can easily hold in memory. That would include texts like “Brown Bear, Brown Bear,” (definitely a predictable text by any definition), but also texts like the “Happy Birthday” song or “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” predictable texts only because they enter easily into students’ memories. Language experience texts – texts dictated by the students themselves – fit this category, too.  

Most important at this stage is to have texts that are easy to remember or follow. Texts that are predictable (Brown Bear,

What you are really trying to accomplish with these kinds of text is a kind of choppy reading, in which students “read” each word, word-by-word. 

The point of using such texts is to get students to “read” them aloud (pronouncing the texts word by word) while pointing at the appropriate words. That’s a bit tricky at the beginning – kids fumble a bit among letters, syllables, and words.

Once they get the idea of matching oral words to written words, then a different kind of text begins to matter.

Carol Chomsky claimed that fluency practice helped students learn to apply their nascent decoding skills, and Joe Torgesen asserted that struggling readers (and probably young readers too) tend to memorize individual words from their fluency practice. Their assertions match well with the National Reading Panel findings that fluency practice has a substantial impact on word reading and decoding outcomes. Hence, it make great sense to focus on relatively decodable texts that are a bit beyond students’ abilities to read fluently. We need to make sure the texts include words that we want our students to master. It would also help if those target words were repeated throughout the texts. The same would be true for spelling patterns and sound-symbol relations; repetition is key to helping the students to grasp the systematic nature of spelling.

It surprises many teachers – given what they have usually been told – but generally, the texts used for fluency practice should be at levels that we would traditionally label as frustration level. We want students to improve their reading of these texts from their oral reading attempts, feedback, and rereading. If they were practicing with texts they could already read reasonably well, we wouldn’t expect to see any improvement.

It has been popular to use poetry for fluency practice and that can be fun. I wouldn’t be against that kind of practice on occasion. Why not have some fun?

However, the point of fluency training is to help students to develop the ability to read more typical prose well. That’s why I would more often focus fluency practice on the kinds of texts that I want students to learn to comprehend.

In fact, I think it can be a good idea, when teaching students to read texts that are above those traditional reading level designations (like having a student read a grade level text despite being a below grade level reader), to have the students do fluency practice as part of the scaffolding that will be provided. The idea here is to get students to resolve some of the word reading problems and prosody/expression that those harder texts may present. Reading a text once or twice aloud before seriously trying to comprehend it, tends to raise the students’ ability to handle that particular text – reducing the gap between student and book.

Too often our focus is on the texts in reading classes. Consider transferring at least some of this oral reading exploration to the science or social studies books. Those can be bigger challenges for many kids.

When I’ve worked with middle school and high school classes, I have sometimes found that students who could read a typical literary story with acceptable levels of fluency, could not do the same with an Algebra text. The mix of English grammar and algebraic grammar and the algebra symbols present a challenge that undermines their ability to make sense of mathematical text.

Indeed, different kinds of text make sense when teaching fluency across the years.

Teacher Question:

As I watch the Dyslexia Awareness movement gain momentum and grassroots organizations such as Decoding Dyslexia spur the movement on... I am feeling an increased urgency to take a long hard look at students under my watch that struggle with reading and are eventually diagnosed with a “specific learning disability.” I find myself in agreement that so many public school structures and teacher awareness do NOT include dyslexia. In fact, the term is avoided. I am interested in becoming trained in literacy instruction methods that are geared toward the dyslexic brain and I am looking into Orton-Gillingham training since it is focused specifically on the needs of dyslexics. Why don’t reading professors and reading specialists emphasize dyslexia?

Shanahan response:

     Our Kindergarten is using a reading program that has some wonderful lessons. However, we also feel that the pacing doesn't match current expectations for kindergarten students. For example, the program doesn't introduce high frequency words until December and it only teaches 25 words for the entire year. The first lesson for teaching letter names doesn't come until December. What does current research say about when letters, sounds, and sight words should be introduced in kindergarten?

 Shanahan response:

     The National Early Literacy Panel examined a lot of research on the role of letter knowledge in learning to read by kindergartners and preschoolers. Those studies clearly showed the value of knowing letter names. There were 52 studies including 7,570 children in pre-K or K that explored the relationship of their knowledge of letters with later decoding, 17 such studies connecting letters to later reading comprehension (2028 kids), and 18 such studies connecting letters to spelling (2619 kids). The result showed a strong significant correlation among all of these skills. Thus, it is reasonable to conclude that the more letters (and sounds) that you know early on, the better your chances of developing strong literacy skills.

     Of course, letter knowledge is one of those “necessary but insufficient” skills. What I mean by that is that if all we did was taught kids about letters, few would become readers; there is more to it than that, so such teaching would be insufficient. However, that doesn’t take away the “necessary” part of the formulation. It would be awfully hard to learn to read without knowing the letters.

     The panel also examined about 75 instructional studies—all done with children in kindergarten and earlier—that focused on letter names, letter sounds, decoding, phonological awareness, and print awareness. These studies were resounding in their results, too. Such teaching not only improved performance on the skills in question (yes, teaching letter names leads to the learning of letter names), but to consequent improvements in decoding and reading comprehension.

     Given that the more letters young kids know, the better they do in literacy, I can think of no reason for delaying the teaching of letters. Some kids pick them up quickly and so waiting until mid-Kindergarten probably would not be harmful. They’ll still be likely to master the letters by the end of the year.

     But what about the strugglers; the kids who don’t pick that kind of information up so easily? (Think about kids who don’t get much academic support at home or who suffer from disabilities.) They would benefit from a longer regime of teaching. That increased opportunity could make a huge difference in their success with letters. The sooner they master that part of early reading, of course, the sooner they can focus their learning efforts on other literacy concepts and processes.

     With regard to teaching words in kindergarten, I think 25 is plenty. We don’t have research studies on this so I’m drawing mostly on personal experience (as a teacher and parent) and on the professional judgment of various educators (such as Catherine Snow at Harvard).

     There definitely are benefits to learning sight words, but sight word learning gets easier as students develop phonics skills. A heavy early emphasis on words puts a lot of strain on memory, unnecessarily. I have long argued for kids to learn 100 high frequency words by the end of grade 1, and 300 by the end of grade 2, and 25 by the end of K makes lots of sense. These would not be the only words that kids could read, but it would cover a lot of those not-so-regular, super-high frequency words like “of” and “the” which are so useful early on.

     I know some programs are going wild with having kindergartners memorize large numbers of words, but I don’t know of any empirical evidence supporting that practice.

     It sounds like your program should be more ambitious when it comes to teaching kids about letters, sounds, and decoding, but its word coverage sounds reasonable to me.

Our school district is going wild over Lexiles because they are in the Common Core standards. I think they are overdoing it and don’t feel comfortable with some of the decisions that we are making. What are the weaknesses of Lexiles?

This entry was first published on October 11, 2015; and it was issued again on March 11, 2023 (it was also reblasted on August 24, 2017). Last week, Nell Duke, issued a Tweet that encouraged the teaching of literacy to young children. Judging by some of the responses you'd have thought my esteemed colleague was encouraging child abuse. Some of the responses claimed there was no value to early teaching since the kids in Finland do so well -- and they don't receive reading instruction at school until the kids' reach age 7. This blog entry is relevant to that discussion. I wrote it originally in response to an article that appeared in Atlantic which posited the same kinds of claims. The Finnish educational system is still doing great, though it has slipped a bit in the world standings over the past decade. Analyses of these reversals don't ascribe blame to Finland's well-trained teachers, but rather to the reduction in reading outside of school, the increasing availability of screen time for kids, economic cuts in support staff at schools (and even larger classes), and the increases in immigration that Finland has experienced. For more on these issues either search for Finland on my site or "international comparisons."  What preschool and kindergarten screening tests reveal again and again in the U.S. is that middle and upper class parents have no fears that teaching their children the ABCs and how to print their names will do any harm. Like so many Finnish parents, American parents want their children to be able to read and they make sure they enter school well on their way to that goal. The arguments against introducing literacy to young children seems to be more about protecting economically disadvantaged kids from gaining the experiences their more advantaged peers have already enjoying.    

Reader Question:  

The Atlantic just published an article about the mistake American educators have made by teaching reading in kindergarten. Shouldn’t we do what the Finns do: let kids learn to read when they want to and end up with high achievement?

Shanahan Response:

This article emanates from the “Whistle a Happy Tune” School of Philosophy. It links a single cultural input with a single achievement output and assumes a causal connection (not teaching reading in kindergarten will result in higher achievement) and that if this cultural input were adopted anywhere else, the same outcome would result there, as well.

It sure is fun to think about how easily we could remake a society.

This is the third or fourth such article on Finland that I've read in the Atlantic and thei tone has been pretty consistent — they convey the sense of a feel good fantasy, that may help ward off the blues as days grow shorter and the verdant earth dies yet again. May this fantasy keep us warm until "April, that cruelest month".

The problem with this dream, however, is that cultural change doesn’t work that way. Nor does literacy teaching in Finland.

The U.S. is not a relatively simple society, small in geography and population, and low in diversity. All kinds of diversity. Few of the 5.5 million Finns (fewer than the population of the Chicago area) differ in race, ethnicity, language, income, or religion. It is estimated that there are more than 11 million immigrants in the U.S. (twice the total population of Finland) and our immigrants tend to differ from the “average American profile” in many ways. Finland takes few immigrants and those they let in have to have to have a secure middle-class income (ours often have only what they can carry with them).

The comparison of Finland with the U.S. is like comparing Scarsdale, Winnetka, Piedmont City, and University Park with the U.S. We’d all be amazed at how wonderful things are in those relatively wealthy communities and how little the schools there have to do to teach reading successfully to most kids.

What are the most pertinent differences between the Finns' situation and that of the U.S.?

First, they teach the Finnish language, not English. Finnish is reputedly the easiest language to learn to read (something I was writing about in the 1970s). The relationship between spelling and pronunciation is highly consistent, making it especially easy and quick to learn to decode. Because the country is so small, there are not dialectical differences to complicate things either. All things being equal, a Finnish child can learn to read Finnish much faster than an American child can learn to read English. (Funny that point wasn’t even mentioned in the article).

Second, most Finnish parents have college degrees or advanced degrees. If we can generalize from U.S. research and I think we can, such children will have better health, nutrition, ability to concentrate, IQs, vocabulary, will have more adults available in the home to provide care, and will be more likely to be reading or to have learned a lot of pre-reading skills before school entry. Given the religious beliefs of most Finns, it would be the rare child who enters school without a big head start on literacy achievement. Most homes subscribe to newspapers, have many books available, have a well-stocked public library close by, and bedtime stories are the norm.

In fact, according to a study conducted by the Finnish government, more than one-third of children enter school already reading. That sure takes the pressure off those supposedly high-skilled Finnish teachers.  (Another point not mentioned in the Atlantic article).

I’ve got to admit I would love to live in a community in which everyone was well educated and had a substantial income. No doubt about it, the children and grandchildren would thrive. However, I live in a community where the majority of adults have not completed high school, libraries may be across gang territory, and mom and dad may not know how to speak English yet. Even when they do, they may be speaking a dialect far removed from the one teachers are using. Under our circumstances, starting early to learn to read a challenging language is a really good idea. (If our population was particularly diabetic, I would support higher than usual insulin injections. But then, I'm just a wild and crazy guy.)

Another problem with the Atlantic article is that it characterizes the typical U.S. kindergarten as teaching literacy with worksheets. I don't support such instruction, but it does happen--in some cases. The silly dichotomy between play and academic learning is something made up by U.S. psychologists in the 1890s and it hangs on with those who've never taught a child to read in their lives. Successful early literacy teaching is much more interactive and hands on (and, perhaps, even play-based) than the weird characterization in the Atlantic.

 The Atlantic article requoted one of my least favorite claims: "'But there isn’t any solid evidence that shows that children who are taught to read in kindergarten have any long-term benefit from it,' Nancy Carlsson-Paige, a professor emeritus of early childhood education at Lesley University, explained in a video published by the advocacy group Defending the Early Years.'"

You can make that claim… as long as you ignore the research. I chaired the National Early Literacy Panel. Unlike Dr. Carlsson-Paige, we had to look at the studies. We found long-term benefits from early learning. But that inconvenient fact screws up the narrative: Finland is great, we're idiots, and teaching your children to read will make a mess of their idyllic lives. Sure, and I have some swampland in Florida that I can let you have for cheap. Really.

Last week, Dale Farran and a team of researchers at the University of Tennessee concluded that preschool education gets kids off to a great academic start, but by the end of kindergarten the results start to wear off. And, by the end of second grade you can’t even tell that the kids had attended preschool or not.

That suggests that preschool education is a lousy investment—if the goal is to improve students’ later reading and math achievement.

The same kind of findings resulted a couple years ago in a similar study of Head Start. Good initial payoff, but no lasting value.

Over the past few days there have been lots of post-mortems of these findings. The press has interviewed various experts, and many have focused on the same concern: the quality of this specific preschool program.

But as Dr. Farran points out, these preschool experiences must have been darn good. Remember, these children were initially doing better than the other kindergarten kids on lots of measures. 

I think the experts are looking in the wrong direction. 

Our system of education, both formally and informally, aims at the bottom, with a clear goal of trying to raise the lowest kids up. Kindergartners and first-graders are tested to identify those who need extra help. Then Title I reading support kicks in; not for everybody, but for the strugglers. 

If the children who experienced preschool are generally in the top half of the distribution when they enter kindergarten, schools are going to work hard at trying to close the gap. They’ll address it by giving the lower achieving kids (the ones who didn't attend preschool) more instruction to try to close the gap. This isn't some weird response by individual teachers. It is public policy. The lower achieving kids--that would mean the ones without preschool will get Title I, RtI, Reading Recovery, after school interventions, and summer school. 

What will the higher achieving kids get while this is going on? Probably not very much. If they enter kindergarten already knowing their letter sounds or able to segment words phonemically, then they are likely to get more work with those same concepts. [I remember my oldest daughter, who could read when she entered school, being surprised that they were going to teach her the letter names—even though she had known them for years.] 

This isn’t a new phenomenon. Dolores Durkin documented it back in the 1970s. She taught a bunch of preschoolers to read then followed them through second grade. Each year the schools retaught these kids skills they had mastered long ago, until eventually the other kids caught up. 

Some people think that early teaching changes kids cognitively, making them smarter. If it worked that way, the early benefits wouldn’t wash out, even given these policies and programs. 

But I think preschool helps because it gives kids extra time to learn specific knowledge and abilities, like numbers and addition or letter sounds and high frequency words. They don’t lose this knowledge once its gained, but if they have no opportunity to add to it, then the other kids simply catch up, making it look like the preschool time was wasted.

If we were really serious about early childhood education making a long-term difference in children’s literacy achievement, we would change primary grade reading curricula to allow these kids to keep progressing from where they are when they enter kindergarten—rather than reteaching the same skills again and again, as if they had not been in preschool, and giving all the extra tuition to the kids they accelerated ahead of.

If you want preschool to be effective, take a close look at what is going to happen to these children when they leave preschool. Given that their skill levels are generally so advanced, one would expect to find a more advanced curriculum aimed at these kids. But I bet you won't find one. 

Our preK-5 school has a number of struggling readers, and we were told yesterday that we should focus only on fluency and accuracy, not comprehension or vocabulary. We were also told that we really shouldn't be using our grade level reading materials or complex texts in the classroom until students are fluent and accurate. I'd love to hear your thoughts on what we do when we have large numbers of struggling readers.

    I pointed out that there wasn’t any evidence that it actually works at improving reading achievement with older students.

Blast from the Past: This posting originally appeared on August 30, 2015 and reposted August 19, 2023. Issues about whether students should be taught at grade level or instructional level continue to plague the field of reading education. Since this first posted, more research has accumulated showing that it is important -- for the sake of learning -- that we give students opportunity to learn to read harder texts than we dared in the past. Sadly, many advocates of guided reading continue to misinterpret the "challenging text" requirements of their state standards. Here i explain why the instructional level theory is reasonable, but that it errs on its definition of what constitutes challenging text. This 8-year-old blog is as relevant today as when first published. Oh, and by the way, be sure to read the comments and responses -- that is one of the best parts of these blogs.

Teacher question:

I’ve read your posts on the instructional level and complex texts, and I don’t think you understand guided reading. The point of guided reading placements is to teach students with challenging text. That’s why it is so important to avoid texts that students can read at their independent level; to make sure they are challenged. The Common Core requires teaching students with challenging texts—not frustration level texts. 

Shanahan response: 

I’m having déjà vu all over again. I feel like I’ve covered this ground before, but perhaps not quite in the way that this question poses the issue.

Yes, indeed, the idea of teaching students at their instructional level is that some texts could be too easy or too hard to facilitate learning. By placing students in between those extremes, the hope was that more learning would take place. In texts that students find easy (what you refer to as the independent level), there would be little for students to learn—since they would recognize all or most of the words and could understand the text fully without any help from the teacher. Likewise, texts that pose too much challenge might overwhelm or frustrate students preventing learning. Placing students in instructional level materials was meant to be challenging (there’d be something to learn), but not so challenging as to discourage.

At least that’s the theory.

So, I do understand that the way you are placing kids in text is meant to provide them with an appropriate degree of challenge.

But please don’t confuse this level of challenge with what your state standards are requiring, and don't assume that your criteria for determining the appropriate level of text challenge to be correct.

Your state standards obligate you to teach students to read texts of specified levels of difficulty—levels of difficulty that for many kids will exceed your notions of what is sufficiently challenging.

In other words, everyone wants kids to be challenged.

The argument is about how much challenge we need to provide.

You may believe that students do best if the texts used for teaching reading would be so easy that they'll err no more than 2-5 times per 100 words. But your state has planted a flag saying that the appropriate challenge level is a level of demand that if accomplished would ensure that the students will graduate from high school with a sufficient level of achievement. That means in many circumstances your state says teach kids to read books at level X, and you’d respond, “No way, my kids make too many errors with book X. That is not at their instructional level.”

It is important to note that the Lexile levels usually associated with the grade levels are not the ones that the state standards have assigned to the grades. Those older Lexile grade-designations were meant to estimate the levels of text that average students could read with 75-89% comprehension (your instructional levels).

Those Lexile designations weren’t claiming that all kids in a particular grade could read such texts well, only that the average students would. Teachers like you (and me, by the way) would then test our individual students and place them in books with higher or lower Lexiles in our efforts to match them to books at their magical instructional level.

The new standards have assigned higher Lexile bands to each grade level than the ones you might be familiar with.

That means that even the average kids will not be able to read those texts at an instructional level; some kids will, but the majority are unlikely to. That means teachers will need to teach students to read books more challenging than in the past.

If you were a teacher who tried to teach reading with grade level texts, you can continue that, but understand, the grade level texts are going to be a bit harder for kids than in the past.

If you were a teacher who tried to teach reading at the instructional level -- teaching students with books that were supposed to facilitate their learning -- doing so will mean that your kids are unlikely to meet the state standards (and more importantly, your kids are not likely to leave school able to participate and benefit fully from our highly literate society).

In other words, if you do what the states have asked, you will need to find ways to teach many children to read at their frustration level.

I do get the idea that instructional level is meant to be challenging.

But for most kids, teaching them at their instructional level will not meet the standards, nor will such reading experiences provide the greatest learning advantages.

That degree of challenge (instructional level) undershoots the level of challenge established by your state – the level at which they will test your students.

My point? You really need to change your approach.

Perhaps you can take solace in the fact that research has increasingly shown that instruction with more challenging texts than you have dared use in the past leads to higher reading levels.

I will spare you references to those studies, but you can find them on this site in other blog entries as well as articles and Powerpoints in the publications section.

Teacher question: 

What do you recommend is the best way to teach vocabulary to struggling readers at the middle school level?  

Shanahan’s response:

          I know of no special ways of teaching vocabulary to that group of students. Vocabulary is one of the many areas of instruction that one doesn’t find much in the way of interactions. What I mean by that is that usually, when it comes to teaching, what works with some kids, works with all or most kids. Struggling readers tend to be a bit slower in picking things up and consequently they tend to benefit a bit more from explicit teaching and increased repetition—but the same patterns of success are to be expected from everyone.

          Vocabulary learning is incremental and there are more words that kids need to learn than we can teach. Kids need lots of opportunities to confront words in their reading and listening. Beyond that, teachers should focus attention on some of these words, by providing explanation of the words, or having the students explaining them from context themselves. Having kids read challenging materials—that is materials that use words they might not yet know, and then drawing their attention to these words through questioning, etc. is very important. That, in fact, should be a big part of the classroom context: understanding and communicating are important in this classroom and words are a big part of that. Students need to be encouraged to pay attention to words. 

          You can also teach some particularly important or powerful words explicitly to help accelerate student progress in vocabulary. Here are some recommendations about how that teaching can be successful:

Word knowledge is multi-dimensional. Students learn words best when they have opportunities to think of words deeply—rather than just through definitions. Focus on the encyclopedia description more than the dictionary definition. Consequently, one of my favorite vocabulary activities is to have students writing multiple “definitions” for words, rather than single definitions. 

           Say you wanted to teach the word rope. The dictionary definition is “a length of strong cord made by twisting together strands of natural fibers such as hemp or artificial fibers such as polypropylene.” But that’s not good enough. I would also want the students to come up with some synonyms for rope (e.g., cord, twine, string), and a real example (like “my mom uses rope for a clothesline in our basement” or “we have a rope that the girls play jump rope with during recess”). What category does rope belong to? Tools or things we can tie, perhaps. It’s a noun (a thing, specifically). How about a comparison? Rope is like stringer, but thicker and stronger because it is made of several strands. Let’s also have kids act this one out. Perhaps they’d pretend to climb a rope, or they’d have an imaginary “tug of war.” Drawing a picture of a rope would be another kind of definition or description and providing a sentence that uses a word in a way that shows that you know what it means is a good idea, too (“I tied the boxes together with a piece of rope”). [This exercise can be elaborated on lots of ways: using the words in analogies such as “rope is to cord as a street is to a lane”; listing different forms of the word by using various prefixes and suffixes, trying to use forms of the word in different ways grammatically as nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives etc. — “The cowboy is roping a calf.” “Since I started riding a bicycle, my muscles have gotten ropey.”]

            Word learning is social. Words are learned best when students have a lot of opportunity to interact and connect around words. For example, the multiple definition exercise described above is most effective when kids don’t do that by themselves. Have them work on that kind of assignment in teams. That requires that they talk to each other and help each other to figure out the word meanings and that they provide explanations of the words. Another possibility: instead of having everyone looking up 8-10 words in the dictionary, assign 2-4 words to each group (I usually overlap these, so that more than one group gets a particular word). Then have the groups take turn teaching each other the words.

            Words need to be related with other words. Words relate each other in lots of ways and understanding how they fit together can help. Many vocabulary programs group words together: words about using our legs (e.g., run, amble, leap, meander) words about talking (e.g., swore, vowed, yelled, recitation), health and medical words (e.g., exercise, diet, calories, cholesterol). That can be tough to replicate in a classroom setting, but this can be done effectively in retrospect, too. As students learn new words keep track of them (e.g., a word wall, a vocabulary bulletin board). Then have them trying to group words: which ones go together—building categories out of the relationships among the words that have been taught. Synonyms aren’t the only kinds of relationships either. Have students consider various relationships (for the rope example above, consider uses or functions (e.g., clothesline, rope climbing, rodeo—roping calves); parts (e.g., fibers, strands); who uses these (e.g., cowboys, gym teachers, campers, someone doing laundry).   

            Words need to be used in lots of ways. Organize your lessons so students have many opportunities to read the words of interest, to hear them orally, to use the words orally themselves, and to write the words in context (I’m not talking about just copying a word). Put vocabulary into the context of communication, learning, and language use—that means lots of speaking, listening, reading, and writing with the focus words.

            Words need to be connected to kids’ lives. Beck and McKeown’s “Word Wizards” is great for this. Have kids watch for their words in use and give them credit if they bring in evidence of having used or come across the words that they are learning.  

            Words don’t stick easily. Include lots of opportunity for review. Words need to accumulate across the entire school year, and that means going back to them again and again. The re-categorizing that I described above is a great review activity. If you test kids’ vocabulary with a weekly quiz, make it cumulative—continually recycle some of the older words. Set aside weeks where you don’t focus on new words, but on a larger number of the previously studied ones. And, of course, give kids lots of opportunity to re-confront the words in text.

Between the two publication dates much has occurred in the world of challenging text. Various authorities who tout schemes for matching kids to texts have made changes to how they do the matching. In other words, they took criteria for identifying the instructional level and changed the numbers so that kids would be in somewhat more difficult text. That's a good thing as it means more kids will now get opportunities to read materials at their interest levels or their intellectual levels, but it is still arbitrary and preserves the idea that there is some magical "instructional level" at which students need to be placed (there isn't such a level).

Teacher question/comment:

My main response is toward your general notion of the research surrounding teaching kids "at their level." 

Teacher question:

            How much of a "gap" can be compensated through differentiation? If my readers are at a 400 Lexile level, is there an effective way to use an 820-level chapter book? 

Shanahan response: 

            This is a great question. (Have you ever noticed that usually means the responder thinks he has an answer).

            For years, teachers were told that students had to be taught with books that matched their ability, or learning would be reduced. As a teacher I bought into those notions. I tested every one of my students with informal reading inventories, one-on-one, and then tried to orchestrate multiple groups with multiple book levels. This was prior to the availability of lots of short paperback books that had been computer scored for F & P levels or Lexiles, so, like most teachers at the time, I worked with various basal readers to make this work.

            However, a more recent careful look at the research shows me that studies are not finding any benefits from such matching. In fact, if one sets aside those studies that focused on children who were reading no higher than a Grade 1 level, then the only results supporting specific student-text matches are those arguing for placing students at what we would have traditionally called their frustration level. 

            Given this research and that so many state standards now require teachers to enable students to read more challenging texts in grades 2-12, teachers are going to need to learn to guide student reading with higher level text than in the past.

            Theoretically, there is no limit to how much of a gap can be scaffolded. Many studies have shown that teachers can facilitate student success with texts that students can read with only 80% accuracy and 50% comprehension, and I have no doubt, that with even more scaffolding, students could bridge even bigger gaps.

            I vividly remember reading a case study of Grace Fernald when I was in graduate school. She wrote about teaching a 13-year-old, a total non-reader, to read with an encyclopedia volume. That sounds crazy, but with a motivated student, and a highly skilled teacher, and a lot of one-on-one instructional time, without too many interruptions… it can work.

            But what is theoretically sound or possible under particularly supportive circumstances does not necessarily work in most classrooms.

            I have no doubt teachers can scaffold a couple of grade levels without too much difficulty. That is, the fifth-grade teacher working with a fifth-grade book can successfully bring along a student who reads at a third-grade level in most classrooms. But as you make the distance between student and book bigger than that, then I have to know a lot more about the teacher’s ability and resources to estimate whether it could be made to work.

           Nevertheless, by preteaching vocabulary, providing fluency practice, offering guidance in making sense of sentences and cohesion and text organization, requiring rereading, and so on, I have no doubt that teachers can successfully scaffold a student across a 300-400 Lexile gap--with solid learning. 

            But specifically, you ask about scaffolding a 400-Lexile reader to an 820-Lexile text. If you had asked about 500 to 920, I wouldn't hesitate: Yes, a teacher could successfully scaffold that gap. I’m more hesitant with the 400 level as the starting point. My reason for this is because 400 is a first-grade reading level. This would be a student who is still likely to be mastering basic decoding skills.

            I do not believe that shifting to more challenging text under those circumstances is such a good idea.

            To address this student’s needs, I would ramp up my phonics and spelling instruction (I want my students to encode the alphabetic system as well as decode it). I might increase the amount of reading he or she is expected to do with texts that highlight rather than obscure how the spelling system works (e.g., decodable text, linguistic text). I would increase work on high frequency words, and I would increase the amount of oral reading fluency work, too. I’d do all of these things.

            But I would not shift him/her to a harder book because of what needs to be mastered at beginning reading levels. We’ll eventually need to do that, but not until the foundations of decoding were more firmly in place. 

           An important thing to remember: no state standards raises the text demands for students in Kindergarten or Grade 1. They do not do this because they are giving students the opportunity to firmly master their basic decoding skills. It isn't the distance between 400 and 820 that concerns me--that kind of a distance can be bridged; but a 400-Lexile represents a limited degree of decoding proficiency, and so I wouldn't want to shift attention from achieving proficiency in reading those basic words.  

Teacher question:

I am seeking your advice based on the email correspondence below that I have had with my principal. She noted that I was practicing “round robin reading” on a classroom observation.  Upon asking her to remove it (since it was not what I was doing), I realized that she doesn’t entirely understand what that practice looks like. 

I gather from her response that she is only interested in the teacher modeling expert reading and students not reading aloud in the classroom at all.  I personally believe that there is a place in the classroom for students to read aloud. 

During the lesson that we are speaking of, I read aloud an excerpt of Frederick Douglass’s autobiography.  I chunked the reading with questions and discussion in between parts. I did ask for volunteers to read some parts and several students did volunteer. I teach gifted language arts. The majority of my students are proficient in reading and enjoy reading aloud. I never force them to read aloud though. If you would please, could you read the correspondence below and let me know your thoughts about students reading aloud in the classroom??

Shanahan response:

I agree that oral reading has a place and even an important one in middle school classrooms.

Oral reading fluency is important because of the role it plays in reading comprehension.

With primary grade readers (grade 2), about 70% of the variation in reading comprehension is due to variance in fluency. That is, if we could make all the kids as fluent as the best second-grade readers, 70% of the differences in their reading comprehension would go away. That’s why studies show that teaching oral fluency improves reading comprehension (NICHD, 2002).

However, the importance of fluency diminishes over time.

It isn’t because fluency stops mattering, but that more students reach the levels of fluency needed for mature reading. There is a ceiling on fluency—generally increasing the numbers of words one can read correctly per minute (wcpm) improves ones reading, but readers can’t do much better than 150-175wcpm. We can only speak so fast, and improvements beyond point don’t help with reading.

What that means is that by eighth grade, oral reading fluency differences only account for about 25% of the variance in reading comprehension. That is much lower than with younger kids, and yet, 25% is still a big deal. 

I would definitely have middle-school kids practicing their oral reading because I want them to get that comprehension payoff. So, there is one point on your side of the ledger. If your principal opposes middle school oral reading, boy, is she wrong.

One problem, in this case, is that you say that these are advanced readers. That means that they are already fluent enough (though that isn't necessarily the case). Even good readers may benefit from oral reading work when working with historical texts, as you were doing.  The language patterns of such texts can be so complex and archaic that reading such material aloud can help to figure it out. I do that myself. Your lesson, however, doesn’t sound like it was that strategic.

We know how to teach oral reading fluency successfully.

What works?

Meta-analyses suggest that oral reading practice with challenging texts (texts that kids have difficulty reading). This oral reading practice should receive feedback from someone (e.g., teacher, parent, volunteer, other students, computers) and it should include rereading—you practice the texts to improve with them. There are now a couple of studies showing that we can build fluency through silent reading, but both studies focused on computer-delivered instruction that monitored fluency thoroughly specialized equipment.

There are lots of methods (e.g., paired reading, repeated reading, echo reading, neurological impress, Radio Reading) as well as programs (e.g., Read Naturally) aimed at providing fluency training.

Modeling can help (having someone show students what oral reading should sound like—which wouldn’t make sense in your case—or, more commonly, this modeling would include reading a short portion of text to students, and then having them give it a try.

Round robin reading refers to one student reading while everyone else listens. Which is what your letter describes. You seem to see this as an issue of motivation, but it is one of teaching. It is not that the oral reading practice that round robin provides is so bad (motivationally or instructionally). But round robin reading allows for so little reading practice. It is terribly inefficient. The person who is learning during round robin is the reader—which means 25 other kids are sitting there waiting for their turn.

In a middle school in which classes might last only 45-50 minutes, that is a terrible waste of time, especially with good readers.

While I encourage, and even require, oral reading instruction in middle schools, I don’t countenance round robin. Engage your kids in paired reading and they’ll get much more oral reading practice than in the round robin approach that you are using. And, if the point was to help students to make sense of the text, I’d encourage you to do that with silent reading—including the silent reading of the short text portions that you describe.

If your students can’t read an eighth-grade text at 150-175wcpm making it sound like English, then it is legitimate to teach oral reading.

But if one student is reading, and everyone else is just listening, then we’re not on the same page.

Instead of you reading Frederick Douglass to the kids, I’d encourage them to read it silently. If they have difficulty making sense of it, I would definitely show them how to use oral reading (or whisper reading) to untangle those complicated Nineteenth-century sentences.

Sorry, on this one, I agree with your principal.

Teacher question:

Our district is wrestling with how much emphasis to give rhyming as an early literacy skill. We had previously downplayed rhyming as a necessary focus but the new CA ELA/ELD Framework and CCSS where rhyming is specifically called out has resurfaced old questions.  

I have recently encountered some severe criticism leveled at reviews and reviewers from What Works Clearinghous  (see http://www.nifdi.org/research/reviews-of-di/what-works-clearinghouse). I am concerned about recommending this site to teachers as a resource for program evaluations. I'm wondering if you agree with the criticisms, and if yes, where you would recommend teachers go for evidence-based program reviews. I know that NELP and NRP reports are possibilities but are also static documents that do not get updated frequently with new findings, so some of the information really isn't current. Perhaps the Florida Center for Reading Research is an alternative? Do you have others than you would recommend?

Teacher question:

  I would like your thoughts on some instructional practices that I am seeing an increase in amongst the schools that I work with What do you have to say about decreasing or eliminating science/social studies instruction for those students who have not met proficiency in reading (as determined by a screener or other assessment tool) to allow for RTI time?

Student question:

        Ah, the "how do I fit into a size 4 dress for my sister's wedding?" question. I say that because we all deal with problems of trying to fit too much into a small space, whether we're still in the condo with the second baby or sneaking our SUV into the compact car spaces at Whole Foods.

      In this case, we want to give kids 8 hours of teaching in a 6-hour day. Of course, that rarely works (I can almost hear the seams stretching). How can we provide students with the reading instruction that they need while ensuring that they learn lots of content, too? Kind of makes you want to drown your sorrows in a pint of Haagen-Dazs--which could help with the reading problem, but I wouldn't advise it if you're still working on size 4. 

      Generally, I’m not a big fan of the practice. Many years ago, Harry Singer and his colleagues found a close relationship between what students knew about social studies and science and how well they were learning to read. These were secondary school students, but you get the idea. If we reduce kids’ opportunity to develop content knowledge, then we undermine their futures as readers.

        Of course, this question is not asking about older students. Research also shows that if students don’t master basic reading skills early on, then their later content learning will be seriously undermined. It is a disaster if kids leave the primary grades without strong reading skills, and undermining content knowledge to get there carries its own problems.

      Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. What is a school supposed to do? If a child is struggling to develop phonological awareness, phonics, and fluency skills, then providing additional tuition in those subjects is a proven way to advance early literacy.

        That’s where the conundrum is. If you don’t intervene well and early with sound reading instruction, then kids are likely to be dogged by low literacy in all their later subject matter courses. But if you do use science, social studies, art & music (etc.) time to fix the reading skills, then you reduce the knowledge that should play a big role in later reading.

      I’ve always sided with the reading intervention idea, but mainly because the content coverage in so many primary grade classrooms is so thin. The negative impact of missing those subjects is likely to be less detrimental than continuing to be a laggard in reading, so reading it is.

      Now I think we should be less accepting of that position, or at least we should try to make it a harder choice. Here are some practices and policies that can ensure  students gain both the reading skills and the subject matter content:

 Preschool literacy

    One way to ensure that most kids can read well in the elementary school grades is to advance their language and literacy skills early on. Preschools should include literacy play (e.g., post office, library, restaurant, newspaper office, writing center), story time, lots of books, and explicit instruction in phonological awareness and letter names and sounds. Whatever they learn before kindergarten and first grade, they don’t need to learn in kindergarten and first grade.

 Universal full-day kindergarten

      This content/reading rivalry is a competition for time. You can split the difference or prioritize, but the best thing for kids would be to expand the resource. More instructional hours means more opportunities for reading AND content instruction.

 Rigorous instruction in social studies, science, and the arts

      Many schools follow the tests. If there is a reading and math test, teachers and principals focus heavily on instruction in those subjects and everything else can go jump. Sadly, this means that kids get shortchanged. Let’s preserve dedicated time for teaching these things—increasing reading instruction without doing that is cheating.

 Reading social studies and science texts

        Teach reading using social studies and science texts. This can mean both including informational texts in the “reading books” and teaching reading using the regular textbooks from the subjects. If kids are going to practice prediction or summarizing or any other reading skill, why can’t they do that within Chapter 4 of the classroom science text?

 Longer academic days

      Again, we keep trying to squeeze an awful lot into too small of a space. I’m a big fan of afterschool and summer programs for kids. Often these are offered by zoos, parks, museums, libraries, scouts, and other non-school institutions. If we want our kids to be really good readers and to know a lot about their world, we need to make sure that the opportunities to learn go well beyond the school day (that way, when a student needs to miss a class because of reading or math, he/she isn’t missing everything). 

 Commitment to success

    When a student enters any kind of remediation, there should be a clear and meaningful goal for such teaching. And, then we ought to be aggressive about making sure they reach these goals. I’d say the same thing about content instruction; we need to make sure this teaching has powerful and clear objectives that we make a serious effort to accomplish. Too often we are rigorous in determining schedules and which teachers are to work with a remedial student, but we aren’t as dedicated to accomplishing real outcomes. 

Parent help

      Another way to expand learning time is to engage parent involvement. Not all parents can or are willing to help, but many are and we should take advantage of the resource. Parents can help with various aspects of reading instruction and activity, and the same is true for involving them in exposing their kids to rich content.

Make sure there is a content plan

      Often IEPs and the like emphasize the reading skills that have to be learned, but they are silent about what content needs to be mastered. In that sense, they can operate like tests... steering teachers to overemphasize some things and to ignore others. Don’t just figure out how to deliver high-quality reading instruction to such students, but also figure out how this will be done while preserving the content learning everyone else will get.

      All of these approaches can help to get more into a small space. They can increase learning opportunity, which could prevent or reduce the need to pull kids out of their content classes. I doubt we’ll ever be able to do away with pullout instruction (any more than we can get by without size 6 dresses). But I suspect we could reduce the ill effects of this approach while ensuring some real benefits. 

Teacher question:

            Should high school English teachers read aloud to their students or play audio recordings to them?

Shanahan response:

            Over the past several years, this practice has insinuated itself, Justin Bieber-like, into our consciousness. It seems to be showing up everywhere and it can be very annoying.

            Reading aloud to older students definitely has a small place, and its appropriateness depends upon the purpose. Many teachers use it like a crutch, reading to kids rather than requiring them to do their own reading. It is easier that way, of course, but it doesn’t accomplish our major instructional purposes. 

            If the idea is to ensure that students know Poe’s story, “The Cask of Amontillado,” as a cultural touchstone (“ooh, that’s the one where the guy gets bricked up in the wall”), then reading it to the kids should accomplish that. Or, you could just show an old Vincent Price movie.

            But how often is that the purpose? 

            English teachers need to teach students to read that kind of text themselves and make sense of it. The hope is that if students build the ability to read and interpret such texts that they will be able to do so later in college and in the workplace (though it would be a pretty strange workplace that wants you to interpret dramatic irony in an account of a homicide). 

            The problem is that students won’t build that ability from being read to. They need to engage the texts themselves. (And, reading whole books to kids in those grades is just plain foolish.)

            While too often the practice is misused by teachers, but that doesn’t mean “no teacher reading.”

            What are some good purposes for oral reading in secondary English?

            Here are a few:

            1.    Teacher reading (or the use of audio recordings) can provide a model of what a text should sound like. If my students were still building oral fluency, I might have them listen to a small portion of the text, and then try to make it sound the same way themselves. Such modeling can play a useful role in fluency practice, even with older students.

            2.    There are times when the point is simply to convey information (like an announcement from the school office). Oral sharing of a text can be a practical way to accomplish that.

            3.    We’re responsible for building students’ reading and oral language. It can be useful to have them listen to the sound of the language for a particular text (like what a Shakespeare play or a Longfellow poem ought to sound like). Eudora Welty wrote about how important reading aloud was for her in learning to write and in appreciating the texts of others. Occasionally demonstrating this power to kids can be a great idea (though she herself did the reading—and your kids should, too). 

            4.    Sometimes we have to balance efficiency with our instructional purposes. Teachers may use their own oral reading to speed things along, to make a lesson fit the schedule. For example, a teacher may have the students reading and discussing a text for the first 40 minutes of class but is not getting as far as she had hoped. Consequently, she reads the next section to everyone just to complete the chapter before the bell rings. Or, in another case, the teacher reads the first 2-3 pages of a story to the students to set the stage, and then turns the rest of the text over to them.

            Nothing wrong with any of those practices since none of them would displace much student reading. Unfortunately, teacher reading tends to be used because the kids are finding the text difficult or don’t want to read it.

             Last week, I was teaching a high school English class myself. I had the students read an essay and was questioning them—and not getting very far, I must admit. At some point, I asked one young man a question about what the author said, and he gave a dopey answer. It was evident he hadn’t done the reading. He either didn’t read it or he read it badly. It was tempting to just stop there and read the essay to them to move things along, but instead I said, “You guys didn’t get it. Read it again.” It was amazing how the tenor of that class changed, and in retrospect I’m sure glad I didn’t read it to them.

             Oral sharing and video and audio presentations have their place in the high school English curriculum. But it is a small place, so teachers need to be honest with themselves as to why they are using those approaches.

            One way to protect against the weak uses of it would be to establish an arbitrary percentage of English class to be devoted to student reading (perhaps 40% or 50%–the teacher might decide that over five 50-minute instructional periods, the students will spend 100 minutes reading—not discussing, not listening to others read, not writing, not waiting, just reading the stories, poems, essays, literary nonfiction, and so on that are to be discussed and written about by the class.

            Teachers should not read the books to their English classes in middle school and high school.

  Why don’t you write more about the new tests?

There are really two things that disturb me about this ongoing disagreement. First, the opponents of early instruction keep citing the same old correlations to prove their point, and they continue to ignore the growing accumulation of correlational and experimental data that gives lie to their beliefs. They don't shift in the face of evidence. They are lock in. It is all a matter of faith now; no data shall change their minds. The second: They never explain what they would do to try to give every opportunity of success to kids growing up in poverty, kids coming to English as a second language, those with disabilities... their panacea is just let those kids play and eventually they'll learn to read. I believe we can do better. 

I continue to support Kindergarten reading instruction for young kids to give them the longest ramp to learning.

Teacher question:

Two groups that are strong advocates in early childhood education (Defending the Early Years and the Alliance for Childhood), released a report called Reading Instruction in Kindergarten: Little to Gain and Much to Lose (see https://dey.org/our-new-report-reading-instruction-in-kindergarten-little-to-gain-and-much-to-lose/). They claim there is no research base for the importance of learning to read in kindergarten (so that its inclusion in the Common Core as a goal for K is potentially harmful).   

I think they are wrong about the research here, but wanted to seek out your reaction. Does research suggest that learning to read, especially as indicated in the Common Core, is associated with long-term positive or negative effects? 

Shanahan response:

Great question. This is one that I’ve been thinking about since I was 5-years-old (no, really). My mom asked my kindergarten teacher if she should do anything with me to help and the teacher discouraged any efforts in that regard. At the time, the “experts” believed that any early academic learning was damaging to children—to their academic futures and to their psyches. 

When I became a first-grade teacher, we were still holding back on such teaching, at least during the first-semester of grade one. We didn't want to cause the mental disabilities, academic failure, and vision problems predicted by the anti-teaching types. 

These days we are doing a great job of protecting poverty children and minority children from this kind of damage. Of course, many of us middle-class white parents are risking our own kids. It is not uncommon these days for suburban kids to enter first-grade, and even kindergarten, knowing how to read. As I’ve written before, I taught both of my kids to read before they entered school.

There are not now, and there never have been data showing any damage to kids from early language or literacy learning—despite the overheated claims of the G. Stanley Halls, Arnold Gessells, Hans Furths and David Elkinds (and many others).

Let me first admit that if you seek studies that randomly assign kids either to kindergarten literacy instruction and no kindergarten literacy instruction and then follow those kids through high school or something… there are no such studies and I very much doubt that there will be. Given how strong the evidence is on the immediate benefits of early literacy instruction I don’t think a scholar could get ethics board approval to conduct such a study.

That it wouldn’t be ethical to withhold such teaching for research purposes should give pause. If it isn’t ethical to do it for research, should it be ethical to do so for philosophical reasons? Yikes.

What we do have is a lot of data showing that literacy instruction improves the literacy skills of the kids who receive that instruction in preschool and kindergarten, and another body of research showing that early literacy skills predict later reading and academic achievement (and, of course, there is another literature showing the connections between academic success and later economic success). There are studies showing that the most literate kids are the ones who are emotionally strongest and there is even research on Head Start programs showing that as we have improved the early literacy skills in those programs, emotional abilities have improved as well.

And, as for the claim that early teaching makes no difference, I wonder why our fourth-graders are performing at the highest levels ever according to NAEP?

The studies showing the immediate benefits to literacy and language functioning from kindergarten instruction are summarized in the National Early Literacy Panel Report which is available on line.

And here are some of studies showing the long-term benefits of early literacy achvievement:

Early reading performance is predictive of later school success (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1997; Duncan, Dowsett, Claessens, Magnuson, et al., 2007; Juel, 1988; Snow, Tabors, & Dickinson, 2001; Smart, Prior, Sansor, & Oberkind, 2005). This means that young children’s reading performances tend to be pretty stable: kindergarten literacy development is predictive of 1^stgrade performance; 1^st grade predicts achievement in various upper grades and the performance at each of these levels is predictive of later levels. 

If a youngster is behind in reading in grade 3, then he/she would likely still be behind in high school, which can have a serious and deleterious impact on content learning (science, history, literature, math), high school graduation rates, and economic viability (the students’ college and career readiness). 

The research seems clear to me: teach kids reading early and then build on those early reading skills as they progress through school. Don’t expect early skills alone to transfer to higher later skills; you have to teach students more literacy as they move up the grades (something that has not always happened).

References

Cunningham, A. E., & Stanovich, K. E., (1997). Early reading acquisition and the relation to reading experience and ability ten years later. Developmental Psychology, 33, 934-945.

D'Angiulli, A., Siegel, L. S., & Maggi, S. (2004). Literacy instruction, SES, and word-reading achievement in English-Language Learners and children with English as a first language: A longitudinal Study. Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, 19(4), 202–213. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5826.2004.00106.x

Duncan, G. J., Dowsett, C. J., Claessens, A., Magnuson, K., Huston, A. C., et al. (2007). School readiness and later achievement. Developmental Psychology, 43, 1428-1446.

Gunn, B., Smolkowski, K., Biglan, A., Black, C., & Blair, J. (2005). Fostering the development of reading skill through supplemental instruction: Results for Hispanic and Non-Hispanic students. The Journal of Special Education, 39(2), 66–85. https://doi.org/10.1177/00224669050390020301

Hus, Y. (2001). Early reading for low-SES minority language children: An attempt to 'catch them before they fall". Folia Phoniatrica Et Logopaedica:International Journal of Phoniatrics, Speech Therapy and Communication Pathology, 53(3), 173-182. doi:https://doi.org/10.1159/000052672

Juel, C. (1988). Learning to read and write: A longitudinal study of 54 children from first through fourth grades. Journal of Educational Psychology, 81, 437-447.

Le, V.-N., Schaack, D., Neishi, K., Hernandez, M. W., & Blank, R. (2019). Advanced content coverage at kindergarten: Are there trade-offs between academic achievement and social-emotional skills? American Educational Research Journal, 56(4), 1254–1280. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831218813913

Lesaux, N. K. (2004). The development of reading in children from diverse linguistic backgrounds: A 5-year longitudinal study Available from APA PsycInfo®. (620628002; 2004-99009-053). 

Relyea, J. E. (2016). The relationship between early word reading and reading comprehension growth for language-minority learners and native-english-speaking students: A seven-year longitudinal study 

Smart, D., Prior, M., Sansor, A., & Oberkind, F. (2005). Children with reading difficulties: A six year follow-up from early primary to secondary school. Australia Journal of Learning Difficulties, 10, 63-75.

Snow, C. E., Tabors, P. O., & Dickinson, D. K. (2001). Language development in the preschool years. In D. K. Dickinson & P. O. Tabors (Eds.), Beginning literacy with language: Young children learning at home and school (pp. 1–26). Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes. (preschool literacy and language predicts 7^th grade performance)

Sonnenschein, S., Stapleton, L. M., & Benson, A. (2010). The relation between the type and amount of instruction and growth in children’s reading competencies. American Educational Research Journal, 47(2), 358–389. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831209349215

Stanley, C. T., Petscher, Y., & Catts, H. (2018). A longitudinal investigation of direct and indirect links between reading skills in kindergarten and reading comprehension in tenth grade. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 31(1), 133–153. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-017-9777-6

Last week, I provided a link to a video that a reader sent me Close Reading Video . The link purported to present a model “close reading” lesson.